Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) (12 page)

“Let’s go back,” he said to himself.

The truth is that the prisoner hadn’t mounted the steps to the gallows yet. They were in no hurry to kill him. There was still time to run away. And since Rubião was staying, why wasn’t he closing his eyes the way a certain Alypius had done at the sight of the wild beasts? It must be noted that Rubião had never heard of that ancient youth. He was unaware that he had not only closed his eyes but had also opened them immediately after, slowly and curiously …

There was the prisoner, mounting the gallows. A murmur ran through the crowd. The executioner went to work. It was here that Rubião’s right foot made a turn in the direction it had come, obeying a feeling to go back. But the left foot, taken by a contrary feeling, stayed where it was. They fought for a few moments … Look at my horse!—See, he’s a fine animal!—Don’t be bad!—Don’t be faint–hearted! Rubião was like that for a few seconds, all that was needed for the fatal moment to arrive. All eyes were fixed on the same spot, the same as his. Rubião couldn’t understand what beast was gnawing at his insides or what iron hands were clutching his soul and keeping it there. The fatal instant really was an instant. The prisoner kicked, stiffened; the executioner climbed onto him in an agile and skillful way. A loud
noise spread through the crowd. Rubião gave a shout and saw nothing more.

“Y
our Worship must have seen what a fine little horse I have ...” Rubião opened his half–closed eyes and saw the coachman who was lightly poking with the tip of his whip in order to rouse the animal. Inside he was annoyed with the man, who’d just brought him out of ancient memories. They weren’t pretty, but they were ancient—ancient and curative, because they were giving him an elixir to drink that seemed to have completely cured him of the present. And there was the coachman, tugging at him and waking him up. They were going up the Rua da Lapa, and the horse really was eating up the road, as if it were going downhill.

“This horse feels a great friendship for me,” the coachman went on, “unbelievable. I could tell you amazing things. There are people who say that they’re all lies of mine, but they’re not, no, sir, they’re not. Doesn’t everybody know that horses and dogs are the animals that like people the most? Dogs, I think, like us even more ...”

The mention of dogs brought Quincas Borba back into Rubião’s memory. He was probably waiting anxiously for him there at home. Rubião wasn’t forgetting the conditions of the will. He was fulfilling them to the letter. It must be said that part of the fear of seeing him run away was that of seeing the loss of his possessions. The lawyer’s assurances were useless. The latter had told him that there was no clause in the will making it revert to anyone else in case the dog ran away. The estate couldn’t leave his hands. What difference would the dog’s running away make for him since it would be one less care? Rubião gave the impression of accepting the explanation, but the doubt still remained, the thought of long, drawn–out lawsuits, a variety of
judicial opinions concerning one single point, the acts of some envious person or an enemy, and, what summed it all up, the terror of being left without anything. Out of that came the strict confinement, out of that also the remorse of having spent the afternoon and evening without thinking even once about Quincas Borba.

“I’m an ingrate!” he told himself.

He immediately corrected himself. He was an even greater ingrate because he hadn’t thought about the other Quincas Borba, who’d left him everything. Then suddenly the thought occurred to him that the two Quincas Borbas might be the same creature through the effect of the dead man’s soul entering the body of the dog, not so much to purge his sins as to keep an eye on his owner. It had been a black woman from Sao Joao d’El–Rei who’d put that idea of transmigration into his head when he was a child. She’d said that a soul full of sin would enter the body of a beast. She even swore that she’d known a court clerk who’d been turned into an opossum …

“Your Worship mustn’t forget to tell me where your house is,” the coachman suddenly told him.

“Stop.”

T
he dog was barking inside the gate, but as soon as Rubião entered, he received him with great joy and, no matter how bothersome it was, Rubião outdid himself with petting. The possibility of the testator’s being there gave him the shivers. They went up the stone steps together. They remained there for a few moments in the light of the lamp that Rubião had ordered left on. Rubião was more credulous than believing. He had no reason to attack or defend anything: eternally virgin soil for anything to be planted. Life in the capital had given him a trait, though: among incredulous people he had come to be incredulous …

He looked at the dog while he waited for them to open the door. The dog was looking at him in such a way that inside him there the selfsame and deceased Quincas Borba seemed to be present. It was the same meditative look that the philosopher had had when he was examining human motives … Another shiver. But the fear, while great, wasn’t so great that it tied his hands. Rubião reached them out to the dog’s head, scratching his ears and neck.

