Chronicle of the Murdered House

by Lúcio Cardoso

  And when I ran my hand over his lips again, he suddenly bit me, and the pain made me release my grip.

  “You little fool!” I cried.

  He was still breathing hard, but he had managed to put some distance between us, and I sensed in the darkness that he was ready now to defend himself. Clutching my wounded hand to my chest, I tried again to reach him—what did I care what he thought or said!—but André, as if he had again gathered sufficient strength, ran over to the door, opened it and left me standing alone in the middle of the room.

  34.

  Betty’s Diary (v)

  3rd – I had been busy restoring some kind of order to the damp, mouse-ridden pantry, and hadn’t seen the mistress for some days. Yesterday, though, when I was walking down the hallway, I heard her calling me from her room. I put down the mousetraps and the other things I was carrying and went in. She was sitting on the bed, with a few clothes scattered around her. Since, as I’ve said, I was the one responsible for ensuring that the house was kept clean and tidy, when I saw the wardrobe doors wide open, I thought she was going to tell me off about something that had been left undone. Instead, she pointed to the clothes on the bed. These were her famous dresses, all of them made in Rio de Janeiro and of little use to her in the Chácara. I recognized a few of them because she occasionally wore them at supper when she felt like getting dressed up like “people in Rio” or on mornings when she was feeling particularly cheerful and would parade up and down the avenues in the garden, but I was seeing most of the dresses for the first time. I had never really had much time for fashion myself, being too busy with household matters, but even I could see how pretty and expensive those glittering outfits were. She was silently lifting them up and shaking the dust off them, then despondently putting them down again.

  “They’re no use at all, Betty, so old-fashioned. This one, for example,” and she held up a blue dress decorated with sparkling beadwork. “It cost me a small fortune, and I can guarantee you that the first dance I wore it to . . .”

  “But you don’t need such clothes here,” I broke in.

  She looked at me, almost scandalized:

  “It isn’t just the clothes, Betty. One should always dress well. And if the day ever comes when I don’t, I won’t feel I’m me any more.”

  “But I hardly ever see you wearing them . . .”

  “Oh well, what does it matter anyway,” she said, and her voice was filled with sadness.

  “You mustn’t talk like that,” I said. “You’re still young and pretty. There’s not another woman around to compare with you.”

  She smiled and clutched the dress to her with unexpected ardor:

  “Ah, if only that were true, Betty, if only that were true!”

  I had never heard her talk like this before. She had often made such grave statements, and I even recorded some of them in this diary, but they had always been rather mocking, off-the-cuff remarks. Now, though, there was an unusually mournful tone to her voice. She wasn’t joking, she was genuinely bemoaning her fate, which both surprised and troubled me.

  “If you like dressing up, then why . . .”

  I was leaning toward her over the bed, trying to establish a kind of intimacy to support my would-be words of advice. Seeing me so close, she threw the dress across the room, stood up with a sigh and said:

  “There’s a time for everything, Betty, and I think my time for wearing pretty dresses has passed.”

  Hearing her putting on that cold tone, I assumed she did not mean what she said. Perhaps she simply wanted to know what I thought; perhaps, as was often the case with her, she had an ulterior motive that I had not yet picked up on. I stayed where I was and watched her walk over to the window, draw back the curtain, then return, and it was as if she were preparing to tell me something very important, but could not quite bring herself to do so, waiting, instead, for the atmosphere between us to grow warmer. She must have decided it was not the right moment, because she again picked up one of the dresses and held it to her, saying:

  “Isn’t this red dress just lovely? I can remember the first time I wore it. The seamstress had sent it to me several days before, but I hadn’t been able to wear it because I was ill. That was when the Colonel turned up—I’ve told you about him before, haven’t I? He was an extraordinary man, a great friend of mine—and he took me out to the Casino. When I went in, the men almost knelt down before me. He got rather jealous and said: ‘You see how you are adored, Nina.’ And I was, Betty, I was adored by all the men.”

  I liked to hear her talking like that, because when she did, she gave off such warmth and enthusiasm. Her eyes briefly took on a new light, and she looked almost happy. This was the first time I had heard her mention a colonel, but that didn’t matter, because it fitted perfectly with the scene she was recalling.

