I
FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS story it would be handy if the reader were kept waiting a very long time before finding out who Miss Dollar was. On the other hand, if there were no such introduction, the author would be obliged to make long digressions, which would certainly fill up the pages, but without moving the action along at all. I have no alternative, therefore, but to introduce you to Miss Dollar now.
If you, the reader, are male and of a melancholy bent, imagine, then, that Miss Dollar is a pale, slender Englishwoman, somewhat fleshless and bloodless, with very large blue eyes and long, fair hair waving in the wind. The girl in question should be as delicate and ideal as one of Shakespeare’s creations; she should be the very opposite of the roast beef of Olde England, which sustains the United Kingdom’s liberty. This Miss Dollar should know Tennyson’s poems by heart and have read Lamartine in the original French; if she knows Portuguese, she should delight in reading Camões’s sonnets and Gonçalves Dias’s Cantos. Milky tea should be her chief sustenance, along with a few sweets and biscuits to stave off hunger. Her voice should be like the murmurings of an aeolian harp, her love a swoon, her life a contemplation, her death a sigh.
All very poetic, but nothing like the heroine of this story.
Let us suppose that the reader is not given to such daydreams and bouts of melancholy; let us, then, imagine a totally different Miss Dollar. This one will be a robust American girl, with rosy cheeks, a curvaceous figure, bright, sparkling eyes, in short, a round, ripe, real woman. Fond of good food and good wine, this Miss Dollar—as is only natural when the stomach calls—would prefer a decent lamb chop to a page of Longfellow, and she will never understand why people find sunsets so poetic. She will be a good mother according to the doctrine laid down by certain religious scholars, namely: fertile and ignorant.
The reader who is past his second youth and sees before him only a hopeless old age will not be of the same opinion. For him, the only Miss Dollar truly worthy of being described in these pages would be a good Englishwoman in her fifties, with a few thousand pounds sterling to her name and who, arriving in Brazil in search of a subject for a novel, ends up living a novel, by marrying the reader in question. This Miss Dollar would be incomplete unless she wore spectacles with green-tinted lenses and wore her thick, graying hair parted in the middle. White lace gloves and a linen hat in the shape of a gourd would add the finishing touch to this magnificent foreigner.
A more astute reader will say that the heroine of the story neither is nor ever was English, but, rather, Brazilian through and through, and that the name, Miss Dollar, merely suggests that the young woman in question is very rich.
This would be an excellent contribution if it were true; unfortunately, neither that nor any of the others is true. The Miss Dollar of the story is not a romantic girl, nor a sturdy mature woman, nor an aging novelist, nor a wealthy Brazilian. Here the proverbial perspicacity of readers is found wanting, for Miss Dollar is a little Italian greyhound bitch.
Such a heroine will immediately cause certain people to lose interest in the story: a grave error. Despite being only a little greyhound bitch, Miss Dollar was lucky enough to see her name in the newspapers before she even entered this story. The following promise-filled lines appeared in the small ads section of O Jornal do Commercio and O Correio Mercantil:
Lost last night, 30th: a little Italian greyhound bitch. Answers to the name of Miss Dollar. Anyone finding her and bringing her to Rua de Matacavalos, No. . . . will receive a reward of 200 mil-réis. Miss Dollar has a collar around her neck with a padlock bearing the following words: De tout mon coeur.
Anyone in urgent need of two hundred mil-réis and lucky enough to read that advertisement would have spent the day scouring the streets of Rio de Janeiro in case they spotted the escapee, Miss Dollar. Any greyhound that appeared on the horizon was pursued tenaciously until the pursuer was able to ascertain that it was not the sought-after animal. This hunt for the two hundred mil-réis, however, proved completely useless, given that, on the day the advertisement appeared, Miss Dollar was already lodging in the house of a man who lived in the Cajueiros district and was a collector of dogs.
II
No one could ever say precisely what it was that drove Dr. Mendonça to collect dogs; some said it was quite simply a passion for that symbol of fidelity or servility, others that Mendonça’s adoration of dogs was simply his revenge on his fellow man, whom he found utterly repugnant.
Whatever the reasons, the truth is that no one had a finer or more varied collection than he. They were of all breeds, sizes, and colors. He cared for them as if they were his children, and if one of them died, he would be plunged into grief. One might almost say that, in Mendonça’s mind, the dogs were as important as love itself, and, as the saying goes: without dogs, the world would be a wilderness.
The superficial reader will conclude that our Mendonça was an eccentric, but he wasn’t. Mendonça was the same as other men, and liked dogs in much the same way as others like flowers. Dogs were his roses and violets, and he nurtured them just as carefully. He liked flowers, too, but he preferred to see them on the plants on which they were born; cutting a sprig of jasmine or caging a canary seemed to him equally murderous acts.
Mendonça was a good-looking thirty-four-year-old, with a frank, distinguished manner. He had studied medicine and had, for some time, practiced as a doctor. His clinic had been doing very well until the city was struck by an epidemic. Dr. Mendonça invented an elixir against the illness, and this proved so successful that it earned him a couple of thousand mil-réis. He still practiced medicine, but only in an amateur capacity. He had enough money for himself and his family, his family consisting of the aforementioned dogs.
