The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis by Machado De Assis
“No, I didn’t.”
The carriage turned into Rua do Ouvidor, where the two friends also happened to be heading. It had stopped just beyond Rua da Quitanda, outside a shop, where the ladies had presumably gotten out and gone in. Mendonça did not actually see them getting out, but he saw the carriage and suspected it was the same one. He quickened his pace without saying anything to Andrade, who merely did the same, filled with the natural curiosity of a man sensing some hidden secret.
Moments later, they were standing at the shop door, where Mendonça was able to see that these were indeed the two ladies from Rua de Matacavalos. With the air of someone about to buy something, he went boldly in. The aunt was the first to recognize him. Mendonça bowed respectfully, and both women gladly acknowledged his greeting. Miss Dollar was at Margarida’s side, and she, thanks to the extraordinary instinct bestowed by Nature on dogs and other courtesans of fortune, leapt with glee as soon as she saw Mendonça and even placed her two front paws on his belly.
“It seems that Miss Dollar has fond memories of you,” said Dona Antônia (for this was the name of Margarida’s aunt).
“So it would seem,” said Mendonça, stroking the greyhound and looking up at Margarida.
At that moment, Andrade came into the shop too.
“Ah, I only just realized it was you,” he said, addressing both ladies.
And he shook their hands, or, rather, squeezed Dona Antônia’s hand and just the tips of Margarida’s fingers.
Mendonça had not expected this, and was glad to be presented with a means of deepening his superficial acquaintance with that family.
“Would you be kind enough to introduce me to these ladies?” he said to Andrade.
“You mean you don’t know them?” asked Andrade in amazement.
“Well, he both does and doesn’t know us,” replied the aunt, smiling. “So far, the only one to introduce us has been Miss Dollar.”
Dona Antônia told Andrade about the dog who had been lost and found.
“In that case,” said Andrade, “allow me to introduce you now.”
When the formal introductions were over, the clerk brought Margarida her purchases, and the two ladies said goodbye, asking the two young men to come and visit them.
I have not set down a single word spoken by Margarida in the conversation transcribed above, because she said only two words to each of the men.
“Good day,” she said, offering each of them the tips of her fingers, before leaving and climbing back into the carriage.
The young men also left and continued along Rua do Ouvidor in silence. Mendonça was thinking about Margarida, and Andrade was wondering how he could wheedle his way into Mendonça’s confidence. Vanity has as many forms as that fabled creature Proteus. Andrade’s vanity consisted in making himself the confidant of other people, for it seemed to him that he could obtain through trust what could otherwise only be achieved through indiscretion. It wasn’t hard for him to discover Mendonça’s secret, and by the time they had reached the corner of Rua dos Ourives, Andrade knew everything.
“Now,” said Mendonça, “you’ll understand why I need to go to her house. I need to see her and find out if I can—”
“Of course,” cried Andrade, “to find out if you can be loved. And why not? But I’ll tell you now, it won’t be easy.”
“Why?”
“Margarida has already rejected five proposals of marriage.”
“She clearly didn’t love those suitors,” said Mendonça with the air of a mathematician alighting on the solution to a problem.
“She was passionately in love with the first one,” said Andrade, “and not exactly indifferent to the last.”
“Presumably something happened to prevent the marriages.”
“No, not at all. Are you surprised? I must admit I am. She’s a very strange young woman. If you feel you have the strength to be the Columbus of that world, then set off across the seas with your armada; but watch out for some mutinous passions, which are the fierce sailors of such voyages of discovery.”
Pleased with this historical-allegorical allusion, Andrade glanced at Mendonça, who was too absorbed in thoughts of Margarida to hear what his friend had said. Andrade made do with his own contentment and smiled the smug smile of a poet who has just written the last line of a poem.
V
Some days later, Andrade and Mendonça went to Margarida’s house, and spent half an hour there in polite conversation. Further visits followed, with Mendonça visiting rather more often than Andrade. Dona Antônia was always the friendlier of the two women, and only after some time did Margarida emerge from the Olympian silence in which she usually enfolded herself.
Indeed, how could she resist, for, although he was no frequenter of salons, Mendonça proved to be the perfect person to entertain those two seemingly mortally bored ladies. The doctor played the piano rather well; he was a lively conversationalist; and he knew the thousands of bits of trivia women tend to find amusing when they cannot or do not wish to discourse on the lofty subjects of art, history, and philosophy. It did not take him long to become a good friend of the family.
After their first few visits, Mendonça learned from Andrade that Margarida was a widow. Mendonça could not conceal his astonishment.
“But you’ve always talked about her as if she were a spinster,” he said.
“No, I didn’t explain myself well, and all those marriage proposals she turned down came after she was widowed.”
“How long has she been a widow?”
“Three years.”
