This latter point was never fully understood by her female friends. None of them would have been capable of repelling a suitor. Indeed, I believe that they asked for nothing else when they prayed before getting into bed, and on Sunday, at mass, at the moment of raising their eyes to God. Why did Eulália reject all comers? I will say now what I found out later. Her friends supposed, at first, that it was simply scorn on her part—too stuck-up, one of them said—but after the third refusal, they were inclined to believe there was some secret love affair, and this was the explanation that prevailed. Even Eulália’s mother would accept no other. She didn’t mind the initial refusals, but the more they went on, the more concerned she became. One day, sitting in their carriage on the way back from a wedding, she asked her daughter if it hadn’t occurred to her that she would end up all alone.
“All alone?”
“Yes, one day I’ll be gone. For now, everything is a bed of roses; I’m here to run the house, and all you need to do is read, daydream, play the piano, and amuse yourself. But I will die, Eulália, and you’ll be left all alone.”
Eulália clasped her hands, speechless. She had never thought about her mother’s death; to lose her mother would be like losing half of her own self. Making the most of this moment of intimacy, her mother dared to ask Eulália if she was in love with someone who did not return her feelings, but Eulália said that she wasn’t. She simply hadn’t liked any of the candidates. The old lady shook her head; she spoke of her daughter’s twenty-seven years, tried to terrify her with thirty, and told her that although not all the suitors were up to scratch, some of them were worthy of being accepted. Did it really matter if they didn’t love each other? Conjugal love could be like that; it could grow later, as the fruit of companionship. She knew several people who had gotten married simply for family reasons, and ended up very much in love. Waiting for a great passion in order to marry was to risk dying waiting.
“Yes, of course, Mama. But just let me be . . .”
And, leaning back her head, she closed her eyes a little to see if she could spy someone, her hidden lover, who was not only hidden, but intangible. I agree that this is all somewhat obscure, and I do not hesitate to say that we are entering the realm of dreams.
Eulália was a strange creature, to use her mother’s expression, or a romantic, to employ her friends’ definition. She did, indeed, have a peculiar way of seeing things. She took after her father, who had been born with a love of the enigmatic, the dangerous, and the obscure; he died while preparing an expedition to Bahia to discover the “abandoned city.” Eulália received this spiritual inheritance, modified or aggravated by her feminine nature. Her dominant characteristic was that of contemplation. Her abandoned cities were to be found in her head. Her eyes were set in such a way that they could not wholly capture life’s contours. She began by idealizing things, and, if she did not end up denying them entirely, it is certain that her sense of reality grew thinner and thinner until it reached the fine transparency at which fabric becomes indistinguishable from air.
She rejected her first marriage proposal at eighteen, her reason being that she was waiting for someone else, an extraordinary husband whom she had seen and conversed with in her dreams and imaginings; the most radiant figure in the universe, the rarest and most sublime, a creature in whom there was no flaw or fault, a true grammar with no irregularities, a pure language with no solecisms.
“Excuse me,” a lady says, “this suitor is not the exclusive invention of Eulália. He is the husband of every seventeen-year-old virgin.” Excuse me, I say to you, madam, there is one difference between Eulália and the others, which is that the others eventually swapped the desired original for an engraved copy, avant ou après la lettre, and sometimes for just a simple photograph or lithograph, whereas Eulália continued to wait for the original masterpiece. The engravings and lithographs came and went, some very well executed, the work of an artist or even a great artist, but for her they all carried the defect of being copies. She hungered and thirsted for originality. Ordinary life seemed to her an eternal copy. Persons of her acquaintance insisted on repeating each other’s ideas, using the same words and even the same tone of voice, just as the clothes they wore were all of the same cut and style. If she had caught sight of a Moorish turban in the street, or even a fluttering ostrich feather, she might have forgiven the rest; but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, only a never-ending uniformity of ideas and vests. It was the mortal sin of objects. But, since she had the ability to live everything she dreamed, she continued to hope for a new life and a unique husband.
