It was, of course, her grandson. However, she paid such close and careful attention to the baby, so frequently and with no other lady in sight, that she seemed more mother than grandmother. Indeed, many people thought so. As to whether this was Dona Camila’s intention, I cannot swear (“Swear not”—Matthew 5:34). I can only say that no mother could have been more vigilant than Dona Camila with her grandson; to assume he was her son was the most natural thing in the world.
PECUNIARY ANECDOTE
THE MAN IN QUESTION is called Falcão. On that day—April 14, 1870—anyone who came into his house, at ten o’clock at night, would have seen him pacing up and down the parlor in his shirtsleeves, black pants, and white necktie, muttering, gesticulating, and sighing to himself, evidently greatly troubled. At times, he would sit, or stop and lean against the window, looking out at the shoreline in Gamboa. But whichever position or pose he adopted, he didn’t maintain it for very long.
“It was wrong of me,” he kept saying, “very wrong of me. She was always so kind to me! Such a sweet, loving creature! She was crying, poor thing! It was wrong of me, very wrong . . . Well, I hope she may at least be happy!”
If I were to tell you that this man had sold one of his nieces, you would not believe me. If I were to go so far as to state the price, ten contos de réis, you would turn your back on me in scorn and indignation. And yet it is enough to see his feline gaze and his two lips—those masters of calculation that seemed to be counting something even when they were closed—to guess immediately that our fellow’s principal characteristic is his voracious appetite for profit. Let us be perfectly clear: he believes in art for art’s sake; he does not love money for what it can give, but for what it intrinsically is. No one can interest him in the pleasures of life. He has neither soft bed nor fine table, neither carriage nor grandiose titles. “Money isn’t earned to be squandered,” he says. He lives on crumbs; everything he accumulates is for his private contemplation. He often goes to check his safe, which he keeps in his bedroom, with the sole purpose of feasting his eyes on the neat stacks of gold coins and bundles of stocks and shares. At other times, out of a refined sense of pecuniary eroticism, he contemplates them from memory alone. In this regard, I can do no more than quote the man himself, in 1857.
By then already a millionaire, or almost, he encountered two boys in the street, who were well known to him and who asked him whether a five-mil-réis note their uncle had given them was genuine. There were some counterfeit banknotes circulating at the time, and the boys had remembered this on their way home. Falcão was with a friend of his. He took the note, trembling, and examined it carefully, turning it this way and that.
“Is it fake?” asked one of the boys impatiently.
“No, it’s real.”
“Give it here,” said both boys.
Falcão slowly folded the note up, without taking his eyes off it. Then he gave it back to the boys, and, turning to his patiently waiting friend, he said with a look of utter candor on his face:
“It’s always a pleasure to see money, even when it’s not your own.”
This was how much he loved money, even in disinterested contemplation. What other motive could have brought him to linger outside the money changers’ windows for five, ten, or even fifteen minutes, salivating over the piles of sovereigns and francs, so neatly stacked and yellow? His shiver of alarm upon touching the five-mil-réis note was but a subtle manifestation of his abiding fear of fake banknotes. Nothing upset him as much as counterfeiters, not because they were criminals, but because of their detrimental and demoralizing effect on the genuine article.
Falcão’s own words merit close study. So it is that one day, in 1864, returning from a friend’s funeral and describing the splendor of the procession, he exclaimed enthusiastically: “There were three thousand contos carrying the coffin!” And, as one of the bystanders didn’t immediately understand what he meant, Falcão assumed in astonishment that the man did not believe him, and itemized the pallbearers as follows: “You-know-who at the front is worth four hundred; the fellow beside him, six hundred. Yes, six hundred, mark my words; when he wound up that business with his father-in-law two years ago, it was worth more than five hundred, but let’s call it five . . .” And on he went, adding them up one by one and concluding: “Three thousand contos exactly!”
