Legend of Mani
Native-south-american tupi nhehengatu legend
Couto de Magalhães.
From O Selvagem, http://biblio.etnolinguistica.org/magalhaes-1876-selvagem , https://archive.org/details/O_Selvagem .
Translation from Brazilian Portuguese version by
Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto.
Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil, 2014.
One of the legends, to which I referred above, conserves the tradition that the use of mandioca[1], which performs so important a role in the life of the indians, was revealed to them through a supernatural way. Mandioca is not only the bread of our savage, as also the substance from which they draw diverse wines, like the 'kauin', the 'maniquera', the 'puchirum' and others. Its discovery was to them more important than the one of wheat was to the aryas.
Although this legend belongs more to the domain of poetry than to that of science, I can't deprive myself of the desire of inserting it here, as a curious specimen of the product of the imagination of our savages. Here you have it such as it was referred to me by the mother of Mr. colonel Miranda, ex-treasurer of public finances of Pará, respectable mistress of about 70 years of age, and who resides in Belem. The legend says that mandioca was discovered like this:
"In gone times appeared pregnant the daughter of a savage chief, which resided in the immediacies of the place where is today the city of Santarém. The chief wanted to punish in the author of the dishonour of his daughter, the offense which his pride had suffered and, in order to know who he was, employed in vain pleas, threats and at length severe punishment. Before the pleas as well as before the punishment the young woman remained inflexible, saying that she had never had relation with any man whatsoever. The chief had deliberated to kill her, when it appeared to him in a dream a white man, which told him not to kill the young woman, because she was effectively innocent, and had not had relation with man. After the nine months she gave birth to a very beautiful girl, and white, causing this last fact the surprise, not only of the tribe, as also of the neighbour nations, which came to visit the child, to see that new and unknown race. The child, which had the name of Mani, and which walked and talked precociously, died at the end of one year, without having gone ill, and without having shown signs of pain.
She was buried inside the house itself, uncovering it, and watering daily the sepulture, following the custom of the people. After some time a plant sprung from the grave which, for being entirely unknown, they refrained from pulling off. It grew, flourished, and bore fruit. The birds which ate the fruit became drunk, and this phenomenon, unknown by the indians, augmented in them the superstition for the plant. The land at length fissured itself; they digged it and judged to recognize in the fruit they found the body of Mani. They ate it, and thus learned to use of mandioca."
The fruit received the name of 'Mani oca', which means: house or transformation of Mani, name which we conserve corrupted in the word mandioca, but which the french conserve without corruption still.
This legend encloses two things common to all asian religions: 1.o the attributing to a god the teaching of the use of bread : 2.o the conception without losing virginity. Will this be a simple product of imagination, will it be a law to which the human understanding is subject, or will it be some recollection of old asian beliefs, conserved confusely by oral tradition? Any of these things is possible, but for now it is nothing but simple conjecture.
Tr. Notes:
[1] mandioca, cassava, manioc, etc.
quarta-feira, 27 de agosto de 2014
terça-feira, 19 de agosto de 2014
I
MAI PITUNA OIUQUAU ÃNA
How the night appeared
Native-south-american tupi nhehengatu legend
Couto de Magalhães
From O Selvagem, http://biblio.etnolinguistica.org/magalhaes-1876-selvagem , https://archive.org/details/O_Selvagem .
Translation from Brazilian Portuguese version by
Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto.
Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, 2014.
'This legend is probably a fragment of the 'Genesis' of the ancient south-american savages. It is perhaps the degraded and corrupted echo of the beliefs they had, of how was formed this order of things in the midst of which we live, and, undressed of the coarse forms with which probably dressed it the grandparents and the foster nurses, it shows that everywhere man has proposed to solve this problem -- where is it that we come from? Here, as in the 'Vedas', as in the 'Genesis', the question is in the deep solved in the same way, that is: in the beginning everyone was happy; a disobedience in a love episode, a forbidden fruit, brought the degradation. The legend is in short as follows: in the beginning there was no distinction between animals, man and plants; everything spoke[1]. There was also no darkness. Having the daughter of the Great Snake married, she didn't want to cohabit with her husband while there was not night over the world, such as there was in the deep of the waters. The husband sent for the night, which was sent to him enclosed in a pit of tucumã, well shut, with express prohibition to the conductors of opening it, penalty of losing themselves and their descendents, and all the things. At first they resist the temptation, but afterwards, the curiosity of knowing what was there inside the fruit made them violate the prohibition, and thus they lost themselves. Substituting the fruit of tucumã for the forbidden tree, the curiosity of knowing for the temptation of the evil spirit; it seems to me there is at the bottom of the episode so much resemblance with the asian thought that I hesitate and ask if it will not be a degraded and transformed echo of that thought?'