While she waited, one by one the other women got married. Thus she lost her three best friends: Júlia Costinha, Josefa, and Mariana. She saw them all as brides and then as mothers, first of one child and then of two, four, and five. Eulália visited them, joined them in their serene and happy daily lives, trivial and banal, with no dreams or dramas, and more or less content. The years went by, and Eulália turned thirty, then thirty-three, thirty-five, and, finally, thirty-eight, as she was when we saw her in the church, conversing with Father Teófilo.
V
On that particular day, she’d had a mass said for the soul of her mother, who had died a year earlier. She didn’t invite anyone else, and attended the mass alone. She listened, prayed, then sat down on the pew.
After serving at mass, I returned to the sacristy, where I saw Father Teófilo, who had come up from the country two weeks earlier and was in search of a few masses, meals included. It seems he had heard from the other sacristan, or from the officiating priest himself, the name of the person being prayed for. Realizing that the deceased was his own aunt, he rushed to the church, where he found his cousin sitting on the pew. He sat down beside her, completely forgetting where they were and their respective positions, and the two of them talked entirely naturally about themselves. They had not seen each other for a long time. Teófilo had visited his aunt and cousin shortly after being ordained a priest, but then left Rio for a distant parish and never heard any more from them, or they from him.
As I said before, I couldn’t hear a word. They sat there for nearly half an hour. The coadjutor priest came poking around, saw them, and was suitably scandalized. Two days later, news reached the bishop. Teófilo was warned by a friend, marched up to Conceição, where he explained everything: she was a dear cousin he hadn’t seen for a very long time. When the coadjutor heard this explanation, he exclaimed, quite rightly, that the fact of being a relative neither changed her sex nor diminished the scandal.
I had known Teófilo at the seminary and was very fond of him; I, therefore, wholeheartedly defended him and made sure my testimony reached the bishop’s palace. Teófilo was very grateful, and we became close friends. Since the two cousins could respectably meet at her house, Teófilo began to visit Eulália, and she was always pleased to receive him. A week later, she received me as well, and, within two weeks, I was part of the family circle.
Two compatriots meeting in a foreign land and finally exchanging words first learned at their mother’s breast could not have felt a greater excitement than these two cousins, who were more than just cousins: spiritually, they were twins. He told her about his life and, as events inevitably evoked feelings, she peered into her cousin’s soul and found it to be identical to her own. In substance, their lives were one and the same. The only difference was that she had waited quietly, while he had gone searching over hill and vale; other than that, it was the same misapprehension, the same conflict with reality, the same dialogue between Arab and Japanese.
“Everything around me is trivial and empty,” he would say to her.
For he had, indeed, wasted his youthful vigor trying to spread an idea that no one understood. While his three closest friends at the seminary progressed, working and serving the Lord, in tune with the times—Veloso now a canon and preacher, Soares with a large parish, Vasconcelos almost a bishop—he, Teófilo, was the same mystic evangelist he had been in his early years, in
the same Christian and metaphysical dawn. He lived very poorly, always courting hunger, thin bread, and the threadbare cassock; he had moments, hours, of sadness and dejection, all of which he confessed to his cousin.
“You too?” she asked.
And they clasped one another’s hands: they understood each other. Failing to find a star in a watchmaker’s shop was the watchmaker’s fault; such was the logic they shared. They gazed at each other as fondly as shipwrecked sailors—shipwrecked but not disillusioned—because their illusions were intact. On his desert island, Robinson Crusoe works and makes things; they did not; cast up on the island, they gazed out over the endless sea, waiting for the eagle that would come to fetch them with its great wings spread wide. One of them was the eternal bride without a bridegroom, the other the eternal prophet without an Israel; both punished, both stubbornly tenacious.
I’ve already said that Eulália was still pretty. I should add that Father Teófilo, at the age of forty-two, had graying hair and a worn face; his hands had neither the softness nor the scent of the sacristy; they were scrawny and callused and smelled of the outdoors. It was his eyes that retained their old fire, that spoke of his inner youth, and, it goes without saying, they alone were worth all the rest.
