Free The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis Page A

to fulfill with all her heart, without any effort, by some kind of law of awareness of the needs of the heart. The desires were never reasonable, but pure whims, some childish wish to see her dress in a certain way, with such and such accessories, this dress and not that one, to go for a walk or something like that, and she would accede to everything, smiling and chattering.
    “You’re a regular expert,” she would tell me.
    And she would go put on the dress, the lace, the earrings with bewitching obedience.

XVI
An Immoral Reflection
     
    An immoral reflection occurs to me, one which at the same time is a correction of style. I think I said in Chapter XIV that Marcela was dying with love for Xavier. She wasn’t dying, she was living. Living isn’t the same as dying. That is attested to by all the jewelers in this world, people held in great esteem for their grammar. My good jewelers, what would become of love were it not for your trinkets and your credit? A third or a fifth at least of the universal trade in hearts. This is the immoral reflection I was trying to make and which is really more obscure than immoral because what I’m trying to say isn’t easily understood. What I’m trying to say is that the most beautiful head in the world will be no less beautiful if ringed by a diadem of fine stones, neither less beautiful nor less loved. Marcela, for example, who was quite pretty, Marcela loved me …

XVII
Of the Trapeze and Other Things
     
    …Marcela loved me for fifteen months and eleven
contos
, no more, no less. My father, as soon as he got wind of the eleven
contos
, was really taken by surprise. He thought the case was reaching beyond the bounds of a juvenile caprice.
    “This time,” he said, “you’re going to Europe. You’re going to study at a university, probably Coimbra. I want you to be a serious man, not a loafer and a thief.” And since I showed an expression of surprise, “Thief, yes sir. A son who does this to me is nothing but…”
    He took from his pocket my I.O.U.s that he had already redeemed and waved them in my face, “Do you see these, you rascal? Is this how a young man is supposed to protect his family name? Do you think my grandfathers and I earned our money in gambling houses or drifting about in the streets? You playboy! This time either you take account of yourself or you’ll be left with nothing.”
    He was furious, but with a tempered and short fury. I listened to him in silence and didn’t oppose the trip in any way as I’d done at other times. I was pondering the idea of taking Marcela with me. I went to see her. I explained the crisis and made my proposal. Marcela listened to me with her eyes in the air, without responding immediately. As I insisted, she told me that she would stay, that she couldn’t go to Europe.
    “Why not?”
    “I can’t,” she said with a sorrowful look. “I can’t breathe that air while I think of my poor father, killed by Napoleon.”
    “Which one, the gardener or the lawyer?”
    Marcela furrowed her brow, hummed a
sequidilha
, then complained about the heat and sent for a glass of pineapple wine. A slave girl brought it on a silver tray, which was part of my eleven
cantos
. Marcela politely offered me the refreshment. My answer was to strike the glass and the tray. The liquid spilled into her lap and the black girl cried out. I roared at her to get out. When we were alone I poured out all the despair in my heart. I told her that she was a monster, that she’d never loved me, that she’d let me drop down to the bottom without even the excuse of sincerity. I called her all sorts of ugly names, making wild gestures. Marcela kept herself seated, tapping her teeth with her nails, cold as a piece of marble. I had an urge to strangle her, humiliate her at least, make her crawl at my feet. Perhaps I would have, but my actions took the opposite turn: It was I who threw myself at her feet, contrite and supplicant. I kissed them, I remembered