There I was, at sixteen years of age, all on my own, friendless and penniless. A canon at the Imperial Chapel tried to get me employment as a sacristan, but although I had often served at mass in Mato Grosso and knew some Latin, I was not admitted due to a lack of vacancies. Others encouraged me to study law, and I accepted with grim determination. I even had some help to begin with, and when that stopped, I soldiered on and finally managed to get my bachelor’s degree. Now, don’t tell me that this was an exception in my life of misfortune, because my academic qualification brought me to an even sorrier state of affairs; however, since destiny was determined to punish me whatever my chosen profession, I do not blame my law degree for that. It’s true that I was very pleased to obtain it; my tender age and a certain superstitious belief in the need to improve oneself made of that roll of parchment the diamond key that would open every door to good fortune.
And, to begin with, my bachelor’s degree was not the only piece of paper in my pocket. No, sir; beside it there were ten or fifteen others, the fruits of a love affair begun in Rio de Janeiro during Holy Week of 1842, with a widow seven or eight years my senior, but fiery, good-humored, and rich. She lived with her blind brother on Rua do Conde; I can’t say any more than that. All my friends were aware of this relationship; two of them even read the letters, which I showed them on the pretext of admiring the widow’s elegant style, but really so that they could read the marvelous things she said to me. In everyone’s opinion, our marriage was a certainty, an absolute certainty; the widow was merely waiting for me to finish my studies. When I graduated, one of these friends congratulated me, underlining his certainty with this definitive sentence:
“Your marriage is pure dogma.”
And, laughing, he asked if, on account of that dogma, I could lend him fifty mil-réis, which he needed urgently. I didn’t have fifty mil-réis on me, but that word “dogma” was still reverberating so sweetly within me that I didn’t rest all day until I had obtained the money. I happily took it to him myself, and he received it gratefully. Six months later, it was he who married the widow.
I won’t tell you how I suffered then, only that my first impulse was to shoot them both. I did shoot them in my imagination, and watched them dying, gasping, begging for my forgiveness. This was a purely hypothetical revenge; in reality, I did nothing. They married, and went to the hills of Tijuca to watch the rising of their honeymoon moon. I was left rereading the widow’s letters. “As God is my witness,” said one of them, “my love is eternal, and I am yours, eternally yours . . .” And, in my bewilderment, I muttered blasphemies to myself: “Ours is a jealous God; he will suffer no eternity but his, and that is why he repudiated the widow’s words; nor will he suffer any dogma but Catholic dogma, and that is why he repudiated my friend’s words.” This was how I explained the loss of my fiancée and the fifty mil-réis.
I left the capital and went to practice as a country lawyer, but not for long. Misfortune rode behind me on my mule, and wherever I got off, it got off with me. I saw its finger in everything, in the cases that never came my way, in the ones that did come but were worth little or nothing, and in the ones that were worth something but were invariably lost. Besides the fact that clients who win are generally more grateful than the other sort, my succession of defeats discouraged other litigants from contacting me. After a year and a half, I returned to Rio and set myself up with an old companion from my student days, Gonçalves.
Gonçalves was the least juridically minded fellow imaginable, and the least suited to grappling with matters of law. In fact, he was an utter good-for-nothing. If one were to compare mental activity to an elegant house, Gonçalves was incapable of even ten minutes of polite drawing-room conversation—he would always be sneaking off down to the pantry to gossip with the servants. However, this baseness was compensated by a certain lucidity and agility in grasping less arduous or less complex subjects, together with a facility of expression and an almost uninterrupted good humor—something which for me, a poor devil beaten down by fortune, was not to be sneezed at. In the early days, when we had no cases to work on, we passed the time in excellent conversation, lively and animated, in which he always took the better part, whether discussing politics or—a subject that was of particular interest to him—women.
But slowly the cases began to arrive; among them a dispute about a mortgage. It concerned the house of a customs official, Temístocles de Sá Botelho, who had no other assets and didn’t want to lose his property. I took charge of the matter. Temístocles was delighted with me, and, two weeks later, when I told him I wasn’t married, he laughed and said he wanted nothing to do with bachelors. He said one or two other things, too, and invited me to dinner that Sunday. I went, and fell in love with his daughter, Dona Rufina, a very pretty girl of nineteen, but rather shy and insipid. Perhaps it’s her upbringing, I thought. We married a few months later. I didn’t, of course, invite misfortune to the wedding, but inside the church, among the neatly trimmed beards and luxuriant side-whiskers, I thought I saw the sardonic face and glancing eyes of my cruel adversary. It was for this reason that, when the time came to utter the sacred and irreversible vows of marriage, I trembled and hesitated before, finally, stammeringly repeating the priest’s words . . .
