The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

by Machado De Assis

  “What am I going to do with you!” she said.

  “Are you coming with me?”

  Marcela thought for a moment. I didn’t like the expression with which her eyes passed from me to the wall and from the wall to the jewel. But that bad impression vanished completely when she answered resolutely:

  “I’ll go. When do you sail?”

  “Two or three days from now.”

  “I’ll go.”

  I thanked her on my knees. I’d found the Marcela of my early days and I told her that. She smiled and went to put the jewel away while I went down the stairs.

  XVIII

  A Vision in the Hall

  At the bottom of the stairs, at the rear of the dark hall, I stopped for a few seconds to catch my breath, to touch myself, to call forth scattered ideas, to see myself in the midst of ever so many deep and contrary feelings once more. I thought I was happy. The diamonds, true, were corrupting my happiness a bit, but no less true was the fact that a pretty lady was quite capable of loving the Greeks and their gifts. And, after all, I trusted my good Marcela. She may have had defects, but she loved me …

  “An angel!” I murmured, looking at the hall ceiling.

  And there, like mockery, I saw Marcela’s gaze, the gaze that a short time before had given me a shade of mistrust, gleaming over a nose that was Bakbarah’s nose and mine at the same time. Poor lover from The Arabian Nights! I could see you right there, running along the gallery after the vizier’s wife, she beckoning to you with possession and you running, running, up to the long tree-lined drive from where you came out onto the street where all the harness-makers jeered at you and thrashed you. Then it seemed to me that Marcela’s hallway was the drive and the street was in Baghdad. As a matter of fact, looking toward the door I saw three harness-makers on the sidewalk, one in a cassock, another in livery, another in civilian clothes, as all three entered the hallway, took me by the arms, put me into a carriage, my father on the right, my canon uncle on the left, the one in livery on the driver’s seat, and from there they took me to the house of a police official, from where I was transported to a ship that was to leave for Lisbon. You can imagine my resistance, but all resistance was useless.

  Three days later I left the harbor behind, downcast and silent. I wasn’t even weeping. I had an idée fixe … Damned idées fixes! The one on that occasion was to dive into the ocean repeating Marcela’s name.

  XIX

  On Board

  We were eleven passengers: a crazy man accompanied by his wife, two youths going on an excursion, four businessmen, and two servants. My father entrusted me to all of them, starting with the ship’s captain, who had much of his own to look after as well because, on top of everything else, he was carrying his wife, who was in the last stages of tuberculosis.

  I don’t know whether the captain suspected anything of my lugubrious project or whether my father had put him on the alert, but I do know that he never took his eyes off me, called to me everywhere. When he couldn’t be with me he brought me to his wife. The woman was almost always on a low couch, coughing a lot, and promising to show me the sights in Lisbon. She wasn’t thin, she was transparent. It was impossible to know why she didn’t die from one moment to the next. The captain pretended not to believe in her approaching death, perhaps to deceive himself. I didn’t know or think anything. What did the fate of a tubercular woman in the middle of the ocean matter to me? The world for me was Marcela.

  Once, after a week had passed, I thought it a propitious time to die. I went cautiously up on deck, but I found the captain standing beside the rail with his eyes fixed on the horizon.

  “Expecting a storm?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied, shivering. “No, I was only admiring the splendor of the night. Take a look. It’s celestial!”

  The style didn’t fit the person, rather crude and a stranger to recherché expressions. I stared at him. He seemed to be savoring my surprise. After a few seconds he took my hand and pointed to the moon, asking me why I wasn’t writing an ode to the night. I replied that I wasn’t a poet. The captain snorted something, took two steps, put his hand in his pocket, took out a piece of crumpled paper, and then, by the light of a lantern, he read a Horacian ode on the freedom of maritime life. It was his poetry.

  “What do you think?”