In the beginning there was no night -- day only there was in all time. The night was asleep at the bottom of the waters. There were no animals; all the things spoke[1].
The daughter of the Great Snake, they tell, had married a young man.
This young man had three faithful servants. One day he called the three servants and told them: -- go walk because my wife does not want to sleep with me.
The servants left, and then he called his wife to sleep with him. The daughter of the Great Snake answered him:
-- It is still not night.
The young man told her: -- There is no night; there is only day.
The young woman said: -- My father has night. If you want to sleep with me send for it there, by the great river.
The young man called the three servants; the young woman sent them to house of her father in order to bring a pit of tucumã (*).
The servants left, reached the house of the Great Snake, who delivered to them a pit of tucumã very well shut, and said to them: --- Here it is; take it. Eia! do not open it, or else all the things will be lost.
The servants left, and they were hearing noise inside the tucuman coconut, thus: tem, ten, ten... xi... (*) it was the noise of the crickets and small frogs which sing in the night.
When they were already far, one of the servants said to his fellowmen: -- Let us see what noise this will be?
The pilot said: -- No; otherwise we will lose ourselves. Let us go, eia, row!
They went and continued to hear that noise inside the tucuman coconut, and they did not know what noise it was.
When they were already very far, they gathered in the middle of the canoe, lit fire, melted the darkness which enclosed the coconut and opened it. Suddenly everything became dark.
The pilot then said: -- We are lost; and the young woman, in her house, already knows that we opened the coconut of tucuman! They continued the trip.
The young woman, at her house, told then her husband: -- They have released the night; let us wait for the morning.
Then all the things which were scattered by the woods transformed into animals and birds.
The things which were scattered through the river transformed into ducks, and into fishes. From the pannier was generated the jaguar[2]; the fisherman and his canoe transformed into duck; from his head were born the head and the beak of the duck; from the canoe the body of the duck; from the oars the legs of the duck.
The daughter of the Great Snake, when she saw the morning star, told her husband:
-- The dawn comes breaking. I will divide the day and the night.
Then she coiled the string, and told him: -- You shall be cujubin. Thus she made the cujubim; she painted the head of the cujubin white, with tabatinga; she painted him the legs red with urucú, and then told him: -- You shall sing for all eternity when the morning comes breaking.
She coiled the string, shook grey above it, and said: you shall be inambú, to sing in the various times of the night, and at dawn[3].
Since then all birds have sang in its times, and at dawn in order to joy the beginning of the day.
When the three servants arrived the young man said to them:
-- You have not been faithful -- you have opened the pit of tucumã, you have released night and all the things have been lost, and you too that have metamorphosed yourselves into monkeys, shall walk for all eternity by the branches of the woods.
(The black mouth, and the yellow line that they have in the arm they say that is still the sign of the darkness which enclosed the pit of tucumã which dripped over them when they melted it.)
(*) The 'tucumã' is a very beautiful thorny palm tree that grows in the valleys of the Amazonas and Prata. Its coconut, of a very shiny orange coloured red, serves as food for the savages, which with its pulp prepare a juicy porridge, of pleasant savor, but indigest.
(*) When the savages narrate this part they imitate the humming of the insects which sing in the night.
Tr. Notes:
[1] falavam, spoke, talked.
[2] onça, jaguar, Panthera onca.
[3] madrugada, dawn, early hours.
Cf. Houaiss, Avery, Barsa.
MAI PITUNA OIUQUAU ÃNA
How the night appeared
Native-south-american tupi nhehengatu legend
Couto de Magalhães
From O Selvagem, http://biblio.etnolinguistica.org/magalhaes-1876-selvagem , https://archive.org/details/O_Selvagem .
Translation from Brazilian Portuguese version by
Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto.
Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, 2014.
