Family Heirlooms by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911420736
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2017-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The habit of keeping it now here, now there, in the least likely places, had appeared with the ruby itself and the circumstances that had brought it to the house on Eugênio de Lima. From the moment when it had come into Maria Bráulia’s possession, it had never had its own proper place in the house, nor its own set time to appear round its owner’s neck. And when it did appear, there was besides her only one person, always the same person, who was able to appreciate that unique item, so original, the same person who had brought it there and who knew its precise value, and who could spend hours and hours discoursing tirelessly about it. Mainly because matters of jewellery, however different they may seem, are very tangled up with matter of existence, and deserve to be examined from a number of different angles. Rare gems ought to be set in jewels with the same care that these jewels are set into a family’s lineage, that is what Marcel the jeweller had once said to his hosts—while they were having dinner, just the three of them, at the small round table—his gaze alternating between Judge Munhoz and the Murano swan. Because around that time the jeweller and goldsmith was finding it more and more difficult to look Maria Bráulia in the eye, and the reverse also being true, it was also harder and harder for the two of them to have a conversation without the mediation of Judge Munhoz, who for his part couldn’t help feeling gratified at the attentiveness, one might even say passion, with which this interesting man, from a French family on his father’s side, and a Portuguese one from the Beira Alta region, Trás-os-Montes, on his mother’s, insisted on distracting him with an introduction to the most picturesque little details of his profession, eyes always firmly fixed on the judge’s (letting them wander only—with the slightly fevered expression of one entirely dominated by his job—to come to rest for a few moments on the centrepiece of the table).

However, even well before the time of these odd narrative excitements, he had already won Munhoz’s trust, and his heart. So much so that one day, near the start of their acquaintance, the judge had gone to pay him a private call at his shop, in search of a gold watch he wanted to give as a little gift to someone whom he owed many favours; he had made no attempt to avoid saying that the gift was for his private secretary—he identified him so that the jeweller might choose something that was “just his style” and, he added at the end of their meeting, “quite unusual, you see?”, before asking for the jeweller’s discretion, absolute discretion, do we understand one another? There had been other visits after this one, always in response to favours or services rendered, services of such a nature that those rendering them would be offended were they to be repaid in cash.

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