Dear Sir,
In sending these lines to you, I am submitting myself to the verdict of a court of honour convened to judge the matter brought to public attention by the letters of Doctor ***, previously printed in these pages. As a player in this painful drama, I feel obliged to explain my part in what happened, which is precisely what I intend to do here. I only hope that these confidences, written with an eye to scrupulous accuracy, will contain the lesson that lies at the bottom of any truth: that the innermost existence of each of us is an integral part of the history of our times and of humanity! There is no heart which, in revealing its actions, does not offer either an endorsement of, or a challenge to, the principles that rule the moral world. The novel today is still only in embryonic form, but when it reaches full maturity as an expression of truth, the Balzacs and the Dickenses of the day will be able to build a complete character out of a single emotion and, through that character, the psychology of a whole era, just as the Cuviers of our day can already reconstruct an unknown animal from just one bone.
*****
As you know from the doctor’s letters, I was born in Viseu. I was brought up in a village wedged between two mountains in Beira-Alta; thrashed on occasion by my father for tearing off branches from some precious tree belonging to the estate manager; blessed by my mother as the hope of her old age; and showered with prophecies of a glorious future by the rector, who saw me as the parish’s young San Marcello and with whom, when I was ten years old, after assisting him at Mass, I would sometimes sit in the vestry and discuss the declensions of Latin nouns. This young marvel had as witnesses the sacristan and the church treasurer, who would stand with their hats under their arms, scratching their heads and gazing at me, wide-eyed with wonderment. In one corner, her eyes brimming with fond tears, my mother would smile at me from the depths of the cave formed round her face by the large, imposing black silk shawl covering her head.
Later, I attended school in Viseu and then came to Lisbon to study medicine.
I live sparingly, humbly and obscurely, my existence constrained by a small monthly allowance and confined to the friendship of a few fellow students and the ministrations of a pair of impoverished, elderly ladies – the sisters of a retired sea-captain who once shared a billet with my father – and in whose guesthouse I lodge for a very modest rent.
The only light piercing the darkness of my dreary life of exile and work came from my memories of Teresinha.
Teresinha! The sweet, dear, gentle companion to whom I principally dedicate these pages, which recount the sole chapter in my life of which she knows nothing – the honest confession and complete account of the one error of which I can accuse myself before her innocence, her kindness and her love!
Teresinha! Beloved flower, hidden among the rock-roses of our mountains, unknown, unseen, ignored, yet who, nevertheless, fills my youth and my life with the sacred perfume of a chaste love, as pure and calm and imperturbable as the light from the stars.
I pray, my innocent friend, that you will understand my words!
If you see fit to forgive the brief and inexplicable lapse, the story of which I place trustingly in your hands, I ask not for a balm to heal a wound, but for a benevolent smile of forgiveness for the strange melancholy that once assailed the convalescent kneeling here at your feet!
Whatever the outcome, my beloved, I believe in my heart that I am discharging a sacred duty in telling you absolutely everything that happened to me, omitting nothing and holding nothing back. The truth is that I love you. I love you now and have always loved you! Another image, irresistible and vaporous, hung over me for a while, but vanished like the shadow cast by an unhealthy dream, pierced by your candid, all-seeing gaze fixed always on mine.
One night, two months ago, at about nine o’clock, I was walking back to my house, which is well away from the centre of Lisbon, when I came upon a hired cab whose coachman was arguing rudely with a lady standing beside the cab. She was all dressed in black, her head and shoulders covered with a long lace veil. After exchanging a few words with her much older companion, she spoke again to the coachman in a fine, tremulous, delicate, musical voice, the like of which I had never heard before.
‘Where may I send payment? I haven’t any more money with me.’
‘Too bad, lady,’ replied the coachman. ‘If you’ve got no money, you walk. I told you how much the fare’d be. If you don’t pay the rest, I’ll call the police. If you haven’t got any more money on you, give me something as security.’
