To one man, Etel was the most beautiful and desirable of women. She, however, was unaware of this. If she had known—if she’d had even the slightest inkling of what his eyes, when they lingered on her eyes, were silently trying to reveal, or sometimes hide, or, at others, timidly suggest—she would obviously have regarded him differently, slightly astonished at such boldness, or she might have chosen to stop looking at him and speaking to him altogether. Because as far as Lisbon’s “upper crust” was concerned—the category to which Etel belonged—Vitorino might be in his last year at business school, but he was still the son of a former hotel cook. However, since she neither knew nor suspected anything, Etel continued to speak to him with a distressing—or consoling—nonchalance and even to ask him, with the friendly but aloof manner of an upper-class girl, if it was true, as she’d been told, that he was still going out with so-and-so. This was one of many buckets of cold water poured over Vitorino’s loving heart, but he would nonetheless manage a smile, however forced, and respond in like manner, in the same innocuous, playful tone.
On the days when he’d had one of these rather silly—but to him precious—conversations, he would always return home feeling silent and bitter after that brief burst of excitement and filled with a great desire to die. On days like that, shut up in his modest bedroom with the door locked, he would survey the possibilities, weighing up the pros and cons of the various ways he could put an end to that tepid, tedious existence in which there would never be an Etel: turning on the gas; slitting his wrists with a razor blade; overdosing on aspirin. He also considered in great detail—even reciting to himself some of the more meaningful phrases—the letter he would write to Etel in his final moments, telling her how desperately he loved her. However, he always recoiled while still some distance away from the edge of the precipice. What lured him back was the life yet unlived and the desire to see Etel once more, to talk to her again, even about painfully superficial matters that would lead nowhere.
On calmer days, especially those when he didn’t see her, he managed to face up to his situation almost coldly and with the necessary objectivity, and even poke fun at himself a little. How could Etel possibly love him, he would think then. He was ugly, poor, from a different class. He had never been exceptionally good at anything, and even in college, he had only scraped by. He could not think of anyone in the city who really deserved Etel. If she were to love him, he would have to be a different person. Why not simply banish the stupid dream that had taken possession of his body and his heart?
This is what Vitorino thought on those calm days, but then he would meet her, talk to her, or somebody would talk to him about her, and it would all begin again. His mother would sometimes look at him sadly when she thought he wasn’t looking. Did she know about his love for Etel? He didn’t think so. However, one night, she had planted a longer-than-usual kiss on his cheek when she went to tuck him in, and then sat down on the edge of the bed and spoke to him of a certain very kind, very pretty young woman, a real delight, who would be just perfect for him.
“But I don’t want to get married, Mama,” said Vitorino with an indifferent shrug.
“Everyone gets married!” she replied, standing up with a sigh of resignation. “Everyone. Sooner or later.”
The very next day, he learned that, during the last week, Etel had been seen in the company of an engineer with an English surname, a new arrival in the city, where he now occupied an important post in a large company.
Vitorino had always accepted that Etel would never be his, but it had never occurred to him that another man would win her with such ease. As easy as pie, so to speak, and in such an ostentatious manner that the neighbors were already sharpening their tongues and preparing to wield them with exceptional vigor. This was a terrible shock for Vitorino. “It’s just not possible,” he would say to himself, as he sat sobbing, head in hands. “It’s just not possible.”
It was. And he started seeing her everywhere with the engineer—a tall, very smartly dressed man, who seemed to him odiously seductive.
Now that Etel was lost to him and lost too, in a way, to the small world of which they were both a part, his obsession with death vanished. Dying had become pointless really. She was so happy that she might not even notice his disappearance, and any final letter he wrote to her would provoke only an “Oh dear, poor fellow,” spoken or thought quickly, in passing. Or she might, almost out of vanity, show it to her fiancé—that, too, was possible. It would be a feather in her cap that few could boast of.
Vitorino continued to live, but he felt no interest in life. He failed his final year at college. His godfather, who was paying for his studies—Vitorino’s father had died when he was a child—withdrew his allowance. He should get a job; he was no better than the other boys, and no one had paid for him to go to college. Vitorino found a job. Meanwhile, people were born and died, people fell in and out of love. And he still loved Etel.
“Why didn’t you tell her while there was still time?” his mother asked him one day, when he finally opened his heart to her.