On the memorable night when Miss Dollar got lost, Mendonça was returning home when he was fortunate enough to find the stray greyhound in the Largo do Rocio. The dog started following him, and Mendonça, realizing that the dog had no apparent owner, took her with him back to Cajueiros.
As soon as they arrived, he submitted the dog to a careful examination. Miss Dollar was a real beauty; she had the slender, graceful form of her noble breed, and her velvety brown eyes, so bright and serene, seemed to express her utter contentment with the world. Mendonça studied her closely. He read the words on the padlock on the collar and became convinced that the animal must be greatly loved by her owner, whoever that was.
“If the owner doesn’t turn up, she stays with me,” he said, delivering Miss Dollar into the hands of the houseboy in charge of the dogs.
The houseboy was given the task of feeding Miss Dollar, while Mendonça planned a golden future for his new guest, whose progeny would live on in the house.
Mendonça’s plan lasted as long as dreams usually last, a single night. While reading the newspaper the next day, he came upon the advertisement transcribed above, promising a reward of two hundred mil-réis to anyone who returned the lost dog. The size of the reward and his own passion for dogs told him the scale of the grief of Miss Dollar’s master or mistress. With considerable sadness, he decided to return the dog. He hesitated for a few moments, but what finally convinced him were his feelings of honesty and compassion, which were the dominant features of that particular soul. And since he found it hard to let go of the dog, however recently acquired, he decided to return her to the owner himself and made the necessary preparations to do so. He had breakfast, and, having made sure that Miss Dollar had done likewise, they both set off to Matacavalos.
Since the Barão do Amazonas had not yet won the Battle of Riachuelo, which was the name later given to Rua de Matacavalos, the street still bore its traditional name, which meant nothing of any great importance.
The house indicated in the advertisement was rather a fine one, suggesting that its inhabitants were fairly wealthy. Before Mendonça had even knocked on the door, Miss Dollar, recognizing her home, began to jump up and down with joy and utter a few happy, guttural barks which—were there such a thing as canine literature—would have been a hymn of gratitude.
A houseboy came to the door, and Mendonça explained that he had come to return the lost greyhound. A big smile appeared on the houseboy’s face, and he ran inside to give the good news. Taking advantage of the slightly open door, Miss Dollar pushed her way in and raced up the stairs. His duty done, Mendonça was just about to leave when the houseboy returned, asking him to go upstairs to the drawing room.
The room was deserted. Some owners of elegantly furnished rooms often allow time for these to be admired by visitors before coming to welcome them. This may have been the custom in that house, but not on this occasion, because no sooner had the doctor entered the room than an old lady emerged from an adjoining room, clutching Miss Dollar in her arms and smiling broadly.
“Do sit down,” she said, pointing to a chair.
“I won’t stay long,” said the doctor, sitting down. “I just came to bring you the dog, which has been with me since yesterday.”
“You can’t imagine how upset we’ve been since Miss Dollar went missing.”
“Oh, I can, senhora. I, too, am a lover of dogs, and if one of mine were ever to go missing, I would feel its absence deeply. Your Miss Dollar—”
“Forgive me,” said the old lady, “she isn’t mine. She belongs to my niece.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Here she comes now.”
Mendonça got to his feet as the niece in question came into the room. She was a young woman of about twenty-eight and in the full flower of her beauty, one of those women who look set for a late but imposing old age. The dark silk of her dress emphasized her intensely white skin. Her dress rustled as she walked, enhancing still further her majestic stature and comportment. The bodice of her dress had a very modest neckline, but one could sense beneath the silk a beautiful marble torso sculpted by a divine sculptor. Her naturally wavy brown hair was arranged in a very simple, homely way—which is the best of all known fashions—and it gracefully adorned her forehead, like a crown bestowed on her by nature. There was not so much as a touch of pink on her cheeks to provide some contrast or harmony with the extreme whiteness of her skin. She had a small, somewhat imperious mouth, but her eyes were her most striking feature: imagine two emeralds swimming in milk.
Mendonça had never seen green eyes before, although he had been told that they existed, and knew by heart the famous lines by Gonçalves Dias in his poem on the subject, but, up until then, such eyes were what the phoenix had been for the ancients. One day, talking to some friends about precisely this, he had said that if ever he met a pair of green eyes, he would flee from them in terror.
“But why?” asked one of his companions, somewhat taken aback.
“Green is the color of the sea,” answered Mendonça, “and just as I avoid storms at sea, so will I avoid the storms caused by such eyes.”
I leave it to the reader to judge this eccentric idea of Mendonça’s, who is becoming increasingly “precious” in Molière’s sense of the word.
III
Mendonça bowed respectfully to the new arrival, and she gestured to him to sit down again.
“I am so grateful to you for returning my poor dog, who means so very much to me,” said Margarida, also sitting down.
“I thank God it was me who found her, because she could have fallen into the hands of someone who might not have returned her.”
Margarida beckoned to Miss Dollar, who jumped off the old lady’s lap and went and placed her front paws on her owner’s knees. Margarida and Miss Dollar exchanged a long, affectionate look. While this lasted, the young woman played with one of the greyhound’s ears, thus giving Mendonça the chance to admire her exquisite fingers armed with very sharp nails.