'This legend is probably a fragment of the 'Genesis' of the ancient south-american savages. It is perhaps the degraded and corrupted echo of the beliefs they had, of how was formed this order of things in the midst of which we live, and, undressed of the coarse forms with which probably dressed it the grandparents and the foster nurses, it shows that everywhere man has proposed to solve this problem -- where is it that we come from? Here, as in the 'Vedas', as in the 'Genesis', the question is in the deep solved in the same way, that is: in the beginning everyone was happy; a disobedience in a love episode, a forbidden fruit, brought the degradation. The legend is in short as follows: in the beginning there was no distinction between animals, man and plants; everything spoke[1]. There was also no darkness. Having the daughter of the Great Snake married, she didn't want to cohabit with her husband while there was not night over the world, such as there was in the deep of the waters. The husband sent for the night, which was sent to him enclosed in a pit of tucumã, well shut, with express prohibition to the conductors of opening it, penalty of losing themselves and their descendents, and all the things. At first they resist the temptation, but afterwards, the curiosity of knowing what was there inside the fruit made them violate the prohibition, and thus they lost themselves. Substituting the fruit of tucumã for the forbidden tree, the curiosity of knowing for the temptation of the evil spirit; it seems to me there is at the bottom of the episode so much resemblance with the asian thought that I hesitate and ask if it will not be a degraded and transformed echo of that thought?'
In the beginning there was no night -- day only there was in all time. The night was asleep at the bottom of the waters. There were no animals; all the things spoke[1].
The daughter of the Great Snake, they tell, had married a young man.
This young man had three faithful servants. One day he called the three servants and told them: -- go walk because my wife does not want to sleep with me.
The servants left, and then he called his wife to sleep with him. The daughter of the Great Snake answered him:
-- It is still not night.
The young man told her: -- There is no night; there is only day.
The young woman said: -- My father has night. If you want to sleep with me send for it there, by the great river.
The young man called the three servants; the young woman sent them to house of her father in order to bring a pit of tucumã (*).
The servants left, reached the house of the Great Snake, who delivered to them a pit of tucumã very well shut, and said to them: --- Here it is; take it. Eia! do not open it, or else all the things will be lost.
The servants left, and they were hearing noise inside the tucuman coconut, thus: tem, ten, ten... xi... (*) it was the noise of the crickets and small frogs which sing in the night.
When they were already far, one of the servants said to his fellowmen: -- Let us see what noise this will be?
The pilot said: -- No; otherwise we will lose ourselves. Let us go, eia, row!
They went and continued to hear that noise inside the tucuman coconut, and they did not know what noise it was.
When they were already very far, they gathered in the middle of the canoe, lit fire, melted the darkness which enclosed the coconut and opened it. Suddenly everything became dark.
The pilot then said: -- We are lost; and the young woman, in her house, already knows that we opened the coconut of tucuman! They continued the trip.
The young woman, at her house, told then her husband: -- They have released the night; let us wait for the morning.
Then all the things which were scattered by the woods transformed into animals and birds.
The things which were scattered through the river transformed into ducks, and into fishes. From the pannier was generated the jaguar[2]; the fisherman and his canoe transformed into duck; from his head were born the head and the beak of the duck; from the canoe the body of the duck; from the oars the legs of the duck.
The daughter of the Great Snake, when she saw the morning star, told her husband:
-- The dawn comes breaking. I will divide the day and the night.
Then she coiled the string, and told him: -- You shall be cujubin. Thus she made the cujubim; she painted the head of the cujubin white, with tabatinga; she painted him the legs red with urucú, and then told him: -- You shall sing for all eternity when the morning comes breaking.
She coiled the string, shook grey above it, and said: you shall be inambú, to sing in the various times of the night, and at dawn[3].
Since then all birds have sang in its times, and at dawn in order to joy the beginning of the day.
When the three servants arrived the young man said to them:
-- You have not been faithful -- you have opened the pit of tucumã, you have released night and all the things have been lost, and you too that have metamorphosed yourselves into monkeys, shall walk for all eternity by the branches of the woods.
(The black mouth, and the yellow line that they have in the arm they say that is still the sign of the darkness which enclosed the pit of tucumã which dripped over them when they melted it.)
(*) The 'tucumã' is a very beautiful thorny palm tree that grows in the valleys of the Amazonas and Prata. Its coconut, of a very shiny orange coloured red, serves as food for the savages, which with its pulp prepare a juicy porridge, of pleasant savor, but indigest.
