I’ve already said that she was thrifty—and if I haven’t I have now—and not only with money but with worn-out objects, that you keep out of respect for the past, as a memory or for old times’ sake. A pair of shoes, for example, little flat shoes with black ribbons that were tied at the instep and ankle, the last ones she had used before she wore more formal shoes: she brought them home, and once in a while took them out the chest of drawers, with other old things, telling me that they were part of her childhood. My mother, who had the same temperament, liked to hear her talking and doing things in this way.
As for saving money itself, I’ll tell one story, and that’s enough. It was, precisely, on one of those occasions when I was giving her an astronomy lesson, at our house in Glória. You know that sometimes I made her nod off a little. One night she was lost to the world, staring at the sea, with such intensity and concentration that I became jealous.
“You’re not listening, Capitu.”
“Me? I heard you perfectly.”
“What was I saying?”
“You … you were talking about Sirius.”
“Sirius my foot, Capitu. It’s twenty minutes since I mentioned Sirius.”
“You were talking … talking about Mars,” she hurriedly corrected herself.
It was Mars, in fact, but of course she had only caught the sound of the word, not the sense. I became serious, and had an impulse to leave the room; Capitu, when she saw this, became the most affectionate of creatures, took my hand, and confessed that she had been counting, that is, adding up some money to find a certain quantity that was missing. She had been converting paper money into gold. At first I thought it was a stratagem to put me in a good humor, but soon I was calculating too, now with pencil and paper on my knee, and I found the difference she had been looking for.
“But what pounds are these?” I asked when I had finished.
Capitu looked at me laughing, and answered that I was the one to blame for breaking the secret. She got up, went into the room, and came back with ten pounds sterling in her hand; it was the leftovers from the money I gave her monthly for household expenses.
“All that?”
“It’s not much, only ten pounds; it’s what your miserly wife could put together in a few months,” she concluded clinking the gold in her hand.
“Who was the broker?”
“Your friend Escobar.”
“Why didn’t he say anything to me?”
“It was just today.”
“Has he been here?”
“Just before you came; I didn’t say anything so that you wouldn’t suspect.”
I wanted to spend double on some present to celebrate this, but Capitu stopped me. On the contrary, she consulted me about what we were going to do with these pounds.
“They’re yours,” I replied.
“They’re ours,” she corrected me.
“You keep them, then.”
The next day, I went to see Escobar at his warehouse, and laughed about their secret. Escobar smiled, and said that he had just been just about to go to my office to tell me everything. His little sister-in-law (he still gave Capitu this name) had spoken to him about it during our last visit to Andaraí, and had told him the reason for keeping it secret.
“When I told Sanchinha about it,” he concluded, “she was amazed: ‘How can Capitu save money, when everything’s so expensive?’ ‘I don’t know, dear; all I know is that she managed to save ten pounds.’”
“I don’t think so; Sancha doesn’t waste money, but she’s not thrifty; what I give her is enough, but just enough.”
I, after some moments of reflection:
“Capitu is an angel!”
Escobar nodded in agreement, but unenthusiastically, as if he regretted that he couldn’t say the same of his wife. You would think the same, so true is it that the virtues of people near to us make us feel a certain vanity, pride or consolation.