However, although Mendonça was greatly enjoying being there, he realized that any further delay would be both strange and humiliating, for it might seem that he was waiting to receive the reward. In order to avoid such an inelegant interpretation, he gave up the pleasure of talking and looking at the young woman and got to his feet, saying:
“Well, my mission has been accomplished . . .”
“But—” began the old lady.
Mendonça understood the threat that lay behind that word. He said:
“The joy that I have restored to this household is the best reward I could possibly hope for. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”
The two women understood his intentions, and the young woman repaid his courtesy with a smile, while the older woman, channeling all her remaining bodily strength into her fingers, fondly clasped his hand.
Mendonça left, feeling deeply impressed by the very interesting Margarida. What he mainly noticed, apart from her beauty—which was of the very first order—was a certain sad seriousness in her eyes and in her manner. If that was her nature, then it fit well with the doctor’s own personality; if it was the result of some episode in her life, then it was the page of a novel calling for analysis by a pair of skillful eyes. In truth, her only defect, as far as Mendonça was concerned, was the color of her eyes, not because it was unattractive, but because he did not like green eyes. This dislike, it must be said, was more literary than anything else. Mendonça had become attached to the words he had once spoken and that we quoted earlier, and it was these words that fueled his dislike. Now, don’t take against him or me: Mendonça was an intelligent, educated man with plenty of common sense; he also had a markedly romantic bent; despite this, though, he also had an Achilles’ heel. In that respect, he was like most other men, for there are Achilleses out there who are one vast heel from head to toe. Mendonça’s weak point was this: the love of a nicely turned phrase was enough to distort his affections; he would willingly sacrifice a promising situation to a well-honed sentence.
When he spoke to a friend about the lost greyhound and his conversation with Margarida, Mendonça remarked that he could really come to like her if only she didn’t have green eyes. His friend gave a slightly sarcastic laugh and said:
“Doctor, I cannot understand such prejudice. I’ve even heard tell that green eyes are the sign of a kind heart. Besides, the color of someone’s eyes is irrelevant, what matters is the look in those eyes. They could be as blue as the sky and as treacherous as the sea.”
This anonymous friend’s remark had the virtue of being as poetic as Mendonça’s, and so it took deep root in the latter’s consciousness. He did not, like Buridan’s ass, remain caught, undecided, between a pile of hay and a pail of water; the ass might hesitate, but Mendonça did not. He suddenly recalled the Spanish Jesuit Tomás Sánchez’s views about probable opinions and so opted for the most probable.
A serious-minded reader will doubtless find all this business about green eyes and their probable qualities quite childish. He will thereby prove that he has little practical experience of the world. Illustrated almanacs delight in describing the eccentricities and flaws of great men, who are nevertheless admired by all humanity, whether for their scholarship or for their courage in battle. The reader should not, therefore, create a special category in which to pigeonhole our doctor. Let us accept him along with his ridiculous notions; after all, who does not have such notions? The ridiculous provides a kind of ballast for the soul when it enters the sea of life; indeed, some make the entire voyage with no other cargo.
To make up for these weaknesses, Mendonça had, as I have mentioned, other sterling qualities. Adopting his friend’s opinion as the most probable, Mendonça decided that the key to his future might lie in Margarida’s hands, and he duly came up with a plan for their joint happiness: a house out in the wilds, with a view of the sea to the west, so that they could watch the sunset together. Margarida and he, united by love and by the Church, would drain the entire cup of celestial happiness, drop by drop. Mendonça’s dream also contained other details that we need not mention here. He thought about this plan for some days and, on a few occasions, even walked down Rua de Matacavalos, but since, alas, he never once saw Margarida or her aunt, he abandoned these walks and returned to his dogs.
His collection of dogs was a veritable gallery of illustrious men. The most esteemed among them was called Diogenes; there was also a greyhound who answered to the name of Caesar, a spaniel called Nelson, a terrier called Cornelia, and Caligula, a huge mastiff, who was the very image of the great monster produced by Roman society. When he was surrounded by these people, all of whom were famous for different reasons, Mendonça felt that he was stepping back into history, and this provided him with a means of forgetting about the rest of the world.
IV
One day, Mendonça was standing outside Carceler’s patisserie, where he had been enjoying an ice cream with a friend of his, when he saw a carriage drive past; inside the carriage were two ladies who looked very like the two ladies from Rua de Matacavalos. Mendonça looked so startled that his friend asked:
“Whatever’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I thought I recognized those ladies. Did you see them, Andrade?”
“No, I didn’t.”
The carriage turned into Rua do Ouvidor, where the two friends also happened to be heading. It had stopped just beyond Rua da Quitanda, outside a shop, where the ladies had presumably gotten out and gone in. Mendonça did not actually see them getting out, but he saw the carriage and suspected it was the same one. He quickened his pace without saying anything to Andrade, who merely did the same, filled with the natural curiosity of a man sensing some hidden secret.
Moments later, they were standing at the shop door, where Mendonça was able to see that these were indeed the two ladies from Rua de Matacavalos. With the air of someone about to buy something, he went boldly in. The aunt was the first to recognize him. Mendonça bowed respectfully, and both women gladly acknowledged his greeting. Miss Dollar was at Margarida’s side, and she, thanks to the extraordinary instinct bestowed by Nature on dogs and other courtesans of fortune, leapt with glee as soon as she saw Mendonça and even placed her two front paws on his belly.
