Free The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis

legacy, signing notes that I would redeem one day at usurious rates.
    “Really,” Marcela would tell me when I brought her something in silk, some piece of jewelry, “really, you’re trying to start a fight with me … Because this is something that… such an expensive gift…”
    And if it was a jewel, she said that as she examined it between her fingers, looking for the best light, trying it on, laughing, and kissing me with an impetuous and sincere obstinacy, but protesting, though happiness was pouring out of her eyes and I felt happy seeing her like that. She liked our ancient gold doubloons very much and I would bring her as many as I could get hold of. Marcela would put them all together in a little iron box whose key was kept where no one ever knew. She hid it because she was afraid of the slaves. The house in which she lived in Cajueiros belonged to her. The carved jacaranda furniture was solid and good as were all the other items, mirrors, pitchers, a silver plate—a beautiful plate from India that an appeals judge had given her. You devilish plate, you always got on my nerves. I told its owner herself many times. I didn’t hide from her the annoyance that these and other spoils from her loves of other times brought on in me. She would listen to me and laugh, with an innocent look—innocence and something else that I didn’t understand too well at the time, but now, recalling the case, I think it was a mixed laugh, as if it were coming from a creature born to a witch of Shakespeare’s by a seraph of Klopstock’s. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself. So it happened one day when I was unable to give her a certain necklace she’d seen at a jeweler’s she retorted that it was all a game, that our love didn’t need such a vulgar stimulant.
    “I’ll never forgive you if you get that awful idea of me,” she concluded, threatening me with her finger.
    And then, quick like a bird, she opened her hands, grasped my face in them, pulled me to her, and put on a funny expression, the mummery of a child. Afterward, reclining on the settee, she continued talking about it with simplicity and frankness. She’d never wanted people to buy her affection. She’d sold the appearances of it many times, but the reality she saved for the few. Duarte, for example, Second Lieutenant Duarte, whom she’d really loved two years before. Only after a struggle had he been able to give her something of value, as had happened with me. She would only willingly accept keepsakes with a low price tag, like the gold cross he’d given her once as a present.
    “This cross…”
    She said that putting her hand into her bosom and taking out a delicate gold cross attached to a blue ribbon and tied around her neck.
    “But that cross,” I observed, “didn’t you tell me it was your father who …”
    Marcela shook her head with a look of pity.
    “Couldn’t you tell that it was a lie, that I told you that in order not to upset you? Come here,
chiquito
, don’t be so mistrustful with me … I was in love with somebody else. What difference does it make? It’s all over. Someday, when we break up …”
    “Don’t say that!” I roared.
    “Everything comes to an end! Someday …”
    She couldn’t go on. A sob was strangling her voice. She held out her hands, took mine, snuggled me against her breast, and whispered softly in my ear, “Never, never, my love!” I thanked her, teary-eyed. The next day I brought her the necklace I’d refused to get.
    “For you to remember me with when we’ve broken up,” I said.
    Marcela at first maintained an indignant silence. Then she made a grand gesture: she made as if to throw the necklace into the street. I held back her arm, kept begging her not to do such an awful thing to me, to keep the jewel. She smiled and kept it.
    In the meantime she was rewarding me abundantly for my sacrifices. She would ferret out my most hidden thoughts. There was no desire of mine that she wouldn’t hasten