ONE AUGUST NIGHT in 186*, Deputy Cordovil simply could not get to sleep. He had come home early from the Cassino Fluminense, once the Emperor had left, and, during the ball, he had not felt in the least bit indisposed, either mentally or physically. On the contrary, it had been an excellent evening, made even more excellent by the fact that an old enemy of his, with a weak heart, had died just before ten o’clock, with news of his death reaching the Cassino shortly after eleven.
You will naturally conclude that he was overjoyed at the man’s death, this being the only kind of revenge available to weak, malicious hearts. Well, there you are wrong; it was not joy, it was relief. This death had been dragging on for months, the kind of death that seems never-ending, grinding, chewing, crushing, and gnawing away at the poor human creature. Cordovil knew of his enemy’s sufferings, for, to console Cordovil for various past insults, certain friends would come and tell him what they saw or knew of the dying man, who was permanently confined to an armchair, enduring long, agonizing nights, with the dawn bringing him no respite and the evening no hope of recovery. Cordovil repaid these friends with the occasional compassionate word, which the bringers of good news would adopt and repeat, rather less sincerely than him. The man’s suffering had ended at last, hence the feeling of relief.
Such a feeling was not dissimilar to human charity, and, indeed, Cordovil took no pleasure in other people’s woes, except in the world of politics. When he prayed each morning, “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors . . .” he was not like a friend of his who mouthed the same words but never forgave his debtors; indeed, the friend would usually demand more than was owed, by which I mean that if he ever heard anyone speak ill of another man, he would learn the slander by heart, embellish it, and repeat it to whoever would listen. The next day, though, Jesus’s beautiful words would emerge from those same lips with dutiful charity.
Cordovil was different; he was always ready to forgive. He may have been somewhat slow in offering his forgiveness, but never obviously so. And besides, slowness has its virtues. It’s no bad thing to mitigate the power of evil. Don’t forget, it was only in the world of politics that the deputy took pleasure in another’s woes, and his dead enemy had been a personal, not a political, enemy. I’ve no idea what the cause of that enmity was, and the man’s name died with him.
“Poor devil, at least he’s at peace now,” said Cordovil.
They had gone on to speak of the deceased’s long illness and discussed other deaths in this world. Cordovil thought that Caesar’s death had been by far the best, not because it involved knives, but because it was quick and unexpected.
“Tu quoque?” asked a colleague, laughing.
And, picking up the allusion to Caesar’s words, Cordovil retorted:
“No, but if I had a son, for example, I would want to die at his hands. Parricide is so unusual that it would make the tragedy still more tragic.”
And the conversation continued in this same sprightly vein. Cordovil left the ball feeling very sleepy and dozed off in his carriage, despite the bumpy ride. When they were almost at his house, he felt the carriage stop and heard the murmur of voices. A man had died, and two policemen were picking him up from where he lay on the ground.
“Was he murdered?” Cordovil asked the footman, who had climbed down to find out what was happening.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, find out.”
“That fellow over there knows what happened,” said the footman, pointing to a man who was talking to some other people.
The young man came over to the carriage window and, without being asked, briefly told Cordovil what he had seen.
“We were both walking along. He was ahead of me and I was just behind. He was whistling a polka, I think. Anyway, just as he was about to cross the street and head off toward the canal, he seemed to stumble, keel over, then fall to the ground unconscious. A doctor came out of a house nearby, examined him, and said that he’d simply dropped down dead. A crowd began to gather, and the police took ages to arrive. They’ve only just come for him now. Do you want to have a look?”
“No, thank you. Can we get through now?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thank you. Come on, Domingos.”
Domingos climbed back onto his seat, the driver chivied the horses into action, and the carriage continued on to Rua de São Cristóvão, where Cordovil lived.
Along the way, Cordovil was pondering the death of that stranger. In itself, it was a good death, and compared to that of his personal enemy, an excellent one. The man had been walking along whistling, thinking about who knows what past delights or future hopes, perhaps reliving something already experienced or anticipating some entirely new experience, when death snatched from him both delight and hope and carried him off to his eternal rest. He died painlessly, or, if he did feel any pain, it was probably very brief, like a lightning flash that leaves the darkness still darker.
