The letter bore yesterday’s date.
The ode was very long, and Estêvão didn’t even bother to read it, but hurled it down.
The ode began thus:
Leave your mountain peak, O muse!
Come, inspire the poet’s lyre;
Fill with light my bold brow,
And let us send into eternity,
On the wings of a resounding ode,
The encouraging embrace of friendship!
I sing not of Achilles’ lofty deeds
Nor do I hail the clamorous beat
Of martial drums on battlefields!
No, another matter inspires my pen.
I sing not of the death-dealing sword,
I sing of the embrace that gives life and glory!
XI
As promised, Estêvão set off immediately in search of Meneses. Instead of coming straight to the point, he wanted, initially, to sound him out as regards his past. It was the first time he had touched on the matter. Meneses, all unsuspecting, was merely taken a little by surprise; however, such was his confidence in his friend that he could refuse him nothing.
“I’ve always thought,” Estêvão said, “that there must have been some kind of drama in your life. This may be a mistake on my part, but I can’t get the idea out of my head.”
“Yes, there was a drama of sorts, one that was booed off the stage. No, don’t smile. That’s the truth. What do you imagine it might have been?”
“I’ve no idea, I imagine . . .”
“You expect drama from a politician?”
“Why not?”
“I’ll tell you. I both am and am not a politician. I didn’t enter public life out of any kind of vocation; I entered it as one enters a tomb: in order to sleep better. Why did I do this? Because of the drama you speak of.”
“A woman, perhaps . . .”
“Yes, a woman.”
“Perhaps,” said Estêvão, attempting a smile, “even a wife?”
Meneses trembled and looked at his friend, alarmed and suspicious now.
“Who told you that?”
“I was merely asking a question.”
“Yes, it was my wife, but I’ll say no more. You’re the first person to have wheedled so much out of me. The past is past, it’s dead: parce sepultis.”
“Possibly,” said Estêvão, “and what if I belonged to a philosophical sect intent on reviving the dead, even a dead past . . . ?”
“Your words either mean a great deal or nothing at all. What are you getting at?”
“I don’t intend to revive the past, but to repair it, to restore it to its former glory, as is only right. My object is to tell you, my dear friend, that the condemned woman is, in fact, innocent.”
When he heard these words, Meneses gave a faint gasp.
Then, springing to his feet, he asked Estêvão to tell him what he knew and how.
Estêvão told him everything.
When he finished, the deputy shook his head in disbelief, the last symptom of incredulity, which is the lingering echo of great domestic catastrophes.
Estêvão, though, was prepared for his friend’s objections. He energetically defended the wife, and urged Meneses to do his duty.
Meneses’s final response was this:
“My dear Estêvão, Caesar’s wife should always be above suspicion. I believe what you say, but what’s done is done.”
“That’s a very harsh principle, my friend.”
“But inevitable.”
Estêvão left.
When he was alone, Meneses sat, sunk in thought; he believed what Estêvão had said, and he loved his wife, but he could not believe there could be a return to those happier days.
By refusing to believe, he thought, he could stay in the tomb where he had slept so peacefully.
Estêvão, however, did not give up.
When he got home, he wrote a long letter to the deputy, urging him to go back to his family, which had been so briefly and unnecessarily torn asunder. Estêvão was very eloquent, and it took little to convince Meneses’s heart.
The doctor proved himself extremely able in this diplomatic mission. After a few days, the clouds of the past had dissipated and the couple were reunited.
How?
Madalena learned of her husband’s intentions, and received a warning that he was about to visit.
Just as the deputy was preparing to leave for her house, he was told that a lady was asking for him.
The lady was Madalena.
Meneses did not even attempt to embrace her, but knelt at her feet.
All was forgotten.
Wanting to celebrate this reconciliation, they invited Estêvão to spend the day with them, for to him they owed their happiness.
Estêvão did not go.
The following day, though, Meneses received this note:
Forgive me, my friend, for not coming to say goodbye to you in person. I have to leave for Minas immediately. I will return in a few months.
I hope you will both be happy and will not forget me.
Meneses rushed to Estêvão’s house, where he found him packing for his journey.
Meneses found this urgency very odd and the note still odder, but the doctor said nothing of the real motive for his departure.
When Meneses returned, he told his wife what had happened and asked her if she could understand it.
“No,” she answered.
But she had, at last, understood.
“A noble soul,” she said to herself.
But she said nothing to her husband, and in this she revealed herself to be a wife concerned for their conjugal peace, and, above all, a woman.
Meneses did not go to the house for many days after this, and left as soon as he could for the North.
His absence upset a number of votes and his departure thwarted many schemes.
However, a man has the right to seek his own happiness, and Meneses’s happiness was independent of politics.
AUGUSTA’S SECRET
I
IT’S ELEVEN O’CLOCK in the morning.
Dona Augusta Vasconcelos is reclining on a sofa with a book in her hand. Adelaide, her daughter, is tinkering at the piano.
“Is Papa up yet?” Adelaide asked her mother.
“No,” Dona Augusta said, without glancing up from her book.
Adelaide left the piano and went over to her mother.