  I can’t remember what I told him, but I do remember that he took my hand with a great deal of strength and a great amount of thanks. Right after that he recited two sonnets for me. He was going to recite another when they came to get him for his wife. “I’ll be right there,” he said and he recited the third sonnet for me, slowly, with love.

  I was left alone, but the captain’s muse had swept away all evil thoughts from my spirit. I preferred going to sleep, which is an interim way of dying. The following day we awakened in the midst of a storm that put fear into everyone except the madman. He started leaping about saying that his daughter was sending for him in a brougham. The death of a daughter had been the cause of his madness. No, I’ll never forget the hideous figure of the poor man in the midst of the tumult of the people and the howls of the hurricane, humming and dancing, his eyes bulging from his pale face, his hair bristly and long. Sometimes he would stop, lift up his bony hands, make crosses with his fingers, then a checkerboard, then some rings, and he laughed a lot, desperately. His wife could no longer take care of him; given over to the terror of death, she was praying to all the saints in heaven for herself. Finally the storm abated. I must confess that it was an excellent diversion from the tempest in my heart. I, who’d thought about going to meet death, didn’t dare look it in the eye when it came to meet me.

  The captain asked me if I’d been afraid, if I’d felt threatened, if I hadn’t found the spectacle sublime. Ail of that with the interest of a friend. Naturally, the conversation turned to life at sea. The captain asked me if I liked piscatorial idylls. I answered ingenuously that I didn’t know what they were.

  “You’ll see,” he replied.

  And he recited a little poem for me, then, another—an eclogue—and finally five sonnets, with which he capped literary confidence for that day. The following day, before reciting anything, the captain explained to me that only because of the gravest reasons had he embraced the maritime profession, because his grandmother had wanted him to be a priest and, indeed, he’d had some schooling in Latin. He didn’t get to be a priest but he never stopped being a poet, which was his natural vocation. In order to prove it he immediately recited for me, in person, a hundred lines. I noticed one phenomenon: the gestures he used were such that they made me laugh once. But the captain, as he recited, looked so deep inside himself that he didn’t see or hear anything.

  The days passed, and the waves, and the poetry, and with them the life of his wife was also passing. She wasn’t for long. One day, right after lunch, the captain told me that the sick woman might not last the week.

  “So soon!” I exclaimed.

  “She had a very bad night.”

  I went to see her. She was almost moribund, really, but she still talked about resting in Lisbon a few days before going to Coimbra with me, because it was her proposal to take, me to the university, I left her, disconsolate, and went to find her husband, who was looking at the waves as they came to die against the hull of the ship, and I tried to console him. He thanked me, told me the tale of their love, praised his wife’s fidelity and dedication, remembered the verses he’d written for her, recited them to me. At that point they came from her to get him. We both ran. It was a crisis. That day and the following one were cruel. The third was the day of her death. I fled from the sight, it was repugnant to me. A half hour later I found the captain sitting on a pile of hawsers, his head in his hands. I said some things to comfort him.

  “She died like a saint,” he answered. And so those words wouldn’t be taken as a sign of weakness, he immediately stood up, shook his head, and peered at the horizon with a long, profound expression. “Let’s go,” he continued, �
�let’s consign her to the grave that’s never opened again.”

  Indeed, a few hours later her corpse was cast into the sea with the customary ceremony. Sadness had shriveled all the faces. That of the widower had the look of a hillock struck by a great bolt of lightning. Deep silence. The wave opened its womb, received the remains, closed—a slight ripple—and the ship went on. I let myself linger at the stern for a few minutes with my eyes on that uncertain spot in the sea where one of us had been left behind … I went off to find the captain, to distract him.

  “Thank you,” he told me, understanding my intent. “You must believe that I’ll never forget her good care. God is the one who’ll pay her for it. Poor Leocádia! Think of us in heaven.”

  He wiped an inconvenient tear with his sleeve. I tried to find a way out in poetry, which was his passion. I spoke to him about the verses he’d read to me and offered to get them published. The captain’s eyes lighted up a little. “They might take them,” he said. “But, I don’t know, they’re rather weak verses.” I swore to him that they were not. I asked him to put them together and give them to me before we landed.