Our visits became more frequent. In the end, we were spending afternoons and evenings there, as well as Sunday dinners. Our companionship had two effects, even three. The first was that, in spending more time in each other’s company, the two cousins each gave strength and life to the other; if you will excuse the familiar expression: they made a picnic of their illusions. The second is that Eulália, tired of waiting for a human bridegroom, turned her eyes to the divine one and, just as the desire to follow Saint Paul had inspired her cousin, so Eulália began to feel a desire to follow in the footsteps of Saint Teresa. The third effect is the one the reader will already have guessed.
You have already guessed, haven’t you? The third was the road to Damascus—a topsy-turvy road, because the voice did not descend from Heaven, but rose up from Earth, and it was not calling them to praise God, but to praise man. Setting aside all metaphors, they were in love. Another difference is that this vocation did not happen suddenly, as it did for the apostle of the peoples; it was slow, very slow, murmuring, insinuating, gently wafted along on the wings of the mystic dove.
Note that reputation preceded love. It had long been whispered that the priest’s visits were not so much those of a confessor as those of a sinner. This was a lie; I swear it was a lie. I watched them, I sat with them, I observed those two temperaments, which were so spiritual, so wrapped up in each other, that they never once thought of reputation, or of the danger of appearances. One day, I saw in them the first signs of love. Call it what you will, a midlife passion, a pale autumn rose, but it was there, it existed, it grew, and it completely overwhelmed them. I considered warning Teófilo, for his sake rather than mine, but that would have been difficult, and possibly dangerous. Moreover, I was and am both a gastronome and a psychologist; to warn him would be to throw away a fine case study and lose those Sunday dinners. Psychology, at the very least, deserves a sacrifice; I kept quiet.
I kept quiet in vain. What I would not say, their hearts made public. If the reader has read me hastily, then he can finish the story for himself by joining the two cousins together. But if he has read me slowly, he will have guessed what happened. The two mystics recoiled; they had no horror of each other, nor of themselves, because that feeling was entirely absent from both of them. But they recoiled, nonetheless, shaken by fear and desire.
“I’m going back to the countryside,” the priest told me.
“But why?”
“I’m going back to the countryside.”
And he did go back to the countryside, never to return. She had clearly found the husband she was waiting for, but he turned out to be as impossible as the life she had dreamed of. I, the gastronome and psychologist, continued to go for dinner with Eulália on Sundays. If it is true, as Schiller would have it, that love and hunger rule the world, then I am of the firm opinion that something, either love or dinner, must still exist somewhere or other.
EX CATHEDRA
“YOU’LL GO BLIND like that, Godfather.”
“What?”
“You’ll go blind; you read as if there were no tomorrow. Go on, give me the book.”
Caetaninha took the book from his hands. Her godfather turned on his heel and went into his study, where there was no shortage of books. He shut the door behind him and carried on reading. It was his vice; he read to excess—morning, noon, and night, at lunch and dinner, in bed, after his bath, while walking or standing up, in the house and in the garden; he read before reading and he read after reading. He read every sort of book, but especially law (for he was a law graduate), mathematics, and philosophy; recently, he had also taken up the natural sciences.
Worse than going blind, he went mad. It was toward the end of 1873, up in Tijuca, that he began to show signs of mental derangement. But since the episodes were few and insignificant, it was only in March or April 1874 that his goddaughter noticed the change. One day, over lunch, he interrupted his reading to ask her:
“What’s my name again?”
“What’s your name?” she repeated, shocked. “Your name is Fulgêncio.”
“From this day forth, you shall call me Fulgencius.”
