The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray (4 page)

No one found it funny. Vanda tightened her face, went on with what she had been saying: “I’m not defending him. He put us through a lot, me and my mother, who was a fine woman. And Leonardo. But that’s no reason for my wanting him to be buried like a stray dog. What would people say when they found out? Before he went crazy he was a respectable person. He should be buried in a proper way.”

Leonardo looked at her with pleading eyes. He knew he wouldn’t get anywhere arguing with Vanda. She always ended up imposing her opinion and her wishes. It had been that way too with Joaquim and Otacília, except that one day Joaquim chucked it all and took off. There was nothing else to do, then, but drag the body home and go about telling friends and acquaintances, inviting people by phone, spending the whole night awake listening to them tell tales about
Quincas, the muffled laughter, the winks, everything going on like that until they left for the cemetery. That father-in-law of his had made his life bitter, given the greatest of upsets. Leonardo had lived in apprehension of “another one of his stunts,” of opening the newspaper and coming upon an item about his arrest for vagrancy, as had happened once. He didn’t even want to remember that day when at Vanda’s insistence he went to the police station and was sent from one place to another until he found Quincas in the basement of headquarters, barefoot and in his undershorts, gambling peacefully with thieves and swindlers. And after all that, now when he thought he could breathe easily, he still had to put up with that corpse for a whole day and night, and in his home.…

But Eduardo wasn’t in favor either, and his opinion carried weight because the merchant had agreed to share the funeral expenses. “That’s all very fine, Vanda. Let him be buried like a Christian, with a priest, new clothes, and a wreath. He doesn’t deserve any of it, but he is your father and my brother after all. That’s all very fine, but why have the body at home—?”

“Yeah, why?” Leonardo repeated like an echo.

“…bothering a lot of people, having to rent six or seven limousines for the procession? Do you know how much each one costs? And carrying the body from Tabuão to Itapagipe? A fortune. Why can’t the funeral start from right here? We’ll make up the whole procession. All that will be needed is one car. Then, if you insist, you can send out invitations to the seventh-day mass.”

“Tell them he died in the interior.” Aunt Marocas hadn’t abandoned her suggestion.

“Maybe so. Why not?”

“So who’s going to sit up with the body?”

“Just us. Why should there be anyone else?”

Vanda ended up giving in. It was true, she thought. The idea of carting the body home was too much. It would only mean a lot of work, too much expense and bother. The best thing was to bury Quincas with the greatest discretion possible and then tell friends, invite them to the seventh-day mass. It was all set, then. They ordered dessert. A nearby loudspeaker was bellowing out the superiority of a real estate firm’s sales plan.

Uncle Eduardo went back to his store. He couldn’t leave it alone in the hands of his workers, a bunch of hoodlums. Aunt Marocas promised to come back later for the wake. She had to stop by her home; she’d left everything in a mess in the flurry of receiving the news. Leonardo, on the advice of Vanda herself, was taking the afternoon off from his office in order to visit the real estate company and complete the sale of a lot they were buying on an installment plan. One day, God willing, they would have their own house.

They had set up a kind of rotation, taking turns with the body: Vanda and Aunt Marocas in the afternoon, Leonardo and Uncle Eduardo at night. The Tabuão hillside neighborhood wasn’t any place for a lady to be seen at night; it was a section with a bad reputation, filled with hooligans and ladies of the evening. The next morning the whole family would come together for the burial.

That was how Vanda found herself alone in the afternoon with her father’s corpse. The sounds of a poor and intense life just reached the third floor of the tenement where the dead man was resting after the fatigue of having his clothes changed.