“But it’s so late, Mama,” she said. “It’s eleven o’clock. Papa does sleep a lot.”
Augusta put the book down on her lap and, looking at Adelaide, said:
“That’s because he came home very late.”
“I’ve noticed that now Papa’s never here to kiss me good night when I go to bed. He’s always out somewhere.”
Augusta smiled.
“You’re still such a country bumpkin,” she said. “You go to bed at the same time as the chickens. Things are different here. Your father has things to do at night.”
“Is it to do with politics, Mama?” asked Adelaide.
“I don’t know,” said Augusta.
I began by saying that Adelaide was Augusta’s daughter, and this information, so necessary to the story, was no less necessary in reality, because, at first sight, no one would ever have thought they were mother and daughter; Vasconcelos’s wife was so young that mother and daughter looked more like sisters.
Augusta was thirty and Adelaide fifteen, but, comparatively speaking, the mother looked even younger than the daughter. She still had all the freshness of a fifteen-year-old, as well as something that Adelaide lacked: an awareness of her own beauty and youth, an awareness that would have been praiseworthy were it not combined with a vanity that was as immense as it was deep. She was of only average height, but nevertheless cut an imposing figure. Her skin was, at once, very pale and very rosy. She had brown hair and green eyes. Her long, shapely hands seemed made for loving caresses. Augusta, however, put her hands to better use, covering them in soft kid gloves.
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All of Augusta’s graces were there in Adelaide, but in embryonic form. You could tell that, by the time Adelaide was twenty, she would rival Augusta; meanwhile, she still retained certain childish qualities that somewhat masked those natural gifts.
And yet a man could easily have fallen in love with her, especially if he was a poet with a liking for fifteen-year-old virgins, perhaps because she was rather pale, and poets down the ages have always had a weakness for pale women.
Augusta dressed with supreme elegance, and while she did spend a lot of money on clothes, she made the most of those enormous expenditures, if one could describe it as “making the most” of them. To be fair, though, Augusta never haggled, she always paid the asking price for everything. She was proud of this, and felt that to behave otherwise was ridiculous and low-class.
In this, Augusta both shared the sentiments and served the interests of certain traders, who agreed that it would be dishonorable to beat them down on the price of their merchandise.
Whenever they spoke of this, Augusta’s draper would tell her:
“Asking one price and then selling the product for a lower price is tantamount to confessing that you intended to swindle your customer.”
The draper preferred to do so without confessing to anything.
And again to be fair to Augusta, we must acknowledge that she spared no expense in ensuring that Adelaide was always dressed as elegantly as she herself was.
And this was no small task.
From the age of five, Adelaide had been brought up in the country by some of Augusta’s relatives, who were more interested in growing coffee than in spending money on clothes, and Adelaide grew up with those habits and those ideas. This is why arriving in Rio to rejoin her family proved to be a real transformation. She passed from one civilization to another; she lived through several years in the space of one hour. Fortunately for her, she had an excellent teacher in her mother. Adelaide changed, and on the day this story begins, she was already quite different, although still a long way behind her mother.
As Augusta was answering her daughter’s curious question about what Vasconcelos actually did at night, a carriage drew up at the front door.
Adelaide ran to the window.
“It’s Dona Carlota, Mama,” she said.
A few minutes later, Dona Carlota entered the room. To introduce readers to this new character, I need say only that she was like a volume two of Augusta: beautiful, like her; elegant, like her; vain, like her, which is to say that they were the very best of enemies.
Carlota had come to ask Augusta to sing at a concert she was planning to give at home, a concert dreamed up purely as an opportunity to show off her magnificent new dress.
Augusta gladly accepted.
“How’s your husband?” she asked Carlota.
“He’s gone into town. And yours?”
“He’s sleeping.”
“The sleep of the just?” asked Carlota with a mischievous smile.
“Apparently,” said Augusta.
At this point, Adelaide, who, at Carlota’s request, had gone over to the piano to play a nocturne, rejoined them.
Augusta’s friend said to her:
“I bet you’ve already got a sweetheart in your sights.”
Greatly embarrassed, Adelaide blushed deeply and said:
“Don’t say such things.”
“I’m sure you do; either that or you’re getting to the age when you certainly will have a sweetheart, and I’m telling you now that he’ll be very handsome.”
“It’s still too early for that,” said Augusta.
“Early!”
“Yes, she’s only a child. She’ll get married when she’s ready, but that won’t be for a while yet.”
“I see,” said Carlota, laughing, “you want to prepare her. And I entirely approve, but in that case, don’t take her dolls away from her.”
“Oh, she’s given up dolls already.”
“Then it will be very hard to fend off any sweethearts. One thing replaces the other.”
Augusta smiled, and Carlota got up to leave.
“Are you going already?” said Augusta.
“Yes, I must. Bye-bye.”
“’Bye!”
They exchanged kisses, and Carlota left.
Immediately afterward, two delivery boys arrived: one bearing some dresses and the other a novel, all of which had been ordered the day before. The dresses had cost a fortune, and the book was Ernest-Aimé Feydeau’s novel Fanny, a satire on society manners.
