“DON’T TELL ME,” I said, going into his room. “It’s that business with
the baroness, isn’t it?”
Norberto dried his eyes and sat on the edge of the bed, his legs dangling. I sat astride a chair, resting my chin on the chair back, and gave the following brief speech:
“How often must I tell you, you little fool, to give up on this ridiculous, humiliating passion of yours? Yes, ‘ridiculous’ and ‘humiliating,’ because she doesn’t even know you exist. Besides, it’s dangerous. You don’t agree? Well, you’ll find out soon enough when the baron starts to suspect you of setting your cap at his wife. He certainly doesn’t look like the sweetest-tempered of men.”
Norberto clutched his head in despair. Having waited for me in the street until nearly one o’clock in the morning, opposite the boardinghouse where I lived, he had finally written a letter, begging me to go to him and offer comfort and advice; in the letter he told me he hadn’t slept, that he’d received a terrible blow; he even talked of drowning himself. Despite the terrible blow that I, too, had received, I went to see my poor friend. We were both the same age, both of us studying medicine, the only difference being that I was currently repeating my third year, which I had failed out of sheer idleness. Norberto was still living with his parents; I was less fortunate, having lost both of mine, and I lived on an allowance from an uncle in Bahia, and on the debts that this good old man paid off for me every six months. He would then write me a letter full of invective, which always concluded by saying that I must continue my studies and become a doctor. But why? I asked myself. If neither the sun, the moon, the girls, nor the best Villegas cigars were doctors, what was the point in my becoming one? And so I laughed and played and let the weeks and the creditors roll by.
I’ve just mentioned receiving a terrible blow of my own. This came in a letter from that same uncle, and arrived at the same time as Norberto’s, on the same morning. I opened my uncle’s letter first and read it, horrified. He no longer addressed me in his usual familiar way, but stiffly and formally: “Senhor Simeão Antônio de Barros, I have had enough of throwing my money away on you, sir. If you wish to finish your studies, then come and enroll in a university up here and live with me. If not, then you must find your own money, because you will receive nothing more from me.” I crumpled up the letter, stared hard at a very bad lithograph of the Viscount of Sepetiba—which had always been there in my boardinghouse room, hanging from a nail on the wall—and called him every name under the sun, from madman downward. I bawled at him that he could keep his money, that I was twenty years old, which was the very first of the rights of man, and took precedence over uncles and all other social conventions.
My imagination—always my mother and my friend—immediately came up with endless possible sources of income, which would mean I could dispense with the paltry amount doled out by a miserly old man; however, after that initial defiant response, I reread the letter and began to see that the solution was not as easy as it seemed. Those other possible sources might be good and even reliable, but I had grown so accustomed to visiting Rua da Quitanda to collect my monthly allowance and then spend it twice over, that I would find it very hard to adopt any other system.
It was then that I opened my friend Norberto’s letter and ran straight to his house. You already know what his letter said and saw him clutch his head in despair. What you do not know is that, having made that gesture, he eyed me gravely and said he had hoped to hear rather different words of advice from me.
“Such as?”
He did not respond.
“Should I tell you to buy a pistol or a lockpick, or perhaps some narcotic or other?”
“Why are you making fun of me?”
Norberto shrugged, and one corner of his mouth lifted slightly in scornful sneer. What kind of man? What did it mean to be a man if not to love the divinest creature on earth and to die for her?
The Baroness of Magalhães, the cause of this madness, had recently arrived from Bahia with her husband, who, before he became a baron—a title acquired to please his fiancée—had been just plain Antônio José Soares de Magalhães. They were newly married; the baroness was about twenty-four, some thirty years younger than the baron. She really was very beautiful. Her childhood name had been Iaiá Lindinha, the Pretty Young Miss. The baron was an old friend of Norberto’s father, and the two families were immediately thrown together.
“Die for her?” I said.
Norberto swore that he truly was capable of killing himself for her sake. She was such a mysterious creature! Her voice seeped into his very bones. And, saying this, he writhed about on the bed, pummeling his head and biting the pillows. He would stop occasionally, panting, then resume these convulsions, muffling his sobs and cries so that no one would hear him on the next floor.
