Deolindo Nostrils (a shipboard nickname of his) left the Navy Arsenal and set off up the Rua de Bragança. The clock was striking three. He was the crème de la crème of sailors and, what’s more, his eyes were brimming with happiness. His corvette had just come back from a long training cruise, and Deolindo came on land as soon as he got leave. His mates had said to him, laughing:
‘Hey, Nostrils! What an admiral’s night you’re going to have! Dinner, music and Genoveva’s arms. A little cuddle from Genoveva …’
Deolindo smiled. That hit the nail on the head; an admiral’s night, as the saying goes, a wonderful admiral’s night lay in wait for him on land. The passion had begun three months before the corvette left. The name of the girl was Genoveva, and she was from up-country, twenty years old, clever, with mischievous black eyes. They’d met at a friend’s house and fallen head over heels for one another, so much so that they almost decided to do something silly – he’d abscond from the Navy and she’d go with him to some town hidden away in the backlands.
Old Ignacia, who lived with her, dissuaded them; Deolindo had no option but to go on the training cruise. He’d be eight or ten months away. To commit themselves, they thought they should swear an oath of fidelity.
‘I swear by God in heaven. And you?’
‘Me too.’
‘Say it out loud then.’
‘I swear by God in heaven; may the light fail me at the hour of death.’
They had made their contract. You had to believe in their sincerity; she was weeping uncontrollably, he was biting his lip to disguise his feelings. Finally they parted. Genoveva went to see the corvette leave, with her chest so tight she thought she was ‘going to have a turn’. Nothing happened, luckily; days, weeks, months went by, ten months in all. Finally the corvette came back, and Deolindo with it.
Here he goes then, up the Rua de Bragança, through Prainha and Saúde, as far as Gamboa, where Genoveva lives. The house is a wooden shack, its door cracked by the sun, just beyond the Cemetery of the English; Genoveva’s bound to be there, leaning out of the window, waiting for him. Deolindo’s prepared something to say to her. Here’s what he’s composed: ‘I swore an oath and I kept it,’ but he’s trying to find something better. At the same time he remembers the women he’s seen in God’s wide world, Italians, Marseillaises and Turks, lots of them pretty, or he thought they were anyway. All right, not all of them might be his type; some were, though, but that didn’t mean he paid any attention. He thought only of Genoveva. Even her house, so tiny, with its rickety furniture, all old and not much of it either – he remembered it when he saw palaces in faraway lands. It was only by saving every penny that he’d bought a pair of earrings in Trieste, which he was carrying in his pocket with some other trinkets. And what would she have ready for him? Maybe a neckerchief with his name and an anchor in the corner, for she was very good at embroidery. At this point he reached Gamboa, went past the cemetery and found the house with the door shut. He knocked, and a familiar voice answered, old Ignacia, who came to open the door with loud exclamations of delight. Deolindo impatiently asked about Genoveva.
‘Don’t talk to me about that flibbertigibbet,’ the old woman burst out. ‘I’m really glad I gave you that piece of advice. Just think, if you’d run away. You’d be in a fine pickle.’
‘But what happened? What happened?’
The old woman told him to calm down, it was nothing, one of those things that happen in life; there was no point in getting worked up. Genoveva’s head had been turned …
‘Turned, how?’
‘She’s taken up with a peddler, José Diogo. Did you ever meet José Diogo, the one that sells cuts of cloth? She’s with him. You can’t imagine how much in love they are. She’s mad about him. That was why we had a fight. José Diogo wouldn’t keep away from my door; they were forever whispering to each other, till one day I said I didn’t want my house to get a bad name. Oh, God in heaven! It was like the day of judgement. Genoveva took off at me, her eyes bursting out of her head, saying she’d never cast aspersions on anyone and she didn’t need my charity. What d’you mean, charity, Genoveva? All I’m saying is I don’t want this whispering at my door, from noon till night … Two days later she’d moved and we were no longer speaking.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘On Formosa beach, before you get to the quarry, in a house with the door freshly painted.’
