“YOU’LL GO BLIND like that, Godfather.”
“What?”
“You’ll go blind; you read as if there were no tomorrow. Go on, give me the book.”
Caetaninha took the book from his hands. Her godfather turned on his heel and went into his study, where there was no shortage of books. He shut the door behind him and carried on reading. It was his vice; he read to excess—morning, noon, and night, at lunch and dinner, in bed, after his bath, while walking or standing up, in the house and in the garden; he read before reading and he read after reading. He read every sort of book, but especially law (for he was a law graduate), mathematics, and philosophy; recently, he had also taken up the natural sciences.
Worse than going blind, he went mad. It was toward the end of 1873, up in Tijuca, that he began to show signs of mental derangement. But since the episodes were few and insignificant, it was only in March or April 1874 that his goddaughter noticed the change. One day, over lunch, he interrupted his reading to ask her:
“What’s my name again?”
“What’s your name?” she repeated, shocked. “Your name is Fulgêncio.”
“From this day forth, you shall call me Fulgencius.”
And, once more burying his nose in the book, he carried on with his reading. Caetaninha discussed the matter with the house-slaves, who told her they had suspected for some time that he wasn’t well. You can imagine the young lady’s fears, but her fear soon passed, leaving only pity, which merely made her feel still fonder of him. Also, his mania was harmless enough, for it extended only to books. Fulgêncio lived for the written word, the printed word, the doctrinal and the abstract, for principles and formulas. Over time, he reached the point of theoretical hallucination, although not yet superstition. One of his maxims was that freedom would not die as long as there remained one piece of paper on which to declare it. One day, waking up with the idea of improving the condition of the Turks, he drafted a constitution and sent it to the British envoy in Petrópolis, as a gift. On another occasion, he applied himself to studying the anatomy of the eyes, to see if they really could see, and concluded that they could.
Tell me how, under such conditions, Caetaninha’s life could possibly be happy? It’s true that she wanted for nothing, because her godfather was a rich man. It was he himself who had brought her up from the age of seven, when he lost his wife; he taught her reading and writing, then French, a little history and geography (which is tantamount to saying almost nothing), and charged one of the house-slaves with teaching her embroidery, lace-making, and sewing. So much is true. But Caetaninha was now fourteen, and, if toys and slaves had once been enough to amuse her, she was reaching the age when toys lose their appeal and slaves their interest, and when no amount of reading and writing can make a paradise of a secluded house up in Tijuca. She sometimes went down to the city, but these were rare occasions, and always very rushed; she didn’t visit the theater or go to dances, and she neither made nor received visits. Whenever she saw a riding party of ladies and gentlemen pass by on the road, her soul would jump up behind one of the riders, while her body stayed put by the side of her godfather, who carried on reading.
One day, when she was in the garden, she saw a young man stop at the front gate. He was riding a small mule, and he asked if this was Senhor Fulgêncio’s house.
“Indeed it is, sir.”
“May I speak with him?”
Caetaninha replied that she would go and see; she entered the house and went to the study, where she found her godfather ruminating over a chapter of Hegel with the most devoutly voluptuous expression on his face. “A young man? What young man?” Caetaninha told him that it was a young man dressed in mourning.
“In mourning?” repeated the old man, snapping the book shut; it must be him.
I forgot to say (but there is time for everything) that a brother of Fulgêncio’s had passed away three months earlier, up north, leaving an illegitimate son. Since the brother, a few days before dying, had written to Fulgêncio asking him to take care of the soon-to-be orphan, Fulgêncio sent for the boy to come to Rio de Janeiro. Upon hearing that a young man in mourning had arrived, he concluded that he must be his nephew, and concluded correctly. It was indeed him.
So far, nothing has happened that would seem out of place in any innocently romantic tale: we have an old lunatic, a lonely, sighing damsel, and now the unexpected arrival of a nephew. So as not to descend from the poetic sphere in which we find ourselves, I shall omit to mention that the mule on which Raimundo was mounted was led back by a slave to the place it had been hired from; I shall skim over the arrangements for the young man’s accommodation, limiting myself to saying that since the uncle, by virtue of his devotion to reading, had entirely forgotten that he had sent for the boy, no preparations whatsoever had been made to receive him. However, the house was large and well appointed, and, an hour later, the young man was comfortably lodged in a beautiful room overlooking the kitchen garden, the old well, the laundry, copious lush greenery, and an immense blue sky.
I don’t believe I have yet revealed the new guest’s age. He is fifteen years old, with just a hint of fuzz on his upper lip; in fact, he’s almost a child. So if Caetaninha quickly became flustered, and the slave-women began rushing hither and thither, peering around doors and talking about “the ole master’s nephew come from far away,” it’s because nothing much happened in that house, not because he was a grown man. This was also Fulgêncio’s impression, but here’s the difference. Caetaninha was unaware that the vocation of such fuzz is to become a mustache, or if she thought of it at all, she did this so vaguely that it’s not worth mentioning here. This was not the case with old Fulgêncio. He understood that here was material for a husband, and he resolved to marry the pair of them. But he also saw that, unless he took them by the hand and instructed them to fall in love, chance might move things in a different direction.