Since the arrival of the baroness, I had grown accustomed to my friend’s tears, and so I waited for them to cease. When they did not, I left my chair, went over to the bed, and yelled at him that he was behaving like a child, and that I was leaving. Norberto grabbed my hand to make me stay and explained that he had not yet told me the worst part.
“That’s true. What is it?”
“They’re leaving. We visited them yesterday, and I heard them say they were taking the boat to Bahia.”
“To Bahia?”
“Yes.”
“Then they’ll be on the same boat as me.”
I told him about my uncle’s letter, and how he had ordered me to enroll in a Bahian university and live with him. Norberto listened in astonishment. In Bahia? Then we could go together; we were close friends, his parents would surely not refuse this favor to our youthful friendship. Despite the many tears that she would shed to lose her son, his mother gave in more quickly than we had imagined. His father, however, would not agree. No amount of pleading and persuading could change his mind; I had managed to get the baron involved in our plan, too, but even he could not get his old friend to allow his son to go with him, not even with the promise that he would take him into his own house and watch over him. Norberto’s father proved utterly immovable.
You can imagine my friend’s despair. I spent Friday night at his house with his family, and stayed until eleven o’clock. On the pretext of spending my last night in Rio together, he came back to my boardinghouse, and the tears he wept were so many and so bitter that I could neither doubt his passion nor presume to console him, it being the first passion he had experienced. Up until then, we had both known only the small change of love; and, alas for him, the first really valuable coin he had found was made not of gold or silver, but of iron, hard iron, like that of old Lycurgus, forged in the fire, then cooled in the same vinegar bath.
We did not sleep at all. Norberto wept and moaned, calling for death to come, making absurd and terrifying plans. As I was packing my bags, I kept trying to console him, but this only made matters worse; it was like inviting a gimpy leg to a dance. I managed to get him to smoke a cigar, then another, and he ended up smoking dozens of them, but never finishing one. At around three o’clock in the morning, he was talking about running away from Rio de Janeiro, not immediately, but in a few days’ time, on the first steamship that would take him. I managed to dissuade him from this, purely in his own interests.
“If it would be of any use, then, fine,” I said, “but not if you have no idea how you will be received when you simply turn up on her doorstep, because if she doesn’t care for you, she might well guess the reason behind your journey and refuse to see you.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. But there’s no guarantee that she’ll welcome your visit. Do you think she really cares for you?”
“Possibly, possibly not.”
He described incidents, gestures, words, all either ambiguous or insignificant; then came another tearful interlude, more breast-beating, more anguished cries, and I began to feel his pain and to suffer with him; reason gave way to compassion, and we melted into a single sorrow. And that is why I made this promise:
“I have an idea. I’ll travel to Bahia with them; after all, since we know each other already, I’ll probably visit them there. If so, I’ll try to sound her out. If I see that she doesn’t care for you one jot, then I’ll write to you, advising you frankly that you should look elsewhere; however, if I detect so much as a tiny tremor of affection, I’ll let you know, and only then, for good or ill, can you get on that boat.”
Norberto was thrilled with this plan. It was, at least, a hope. He made me swear that I would keep my word, that I would fearlessly observe her, and he, for his part, swore that he would not waver for an instant. He urged me not to miss a thing, saying that sometimes the smallest gesture could be worth its weight in gold, that a single word could be a whole book; and he asked me, please, if I could, to tell her of the despairing state in which I had left him. To further shore up my determination, he said that disappointment would kill him, because his love, being eternal, would find rest only in death and eternity. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that this was tantamount to obliging me to send only good news. At the time, though, all I could do was to weep with him.
Dawn witnessed our immoral pact. I would not allow him to come on board to say goodbye, and I left. Let us not talk about the voyage . . . O epic seas of Homer, whipped up by Eurus, Boreas, and violent Zephyrus, you may buffet brave Ulysses all you like, but whatever you do, do not afflict him with seasickness. That is best left to our modern-day seas, and especially for those that carried me from Rio to Bahia. Only when we had nearly reached our destination did I dare to appear before our magnificent lady, who was as calm and composed as if she had merely taken a longer-than-usual walk.