The men from the funeral parlor had done a good job. They were competent and well trained. The image vendor
had said when he stopped by for a moment to see how things were going, “He doesn’t even look dead.” His hair combed, shaved, dressed in black, a white shirt, and a tie, with a pair of shined shoes, it really was Joaquim Soares da Cunha who was resting in the coffin—a splendid casket (Vanda stated this with satisfaction), with gold handles and frills on the edges. They had improvised a kind of table with some boards and sawhorses, and onto it they’d lifted the noble and austere casket. Two large candles—the kind used on a main altar, Vanda boasted—were giving off a weak illumination because the light of Bahia was coming in through the window and filling the room. All that sunshine, so much merry light, seemed to Vanda to be a disrespect for the dead as it negated the candles, taking away their august light. For a moment she thought about snuffing them out, for reasons of economy. But since the undertaker would no doubt charge the same for the use of two or of ten candles, she decided to shut the window, and shadows took over the room as the holy flames leaped up again like tongues of fire. Vanda sat down on a chair (a loan from the image vendor), feeling satisfaction. Not the simple satisfaction of having fulfilled her daughterly duty, but something deeper.

A complacent sigh escaped her breast. She fixed her brown hair with her hands. It was as though she had finally tamed Quincas, as though she were holding the reins again, the ones he had torn from Otacília’s strong hands one day as he laughed in her face. The shadow of a smile bloomed on Vanda’s lips, and it might have been beautiful and desirable had not a certain firm hardness marked it. She felt avenged for everything that Quincas had made the family suffer, especially herself and Otacília. The humiliation of all those years. There had been ten of them since Joaquim had begun to lead that absurd life. “The king of the tramps of Bahia,” the crime blotter in the newspapers had said
about him, a street type mentioned in the chronicles by literary people, avid for something quick and picturesque. Ten years of shame for the family as it was splashed with the shame of that disreputable celebrity, the “boozer in chief of Salvador,” the “tatterdemalion philosopher of the market dock,” the “senator of honky-tonks,” “Quincas Water-Bray, tramp par excellence”—just look at the treatment he received from the newspapers, where they would sometimes print a picture of him, all covered in filth. My God: how much a daughter can suffer in this world where fate has reserved for her the cross of a father with no awareness at all of his duties.

But now she felt content, looking at the corpse in the almost luxurious coffin, wearing a black suit, his hands crossed over his chest in a pose of devout contrition. The flames of the candles rose up, making his new shoes gleam. Everything was quite proper, except for the room, of course. It was a consolation for someone who had been so afflicted and had suffered so much. Vanda felt that Otacília must be feeling happy in the distant circle of the universe where she was. Because her will had finally been imposed: Her daughter had restored Joaquim Soares da Cunha, that good, timid, obedient husband and father. All she had had to do was raise her voice and tighten her face to have him there, sensible and reconciled. There he was, his hands crossed over his chest. The tramp had disappeared forever, the “senator of honky-tonks,” the “patriarch of the red-light district.”

It was too bad he was dead and couldn’t see himself in the mirror; couldn’t witness his daughter’s victory, that of the proper and outraged family.

In that moment of intimate satisfaction, of complete victory, Vanda had wanted to feel generous and good, forgetting the last ten years, as though the competent people from the funeral parlor had purified them with the same
wet, soapy rag with which they had removed the filth from Quincas’s body. Remembering her childhood, her adolescence, her engagement, her marriage, and the peaceful image of Joaquim Soares da Cunha, half-hidden in his canvas chair reading the newspaper, trembling as Otacília’s voice would call out in reprimand: “Quincas!” That was how she was thinking about him, feeling tenderness for him, for that father she had missed, and with a little more effort she might have been capable of a little sentimentality, feeling herself an unhappy and desolate orphan.

The room was growing warmer. With the window closed the sea breeze could find no way to enter. Nor did Vanda want it: Sea, waterfront, breeze, the streets that climbed up the hillside, the street noises—they were all part of that now terminated derangement, its existence ended. All that should remain there were herself; her dead father, the late Joaquim Soares da Cunha; and the fondest memories he had left her. She dug into her past for forgotten episodes. Her father taking her to a merry-go-round that had been set up on the Ribeira on the occasion of a feast day at the church of Bonfim. She had probably never seen anything so delightful: a grown man up on a child’s saddle, bursting with laughter, he who smiled so little. She also remembered the tribute his friends and colleagues had paid him when Joaquim had received a promotion at the Bureau of Revenue. The house was full of people. Vanda was a young girl then, just starting to date. The one who was all puffed up with contentment that day was Otacília, in the center of a group that had formed in the living room, where there were speeches, beer, and a fountain pen presented to the clerk. She looked as if she were the one being honored. Joaquim listened to the speeches, shook hands, and accepted the pen without showing any great enthusiasm. As though he was bored by it all and didn’t have the courage to say so.