Deolindo wouldn’t listen to any more. Old Ignacia, a bit sorry she’d spoken, gave him some prudent bits of advice, but he wouldn’t listen and went on his way. I’ll not say what his thoughts were on the way; he had none. Ideas were clambering about in his head, as if in a storm at sea, amid a confusion of howling winds and ships’ whistles. His sailor’s knife flashed out in the chaos, bloody and vengeful. He’d passed Gamboa and the Alferes inlet, and got to Formosa beach. He didn’t know the house number, but it was near the quarry, freshly painted, and with help from the people in the neighbourhood he’d find it. He couldn’t have foreseen that, as chance would have it, Genoveva was sitting at her window sewing at the moment Deolindo was going by. He recognised her and stopped; she, seeing the figure of a man, lifted her eyes and recognised the sailor.
‘What’s this?’ she exclaimed in astonishment. ‘When did you get in? Come in, Deolindo.’
She got up, opened the door and brought him in. Another man would have been buoyed up with hope, so open was the girl’s manner. Maybe the old woman had been wrong or lied; maybe the peddler’s serenade had reached its final refrain. All this passed through his head, though not in a reasoned or reflective form, but in a flash, and in a jumble. Genoveva left the door open; she had him sit down, asked about his voyage and said she thought he’d put on weight; no emotion or intimacy. Deolindo lost his last hope. Without his knife, he still had hands to strangle Genoveva, who was a slip of a thing, and for the first few minutes he thought of nothing else.
‘I know everything,’ he said.
‘Who told you?’
Deolindo shrugged his shoulders.
‘Whoever it was,’ she replied, ‘did they say I was in love with someone?’
‘Yes.’
‘What they said was true.’
Deolindo started forward; she made him stop just with her eyes. Then she said that, if she’d opened the door to him, it was because she thought he was a sensible man. Then she told him everything, how much she’d missed him, the peddler’s courting, her refusals, until one day, without knowing why, she’d got up one morning in love with him.
‘You can believe I thought about you an awful lot. Sinhá Ignacia’ll tell you how much I cried … But my heart’s changed … It’s changed … I’m telling you all this like I would to a priest,’ she ended with a smile.
It wasn’t a mocking smile. The tone behind her words was a real mixture of candour and cynicism, simplicity and insolence, and I give up on defining it any better. In fact, I think cynicism and insolence are the wrong words. Genoveva wasn’t defending herself for some mistake, or for breaking an oath; she had no moral measure for her actions. What she was saying, summing it up, was that it would have been better not to have changed, she had been quite happy with Deolindo’s affection, and the proof of that is that she would have run away with him. But now that the peddler had won out over the sailor, the peddler was in the right, and it might as well be admitted. What do you think? The poor sailor cited the oath they’d sworn when they parted, as an eternal obligation, which had made him agree to not running away, and sent him back to his ship: ‘I swear by God in heaven; may the light fail me at the hour of death.’ If he’d gone on board, it was because she’d sworn that. With these words he’d departed, travelled, hoped and returned; they had given him the strength to go on living. I swear by God in heaven; may the light fail me at the hour of death …
‘Yes, Deolindo, it was true. When I swore it, it was true. It was so true, I wanted to run away with you into the back-lands. God alone knows it was the truth! But other things came along … This lad appeared, and I began to fall for him …’
‘But that’s just why people swear; so they don’t fall for anyone else …’
‘Give over, Deolindo. Did you never think of anyone else? Don’t be silly …’
‘What time does José Diogo get back?’
‘He’s not coming back today.’
‘Isn’t he?’
‘No; he’s over around Guaratiba with his wares; he should be back on Friday or Saturday … And why do you want to know? What harm’s he done you?’
Other women might have spoken those words; not many would have expressed it so openly, and not out of guile, but quite unintentionally. Note that we’re very close to nature in this case. What harm had he done him? What harm’s that stone done, the one that’s just fallen on your head? Any physicist could explain the falling stone. Deolindo declared, with a gesture, that he wanted to kill him. Genoveva looked at him with contempt, gave a little smile, tossed her head and tutted; when he started talking about ingratitude and broken vows, she couldn’t disguise her amazement. What broken vows? What ingratitude? She’d already said over and over that when she swore it, it was true. Our Lady, there on the dresser, she knew if it was true or not. Was this a way to pay her for what she’d been through? And as for him, so full of talk about being faithful, had he remembered her where he’d been?
