My mother was a good soul. When her husband, Pedro de Albuquerque Santiago, died, she was thirty-one, and she could have gone back to Itaguaí. She didn’t want to; rather, she chose to live close to the church where my father had been buried. She sold the old plantation and the slaves, bought some more that she sent out to work or hired out, bought a dozen buildings and a quantity of government bonds, and settled down in the Matacavalos house, where she had lived for the last two years of her married life. She was the daughter of a lady from Minas Gerais, herself a descendent of a lady from São Paulo, of the Fernandes family.
So then, in the year of grace 1857, Dona Maria da Glória Fernandes Santiago was forty-two years old. She was still pretty and didn’t look her age, but however much nature tried to preserve her from the ravages of time, she obstinately hid the remnants of her youthful looks. She wore an eternal dark dress, without ornaments, with a black shawl, folded in a triangle and fastened at the breast with a cameo. Her hair, which was plaited, was gathered at the nape of the neck by an old tortoiseshell comb; sometimes she wore a white frilled bonnet. She spent the whole day like this, from morning till night, in her flat leather shoes with their muffled sound, supervising all the household activities.
I have her portrait there on the wall, next to her husband’s, just as they were in the other house. The paint has darkened with time, but it still gives a good idea of both. I don’t remember anything about him, except vaguely that he was tall and wore his hair long; the portrait shows a round pair of eyes, which follow me everywhere, an effect of the painting that frightened me as a child. His neck emerges from a voluminous black necktie, and his face is clean shaven, except for a small patch just next to the ears. My mother’s picture shows she was lovely. She was twenty, and she held a flower in her fingers. On the canvas, she seems to be offering the flower to her husband. What you can read on each of their faces is that, if conjugal bliss can be compared to winning the lottery, they’ve won it with a ticket they bought together.
My conclusion is that lotteries ought not to be abolished. No winner has ever yet accused them of immorality, as no one has ever called Pandora’s box evil, since hope was left inside; it has to be left somewhere. Here I have them, then, the happily married couple of olden days, the contented lovers, the lucky ones, who have gone from this life to a better one, no doubt to continue the dream. When I grow weary of the lottery and Pandora, I lift my eyes to them, and forget unsuccessful tickets and the fateful box. The portraits are as good as the originals. My mother’s, holding out the flower to her husband, seems to say: “I’m all yours, my handsome gentleman!” My father, looking at us, makes this comment: “See how the girl loves me….” I don’t know if they suffered from illnesses, just as I don’t know if they had disappointments: I was a child, and at first I hadn’t been born. After his death, I remember she wept a great deal. But here are the portraits of both, and the grime accumulated over time has not destroyed their original expressions. They are like snapshots of happiness.