(*) When the savages narrate this part they imitate the humming of the insects which sing in the night.
Tr. Notes:
[1] falavam, spoke, talked.
[2] onça, jaguar, Panthera onca.
[3] madrugada, dawn, early hours.
Cf. Houaiss, Avery, Barsa.
quarta-feira, 29 de janeiro de 2014
A Sick Man
Coelho Netto (Caxias-MA, 1864-02-21 -- Rio de Janeiro, 1934-11-28)
From: Contos da Vida e da Morte
Translation by Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto
-- It depends on me. It's a question of will, say you. It seems to you. You think, perhaps, that I don't react, that I let myself be dominated passively by this kind of possession. You're wrong. I do as much as I can to combat it. I walk by foot, hours and hours, tiring myself, I search for distractions and diversions: I smoke, I drink; I have already even tried the stupefacients. It was worse. The excitation was aggravated. In the silence or in the rumour, isolated or in the multitude I'm always the same martyr, the same tortured one. The idea accompanies me, doesn't leave me for a single instant: it is an interior shadow held to my soul as the exterior one is held to my body.
-- However, whoever sees you in society, as yet, days ago, in the small palace of senator Balduino, joyful, making phrases and puns from group to group and dancing all the marks...
-- Ah! yes... whoever sees me...
'How many people which laugh perhaps exist
Whose only venture consists
In seeming venturous to the others.'
I'm in the roll of these miserable people, of these hypocrite wretches who cloak themselves in laughter so that their sufferings are not discovered. I'm like that peach of which speaks Dumas the son in the 'Demimonde' when he refers to occult rottennesses; sane aspect, however whoever examines it meticulously will discover in it a little black point, almost imperceptible defect by where penetrated the larva which makes itself worm in the pulp and goes slowly devouring it.
In me this point does not appear but in hours of solitude, when the despair irritates me[1]. Only I know what I suffer! The terrible worm does not leave me and, the more I combat it, it seems that the more I excite and irritate it. Everything I do is in vain. I open a book, I put myself to reading. Soon it opposes itself to my eyes a kind of brume which obscures and stuns the attention and I'm taken from the subject by the exciting idea and there's no escaping it anymore. So must it be with the octopus in the holes[2] of the ocean. Wherever I am it is always it which governs me. I hold myself to a book, contemplate a work of art, stare at a woman, all useless: the obsession drags me, attracts me, captivates me and it's over. I converse animatedly, I seem attentive to the spectacle, to the game, or to whatever it is I have before my eyes... mistake, everything is appearance, illusory placidity -- the torment continues latent. I'm under the dominion of the one infernal idea, it is it which fills vassalizingly my brain, which agitates itself in it, which goes corroding it, as the worm does to the fruit. Travels... Why? At sea, at the mountains, everywhere I find it, as that eye which pursued Cain even in the depths of the earth:
'O mon père! L'oeil a-t-il disparu?' dit en tremblant Tsilla. Et Cain répondit: 'Non, il est toujours là.'
That's it. Elle est toujours là! Is the people freed from the shadow moving from a site to another? No. Thus is the idea. How was it formed? How did it appear to me? I don't know.
-- But what is that idea, after all?
-- I won't ever tell it. It is a satanic idea or even worse: ridiculous, repugnant. So repugnant that I vex myself of bringing it in thought. If someone was pointed to me who found themselves in my case, I swear to you that I'd have aversion of receiving them. It is one of those anomalies which are not explained, an aversive extravagance; sickness, my friend, sickness as the carbuncle or cancer. A corrosive degeneration, an evil which invades us and suddenly explodes, whose origin we search for in this, in that, attributing it, at length, to heredity. I don't know! The cancerous one resigns or revolts himself. Some await patiently for death, letting themselves be devoured little by little; others run from the torture by the door of suicide. I...
-- But listen. If that idea is that sordid... Forgive my expression.
-- Sordid, you say well.
-- Well then there it goes. If it is a sordid idea... Criminous, I don't believe it is?
-- Criminous... And do I know, in truth, what crime is? Before the bar of conventionalism everything which deviates from the guide line of the duty is crime. The Morals has a privative code, a kind of internal regiment for the domestic cases and everything which transgresses the rules of such an advertence[3] is considered crime against the virtue of the home, profanation, outrage and so on. It is as I tell you. My case, studied serenely, can only have one name: madness.