His reply was to put his hand in his pocket and pull out the packet he’d brought for her. She opened it, looked at the trinkets one by one, and finally came across the earrings. They weren’t expensive, there was no chance of that; they were in bad taste, even, but they twinkled like nothing on earth. Genoveva picked them up, happy, dazzled, looked at them from both sides, close up and far off, and finally put them in her ears; then she went to the cheap mirror hanging on the wall between the door and the window, to see how they looked on her. She stood back, went closer, turned her head from left to right, and from right to left.
‘Yes, sir, very pretty,’ she said, curtseying to thank him. Where had he bought them?
He said nothing in reply, I think – there was no time, because she fired two or three more questions, one after the other, so confused was she at receiving a gift in exchange for ditching someone. There was confusion for four or five minutes – two, maybe. She soon took the earrings off, looked at them again and put them in the little box on the round table in the middle of the room. He, for his part, began to think that, just as he’d lost her when he was away, now that his rival was away, maybe he too might lose her; probably, too, she’d sworn him nothing.
‘Here we are chatting, and it’ll soon be night,’ said Genoveva.
It was true, night was falling fast. They could no longer see the Lepers’ Hospital and you could hardly make out Melon Island; the boats and canoes pulled out of the water opposite the house blended into the earth and mud of the beach. Genoveva lit a candle. Then she went to sit on the threshold and asked him to tell her something about the countries he’d seen. Deolindo refused at first; he said he was going, got up and took a few steps. But hope kept gnawing at him and flattering the poor devil’s heart, and he sat down to tell two or three stories about the voyage. Genoveva listened attentively. Interrupted by a woman from the neighbourhood who came round, Genoveva made her sit down to listen to ‘the lovely stories Senhor Deolindo’s telling’. That was all she said by way of introduction. The great lady who stays awake to finish her reading of a book or a chapter feels no closer to its characters than the sailor’s ex-lover who lived through the scenes he recounted, so freely interested she was, captivated as if there were nothing more between them than this narration of a few episodes from the past. What does the great lady care about the book’s author? What did the girl care about the person relating the events?
Hope, meanwhile, was beginning to forsake him, and he got up finally to leave. Genoveva didn’t want him to go before her friend had seen the earrings, and showed them to her with much acclaim. The neighbour was enchanted, praised them to the skies, asked if he’d bought them in France and asked Genoveva to put them on.
‘They’re really lovely.’
I’d like to think the sailor himself agreed with this opinion. He liked to look at them, thought they were made for her, and for a brief moment tasted the exclusive, delicious sensation of having given a welcome present; but it was just a few seconds.
As he was going, Genoveva went to the door with him to thank him again for his gift, and probably to say a few sweet, useless words to him. Her friend, whom she’d left in the room, only heard these words: ‘Don’t be silly, Deolindo,’ and this from the sailor, ‘You’ll see.’ She couldn’t hear the rest, which was no more than a whisper.
Deolindo went slowly along the beach, downcast, no longer the impetuous fellow he was that afternoon, but with a look that was aged, sad or, to use another nautical metaphor, of a man ‘who’s halfway back to land’. Genoveva soon went in, happy and boisterous. She told her friend the story of her maritime loves, praised Deolindo’s character and his agreeable manners; her friend said she thought he was very charming.
‘A really nice lad,’ Genoveva agreed. ‘D’you know what he said to me just now?’
‘What?’
‘That he’s going to kill himself.’
‘Good Jesus!’
‘Forget it! He’ll not kill himself. That’s Deolindo; he says things, but he doesn’t do them. You’ll see, he’ll not kill himself. It’s jealousy, poor lad. But the earrings are really gorgeous.’
‘I’ve never seen any like them here.’
‘Nor me,’ Genoveva agreed, looking at them in the light. Then she put them away and invited her friend to come in and sew. ‘Let’s sew for a little while, I want to finish my blue top …’
The truth is that the seaman didn’t kill himself. The next day, some of his mates clapped him on the shoulder, congratulating him on his admiral’s night, and asked for news of Genoveva, if she was even prettier, if she’d cried a lot while he was away, etc. He answered everything with a discreet, satisfied smile, the smile of a person who’s had a great night. It seems he was ashamed of the truth, and preferred to lie.