“That explains everything,” said Mendonça after a pause. “She wants to remain faithful unto the grave, an Artemis for our own age.”
Unconvinced by this reference to Artemis, Andrade smiled at his friend’s remark, and when Mendonça insisted, he replied:
“I told you before that she was passionately in love with her first suitor and not entirely indifferent to the last, either.”
“Then I really don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
From that point on, Mendonça began to court the widow assiduously, but she received his first loving glances with such supreme disdain that he almost abandoned the whole enterprise; however, while she appeared to be refusing his love, she did not refuse him her esteem and treated him with great affection as long as he looked at her precisely as everyone else did.
Love rejected is love multiplied. Each rebuff only increased Mendonça’s passion. He even began to neglect fierce Caligula and elegant Julius Caesar. His two slaves noticed a profound change in his habits. They assumed he must be worried about something, and this suspicion was confirmed when Mendonça came home one day and kicked Cornelia in the nose, when that most interesting of terriers, mother to two Gracchi, rushed to celebrate the doctor’s return home.
Andrade was not unaware of his friend’s suffering and tried to console him. In such cases, consolation is as sought-after as it is useless; Mendonça heard Andrade’s words and confided all his sorrows to him. Andrade mentioned to Mendonça that an excellent way of putting an end to passion was to leave home and set off on a journey. To this Mendonça answered with a quotation from La Rochefoucauld: “Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, just as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.”
This quote had the effect of silencing Andrade, who believed about as much in constancy as he did in Artemises, but he did not want to question either the authority of the great moralist or Mendonça’s resolve.
VI
Three months passed. Mendonça’s courtship did not advance one step, but the widow continued to treat him in the same friendly fashion. And this was mainly what kept the doctor kneeling at the feet of that obdurate woman, for he had still not abandoned all hope of winning her heart.
Some serious-minded reader will be wishing that Mendonça were a less regular visitor to the house of a lady exposed to the calumnies of the world. The doctor did consider this, but
Margarida seemed as indifferent to what the world might say as she was to the young man’s assiduous courtship of her. Was she perhaps indifferent to everything in the world? No, she loved her aunt, adored Miss Dollar, enjoyed good music, and read novels. She dressed well, although without being a slave to fashion; she never waltzed and, at most, would dance a quadrille at the parties to which she was invited. She did not talk much, but when she did, she expressed herself well. She was graceful and animated, but neither pretentious nor ostentatious.
Whenever Mendonça arrived, Margarida would welcome him with evident pleasure, and even though he was accustomed to this, he was always taken in. Margarida really did enjoy his company, but she appeared not to give his presence the degree of importance that would have warmed his heart. She enjoyed his company much as one enjoys a lovely sunny day, but without falling in love with the sun.
Such a situation could not possibly go on for very long. One night, making an effort of which he would never have thought himself capable, Mendonça asked Margarida this indiscreet question:
“Were you happy with your husband?”
Margarida frowned in disbelief, then fixed her eyes on those of the doctor, which seemed to continue silently to ask that question.
“Yes,” she said after a few moments.
Mendonça said not a word; this was not the answer he had expected. He had put too much trust in the apparent intimacy that reigned between them, and he wanted somehow to find out what lay behind the widow’s imperviousness. His gambit failed; Margarida grew very serious, and only the arrival of Dona Antônia saved him from this awkward situation. Shortly afterward, Margarida’s usual good mood was restored, and the conversation resumed its usual lively, amicable tone. When Jorge joined them, the conversation grew still livelier. Dona Antônia, with the eyes and ears of a mother, thought her son the wittiest creature in the world; but the truth is that there wasn’t a more frivolous fellow in all Christendom. His mother laughed at everything her son said, and he alone was quite capable of filling up the conversation with anecdotes and by mimicking the sayings and manners he had picked up at the theater. Mendonça watched all this and tolerated the boy with a show of angelic resignation.
By livening up the conversation, Jorge’s arrival made the hours speed by. At ten o’clock, the doctor left, accompanied by Dona Antônia’s son, who was off to have supper somewhere. Mendonça declined Jorge’s invitation to join him, and said goodbye to him in Rua do Conde, on the corner of Rua do Lavradio.
That same night, Mendonça resolved to take a decisive step: he would write Margarida a letter. Anyone who knew the widow would have thought this a bold move, and, given the precedents described above, it was positive madness. Nevertheless, the doctor did not hesitate to put pen to paper, confident that he could express himself far better in writing than in person. He dashed off the letter with febrile impatience; the following morning, immediately after breakfast, he put the letter inside a novel by George Sand and ordered the houseboy to deliver it to Margarida.
