Free Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

between his legs. Then his master snaps his fingers, and there he is again, back with the same joy.
    “Easy! Easy!”
    Quincas Borba follows him through the garden, goes around the house, sometimes walking, sometimes leaping. He savors his freedom but doesn’t lose sight of his master. Here he sniffs, there he cocks an ear, over there he goes after a flea on his belly, but with a leap he recovers the space and the time lost and once again dogs the heels of his master. It appears that Rubião isn’t thinking about anything now other than walking back and forth, only to make him walk too and make up for the time he was tied up. When Rubião halts, he looks up, waiting. The master’s thinking about him, naturally. It’s some plan, they’ll go out together or something just as pleasant. He never thinks of the possibility of a kick or a whack. He has a feeling of trust and a very short memory for blows. On the other hand, petting makes a deep and fixed impression on him, no matter how casual it might have been. He likes being loved. He’s happy believing that he is.
    Life there isn’t completely good or completely bad. There’s a black boy who bathes him every day in cold water, a devilish custom that he can’t get used to. Jean the cook likes the dog; the Spanish servant doesn’t like him at all. Rubião spends a lot of time away from the house but doesn’t treat him poorly, and he allows him inside, lets him stay with him at lunch and dinner, accompany him in the parlor or the study. Sometimes he plays with him, makes him leap. If visitors of some importance arrive, he has him taken away or brought downstairs, and since he always resists, the Spaniard leads him quite carefully at first, but gets his revenge soon after, dragging him by an ear or a leg, flinging him and cutting him off from all communication with the house.
    “Perro del infiernor!”
    Bruised, separated from his friend, Quincas Borba then goes to lie down in a corner and remains there for a long time, silent. He moves about a little until he finds a final position and closes his eyes. He doesn’t sleep; he’s gathering ideas, combining them, remembering. The vague figure of his dead friend might pass in the distance, far off, in bits and pieces, then it mingles with that of his present friend, and they seem to be one single person. Then other ideas …
    But there are a lot of ideas now—there are too many ideas. In any case, they’re the ideas of a dog, a jumble of ideas—evenless than a jumble, the reader is probably explaining to himself. But the truth is that the eye that opens from time to time to stare into space so expressively seems to be translating something that’s glowing there inside, deep inside there behind something else that I don’t know how to define, how to express a canine part that isn’t the tail or the ears. Poor human tongue!
    Finally he dozes off. Then the images of life play in him in a dream, vague, recent, a scrap here, a patch there. When he awakens, he’s forgotten the bad things. He has an expression that I’ll say could be melancholy, at the risk of annoying the reader. One can speak of a landscape as being melancholy, but the same thing can’t be said of a dog. The reason can’t be any other than the fact that the melancholy of the landscape is in ourselves, while to attribute it to a dog is to place it outside of ourselves. Whatever it might be, it’s something that’s not the joy of a while before. But let there be a whistle from the cook or a signal from his master, and it all vanishes, the eyes shine, pleasure lifts up his muzzle, and his legs fly so fast that they look like wings.

X X I X
     
    R ubião spent the rest of the morning happily. It was Sunday. Two friends had come to have lunch with him, a young man of twenty–four who was nibbling at the first items of his mother’s possessions that had been handed down, and a man of forty–four or forty–six who no longer had anything to nibble