  As if those good memories had been vanquished by an awareness of her present situation, she slowly lowered her arms and let the hem of the red dress drag on the floor.

  “How time passes, how everything changes! I was almost happy then. There was the Colonel, there were other friends. Everything would have been so different if I . . .”

  A sob rose up in her throat, she pressed the dress to her face, then ran and flung herself on the bed. I was so astonished I didn’t know what to do—should I console her, should I wait so as not to interrupt the wave of memories that had provoked that sob? Selfishness won out. Firstly, because I didn’t know what to say or what kind of consolation to offer without knowing the cause of her distress, and, secondly, because, like most people, I longed to find out more about her obscure past. Often, when absorbed in some mechanical task, I would ponder the mystery of that existence, an absurd enterprise really, pure conjecture. People said so many things, there was more and more gossip doing the rounds, and yet so little was known about that strange creature! Thanks to my privileged position in the household, I was able to find out a lot of things and adapt them to my imaginings, and thus create a fairly convincing figure. However, when I compared this to the real-life model, it fell far short of the reality. Dona Nina eluded any amount of conjecture, just as it was impossible to find out anything definite and clear-cut about her, whether good or ill. One thing was certain, she never failed to arouse people’s interest and even, sometimes, their passion. Now, seeing her weeping so disconsolately, I realized that I had never been able to imagine her life as anything but brilliant and magnificent, the sort of life led by an artist or a famous singer. And yet there she was, not brilliant or magnificent at all. When I still said nothing, she looked up. A few tears still shone in her eyes.

  “How strange life is,” she said. “We never really know when we are happy. We look back at a particular time as being most unfortunate, and only later do we understand that we allowed an opportunity for a little peace to pass us by. Anyway . . .”

  She got up, threw the dress down on the bed and began pacing again:

  “. . . I have never been as unhappy as I am now.” (Given her agitated state, it was clear that, for her, happiness meant peace.) “I know, I know,” she exclaimed when she saw the look on my face, “I have everything I could possibly want, a house, a family, a husband. But happiness, Betty, is a very personal thing. I wasn’t born to be happy in the same way as other people.”

  What did she mean? Probably that material things were not enough, which was true. But what about her husband, and the comfort of his constant presence? I had heard countless times that she was the one who had brought about the reconciliation. If she had been so happy during her time with that colonel, why then had she given him up in favor of exile at the Chácara? No, what she should have said was that she simply wasn’t made to be happy, that, unlike other people, everything about her aspired to a continual, insatiable state of unhappiness. I had never known such people personally, but I knew they existed: for them, unhappiness was as necessary as the air they breathed. Watching her pacing up and down, imprisoned by the mechanisms of her life as if by the bars of a ca
ge, I realized that she had never loved her husband and had probably never loved anyone! For what characterizes people greedy for misfortune is a deadness of soul, a disquieting lack of love. When I grasped this, I understood her misery and could not help but feel sorry for her, because it seemed to depend less on her than on the baleful influence of some planet full of negative energy.

  She paced a little more, then came back and stood before me:

  “You probably think I’m a bad person. Most people do. It’s always so easy to judge others. But I can assure you, Betty, that appearances have always been against me. I have only ever been bad unintentionally or because I could not be anything else.” She fell silent for a moment, as if weighing her own words. “Although it’s true to say that I have never tried very hard to be good either . . .”

  I had never thought about such things or paused to consider such deep problems, but a thought suddenly occurred to me, one that almost rose to my lips in the form of a shout: What is goodness? How could one judge or evaluate it when in the presence of a blind, impulsive being like her? I may well have been deceiving myself, I may merely have been giving in to her charm, but wasn’t that what redeemed her and made her different from anyone else I had ever met?

  And suddenly, she said in an extraordinarily calm voice:

  “We are always cruel whenever we try to be ourselves.” (I looked at her: she had her back to me now and was silhouetted against the window.) “But what about the others, those who impede us and block our path . . . what about them?”

  She turned and fixed me with an intense look:

  “No, I was never bad. When I look back, it seems to me that I have merely been weak.” (I was thinking: Weak? When everything about her bespoke determination and boldness? Yes, perhaps she was weak in that she had lacked the courage to embrace her natural impulse, that of death and destruction.) “I could have done some things differently . . . or avoided them . . . But who can say that they have never sinned?”