One thought begets another. The idea of marrying them combined with one of his recent opinions, viz., that calamities and setbacks in matters of the heart come from love being conducted in a purely empirical manner, with no scientific basis. A man and a woman who were aware of the physical and metaphysical reasons for such a sentiment would be more inclined to receive and nourish it effectively than a man and a woman who knew nothing of the phenomenon.
“My young charges are still wet behind the ears,” he said to himself. “I have three or four years ahead of me, and I can start preparing them now. We shall proceed in a logical manner; first, the foundations, then the walls, then the roof . . . rather than starting with the roof . . . Someday we will learn to love just as we learn to read. When that day comes . . .”
He was dazed, dazzled, and delirious. He went to his bookshelves, took down various volumes on astronomy, geology, physiology, anatomy, jurisprudence, politics, and linguistics, opening them, leafing through them, comparing them, and taking a few notes here and there, until he had formulated a program of instruction. It was composed of twenty chapters, and included general concepts of the universe, a definition of life, a demonstration of the existence of man and woman, the organization of societies, the definition and analysis of passion, and the definition and analysis of love, along with its causes, needs, and effects. In truth, they were rather tricky subjects, but he knew how to tame them by using plain, everyday language, giving them a purely familiar tone, just as Fontenelle did when he wrote about astronomy. And he would say emphatically that the essential part of the fruit was the pulp, not the peel.
All of this was highly ingenious, but here is the most ingenious bit. He did not ask them if they wanted to learn. One night, looking up at the sky, he commented on how brightly the stars were shining; and what were the stars? Did they perhaps know what the stars were?
“No, sir.”
From here it was but a short step to beginning a description of the universe. Fulgêncio took that step so nimbly and so naturally that the two youngsters were delighted and charmed, and begged him to continue the journey.
“No,” said the old man. “We won’t exhaust it all today; these things can only be understood slowly. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after . . .”
Thus, stealthily, he began to execute his plan. The two students, astounded by the world of astronomy, begged him every day to continue, and, although Caetaninha was a little confused at the end of this first lesson, she still wanted to hear the other things her godfather had promised to tell them.
I will say nothing about the growing familiarity between the two students, since that would be too obvious. The difference between fourteen and fifteen is so small that the two bearers of those respective ages had little more to do than take each other by the hand. This is what happened.
After three weeks, it was as if they had been raised together. This alone was enough to change Caetaninha’s life, but Raimundo brought her still more. Less than ten minutes ago, we saw her looking longingly at the riding parties of ladies and gentlemen passing along the road. Raimundo put an end to such longings by teaching her to ride, despite the reluctance of her godfather, who feared some accident might befall her. Nevertheless, he gave in and hired two horses. Caetaninha ordered a beautiful riding habit; Raimundo went into the city to buy her gloves and a riding crop, with his uncle’s money (obviously), which also provided him with the boots and other men’s apparel he needed. It was soon a pleasure to behold them both, gallant and intrepid, riding up and down the mountain.
At home, they were free to do as they wished, playing checkers and cards, tending to the birds and the plants. They often quarreled, but, according to the house-slaves, these were silly squabbles that they got into just so that they could make up afterward. Such was the extent of their quarrels. Raimundo sometimes went into the city on his uncle’s instructions. Caetaninha would wait for him at the front gate, watching anxiously. When he arrived, they would always argue, because she wanted to take the largest parcels on the pretext that he looked tired, and he wanted to give her the lightest one, claiming that she was too delicate.
After four months, life had changed completely. One could even say that only then did Caetaninha begin to wear roses in her hair. Before this, she would often come to the breakfast table with her hair uncombed. Now, not only did she comb and brush her hair first thing, she would even, as I say, wear roses—one or even two, which were either picked by her the previous night and kept in water, or picked that very morning by Raimundo, who would then bring them to her window. The window was high up, but, by standing on tiptoe and reaching out his arm, Raimundo managed to hand her the roses. It was at around this time that he acquired the habit of tormenting his incipient mustache, tugging at it, first on one side and then on the other. Caetaninha would rap him on the knuckles to make him desist from such an unseemly practice.
Meanwhile, their lessons followed a regular pattern. They already had a general notion of the universe, and a definition of life that neither of them understood. Thus they reached the fifth month. In the sixth, Fulgêncio began his demonstration of the existence of man. Caetaninha could not help giggling when her godfather asked if they knew that they existed and why; but she quickly became serious, and replied that she did not.
“What about you?”
“No, me neither,” confirmed the nephew.
Fulgêncio began a general, and profoundly Cartesian, demonstration. The following lesson took place in the garden. It had rained heavily in the preceding days, but the sun now flooded everything with light, and the garden resembled a beautiful widow who has swapped her mourning veil for that of a bride. As if wanting to imitate the sun (great things naturally copy each other), Raimundo shot her a long, all-embracing gaze, which Caetaninha received, quivering, just like the garden. Fusion, transfusion, diffusion, confusion, and profusion of beings and things.