“Poor Quincas Borba! You like your master, don’t you? Rubião is a good friend of Quincas Borba …”

And the dog moved his head left and right to facilitate the petting of his two drooping ears. Then he lifted up his jaw so he could be scratched underneath it, and his master obeyed. But then the dog’s eyes, half closed with pleasure, took on the look of the philosopher’s eyes, in bed, telling him things of which he understood very little or nothing at all... Rubião closed his eyes. They opened the door for him. He took leave of the dog but with such petting that it was the same as inviting him in. The Spanish servant took charge of taking him back down.

“Don’t hurt him,” Rubião ordered.

He didn’t hurt him, but just going down was painful enough and the dog–friend whimpered in the garden for a long time. Rubião went in, got undressed, and lay down. Oh, he’d lived through a day full of diverse and contrary sensations, from his morning memories and lunch with his two friends up to that last idea of metempsychosis, passing along the way through the memory of the hanged man and through a declaration of love that wasn’t accepted, was barely repulsed, was seemingly suspected by other people … He was mixing everything in. His spirit was going back and forth like a rubber ball between the hands of children. All in all, the major feeling was that of love. Rubião was amazed at himself, and he repented. But the repentance was the work of his conscience, while his imagination wouldn’t for any price release the image of the beautiful Sofia … One, two, three o’clock… Sofia far off, the barking of the dog down below … Evasive sleep … Where had three o’clock gone? Three–thirty … Finally, after a great effort, sleep came for him, squeezed out the opium from its poppies, and it took only an instant. Before it was four o’clock, Rubião was asleep.

N
o, my dear lady, that ever so long day isn’t over yet. We still don’t know what happened between Sofia and Palha after everyone had left. It’s even possible that you’ll find a better taste here than in the case of the hanged man.

Be patient. It’s a matter of going back to Santa Teresa now. The parlor is still lighted by a gas jet. The other lights have been extinguished, and the last one was about to be when Palha ordered the servant to wait inside for a bit. The wife was about to leave the room; the husband held her back. She trembled.

“Our party was quite nice,” he said.

“It was.”

“Siqueira’s a bore, but we’ve got to be patient. He’s a jolly sort. His daughter didn’t look too bad. Did you see how Ramos gobbled up everything that was put on his plate? You just watch, someday he’s going to swallow his wife.”

“His wife?” Sofia asked, smiling.

“She’s fat. I admit, but the first one was even fatter, and I don’t think she died. He most certainly gobbled her up.”

Sofia, reclining on the settee, laughed at her husband’s witticisms. They discussed a few more episodes of the afternoon and evening; then Sofia, stroking her husband’s hair, said suddenly:

“But you still don’t know what the best episode of the evening was.”

“Which was it?”

“Guess.”

Palha was silent for some time, looking at his wife, trying to guess what had been the best episode of the evening. He couldn’t. This one or that one came to mind, but they weren’t it. Sofia would shake her head.

“Which was it, then?”

“I don’t know. Guess.”

“I can’t. Come on, tell me.”

“Under one condition,” she hastened to say. “I don’t want any huffing or any row ...”

Palha grew more serious. Huffing? Row? What the devil could it be? he thought. He wasn’t laughing any longer. All he had left
were the remains of a forced and resigned smile. He stared hard at her and asked her what it was.

“Do you promise what I asked?”

“All right. What was it?”

“Well, you should know, then, that I heard a declaration of love.”

Palha grew pale. He hadn’t promised not to grow pale. He loved his wife, as we know, even to the point of showing her off. He couldn’t hear that news coldly. Sofia saw his paleness and enjoyed the bad impression she’d made. To savor it all the more she leaned her breast over him, loosened her hair, which had been bothering her a little, gathered the hairpins in a handkerchief, then shook her head, breathed deeply, and grasped her husband’s hands as he stood there.