“Do you miss Rio?” I asked as an introit.
“Of course.”
The baron joined us to point out to me the places we could see from the ship, or the location of others that remained out of sight. He invited me to their house in Bonfim. My uncle came on board, and, despite his attempt to maintain a stern demeanor, I could tell that he had a good heart and that he saw in me his late sister’s only child, and saw, too, that I was prepared to be obedient. My first impressions could not have been better. Ah, divine youth! These new things were more than enough to compensate for the old things I had left behind.
I spent the first few days getting to know the city, but it was not long before I received a letter from my friend Norberto, reminding me of his plight. I duly went to visit Bonfim. The Baroness—or Iaiá Lindinha, the name by which everyone still knew her—received me with such good grace, and her husband was so kind and hospitable, that I felt ashamed of my mission. That shame was short-lived, though, for I could feel my friend’s despair, and the need either to console or to undeceive him was more important than anything else. Oddly enough, now that they were separated, I confess that I began to hope that she did actually like him, which was precisely what I had always refused to believe earlier. Perhaps it was a desire to see him happy, or perhaps merely the promptings of vanity, that made me hope I would prove victorious and save the poor unfortunate.
Inevitably, we talked about Rio de Janeiro. I told her the things I missed most, we spoke of familiar sights, the streets that were almost part of my very being, the faces I saw every day, the houses, the friendships. Ah, yes, friendships were what bound one most closely to a place. I had friends, Norberto’s parents, for example—
“Two angels!” she said, interrupting me. “My husband, who has known the gentleman for many years, has told me some interesting things about him. Did you know that he was passionately in love with his wife when they married?”
“That doesn’t surprise me. The son is clearly the fruit of that love. Do you know my poor Norberto well?”
“Yes, he often came to our house.”
“No, I’m afraid you don’t know him at all well.”
Iaiá Lindinha frowned slightly.
“Forgive me for contradicting you,” I went on urgently. “But you don’t know the kindest, purest, most ardent soul in God’s creation. You might think me somewhat biased because he’s my friend, but the truth is, he is the person who binds me closest to Rio de Janeiro. Poor Norberto! He is a man made for two careers at once, archangel and hero—born both to tell the earth about the delights of heaven and, if necessary, to carry our human lamentations up there too . . .”
Only when I finished this speech did I realize how ridiculous it was. Iaiá Lindinha either didn’t think it ridiculous or pretended not to; she said only that I clearly valued my friend greatly, but that while he had seemed a very nice person, he was not exactly cheerful company or else appeared to suffer from frequent bouts of melancholia. People told her that he studied a great deal . . .
“Oh, yes, he does.”
I did not insist so as not to rush things, but, please, dear reader, do not condemn me out of hand. I know the part I played was not exactly a pretty one, but this did all happen twenty-seven years ago. I put my trust in Time, that most noble of alchemists. Give Time a dollop of mud, and it will turn the mud into diamonds, or, at the very least, grit. It’s the same when a statesman writes and publishes an utterly unscrupulous volume of memoirs, omitting nothing, not even private conversations or government secrets, not even love affairs of an extremely personal and unconfessable nature. The scandal that ensues! People will—quite rightly—say that the author is a cynic, unworthy of the men who put their trust in him and of the women who loved him. A perfectly sincere and legitimate outcry, because public life imposes many barriers; the politeness and respect one owes to the women one has loved both demand silence . . .
However, allow the years to fall, drip by drip, into the bucket of a century, and once the century is full, the book becomes a historical document, psychological, anecdotal. It will be read purely as a study of the private lives and loves of our age, of how governments were built up and torn down, of whether women at the time were more forward or more discreet, how elections and flirtations were conducted, whether people wore shawls or cloaks, what vehicles we used, whether we wore our pocket watches on the right or the left, along with a multitude of other interesting details about our public and private history. That is why I hope not to be condemned outright by the consciences of my readers. After all, it was twenty-seven years ago!
