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

liked Freitas’ expansive and frank ways.

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    D o you want the reverse of this, curious reader? Take a look at the other guest at lunch, Carlos Maria. If the first one has “expansive and frank” ways—in a laudatory sense—it’s quite clear that this man has just the opposite kind. So it won’t be difficult at all for you to see him enter the parlor, slow, cold, and superior, to be introduced to Freitas and look away. Freitas, who had already cursed him cordially because of his lateness (it’s almost noon), treats him now with great courtesy, with friendly greetings.
    You can also see for yourself that our Rubião, if he likes Freitas better, holds the other in higher esteem. Rubião waited for Carlos Maria until now and would have waited for him until tomorrow. Carlos Maria is the one who doesn’t hold either Freitas or Rubião in high esteem. Take a good look at him! He’s an elegant young man with large, placid eyes, very much in control of himself and even more in control of others. He looks beyond things, he doesn’t have a jovial laugh but a mocking one. Now, as he sits down at the table, picks up his utensils, opens his napkin, it can be seen in everything that he’s doing the host a great favor—perhaps two—that of eating his food and that of not calling him a fool.
    And, in spite of the disparity of personalities, the lunch was merry. Freitas was devouring his food, with a pause now and then, of course—and confessing to himself that the lunch, if the man had come at the appointed time (eleven o’clock) might not have tasted so good. Now he was sailing into the first mouthfuls that heightened his castaway’s hunger. After some ten minutes he was able to start talking, full of laughter, expanding with gestures and looks, stringing together a whole series of sharp witticisms and picaresque anecdotes. Carlos Maria listened to most of them with a serious look in order to humiliate him, to such a point that Rubião, who really found Freitas amusing, no longer dared to laugh. Toward the end of the lunch Carlos Maria loosened up a little, grew expansive and made reference to other people’s amorous adventures. Freitas, in order to flatter him,asked him to tell about one or two of his own. Carlos Maria burst out laughing.
    “What role do you want me to play?” he asked.
    Freitas explained. It wasn’t a discourse, but deeds, he was asking him for deeds, nothing untoward or anything left to the imagination.
    “Are you comfortable living here in Botafogo?” Carlos Maria interrupted, addressing the host.
    Freitas, cut off, bit his lip and cursed the young man a second time. He leaned back in his chair, taut, serious, looking at a picture on the wall. Rubião answered that he was quite comfortable, that the beach was beautiful.
    “It’s a pretty view, but I was never able to stand the stench there is here on certain occasions,” Carlos Maria said. “What do you think?” he went on, turning to Freitas.
    Freitas straightened up and said everything he thought, that they could both be right. But he insisted that the beach, in spite of everything, was magnificent. He went on without any ill humor or annoyance. He even did Carlos Maria the favor of calling his attention to a small piece of fruit that had become stuck to the tip of his mustache.
    They reached the end. It had been a little over an hour. Rubião, silent, was mentally recomposing the lunch, dish by dish, he looked with pleasure at the glasses and the remains of the wine there, the scattered crumbs, the final appearance of the table just before coffee. From time to time he would glance at the servant’s jacket. He managed to catch Carlos Maria’s face in flagrant pleasure as he was taking the first puffs on one of the cigars that Rubião had asked to be distributed. At that point the servant entered with a small basket covered with a cambric handkerchief and a letter that had just been delivered.

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    “W ho sent this?”