I
. . . . . . . . . . . . WHEN I SAW Father Teófilo speaking to a lady, both of them seated comfortably on a church pew, and the church deserted, I confess that I was shocked. They were speaking in such quiet, discreet voices that, however hard I strained my ears and however long I lingered over snuffing out the candles on the altar, I couldn’t catch a word, not a single word. I had no choice but to draw my own conclusions, for I am a philosophical sacristan. No one should judge me by my crumpled, tattered surplice, or by my clandestine use of the Communion vessels. No, I am, as I say, a philosophical sacristan. I had some ecclesiastical training, but this was interrupted by illness and then abandoned entirely on account of a violent passion that reduced me to penury. Since the seminary always leaves its mark, however, I became a sacristan at the age of thirty, just to make ends meet. That’s enough about me, though, let’s get back to the priest and the lady.
II
Before going any further, I should say that, as I found out later, they were cousins, both born in the town of Vassouras. Her parents moved to Rio when Eulália (for that is her name) was seven. Teófilo came later. It was a family tradition for one of the sons to become a priest. One of Teófilo’s uncles, still living up in Bahia, was a canon. Since, in this generation, it fell to Teófilo to don the cassock, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty something, he enrolled at the São José Seminary, which is where I met him. You will understand my discretion in not specifying the date.
III
At the seminary, the rhetoric teacher used to tell us:
“Theology is the head of the human species, Latin the left leg, and rhetoric the right.”
Teófilo’s weak point was that right leg. He knew a lot about the other things: theology, philosophy, Latin, church history; but he simply could not get rhetoric into his head. As an excuse, he used to say that the divine word needed no adornment. He was twenty or twenty-two years of age then, with the good looks of a Saint John.
By that time, he was already a mystic, finding hidden meaning in everything. Life was an eternal mass, in which the world served as altar, the soul as priest, and the body as acolyte; nothing conformed to external reality. He was keen to take holy orders so as to go out into the world and preach great things, awaken souls, summon men’s hearts to the Church, and renew the human race. Of all the apostles, he especially loved Saint Paul.
I don’t know if the reader shares my opinion, but I believe a man may be judged by his historical affinities; you will become more or less the same tribe as the people you truly love. I thus apply Helvétius’s law: “The degree of intellect that pleases us gives an exact measure of the degree of intellect we possess.” In our case, at least, the rule did not fail. Teófilo loved Saint Paul, adored him, studied him day and night, and seemed to live by that notable convert who wandered from city to city, pursuing the humble trade of spreading the good news to all men. Saint Paul was not his only role model; there were two more: Hildebrand and Loyola. From this you may conclude that he was born with a rebellious, evangelizing streak. He hungered for ideals and creation, viewing all worldly affairs as if peering over the head of this century of ours. In the opinion of a canon who used to attend the seminary, his love of the two latter role models tempered what might have been dangerous in the first. One day, the canon said to him gently:
“Don’t fall into the sins of excess and exclusivity. Don’t give the impression that by exalting Paul, you intend to diminish Peter. The Church, which honors them side by side, included both of them in the Creed, yet we revere Paul and obey Peter. Super hanc petram . . .”
The other seminarians liked Teófilo, in particular Vasconcelos, Soares, and Veloso, all three of whom were excellent rhetoricians. They were also fine young men, cheerful by nature, serious by necessity, and ambitious. Vasconcelos solemnly vowed that he would become a bishop; Soares contented himself with some other senior position; Veloso coveted a pulpit and the purple socks of a canon. Teófilo tried to share with them the mystical bread of his dreams, but soon realized that it was either too light or too heavy a morsel, and instead devoured it alone. So much for the priest; now let’s turn to the lady.
IV
The lady. At the time I saw them whispering in church, Eulália was thirty-eight years of age. She was, I can assure you, still very pretty. She was not poor, for her parents had left her some money. Nor was she married, although she had turned down five or six admirers.
This latter point was never fully understood by her female friends. None of them would have been capable of repelling a suitor. Indeed, I believe that they asked for nothing else when they prayed before getting into bed, and on Sunday, at mass, at the moment of raising their eyes to God. Why did Eulália reject all comers? I will say now what I found out later. Her friends supposed, at first, that it was simply scorn on her part—too stuck-up, one of them said—but after the third refusal, they were inclined to believe there was some secret love affair, and this was the explanation that prevailed. Even Eulália’s mother would accept no other. She didn’t mind the initial refusals, but the more they went on, the more concerned she became. One day, sitting in their carriage on the way back from a wedding, she asked her daughter if it hadn’t occurred to her that she would end up all alone.
“All alone?”
“Yes, one day I’ll be gone. For now, everything is a bed of roses; I’m here to run the house, and all you need to do is read, daydream, play the piano, and amuse yourself. But I will die, Eulália, and you’ll be left all alone.”