I spent more than six months knocking at the door of that heart to see if I might find Norberto in there, but no one answered, not even the husband. Nevertheless, the letters I sent to my poor friend somehow managed to convey neither hope nor despair. Some were actually more hopeful than despairing. The affection I felt for him and for my own pride combined forces to arouse in her at least some curiosity and intrigue about that remote, possible mystery.
By then I had become firm friends with the couple, and often visited them. When three whole nights passed without my going to their house, I would be filled with torment and unrest, and when I rushed to see them on the fourth night, she would be waiting for me at the door, calling me all kinds of ugly things, ungrateful, idle, indifferent. This name-calling eventually ceased, but the person would still be there waiting, her sometimes tremulous hand ready to squeeze mine, or was it my hand that trembled? I’m not sure. Sometimes, when the moment came to say good night, I would stand beneath a window and say softly:
“I won’t be able to come tomorrow.”
“Why?” she would ask.
And I would explain either that I had to study or that I had promised to help my uncle. While she never tried to dissuade me, she was clearly disappointed. My letters to Norberto became less frequent and, when I did write, I hardly mentioned Iaiá Lindinha, as if I rarely went to her house. I used various different formulas: “Yesterday, near the palace, I bumped into the baron, who told me that his wife is well.” Or: “Do you know who I saw at the theater the other night? The baroness.” To avoid coming face-to-face with my own hypocrisy, I never reread my letters. For his part, Norberto also wrote less often, and then only briefly. His name was never spoken between me and her; we silently agreed that he had died, a sad death with none of the usual funeral pomp.
We skirted around the abyss, both of us insisting that it was merely a reflection of the celestial dome—a contradiction in terms for those who are not in love. Death finally solved the problem by carrying off the baron with an attack of apoplexy, on the twenty-third of March, 1861, at six o’clock in the evening. He was an excellent man, and his widow repaid him with prayers for the love she had failed to give him.
When, three months later, once the period of mourning was over, I asked her to marry me, Iaiá Lindinha was neither surprised nor outraged. On the contrary, she said yes, but not yet. She imposed one condition, that I must first finish my studies and qualify as a doctor. And she said this with lips that seemed to be the one book of the world, the universal book, the best of academies, the school of schools. I argued my case, but she heard me unmoved. The reason she gave was that my uncle might think that, once married, I would interrupt my studies.
“And he would be right,” she concluded. “I will only marry a doctor.”
We both kept that promise. For a while, she went traveling in Europe with one of her sisters-in-law and the latter’s husband; and I missed her so much that those feelings became my hardest taskmasters. I studied patiently and abandoned all my former idle occupations. I graduated on the eve of our wedding, and I can say, without a hint of hypocrisy, that I found the priest’s Latin far superior to the graduation address.
Some weeks later, Iaiá Lindinha asked if we could visit Rio de Janeiro. I agreed to her request, but confess that I felt distinctly uncomfortable. We would be sure to run into my friend Norberto, always assuming he still lived there. We had not written to each other for three years, and our last letters had been brief and rather dull. Would he know about our marriage? Or about what led up to it? We went to Rio, and I said nothing to my wife of these anxieties.
What would be the point? It would, I told myself, mean owning up to a secret act of treachery. When we arrived in Rio, I wondered whether I should wait for him to visit me or if I should be the one to seek him out; I chose the second option, in order to explain the situation to him. I dreamed up certain special, curious circumstances engineered by Providence itself, the threads of whose web are always hidden from mankind. This was not a joke, you understand; in my mind, these were all serious justifications.
Four days later, I learned that Norberto was living near Rio Comprido; he was married. So much the better. I hurried to his house. In the garden, I found a wet nurse suckling a baby, and another child of about eighteen months was crouched on the ground, picking up pebbles.
“Master Bertinho, go and tell your mama that a gentleman is here, asking to speak to your Papa.”
The child obeyed, but before he could return, my old friend Norberto came in through the garden gate. I recognized him at once, despite the thick sideburns he was wearing. We embraced each other warmly.
