Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) (30 page)

What a bothersome man!”

From there she went over to lean against the window, which opened onto the wretched garden where the two ordinary roses were withering. Roses, when they’re fresh, care little or nothing about the anger of others, but if they waste away, everything about them is cause for the vexation of the human soul. I should like to believe that this custom is born of the brevity of life. “For roses,” someone wrote, “the gardener is eternal.” And what better way to wound eternity than to make fun of its angers? I go, but you stay. But all I did was bloom and give aroma, I served ladies and maidens, I was a symbol of love, I decorated men’s buttonholes, or I expired on my own bush, and all hands and all eyes dealt with me and looked upon me with admiration and affection. Not you, oh, eternity! You rant, you suffer, you weep, you flagellate yourself! Your eternity isn’t worth one single minute of mine.

So when Sofia got to the window that looked out onto the garden, both roses laughed with unplucked petals. One of them said it was well done! Well done! Well done!

“You’re right to get angry, beautiful creature,” it added, “but it’s got to be over you and not him. What’s he worth? A sad man without charm can get to be a good friend and maybe a generous one, but repugnant, right? And you, courted by others, what devil brings you to lend an ear to that intruder in your life? It humiliates you, oh, you superb creature, because you’re the very cause of your own trouble. You swore to forget about him and you haven’t. But must you forget him? Isn’t it enough for you to look at him and listen to him to scorn him? That man hasn’t said a single thing, oh, singular creature, and you …”

“It’s not entirely that way,” the other rose interrupted with an ironic and weary voice. “He’s been saying something and he’s been saying it for a long time, not dropping it, not changing it. He’s firm, he ignores pain, he believes in hope. His whole amorous
life has been like the ride to Tijuca that you were talking about a while back. ‘It’s all set for next Sunday!’ Come now, some pity at least. Show some pity, my good Sofia! If you’ve got to love someone outside your marriage, let it be him. He loves you and is discreet. Go on, repent for your action a while back. What harm has he done to you, and what fault is it of his that you’re beautiful? And if there’s any blame, the basket doesn’t have any just because he bought it, even less the thread and the sewing things that you yourself had bought by a servant. You’re bad, Sofia, you’re unjust…”

S
ofia let herself go on listening, listening … She interrogated other plants, and they didn’t tell her anything different. There are these miraculous lucky hits. Anyone who knows the soil and the subsoil of life knows quite well that a stretch of wall, a bench, a rug, an umbrella are rich with ideas or feelings when we are, too, and that the reflections of a partnership between men and things constitute one of the most interesting phenomena on earth. The expression “Talking to his buttons,” which looks like a simple metaphor for “Talking to himself,” is a phrase with a real and direct meaning. The buttons operate synchronically with us, forming a kind of senate, handy and cheap, that always votes in favor of our motions.

T
he ride to Tijuca took place without incident except for a fall from a horse on the way down. It wasn’t Rubião who fell, or Palha, but the latter’s wife as she went along thinking about something and whipped the animal in a rage. He reared and dropped her to the ground. Sofia fell gracefully. She was singularly slim, wearing a riding habit, her small, attractive body just right. If he could have seen her, Othello would have exclaimed, “Oh, my beautiful warrior lass!” Rubião limited himself to this as the ride began: “You’re an angel!”

“
T
hurt my knee,” she said as she entered the house, limping. “Let me see.”

In the drawing room Sofia lifted her foot onto a stool and showed her husband the bruised knee. It had swollen a little, only a little, but touching it made her cry out. Palha, not wishing to hurt her, touched it only with the tip of his lips.

“Did I reveal anything when I fell?”

“No. Because with such a long dress … The tip of your foot was barely showing. There was nothing, believe me.”

“Do you swear?”

“You’re not at all very trusting, Sofia! I swear by everything holy, by the light that guides me, by Our Lord God. Are you satisfied?”

Sofia was covering her knee.

“Let me see it again. I don’t think it’s anything serious. Put a little something on it. Have someone go ask the druggist.”

“It’s all right, let me get undressed,” she said, struggling to lower her dress.

