Chronicle of the Murdered House

by Lúcio Cardoso

  That really was the last time I saw her. I said goodbye, picked up my suitcase and walked away, but then, as if drawn back by an inescapable force, I turned around again. In the distance, the wind had picked up, sending the dust spiraling skyward. She was still standing there, determinedly silent. I could tell she had been watching me, but as soon as she saw me turn, she looked up as if she had received a shock. I waved goodbye, possibly my only gesture of friendship to her in my whole life. She did not respond, but simply turned and began walking back toward the Chácara.

  For some time I watched her black figure growing smaller and smaller. Then, as so often before, she vanished, leaving only the blue sky and, silhouetted against it, the roof of the house where I had been born.

  Demétrio lay sprawled on the floor until Ana, as if waking from her torpor, reached out her hand to him. He got up and brushed the dirt off his clothes. Slowly, looking first at me and then at his wife, he ran his hand through his white hair and I noticed that his hand was trembling. Not wanting to show his fear—him of all people!—he glanced furtively over at the doorway where there were now even more curious onlookers.

  “You seem to have something against me,” he said, turning toward me. “Whatever it might be . . .”

  Perhaps he was going to say: “today is not the day,” or some other such phrase (and if he had, it would have been the first time he had alluded directly to the dead woman), but I broke in:

  “Today is the day. I want you to know that I know everything that happened.”

  Facts? Mere suppositions? The truth—all of it, finally? I watched these questions run through his mind, and the color drained from his face.

  “If you’re referring to . . .”

  The insinuation hung in the air.

  “To the revolver,” I said calmly.

  There it was, a fact. And suddenly, just when I thought I had him beaten, I watched that old man rally, pull himself together, almost light up, like a young horse rearing and whinnying—and then a shout, a single shout, erupted from his lips:

  “But it was the house I was defending, the house!”

  An extraordinary phenomenon occurred: around him, like a forest of iron, the reasons sprang up, omnipotent. I felt dizzy, fumbled for the windowsill and leaned on it: Had I been entirely blind? Was I mistaken? Had I been swayed by an influence that was neither right nor just? My forehead was dripping with sweat and, for a moment, everything around me went black. But this only lasted a fraction of a second, and I felt, with every fiber of my being, that I had merely been doing battle with an irrational force, immune to reason. Slowly, as if for the first time, I stared at the man standing in front of me, naked in his righteousness and his beliefs. He had spoken those words with absolute sincerity, but also with real passion. It was as if, in this vale of uncertainty, he had named the one truly sacred object.

  “The house?” I repeated, unable to contain my surprise.

  He gestured grandly, pathetically, to everything around us:

  “All of this. Our property. Our inheritance.”

  Then, and only then, did I understand that there was no point in arguing with him. How can you argue with someone who no longer speaks your language? How accuse him when the reasons he invokes are palpable, material reasons?

  “No, that’s not it,” I replied, my voice trembling. “No, it’s not. The house . . . I couldn’t care less about the damn house. To keep it . . .”

  Seeing that I was refusing to look at him, he suddenly jumped forward and crouched down in front of me, trying to catch my eye:

  “The house!” he yelled. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep it!”

  Even his voice sounded strange, spirited, almost youthful. Thinking back, perhaps it wasn’t even the voice of a man—in its desire to entice and seduce there was something strangely feminine or childish. Who knows, it might well have been the voice of the only true Meneses, who I did not know and had never known, but who now rose before me in all his fateful splendor. I smiled:

  “I know you would do anything.” And then, in a quieter voice, as if making my own mental calculation: “And for this you have lied, cheated, and betrayed. You never could stand her, could you?” My voice grew louder, a broken sob becoming stronger, almost a howl, which was perhaps my cry of love, standing in for all the words I had not spoken and that had foundered between the four walls of that cold house, between the walls of my own being, possessed by the malevolent spirit of the Meneses:

  “All you ever wanted was to destroy her. The revolver was just one of your many ploys. and there were those trips away as well . . . But you would have been capable of strangling her, of shooting her or of beating her to death—it didn’t matter as long as she was gone.”

