FLINCHING AT THE attorney’s angry cries, Inácio took the plate being handed to him and tried to eat beneath the deluge of insults: “Good-for-nothing, blockhead, idiot, imbecile!
“How is it you never hear a word I say? I’ll tell your father and he’ll beat the laziness out of you with a good quince rod or some other big stick; you’re not too old to get a beating, sonny, so don’t go thinking you are. Idiot! Imbecile!
“He’s the same out of the house as in,” the attorney went on, turning to Dona Severina, a lady who had been living with him, matrimonially, that is, for many years. “He gets all my documents in a muddle, goes to the wrong house, visits one notary instead of another, mixes up the lawyers’ names: he’s a complete disaster! It’s that endless sleeping of his that does it. You’ve seen what he’s like in the mornings; you practically have to break his bones to get him out of bed . . . Well, just you wait; tomorrow I’ll beat him out of bed with a broom handle!”
Dona Severina nudged him with her foot to stop. Borges spat out several more choice insults, then made his peace with God and men.
I won’t say he made his peace with children, because our Inácio was not exactly a child. He was fifteen years old, and a good fifteen at that. He had a somewhat disheveled but handsome head, and the dreamy eyes of a young lad who wonders, and questions, and wants to know everything, but ends up knowing nothing at all. All this set atop a body that was not devoid of grace, albeit badly dressed. His father, a barber in Cidade Nova, had apprenticed him as an errand boy or clerk or whatever, to the attorney Borges, in the hope of seeing him one day practice at the bar, for he reckoned that even small-time attorneys made lots of money. All this took place in Rua da Lapa, in 1870.
For some minutes, nothing more was heard apart from the clink of cutlery and the sound of chewing. Borges stuffed himself with lettuce and beef, punctuating his munching with an occasional slurp of wine before continuing to eat in silence.
Inácio ate slowly, not daring to raise his eyes from his plate, not even to return them to where they had been resting before the formidable Borges began laying into him. Doing so now would be very risky indeed. He never could set eyes upon Dona Severina’s arms without forgetting both himself and everything else.
The blame for this lay first and foremost with Dona Severina for showing off her arms like that. All the dresses she wore around the house had short sleeves, scarcely a few inches below the shoulder, leaving her arms bare for all to see. They were, it must be said, beautifully full and rounded arms in perfect harmony with their mistress—who was more plump than thin—and neither their color nor their softness suffered on being exposed to the air. However, it is only fair to explain that she did not display them out of vanity, but because all her long-sleeved dresses were too old and worn. When standing, she was a fine figure of a woman, and when she walked, she had a charming little wiggle; Inácio, however, hardly ever saw her except at the dining table, where he could scarcely see beyond her arms to look at her bust. She could not be said to be pretty, but nor was she ugly. She wore no jewelry and took little trouble with her hair, simply combing it back and fastening it on top of her head with the tortoiseshell comb her mother had left her. She wore a dark-colored scarf around her neck and no earrings at all—a sturdy twenty-seven-year-old in the full bloom of life.
When supper was over and coffee was served, Borges pulled four cigars from his pocket, compared them, squeezed them between thumb and forefinger, chose one, and put the others back. Once he had lit the chosen cigar, he planted his elbows on the table and talked to Dona Severina about a hundred and one things that were of no interest whatsoever to our Inácio. Still, for as long as the attorney talked, at least he wasn’t scolding him, and he could let his mind wander freely.
Inácio lingered over his coffee as long as he could. Between one sip and the next, he smoothed the tablecloth, picked imaginary bits of skin from his fingers, or let his eyes wander over the pictures in the dining room, of which there were two: one of Saint Peter and one of Saint John, devotional prints brought back from church festivals and framed at home. He might just about be able to hide his thoughts from Saint John, whose youthful head brings cheer to Catholic imaginations, but the austere Saint Peter was too much for him. In his defense, young Inácio could plead only that he saw neither one nor the other; his eyes passed over them as if there were nothing there at all. He saw only Dona Severina’s arms—either because he took the occasional stealthy sideways glance at them, or because they were emblazoned on his memory.
“Come on, man! Are you still not done?” bellowed the attorney suddenly.