But Palha lowered his eyes from the knee to the rest of her
leg where it met the top of her boot. It really was a good stretch of nature. The silk stocking enhanced the perfection of its shape. Palha, for the fun of it, kept asking his wife if she’d hurt herself here, and then here, and then here, pointing out the places with his hand as it descended. If just a little piece of this masterpiece were to appear, the sky and the trees would be astounded, he concluded as his wife lowered her dress and took her foot off the stool.

“That might be so, but it wasn’t just the sky and the trees,” she said. “Rubião’s eyes were there, too.”

“Come, now, Rubião! But that’s right. Did he ever repeat that nonsense from Santa Teresa?”

“Never again, but, really, I wouldn’t like it. . . Do you swear, truthfully, Cristiano?”

“What you want me to do is to keep going from one holy thing to the next until I reach the holiest of holies. I swore by God, that wasn’t enough. I swear by you, are you satisfied?”

Silly little love plays. He finally left his wife’s room and went into his own. That timid and unbelieving modesty of Sofia’s had had a good effect on him. It showed that she was his, completely his. For that very reason of possession he felt it was the place of a great lord not to be bothered by some quick, casual glance at a hidden piece of his realm. And he was sorry that the casual glance had stopped at the tip of the boot. It was only the border. The first villages of the territory lying before the city injured by the fall would give the idea of a sublime and perfect civilization. And, soaping and rubbing his face, his neck, and his head in the broad silver basin, scrubbing himself, drying himself, perfuming himself, Palha imagined the surprise and envy of the only witness to the disaster had it been less incomplete.

I
t was around that time that Rubião gave all his friends a fright. On the Tuesday following the Sunday of the ride (it was then January 1870), he told a barber on the Rua do Ouvidor to send someone to give him a shave at his house the next day at nine o’clock in the morning. A French journeyman, name of Lucien, arrived there and went into Rubião’s study according to instructions given the servant.

“Grr!” growled Quincas Borba on Rubião’s knees.

Lucien greeted the master of the house. The latter, however, didn’t see the bow, just as he hadn’t heard Quincas Borba’s warning. He was on a chaise longue, bereft of his spirit, which had broken through the ceiling and had been lost in the air. How many leagues would it go? Neither a condor nor an eagle would be able to say. On its way to the moon—all it could see down here were the perennial bits of happiness that had rained down upon it, from the cradle, where fairies had swaddled it, to the Praia de Botafogo, where they had carried it over a bed of roses and jasmines. No reverses, no misfortune, no poverty—a placid life, sewn together with pleasure and with an excess of lace. On its way to the moon!

The barber cast his eyes about the study where the main item was the desk and on it the busts of Napoleon and Louis Napoleon. Relative to the latter, hanging on the wall there was also an engraving or lithograph showing the Battle of Solferino and a portrait of the Empress Eugénie.

Rubião was wearing a pair of damask slippers edged in gold. On his head, a cap with a black silk tassel. On his mouth, a pale blue smile.

“
S
ir …” “Grr!” Quincas Borba repeated, standing on his master’s knees.

Rubião came to and saw the barber. He recognized him from having seen him recently in the shop. He got up from the chair, and Quincas Borba barked, as if defending him against the intruder.

“Quiet! Be still!” Rubião told him, and the dog, ears down, went over behind the wastebasket. During this time Lucien was unwrapping his implements.

“You’re going to lose a beautiful beard,” he told him in French. “I know people who did the same thing, but to please some lady. I’ve had the confidence of important men …”

Precisely!” Rubião interrupted.

He hadn’t understood a word. Even though he knew some French, he could barely understand the written language—as we know—and he didn’t understand the spoken at all. But, a strange phenomenon, he didn’t answer as a false pretense. He heard the words as a compliment or praise and, stranger still, answering him in Portuguese, he thought he was speaking French.

“Precisely!” he repeated. “I want to restore my face to its earlier form. Like that.”