She stamped her foot impatiently, threw back part of the veil covering her face and angrily began to peel off a glove. I imagined she was about to remove a ring from her finger. The coachman quickly passed the reins through the grille of the driver’s seat and climbed down. Meanwhile, I had approached the group, and as he took his first step forward, I dealt him a blow across the face with the back of my hand, a blow that sent him staggering backwards against the horses.
And then, giving him a gold coin I had in my pocket, I said:
‘Here, this is for the blow across the face. Otherwise, be satisfied with what these ladies paid you for the ride.’
It was as if someone behind me had suggested these gallant words to me, indeed, even today, I’m amazed that I, all unaided, came up with a solution of such oratorical impact.
The coachman held up the coin, studied it in the light of the lantern, climbed up again to his seat, and departed, calling out to me:
‘Good night, sir!’
Confused and disconcerted, I automatically doffed my hat to the lady and stammered a few barely intelligible words, not knowing how to take my leave.
It was the first time I had been so close to one of those handsome society ladies; she was more exquisite, refined and delicate than anyone I had ever seen. She had a milky, velvety complexion, like the petal of a camellia – a marvel of refinement comparable only to a woman who once passed me in the foyer of the Teatro São Carlos on the arm of another man and who wore a very grand cape, white with pink stripes.
I suppose that those who know these magnificent creatures, who see and talk to them every day, are unimpressed by their appearance, but for those who encounter them for the first time, there is nothing more unsettling. Men accustomed to confronting the most violent of disturbances, undaunted by danger, misfortune or glory, tremble before this simplest of things: their first contact with an elegant woman! Thence comes the magnetic power wielded by queens over pages and chatelaines over minstrels. It’s a unique sensation. A human being struck dumb and transformed momentarily into a vegetable that can see.
I stood there, motionless and tongue-tied.
The lady looked me rapidly up and down, then, with a tremulous ‘Thank you,’ held out a gloveless hand from beneath the black cloud of her lace veil.
I surrendered my coarse hand to her cold, delicate, trembling one, and that brief handshake – which set her thick chain bracelet jingling – sent a kind of electric shock through my nerves.
Obliged to say something, I leapt without thinking to the hideous words of a phrase common enough in Viseu, but which I am sure had never, until that night, been heard by such a person, and which doubtless sounded to her like the howl of a wild beast heard for the first time in some dense unexplored jungle.
To my eternal shame, the words, which, alas, I had retained in my provincial ear and which my equally provincial mouth unleashed, were these:
‘At your service, ma’am!’
Horrified at the sound of my own voice, I turned on my heel and strode away as fast as I could. I was angry, ashamed, crestfallen, as if I had uttered a sacrilegious obscenity. It made me want to melt into the walls or be swallowed up by the earth! I dared not look back, and I felt as if I were surrounded by fantastical, but silent gales of laughter. I fancied that everything was mocking me, lamp posts, stray dogs, cobblestones, the numbers on house doors, the posters on street corners, the water-carriers who passed, groaning under their barrels, and the grocers weighing out rice on the counter in the back of their little shops.
I rushed into my house, climbed the stairs, locked myself in my room and began pacing back and forth in the darkness.
As if lit by a satanic flash of lightning, I could see the two hands that had just clasped each other for the first time in the street below – mine and hers – one weather-beaten, rough and hot, the other white, nervous, icy cold. Then I began to reconstruct the appearance of those two people.
She, pale as ivory, had the melancholy profile of a Madonna whose infant child had been snatched from her arms, and in her laces and satins she moved with all the fluid grace of a mermaid. I, stiff and awkward in her presence, not knowing quite how to manage both hat and cane, offered a flagrant display of my personal defects and my undistinguished, petty bourgeois poverty.
Alongside that ideal, transcendant, ethereal presence, I became painfully aware of how base and wretched I must have looked: a ready-made jacket bought on the cheap; clodhopper boots with misshapen soles caked in mud; trousers bagging so badly at the knees that they made me look as if I were sitting down even when I was standing up; frayed shirt-cuffs, and the tip of the middle finger on my right hand stained with ink!
We truly were polar opposites, placed together on the same latitude by foolish chance and immediately separated for ever by those dreadful words that kept buzzing in my ears like the early symptoms of a stroke:
‘At your service, ma’am.’
