Quincas Borba

by Machado De Assis

  XXXVIII

  Rubião was resolute. Never had Sofia’s soul seemed to be –LV–inviting his so insistently to fly off to those clandestine lands from which people generally return old and weary. Some don’t return. Others stop halfway there. A great number never get beyond the edge of the roof.

  XXXIX

  The moon was magnificent. Up there on the heights, between the sky and the flatland below, even the least audacious soul was capable of going against an enemy army and destroying it. One is not permitted to say how he would behave with a friendly army like this one. They were in the garden. Sofia had put her arm on his so they could go look at the moon. She’d invited Dona Tonica, but the poor lady answered that her leg had gone to sleep, that she’d be along shortly, but she didn’t come.

  The two of them remained silent for some time. The other people could be seen through the open windows chatting and even the men, who’d finished their game of cards. The garden was small but the human voice has a wide range, and they were able to recite poetry without being heard.

  Rubião remembered an old comparison, a very old one he’d picked up from some ten–line stanza back in 1850 or thereabouts or from some page of prose from all ages. He called Sofia’s eyes the stars of the earth and the stars the eyes of heaven. All of that in a low, tremulous voice.

  Sofia was astonished. She suddenly straightened up her body, which had been weighing on Rubião’s arm until then. She was so accustomed to the man’s bashfulness … Stars? Eyes? She wanted to tell him to stop teasing her, but she didn’t know how to put a response together without rejecting a conviction that was also hers or encouraging him to continue on. A long silence was the result.

  “With one difference,” Rubião continued. “The stars are not even as beautiful as your eyes, and I really don’t know what they are. God, who put them up so high, did so because they can’t be seen close up without losing much of their beauty … But not your eyes. They’re right here beside me, large, luminous, more luminous than the sky …”

  Loquacious, daring, Rubião seemed like a completely different person. He didn’t stop there. He went on talking a great deal, but always within the same circle of ideas. He didn’t have too many, and the situation, in spite of the man’s sudden transformation, tended more to hedge them in rather than to inspire new ones in him. Sofia was the one who didn’t know what to do. She’d been holding a little dove, tame and quiet, in her arms, and it was turning into a hawk on her—a grasping and voracious hawk.

  It was necessary to reply, to make him stop, to tell him that he was going where she didn’t want to go, and all that without making him angry, without driving him away… Sofia was searching for something. She couldn’t find it because she was running up against the problem, insoluble for her, of whether it was better to show that she understood or that she didn’t understand. At this point she remembered her own gestures, her soft words, her special attentions. She couldn’t ignore the meaning of the man’s compliments. But to confess that she understood and not to order him from the house was where the delicate point lay.

  XL

  Up above the stars seemed to be laughing at that inextricable situation. Let the moon see them! The moon doesn’t know how to mock. And poets, who find her nostalgic, must have perceived that in times gone by she’d loved some vagabond star who’d abandoned her after long centuries. Perhaps they’re still in love. Her eclipses (forgive my astronomy) might be nothing more than lovers’ trysts. The myth of Diana’s coming down to meet Endymion might well be true. The coming down isn’t what’s too much. What’s wrong with the pair of them meeting up there in the sky like crickets in the treetops down here? Night, a charitable mother, takes it upon herself to watch over everyone.

  After all, the moon is solitary. Solitude makes a person serious. The stars, in a throng, are like girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty, talkative, laughing and talking at the same time about everything and everybody.

  I won’t deny that they’re chaste, but so much the worse—they’ve probably laughed at what they don’t understand… Chaste stars! That’s what Othello the terrible and Tristram Shandy the jovial call them. Those extremes in heart and spirit are in agreement on one point: the stars are chaste. And they heard everything (chaste stars!), everything that Rubião’s bold mouth was pouring into Sofia’s startled soul. The one who’d been bashful for months on end was now (chaste stars!) a libertine no less. You’re probably saying that the Devil was at work deceiving the young woman with the two great wings of an archangel that God had put on him. Suddenly he was putting them in his pocket and taking off his hat, revealing the two malignant points sticking out of his forehead. And, laughing that oblique laugh evil people have, he proposed buying not only her soul but her soul and her body … Chaste stars!

  XLI

  “Let’s go in,” Sofia murmured. She tried to pull her arm away, but he held it back forcefully. No. Why go in? They were fine there, quite fine … What could be better? Or was he boring her, perhaps? Sofia hastened to say no, on the contrary, but she had to go attend to her guests . .. They’d been out there too long!

  “It hasn’t been ten minutes,” Rubião said. “What are ten minutes?”

  “But they may have noticed our absence …”

  Rubião quivered at that possessive: our absence. He found it a beginning of complicity. He agreed that they might have noticed our absence. She was right, they should separate. He was only asking for one thing, two things. The first was that she not forget those sublime ten minutes, the second was that every night at ten o’clock she look at the Southern Cross. He would be looking at it too, and the thoughts of both would go to find themselves together there, intimate, in between God and men.