-- And if you realized[4] that idea, which does not involve crime, as you affirm to me, don't you think you'd be cured?
-- Maybe.
-- Well then, my friend, do not hesitate. Do as if you were taking a bitter remedy or one of those theriacs[5] which provoke nausea in us, but which cure. What you must not is continue in this state of suffering. It can be only a caprice, a depravation of taste, as the craving[6] in the pregnant women. Whatever it is it is a torment.
-- Yes, a torment which can take me to the worst of deaths, which is insanity.
-- Not that.
-- How not? Where do I have the sense? I'm a plaything of this idea which has become an axis, around which my soul spins in vertiginous turbillion and everything which tries to settle on it is repelled with the violence with which a rotating disk throws off[7] what is thrown at it. That's it. I'm a plaything of this fixed idea which tortures me, which does not consent for me a moment of peace, which pursues me day and night, and, sometimes, even in sleep manifests itself in dreams the most bizarre. Already one night it occurred to me to do as you counsel me. I tried and do you want me to tell you? It was not for fear that I gave up, it was for shame, pudency.
-- You took the remedy to mouth and repelled it. You did bad.
-- I did bad? Do you think then...?
-- Yes, my friend. We have the obligation of defending life against everyone and against everything. If you feel that that idea goes each time penetrating more in your spirit and in it destroying all the faculties, why won't you try the supreme resource? It is not about a crime which stains with infamy or blood, but a question of scruple.
-- Of cleanliness, my friend; of cleanliness. Depravation, you said well. That cannot be but sickness.
-- Well you have the remedy at hand. Cure yourself.
-- And then? Let us admit that I cure myself, that the idea disappears, how will I behave before this raffish creature, which will be capable of imagining that I... It is horrible! my friend. Horrible.
-- Listen here. After you take the remedy what does it matter to you, the glass or the box which contained it? The cure you were searching for you had it in the drug, the rest... glass or box, break it, lay it off, and it's over. Look, my old one, there is no worse thing than castor oil and I, in my crises, it is to it that I appeal. You're sick, you've got the medicine at hand, cure yourself and retake your place in life. That's it.
Notes:
[1] me assoma, irritates me, or comes over me.
[2] madrigueiras.
[3] monita.
[4] realizasse, realized, executed, effected, did, etc.
[5] triaga, lit. theriac; Latin theriaca; antidote, bitter substance, etc.
[6] antojo, craving, desire, etc.
[7] alija, jettisons, throws off.
terça-feira, 28 de janeiro de 2014
The Cemetery
Lima Barreto (Rio de Janeiro, 1881-05-13 -- Rio de Janeiro, 1922-11-01)
From: A Nova Califórnia
Translation by Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto
Through the streets of tumuli, we went silent. I looked vaguely at that multitude of sepultures, which climbed, touched each other, fought for space, in the narrowness of the vacancy and in the slopes of the hills beside. Some of them seemed to look at the others affectuously, grazing each other friendlily; in others, appeared-through the repugnance of being together. There were incomprehensible solicitations and also repulsions and antipathies; there were arrogant, imponent, vain and poor and humble tumuli; and, in all of them, revealed itself the extraordinary effort to escape the leveling of death, the fading that it brings to the conditions and the fortunes.
Marble sculptures, vases, crosses and inscriptions were piled; they went beyond; they raised pyramids of rough stone, made extravagant bowers, imagined complications of woods and plants -- white and delirious things, of a bad taste which irritated. The inscriptions exuberated; long, full of names, surnames and dates, they didn't bring to our memory even a single illustrious name; in vain did I try to read in them celebrities, dead notabilities; I didn't find them. And in such a way our society marks in us such a profound point, that even there, at that field of dead, mute laboratory of decomposition, I had an image of it, made unconsciously of a purpose, firmly drawn through that access of poor and rich tumuli, grotesque and noble, of marble and stone, covering vulgarities equal to one another by force strange to its wills, fighting...
We went on. The cart, pushed by the professional hands of the employees, went turning the tree-lined streets, taking streets, until it reached the mouth of the somber hole, by where were seen running, forever from our view, the humbleness and the sadness of the office boy of the Secretariate of the Cults.
