Ignacio trembled as he heard the lawyer’s shouts, took the plate he was given and tried to eat under a cloudburst of names: layabout, day-dreamer, fool, nutcase.
‘Where’s your brain gone? Why do you never hear a word I say? I’ll tell your father everything, so he can beat the laziness out of your body with a good quince cane or a stick; yes, you’re not too old for a beating, don’t think you are! Fool! Nutcase!’
‘He’s just the same out there as he is here,’ he went on, turning to Dona Severina, a lady who’d been living with him, maritally so to speak, for years. ‘He gets all my papers mixed up, goes to the wrong addresses, goes to one notary when he should go to another, mixes up lawyers’ names – it’s murder! It’s this doze he’s in all the time. In the mornings, that’s the way it is; you need to break his bones to wake him up … leave it to me; tomorrow I’ll wake him with a broomstick!’
Dona Severina prodded Borges gently with her foot, as if asking him to stop. He spat out a few more insults, then settled down, at peace with man and God.
I’ll not say he was at peace with children, because our friend Ignacio was not exactly a child. He was fifteen, and looked every bit of it. The head was handsome, with its dishevelled hair and the dreamy, inquisitive eyes of a lad who questions, searches and never quite finds – all this crowning a body not without charm, even if it was badly dressed. His father’s a barber in Cidade Nova, and placed him as an agent, scribe, clerk, or something of the sort with Borges the lawyer, hoping he’d rise in the world, because he thought barristers got a lot of money. All this took place in the Rua da Lapa, in 1870.
For some minutes there was nothing more than the clink of knives and forks and the noise of chewing. Borges stuffed himself with beef and lettuce; he punctuated the flow with a slug of wine, and carried on in silence.
Ignacio went on eating slowly, not daring to lift his eyes from the plate or put them where they were at the moment the terrible Borges took off at him. The truth is that at this moment it would be very risky. If he so much as let his eyes wander to Dona Severina’s arms he’d forget himself, and everything else too.
It was, truly, Dona Severina’s fault, going round with them bare all the time. All her indoor dresses had short sleeves, which stopped a few inches below her shoulder; from that point on her arms were on show. They really were lovely and rounded, in harmony with the lady herself, more plump than she was thin, and they lost none of their colour or softness by exposure to the open air; but it is fair to explain that she didn’t wear them that way to show off, but because she’d already worn out all her long-sleeved dresses. When she was standing she was very striking; when she walked she swayed in a funny way; Ignacio, however, almost never saw her except at table, where, beyond her arms, he could hardly even see her bust. You can’t say she was pretty; but she wasn’t ugly either. She wore no ornament; even her hair was simply arranged; she smoothed, gathered, and tied and fixed it on top of her head with the tortoiseshell comb her mother had left her. At her throat was a dark neckerchief; in her ears, nothing. Her twenty-seven years were solid and in full bloom.
They finished dining. Borges, when the coffee came, took four cigars out of his pocket, compared them, pressed them between his fingers, chose one and put the others back. With his cigar lit, he placed his elbows on the table and spoke to Dona Severina of thirty thousand things that had no interest for our young friend; but while Borges was speaking, he wasn’t lambasting him, and he could dream at leisure.
Ignacio made the coffee last as long as he could. Between one sip and the next, he smoothed the cloth down, picked imaginary pieces of skin off his fingers, or let his eyes wander round the pictures in the dining room, which were two, one of St Peter, the other of St John, devotional pictures bought at festival time and framed at home. We can believe he could disguise his thoughts with St John, whose young head brings cheer to Catholic imaginations; but with the austere St Peter it is going a bit far. Ignacio’s only defence is that he saw neither one nor the other. All he saw was Dona Severina’s arms – either because he took a sly look at them, or because they were imprinted on his memory.
‘Come on, man! Are you never going to finish?’ the lawyer shouted suddenly.