  Overwhelmed, as if everything I had done that day were suddenly pressing down on my shoulders, I slumped onto the windowsill and wept, freely and purely, feeling that I was at last regaining a little of the self-respect that had long been buried, but which was now returning, terrified and strange, but nevertheless capable of bearing the weight of all my mistakes and feelings of shame. I don’t know how long I remained like that, but when I looked up, I found Ana and Demétrio standing before me. I pointed to the pile of clothes on the floor:

  “And even now, Demétrio . . . Even now, can’t you see? All you want is to banish her memory.”

  He bowed his head.

  I left the windowsill and went over to him, so close that my lips almost brushed his ear:

  “And I know why. Oh, yes, I know why,” I whispered.

  He didn’t raise his head, but I could see the sweat dripping from his forehead. And so I left him, head bowed, but unyielding, amid the clothes littering the hallway.

  52.

  From Timóteo’s Memoirs (i)

  The only reason I am writing this is in order to remember her. When they told me she was dead (it was Betty who told me; I was lying down with a damp towel on my forehead, prostrated by one of those violent headaches I’ve been getting recently), the words seemed so strange that at first they made no sense at all—after all, what does death mean to someone like me who has spent his whole life at death’s door? But for all her self-restraint, there was in what she told me a cry so human and so plangent that I removed the towel and opened my eyes. And that was when I sensed that everything around me had changed. The room was filled with a strange yellowish glow, as if someone had flung wide the shutters. Inside, the furniture stood stiff and precise in the heavy silence. A feeling rose up within me far stronger than certainty, for it was a glimpse of death itself, the very death that had just occurred in the next room, and its aura came floating toward me in a solemn, all-mastering wave. Disjointed and hitherto shapeless elements—fluids, currents, intimations of destiny and destruction—came together within me to create a perfectly formed face, a clearly defined being, not for the eyes of others, but for me alone to see, sad and secret. It was a portrait drawn by a bold hand, a complete presence, belonging to someone I had once known and which only I, by some miracle of fidelity, could recreate exactly. There was no embarrassment, no nostalgia, no grief—merely the recognition of something familiar, like a private landscape slowly revealing itself in the growing light of understanding.

  I remembered the first time she sat down beside me—a long time ago—and how she looked at me with the sad expression of someone who knows everything and condemns nothing. What really struck me about her wasn’t her beauty, although she was indeed very beautiful. (Here, I will pause for a moment and ask myself: what is beauty? Beauty is the ultimate goal of our inner fluids, a secret ecstasy, a concordance between our internal world and our external existence. A gift of harmony, you might say. Nina never stood out in any given environment—with the simplicity of all innocent creatures, endowed with all the graces, she was that environment.) From the very beginning, I sensed that she was one of those irreplaceable human beings, a vital, transcendental force, like a sudden wind that wakes us in the dead of night. That she was ma
de of flesh and blood and had a name, that she was brought here on the arm of another man and never stayed for long—what did any of that matter? That is the way with free spirits, they never stay. And the truth is that for me she embodied what I had long been waiting for. Now that she is dead I can call her by her name, softly, as if wanting to see her once again, and yet, for me, that is no longer the name of the person she once was, but the partial, human translation of the power with which she thrust herself into our midst. Let me be blunt: from the very outset and with the special intuition that certain victims have, the Meneses knew that they were faced with a kind of angel of death.

  Betty was waiting with a cup in her hand, still trembling from the news she had just given me.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  With some difficulty I sat up, while the yellow light swirled around me—an effect of my nausea. (I could have said to her: “Betty, I’m not well. I’ve got a headache and I’m feeling sick. Anything could happen to me, absolutely anything . . .” But I didn’t, for she never believed my stories.)

  “Yes, Betty, I heard. She’s dead.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for the shapes around me to stop moving. In a minute or so everything returned to its rightful place. My feelings of nausea shifted to my heart, which felt heavy and still. In response to my apparently simple answer, I saw that gentle creature erupt in anger for the very first time:

  “Oh, Senhor Timóteo! How can you take such news so calmly? And the poor woman lying next door, rolled up in a sheet!”