There was nothing for it. Inácio downed the last drop of already cold coffee, and retired, as usual, to his room at the rear of the house. On entering, he made a silent gesture of anger and despair, then went over to lean at one of the two windows looking out to sea. After five minutes, the view of the water close by and the mountains far off brought back the confused, vague, restless feeling that both pained and comforted him, much as a plant must feel when its first flower blooms. He wanted to leave, but also to stay. He’d been there for five weeks now, and his life followed the same, unchanging routine: leaving the house every morning with Borges, hanging around the courts and notaries’ offices, running here and there getting documents stamped and delivered, chasing after clerks and bailiffs. In the afternoon, he would return to the house, have his dinner, and go to his room until it was time for supper; after supper, he went straight to bed. Borges did not treat him as part of the family, which consisted solely of Dona Severina, whom Inácio saw only three times a day at mealtimes. Five weeks of solitude and drudgery, far from his mother and sisters; five weeks of silence, since he only spoke now and then to someone in the street, and in the house, not a word.
“Just you wait,” he thought to himself one day, “I’ll run away and never come back.”
But he stayed; chained and shackled there by Dona Severina’s arms. He had never seen such fresh, pretty arms. His upbringing would not allow him to look at them directly; at first it seems he even averted his eyes in embarrassment. Little by little, though, he did begin to look, especially when he realized that those arms were always unencumbered by sleeves, and thus he gradually began to discover, contemplate, and love them. By the end of three weeks they had become, spiritually speaking, the tent where he laid his weary head. He put up with the hard slog of mundane work, the melancholy of his solitude and silence, his boss’s rudeness, for the reward of seeing, three times a day, that stupendous pair of arms.
The very same evening, as night fell and Inácio was stretching out in his hammock (for there was no other bed for him), Dona Severina, in the front room, was going over the episode at dinner and, for the first time, began to suspect something. She quickly rejected the idea—he was a child, for goodness’ sake! But some ideas are like insistent flies: however often we brush them away, they still return to pester us. A child? He was fifteen years old; and she noted that between the lad’s nose and lip were the fuzzy beginnings of a mustache. Was it so surprising that he had begun to fall in love? Was she not, after all, pretty? She did not reject this second observation, but rather cherished and embraced it. She recalled his listless demeanor, his lapses of concentration, his habit of staring into the middle distance—such small things, but symptoms nonetheless. Yes, she concluded, he must be in love.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked the attorney after several minutes’ silence, as he lay on the sofa.
“Nothing,” she replied.
“Nothing? Everyone in this house seems half asleep! Well, just you wait; I know a good cure for sleepyheads . . .”
And on he went, in the same angry tone, firing off threats that he was quite incapable of carrying out, for he was more boorish than bad. Dona Severina interrupted several times to tell him he was mistaken, that she hadn’t been sleeping, but rather thinking about Fortunata, her godson’s mother. They hadn’t been to see her since Christmas; perhaps one of these evenings they should pay her a visit. Borges retorted that he was tired, that he’d been working like a black, that he wasn’t in the mood for social chitchat, and then launched into a tirade against the mother, the father, and the godson, who at ten years of age still wasn’t at school! By that age, he, Borges, could already read, write, and do his sums; not very well, of course, but still. Ten years old! Well, it was sure to end badly: he’d be picked up off the streets and marched off to war, that’s what would happen. A soldier’s billet would sort him out, one way or another.
Dona Severina tried to assuage him with excuses: the mother’s poverty, the father’s string of misfortunes. She caressed her husband, tentatively, for fear of irritating him further. It was now completely dark, and she heard the tlic of the streetlamp as the gas was lit, and saw its glow reflected in the windows of the house across the street. Borges, tired after his long day (for he really was a prodigiously hard worker), let his eyes close and drifted off to sleep, leaving her alone in the room, in the dark, alone with herself and this new discovery.
Everything seemed to tell her it was true; but this truth, once she had gotten over the initial shock, brought with it a moral dilemma she could only recognize by its effects, since she had no means of identifying exactly what it was. She could make no sense of herself, nor regain her equilibrium, and she even thought of telling the attorney everything so that he would send the young whippersnapper packing. But what was “everything”? Here she paused: in reality there was nothing but supposition, coincidence, and quite possibly delusion. No, not delusion. She began to piece together all the vague clues in the boy’s behavior: his awkwardness, his absentmindedness, and rejected the idea that she might be mistaken. But shortly afterward (ah, capricious nature!), reflecting that it would be wrong to make groundless accusations, she admitted that she was perhaps fooling herself after all. Her sole aim, of course, was to watch the young man more closely and ascertain the true state of affairs.