“It’s true, you fine fellow, your wife was courted.” “So who was the scoundrel?” he asked, impatient.

“Easy. If this is the way things are going to go, I won’t tell. Who was it? You want to know who it was? You’ve got to hear it calmly. It was Rubião.”

“Rubião?”

“I couldn’t have imagined such a thing. He always seemed so bashful and respectful to me. It only proves that the habit doesn’t make the monk. I’ve never heard the slightest peep out of all the men who’ve come here. They look at me, naturally, because I’m not ugly … Why are you walking back and forth like that? Stop. I don’t want to have to raise my voice … Fine, like that… Let’s get down to cases. He didn’t make an out and out declaration to me …”

“Oh, no?” her husband put in eagerly.

“No, but it amounted to the same.” And then she told him what had happened in the garden, from the time the two of them had gone out there until the major appeared.

“That’s all there was,” she concluded, “but it’s enough to see that if he didn’t say love it was because the word hadn’t got to his tongue. But it did get to his hand, which squeezed my fingers … That’s all, but, even so, it’s too much. It’s good you’re not getting angry, but we’ve got to shut the door on him—either all at once or little by little. I’d prefer it all at once, but
I’ll accept either way. What do you think is the best way to do it?”

Biting his lower lip, Palha continued looking at her like a dunce. He sat down on the settee, silent. He was thinking the matter over. He found it natural that his wife’s charms should captivate a man—and Rubião could be that man. But he trusted Rubião so much that the note Sofia had sent him along with the strawberries had been dictated by him. His wife had limited herself to copying it down, signing it, and sending it off. Never, however, had the idea crossed his mind that his friend would make a declaration of love to anybody, much less Sofia, if it really was love. He might have been making a joke between close friends. Rubião would look at her a lot, it was true, and it also seemed that Sofia, on some occasions, would repay those looks with others of her own … The concessions of a pretty woman! But, after all, while their eyes stayed like that some flashes might come out of them. One shouldn’t be jealous of the optic nerve, the husband was thinking. Sofia got up, went to put the handkerchief with the hairpins on the piano, and took a look in the mirror to see herself with her hair down. When she returned to the settee her husband took her hand, laughing:

“It seems to me that you’ve got more upset than the case deserves. Comparing a young woman’s eyes to the stars and the stars to her eyes, after all, is something that can be done in front of everybody among close friends and in prose or verse in front of the general public. The blame belongs to those pretty eyes of yours. Besides, in spite of what you’re telling me, you know that he’s just a bumpkin …”

“Then the devil’s a bumpkin, too, because he didn’t seem like anything less than the devil to me. What about his asking me to look at the Southern Cross at a certain time so that our souls could meet?”

“That, yes, that does have the smell of lovemaking about it,” Palha agreed. “But you can see that it’s the request of a poor innocent soul. That’s the way fifteen–year–old girls talk. That’s the way boobs talk all the time; poets, too. But he’s not a young girl and he’s not a poet.”

“I don’t think so. And what about grabbing my hand to keep me in the garden?”

Palha felt a chill. The idea of the contact of hands and the force taken to hold his wife back was what mortified him most. Frankly, if he could have done so, he was capable of having it out with Rubião and laying his hands on his throat. Other ideas, however, came and dissipated the effect of the first. So that although Sofia had thought she’d upset him, she saw him shrug his shoulders with disdain and respond that it was only a matter of coarse manners after all.

“But after all, Sofia, whatever gave you the idea of inviting him to go have a look at the moon, please tell me?”

“I called Dona Tonica to come with us.”

“But once Dona Tonica refused you should have found ways and means not to go into the garden. They’re things that can immediately incite a person. You’re the one who gave him the opportunity…”

Sofia looked at him, contracting her thick eyebrows. She was going to answer, but she remained silent. Palha continued developing the same theme. The blame was hers. She shouldn’t have given him the opportunity…

“But didn’t you tell me yourself that we should treat him with special consideration? I certainly wouldn’t have gone into the garden if I could have imagined what was going to happen. But I never expected that a man who was so quiet, so I don’t know what, would throw care to the winds and say strange things to me …”