Before we got there, however, I detained myself a little at a tumulus of limpid marble, arranged in gothic chapel, with angels and crosses which finished it pretentiously.
In the corners of the tombstone, vases with flowers of 'biscuit'[1] and, under a glass, at the level height of the base of the little chapel, in half body, the portrait of the dead woman that the tumulus had swallowed. As if I were at the Rua do Ouvidor, I could not repress an evil thought and almost exclaimed:
-- Beautiful woman!
I stood seeing the photograph and soon after it came to my mind that those eyes, that mouth provocative of kisses, those tumid breasts, tempting of long carnal contacts, would at that time be reduced to a stinking paste, under a portion of earth embedded in fat.
What results did her beauty have on earth? What eternal things did the men that she inspired create? Nothing, or perhaps other men, to die and suffer. It didn't go beyond that, everything else was lost; everything else had no existence, not even for her and for her loved ones; it was brief, instantaneous, fugitive.
I was shaken! I that told everyone that I loved life, I that affirmed my admiration for the things of society -- I meditating as a hebrew prophet scientist! It was weird! Remanent of notions which had infiltrated me and whose entrance in myself I had not noticed! Who could escape them?
Continuing to walk, I guessed the hands of the woman, diaphanous and of long fingers; I composed her erect and full bust, the waist, the hips, the neck, slim and modeled, the white shoulders, the serene face illuminated by a pair of eyes undefined of sadness and desires...
It was no longer the portrait of the tumulus woman; it was of one, alive, who spoke to me.
With what surprise, did I verify this.
Because I, I that lived since age sixteen, dispreoccupiedly, passing through my eyes, at Rua do Ouvidor, all the figures of the fashion newspapers, I impressing myself for that cemetery girl! It was curious.
And, as much as I tried to explain it, I couldn't.
Notes:
[1] biscuit, in French, mass of porcelain (non-glassed)
Lima Barreto (Rio de Janeiro, 1881-05-13 -- Rio de Janeiro, 1922-11-01)
From: A Nova Califórnia
Translation by Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto
Through the streets of tumuli, we went silent. I looked vaguely at that multitude of sepultures, which climbed, touched each other, fought for space, in the narrowness of the vacancy and in the slopes of the hills beside. Some of them seemed to look at the others affectuously, grazing each other friendlily; in others, appeared-through the repugnance of being together. There were incomprehensible solicitations and also repulsions and antipathies; there were arrogant, imponent, vain and poor and humble tumuli; and, in all of them, revealed itself the extraordinary effort to escape the leveling of death, the fading that it brings to the conditions and the fortunes.
Marble sculptures, vases, crosses and inscriptions were piled; they went beyond; they raised pyramids of rough stone, made extravagant bowers, imagined complications of woods and plants -- white and delirious things, of a bad taste which irritated. The inscriptions exuberated; long, full of names, surnames and dates, they didn't bring to our memory even a single illustrious name; in vain did I try to read in them celebrities, dead notabilities; I didn't find them. And in such a way our society marks in us such a profound point, that even there, at that field of dead, mute laboratory of decomposition, I had an image of it, made unconsciously of a purpose, firmly drawn through that access of poor and rich tumuli, grotesque and noble, of marble and stone, covering vulgarities equal to one another by force strange to its wills, fighting...
We went on. The cart, pushed by the professional hands of the employees, went turning the tree-lined streets, taking streets, until it reached the mouth of the somber hole, by where were seen running, forever from our view, the humbleness and the sadness of the office boy of the Secretariate of the Cults.
Before we got there, however, I detained myself a little at a tumulus of limpid marble, arranged in gothic chapel, with angels and crosses which finished it pretentiously.
In the corners of the tombstone, vases with flowers of 'biscuit'[1] and, under a glass, at the level height of the base of the little chapel, in half body, the portrait of the dead woman that the tumulus had swallowed. As if I were at the Rua do Ouvidor, I could not repress an evil thought and almost exclaimed:
-- Beautiful woman!
I stood seeing the photograph and soon after it came to my mind that those eyes, that mouth provocative of kisses, those tumid breasts, tempting of long carnal contacts, would at that time be reduced to a stinking paste, under a portion of earth embedded in fat.