And as he pointed to the bust of Napoleon III, the barber responded in our language:

“Ah! The emperor. A nice bust, really. A fine piece of work. Did you buy it here or have it sent from Paris? They’re magnificent. There’s the first, the great one. He was a genius. If it hadn’t been for betrayal, oh, the traitors. Do you see, sir? Traitors are worse than Orsini’s bombs!”

“Orsini! Poor devil!”

“He paid dearly.”

“He paid what he should have. But neither bombs nor Orsini can stand up to a great man,” Rubião went on. “When the fate of a nation places the imperial crown on the head of a great man, there’s no evil that can do anything … Orsini! A fool!”

In just a few minutes the barber began dropping Rubião’s
beard to the floor, leaving only the mustache and the goatee of Napoleon III. It was hard work. He stated that it was difficult to make one thing match the other exactly. And as he cut the beard he praised it.—Such fine hair! It was a great and honest sacrifice he was making, really…

“Mister barber, you’re being presumptuous,” Rubião interrupted him. “I already told you what I want. Make my face the way it used to be. You’ve got a bust there to guide you.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll do just as you say, and you’ll see how close the resemblance will turn out.”

And snip, snip, he gave the last cuts to Rubião’s beard and began to shave his cheeks and chin. The operation took a long time, and the barber was going along peacefully shaving, comparing, dividing his gaze between the bust and the man. Sometimes, for a better comparison, he would step back two paces, look at them alternatively, lean over, ask the man to turn to one side or the other, and go to take a look at the corresponding side of the bust.

“How’s it coming?” Rubião asked.

Lucien made a gesture for him not to talk and went on with his work. He trimmed the goatee, left the mustache, and shaved freely, slowly, in a friendly way, relaxed, his fingers discovering some little, imperceptible hair on the chin or the cheeks. Sometimes Rubião tired of looking at the ceiling while the other man perfected his chin, asked to rest. As he rested, he stroked his face and felt the change through touch.

“The mustache isn’t very long,” he observed.

“I have to fix the edges. I’ve got little irons here to make them curve over the lips, and then we’ll fix the tips. Oh, I’d rather do ten original pieces of work than just one copy!”

It took ten more minutes before the mustache and goatee were trimmed. Finally, all ready, Rubião jumped up, ran to the mirror in the bedroom next door. He was the other one; in a word, they were the same.

“Just right!” he exclaimed, returning to the study where the barber, having put his implements away, was petting Quincas Borba.

And, going to the desk, Rubião opened a drawer, took out a twenty
mil–réis
note, and gave it to him.

“I don’t have any change,” the other man said.

“There’s no need for change,” Rubião hastened to say with a sovereign gesture. “Take out what you have to pay the shop, and the rest is yours.”

W
hen he was alone, Rubião dropped into an armchair and V V watched all sorts of sumptuous things pass by. He was in Biarritz or Compiégne, which one isn’t really known. Compiégne, it would seem. He governed a great state, he listened to ministers and ambassadors, he danced, he dined—and performed other acts mentioned in newspaper reports which he had read and which had stuck in his memory. Not even Quincas Borba’s whines succeeded in rousing him. He was far away and high up. Compiégne was on the road to the moon. On his way to the moon!

W
hen he came down from the moon, he heard the whining of the dog, and his chin felt cold. He ran to the mirror and verified that the difference between his bearded face and his smooth face was great but that even smooth like that it didn’t look too bad on him. His tablemates reached the same conclusion.

“It’s perfectly fine! You should have done it a long time ago. Not that a full beard took away the nobility of your face, but the way it is now, it keeps what it used to have and has a modern look as well...”

“Modern,” the host repeated.

Outside there was the same surprise. Everybody sincerely found that this changed look became him better than the previous one. Only one person, Dr. Camacho, even though he found that the mustache and goatee looked very good on his friend, argued that it wasn’t a good idea to change one’s face, a true mirror of the soul, whose stability and constancy should be reproduced.

“I’m not just talking about myself,” he concluded, “But I’ll never see your face in any other way. It’s a moral necessity of my person. My life, sacrificed to principles—because I’ve never tried to compromise principles, only with men—my life, I say, is a faithful image of my face and vice versa.”