He imagined himself in that same situation. What if it had happened to him at the Cassino? He would not have been dancing; at forty, he no longer danced. It could be said that he had only danced until he was twenty. He wasn’t a ladies’ man, and had known only one great love in his life, when he was twenty-five. He had married and been widowed five weeks later, never to marry again. Not that he had lacked for admirers, especially after his grandfather died, leaving him two country estates. He had sold both and, from then on, lived alone; he had made two trips to Europe, and continued his political and social life. Lately, he had seemed rather bored with both, but, having nothing better to do, had not yet abandoned either. He had been appointed minister once, of the navy, I believe, but lasted only seven months in the post. The appointment brought him no glory and his dismissal no regret. He wasn’t ambitious, and was more given to inaction than action.
But what if he had died suddenly in the Cassino, during a waltz or a quadrille, alive one moment, dead the next? It could have worked out really well. Cordovil imagined the scene, with him lying prone or prostrate, all gaiety extinguished and the dancing at an end . . . or perhaps not. There would be a brief moment of shock, perhaps, or alarm, with the men reassuring the women, and the orchestra continuing to play on for a few moments despite the confusion. There would be no shortage of strong arms to carry him into another room, dead, totally dead.
“Just like Caesar’s death,” he told himself.
Then he added:
“No, better than that: no threats, no weapons, no blood, just a fall and it’s over. I wouldn’t feel a thing.”
Cordovil found himself laughing or smiling, anything to drive away the terror and leave only the sense of freedom. Well, better to die like that than after long days or months and years, like the enemy he had lost a few hours before. It wasn’t even like dying; it was like tipping one’s hat, with the gesture lost in the air along with the hand and mind that had made it. Like nodding off into eternal sleep. He found only one thing wrong with it—the showiness of it. That death in the middle of a dance, in front of the Emperor, to a waltz by Strauss, described, painted, and exaggerated in the newspapers, that death would seem made to order. Never mind, as long as it was quick.
It could also, he thought, happen in the Chamber, the following day, at the beginning of the debate about the budget. He had the floor; he was already spouting figures and statistics. No, he didn’t want to imagine the scene, there was no point, but it refused to go away and appeared of its own accord. The Chamber, rather than the Cassino, with no ladies present or only a very few in the public gallery. A vast silence. Cordovil, on his feet, would begin his speech, then glance around the room, at the minister and the prime minister: “I thank you, gentlemen, for your time. I will be brief and, I hope, fair . . .” A cloud would pass before his eyes, his tongue would stop, his heart, too, and he would suddenly collapse. Chamber, gallery, benches would freeze. Many deputies would rush to help him; one, who was a doctor, would declare him dead; he wouldn’t say he had simply dropped down dead, as the doctor in the street earlier had put it, but would use some more technical term. Work would be halted, there would be a few words from the prime minister, and a group would be chosen to accompany the dead man to the cemetery . . .
Cordovil tried to laugh off these imaginings about what would happen after death, the crowds and the funeral, the obituaries in the newspapers, which he quickly had by heart. He tried to laugh, but would have far preferred simply to nod off; however, his eyes, sensing that they were now so close to home and bed, preferred not to spoil their night’s sleep and remained wide awake.
And that same death—which he had imagined happening at the ball or the following day in the middle of the debate—now entered the carriage. He imagined the footman opening the door and finding his corpse. He would thus leave a very noisy night for a peaceful one, with no conversations, no dances, no meetings, no struggle or resistance. A sudden jolt made him realize this wasn’t true. The carriage had proceeded up the drive to his house and stopped, and Domingos had sprung down from his seat to come and open the door for him. Cordovil climbed out with his legs and soul alive and went in by the side door, where his slave Florindo was waiting for him with a candle. He went up the stairs, and his feet felt that those steps were definitely of this world; had they been of the next world, they would, of course, have been going down. Upstairs, he went into his bedroom and looked at the bed; it was the same bed where he had spent many a long, tranquil night asleep.
“Any callers?”
“No, sir,” said the slave distractedly, then corrected himself: “I mean, yes, sir. The doctor who had lunch with you last Sunday, he came to see you.”
“Did he leave a message?”
“He said he had some good news and left a note, which I put at the foot of the bed.”
The note announced the death of his enemy; the doctor was one of the friends who had kept him updated on the progress of his enemy’s illness. He had wanted to be the first to tell him the great news and sent his very best wishes. So the blackguard had died. The friend didn’t actually use that word, but it amounted to the same thing, and he added that this had not been his only reason to call. He had come to spend the evening with him, only to be told that Cordovil had gone to the Cassino. He had been about to leave, when he remembered their mutual enemy’s death and asked Florindo to let him leave a brief message. Cordovil read the note and again felt the dead man’s pain. He made a melancholy gesture and muttered:
“Poor wretch! Yes, long live sudden deaths!”