“It seems that Miss Dollar has fond memories of you,” said Dona Antônia (for this was the name of Margarida’s aunt).
“So it would seem,” said Mendonça, stroking the greyhound and looking up at Margarida.
At that moment, Andrade came into the shop too.
“Ah, I only just realized it was you,” he said, addressing both ladies.
And he shook their hands, or, rather, squeezed Dona Antônia’s hand and just the tips of Margarida’s fingers.
Mendonça had not expected this, and was glad to be presented with a means of deepening his superficial acquaintance with that family.
“Would you be kind enough to introduce me to these ladies?” he said to Andrade.
“You mean you don’t know them?” asked Andrade in amazement.
“Well, he both does and doesn’t know us,” replied the aunt, smiling. “So far, the only one to introduce us has been Miss Dollar.”
Dona Antônia told Andrade about the dog who had been lost and found.
“In that case,” said Andrade, “allow me to introduce you now.”
When the formal introductions were over, the clerk brought Margarida her purchases, and the two ladies said goodbye, asking the two young men to come and visit them.
I have not set down a single word spoken by Margarida in the conversation transcribed above, because she said only two words to each of the men.
“Good day,” she said, offering each of them the tips of her fingers, before leaving and climbing back into the carriage.
The young men also left and continued along Rua do Ouvidor in silence. Mendonça was thinking about Margarida, and Andrade was wondering how he could wheedle his way into Mendonça’s confidence. Vanity has as many forms as that fabled creature Proteus. Andrade’s vanity consisted in making himself the confidant of other people, for it seemed to him that he could obtain through trust what could otherwise only be achieved through indiscretion. It wasn’t hard for him to discover Mendonça’s secret, and by the time they had reached the corner of Rua dos Ourives, Andrade knew everything.
“Now,” said Mendonça, “you’ll understand why I need to go to her house. I need to see her and find out if I can—”
“Of course,” cried Andrade, “to find out if you can be loved. And why not? But I’ll tell you now, it won’t be easy.”
“Why?”
“Margarida has already rejected five proposals of marriage.”
“She clearly didn’t love those suitors,” said Mendonça with the air of a mathematician alighting on the solution to a problem.
“She was passionately in love with the first one,” said Andrade, “and not exactly indifferent to the last.”
“Presumably something happened to prevent the marriages.”
“No, not at all. Are you surprised? I must admit I am. She’s a very strange young woman. If you feel you have the strength to be the Columbus of that world, then set off across the seas with your armada; but watch out for some mutinous passions, which are the fierce sailors of such voyages of discovery.”
Pleased with this historical-allegorical allusion, Andrade glanced at Mendonça, who was too absorbed in thoughts of Margarida to hear what his friend had said. Andrade made do with his own contentment and smiled the smug smile of a poet who has just written the last line of a poem.
V
Some days later, Andrade and Mendonça went to Margarida’s house, and spent half an hour there in polite conversation. Further visits followed, with Mendonça visiting rather more often than Andrade. Dona Antônia was always the friendlier of the two women, and only after some time did Margarida emerge from the Olympian silence in which she usually enfolded herself.
Indeed, how could she resist, for, although he was no frequenter of salons, Mendonça proved to be the perfect person to entertain those two seemingly mortally bored ladies. The doctor played the piano rather well; he was a lively conversationalist; and he knew the thousands of bits of trivia women tend to find amusing when they cannot or do not wish to discourse on the lofty subjects of art, history, and philosophy. It did not take him long to become a good friend of the family.
After their first few visits, Mendonça learned from Andrade that Margarida was a widow. Mendonça could not conceal his astonishment.
“But you’ve always talked about her as if she were a spinster,” he said.
“No, I didn’t explain myself well, and all those marriage proposals she turned down came after she was widowed.”
“How long has she been a widow?”
“Three years.”
“That explains everything,” said Mendonça after a pause. “She wants to remain faithful unto the grave, an Artemis for our own age.”
Unconvinced by this reference to Artemis, Andrade smiled at his friend’s remark, and when Mendonça insisted, he replied:
“I told you before that she was passionately in love with her first suitor and not entirely indifferent to the last, either.”
“Then I really don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
From that point on, Mendonça began to court the widow assiduously, but she received his first loving glances with such supreme disdain that he almost abandoned the whole enterprise; however, while she appeared to be refusing his love, she did not refuse him her esteem and treated him with great affection as long as he looked at her precisely as everyone else did.
Love rejected is love multiplied. Each rebuff only increased Mendonça’s passion. He even began to neglect fierce Caligula and elegant Julius Caesar. His two slaves noticed a profound change in his habits. They assumed he must be worried about something, and this suspicion was confirmed when Mendonça came home one day and kicked Cornelia in the nose, when that most interesting of terriers, mother to two Gracchi, rushed to celebrate the doctor’s return home.
Andrade was not unaware of his friend’s suffering and tried to console him. In such cases, consolation is as sought-after as it is useless; Mendonça heard Andrade’s words and confided all his sorrows to him. Andrade mentioned to Mendonça that an excellent way of putting an end to passion was to leave home and set off on a journey. To this Mendonça answered with a quotation from La Rochefoucauld: “Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, just as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.”