Eulália clasped her hands, speechless. She had never thought about her mother’s death; to lose her mother would be like losing half of her own self. Making the most of this moment of intimacy, her mother dared to ask Eulália if she was in love with someone who did not return her feelings, but Eulália said that she wasn’t. She simply hadn’t liked any of the candidates. The old lady shook her head; she spoke of her daughter’s twenty-seven years, tried to terrify her with thirty, and told her that although not all the suitors were up to scratch, some of them were worthy of being accepted. Did it really matter if they didn’t love each other? Conjugal love could be like that; it could grow later, as the fruit of companionship. She knew several people who had gotten married simply for family reasons, and ended up very much in love. Waiting for a great passion in order to marry was to risk dying waiting.
“Yes, of course, Mama. But just let me be . . .”
And, leaning back her head, she closed her eyes a little to see if she could spy someone, her hidden lover, who was not only hidden, but intangible. I agree that this is all somewhat obscure, and I do not hesitate to say that we are entering the realm of dreams.
Eulália was a strange creature, to use her mother’s expression, or a romantic, to employ her friends’ definition. She did, indeed, have a peculiar way of seeing things. She took after her father, who had been born with a love of the enigmatic, the dangerous, and the obscure; he died while preparing an expedition to Bahia to discover the “abandoned city.” Eulália received this spiritual inheritance, modified or aggravated by her feminine nature. Her dominant characteristic was that of contemplation. Her abandoned cities were to be found in her head. Her eyes were set in such a way that they could not wholly capture life’s contours. She began by idealizing things, and, if she did not end up denying them entirely, it is certain that her sense of reality grew thinner and thinner until it reached the fine transparency at which fabric becomes indistinguishable from air.
She rejected her first marriage proposal at eighteen, her reason being that she was waiting for someone else, an extraordinary husband whom she had seen and conversed with in her dreams and imaginings; the most radiant figure in the universe, the rarest and most sublime, a creature in whom there was no flaw or fault, a true grammar with no irregularities, a pure language with no solecisms.
“Excuse me,” a lady says, “this suitor is not the exclusive invention of Eulália. He is the husband of every seventeen-year-old virgin.” Excuse me, I say to you, madam, there is one difference between Eulália and the others, which is that the others eventually swapped the desired original for an engraved copy, avant ou après la lettre, and sometimes for just a simple photograph or lithograph, whereas Eulália continued to wait for the original masterpiece. The engravings and lithographs came and went, some very well executed, the work of an artist or even a great artist, but for her they all carried the defect of being copies. She hungered and thirsted for originality. Ordinary life seemed to her an eternal copy. Persons of her acquaintance insisted on repeating each other’s ideas, using the same words and even the same tone of voice, just as the clothes they wore were all of the same cut and style. If she had caught sight of a Moorish turban in the street, or even a fluttering ostrich feather, she might have forgiven the rest; but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, only a never-ending uniformity of ideas and vests. It was the mortal sin of objects. But, since she had the ability to live everything she dreamed, she continued to hope for a new life and a unique husband.
While she waited, one by one the other women got married. Thus she lost her three best friends: Júlia Costinha, Josefa, and Mariana. She saw them all as brides and then as mothers, first of one child and then of two, four, and five. Eulália visited them, joined them in their serene and happy daily lives, trivial and banal, with no dreams or dramas, and more or less content. The years went by, and Eulália turned thirty, then thirty-three, thirty-five, and, finally, thirty-eight, as she was when we saw her in the church, conversing with Father Teófilo.
V
On that particular day, she’d had a mass said for the soul of her mother, who had died a year earlier. She didn’t invite anyone else, and attended the mass alone. She listened, prayed, then sat down on the pew.
After serving at mass, I returned to the sacristy, where I saw Father Teófilo, who had come up from the country two weeks earlier and was in search of a few masses, meals included. It seems he had heard from the other sacristan, or from the officiating priest himself, the name of the person being prayed for. Realizing that the deceased was his own aunt, he rushed to the church, where he found his cousin sitting on the pew. He sat down beside her, completely forgetting where they were and their respective positions, and the two of them talked entirely naturally about themselves. They had not seen each other for a long time. Teófilo had visited his aunt and cousin shortly after being ordained a priest, but then left Rio for a distant parish and never heard any more from them, or they from him.
As I said before, I couldn’t hear a word. They sat there for nearly half an hour. The coadjutor priest came poking around, saw them, and was suitably scandalized. Two days later, news reached the bishop. Teófilo was warned by a friend, marched up to Conceição, where he explained everything: she was a dear cousin he hadn’t seen for a very long time. When the coadjutor heard this explanation, he exclaimed, quite rightly, that the fact of being a relative neither changed her sex nor diminished the scandal.