II
At about one in the afternoon that same day, Vasconcelos rose from his bed.
He was about forty, good-looking, and endowed with a magnificent pair of graying side-whiskers, which gave him the air of a diplomat, something that he was a million miles from being. He had a smiling, expansive face, and positively oozed robust health.
He possessed a decent fortune and did not work, or, rather, he worked very hard at squandering said fortune, with his wife as enthusiastic collaborator.
Adelaide had been quite right about her father; he went to bed late, always woke up after midday, and left again in the evening, only to return the following morning in the early hours, which is to say that he made regular brief visits to the family home.
Only one person had the right to demand that Vasconcelos become a more assiduous visitor, and that was Augusta; but she said nothing. They got on well enough, though, because the husband, as a reward for his wife’s tolerant behavior, denied her nothing and every whim of hers was quickly granted.
If Vasconcelos could not accompany her to every outing and every ball, a brother of his stood in for him; Lourenço was a commander of two different orders, an opposition politician, an excellent player of ombre, and, in his few moments of leisure, a most amiable fellow. He was what might be described as “an awkward so-and-so,” at least as regards his brother, for while he obeyed his sister-in-law’s every order, he would address the occasional admonitory sermon to his brother. Good seed that fell on stony ground.
Anyway, Vasconcelos had eventually woken up, and he woke in a good mood. His daughter was very pleased to see him; he spoke to his wife most affably, and she responded in kind.
“Why do you always wake up so late?” asked Adelaide, stroking his side-whiskers.
“Because I go to bed late.”
“But why do you go to bed late?”
“What a lot of questions!” said Vasconcelos, smiling.
Then he went on:
“I go to bed late because my political duties require it. You don’t know what politics is: it’s something very ugly, but very necessary.”
“I do know what politics is!” said Adelaide.
“All right, then, tell me.”
“In the country, whenever they were beating up the magistrate, they always used to say that the motive was political, which I thought was really odd, because politically speaking, not beating him up would have made much more sense . . .”
Vasconcelos laughed out loud at his daughter’s remark, and was just going off to have his breakfast when in came his brother, who could not resist saying:
“A fine time to be having breakfast!”
“Don’t you start. I have my breakfast whenever I feel like it. Don’t try and pin me down to certain hours and certain meanings. Call it breakfast or lunch, I don’t mind, but whatever it is, I’m going to eat it.”
Lourenço responded by pulling a face.
When breakfast was over, Senhor Batista arrived. Vasconcelos received him in his private study.
Batista was twenty-five and the typical man-about-town; excellent company at a supper attended by rather dubious guests, but absolutely useless in respectable company. He was witty and quite intelligent, but he had to be in the right situation for these qualities to be revealed. Otherwise, he was handsome, sported a fine mustache, wore expensive shoes, and dressed impeccably; he also smoked like a trooper, but smoked only the finest cigars.
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?Only just woken up, have you?” Batista asked as he went into Vasconcelos’s study.
“Yes, about three-quarters of an hour ago. I’ve just finished breakfast. Have a cigar.”
Batista took one and sat down in a chair, while Vasconcelos struck a match.
“Have you seen Gomes?” asked Vasconcelos.
“Yes, I saw him yesterday. The big news is that he’s given up society life.”
“Really?”
“When I asked him why he hadn’t been seen for over a month, he told me he was undergoing a transformation, and that the Gomes he was will live on only as a memory. Incredible though it may seem, he appeared to mean it.”
“I don’t believe him. He’s having a joke at our expense. Any other news?”
“None, not unless you’ve heard any.”
“Not a peep.”
“Come on! Didn’t you go to the Jardim yesterday?”
“Yes, there was a supper on there . . .”
“A family do, eh? I was at the Alcazar. What time did that ‘family supper’ end?”
“At four in the morning.”
Vasconcelos lay down in a hammock, and the conversation continued along the same lines, until a houseboy came to tell Vasconcelos that Senhor Gomes was in the parlor.
“Ah, the man himself!” said Batista.
“Tell him to come up,” ordered Vasconcelos.
The houseboy went back downstairs, but Gomes only joined them a quarter of an hour later, having spent some time chatting with Augusta and Adelaide.
“Well, long time no see,” said Vasconcelos when Gomes finally entered the room.
“You haven’t exactly searched me out,” Gomes retorted.
“Excuse me, but I’ve been to your house twice, and twice they told me you were out.”
“That was pure bad luck, because I hardly ever go out now.”
“So you’ve become a hermit, have you?”
“I’m a chrysalis at the moment, and will reemerge as a butterfly,” said Gomes, sitting down.
“Poetry, eh? Watch out, Vasconcelos.”
This new character, the longed-for, long-lost Gomes, appeared to be about thirty. He, Vasconcelos, and Batista were a trinity of pleasure and dissipation, bound together by an indissoluble friendship. When, about a month before, Gomes stopped appearing in the usual circles, everyone noticed, but only Vasconcelos and Batista really felt his absence. However, they did not try too hard to drag Gomes out of his solitude, in case there was some ulterior motive on his part.