This quote had the effect of silencing Andrade, who believed about as much in constancy as he did in Artemises, but he did not want to question either the authority of the great moralist or Mendonça’s resolve.
VI
Three months passed. Mendonça’s courtship did not advance one step, but the widow continued to treat him in the same friendly fashion. And this was mainly what kept the doctor kneeling at the feet of that obdurate woman, for he had still not abandoned all hope of winning her heart.
Some serious-minded reader will be wishing that Mendonça were a less regular visitor to the house of a lady exposed to the calumnies of the world. The doctor did consider this, but assuaged his conscience with the presence of an individual whom we have not named before because of his relative unimportance to the plot, and this was none other than Senhora Dona Antônia’s son, the apple of her eye. His name was Jorge, and he got through two hundred mil-réis a month without ever having earned a penny himself, and thanks entirely to his mother’s generosity. He spent more time at the barber’s than a woman in the declining days of the Roman Empire might have spent being primped and preened by her maids. He never missed a play at the Teatro Alcazar; he rode fine horses and, with bounty beyond measure, stuffed the pockets of certain notorious ladies and various other obscure parasites. He wore size-E gloves and size-36 boots, two qualities which he threw in the faces of the less elegant of his friends, who wore size-40 boots and size H gloves. Mendonça felt that the presence of this overgrown child made the situation safe. He hoped this would satisfy the world or rather the city’s idle gossips, but would this be enough to seal the lips of those idlers?
Margarida seemed as indifferent to what the world might say as she was to the young man’s assiduous courtship of her. Was she perhaps indifferent to everything in the world? No, she loved her aunt, adored Miss Dollar, enjoyed good music, and read novels. She dressed well, although without being a slave to fashion; she never waltzed and, at most, would dance a quadrille at the parties to which she was invited. She did not talk much, but when she did, she expressed herself well. She was graceful and animated, but neither pretentious nor ostentatious.
Whenever Mendonça arrived, Margarida would welcome him with evident pleasure, and even though he was accustomed to this, he was always taken in. Margarida really did enjoy his company, but she appeared not to give his presence the degree of importance that would have warmed his heart. She enjoyed his company much as one enjoys a lovely sunny day, but without falling in love with the sun.
Such a situation could not possibly go on for very long. One night, making an effort of which he would never have thought himself capable, Mendonça asked Margarida this indiscreet question:
“Were you happy with your husband?”
Margarida frowned in disbelief, then fixed her eyes on those of the doctor, which seemed to continue silently to ask that question.
“Yes,” she said after a few moments.
Mendonça said not a word; this was not the answer he had expected. He had put too much trust in the apparent intimacy that reigned between them, and he wanted somehow to find out what lay behind the widow’s imperviousness. His gambit failed; Margarida grew very serious, and only the arrival of Dona Antônia saved him from this awkward situation. Shortly afterward, Margarida’s usual good mood was restored, and the conversation resumed its usual lively, amicable tone. When Jorge joined them, the conversation grew still livelier. Dona Antônia, with the eyes and ears of a mother, thought her son the wittiest creature in the world; but the truth is that there wasn’t a more frivolous fellow in all Christendom. His mother laughed at everything her son said, and he alone was quite capable of filling up the conversation with anecdotes and by mimicking the sayings and manners he had picked up at the theater. Mendonça watched all this and tolerated the boy with a show of angelic resignation.
By livening up the conversation, Jorge’s arrival made the hours speed by. At ten o’clock, the doctor left, accompanied by Dona Antônia’s son, who was off to have supper somewhere. Mendonça declined Jorge’s invitation to join him, and said goodbye to him in Rua do Conde, on the corner of Rua do Lavradio.
That same night, Mendonça resolved to take a decisive step: he would write Margarida a letter. Anyone who knew the widow would have thought this a bold move, and, given the precedents described above, it was positive madness. Nevertheless, the doctor did not hesitate to put pen to paper, confident that he could express himself far better in writing than in person. He dashed off the letter with febrile impatience; the following morning, immediately after breakfast, he put the letter inside a novel by George Sand and ordered the houseboy to deliver it to Margarida.
She unwrapped the book and put it down on the living room table; half an hour later, she returned and picked up the book, intending to read it. As soon as she did so, the letter fell out. She opened it and read the following:
Whatever the cause of your indifference, I respect it and do not intend to rebel against it. However, while I cannot rebel, do I not have the right to complain? You must be aware that I love you, just as I am aware of your indifference, but however great that indifference, it cannot compare with the deep, urgent love that has filled my heart at a time when I felt I had long since left behind me such youthful passions. I will not describe to you the sleepless nights and tears, the hopes and disappointments, the sad pages of this book which fate has placed in the hands of man so that two souls might read it. None of that is of any interest to you.
I dare not ask you about your indifference toward me personally, but why do you extend that indifference to so many others? Having reached an age when passion is the norm, and being, as you are, blessed by heaven with a rare beauty, why do you wish to hide away from the world and deny nature and your heart their undeniable rights? Forgive me for asking such an audacious question, but I find myself faced by an enigma that my heart longs to decipher. I wonder sometimes if you are tortured by some great grief, and wish I could be the doctor of your heart; I confess that I would love to restore to you some lost illusion, which is, after all, an inoffensive enough ambition.