He did not reply, because this was such a difficult question and he really didn’t know how to reply. Speak to Etel? Him? Vitorino? And he knew that there was a good reason why he had remained silent. However, he didn’t want to think about that; he feared such thoughts and the conclusions to which they might lead.
One day, the engineer announced that he was leaving Lisbon, and the city’s notables put on a farewell lunch complete with lobsters and laudatory speeches. Almost immediately afterward, it became clear that his affair with Etel had ended and that he had asked to be transferred in order to be free of her. Etel felt too humiliated to attend the first ball of the season, and the other girls all smiled discreetly. “Poor thing!” they said without a hint of pity. “There she was imagining herself already married to the engineer, when, for all her pompous ways, she doesn’t have a penny to her name.” “Whatever was she thinking of?” said the mothers sitting in the wicker chairs placed around the room and all wearing their Sunday-best dresses, which were bursting at the seams because, lately, they had put on weight. They felt almost happy about this romantic setback, because none of their daughters had ever had such an eligible suitor. One of the ladies, the mother of the girl who was “just perfect for Vitorino,” took Vitorino aside and made a great show of asking him if he had heard about what had happened to “our Etel.”
“No, what?” he said, feigning an indifference he certainly didn’t feel.
“She’s broken off her relationship with the engineer. Or, rather, he broke it off, which is not quite the same thing.”
“Oh, yes, I did hear something about that.”
“And is that all you have to say?” cried the lady, revealing very white teeth beneath the thick down on her upper lip. “You men are just like weathercocks… One day, you’re facing south, the next north. Poor Etel certainly doesn’t have much luck with the men who claim to be in love with her!”
Vitorino gave a little laugh, purely as a way of responding, then off he went and danced with the girl who was perfect for him, and who also spoke to him about Etel in a voice that was, at once, sweet and rather scathing. Poor Etel: She was such a nice girl, and pretty too, no doubt about that, but she just couldn’t seem to hang on to a man, had he noticed? Some women were like that, and Etel was one of them. She was genuinely upset for her though, because she was such a good friend of hers.
Full of suppressed rage, he held her very close as they danced. Indeed, he clasped her so tightly to him that, in the end, she pulled away and said she wanted to go and sit down, that she was feeling a little dizzy. Later, she told people that the cook’s son had been very forward—the cheek of it!—not realizing that he had been clutching her to him out of pure loathing.
The engineer’s departure cheered Vitorino up a lot, but, at the same time, it brought back his old anxiety. At the office, he was often told off because he kept forgetting what he was doing and would sit staring straight through people and walls, wishing himself far away from there.
“So, Senhor Vitorino, where’s that letter? Whatever can you be thinking about?”
He was, of course, thinking about Etel, but his boss didn’t know that, for he wouldn’t stoop to taking an interest in the private lives of his employees, and certainly not in their love lives. Feeling very shaken, Vitorino would always rush back to the old desk he occupied and would write to some limited company or other about something or other that was of absolutely no interest to him whatsoever. Then he would write “yours most sincerely” and get up in order to hand the letter personally to the boss so that he could sign it.
Eventually, Etel started coming to the balls at the casino again, and she laughed and joked as she used to, although hanging over that apparent good humor was a melancholy veil, invisible to most people. “I’ve heard tell that you’re in love with so-and-so. Is that true?” So-and-so was the girl who was perfect for him, and Vitorino said that she shouldn’t believe everything she heard, all the while thinking: It’s you I love, Etel: only you.
She, however, couldn’t hear thoughts, even violent, strident thoughts like Vitorino’s. And so she would eye him interrogatively, eyebrows raised, a tiny frown line creasing her very white forehead.
“Bye then!” she said, borne away to the rhythm of a samba in some other man’s arms. “See you soon!”
“Yes, see you soon, Etel.”
Because he hadn’t even dared to ask her to dance with him.
At the end of the year, he was fired for incompetence, and Vitorino found work as a clerk in a draper’s shop, but the customers, all of whom were ladies, didn’t like him and always wanted to be served by the other clerk—a small, bald man, obsequious and efficient, who was authorized to give them a ten percent discount or run a tab.
