Nothing escaped Capitu’s curiosity. There was one occasion, though, when I do not know if she was the teacher or the pupil, or both at the same time: the same was true of me. I’ll tell the story in the next chapter. In this one I will only say that, some days after the agreement with the dependent, I went to see my young friend; it was ten in the morning. Dona Fortunata, who was in the yard, didn’t even wait for me to ask where her daughter was.
“She’s in the parlor combing her hair,” she said, “go in on tiptoes to give her a fright.”
I did as I was told, but either my footsteps or the mirror gave me away. It may not have been the latter; it was a twopenny mirror (with apologies for the cheapness), bought from an Italian pedlar, with a rough frame, hanging by a brass ring between the two windows. If it wasn’t that, it was my footsteps. Whichever it was, hardly had I entered the room when comb, hair, all of her flew up in the air, and all I heard was this question:
“Has something happened?”
“Nothing new,” I replied, “I came to see you before Father Cabral comes for my lesson. Did you have a good night?”
“Fine. Has José Dias not spoken yet?”
“It doesn’t seem like it.”
“When is he going to?”
“He says that today or tomorrow he intends to touch on the question. He won’t go straight to the point; he’ll just allude to the topic casually first, no more than a hint. Later, he’ll get to the nub of the matter. First he wants to see if Mamma has her mind made up …”
“Of course she has,” Capitu interrupted, “if there was no need for someone to win this battle now, once and for all, we wouldn’t be bringing the subject up. I don’t know if José Dias can have that much influence any more; I think he’ll do everything in his power, if he feels that you really don’t want to be a priest, but will be get his way…? She does usually listen to him. But if … Oh, this is murder! Keep on at him, Bentinho.”
“I will; he must speak to her today.”
“Do you swear?”
“I swear! Let me see your eyes, Capitu.”
I had remembered the definition José Dias had given them; “a gypsy’s eyes, oblique and sly.” I didn’t know what oblique was, but I did know what sly was, and I wanted to see if they could be called that. Capitu let herself be stared at and examined. She only asked me what the matter was—had I never seen her eyes before? I found nothing out of the ordinary: just the color and the soft sweetness I knew of old. When I took so long over this contemplation, I think she got another notion of what I wanted; she thought it was a pretext to look at them more closely, with my eyes longingly fixed on hers: and to this I attribute the fact that they began to get larger, larger still and darker, with an expression…
Lovers’ language, give me an exact and poetic comparison to say what those eyes of Capitu were like. No image comes to mind that doesn’t offend against the rules of good style, to say what they were and what they did to me. Undertow eyes? Why not? Undertow. That’s the notion that the new expression put in my head. They held some kind of mysterious, active fluid, a force that dragged one in, like the undertow of a wave retreating from the shore on stormy days. So as not to be dragged in, I held on to anything around them, her ears, her arms, her hair spread about her shoulders; but as soon as I returned to the pupils of her eyes again, the wave emerging from them grew towards me, deep and dark, threatening to envelop me, draw me in and swallow me up. How many minutes did this game last? Only the clocks of heaven could have registered that space of time which was infinite, yet brief. Eternity has its pendula; just because it never ends does not mean it takes no cognizance of the duration of bliss and damnation. The joy of the blessed in heaven must be doubled by knowing the sum of torments their enemies have already suffered in hell; so too the quantity of delights their foes enjoy in heaven must increase the agony of the damned. This particular torture escaped the divine Dante’s notice; but I am not here to correct poets. I am simply about to recount that, after an unspecified time, I finally grasped Capitu’s hair, but this time with my hands, and said—so as to say something—that I would comb it for her, if she wanted.
“You?”
“Yes, me.”
“All you’ll do is get my hair tangled up.”
“If I do, you can untangle it afterwards.”
“We’ll see.”