  The invitation was poetic, but only the invitation. Rubião was devouring the young lady with eyes of fire and was gripping one of her hands so she wouldn’t run away. Neither his eyes nor his gesture had any poetry about them. Sofia was on the point of uttering some harsh word, but she immediately swallowed it as she remembered that Rubião was a good friend of the house. She tried to laugh but couldn’t. Then she acted annoyed, then resigned, finally pleading. She begged him on the soul of her mother who should be in heaven … Rubião didn’t care about heaven or her mother or anything. What was a mother? What was heaven? his face seemed to be saying.

  “Ouch, you’re breaking my fingers!” the young woman moaned in a low voice.

  This was when he began to come to. He relaxed his grip without releasing her fingers.

  “Go ahead,” he said, “but first…”

  He leaned over to kiss her hand when a voice a few steps away woke him up completely.

  XLII

  “Hello there! Admiring the moon? It really is delightful. It’s a night made for lovers . . . Yes, delightful… It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a night like this … Just look down below there, the gaslights … Delightful! For lovers … Lovers always like the moon. In my time, in Icarai…”

  It was Siqueira, the awful major. Rubião didn’t know what to say. Sofia, after the first few moments, got hold of herself. She replied that the night really was beautiful. Then she said that Rubião insisted in saying that Rio nights couldn’t compare with those in Barbacena, and in line with that he’d told an anecdote by a Father Mendes … “It was Mendes, wasn’t it?”

  “Mendes, yes, Father Mendes,” Rubião murmured. The major had trouble holding back his surprise. He’d seen the two hands together, Rubião’s head leaning over, the quick movement of them both when he came into the garden. And out of all that he got a Father Mendes … He looked at Sofia, saw she was smiling, tranquil, impenetrable. No fright, no fluster, she spoke so simply that the major thought his eyes had deceived him. But Rubião ruined everything. Annoyed, silent, all he could do was take out his watch to see what time it was, holding it up to his ear as if he thought it wasn’t running, then cleaning it with his handkerchief slowly, slowly, without looking at one or the other …

&
nbsp; “Well, you two have a talk. I’m going to see to the ladies, who shouldn’t be left alone. Have the men finished their dreadful card game yet?”

  “Just now,” the major replied, looking at Sofia curiously. “Just now, and they were asking about this gentleman. That’s why I came out, to see if I could find him in the garden. But have you been out here long?”

  “We just came out,” Sofia said.

  Then, patting the major lovingly on the back, she left the garden and went into the house. She didn’t go in through the parlor door but through another that opened into the dining room, so that when she reached the parlor from inside it was as if she’d just given orders for tea.

  Rubião, coming to, still couldn’t find anything to say and yet it was most urgent that he say something. That story about Father Mendes was a good idea. The worst of it was that there was no priest and no anecdote, and he was incapable of inventing anything. It seemed to him sufficient to say this:

  “The priest! Mendes! A very amusing person, Father Mendes!”

  “I knew him,” the major said, smiling. “Father Mendes? I knew him. He died a canon. Was he in Minas a long time?”

  “I think he was,” the other murmured, horrified.

  “He was from here, from Saquarema. He was missing this eye,” the major went on, raising his finger to his left eye. “I knew him well, if it’s the same one. It might be a different one.”

  “It might be.”

  “He died a canon. He was a man of good habits, but he had an eye for pretty girls, the way you look at a masterpiece. Is there any greater master painter than God? This Dona Sofia, for example, he never saw her on the street but what he’d say to me: ‘I saw the pretty Mrs. Palha today …’ He died a canon. He was from Saquarema … He really did have good taste … Our Palha’s wife really is a beauty, beautiful in face and in figure. Although I find her more well put together than pretty … What do you think?”

  “I think you’re right…”

  “She’s a fine person, an excellent lady of the house,” the major continued, lighting a cigar.

  The light from the match gave the major’s face a mocking expression, or something less harsh but no less adverse. Rubião felt a chill run up his spine. Could he have heard? Seen? Guessed? Was he an indiscreet person, a busybody? The man’s face didn’t clarify that point. In any case, it was safer to believe the worst. Here we have our hero like someone who, after sailing close to shore over the years, finds himself one day in the midst of the high seas. Luckily, fear is also an officer with ideas and it gave him one then: flatter the man. He didn’t waste any time in finding him amusing and interesting and telling him that he had a house on Botafogo beach, number such–and–such, that was open to him. It would be a great honor to have him for a friend. He didn’t have many friends here: Palha, to whom he owed many favors; Dona Sofia, who was a lady of rare prudence; and three or four other people. He lived alone. He might even be going back to Minas.

  “Soon?”

  “I can’t say soon, but it might not be too long from now. You know, for a person who’s lived all his life in a place it’s hard to get used to another.”

  “That depends.”

  “Yes, that depends … But it’s the general rule.”

  “It may be the general rule, but you’re going to be the exception. The capital is a devilish place. You catch a passion for it the way you catch a cold. One breath of air and you’re lost. Look, I’ll bet that within six months you’ll be married …”

  “He didn’t see anything,” Rubião thought.