She unwrapped the book and put it down on the living room table; half an hour later, she returned and picked up the book, intending to read it. As soon as she did so, the letter fell out. She opened it and read the following:
Whatever the cause of your indifference, I respect it and do not intend to rebel against it. However, while I cannot rebel, do I not have the right to complain? You must be aware that I love you, just as I am aware of your indifference, but however great that indifference, it cannot compare with the deep, urgent love that has filled my heart at a time when I felt I had long since left behind me such youthful passions. I will not describe to you the sleepless nights and tears, the hopes and disappointments, the sad pages of this book which fate has placed in the hands of man so that two souls might read it. None of that is of any interest to you.
I dare not ask you about your indifference toward me personally, but why do you extend that indifference to so many others? Having reached an age when passion is the norm, and being, as you are, blessed by heaven with a rare beauty, why do you wish to hide away from the world and deny nature and your heart their undeniable rights? Forgive me for asking such an audacious question, but I find myself faced by an enigma that my heart longs to decipher. I wonder sometimes if you are tortured by some great grief, and wish I could be the doctor of your heart; I confess that I would love to restore to you some lost illusion, which is, after all, an inoffensive enough ambition.
If, however, your indifference is merely an expression of perfectly legitimate pride, then forgive me for daring to write to you when your eyes expressly forbade me to. Tear up this letter, which has value neither as a memento nor as a weapon.
The letter was entirely composed of such thoughts; the cold, measured words conveyed none of his own fiery feelings. The reader cannot have failed to notice, though, the innocence with which Mendonça asked for an explanation that Margarida would probably not give.
When Mendonça told Andrade he had written to Margarida, Andrade burst out laughing.
“Was I wrong to do so?” asked Mendonça.
“You’ve ruined everything. The other suitors also began by writing a letter, and it was tantamount to writing the death certificate of their love.”
“Oh, well, if the same thing happens again, I’ll just have to accept it,” said Mendonça with an almost casual shrug. “But I wish you would stop talking about those other suitors. I’m not a suitor in that same sense.”
“I thought you wanted to marry her.”
“I do, if possible,” said Mendonça.
“That is what all the others wanted too; you would marry and enter into the sweet possession of the wealth it would fall to you to share and which comes to considerably more than one hundred contos. My dear fellow, I don’t mention the other suitors in order to offend you, for I was one of the suitors she sent packing.”
“You?”
“Yes, but, don’t worry, I was neither the first nor even the last.”
“And you wrote her a letter.”
“As did the others, and, like them, I never received a reply, or rather, I did: she returned my letter to me. Anyway, now that you’ve written to her, just wait for her response, and you’ll see that I’ve been telling you the truth. You’re lost, Mendonça. You’ve made a real blunder.”
Andrade was the kind of man who insisted on describing the very darkest side of any situation, on the pretext that one ought to tell one’s friends the truth. Having painted a suitably gloomy picture, he said goodbye to Mendonça and left.
Mendonça went home, where he spent another sleepless night.
VII
Andrade was wrong; the widow did reply to the doctor’s letter, but only to say:
I forgive you everything; however, what I will not forgive is a second letter. There is no cause for my indifference; it is purely a matter of temperament.
The meaning of this letter was even more gnomic than the way in which it was expressed. Mendonça read it several times,
The first time Mendonça returned to Rua de Matacavalos, he was dreading having to speak to Margarida; she, however, saved him from any awkwardness by talking as if nothing had happened between them. There was no opportunity for Mendonça to talk to her about the letters because Dona Antônia was with them all the time, something for which he was very grateful, since he had no idea what he would say were he left alone with Margarida.
Days later, Mendonça wrote a second letter to the widow and by the same method. The letter was returned to him unopened. Mendonça then regretted have disobeyed Margarida’s orders and resolved, once and for all, never to return to the house in Rua de Matacavalos. Besides, he lacked the courage to go there; it was so awkward being with someone who could never return his love.
A month went by, and his feelings for the widow had diminished not one iota. He loved her as passionately as before, and, just as he had thought, absence only increased his love, just as the wind fans a fire. In vain he tried to lose himself in books or in Rio’s busy social life; he even began writing an article on the theory of hearing, but his pen kept being distracted by his heart, and what he wrote emerged as a mixture of frayed nerves and sentiment. At the time, Renan’s The Life of Jesus was at the height of its fame, and Mendonça filled his study with all kinds of pamphlets written on the subject and immersed himself in the mysterious drama of Judea. He did all he could to occupy his mind with other thoughts and to forget about the elusive Margarida, but this proved impossible.
One morning, Dona Antônia’s son came to call, for two reasons: to ask him why he no longer visited Matacavalos and to show off his new trousers. Mendonça approved of the trousers and excused his absence, saying that he had been terribly busy. Jorge was not the sort of fellow to detect the truth lying hidden behind those indifferent words. Seeing Mendonça surrounded by a horde of books and pamphlets, Jorge asked if he was studying to become a deputy. He was, wasn’t he?