Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright

CHAPTER LXIV / The transaction

I WANDERED THROUGH THE STREETS and reached home at nine o’clock. Unable to sleep, I threw myself into reading and writing. By eleven o’clock I regretted not having gone to the theater; I looked at the clock, and considered getting dressed and going out. I decided, however, that I would arrive too late; what’s more, it would be a sign of weakness. Virgília was clearly beginning to grow tired of me, I thought. This idea filled me with successive waves of despair and indifference, alternating between a desire to kill her and to forget all about her. I could see her there, leaning back in her opera box, with her magnificently bared arms—those arms that were mine, only mine—seducing the eyes of all before her with the superb gown she must surely be wearing, her milky-white décolleté, her hair parted down the middle according to the fashion of the time, and her diamonds, which sparkled less brightly than her eyes . . . That was how I envisaged her, and it pained me that others would see her like that too. Then I began to undress her, setting her jewels and silks to one side, unpinning her hair with my greedy, lascivious hands, making her—I don’t know whether more beautiful or more natural—making her mine, all mine, only mine.

The following day, I could bear it no longer. I went to Virgília’s house early and found her with her eyes red from crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You don’t love me,” she answered. “You’ve never loved me in the slightest. Yesterday you treated me as if you hated me. If I at least knew what I’d done! But I don’t. Won’t you tell me what it was?”

“What what was? I don’t think there was anything.”

“Nothing? You treated me like a dog . . .”

At that word I grasped her hands, kissed them, and tears welled up in her eyes.

“Hush, hush,” I said.

I didn’t have the heart to reproach her, and besides, what could I reproach her with? It wasn’t her fault if her husband loved her. I told her that she had done me no wrong, that, naturally enough, I was jealous of her husband, and that I didn’t always find his company easy to endure. I added that he might well have his suspicions, and that the best means of closing the door on fears and quarrels was to accept the plan I had put to her the previous day.

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about that,” replied Virgília. “A little house all of our own, by itself, with a garden, tucked away on some backstreet—isn’t that it? I like the idea, but why do we need to run away?”

She said this in the languid, guileless tone of someone with not an evil thought in her head, and the smile that lifted the corners of her mouth bore the same candid expression. Pulling away from her, I replied:

“You’re the one who has never loved me.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you’re a complete egotist! You’d rather see me suffer every day .

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