He was not married. To marry was to throw money away. But the years passed, and, at forty-five, he began to feel a certain moral necessity, which he did not immediately understand, for that need was the longing to be a father. He didn’t want a wife or relatives, mind you, but to have a son or daughter would be like receiving a precious gold coin. Unfortunately, this other kind of capital should have been accumulated a long time ago, and it was too late to start earning it now. All that remained was the lottery, and the lottery brought him the grand prize.
His brother died and then, three months later, so did his sister-in-law, leaving an eleven-year-old daughter. He was very fond both of this niece and another one, the daughter of a widowed sister; he bestowed kisses on them when he visited, and his enthusiasm even stretched, on several occasions, to taking them some cookies. He hesitated somewhat, but, finally, he took in the orphan; she was the daughter he had always wanted. He could scarcely contain his happiness; for the first few weeks, he barely left the house and was always at her side, listening to her stories and silliness.
Her name was Jacinta. She wasn’t pretty, but she had a melodious voice and a gentle manner. She could already read and write, and was starting to learn music. Her piano came with her along with what she had learned and a few exercises; she couldn’t bring her piano teacher, for her uncle thought it better to carry on practicing what she knew already, and one day, perhaps later . . . Eleven, twelve, thirteen—every year that passed was another tie that bound the old bachelor to his adopted daughter, and vice versa. At thirteen, Jacinta was running the household; by seventeen she was its true mistress. She did not abuse her power; she was naturally modest, frugal, and thrifty.
“An angel!” said Falcão to Chico Borges.
This Chico Borges fellow was forty years old and owned a warehouse. He played cards with Falcão in the evenings. Jacinta accompanied them when they played. By then she was eighteen; she was no prettier, but everyone said that she was “improving with age.” She was petite, and the warehouse owner liked petite women. They wrote to each other, and courtship turned to passion.
“Right, let’s get down to it,” said Chico Borges as he entered the room one evening, shortly after dusk.
The card games were the two lovers’ discreet parasol. The two men didn’t play for real money, but Falcão had such a thirst for profit that he drooled over his worthless counters, and totted them up every ten minutes, just to see if he was winning or losing. When he was losing, a terrible look of dejection would come over his face, and he would withdraw into silence. If bad luck continued to pursue him, he would stop the game and rise to his feet, so absorbed in his own melancholy that his niece and Chico Borges could clasp each other’s hand once, twice, or even three times, without him even noticing.
This was in 1869. At the beginning of 1870, Falcão offered to sell some shares to Chico Borges. He didn’t yet own the shares, but his nose told him the stock market was about to crash, and he reckoned he could make thirty to forty contos from Chico Borges in one go. The latter replied delicately that he had been thinking of making the very same proposal to Falcão. Since they both wished to sell and neither wished to buy, why didn’t they club together and offer to sell to a third party? They found just such a third party, and signed the contract with sixty days for delivery. On their way home from closing the deal, Falcão was in such good spirits that his partner opened his heart to him and asked for Jacinta’s hand. Falcão stopped in his tracks, as stunned and bewildered as if Borges had suddenly started speaking Turkish. Hand over his niece? But . . .
“Yes, I confess that I would very much like to marry her, and she . . . I think that
she, too, would very much like to marry me.”
“What? Absolutely not!” said Falcão, interrupting him. “No, sir. She’s still a child; I will not consent.”
“At least think about it . . .”
“I will not think about it; I will not have it.”
He arrived home feeling angry and afraid. His niece cajoled him into telling her what was the matter, and he ended up telling her everything, even calling her thoughtless and ungrateful. Jacinta turned pale; she loved both her uncle and Chico Borges, and thought them such good friends that she had never imagined this clash of affections. In her bedroom she wept profusely; then she wrote a letter to Chico Borges, begging him, for the love of Christ and His five Holy Wounds, that he neither make a fuss nor fight with her uncle; she told him she would wait, and swore eternal love.