There was no help for it; Ignacio drank the last cold drop and retired, as usual, to his room at the back of the house. As he went in he made a gesture of anger and despair, and later went to lean out of one of the two windows looking over the sea. Five minutes later, the sight of the water nearby and the far-off mountains gave him a confused, vague, restless feeling, painful and pleasurable at the same time, like something a plant must feel when its first flower comes into bud. He wanted to leave, and he wanted to stay. He’d been there for five weeks, and life was the same every day, out in the morning with Borges, going round courts and notaries, running round, taking papers to be stamped, to the post, to scribes and officials. He came back in the afternoon, had lunch and went to his room until supper-time; he had his supper and went to bed. Borges didn’t admit him into the family circle, which consisted only of Dona Severina, and Ignacio saw her no more than three times a day, at meals. Five weeks of solitude, of drudgery, far from his mother and sisters; five weeks of silence, because he only said anything once or twice in the street; in the house, he never said a word.
‘You’ll see,’ he thought one day, ‘I’ll run away from here and not come back.’
He didn’t; he felt bound and chained to Dona Severina’s arms. He’d never seen any as pretty and as fresh. His upbringing didn’t allow him to look at them openly; it seems, in fact, that at the beginning he withdrew his eyes in embarrassment. He began to look little by little, once he saw that they never had sleeves to cover them, and he gradually discovered them, looking and loving. At the end of three weeks they were, morally speaking, the tents where he took his repose. He put up with all the work in town, all the melancholy of solitude and silence, and all his boss’s rude abuse, just for the reward of seeing, three times a day, the famous pair of arms.
That day, when night was falling and Ignacio was stretching out in his hammock (he had no other bed), Dona Severina, in the front room, was thinking over the dinner episode and, for the first time, she suspected something. She rejected the idea immediately – he was only a boy! But there are ideas akin to insistent flies: the more we beat them off, the more they come back and alight on us. A boy? He was fifteen; and she noticed that between the lad’s nose and mouth there was the beginning of a sketch of fuzz. Was it so astonishing that he was beginning to fall in love? And wasn’t she pretty? This last idea wasn’t rejected; rather it was caressed and kissed. Then she remembered his demeanour, his distracted air, his oversights – one incident after another; these were all symptoms, and she thought yes, it was true.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ said the lawyer to her, stretching out on the settee, after a few minutes’ silence.
‘Me? Nothing.’
‘Nothing? It seems everything’s asleep in this house! Leave it to me, I know a good medicine for waking sleepyheads …’
And so he went on, in the same angry tone, firing off threats, but in fact incapable of carrying them out, for he was more of a loudmouth than a truly nasty man. Dona Severina kept telling him no, he was mistaken, she wasn’t asleep, she was thinking about her good friend Fortunata. They hadn’t been to see her since Christmas; why didn’t they go over there some night soon? Borges replied that he was tired all the time, working like a black man, and he’d no time for idle chat; and he attacked Fortunata, her husband, and their son, who wasn’t going to school, at the age of ten! He, Borges, when he was ten, already knew how to read, write and do his sums, not very well, it’s true, but at least he knew. Ten! He’d come to a good end: a good-for-nothing, he’d be press-ganged in no time. Life in the army would teach him a lesson.
Dona Severina soothed him with excuses, Fortunata’s poverty, her husband’s bad luck, and caressed him a little fearfully, in case the caresses irritated him some more. It was completely dark; she heard the click of the gas lamp, which had just come on, and saw its glimmer in the windows of the house over the street. Borges, tired out after his day, for he really did work very hard, closed his eyes and started to drop off. He left her in the room, in the dark, alone with herself and the discovery she’d just made.
Everything seemed to tell the lady it was true; but this truth, once she’d got over the surprise, brought with it a moral complication, which she only recognised by its effects; she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She couldn’t understand herself or settle down, and even thought of telling the lawyer everything, so that he would send the youngster away. But what did it all amount to? Here she stopped in her tracks: in reality, there was nothing more than supposition, coincidence and possibly illusion. No, no, it wasn’t an illusion. Then she started piecing together the vague clues, the lad’s attitudes, his shyness, his distractedness, till she rejected the idea that she was mistaken. In a short while (O perfidious nature!), reflecting that it would be wrong to accuse him baselessly, she admitted she might be deluded, with the single aim of observing him better and seeing what was really going on.
