Now I have explained the title, I can proceed to write the book. Before that, however, let me explain the motives that put the pen in my hand.
I live alone, with a servant. The house I live in is my own; I decided to have it built, prompted by a such a personal, private motive that I am embarrassed to put it in print, but here goes. One day, quite a few years ago, I had the notion of building in Engenho Novo a replica of the house I had been brought up in on the old Rua de Matacavalos,* and giving it the same aspect and layout as the other one, which has now disappeared. Builder and decorator understood my instructions perfectly: it is the same two-storey building, three windows at the front, a verandah at the back, the same bedrooms and living rooms. In the main room, the paintings on the ceiling and walls are more or less the same, with garlands of small flowers and large birds, at intervals, carrying them in their beaks. In the four corners of the ceiling, the figures of the seasons, and at the center of the walls, medallions of Caesar, Augustus, Nero and Massinissa,† with their names underneath … Why these four characters I do not understand. When we moved into the Matacavalos house, it was already decorated in this way: it had been done in the previous decade. It must have been the taste of the time to put a classical flavor and ancient figures into paintings done in America. The rest is also analogous to this and similar to it. I have a small garden, flowers, vegetables, a casuarina tree,†† a well and a washing-stone. I use old china and old furniture. Finally, there is, now as in the old days, the same contrast between life inside the house, which is placid, and the noisy world outside.
Clearly my aim was to tie the two ends of life together, and bring back youth in old age. Well sir, I managed neither to reconstruct what was there, nor what I had been. Everywhere, though the surface may be the same, the character is different. If it was only others that were missing, all well and good: one gets over the loss of other people as best one can; but I myself am missing, and that lacuna is all-important. What is here, if I can put it this way, is like dye that you put on your beard and hair, and which only preserves the external habit, as they say in autopsies; the internal parts will not take dye. A certificate saying I was twenty years old might fool others, like any false document, but not me. The friends I have left are all of recent date; all the older ones have gone to study geology in God’s acre. As for female friends, I’ve known some for fifteen years, others for less, and they almost all believe in their own youth. Two or three might persuade others, but the language they use forces me to consult dictionaries, a tiresome occupation.
All the same, though life may have changed, that’s not to say it’s worse; just different, that’s all. In certain respects, life in the old days now seems stripped of the charms I once thought it had; but it is also true that it has lost many of the thorns that made it painful, and I still have a few sweet, enchanting memories. Truth to tell, I go out little and seldom converse much when I do. I have few amusements. Most of the time is taken up with looking after the orchard and the garden, and reading. I eat well and don’t sleep badly.
But everything palls in the long run, and this monotony ended up wearying me, too. I wanted a little variety, and had the idea of writing a book. Jurisprudence, philosophy and politics occurred to me; but I didn’t have the necessary energy for such projects. Then I thought I might write a History of the Suburbs, less dry than the memoir Father Luís Gonçalves dos Santos wrote about the city of Rio itself;* a modest undertaking, but it required documents and dates as preliminaries, all of which would be boring and time-consuming. Then it was that the busts painted on the walls started to talk to me, and to tell me that, since they couldn’t bring back times past, I should take a pen and recount some of them. Perhaps the narration would beguile me, and the old shades would pass lightly over me, as they passed over the poet:—not the one on the train, but the author of Faust. “Ah, come ye back once more, ye restless shades?”†
This idea delighted me so much, that the pen is trembling in my hand even now. Yes, Nero, Augustus, Massinissa, and you, great Caesar, urging me on to write my own Commentaries, I’m grateful for the advice, and I’m going to put down on paper the reminiscences that come into my head. In this way, I will relive what I lived then, and strengthen my hand for some weightier work. To work then: let us begin by evoking a celebrated November afternoon that I have never forgotten. There were many others, better and worse, but that one has never been erased from my mind. Read on and you will understand what I mean.