While the old man spoke—straightforward, logical, and plodding, relishing his words, and with his eyes fixed on nowhere in particular, his two students made strenuous efforts to listen, but found themselves hopelessly distracted by other things. First, it was a pair of butterflies fluttering in the breeze. Would you please tell me what is so extraordinary about a pair of butterflies? Admittedly, they were yellow, but this alone is insufficient to explain the distraction. Nor was their distraction justified by the fact that the butterflies were chasing each other—to the left, to the right, then up, then down—given that butterflies, unlike soldiers, never travel in a straight line.
“Man’s understanding,” Fulgêncio was saying, “as I have just explained . . .”
Raimundo gazed at Caetaninha, and found her gazing at him. Each of them seemed awkward and confused. She was the first to lower her eyes. Then she raised them again, so as to look at something else farther off, such as the garden wall; on their way there, given that Raimundo’s eyes lay in their path, she glanced at them as briefly as she could. Luckily, the wall presented a spectacle that filled her with surprise: a pair of swallows (it was the day for couples) were hopping along it with the elegance peculiar to winged beings. They chirruped as they hopped, saying things to each other, whatever it might be, perhaps this: that it was a very good thing that there was no philosophy in garden walls. Suddenly one of them took off, probably the female, and the other, naturally the male, was not going to let himself be left behind: he spread his wings and flew off in the same direction. Caetaninha looked down at the grass.
When the lesson finished a few minutes later, she begged her godfather to continue and, when he refused, took him by the arm and invited him to take a turn in the garden.
“No, it’s too sunny,” protested the old man.
“We’ll walk in the shade.”
“It’s terribly hot.”
Caetaninha suggested they remain on the veranda, but her godfather said to her mysteriously that Rome was not built in a day, and ended up saying that he would only continue the lesson two days hence. Caetaninha retired to her room and stayed there for three-quarters of an hour, with the door closed, either seated or standing at the window or pacing back and forth, or else looking for something she was already holding in her hand, and even going so far as to imagine herself riding up the road alongside Raimundo. At one point, she saw the young man standing by the garden wall, but, on closer inspection she realized it was a pair of beetles buzzing through the air. One of the beetles was saying to the other:
“Thou art the flower of our race, the flower of the air, the flower of flowers, the sun and moon of my life.”
To which the other replied:
“No one exceeds thee in beauty and grace; thy buzzing is an echo of divine voices; but leave me . . . leave me . . .”
“Why should I leave thee, O soul of these sylvan glades?”
“I have told thee, king of pure breezes, leave me.”
“Do not speak to me like that, thou charm and ornament of the forest. Everything above and around us is saying that thou shouldst speak to me another way. Dost thou not know the song of blue mysteries?”
“Let us listen to it upon the green leaves of the orange tree.”
“The leaves of the mango tree are lovelier.”
“Thou art more beautiful than both.”
“And thee, O sun of my life?”
“Moon of my being, I am whatever thou wilt have me be . . .”
This is how the two beetles were talking. She listened to them, engrossed. When they disappeared, she turned away from the window, saw what time it was, and left her bedroom. Raimundo had gone out; she went to wait for him at the front gate for ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty minutes. When he returned, they said very little; they met and parted two or three times. The last time it was she who took him to the veranda, to show him a trinket she thought she’d lost and had just found. Readers, please do her the justice of believing that this was a blatant lie. Meanwhile, Fulgêncio brought the next lesson forward and gave it on the following day between lunch and dinner. Never had he spoken so clearly and simply, which was just as it should be, for it was the lesson concerning the existence of man, a profoundly metaphysical chapter, in which it was necessary to consider everything and from every possible angle.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
“Perfectly.”
And the lesson carried on to its conclusion. When it was over, the same thing happened as the day before. As if she were afraid of being alone, Caetaninha begged him to continue the lesson, or to take a turn about the garden with her. He refused both requests, patted her paternally on the cheek, and went and shut himself up in his study.
“Next week,” the old man thought as he turned the key, “next week I will make a start on the organization of societies; all of next month and the one after will be devoted to the definition and classification of passion; in May we will move on to love . . . by then it will be time . . .”
While he was saying this and closing the study door, a sound echoed forth from the veranda—a thunderclap of kisses, according to the caterpillars in the garden. Mind you, to caterpillars the slightest noise sounds like thunder. As for the authors of the noise, nothing definitive is known. It seems that a wasp, seeing Caetaninha and Raimundo together at that moment, confused coincidence with consequence and deduced that it was them, but an old grasshopper demonstrated the absurdity of such a proposition, citing the fact that he had heard many kisses, long ago, in places where neither Raimundo nor Caetaninha had ever set foot. We may all agree that this latter argument was utter nonsense, but such is the prestige of good character that the grasshopper was applauded for having once again defended both truth and reason. And, on that basis, maybe it was indeed so. But a thunderclap of kisses? Let’s imagine there were two; let’s even imagine three or four.