  She slowly went and picked up the clothes she had thrown down on the bed:

  “When I used to wear these dresses, I believed in them, I thought I was beautiful.”

  “But you still are beautiful,” I protested.

  She shrugged impatiently:

  “No, now I am wounded, and these clothes are of no use any more.”

  “Wounded?” I could not help but exclaim at the strangeness of that word.

  She said sadly:

  “The woman who wore those clothes, Betty, no longer exists.”

  “Dona Nina!”

  And everything in me cried out at that attack upon herself. No, in my eyes, she was not a simple human being, but a construct, a work of art. She did not have the right to wound herself, to rot and die like other people—she was untouchable in her majesty. I pressed my hands to my breast, as if to hold in the feelings flooding my heart. She noticed this and must have understood what was happening: a new energy ran through her, she straightened up, raised her head, and the wind blowing in through the window ruffled her hair. Then she came over to me, her eyes bright with determination:

  “Betty, I can’t resign myself to being just like anyone else. I have to follow my own path until the end, I have to be myself, pitted against everything and everyone. Timóteo said to me once: ‘Nina, you are the one who will avenge us all.’ How can I possibly betray him now by giving in?”

  I did not entirely understand what she was talking about—I certainly had no idea what she meant by “giving in.” However, I knew that I was ready for anything, that I would defend her come what may, and that she could count on my help. In silence, as if she had sensed exactly what was going on inside me, she pointed to the clothes on the bed, then, while I gathered them up, she went over to the wardrobe, took out all the other dresses and, still in silence, went over to the door. I didn’t know where we were going, but I followed, carrying my bundle of dresses. Fortunately, we met no one else on the way. In the kitchen, she picked up a box of matches. The servants eyed us with evident curiosity. We went down the stairs to the basement and into the backyard, where she put the clothes down next to the outdoor sink. There were a lot of them, and she had to organize them into a neat pile with her foot. I stood beside her, watching and fascinated. With no further hesitation, she struck a match and set fire to the dresses, and I could not help give a gasp. She looked at me as if trying to instill me with some of her courage, and I bowed my head, ashamed. The flames grew quickly. For some time, the dresses burned brightly in the midst of great billows of smoke, and I occasionally saw a buckle gleam as it shrank in upon itself like an animal, or caught the greenish-yellow glint of glass beads, like cat’s eyes. Frills and flounces and ruffles in lace or satin were quickly consumed and the pile gradually dwindled down to nothing. Soon there was only a handful of ashes—all that was left of the beautiful dresses that had so excited the Chácara and the town and had shone at so many famous suppers and family reunions. Rooted to the spot, I was remembering the boxes and the trunks arriving from the station, the lines of servants picking them up, Dona Nina herself, so young at the time, glancing hesitantly around her, a veil covering her face. Without knowing why, as if I were witnessing the end of an era, I could not bring myself to look away from that little heap of ashes, and my heart felt horribly heavy. It was then that I felt the mistress’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Let’s go.”

  I looked up and saw that she was smiling. I went with her, unable to speak. She, on the other hand, strode ahead, as if she had made a decision to start life anew.

  Undated – I’ve felt really worried since the mistress burned those dresses, trying to work out exactly what that gesture meant. She had never before spoken to me so spontaneously, and as time passes—seven days have gone by—I still feel shaken by what I saw. And despite everything, I can’t forget the sense of sadness she provoked in me; on the contrary, with time, the atmosphere I had always felt surrounding her has grown denser, as if it were driving her toward some ineluctable fate.

  35.

  Second Letter from Nina to the Colonel

  I realize, Colonel, that this is not a letter you were expecting to receive. When you happen upon the envelope in your mail box, you won’t even know or be able to imagine what it might contain. However, these very first lines will make your hands tremble, the sentences will blur before your eyes and, still incredulous, heart pounding, you will hurriedly turn to the end of the letter to see who wrote it.