If, however, your indifference is merely an expression of perfectly legitimate pride, then forgive me for daring to write to you when your eyes expressly forbade me to. Tear up this letter, which has value neither as a memento nor as a weapon.
The letter was entirely composed of such thoughts; the cold, measured words conveyed none of his own fiery feelings. The reader cannot have failed to notice, though, the innocence with which Mendonça asked for an explanation that Margarida would probably not give.
When Mendonça told Andrade he had written to Margarida, Andrade burst out laughing.
“Was I wrong to do so?” asked Mendonça.
“You’ve ruined everything. The other suitors also began by writing a letter, and it was tantamount to writing the death certificate of their love.”
“Oh, well, if the same thing happens again, I’ll just have to accept it,” said Mendonça with an almost casual shrug. “But I wish you would stop talking about those other suitors. I’m not a suitor in that same sense.”
“I thought you wanted to marry her.”
“I do, if possible,” said Mendonça.
“That is what all the others wanted too; you would marry and enter into the sweet possession of the wealth it would fall to you to share and which comes to considerably more than one hundred contos. My dear fellow, I don’t mention the other suitors in order to offend you, for I was one of the suitors she sent packing.”
“You?”
“Yes, but, don’t worry, I was neither the first nor even the last.”
“And you wrote her a letter.”
“As did the others, and, like them, I never received a reply, or rather, I did: she returned my letter to me. Anyway, now that you’ve written to her, just wait for her response, and you’ll see that I’ve been telling you the truth. You’re lost, Mendonça. You’ve made a real blunder.”
Andrade was the kind of man who insisted on describing the very darkest side of any situation, on the pretext that one ought to tell one’s friends the truth. Having painted a suitably gloomy picture, he said goodbye to Mendonça and left.
Mendonça went home, where he spent another sleepless night.
VII
Andrade was wrong; the widow did reply to the doctor’s letter, but only to say:
I forgive you everything; however, what I will not forgive is a second letter. There is no cause for my indifference; it is purely a matter of temperament.
The meaning of this letter was even more gnomic than the way in which it was expressed. Mendonça read it several times, in an attempt to fathom it out, but to no avail. He did reach one conclusion: there was clearly some hidden reason for Margarida’s fear of marriage. Then he came to another conclusion, that Margarida would, in fact, forgive him if he wrote to her again.
The first time Mendonça returned to Rua de Matacavalos, he was dreading having to speak to Margarida; she, however, saved him from any awkwardness by talking as if nothing had happened between them. There was no opportunity for Mendonça to talk to her about the letters because Dona Antônia was with them all the time, something for which he was very grateful, since he had no idea what he would say were he left alone with Margarida.
Days later, Mendonça wrote a second letter to the widow and by the same method. The letter was returned to him unopened. Mendonça then regretted have disobeyed Margarida’s orders and resolved, once and for all, never to return to the house in Rua de Matacavalos. Besides, he lacked the courage to go there; it was so awkward being with someone who could never return his love.
A month went by, and his feelings for the widow had diminished not one iota. He loved her as passionately as before, and, just as he had thought, absence only increased his love, just as the wind fans a fire. In vain he tried to lose himself in books or in Rio’s busy social life; he even began writing an article on the theory of hearing, but his pen kept being distracted by his heart, and what he wrote emerged as a mixture of frayed nerves and sentiment. At the time, Renan’s The Life of Jesus was at the height of its fame, and Mendonça filled his study with all kinds of pamphlets written on the subject and immersed himself in the mysterious drama of Judea. He did all he could to occupy his mind with other thoughts and to forget about the elusive Margarida, but this proved impossible.
One morning, Dona Antônia’s son came to call, for two reasons: to ask him why he no longer visited Matacavalos and to show off his new trousers. Mendonça approved of the trousers and excused his absence, saying that he had been terribly busy. Jorge was not the sort of fellow to detect the truth lying hidden behind those indifferent words. Seeing Mendonça surrounded by a horde of books and pamphlets, Jorge asked if he was studying to become a deputy. He was, wasn’t he?
“No, not at all,” said Mendonça.
“True. My cousin always has her nose in a book too, and I’m pretty sure she has no such ambitions, either.”
“Your cousin?”
“Oh, you’ve no idea. All she does is read. She shuts herself up in her room and spends whole days reading.”
Given what Jorge said, Mendonça imagined that Margarida was perhaps a woman of letters, even a poet, who spurned men’s love in favor of the muses’ fond embrace. This was a completely baseless supposition and the child of a mind blinded by love. There are various reasons for reading a great deal without one necessarily having any truck with the muses.
“My cousin never used to read so much. It’s a new fad of hers,” said Jorge, taking from his cigar case a magnificent Havana cigar worth three tostões, and offering another to Mendonça. “Here,” he went on, “smoke this—it’s from Bernardo’s shop—and tell me if you can find a better cigar anywhere.”
Once the cigars were smoked, Jorge took his leave, bearing with him the promise that the doctor would visit Dona Antônia’s house as soon as possible.
Two weeks later, Mendonça returned to Matacavalos.