She also remembered her father’s face when she told him about Leonardo’s impending visit after he had finally decided to ask him for her hand. He had shaken his head and muttered, “Poor devil.”

Vanda would brook no criticism of her fiancé. “Why poor devil? He comes from a good family, has a good job, and isn’t one for drinking and debauchery.”

“I know that, I know that. I was thinking about something else.”

It was strange: She couldn’t remember many details about her father. It was as if he’d never had an active part in life at home. She could spend hours remembering Otacília: dinners, little things, her expressions, events where her mother was present. The truth is that Joaquim began to figure in their lives only on that absurd day when, after labeling Leonardo a “blockhead,” he stared at her and Otacília and out of nowhere threw into their faces, “Vipers!” And with the greatest of calm in the world, as though he were simply carrying out some exceedingly banal act, he left and never came back.

But Vanda didn’t want to think about that. She went back to her childhood again. It was there that she found the figure of Joaquim in sharper focus. For example, when she was a girl of five, with hair in braids, and quick to tears, she came down with an alarming fever. Joaquim never left her room, sitting beside the little patient, holding her hands, doling out her medicine. He was a good father and a good husband. With that last memory Vanda felt she had been sufficiently sentimental and—had there been anyone else there at the wake—capable of a bit of weeping, as is the obligation of a good daughter.

With a melancholy look on her face, she stared at the corpse. Polished shoes where the light of the candles gleamed, trousers with a perfect crease, a well-fitting black
jacket, devout hands folded over his chest. Her eyes lighted on the shaved chin, and she received her first shock.

She saw the smile. The cynical, immoral smile of someone who was enjoying himself. The smile hadn’t changed. The experts from the funeral parlor had been unable to do anything about it. Also she, Vanda, had forgotten to tell them, to ask for an expression more in keeping with the solemnity of the dead. That smile of Quincas Water-Bray’s was still there, and in the face of that smile of mockery and pleasure, what good were the new shoes, brand-new while poor Leonardo had to get his half-soled for a second time? What good were the dark suit, the white shirt, the shaved chin, the pomaded hair, the hands placed in prayer? Because Quincas was laughing at all that, a laugh that was growing louder and longer and in a short time would be echoing all over that filthy den. He was laughing with his lips and with his eyes, the eyes staring at the pile of dirty, ragged clothes, tossed in a corner and forgotten by the men from the funeral parlor. The laugh of Quincas Water-Bray.

And Vanda could clearly hear the insulting neatness of the syllables in the funereal silence.

“Viper!”

Vanda was startled. Her eyes flashed like Otacília’s, but her face turned pale. That was the word he had used, spitting it out, when she and Otacília had sought him out at the beginning of that madness to lead him back to the comforts of home, his established habits, and his lost decency. Not even now, dead and lying in a coffin, with candles by his feet, dressed in good clothing, would he surrender. He was laughing with his lips and with his eyes. It wouldn’t have been all that strange had he started whistling. And, to make matters worse, one of his thumbs—the one on his left hand—wasn’t folded properly over his other one but was sticking up, anarchic and taunting.

“Viper!” he said again, and whistled playfully.

Vanda shuddered in her chair and ran her hand over her face. “Can I be going mad?” She felt a need for air; the heat was becoming unbearable, and her head was swimming. Heavy breathing on the stairs: Aunt Marocas, dripping fat, was entering the room. She saw how upset her niece was there on the chair, pale, her eyes fixed on the mouth of the dead man.

“You’re all done in, child. And it’s so hot in this cubbyhole.”

Quincas’s devilish smile got wider when he caught sight of his sister’s monumental bulk. Vanda wanted to cover her ears. She knew from past experience the words he loved to use to define Marocas, but what good were hands held over her ears in shutting out the voice of a dead man? She heard: “Fart-sack!”

Marocas, recovered now after her climb, opened the window wide without even a glance at the corpse. “Did they put perfume on him? It stinks to high heaven.”