Capitu preferred anything to the seminary. Instead of being downcast at the threat of the long separation should the European idea come to fruition, she was pleased. When I told her of my Imperial dream:
“No, Bentinho, let’s leave the Emperor in peace,” she replied, “for the time being, let’s stick with José Dias’ promise. When did he say he’d speak to your mother?”
“He didn’t fix a day; he promised that he’d see, that he’d speak as soon as he could, and said that I should pray to God.”
Capitu asked me to repeat all the dependent’s replies, the alterations in his gestures and even the pirouette, which I had hardly mentioned. She asked for the tone of all his words. She gave it all her minute attention. She seemed to ruminate on everything, the story itself and the dialogue. Or you could say that she was comparing, labelling and, as it were, pinning my account up in her memory. Perhaps this image is better than the preceding one, but best of all would be none. Capitu was Capitu, that is, a very particular person, more of a woman than I was a man. If I’ve not said it already, there you have it. And if I have, there you have it anyway. There are things which must be impressed on the reader’s mind by dint of repetition.
She was also more curious than I. Capitu’s curiosity is a subject for a whole chapter. It came in all guises, explicable and inexplicable, useful and useless, some serious, others frivolous; she liked to know everything. At the school where from the age of seven she had learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, French, religious doctrine, and needlework, she did not, for example, learn lacemaking: for that very reason, she asked cousin Justina to teach it her. The only reason she didn’t study Latin with Father Cabral was because the priest, after suggesting it to her in fun, ended up saying that Latin was not a language for girls. One day Capitu admitted to me that this very argument fired her desire to learn it. On the other hand, she decided to learn English with an old teacher friend of her father’s, his partner at solo, but she didn’t persevere. Uncle Cosme taught her backgammon.
“Come and get a drubbing, Capitu,” he would say to her.
Capitu obeyed and played with skill and care, you could almost say lovingly. One day I came across her doing a pencil portrait; she was putting the finishing touches to it, and asked me to wait and see if it was a good likeness. It was of my father, copied from the canvas my mother kept in the drawing room, and which I still have. It certainly wasn’t perfect; quite the contrary, he looked popeyed, and the hair consisted of small circles one on top of the other. But given that she had no rudiments of the art of drawing, and had done it from memory in a short space of time, I thought it was a work of great merit; make allowances for my age and my feelings for the portraitist. Even so, I am sure that she could easily have learned painting, as she learned music later. She was already looking longingly at the piano in our house, a useless old piece of furniture with nothing but sentimental value. She read our novels, leafed through our books of engravings, wanting to know all about the ruins, the people, the military campaigns, the name, the place, the story behind everything. José Dias gave her this information with a certain pride in his erudition, which did not go much deeper than his plantation homeopathy.
One day, Capitu wanted to know who the busts in the drawing room were. The dependent told her briefly, dwelling somewhat more on Caesar, with exclamations and Latin sayings:
“Caesar! Julius Caesar! A great man! Tu quoque, Brute?”
Capitu did not think Caesar’s profile handsome, but the deeds recounted by José Dias elicited gestures of admiration from her. She stood for a long while staring at the bust. A man who could do anything, and did! A man who gave a lady a pearl worth six million sesterces!
“How much was each sesterce worth?”
José Dias, who couldn’t quite remember the value of a sesterce, answered enthusiastically: “He’s the greatest man in history!”
Caesar’s pearl lit up Capitu’s eyes. That was the occasion on which she asked my mother why she no longer wore the jewels in the portrait. She was referring to the one in the drawing room, next to my father’s; in it, she had a large necklace, a diadem, and earrings.
“They’re widowed jewels, like me, Capitu.”
“When did you put them on?”
“For the Coronation.”
“Oh, tell me about the Coronation!”
She already knew what her parents had told her, but naturally thought that they would hardly know anything beyond what had happened in the streets. She wanted to know about the privileged seats in the Imperial Chapel and the ballrooms. She had been born long after these famous festivities. Often hearing talk of the Emperor’s Majority,* she insisted one day on knowing about this event; they told her, and she thought the Emperor had been quite right to want to ascend to the throne at fifteen. Everything was a subject for Capitu’s curiosity: old furniture, old furnishings, customs, stories about Itaguaí, my mother’s childhood and adolescence, something said here, a memory there, an old proverb she’d heard …