That very night, Dona Severina looked from under her eyelids at Ignacio’s gestures; she saw nothing, because tea didn’t take long, and the lad didn’t take his eyes off the cup. The next day she was able to observe him better, and later still, extremely well. She saw it was true, she was loved and feared, with an adolescent, virginal love, held back by social ties and a feeling of inferiority which prevented him from understanding himself. Dona Severina realised that she need fear no misdemeanour, and concluded it was better to say nothing to the lawyer; she would save him from one nasty surprise, and the poor child from another. She was already persuading herself that he was a child, and determined to treat him as coolly as she had done till now, or even more so. So she did; Ignacio began to feel that her eyes avoided his, or she spoke sharply, almost as much so as Borges himself. It is true that at other times her tone of voice came out quite soft and even gentle, very gentle; in just the same way her look, generally elusive, wandered elsewhere so much that, just to find some rest, it would sometimes alight on his head; but all this was fleeting.
‘I’m going to leave,’ he repeated in the street, as he had when he was first there.
But he’d come back to the house, and he didn’t leave. Dona Severina’s arms formed a parenthesis in the middle of the long and tedious sentence of the life he was leading, and this inserted phrase had an original and profound idea embedded in it, invented by Heaven only for him. He stayed and carried on as before. In the end, however, he had to leave, and for good; here’s how and why.
Dona Severina had been treating him with some benevolence. The roughness in her voice seemed to have disappeared, and there was more than softness, there was care and affection. One day she would tell him to keep out of draughts, another that he shouldn’t drink cold water after hot coffee, reminders, advice, the considerate thoughts of a friend and mother, which threw his soul into even greater anxiety and confusion. Ignacio grew so confident of himself that he laughed one day at the table, something he’d never done; and the lawyer didn’t berate him this time, because it was he who was telling a funny story, and no one punishes anyone for applauding them. It was then that Dona Severina saw that the boy’s mouth, charming when he was silent, was no less charming when he laughed.
Ignacio’s agitation grew; he couldn’t keep calm or understand what was happening to him. Nowhere did he feel easy. He’d wake up at night, thinking about Dona Severina. In the street, he would take wrong turnings, go to the wrong doors, much more than before, and he couldn’t set eyes on a woman, nearby or far off, who didn’t remind him of her. When he entered the house along the corridor as he returned from work, he always felt some excitement; sometimes a great deal, when he saw her at the top of the stairs, looking at him through the wooden slats of the door, as if having come to see who it was.
One Sunday – he never forgot that Sunday – he was alone in his room, at the window, looking at the sea, which was whispering the same obscure new language as Dona Severina. He amused himself watching the gulls describing circles in the air, alighting on the water or simply fluttering round. It was a beautiful day. It wasn’t just a Christian Sunday; it was an immense, universal Sunday.
Ignacio always spent these days there in his room or looking out of the window, or rereading one of the three little books he’d brought with him, stories of times past, bought for next to nothing under the archway in the Largo do Paço. It was two in the afternoon. He was tired, he’d slept badly, having walked around a great deal the previous day; he stretched out in the hammock, picked up one of the books, Princess Magalona, and began reading. He’d never been able to understand why all the heroines in these old stories had the same face and figure as Dona Severina, but the fact was that they had. After half an hour, he let the book drop and stared at the wall, from where, five minutes later, he saw the mistress of his thoughts emerge. He should have been astonished; but he wasn’t. Even though his lids were shut, he saw her detach herself completely, stop, smile, and walk towards the hammock. It was she; those were her arms.
The truth is, however, that not only could Dona Severina not have emerged from the wall, supposing there to have been a door or a fissure there – but she was in the front room, listening to the lawyer’s footsteps as he went downstairs. She heard him go down; she went to the window and only came back when he’d disappeared into the distance, on his way to the Rua das Mangueiras. Then she came in and went to sit on the settee. She seemed out of sorts, restless, almost manic; getting up, she went to pick up a jar on the sideboard and put it back where it had been; then she walked as far as the door, stopped and turned back, for no reason at all, it seems. She sat down again, for five or ten minutes. Suddenly, she remembered that Ignacio hadn’t eaten much at breakfast and looked a bit downcast. It occurred to her he might be ill – maybe he was very ill indeed.
She went out of the door, hurriedly crossed the corridor and went to the lad’s room, finding the door wide open. Dona Severina stopped, peeped in, and saw him in the hammock, asleep, with his arm hanging down and the book on the floor. His head was turned a little towards the door, so one could see his eyes were closed; his hair was tousled and he had a smiling, blissful look about him.