  “Poor Leocádia!” he murmured without answering my request. “A corpse … the sea … the sky … the ship …”

  The next day he came to read me a newly composed elegy in which the circumstances of the death and burial of his wife were memorialized. He read it to me with a truly emotional voice and his hand trembled. At the end he asked if the poem was worthy of the treasure he’d lost.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “It may not have style,” he pondered after an instant, “but no one can deny me feeling, unless that very feeling is harmful to the perfection …”

  “I don’t think so. I think it’s a perfect poem.”

  “Yes, I think that… The poem of a sailor.”

  “Of a sailor poet.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, looked at the piece of paper, and recited the composition again, but this time without trembling, stressing the literary intent, giving emphasis to the imagery and melody to the lines. At the end he confessed to me that it was his most accomplished piece of work. I said that it was. He shook my hand and predicted a great future for me.

  XX

  I Am Graduated

  A great future! With that word pounding in my ears I turned my eyes back to the distance, to the mysterious and uncertain horizon. One idea drove out another, ambition was displacing Marcela. Great future? Maybe a naturalist, a literary man, an archeologist, a banker, a politician, or even a bishop—let it be a bishop—as long as it meant responsibility, preeminence, a fine reputation, a superior position. Ambition, since it was an eagle, had broken the shell of its egg on that occasion and removed the cover from that tawny, penetrating eye. Farewell, love! Farewell, Marcela! Days of delirium, priceless jewels, ungoverned life, farewell! Here I come for toil and glory. I leave you with the short pants of childhood.

  And that was how I disembarked in Lisbon and continued on to Coimbra. The university was waiting for me with its difficult subjects. I studied them in a very mediocre way, but even so I didn’t lose my law degree. They gave it to me with all the solemnity of the occasion, following years of custom, a beautiful ceremony that filled me with pride and nostalgia—mostly nostalgia. In Coimbra I’d earned a great reputation as a carouser. I was a profligate, superficial, riotous, and petulant student, given to larks, following romanticism in practice and liberalism in theory, living with a pure faith in dark eyes and written constitutions. On the day that the university certified me, on parchment, a knowledge that was far from rooted in my brain, I must confess I thought myself hoodwinked in some way, even though I was proud. Let me explain: the diploma was a certificate of emancipation. It gave me freedom, but it also gave me responsibility. I put it away, I left the banks of the Mondego and came away rather disconsolate but already feeling a drive, a curiosity, a desire to elbow others aside, to influence, to enjoy, to live—to prolong the university for my whole life forward …

  XXI

  The Muleteer

  Going on, then, the donkey I was riding balked. I whipped him and he gave two bucks, then three more, and finally another one that shook me out of the saddle so disastrously that my left foot got stuck in the stirrup. I tried to hold on to the beast’s belly, but by then, spooked, he took off down the road. I’m not telling it right: he tried to take off and did take a couple of bounds, but a muleteer who happened to be there ran up in time to grab the reins and hold him, not without some effort and danger. With the animal under control, he untangled me from the stirrup and stood me on my feet.

  “Lucky you were to escape, sir,” the muleteer said.

  And he was right. If the donkey had run away I really would have got bruised and I’m not sure but that death might have been the outcome of the disaster. Head split open, a congestion, some kind of internal injury, all my budding knowledge leaving me. The muleteer may have saved my life. I was sure of it. I felt it in the blood that was pounding through my heart, Good muleteer! While I was taking account of myself, he was carefully adjusting the donkey’s harness with great skill and zeal. I decided to give ‘him three gold coins from the five I was carrying with me. Not because it was the price of my life—that was inestimable—but because it was just recompense for the dedication with which he’d saved me. All settled, I’d give him the three coins.

  “All ready,” he said, handing me the reins to my mount.