The two friends did not fight, but Borges’s visits naturally became fewer and chillier. Jacinta did not come down to the parlor, or else withdrew quickly. Falcão was petrified. He loved his niece with a dog-like devotion, the kind of dog that snaps at the heels of strangers. He wanted her for himself, not as a man, but as a father. Natural fatherhood provides its own strength for the sacrifice of separation, but his fatherhood was on loan, and, perhaps for that very reason, more selfish. He had never considered losing her; now, however, he took endless precautions: closing the shutters, warning the servants, mounting a perpetual vigil, spying on her every word and deed; in other words, a campaign worthy of Don Bartolo in The Barber of Seville.
Meanwhile, the sun, that model of public officialdom, continued punctually to serve the passing days, one by one, until the two-month period for delivery of the shares was up. By then the share price should have gone down, but, like lotteries and wars, the stock market scorns human calculations. In this particular case, scorn was met by cruelty, for the price neither fell nor stayed the same; it rose to such an extent that the expected profit of forty contos became a loss of twenty.
It was at this point that Chico Borges had an ingenious idea. That evening, while Falcão paced the room in silent, dejected disappointment, Chico Borges proposed that he would finance the whole of the shortfall if Falcão gave him his niece. Falcão was dumbstruck.
“You want me to—”
“Precisely,” interrupted Chico Borges, smiling.
“No, certainly not.”
He would not hear of it, and refused three or four times. His first reaction had been one of happiness at the ten contos he would save, but the idea of being parted from Jacinta was unbearable, and so he refused. He slept badly. In the morning, he reviewed the situation, and, weighing up all the factors, concluded that, in handing Jacinta over to Chico Borges, he wouldn’t be losing her entirely, whereas if he didn’t, the ten contos would be irretrievably lost. Furthermore, if she liked him and he liked her, who was he to keep them apart? All daughters get married, and their fathers content themselves with seeing them happy. He hurried over to Chico Borges’s house, and they reached an agreement.
“It was wrong of me, very wrong,” he bawled on the night of the wedding. “So kind to me! Such a sweet, loving creature . . . She was crying, poor thing! It was wrong of me, very wrong.”
The terror of losing the ten contos had passed, but the tedium of solitude had just begun. The following morning, he went to visit the two newlyweds. Jacinta did not just treat him to a good lunch, she showered him with love and affection, but neither her affection nor the lunch restored his spirits. On the contrary, the newlyweds’ happiness made him sadder still. When he returned to his own house he felt lost without Jacinta’s gentle face. Never again would he hear her girlish songs; no longer would it be Jacinta who made his tea, nor, at night, when he wanted to read, would she be the one to bring him his well-thumbed old copy of St. Clair of the Isles, a gift from 1850.
“It was wrong of me, very wrong . . .”
To right the wrong, he moved the card games to his niece’s house, and would go there, in the evenings, to play cards with Chico Borges. But when fortune decides to punish a man, she takes away all his winnings. Four months later, the young couple took themselves off to Europe; his solitude now stretched the entire width of the ocean. By this time, Falcão was fifty-four. He was reconciled to Jacinta’s marriage and had even planned to go and live with them, either at no cost to himself or by making some small contribution, which, he had calculated, would still be far more economical than living alone. All these plans now crumbled into dust; there he was, back in the same situation as eight years before, with the difference that fate had snatched the cup away from him between sips.
Then, suddenly, another niece landed upon him. This was the daughter of his widowed sister, who, on her deathbed, had asked him to take care of her daughter. Falcão promised nothing, because a certain instinct told him not to promise anything to anyone, but he did in fact take in his niece, no sooner than his sister’s body was cold. There was no reticence on his part; on the contrary, he opened the doors of his house to her with a feverish excitement, and almost gave thanks to God for his sister’s death. Once again, here was the daughter he had never had.
“She’ll be the one at my bedside when I die,” he said to himself.
It wasn’t easy. Virgínia was eighteen, a genuinely original beauty; she was both tall and attractive. To avoid the risk of anyone taking her away from him, Falcão picked up where he had left off the first time around: closed shutters, warnings to servants, rare outings, or only with him and with her eyes modestly lowered. Virgínia didn’t seem bothered.