I was married. It is true that Rufina lacked brilliance and elegance; it was immediately apparent, for example, that she would never be a society hostess. She did, however, possess the qualities of a good housewife, and that was all I asked for. A quiet life was enough for me, and as long as she filled that life, all would be well. But this was precisely the fly in the ointment. If you will permit me a chromatic illustration, Rufina’s soul was not black like Lady Macbeth’s, or red like Cleopatra’s, or blue like Juliet’s, or white like Beatrice’s, but gray and dull like the lumpen mass of humanity. She was kind only out of apathy, faithful but not out of virtue, friendly but never intentionally tender. An angel might carry her up to heaven, or the devil down to hell, in either case without any struggle on her part, and without her meriting either glory in the first case or shame in the second. Hers was the passivity of a sleepwalker. She was not in the least bit vain. Her father had hatched the marriage because he wanted his son-in-law to be a man with a profession; she accepted me just as she would have accepted any sacristan, magistrate, general, civil servant, or lieutenant, and not out of impatience to be married, but out of obedience to her family and, to a certain extent, so as to be like everyone else. All the other women had husbands, so she wanted one too. Nothing could have been more antipathetic to my nature, but married I was.
Happily—ah! a “happily” in this the final chapter of an unlucky man is, it’s true, something of an anomaly. But carry on reading and you will see that the adverb is simply a matter of style, not of life; it is a way of moving the story along, nothing more. What I am going to say will not alter what has already been said. I will say that Rufina’s domestic qualities were greatly to her credit. She was modest; she did not care for balls, or walks, or gazing out of windows. She kept to herself. She didn’t toil away at domestic chores, nor was this necessary, for my work provided her with everything, and all her dresses and hats came from “the French ladies,” as we used to call the seamstresses in those days. In between giving orders to the servants, Rufina would sit for hours and hours, letting her spirits yawn, killing time, that hundred-headed hydra that would never die. But, I repeat, despite all her shortcomings, she was a good housewife. As for me, I played the role of the frogs in Aesop’s Fables who wanted a king, the difference being that when Jupiter threw me down a lump of wood, I didn’t ask him for another king, knowing he’d send a snake that would come and swallow me up. “Long live the lump of wood!” I said to myself. I only mention these things to show the steadfast logic of my fate.
Time for another “happily,” I think, and this time it isn’t just a way of moving between two sentences. Happily, after a year and a half, a sign of hope appeared on the horizon, and, judging by the excitement the
news aroused in me, it was a supreme and unique sign of hope. The thing I most desired was on its way. What thing? A child. My life changed in an instant. Everything smiled upon me as on the day of a wedding. I prepared a royal reception for the baby; I bought an expensive cradle finely carved from ebony and ivory; then, little by little, I bought all the other items for the layette; I set the seamstresses to work on the finest cambrics, the warmest flannels, a lovely little lace bonnet; I bought him a pram, and I waited and waited, ready to dance before him like David dancing before the Ark . . . Ah, woe is me! The Ark entered Jerusalem empty; the child was stillborn.
The person who consoled me in my despair was Gonçalves, who was to have been the child’s godfather, and was our friend, companion, and confidant. “Be patient,” he said, “I’ll be godfather to the next one.” And he comforted me, and talked to me about other things with the tenderness of a true friend. Time did the rest. Gonçalves himself told me later on that if the child was destined to be unlucky, as I was convinced he would be, then he was better off stillborn.
“What makes you think he wouldn’t have been born unlucky?” I retorted.
Gonçalves smiled; he didn’t believe in my rotten luck. In fact he had no time to believe in anything; he devoted himself entirely to being happy. He had finally begun to apply himself to the law; he was now pleading cases, presenting petitions, attending court, all because, as he used to say, he needed to live. And he was always happy. My wife found him very amusing; she would laugh at his little stories and jokes, which at times were somewhat risqué. At first I reprimanded him privately, but eventually I grew used to them. After all, who wouldn’t pardon the talents of a friend, and such a jovial friend at that? I must say that, eventually, he began to rein himself in, and, from then on, I began to find him a far more serious companion. “You’re in love,” I said to him one day, and he, turning pale, replied that he was, and added with a smile, albeit weakly, that he, too, must marry. Over supper that evening, I returned to the subject.
“Rufina, did you know that Gonçalves is getting married?”
“It’s just his little joke,” Gonçalves said, interrupting me.
I cursed my indiscretion, and neither he nor I mentioned it again. Five months later . . .—you must excuse the rapid transition, but there is no means of lengthening it out—five months later, Rufina fell seriously ill and, within a week, she had died of a rampant fever.
And here’s a strange thing: while she lived, our differing temperaments weakened the ties between us, which were based principally on necessity and habit. Death, with its great spiritual power, changed everything. Rufina now seemed to me like the bride in the Song of Songs who descends from Lebanon, and the divergence between us was replaced by a complete fusion of our beings. I seized upon the image; it filled my soul, and with it she filled my life, where once she had occupied so little space and for so little time. It was a defiant challenge to my evil star; I was building the fortress of destiny on solid, indestructible rock. Please understand me: everything that had, up until then, depended on the exterior world was naturally precarious: roof tiles fell when hammocks swayed, surplices turned their backs on sacristans, widows’ vows fled arm in arm with friends’ dogmas, lawyers’ cases came but fleetingly or sank without trace; finally, children were born dead. But the image of a dead woman was immortal, and with it I could defy the malicious gaze of misfortune. I held happiness captive in my hands, its great condor wings beating the air, while owl-like misfortune flapped its wings and vanished into night and silence . . .