  I motioned for her to sit beside me.

  “Betty, it’s all very sad, but what can we do? Everyone must die some day.”

  No, death definitely did not terrify me. Powerless to contradict me, Betty covered her face with one hand and slumped onto the bed beside me:

  “She was such a good friend to you, Senhor Timóteo. She was so fond of you!”

  Yes, Betty knew that too, although she could not have known the full extent of our pact. Yes, Betty knew, and as we sat there in silence, alone with our thoughts, the structure of time itself seemed to disintegrate and there came to us suddenly a vision of the dead woman so pure and so implacable that I felt my heart ache. I hugged Betty tight, and, for those few seconds, it felt as if the hostile, senseless world had stopped whirling about me. In our small refuge, as if bathed in a little friendly sunlight, Betty began to talk, and her cautious tones gradually began to clothe that specter already stripped of earthly pomp.

  “It was horrible to watch,” she said. “By the end, she was in such pain she wouldn’t let anyone near her. All she said was: ‘Betty, rub a little perfume on my body.’ I did, but it didn’t get rid of that terrible smell. She asked for a mirror so that she could see herself. Then she combed her stiff, dry hair, then threw the comb down, hid her face in her hands, and wept. Oh, Senhor Timóteo, why does dying bring such suffering? At the end, she was in such a state that we couldn’t even dress her.”

  She described how they had lifted the body, still warm (for a second, she thought she had seen one of her pupils quiver) and rolled her in a white sheet, on top of the other sheet that had become stuck to her body. And there she lay in the drawing room, her sunken cheeks glowing green in the flickering candlelight.

  “Who stayed with her?”

  “No one.” The way in which she said this was a reproach to us all, and she had never dared to go that far before. No, no one at all, and yet the room must surely have been full of people. Or at least no one who truly loved and understood her, who felt some tenderness or compassion for her, or even friendship, rather than the kind of love that scorns the lifeless shell. That is what Betty had come to tell me, and what sorrow, what grief, must have filled her mind as she witnessed the formal trappings of that drama, of which she understood so little. Slowly, like a distant bell beginning to toll dully, dimly—a sound, so jumbled up with past ages, with the dust of events, with old, meaningless objects; a sound, sweeping across the fields, still far off, but already raising up to heaven its heavy bronze voice—and I began to understand that the time had come, and with it the crowning moment of the cause I had so long espoused.

  Almost effortlessly, as if propelled by a new energy, I stood up.

  “And Demétrio, did he not send word to anyone?”

  “Yes, he did,” she said. “She had scarcely closed her eyes when he sent a message to the Baron.”

  At that, I began to laugh, and the sound of my laughter filled the room like a foretaste of resurrection.

  “The Baron! Ah, Betty, what a strange place the world is . . .”

  I saw from her silence that she disapproved. She must certainly have thought me ungrateful, laughing at the woman who had been the only person in the world to show me a little friendship. Ever since I had shut myself up in my room, how many people had dared to cross its threshold? How many had exchanged even a few words or sipped a glass of champagne with me? And yet—ah, the mysteries of human nature!—I was glad. Even at a time like that I could laugh, and I felt neither shame nor remorse. And perhaps—why not?—Betty’s disapproval extended to the entire Meneses tribe, for we were such a cold, heartless lot. Ah, this is what she must be thinking, poor Betty, and I realized how difficult it would be to make her understand what my laughter really meant. It was like the creaking of an iron gate being pushed open. No, for me there was neither pain nor despair, because it was not death, but consummation. There was no anguish because there was no suffering. There was only a task fulfilled. Nina had gone, and I would go and pay her my last respects, as a soldier pays homage to his fallen comrade.

  “Betty,” I said, “before she died, Nina asked me to do something.”

  She looked up at me:

  “What was that?”

  “She asked me—and this was a long time ago—she asked me to lay a bunch of violets on her coffin.”

  Betty nodded:

  “They were her favorite flowers.”