  Yes, it’s me. I have to say that I myself am not in the least surprised to be writing to you again; I always thought I would one day, not in order to recall the appalling way in which I treated you or how I ran away from Rio or the many other things that belong firmly in the past, but in order for us to speak seriously like two old friends, who, having survived stormy seas, finally come in sight of terra firma, the one place where they can finally reach some understanding. I hear you sigh: “Ah, that Nina always finds a way to disinter the old Colonel!” But it is only with age, my friend, that we do, at last, understand certain truths. Or, rather, those truths finally take on some kind of reality inside us, because reality takes time, and we can only believe in what our age allows us to believe in. And I am being absolutely honest, hand on heart, when I say that I, who never once considered the possible consequences of any of my actions, I, who was so often cruel and unjust with you, do truly repent, now that I find myself in dire need of a good friend . . . (As I write these words, incidents from the distant past surface in my mind—the afternoon, for example, at a bar on the beach, when you gave me a wristwatch . . . There was another friend sitting nearby, and for some mad reason I was expecting him to give me a watch, not you. I think a few days earlier, I had mentioned, in your presence, that I needed a watch, and you immediately rushed off and bought me one. And that was what irritated me. I only had to express a wish for you to grant it. And you were not the one from whom I wanted such haste or such resolve. I scornfully closed the box containing the watch and flun
g it into the middle of the road. The box flew open and the watch lay glittering on the tarmac. You went to get up, and I stopped you, saying: “If you touch that thing, I’ll leave.” You did not move, but your eyes filled with tears. The other man sitting next to me observed the scene in silence. The watch stayed where it was until a tramp picked it up, examined it carefully, then disappeared around a corner with it. I don’t know what happened afterward, Colonel, but whatever it was, I can guarantee that was the last I saw of the man sitting next to me. I don’t know if he was frightened or what, but he never came back.

  As I say, I always thought I would write to you again one day, and if I do so now, with tear-filled eyes, it is because I am so horrified at what is happening to me; and during what is, for me, a crucial time, the image of all those who loved me—who truly loved me—is horribly vivid. Whichever way I turn, and however many more things happen to me, I will never forget the times we spent together, and I recall everything, absolutely everything: your kindness, the interest you took in my late father, your advice when he died, and even—yes, why not?—your voice, which so irritated me then and which, now, alas, I miss so very much. No, I have not forgotten those things, nor can I remain silent about how much I miss those precious days. I always knew, and this is a confession I make as a homage to your friendship, I always knew how you felt about me. (Yes, this is the moment to be totally honest.) It was clear to me that I was the reason you came to visit us. You may call me fickle and say that I was always more than happy to take, but never had any intention of giving anything back. That is because you do not understand women’s hearts, and do not know to what extent we are prepared to sacrifice others in order to satisfy our own vanity. (Ah, the things I remember as I write this! The modest room in which we lived, the window that looked out onto the slums behind. The noise of the children in the afternoon, playing in the street. My father’s coughing. His invariable question: “Nina, has the Colonel arrived yet?” And later, when the card games stopped, the sad tone in which he said: “Nina, the Colonel won’t be coming to play cards any more.” He went rapidly downhill after that, until he died. I remember the funeral, his body laid out in the middle of the room, covered with a sheet. That was when you suddenly reappeared and took my hands in yours: “It’s such a shame, Nina, that you find yourself in this situation.” And when you left, after one last long look at your dead friend, you left some money on my pillow. At that moment, I did, I admit, consider seeking you out and marrying you. We even met a few times, do you remember? But it was then I met the man who would become my husband and abandoned everything to come and live at the Chácara. I can still remember our last conversation, when I told you of my decision. You made no attempt to hide your horror: “Vila Velha? But that’s the provinces, the back of beyond!” It took me a few years to see that, once again, you were right, but that’s the way we are, we never know for certain who we will be happy with or where. A rather banal thought, perhaps, but how different it is when we experience the truth of that banal thought in our very flesh.) I feel I should be more explicit: on the few occasions when you squeezed my hand—always very delicately—or looked at me when my father fell asleep, or when you followed me down to the street on the pretext of giving me a present, I was always perfectly aware of the nature of your feelings for me. But I was so confused at the time, how could I possibly have shown you the gratitude you deserved or returned the deep feelings of a heart that was ripe for love? I let everything slip away, and the current that carried me off cast me up here in this sad place.