I had known Teófilo at the seminary and was very fond of him; I, therefore, wholeheartedly defended him and made sure my testimony reached the bishop’s palace. Teófilo was very grateful, and we became close friends. Since the two cousins could respectably meet at her house, Teófilo began to visit Eulália, and she was always pleased to receive him. A week later, she received me as well, and, within two weeks, I was part of the family circle.
Two compatriots meeting in a foreign land and finally exchanging words first learned at their mother’s breast could not have felt a greater excitement than these two cousins, who were more than just cousins: spiritually, they were twins. He told her about his life and, as events inevitably evoked feelings, she peered into her cousin’s soul and found it to be identical to her own. In substance, their lives were one and the same. The only difference was that she had waited quietly, while he had gone searching over hill and vale; other than that, it was the same misapprehension, the same conflict with reality, the same dialogue between Arab and Japanese.
“Everything around me is trivial and empty,” he would say to her.
For he had, indeed, wasted his youthful vigor trying to spread an idea that no one understood. While his three closest friends at the seminary progressed, working and serving the Lord, in tune with the times—Veloso now a canon and preacher, Soares with a large parish, Vasconcelos almost a bishop—he, Teófilo, was the same mystic evangelist he had been in his early years, in the same Christian and metaphysical dawn. He lived very poorly, always courting hunger, thin bread, and the threadbare cassock; he had moments, hours, of sadness and dejection, all of which he confessed to his cousin.
“You too?” she asked.
And they clasped one another’s hands: they understood each other. Failing to find a star in a watchmaker’s shop was the watchmaker’s fault; such was the logic they shared. They gazed at each other as fondly as shipwrecked sailors—shipwrecked but not disillusioned—because their illusions were intact. On his desert island, Robinson Crusoe works and makes things; they did not; cast up on the island, they gazed out over the endless sea, waiting for the eagle that would come to fetch them with its great wings spread wide. One of them was the eternal bride without a bridegroom, the other the eternal prophet without an Israel; both punished, both stubbornly tenacious.
I’ve already said that Eulália was still pretty. I should add that Father Teófilo, at the age of forty-two, had graying hair and a worn face; his hands had neither the softness nor the scent of the sacristy; they were scrawny and callused and smelled of the outdoors. It was his eyes that retained their old fire, that spoke of his inner youth, and, it goes without saying, they alone were worth all the rest.
Our visits became more frequent. In the end, we were spending afternoons and evenings there, as well as Sunday dinners. Our companionship had two effects, even three. The first was that, in spending more time in each other’s company, the two cousins each gave strength and life to the other; if you will excuse the familiar expression: they made a picnic of their illusions. The second is that Eulália, tired of waiting for a human bridegroom, turned her eyes to the divine one and, just as the desire to follow Saint Paul had inspired her cousin, so Eulália began to feel a desire to follow in the footsteps of Saint Teresa. The third effect is the one the reader will already have guessed.
You have already guessed, haven’t you? The third was the road to Damascus—a topsy-turvy road, because the voice did not descend from Heaven, but rose up from Earth, and it was not calling them to praise God, but to praise man. Setting aside all metaphors, they were in love. Another difference is that this vocation did not happen suddenly, as it did for the apostle of the peoples; it was slow, very slow, murmuring, insinuating, gently wafted along on the wings of the mystic dove.
Note that reputation preceded love. It had long been whispered that the priest’s visits were not so much those of a confessor as those of a sinner. This was a lie; I swear it was a lie. I watched them, I sat with them, I observed those two temperaments, which were so spiritual, so wrapped up in each other, that they never once thought of reputation, or of the danger of appearances. One day, I saw in them the first signs of love. Call it what you will, a midlife passion, a pale autumn rose, but it was there, it existed, it grew, and it completely overwhelmed them. I considered warning Teófilo, for his sake rather than mine, but that would have been difficult, and possibly dangerous. Moreover, I was and am both a gastronome and a psychologist; to warn him would be to throw away a fine case study and lose those Sunday dinners. Psychology, at the very least, deserves a sacrifice; I kept quiet.
I kept quiet in vain. What I would not say, their hearts made public. If the reader has read me hastily, then he can finish the story for himself by joining the two cousins together. But if he has read me slowly, he will have guessed what happened. The two mystics recoiled; they had no horror of each other, nor of themselves, because that feeling was entirely absent from both of them. But they recoiled, nonetheless, shaken by fear and desire.
“I’m going back to the countryside,” the priest told me.
“But why?”
“I’m going back to the countryside.”
And he did go back to the countryside, never to return. She had clearly found the husband she was waiting for, but he turned out to be as impossible as the life she had dreamed of. I, the gastronome and psychologist, continued to go for dinner with Eulália on Sundays. If it is true, as Schiller would have it, that love and hunger rule the world, then I am of the firm opinion that something, either love or dinner, must still exist somewhere or other.