That same evening, Dona Severina surreptitiously studied Inácio’s every look and gesture. She could find nothing, because teatime was very short, and the boy scarcely raised his eyes from his cup. The next day she was able to observe him more closely, and even more so in the days that followed. She realized that, yes, she was both loved and revered—an adolescent and virginal love constrained by social proprieties and by a feeling of inferiority that prevented the young man from even acknowledging it to himself. Dona Severina saw that she need fear no impertinence on his part, and decided it was best to say nothing to her husband; she would be sparing both him and the poor child any unpleasantness. By now she was persuaded that he was indeed a child, and resolved to treat him just as coolly as before, or even more so. And so she did; Inácio began to notice that she avoided his looks and spoke sharply to him, almost as sharply as Borges himself. It’s true that, on other occasions, her tone of voice was soft, even tender, very tender; in the same way, her gaze, generally so elusive, wandered so much around the room that, for a moment’s respite, it would occasionally come to rest upon his head; but such moments were only fleeting.
“I’ve got to leave,” he would say to himself in the street, just as he had in the early days.
He would arrive back at the house, though, and he wouldn’t leave. Dona Severina’s arms were a parenthesis in the long, tedious sentence of the life he was leading and this interpolated clause contained a profound and original idea, invented by Heaven solely for him. So he stayed and carried on as before. Finally, however, he did have to leave, never to return; here’s the how and why.
For several days, Dona Severina had been treating him kindly. The severe tone had vanished from her voice, and now there was more than just softness, there was genuine care and affection. One day, she warned him to keep away from drafts, another day, she told him not to drink cold water after hot coffee—the advice, thoughts, and concerns of a friend and mother, all of which threw Inácio into an even greater state of confusion and consternation. He grew so confident, however, that he actually laughed at the table, something he had never done before. This time the attorney did not scold him, because it was the attorney himself who was telling a funny story, and no one punishes an appreciative audience. It was then that Dona Severina noticed that the young lad’s lips, attractive when he was silent, were no less so when he laughed.
Inácio’s turmoil grew and grew, and he could neither calm himself nor understand what was going on. He felt uncomfortable wherever he was. He would wake up at night thinking about Dona Severina. When out on his errands, he became even more likely to take a wrong turn or knock on the wrong door, and every woman he saw, from near or far, reminded him of her. He always felt a certain, occasionally intense, excitement when he returned from work and found her standing at the top of the stairs, peering down through the wooden banisters, as if she had rushed to see who it was.
One Sunday—a Sunday he would never forget—Inácio was alone in his room, at the window, looking out to sea, which spoke to him in the same obscure new language as Dona Severina. He was amusing himself watching the seagulls as they made wide circles in the air, or hovered above the water, or simply fluttered on the breeze. It was a magnificent day, not merely a Christian Sabbath, but an immense, universal Sabbath.
Inácio spent all his Sundays there in his room, either at the window or rereading one of the three cheap, slender books he had brought with him from home, stories of times gone by, purchased for a penny under the arches on Largo do Paço. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. He was tired; he had slept badly the night before, after having walked a lot the previous day. He stretched out in the hammock, picked up one of the books—Princess Magalona—and began to read. He could never understand why all the heroines in these old stories had the same face and figure as Dona Severina, but they did. After half an hour, he let the book drop and rested his eyes on the wall, from where, five minutes later, he saw the lady of his dreams emerge. He should, naturally, have been astonished, but he wasn’t. Even though his eyes were shut, he watched her detach herself from the wall, pause, smile, and walk toward the hammock. It really was her; those really were her arms.
It is certain, however, that Dona Severina could not have emerged from the wall, even had there been a door or a crack in it, for at that very moment she was in the front room listening to the attorney’s footsteps going down the stairs. When he reached the bottom, she went to the window to watch him leave the house, only withdrawing once he had disappeared into the distance, on his way to Rua das Mangueiras. Then she came back into the room and sat on the sofa. She seemed out of sorts, restless, almost manic; she stood up, went over to the sideboard, picked up a jug only to set it back down in the same place; then she walked to the door, paused, and turned back, for no apparent reason. She sat down again for five or ten minutes. Suddenly she remembered that Inácio had eaten very little at breakfast and had looked rather downcast; she wondered if he might be ill, perhaps even gravely ill.