One day, however, while convalescing from a fever, I had the notion of drawing up an inventory of my dead wife’s possessions. I began with a little box that hadn’t been opened since she had died five months previously. I found inside a large number of odds and ends: needles, threads, scraps of lace, a thimble, a pair of scissors, a prayer of Saint Cyprian, a list of clothes, other bits and pieces, and a bundle of letters tied with a blue ribbon. I undid the ribbon and opened the letters: they were from Gonçalves . . . Ah, it’s noon already! I must finish; my manservant will be back at any moment, and then that would be that. No one can imagine how time rushes by in these circumstances; minutes fly like fleeting empires, and, more importantly on this occasion, the leaves of paper fly with them.
I won’t dwell on the discarded lottery tickets, the aborted business deals, the interrupted love affairs; still less on fate’s other petty grudges. Weary and dismayed, I realized that I would not find happiness anywhere; I went even further: I believed that it did not exist anywhere on Earth, and, since yesterday, I have been preparing myself for my great plunge into eternity. This morning, I had breakfast, smoked a cigar, and leaned out the window. After ten minutes, I saw a well-dressed man walk by, and he kept looking down at his feet. I knew him by sight; he had been the victim of many great misfortunes, but he smiled as he walked, and stared his feet, or, rather, his boots. They were new, patent leather, beautifully made, and no doubt impeccably stitched. From time to time, he looked up at the windows, or at people’s faces, but his eyes quickly darted back to his boots, as if drawn to them by a law of attraction stronger than his own will. He was a happy fellow; one could see the blissful expression on his face. He was clearly happy; and yet he may have had no breakfast; he might not even have so much as a penny in his pocket, but he was happy gazing at his boots.
Could happiness be a pair of boots? That man, so buffeted by life, had finally found fortune smiling on him. Nothing is worth nothing. No worldly preoccupation, no social or moral dilemma, neither the joys of the new generation nor the sorrows of the old, neither poverty nor class warfare, no artistic or political crisis, nothing is worth as much to him as a pair of boots. He gazes at them, he breathes them in, he glows, in them he treads the surface of an orb that belongs only to him. Thence comes the dignity of his posture, the firmness of his step, and a certain air of Olympian tranquility. Yes, happiness is a pair of boots.
So here you have the explanation for my will. Those of a superficial nature will say that I’m crazy, that the testator’s closing words are pure suicidal delirium; but I am speaking here to the wise and to the unfortunate. And there’s no point suggesting that I would be better off wearing the boots myself rather than bequeathing them to others; no, because then there would be only me. By distributing them, I make a certain number of people fortunate. Roll up, roll up, O unfortunate ones! May my final wish be granted. Farewell, and put your boots on!
NUPTIAL SONG
IMAGINE, MY DEAR READER, that it is 1813, and you are sitting in the Carmo Church, along with all the other women, and watching and listening to one of those wonderful old pageants that were all there was back then in terms of public entertainment and musical talent. You know what a sung mass is, so you can imagine what a sung mass would have been like in those distant days. I won’t call your attention to the priests or sacristans, nor to the sermon, nor to the eyes of the young carioca ladies, which were pretty even then, nor to the black lace mantillas of the somber matrons, the breeches, the wigs, the dusty drapes, the candles, or the incense, none of that. I won’t even speak of the orchestra, which is excellent; I will limit myself to showing you one white head, the head of that old man conducting the orchestra with such soulful devotion.
His name is Romão Pires; he can’t be a day under sixty, and he was born in Valongo, or thereabouts. He is a good musician and a good man; all the musicians like him. He was known familiarly as Maestro Romão, and, in those days, “familiarly” and “publicly” amounted to much the same thing. “Maestro Romão is conducting the mass” was the equivalent of that other form of announcement many years later: “The actor Jõao Caetano plays the part of . . .” or even: “The actor Martinho will sing one of his best arias.” It was just the thing to whet the audience’s appetite. Maestro Romão is conducting the mass! Surely everyone knew Maestro Romão, with his circumspect air, his downcast eyes, his sad smile, and his faltering step? All of this vanished when he stood in front of
the orchestra; life would then pour from every part of his body and from every gesture; his eyes would light up, his smile would beam forth: he was utterly transformed. Not that the mass was his own composition; for example, the one he is conducting now is by José Maurício; but he conducts it as lovingly as if it were his own.
The pageant has ended, and it’s as if a great blaze had been extinguished, leaving his face lit only by ordinary candlelight. See him coming down from the choir, leaning on his stick; he’s going to the sacristy to kiss the priests’ hands and accept their invitation to join them for lunch. All without saying a word, entirely indifferent. He has lunch, leaves the church, and walks toward the Rua da Mãe dos Homens, where he lives with an old black slave called Papa José, who is his true mother and who, at this very moment, is talking to the woman next door.
“Here comes Maestro Romão, Papa José,” said the neighbor.
“I’d best be going. See you later, sinhá.”