  “Well, then, Betty, I want you to gather as many as you can. Lots and lots of them.”

  She shook her head:

  “That’s impossible, Senhor Timóteo. It isn’t the season for violets.”

  I flew into a rage—I don’t know why—and stamped my foot.

  “I want violets, Betty. I need them.”

  This time she did not answer, but merely gave a sigh of resignation. Then, softly, she asked:

  “How can I bring lots? I might only find half a dozen, at most.” “Bring whatever you can find.” (Suddenly, as if the urgency of the problem had jogged my memory, I remembered an old, very old, flower bed over by the Pavilion. It was exactly that, a bed of violets, and had been planted by a gardener called Alberto, who had killed himself right here at the Chácara. It probably hadn’t been disturbed since, and perhaps among all the weeds there might still be a few flowers, which would be enough for what I needed.) “Listen, Betty, there’s an old flower bed near the Pavilion. I think you’ll find all you need there.”

  She replied pensively:

  “That was exactly where I was planning to go.”

  With that matter settled, my thoughts turned instead to finalizing the details of my plan. So the Baron would at last set foot in this house that had for so long coveted his presence! There was not the slightest doubt that this was, in all respects, one of the most important days in the entire existence of the Meneses. It was thus incumbent upon me to play my part, even though it would be the very last time my plans would fit in with those of my brothers, for after this, eternal oblivion would bury me far from them.

  “Betty!” I exclaimed, turning to face her. “I will leave this room today. I want to see Nina. I want to say goodbye to her.”

  “Oh, Senhor Timóteo!” And her voice trembled with pleasure.

  Curiously, she did not for a second consider how unusual a decision this was, or how ridiculous my gift of a little bunch of violets, or how much my mere presence would offend the others. But what was there to be gained by her knowi
ng these things and being able to gauge the full extent of the cruelty I was about to inflict? It was evident that, for her, the only death that counted was Nina’s, and she would never be able to grasp that another type of death was imminent—a cold, calculated killing committed by hands well-equipped for such a dexterous, murderous deed.

  “Now pay attention, Betty.” I tried to control my voice so she would not pick up the slightest hint of excitement, or notice in my behavior anything other than sorrow at the death of my dear friend. “Now pay attention, so that you don’t forget. As soon as the Baron arrives—and not a moment before—you must come running to tell me. The door will be unlocked, so you’ll just have to push it open.”

  “Just push,” replied Betty mechanically. Then, suddenly suspicious, she turned to me with a doubtful look in her eyes: “Why the Baron, Senhor Timóteo? Why him in particular?”

  “Betty,” I replied, “these are personal matters that don’t concern you. I’ve been waiting for this visit for years.”

  “Oh, Senhor Timóteo! Senhor Timóteo!” she murmured, and stayed where she was, as if waiting for me to explain precisely what I intended.

  “This is the only way, Betty. If you don’t do as I say, Nina will leave this house without her violets and without my farewell, and you will have committed a grave sin.”

  “No! No!” she cried, clasping her hands.

  “Then swear that you will come and tell me when, exactly when, he enters the drawing room.”

  “I swear.”

  Reassured, I lay down again on the bed. Betty stayed where she was, occasionally inhaling sharply as if she were about to say something. Then, apparently changing her mind, she turned and left the room. The familiar silence that ensued felt unexpectedly heavy. I looked from one side of the room to the other, and not a thing moved, as if in expectation of some momentous event. It was only then, as if welling up from deep waters, that the full realization of Nina’s death penetrated the farthest corners of my consciousness. Before me, under a shifting, bluish light, I saw her face as if for the first time—and that familiar ghost, restoring to me a long-lost image, seemed to have been fashioned solely for me. I whispered “Nina,” and everything around me appeared to tremble as if shaken to its foundations. It wasn’t the world retreating into impassive hostility, but a new reality asserting itself, in which there would be no room for peace or generosity. More than ever I felt that I must go to her and that she, wherever she might be, was waiting for me. And I would go just as I had said I would, as her comrade-in-arms. What finer eulogy could I give her?