He found Andrade and Dona Antônia in the drawing room, where they received him almost with cries of hallelujah. Mendonça did indeed resemble someone who has just emerged from his tomb, for he was thinner and paler, and his melancholy mood had imprinted on his face a look of sadness and weariness. He claimed to have been overwhelmed by work, then began chatting away as gaily as ever. That gaiety, of course, was entirely forced. After a quarter of an hour, his face resumed its sad expression. During that time, Margarida did not appear; for some reason, Mendonça had not asked after her, but, when there was still no sign of her, he asked if she was ill. Dona Antônia told him that Margarida was a little unwell.
Margarida’s unwellness lasted about three days; it was merely a headache, which her cousin Jorge attributed to her reading too much.
After a few more days, Margarida surprised Dona Antônia with an unusual request: she wanted to go and spend some time in the countryside.
“Are you bored with the city?” asked her aunt.
“Yes, a little,” answered Margarida, explaining that she fancied spending a couple of months in the country.
Since Dona Antônia could deny her niece nothing, she agreed to that rural retreat, and they began preparations. Mendonça learned of this plan when he was out for a stroll one night and met Jorge, who was on his way to the theater. Jorge considered the plan a stroke of great good fortune, because it would rid him of the one obligation he had in the world, namely having to dine with his mother.
Mendonça was not in the least surprised by this decision, for all Margarida’s decisions were beginning to seem to him inevitable.
When he returned to his house, he found a note from Dona Antônia, which said:
We have to leave Rio for a few months; I hope you will not let us go without coming to say goodbye. We set off on Saturday, and there is something I would like you to do for me.
Mendonça drank a cup of tea and settled down to sleep. But he couldn’t sleep. He tried to read, but he couldn’t do that, either. It was still quite early, and so he went out for a walk. His steps led him to Matacavalos. Dona Antônia’s house was dark and silent; everyone must already be asleep. Mendonça walked on, then stopped by the railings surrounding the garden. From there he could see Margarida’s bedroom window, almost at ground level and giving onto the garden. A lamp was burning, which meant that Margarida must still be awake. Mendonça took a few more steps; the garden gate was open. Mendonça could feel his heart beating furiously. A suspicion entered his mind. It happens to even the most trusting of souls; besides, perhaps his suspicion was right. Not that Mendonça had any rights over the widow; he had been firmly rebuffed. If he had any duty toward her, it was to withdraw in silence.
Mendonça did not want to overstep the boundary set for him; one of the servants had doubtless simply forgotten to close the garden gate. He persuaded himself that the open gate was mere chance and, with some effort, he walked on. Then he stopped and thought again; some demon was propelling him through that gate. He went back and very cautiously entered the garden.
He had only gone a few feet when Miss Dollar emerged out of the darkness, barking, having apparently slipped out of the house unnoticed. Mendonça bent down and stroked her, and the dog seemed to recognize him, for she stopped barking and began licking him instead. The shadow of a woman appeared on the wall of Margarida’s bedroom; she had come over to the window to see what all the noise was about. Mendonça shrank back among the bushes growing by the railings, and Margarida, seeing no one, went back into her room.
After a few minutes, Mendonça came out of his hiding place and went over to Margarida’s window. He was accompanied by Miss Dollar. Even if he’d been taller, he would not have been able to see into the young woman’s room. As soon as Miss Dollar reached that point, she trotted lightly up the stone steps connecting the garden and the house; the door to Margarida’s room was in the corridor immediately beyond; that door stood open. Mendonça followed Miss Dollar and when he set foot on the last step, he heard Miss Dollar scampering about in the room and repeatedly running to the door barking, as if to warn Margarida that a stranger was approaching.
Mendonça was about to go farther when a slave came into the garden, attracted by the barking; he peered about him, but, seeing nothing and no one, withdrew. Margarida went to the window and asked what the matter was; the slave reassured her, saying that there was no one out there.
As Margarida turned away from the window, Mendonça appeared at her bedroom door. She shuddered and turned still paler; then, her eyes aflame with all the indignation a heart can muster, she asked in a tremulous voice:
“What are you doing here?”
It was then, and only then, that Mendonça realized the baseness of his actions, or, to be more exact, his madness. He seemed to see in Margarida his own conscience reproaching him for such undignified behavior. The poor young man did not even try to excuse himself; his response was simple and honest:
“I know I have behaved contemptibly,” he said. “I have no reasonable explanation. I was mad, and only now do I see how wrong my actions were. I do not ask you to forgive me, Dona Margarida; I do not deserve to be forgiven; I deserve only scorn. Goodbye!”
“Oh, I understand perfectly, sir,” said Margarida. “By discrediting my name, you wish to make me do what your heart could not persuade me to. That is not the act of a gentleman!”
“I assure you that such a thing could not be further from my thoughts.”
Margarida slumped down in a chair, apparently crying. Mendonça made as if to go into the room, for, until then, he had not moved from the doorway. Margarida looked up at him with tear-filled eyes and gestured imperiously for him to leave.
Mendonça obeyed. Neither of them slept that night. Both were bent beneath the weight of shame, but to be fair to Mendonça, his shame was far greater than hers; and the pain of one could not compare to the remorse of the other.