  And then, merrily:

  “It could be, but marriages take place in Minas, too. And there’s no lack of priests there.”

  “Father Mendes is lacking,” the major put in, laughing.

  Rubião smiled weakly, not knowing whether the major’s words were innocent or malicious. The latter was the one who took up the reins of the conversation and steered it onto other matters: the weather, the city, the cabinet, the war and Marshal López.* And just note the contrast in the occasion. That torrential rain, heavier than the one at the beginning, was like a ray of sunshine for our Rubião. Behold his soul flapping the dust off its wings to the heat of the major’s endless discourse, injecting a small word here and there if he could and always nodding with applause. And he was thinking once more, “No, he hadn’t seen anything.”

  “Papa! Papa, are you there?” a voice said at the door to the garden.

  It was Dona Tonica. She’d come to fetch him so they could leave. Tea was on the table, it was true, but she couldn’t stay any longer; she had a headache, she told her father in a low voice. Then she held out her fingers to Rubião. The latter asked her to wait just a few minutes more, the distinguished major …

  “You’re wasting your time,” the major interrupted. “She’s the one who governs me.”

  Rubião offered him his hospitality again. He even demanded that they set a date that very week, but the major was quick to say that he couldn’t promise a specific day. He would come as soon as it was possible. His life was quite busy. He had duties at the arsenal, a lot of them, and besides that…

  “Papa! Let’s go!”

  “I’m coming. See? I can’t stop and chat for even a minute. Did you say goodbye already? Where’s my hat?”

  * Francisco Solano Lopez (1826–1870), dictator of Paraguay during the 1865-1870 war with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. [Ed.]

  XLIII

  On the way down Dona Tonica went along listening to the remainder of her father’s discourse as he changed subjects without changing style—diffuse and digressive. She was listening without understanding. She went along all wrapped up in herself, absorbed, putting the night through the mill again, recomposing the looks between Sofia and Rubião.

  They reached their home on the Rua do Senado. The father went to bed, but the daughter didn’t lie down right away, sitting up in a small chair beside her dressing table, where she had an image of the Virgin. She wasn’t carrying any ideas of peace and innocence. Without having known love, she knew what adultery was, and the persona of Sofia seemed rotten to her. She saw a monster in her now, half–human, half–snake, and she felt that she hated her, that she was capable of getting her revenge by telling her husband everything.

  “I’ll tell him everything,” she was thinking, “either orally or in a letter… No, not a letter. I’ll tell him everything face–to–face one day.”

  And imagining the dialogue, she foresaw the man’s surprise, then his anger, then his curses, the harsh words that he would address to his wife: miserable wretch, unworthy, vile woman … All those names sounded good to the ears of her desire. She was able to bring out her own rage with them. She could only bring her down that way, placing her beneath her husband’s feet, since she couldn’t do it herself… Vile, unworthy, miserable woman …

  That explosion of inner rage lasted for a long time—close to twenty minutes. But her soul grew tired, and she became herself again. Her imagination couldn’t do anything further, and the reality around her caught her sight. She looked about, looked at her old maid’s bedroom, artistically arranged—that ingenious art which turns cotton into silk and an old swatch into a ribbon, which decorates, arranges, embellishes the nakedness of things as much as possible, adorns sad walls, beautifies the few modest pieces. And everything there seemed made to receive a loving bridegroom.

  Where did I read that an ancient tradition made a virgin in Israel wait for divine conception during a certain night of the year? Wherever it was, let’s compare her to this other one, who differs from the first only in that she doesn’t have one fixed night but all of them, all, all... The wind whistling outside never brought her the hoped–for male, nor did maiden dawn tell her the spot on earth where he lived. It was only waiting, waiting…

  Now, with her imagination and resentment soothed, she looks and looks again at her lonely bedroom. She remembers her friends from school and family, the closest ones, all married. The last of th
em married a naval officer at the age of thirty, and that was what made the hopes of her unmarried friend bloom again. She wasn’t asking for so much because a cadet’s uniform had been the first thing to seduce her eyes at the age of fifteen … Where did they go? But that was five years ago. She was thirtynine and would soon be forty. An old maid of forty. Dona Tonica shuddered. She kept on looking, remembering everything. She stood up suddenly, turned around twice, and threw herself onto the bed weeping …

  XLIV

  You mustn’t believe that the pain here was more real than the anger. By themselves they were equal; the effects were what was different. Anger didn’t lead anywhere. Humiliation dissolved into legitimate tears. And, nonetheless, that lady still had an urge to strangle Sofia, to trample her, tear out her heart in pieces, telling her to her face the cruel names she’d attributed to her husband … All of it was imagined! Believe me, there are tyrants by intention. Who knows? In that lady’s soul there was a slight touch of Caligula …

  XLV

  “while one is weeping, the other one laughs. It’s the law of the world, my fine fellow, it’s universal perfection. Nothing but weeping would be monotonous, nothing but laughter would be wearisome. But a proper distribution of tears and polkas, sobs and sarabands ends up by giving the soul of the world the necessary variety, and it becomes the balance of life.