And, once more burying his nose in the book, he carried on with his reading. Caetaninha discussed the matter with the house-slaves, who told her they had suspected for some time that he wasn’t well. You can imagine the young lady’s fears, but her fear soon passed, leaving only pity, which merely made her feel still fonder of him. Also, his mania was harmless enough, for it extended only to books. Fulgêncio lived for the written word, the printed word, the doctrinal and the abstract, for principles and formulas. Over time, he reached the point of theoretical hallucination, although not yet superstition. One of his maxims was that freedom would not die as long as there remained one piece of paper on which to declare it. One day, waking up with the idea of improving the condition of the Turks, he drafted a constitution and sent it to the British envoy in Petrópolis, as a gift. On another occasion, he applied himself to studying the anatomy of the eyes, to see if they really could see, and concluded that they could.
Tell me how, under such conditions, Caetaninha’s life could possibly be happy? It’s true that she wanted for nothing, because her godfather was a rich man. It was he himself who had brought her up from the age of seven, when he lost his wife; he taught her reading and writing, then French, a little history and geography (which is tantamount to saying almost nothing), and charged one of the house-slaves with teaching her embroidery, lace-making, and sewing. So much is true. But Caetaninha was now fourteen, and, if toys and slaves had once been enough to amuse her, she was reaching the age when toys lose their appeal and slaves their interest, and when no amount of reading and writing can make a paradise of a secluded house up in Tijuca. She sometimes went down to the city, but these were rare occasions, and always very rushed; she didn’t visit the theater or go to dances, and she neither made nor received visits. Whenever she saw a riding party of ladies and gentlemen pass by on the road, her soul would jump up behind one of the riders, while her body stayed put by the side of her godfather, who carried on reading.
One day, when she was in the garden, she saw a young man stop at the front gate. He was riding a small mule, and he asked if this was Senhor Fulgêncio’s house.
“Indeed it is, sir.”
“May I speak with him?”
Caetaninha replied that she would go and see; she entered the house and went to the study, where she found her godfather ruminating over a chapter of Hegel with the most devoutly voluptuous expression on his face. “A young man? What young man?” Caetaninha told him that it was a young man dressed in mourning.
“In mourning?” repeated the old man, snapping the book shut; it must be him.
I forgot to say (but
there is time for everything) that a brother of Fulgêncio’s had passed away three months earlier, up north, leaving an illegitimate son. Since the brother, a few days before dying, had written to Fulgêncio asking him to take care of the soon-to-be orphan, Fulgêncio sent for the boy to come to Rio de Janeiro. Upon hearing that a young man in mourning had arrived, he concluded that he must be his nephew, and concluded correctly. It was indeed him.
So far, nothing has happened that would seem out of place in any innocently romantic tale: we have an old lunatic, a lonely, sighing damsel, and now the unexpected arrival of a nephew. So as not to descend from the poetic sphere in which we find ourselves, I shall omit to mention that the mule on which Raimundo was mounted was led back by a slave to the place it had been hired from; I shall skim over the arrangements for the young man’s accommodation, limiting myself to saying that since the uncle, by virtue of his devotion to reading, had entirely forgotten that he had sent for the boy, no preparations whatsoever had been made to receive him. However, the house was large and well appointed, and, an hour later, the young man was comfortably lodged in a beautiful room overlooking the kitchen garden, the old well, the laundry, copious lush greenery, and an immense blue sky.
I don’t believe I have yet revealed the new guest’s age. He is fifteen years old, with just a hint of fuzz on his upper lip; in fact, he’s almost a child. So if Caetaninha quickly became flustered, and the slave-women began rushing hither and thither, peering around doors and talking about “the ole master’s nephew come from far away,” it’s because nothing much happened in that house, not because he was a grown man. This was also Fulgêncio’s impression, but here’s the difference. Caetaninha was unaware that the vocation of such fuzz is to become a mustache, or if she thought of it at all, she did this so vaguely that it’s not worth mentioning here. This was not the case with old Fulgêncio. He understood that here was material for a husband, and he resolved to marry the pair of them. But he also saw that, unless he took them by the hand and instructed them to fall in love, chance might move things in a different direction.