VIII
The following day Mendonça was at home, smoking cigar after cigar, something he usually reserved for special occasions, when a carriage drew up outside his house and out stepped Dona Antônia. This visit seemed to Mendonça to presage no good. However, she dispelled all his fears as soon as she came into the house.
“I believe,” said Dona Antônia, “that, given my great age, it is safe for me to visit a bachelor on my own.”
Mendonça tried to smile at this joke, but failed. He invited the good lady to take a seat and he sat down, too, waiting for her to explain the reason for her visit.
“I wrote to you yesterday,” she said, “asking you to come and see me today. Then I decided to come and see you instead, fearing that, for whatever reason, you might not come to Matacavalos.”
“You had a favor to ask of me.”
“No, not all,” she replied, smiling. “That was just an excuse. What I want is to tell you something.”
“What?”
“Do you know who did not get out of bed today?”
“Dona Margarida?”
“Exactly. She woke up feeling rather under the weather and saying that she had slept badly. And I think I know the reason,” added Dona Antônia, smiling mischievously at Mendonça.
“What would that be?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“Margarida loves you.”
Mendonça leapt out of his chair as if propelled by a spring. Dona Antônia’s words were so unexpected that he thought he must be dreaming.
“She loves you,” Dona Antônia said again.
“I don’t think she does,” answered Mendonça after a silence. “You must be mistaken.”
“Mistaken!” said Dona Antônia.
She then told Mendonça that, curious to know what lay behind Margarida’s sleepless nights, she had gone into her niece’s room and found Margarida’s personal diary, written in imitation of all those many heroines in novels; and there she had read what she had just told him.
“But if she loves me,” said Mendonça, feeling his soul filling up with a whole world of hope, “if she loves me, why then does she reject me?”
“The diary explains precisely why. Margarida was unhappily married; her husband was only interested in her money. She became convinced that she would never be loved for herself, but only for her wealth. She attributes your love to greed. Now do you believe me?”
Mendonça began to protest his innocence.
“There’s no need,” said Dona Antônia, “I believe in the sincerity of your love. I have for a long time, but how to convince a suspicious heart?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nor do I,” she said, “but that is what has brought me here today. I’m asking you to see if you can make my Margarida happy again, if you can make her believe in your love.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
Mendonça considered telling Dona Antônia about what had happened the previous night, but decided not to.
Dona Antônia left shortly afterward.
Mendonça’s situation may have been clearer, but it was also more complicated. It would have been possible to do something before last night’s scene, but not after; Mendonça felt that now it would be impossible to achieve anything.
Margarida’s illness lasted two days, after which she got out of bed, feeling slightly low in spirits, and the first thing she did was to write to Mendonça asking him to visit her.
Mendonça was most surprised to receive this invitation, and he obeyed immediately.
“After what happened three days ago,” Margarida said, “you will understand that I cannot remain at the mercy of idle gossip. You say you love me, well, then, our marriage is inevitable.”
Inevitable! The word left a bitter taste in the doctor’s mouth, but he could hardly protest. He remembered, too, that he was loved, and while this thought made him smile, the accompanying thought, that Margarida suspected his motives, instantly put paid to any momentary flicker of pleasure.
“As you wish,” he said.
When, that same day, Margarida told her aunt the news, Dona Antônia was amazed at the speed with which their marriage had been arranged. She assumed the young man had performed some miracle. Later, though, she noticed that bride and groom looked more as if they were about to attend a funeral than a marriage. She asked her niece about this, but received no satisfactory answer.
The wedding was a modest, sober affair. Andrade was best man, Dona Antônia was matron of honor, and Jorge asked a friend of his from the theater, a priest, to conduct the ceremony.
Dona Antônia wanted the newlyweds to continue living in the house with her. And the first time Mendonça found himself alone with Margarida, he said:
“I married you in order to save your reputation, but I do not want such an accident of fate to oblige another person to love me. I am, however, your friend. Until tomorrow.”
And with that, Mendonça left the room, leaving Margarida caught between her own view of him and the impression made on her by those words.
There could not have been an odder situation than that of those two newlyweds separated by a chimera. The happiest day of their lives was becoming a day of unhappiness and loneliness; the formality of the wedding was simply the prelude to the most absolute divorce. With a little less skepticism on the part of Margarida and some rather more gentlemanly behavior on his, they would have been spared the grim ending to this comedy of the heart. We had best leave to the reader’s imagination the torments of their wedding night.
However, time, which always has the last word, will overcome what man’s mind cannot. Time persuaded Margarida that her suspicions had been entirely groundless, and when her heart concurred, their still very recent marriage became a real marriage.
Andrade knew nothing of all this; whenever he met Mendonça, he would call him the Columbus of love. Like anyone who only rarely has a good idea, Andrade, having come up with this bon mot, would repeat it ad nauseam.
Husband and wife are still married and have promised to remain so until death do them part. Andrade has joined the diplomatic service and looks set to become one of our most eminent representatives abroad. Jorge continues to be a dedicated reveler; and Dona Antônia is preparing to bid farewell to this world.
As for Miss Dollar, the indirect cause of all these events, she was knocked down by a carriage one day when she ran out into the street. She died shortly afterward. Margarida could not help but shed a few tears over the noble creature, who was buried on her country estate, with a gravestone bearing this simple inscription: