I had got to the top step, and an idea entered my head, as if it had been waiting for me between the bars of the gate. I heard in my memory Manduca’s father’s words asking me to go to the funeral the next day. I came to a halt on the step. I thought for a moment; yes, I could go to the funeral, I would ask my mother to rent a carriage for me…
Don’t think that it was the desire to ride in a carriage, however much I enjoyed driving round. When I was small, I remember that I often went that way with my mother when she went to see friends or on more formal visits, and to mass, if it was raining. It was an old chaise of my father’s, which she kept for as long as she could. The coachman, who was our slave and as old as the chaise, when he saw me at the door, dressed and waiting for my mother, would say laughing:
“Old João’s goin’ to take young master!”
And I almost always told him:
“João, really slow the animals down; go slow.”
“Mistress Glória don’t like it.”
“Slow down, all the same!”
You’ll understand that it was to savor riding in the chaise, not out of vanity, because the people inside could not be seen. It was an old obsolete chaise, a two-wheeler, narrow and short, with two leather curtains at the front, which drew to each side when one got in or out. Each curtain had a spyglass, through which I liked to look.
“Sit down, Bentinho!”
“Let me look out, Mamma!”
When I was smaller, I would stand up and put my face to the glass, and see the coachman with his big boots, astride the left-hand mule, and holding the other by the reins; in his hand he carried the thick, long whip. Everything was cumbersome, the boots, the whip and the mules, but he enjoyed it and so did I. On either side, I watched the buildings go by, some with shops, open or shut, with or without people in them, and in the street the people coming and going, crossing in front of the chaise with great strides or short steps. When there was something in the way, either people or animals, the chaise would stop, and then there was a particularly interesting spectacle; people stopped on the pavement or at the doors of the houses, looked at the chaise and talked to each other, no doubt about who was inside. As I grew older I imagined them guessing and saying: “It’s that lady in the Rua de Matacavalos, who has a son, Bentinho …”
The chaise went so well with my mother’s secluded life, that when there were no others left in Rio, we continued to go about in it, and it was known in the street and the neighborhood as the “old chaise.” In the end my mother consented to us abandoning it, though it was not sold at once; she only let it go because the stabling costs forced her to it. The reason for keeping it when it was of no use was purely sentimental: her husband’s memory. Everything that had belonged to my father was kept as if it were part of him, a remnant of him, the unsullied, pure soul of the man. But these habits were also the fruit of a conservatism which she admitted to her friends. My mother well expressed this faithfulness to old habits, old ways, old ideas, old fashions. She had her museum of relics, disused combs, a piece of a mantilla, some copper coins dated 1824 and 1825, and, so that everything should be ancient, she tried to make herself old; but I have already said that, in this respect, she did not achieve all she wanted.