She left the parlor and went straight along the hallway to the young man’s bedroom. The door was wide open. Dona Severina stopped, peered in, and saw him lying in the hammock, asleep, one arm hanging loose and his book lying on the floor. His head was tilted slightly toward the door, so she could see his closed eyes, his tousled hair, and a wide, blissful grin on his face.
Dona Severina felt her heart pounding furiously, and drew back. The previous night she had dreamt of him; perhaps now he was dreaming of her. Ever since dawn, the lad’s face had danced before her eyes like a devilish temptation. She took a further step back, then returned, and looked at him for two, three, five minutes or more. Sleep seemed to accentuate Inácio’s youth, giving it an almost feminine, childlike expression. “A child!” she said to herself, in that wordless language we all carry around inside us. And this idea slowed her racing blood and somewhat calmed her turbulent senses.
She gazed at him unhurriedly, until she had had her fill: his head tilted to one side, one arm hanging loose; but, at the same time as she found him childlike, she also found him handsome, much more so than when he was awake; one of these notions either corrected or corrupted the other. Suddenly she jumped back in fear: she had heard a sound close by, in the linen closet. She went to investigate: a cat had knocked a bowl onto the floor. Creeping back to spy on Inácio, she saw that he was still sleeping soundly. He was certainly a deep sleeper! The noise that had made her jump out of her skin hadn’t even caused him to stir. She stood there and watched him sleep—to sleep, perchance to dream.
Ah, if only we could see other people’s dreams! Dona Severina would have seen herself in the boy’s imagination; she would have seen herself standing by the hammock, smiling and quite still, then leaning toward him, taking his hands, raising them to her chest, and folding them in her arms, those stupendous arms. Even thus, in love with her arms, Inácio could still hear her words, which were beautiful, warm, and above all new—or, rather, they belonged to some language he did not know, although he understood it well enough. Two, three, and even four times, the figure faded only to return, swooping in from the sea or from up among the seagulls, or sailing down the hallway with her usual sturdy elegance. And each time she returned, she would lean toward him, take his hands once again, and fold them in her arms, until, leaning closer, much closer, she pursed her lips and kissed him gently on the mouth.
Here the dream coincided with reality, and the same mouths united both in his imagination and outside it. The difference is that the vision did not draw back, whereas the real person had no sooner kissed him than she fled to the door, ashamed and afraid. She went back to the front room, shocked at what she had done and staring blankly into space. Straining her ears, retracing her steps down the hallway, she listened for any sound of him waking, and it took quite some time before her fears subsided. The child really did sleep like a log; nothing would open his eyes, neither the nearby sound of things breaking nor real-life kisses. But while her fears subsided, her shame lingered and grew. Dona Severina could not believe what she had done; it seems she had swathed her desires in the notion that this was an adoring child lying blameless and unconscious there before her; and, half mother, half friend, she had leaned over and kissed him. Be that as it may, she felt confused, cross, and annoyed with herself and with him. The fear that he might have been feigning sleep troubled her soul and sent shivers down her spine.
In fact, he carried on sleeping for a long time and only awoke for dinner. He sat down gaily at the table. Although Dona Severina was as tight-lipped and stern as ever, and the attorney just as abrasive, neither the harshness of one nor the severity of the other could dispel the charming vision he still carried inside his head, or dull the sensation of that kiss. He didn’t notice that Dona Severina was wearing a shawl covering her arms; he noticed later, on Monday, and then again on Tuesday, and every day until Saturday, which was the day on which Borges sent to tell the boy’s father that he couldn’t keep him on any longer. He did not act in anger, though, for he treated Inácio relatively well and even said to him as he left:
“If you ever need me for anything, you know where I am.”
“Yes, sir. And Senhora Dona Severina . . . ?”
“She’s up in her room, with a very bad headache. Come back tomorrow or the day after to say goodbye to her.”
Inácio left, not understanding a thing. He didn’t understand his dismissal, or Dona Severina’s complete change of attitude, or the shawl, or any of it. She had seemed so contented! She had spoken to him so kindly! How, then, so suddenly . . . ? He thought and thought, and ended up imagining that some indiscreet look on his part, some thoughtless act, had offended her; yes, that must be it, and that would explain her scowling face and the shawl covering her lovely, lovely arms . . . Well, never mind; he still had his dream to savor. And down through the years, despite other love affairs, more real and lasting, he never felt anything that could match the sensation of that Sunday, in Rua da Lapa, when he was fifteen years old. He even sometimes exclaims, not knowing how wrong he is:
“And it was all a dream! Just a dream!”