Dona Severina’s heart beat violently, and she drew back. She had dreamed of him the previous night; maybe he was dreaming about her now. Since daybreak, the lad’s image had been floating in front of her eyes like a temptation of the devil. She drew back further, then came forward again, and looked for two, three, five minutes or more. It seems sleep gave an emphasis to Ignacio’s adolescence, an almost feminine, childlike expression. A child! she said to herself, in that wordless language we all have within us. This idea slowed the rush of blood to her heart and partially calmed her agitated feelings.
‘A child!’
She looked him over slowly, surfeited herself with looking at him, with his head bent to one side, his arm drooping; but, at the same time as she found him childlike, she found him handsome, much more than when he was awake, and one of these notions corrected or corrupted the other. Suddenly she shuddered and drew back in shock: she’d heard a noise nearby, in the ironing closet. She went to look – a cat had knocked a bowl on to the floor. Slowly, quietly coming back to look at him, she saw he was in a deep sleep. How soundly the boy slept! The noise that had given her such a fright hadn’t even made him change position. And she went on looking at him sleeping – sleeping, dreaming, who knows?
How sad we can’t see each other’s dreams! Dona Severina would have seen herself in the boy’s imagination; she would have seen herself standing by the hammock, smiling and motionless; then leaning over, taking his hands, lifting them to her chest and enfolding them in her arms, her wondrous arms. Ignacio, fond as he was of her arms, even so heard her words, which were beautiful, warm, and above all new – or, at least, they belonged to some language he didn’t know, even though he understood it. Two, three, four times the figure faded away, only to return, coming from the sea or somewhere else, flying with the gulls, and crossing the corridor, with all the robust charm she was capable of. And coming back, she leaned over, took his hands in hers again and folded her arms across her chest, until, leaning over further, much further, she pursed her lips and gave him a kiss on the mouth.
Here the dream coincided with reality, and the same mouths were united in the imagination and outside it. The difference is that the vision did not draw back, and the real person had no sooner completed this movement than she fled to the door, ashamed and afraid. From there she went to the front room, stunned by what she had done, unable to fix her eyes on anything. Her ears were on stalks, she went to the end of the corridor to see if she could hear any noise that might tell her he was awake, and only after a long time did the fear begin to subside. It really was true that the lad slept soundly; nothing would open his eyes, whether it was a nearby crash, or a real kiss. But, if the fear faded, her shame stayed and grew. Dona Severina couldn’t believe she’d done a thing like that; it seems she’d wrapped up her desires in the idea that in front of her was an adoring child, unconscious and blameless; and half-mother, half-friend, she had leaned over and kissed him. However that may be, she was confused, irritated, annoyed at herself and at him. The fear that he might be pretending he was asleep surfaced in her soul and made her shiver.
But the truth is that he slept for much longer, and only woke for supper. He sat eagerly down at the table. Although he found Dona Severina silent and severe and the lawyer as sharp as ever, neither the sharpness nor the severity could dissolve the charming scene he still had in his mind, nor could they dull the sensation of the kiss. He didn’t notice that Dona Severina was wearing a shawl covering her arms; he noticed later, on the Monday, and the Tuesday, and until the Saturday, when Borges sent to tell his father that he couldn’t keep him any longer. He didn’t do it angrily, treating him relatively well, and even saying as he left:
‘If you need me for anything, look me up.’
‘Yes, sir. Senhora Dona Severina …’
‘She’s in her room, with a bad headache. Come back tomorrow or the next day to say goodbye to her.’
Ignacio left without understanding a thing. The dismissal, the complete change in Dona Severina’s attitude towards him, the shawl, it was all a mystery to him. She seemed so content! She spoke to him so kindly! How, so suddenly … He thought about it so much that he ended up surmising that some indiscreet look or a momentary distraction had offended her. That must be it; that explained the frowning face and the shawl covering those beautiful arms … Never mind; he took the taste of the dream away with him. And for many years, passing through other love affairs, more tangible and longer, he never found a sensation like the one he felt that Sunday, in the Rua da Lapa, when he was fifteen years old. Sometimes, unaware of his mistake, he himself exclaims: