When I lifted my head, I saw the figure of Capitu before me. Here is another scene that will seem staged, and yet it’s as natural as the first, since mother and son were going to mass, and Capitu never went out without speaking to me. Nowadays it was a dry, brief word; most times, I didn’t even look at her. She always looked at me, waiting.
This time, when I saw her, I don’t know if it was in my eyes, but Capitu seemed pale to me. There followed one of those silences which can, without exaggeration, be described as lasting a century, time seems to stretch out so in moments of great crisis. Capitu regained her composure; she told her son to go out, and asked me to explain …
“There’s nothing to explain,” I said.
“There’s everything to explain; I don’t understand your tears or Ezequiel’s. What’s happened between you?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said to him?”
Capitu replied that she had heard crying and the sound of words. I think she had heard everything clearly, but to confess it would have meant losing the hope of silence and of reconciliation; for this reason she denied hearing anything and only confirmed what she had seen. Without telling her of the coffee episode, I repeated the words at the end of the chapter.
“What?” she said as if she had heard wrong.
“That he is not my son.”
Great was Capitu’s stupefaction, and the indignation that followed was no less, and both of them so natural that they would have made the first eyewitnesses in our law courts doubt what they had seen. I’ve heard that they exist for all kinds of cases: it’s just a question of paying the right price. I don’t think it’s true, the more so as the person who told me had just lost an action. But, whether or not there are witnesses for hire, mine was reliable; nature itself swore on her own behalf, and I had no wish to doubt her. So, paying no attention to Capitu’s words, to her gestures, to the pain that twisted her features, to anything at all, I repeated the words I had said twice with such resolution that she began to give way. After some moments, she said to me:
“Such an insult can only be explained by sincere conviction; however, you, who were so jealous of my least gesture, never showed the least shadow of suspicion. Where did you get such a notion? Tell me,” she went on, seeing I said nothing in reply, “tell me everything; after what I’ve heard, I can hear the rest, it can’t be much. What has given you such a conviction now? Come on, Bentinho, tell me, tell me! Send me away now, but tell me everything first.”
“There are things that can’t be said.”
“That can’t be said by halves; but now you’ve said the half, tell me everything.”
She had sat down on a chair by the table. She might have been a little confused: her bearing was not that of an accused woman. I asked her once again not to insist.
“No, Bentinho, either tell me the rest, so that I can defend myself, if you think I have a defense, or I’ll ask for an immediate separation: I can’t take any more!”
“The separation is already decided on,” I replied taking up her suggestion. “It would have been better to have done it by means of hints, or in complete silence; each of us would have gone his way, with his own wound. Since you insist, however, here is what I can say, and it’s all.”
I didn’t say everything; I could hardly refer to the affair with Escobar without uttering his name. Capitu could not prevent herself laughing, with a laugh that I am sorry not to be able to transcribe here; then in a tone both ironic and melancholy:
“Even the deceased! Not even the dead escape your jealousy!”
She adjusted her short cape and stood up. She sighed, I think she sighed, while I, who wanted nothing more than her complete vindication, said some words I can’t remember to this effect. Capitu looked at me disdainfully, and murmured:
“I know the reason for this; it’s the accident of the resemblance … The will of God must explain it all … You’re laughing? It’s natural; in spite of the seminary, you don’t believe in God; I do … But don’t let’s talk of it any more; it’s not right for us to say any more.”