“I was never one for gazing out of windows,” she would say, “and I think it’s hardly becoming for a young lady to spend all her time wandering the streets.”
Another of Falcão’s precautions was never to bring card players to the house unless they were over fifty or married. In short, he stopped caring about falls in the stock market. But all of this proved unnecessary, because Virgínia didn’t really care for anything except him and the house. Sometimes, as her uncle’s sight was beginning to fail, she herself would read to him a page or two from St. Clair of the Isles. Since there was sometimes a lack of partners, she learned to play cards and, realizing that her uncle liked to win, she always made a point of losing. She went still further: when she was losing badly, she would pretend to be angry or sad, with the sole aim of increasing her uncle’s pleasure. He would roar with laughter, make fun of her, say her nose was too big, and ask for a handkerchief to wipe away her tears, but he carried on adding up his counters every ten minutes, and if one fell on the floor (they used corn kernels), he would rummage around with the candle to find it.
Three months later, Falcão fell ill. It wasn’t a serious or prolonged illness, but a fear of death nevertheless gripped his soul and it became clear then how very fond he was of his niece. Every visitor to the house was received coldly, or at least with indifference. Those closest to him suffered the most, for he would tell them brutally that he was not yet a corpse, that the flesh was still living, that the vultures had picked up the wrong scent, and so on. Virgínia, however, never saw in him the merest glimmer of bad humor. Falcão obeyed her in everything, with a childlike docility, and when he laughed, it was because she made him laugh.
“Come on, be good and take your medicine. You’re my little boy now . . .”
Falcão would smile and sip the syrupy concoction. She sat beside the bed, telling him stories; she kept an eye on the clock for when it was time for his soup or chicken broth; she read to him from the everlasting and eternal St. Clair. Then came convalescence. Falcão went out for a few gentle strolls, accompanied by Virgínia. When she offered him her arm, her uncle was delighted to see the care with which she kept her eyes fixed firmly on the cobblestones, for fear of catching a man’s gaze.
“She’ll be the one at my bedside when I die,” he repeated to himself. One day, he even thought it out loud: “Isn’t it true that you’ll be at my bedside when I die?”
“Don’t talk such nonsense!”
Even though they were in a public place, he stopped and clasped her hands in gratitude, not knowing what to say. Had he possessed the ability to cry, his eyes would doubtless have grown moist with tears. When they arrived home, Virgínia rushed to her room to reread a letter that a certain Dona Bernarda, an old friend of her mother’s, had given her the day before. It was postmarked from New York, and the only signature was the name “Reginaldo.” One passage read as follows:
I leave here by steamer on the twenty-fifth. Wait for me without fail. I don’t yet know if I will be able to come and see you straight away. Your uncle may well remember me; he saw me at the house of my uncle, Chico Borges, on the day of your cousin’s wedding . . .
Forty days later, the same Reginaldo disembarked in Rio; he was a young man of thirty and with three hundred thousand dollars to his name. Twenty-four hours later, he visited Falcão, who received him courteously, but nothing more. Reginaldo, though, was shrewd and practical; he struck a chord with the other man, and it resonated. He regaled him with tales of the fortunes to be made in the United States, and the waves of money that washed from one ocean to the other. Falcão listened in amazement and wanted to hear more. Reginaldo then provided him with an extensive account of companies and banks, stocks and shares, public expenditure, private fortunes, the municipal revenues of New York; he described the mighty palaces of commerce . . .
“It truly is a great country,” said Falcão from time to time. And after a few minutes’ reflection: “But from what you tell me, there’s only gold.”
“No, not gold alone; there’s lots of silver and paper money too; but, up there, paper and gold are the same thing. And as for coins from other countries, well, I must show you the collection I brought back with me. If you want to see what sort of place it is, you need look no further. I went there a poor man at the age of twenty-three; seven years later, I arrived back here with six hundred contos.