Vitorino didn’t mind being so ostentatiously side-lined. He was used to that and thought it natural. Being treated any differently would have alarmed, even frightened, him. Besides, the shop was on the street where Etel lived, and he could see her pass by several times a day and even smile at her when she stopped to look in the window.
One day, his godfather died, and, to everyone’s amazement and to the indignation of many, he left Vitorino everything. He was suddenly a rich man. What would he do with so much money? He wasn’t ambitious, and it had never occurred to him that such a thing could happen, because his godfather had always made a point of saying that he was leaving his fortune to various charities. Vitorino had therefore never nurtured dreams of great wealth—well, he had never been brought up to expect it, which is why he found this new future as a rich man very difficult and awkward. He would have rents to collect, taxes to pay, damn it. And he hesitated over whether to remain working behind the counter in the shop or to set up his own business.
“Why don’t you marry Etel?” his mother asked him one day.
Vitorino stared at her in astonishment.
“Marry Etel?” he said.
“Yes, why not? In what way is a girl without a penny to her name any better than you?” said his mother, in her new role as a wealthy woman.
Vitorino felt his heart pounding, and, for a moment, he didn’t know what to say or even think. Then, gradually, he began to calm down, and he sat very still so as to put his ideas in order. His mother returned to the kitchen (because she still refused outright to have a maid), while he remained alone with his thoughts. Yes, why not? he thought timorously. Etel was poor, albeit from a good family—”swells,” as they used to say—and after that business with the engineer, no one else had sought her out. Why shouldn’t he ask her to marry him?
During the days that followed, he continued to hone his thoughts and decided that he would speak to her on Sunday, but as the days passed and Sunday approached, Vitorino’s fears grew. What would her answer be? She would, of course, say No; that was only to be expected. Etel was Etel and he was he, a poor fellow who happened to have come into a great deal of money, which he didn’t even know how to spend. They had absolutely nothing in common. Etel will say No, but how? What words would she use? Deep inside, though, Vitorino knew that she would, in a way, be happy to find herself loved even by him. She had been so depressed lately… Her good humor was so obviously put on, and there was such an anxious look in her blue eyes…
He called her on Sunday, and his hand was shaking as he dialed her number.
“Hello,” he heard her say.
“It’s me, Vitorino. Forgive me for bothering you, but I have something important to ask you.”
She was taken aback.
“Important, you say?”
“I love you. Will you marry me.”
He blurted this out, like someone issuing an apology, afraid that he might change his mind and allow his timidity to get the better of him and stop him saying everything he needed to say. There was a pause at the other end of the phone, and then in a rather faint voice, Etel asked:
“Is this true?”
“It’s always been true. Ever since I first met you. But I was afraid. And I would find it perfectly natural if you were to…”
Etel interrupted him and said:
“Yes, I think I will marry you, Vitorino.”
He heard these words and froze, his mind empty of thoughts and words. When he was able to speak, when speech was once again possible, he muttered something intended to show how happy he was and then quickly hung up. Something along the lines of, “I’m very happy, Etel. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
That was it. Then he put the phone down and collapsed into a chair. He stayed like that for a long time, as if stunned, and he felt sad, disconsolate, arid. His mother appeared, wiping her hands on her apron, and asked if he had spoken to her. Seeing him so downcast, she assumed that Etel had rejected him. “What did she say?” she asked anyway, feeling angry on his behalf.
He said nothing, perhaps because he hadn’t even heard her question. The last words that had stayed with him were not his own “I’m very happy, Etel”—him, happy!—but the words she had said to him, words he never thought he would hear: “Yes, I think I will marry you, Vitorino.” How was that possible?
His mother was standing in front of him, talking. Suddenly, he heard her tell him not to take it to heart, that the silly fool (by which she meant Etel) was hardly much of a catch: She was, after all, nearly thirty, and there had been a lot of gossip about her and that engineer. He, Vitorino, could do better than that. And all of a sudden, Vitorino realized that Etel was indeed as old as his mother said, that she wasn’t as beautiful as she had always seemed to him, and she had indeed been the subject of a lot of talk. He felt, too, that he had stopped desiring her and that her face, which he knew by heart, and her voice—which, only minutes earlier, had spoken into his ear the words he had so often dreamed of hearing—had suddenly ceased to have any profound meaning for him, and were just like any other face and voice.