  “Not quite yet,” I answered. “Let me wait a bit. I’m still not myself.”

  “Come, now, sir!”

  “Well, isn’t it a fact that I was almost killed?”

  “If the donkey had run off, maybe so, but with the help of the Lord you can see that nothing happened, sir.”

  I went to the saddlebags, took out an old waistcoat in the pocket of which I was carrying the five gold coins, but during that interval I’d got to thinking that maybe the gratuity was excessive, that two coins might be sufficient. Maybe one. As a matter of fact, one coin was enough to make him quiver with joy. I examined his clothing. He was a poor devil who’d never seen a gold coin, One coin, therefore. I took it out, saw it glitter in the sunlight. The muleteer didn’t see it because I had my back turned, but he may have suspected something. He began talking to the donkey in a meaningful way. He was giving it advice, telling it to watch out, that the “good doctor” might punish it. A paternal monologue. Good Lord! I even heard the smack of a kiss. It was the muleteer kissing it on the head.

  “Hurray!” I exclaimed.

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but the devilish creature was looking at us with such charm …”

  I laughed, hesitated, put a silver cruzado in his hand, mounted the donkey, and went off at a slow trot, a little bothered, I should really say a little uncertain of the effect of the piece of silver. But a few yards away I looked back and the muleteer was bowing deeply to me as an obvious sign of contentment. I noted that it must have been just that. I’d paid him well; maybe I’d paid him too much. I put my fingers into the pocket of the waistcoat I was wearing and I felt some copper coins. They were the vinténs I should have given the muleteer instead of the silver cruzado. Because, after all, he didn’t have any recompense or reward in mind. He’d followed a natural impulse, his temperament, the habits of his trade. Furthermore, the circumstance of his being right there, not ahead and not behind, but precisely at the point of the disaster, seemed to be the simple instrument of Providence. And, in one way or another, the merit of the act was positively nonexistent. I became disconsolate with that reflection. I called myself prodigal. I added the cruzado to my past dissipations. I felt (why not come right out with it?), I felt remorse.

  XXII

  Return to Rio

  Blasted donkey, you made me lose the thread of my reflections! Right now I’m not going to say what I went through from there to Lisbon or what I did in Lisbon, on the Peninsula, or in other places in Europe, the old Europe that seemed to be rejuvenating at that time. No, I’m
not going to say that I was present at the dawn of Romanticism, that I, too, went off to write poetry to that effect in the bosom of Italy. I’m not going to say a thing. I would have to write a travel diary and not memoirs like these, where only the substance of life will enter.

  After some years of wandering I heeded my father’s entreaties: “Come home,” he said in his last letter, “if you don’t come quickly you’ll find your mother dead!” That last word was a blow to me. I loved my mother very much. I still had the last blessing she’d given me on board the ship before my eyes. “My poor child, I’ll never see you again!” the unfortunate lady had sobbed, clutching me to her breast. And those words echoed in my ears now like a prophecy fulfilled.

  Let it be noted that I was in Venice, still redolent with the verses of Lord Byron. There I was, sunk deep in dreams, reliving the past, thinking that I was in the Most Serene Republic. It’s true. It occurred to me once to ask the innkeeper if the doge would take his walk that day. “What doge, signer mio?” I came back to my senses, but I didn’t confess the illusion. I told him that my question was a kind of South American charade. He acted as if he understood and added that he liked South American charades a lot. He was an innkeeper. Well, I left all that, innkeeper, doge, Bridge of Sighs, gondolas, poetry of the lord, ladies of the Rialto, I left it all and took off like a shot in the direction of Rio de Janeiro.

  I came … But no, let’s not lengthen this chapter. Sometimes I forget myself when I’m writing and the pen just goes along eating up paper to my great harm, because I’m an author. Long chapters are better suited for logy readers and we’re not an in-folio public but an in-12 one, not much text, wide margins, elegant type, gold trim, and ornamental designs … designs above all… No, let’s not lengthen the chapter.