Had Florindo made a connection between the doctor who left the note, that gesture, and those words, he might have regretted taking the trouble to pass on the note, but this never even occurred to him. He helped his master undress, received his final orders, and said good night. Cordovil then climbed into bed.
“Ah!” he sighed, stretching out his weary body.
Then he had an idea: What if he were to wake up in the morning dead? This hypothesis—the best of the lot, because it would catch him when he was already half dead—brought with it a thousand other fantasies that drove sleep from his eyes. In part, these were a repetition of the earlier ones, his speech to the Chamber, the prime minister’s words, the funeral cortege, and all the rest. He heard the sad words of friends and servants, read the obituaries, all either flattering or fair. He began to suspect that he was already asleep, but he wasn’t. He brought himself back to the room, to the bed, to himself: he was awake.
The lamp lent more substance to reality. Cordovil dismissed these gloomy ideas and waited for happier ones to take over and dance him to sleep. He tried to vanquish one vision with another. He even did one rather ingenious thing: he summoned up all his five senses, whose memories were still sharp and fresh, and evoked long-extinct incidents and episodes. Certain gestures, social and family gatherings, panoramic vistas, and many other things he had seen, resurfaced from distant, diverse times. He once again savored a few favorite titbits as if he were eating them now. His ears heard footsteps, light and heavy, songs, cheerful and sad, and words in all their many guises. Touch and smell played their part, too, and he quite lost track of time.
He tried to sleep and firmly closed his eyes. But he couldn’t sleep, not on his right side or his left, not on his back or his front. He sat up and looked at his watch; it was three o’clock. Unthinkingly, he pressed the watch to his ear to see if it had stopped; it hadn’t; it was fully wound. Yes, he still had time to have a good sleep; he lay down again and covered his head with the sheet to block out any light.
It was then that sleep tried to enter, silently, soundlessly, cautiously, just as death would if it wanted to carry him off suddenly and for good. Cordovil again squeezed his eyes tight shut, but the effort involved in this only increased his longing to sleep; he managed then to relax his eyelids, and this worked, for sleep, which had been about to retreat, returned and came and lay down next to him, wrapping him in the simultaneously light and heavy arms that deprive a person of all movement. Cordovil could feel them and tried to return their embrace and snuggle up still closer. That is not a good image, but I have no better one at hand and no time to go and find another. I will describe only the result of that gesture, which was to drive away sleep, much to the annoyance of that giver of rest to the weary.
“What has he got against me tonight?” sleep would have asked if it could speak.
As you know, sleep is essentially silent. When it does seem to speak, it is a dream opening the dreamer’s mouth; sleep is as silent as a stone, although even a stone can speak if struck, as the road-menders are doing right now outside in my street. Every blow awakens in the stone a sound, and the regularity of those blows makes a noise like the soul of a clock. People talking or selling something, carriage wheels, footsteps, a window blown shut by the wind, none of the things I can hear now enlivened Cordovil’s street or his night. Everything favored sleep.
And Cordovil was, at last, falling asleep, when the idea of waking up dead reappeared. Sleep drew back and fled. This toing and froing went on for some time. Just as sleep was sealing his eyes shut, the thought of death would open them, until, in the end, he threw back his sheets and leapt out of bed. He opened the window and leaned on the sill. The sky was trying to grow light, a few dark shapes were walking down the street, workers or merchants making their way into town. Cordovil shivered, but whether from cold or fear, he didn’t know; he went and put on a cotton dressing gown and returned to the window. Yes, it must have been the cold, because he had stopped shivering.
People continued to pass and the sky continued to lighten; a whistle from the station indicated that a train was about to leave. Men and things emerged from their night’s rest, the sky frugally extinguished the stars as the sun arrived for its shift. Everything made one think of life, and the idea of death gradually slipped away and vanished entirely, while our man, who had sighed for death in the Cassino and wished for it the following day in the Chamber of Deputies, who had come face-to-face with it in his carriage, now turned his back on it when he saw it enter along with sleep, death’s elder brother, or, who knows, its younger one.
When he did eventually die, many years later, he asked for and received not a sudden death, but a gradual one, the death of a slowly decanted wine, which leaves one bottle and enters another, with all its impurities filtered out. Only the dregs would go to the cemetery. Now he understood the philosophy of death; the wine remained in the bottles, until, drop by drop, it was all decanted into the second bottle. As for what a sudden death meant, he never did grasp that.