I do not know what strange attraction fixed the image of that woman in my mind. It wasn’t just a vague feeling of compassion nor was it hidden desire or even the first stirrings of love. I felt intensely drawn to her and yet the only emotion I could find in my heart – and I say this sincerely – was that of hatred. Yes, hatred, inexplicable, monstrous hatred, the kind I imagine a complete outsider might feel for the society into which he was born!
I found that noble creature’s aristocratic distinction, her effortless, native elegance, humiliating and infuriating; it aroused in me the ferment of demagogical revolt that every commoner carries with him, concealed in the depths of his consciousness like an illegal weapon.
The woman undoubtedly had a mind less cultivated than mine, inferior reasoning powers, a weaker will and a narrower life. However, to compensate for these shortcomings she enjoyed the repugnant, inadmissible superiority that comes with breeding. A fine cradle, a delicate constitution, a feather bed, a cosseted childhood spent among upholstered furniture, carpets and the sound of a piano, that was enough for any man brought up in the bright light of day – with the harsh mountainside for a carpet and, for music, the wind roaring in the oak trees and whistling through the pines – to seem ridiculous, wretched and despicable by comparison!
Between me and her there would always be a barrier.
She would always be beautiful, superior, naturally seductive, instinctively charming, vivacious and beloved within her own little world of aromas, velvet, crystal and candles!
With a plaster figurine adorning my pinewood shelf and a cotton bedcover on my iron bedstead, I will always be glum and useless – miserable when I try to be slightly less ridiculous and laughable whenever I have a fancy to be slightly less miserable!
I lit the two wicks of my brass lamp and tried to study. Impossible. I ran my eyes over the letters of the book before me, but after three or four pages, I had not understood a single word. I abandoned my reading and sat for a while, inert, stupid, dead, my gaze fixed on the empty eye-sockets of a skull I had on my table, and which was laughing at me with the open-mouthed sarcasm that exhumed skeletons bring with them from the grave. I hated life. I snuffed out the light, undressed and went to bed.
My bed had been made that day with a pair of sheets with starched borders that my mother had generously provided for my student trunk. They had the rough texture of new sheets and the characteristic smell of bed linen from the provinces.
‘My poor dear mother!’ I thought, as I lay breathing in that faint, distant, olfactory memory of my family home. ‘Poor thing. In your own simple way you thought that by edging my sheets with the lace that you yourself had so tirelessly made, you would be lavishing upon me a luxury that would turn Lisbon on its head! If you only knew. This labour of love that took you two years of patient effort has been admired by no one, seen by no one, noticed by no one, except for this morning when, with sacrilegious peals of laughter, a housemaid asked if the priests in my part of the country wore sheets like mine on days when there was a sung mass! What does it matter, though, if others do not appreciate it? They are bad, corrupt, perverse creatures! I thank you, my unsung mother, my old friend. In the arabesques of the lace you made for me, and which I can feel beneath my fingers, I imagine I can trace the many tears you shed on winter nights when the wind was buffeting the trees, the hail was clattering against the windows, while you stayed awake, resignedly kneeling beside the cot of your fretful little boy. When I feel the rough touch on my cheek of the prickly lace trimmings, I kiss them reverently as if a guardian angel had touched me with the tip of its pure white wings.’
But along with the smell of homespun cloth that wrapped about me like a caress from afar, there was, in my bed, another markedly different fragrance, that which had perfumed the skin of the unknown woman and which lingered on the hand she had grasped. I breathed it in with an irritating eagerness that pierced and tormented me. I was lost! I pressed my lips to the palm of my hand and began to drink in the mysterious scent of a strange, remote paradise.
The whirlwind of ideas stirred up in my head by that warm, penetrating, alien aroma was monstrous, infernal.
I felt the flames, the palpitations, the hallucinations of a fever.
When I got up in the morning, having slept not a wink all night, my pillow was soaked with tears.
Forgive me Teresinha, forgive me! Those bitter tears were not shed for you, my perfect angel!