“What are you doing here? When did you arrive?”
“Yesterday.”
“You’ve grown positively plump, my friend! Plump and handsome. Let’s go inside. And what’s wrong with you?” he said, bending down to Master Bertinho, who had his arms clasped about one of his legs.
He picked the boy up, lifted him into the air, and showered him with a profusion of kisses, then, holding him perched on one arm, he pointed to me:
“Do you know this young man?”
Master Bertinho regarded me in alarm, one finger in his mouth, as his father explained that I was a very old friend of Papa’s, from the days when Grandma and Grandpa were still alive . . .
“Oh, so your parents are dead?”
Norberto nodded and turned back to his son, who now had his little hands pressed to his father’s face, begging for more kisses. Then Norberto turned to the baby, and, without picking her up, spoke to her tenderly and called me over to see her. He gazed at her adoringly. She was five months old, he said, but if I came back in fifteen years’ time, I’d find a big, strong, healthy girl. What arms! What fat fingers! Unable to resist, he bent over and kissed her.
“But come in and meet my wife. Stay for dinner.”
“No, I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Mama’s watching,” said Master Bertinho.
I looked up and saw a young woman standing and waiting for us at the parlor door, which opened out onto the garden. We went up five steps and into the parlor. Norberto clasped her hands and kissed her twice. She tried to draw back, but, unable to escape, she blushed deeply.
“Don’t be embarrassed, Carmela,” he said. “Do you know who this gentleman is? He’s Simeão Barros, the medical student I’ve often spoken to you about. By the way, Simeão, why did you never respond to our wedding invitation?”
“I never received it,” I said.
“Well, I definitely put it in the post.”
Carmela was listening to her husband admiringly, and, seeing this, he went and sat down next to her and secretly took her hand. I pretended not to notice, and I spoke about our university days, about mutual friends, politics, the war, anything to avoid him asking me if I was married. I was already regretting my visit; what would I say if he mentioned marriage and asked my wife’s name? He said nothing, so perhaps he already knew.
The conversation dragged on, but, in the end, I insisted that I had to leave and got up to go. Carmela bade me a very friendly goodbye. She was very beautiful, and her eyes lent her face an almost saintly glow. Her husband clearly adored her.
“Did you look at her closely?” he asked me at the garden gate. “I won’t even attempt to describe the love that binds us together, those are things that one feels but cannot put into words. What are you smiling at? Do you think me a child? I think I probably am, an eternal child, just as my love is eternal.”
I got into my cab, promising that I would have supper with them one day soon.
“Eternal!” I thought. “Just like the love he once felt for my wife.”
And, turning to the driver, I asked him:
“Is there anything that’s truly eternal?”
“If you’ll forgive me, sir,” he said, “I think the tax collector who lives in my street is eternal, a right old rascal he is, sir. I’d give my soul to smack him in the face just once. He’s definitely eternal, clinging on like a limpet, and he’s got useful connections, too, apparently—well, that’s what people say. Not that it’s any of my business, really, but, yes, if I could smack him in the face just once . . .”
I didn’t hear the rest. I sat absorbed in my own thoughts, lulled by the driver’s voice droning on and on. Before I knew it, we had arrived in Rua da Glória. And the wretch was still talking. I paid him and walked down to Glória Beach, then along Rua do Russel to Flamengo Beach, where the sea was quite rough. I slowed my pace, and stood looking at the waves rising and falling. Like a line from a song, the question I had asked the driver kept repeating inside me: “Is there anything that’s truly eternal?” The waves, more discreet than him, said nothing of their private troubles, but merely rose and fell, rose and fell.
I reached the Hotel dos Estrangeiros as dusk was coming on. My wife was waiting for me to have supper. On entering our room, I clasped her hands and asked her:
“Is there anything that’s truly eternal, Iaiá Lindinha?”
She sighed and said:
“Why, you ungrateful boy! My love for you, of course.”
I dined with no feelings of remorse; indeed, I felt serene and cheerful. Time! Give it a dollop of mud and it’ll turn mud into diamonds . . .