What results did her beauty have on earth? What eternal things did the men that she inspired create? Nothing, or perhaps other men, to die and suffer. It didn't go beyond that, everything else was lost; everything else had no existence, not even for her and for her loved ones; it was brief, instantaneous, fugitive.
I was shaken! I that told everyone that I loved life, I that affirmed my admiration for the things of society -- I meditating as a hebrew prophet scientist! It was weird! Remanent of notions which had infiltrated me and whose entrance in myself I had not noticed! Who could escape them?
Continuing to walk, I guessed the hands of the woman, diaphanous and of long fingers; I composed her erect and full bust, the waist, the hips, the neck, slim and modeled, the white shoulders, the serene face illuminated by a pair of eyes undefined of sadness and desires...
It was no longer the portrait of the tumulus woman; it was of one, alive, who spoke to me.
With what surprise, did I verify this.
Because I, I that lived since age sixteen, dispreoccupiedly, passing through my eyes, at Rua do Ouvidor, all the figures of the fashion newspapers, I impressing myself for that cemetery girl! It was curious.
And, as much as I tried to explain it, I couldn't.
Notes:
[1] biscuit, in French, mass of porcelain (non-glassed)
domingo, 26 de janeiro de 2014
The New California
Lima Barreto (Rio de Janeiro, 1881-05-13 -- Rio de Janeiro, 1922-11-01)
From: A Nova Califórnia
Translation by Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto
No one knew where that man had come from. The Mail agent could only inform that he answered to the name of Raimundo Flamel, because thus was subscribed the correspondence he received. And it was big. Almost daily, there went the mailman to one of the extremities of the town, where lived the unknown man, sustaining a robust pack of letters coming from the whole world, thick magazines in obscure[1] languages, books, packages...
When Fabrício, the mason, came back from a service at the house of the new inhabitant, all at the small store asked him what work had been determined to him.
-- I'll make an oven, said the black man, in the dining room.
Imagine the astonishment of the little town of Tubiacanga, in knowing of so extravagant a construction: an oven in the dining room! And, through the next days, Fabrício could tell that he had seen balloons of glasses, knives with no cut, cups as the ones of a pharmacy --- a roll of weird things showing themselves through the tables and shelves as utensils of a kitchen battery in which the devil himself cooked.
The alarm was made in the village. To some, the most advanced ones, it was a maker of fake currency; to others, the believers and simple ones, a type that had part with the Evil One[2].
Chico da Tirana, the carter, when he passed in front of the house of the mysterious man, next to the hissing car, and looked at the chimney of the dining room smoking, didn't refrain from crossing himself and praying a "credo" in low voice; and, were it not for the intervention of the pharmacist, the subdelegate would have gone give a siege to the house of that suspect individual, which uneased the imagination of a whole population.
Taking in consideration the information from Fabrício, the apothecary Bastos had concluded that the unknown man must be a wise man, a great chemist, in refuge there to more tranquilly take forward his scientific works.
Graduated man and respected in the city, councilman, doctor too, because doctor Jerônimo did not like to prescribe and had made himself an associate of the pharmacy to more in peace live, the opinion of Bastos took tranquillity to all the consciences and made the population surround with a silent admiration the person of the great chemist, which had come to inhabit the town.
By afternoon, if they saw him striding by the margin of the Tubiacanga, sitting here and there, looking lostly at the clear waters of the little river, preoccupied before the penetrating melancholy of the crepuscle, all uncovered themselves and it was not rare that to the "good evening" they added "doctor". And it touched the heart of that people very much the profound simpathy with which he treated the children, the way by which he contemplated them, seeming to take pity that they had been born to suffer and die.
In truth, it was to be seen, under the smooth sweetness of the afternoon, the goodness of Messiah with which he caressed those black children, so smooth of skin and so sad of ways, dived in their moral captivity, and also the white ones, of dark-complexioned, fissured and rough skin, living supported in the necessary cachexia of the tropics.
Sometimes, it came upon him the will to think what the reason was of having Bernardin de Saint-Pierre spent all his tenderness with Paul and Virginia and forgotten the slaves which surrounded them...
In few days the admiration for the wise man was almost general, and it wasn't so only because there was someone who didn't hold in great account the merits of the new inhabitant.
Captain Pelino, school-master and redactor of the ''Gazeta de Tubiacanga'', local organ and affiliated to the situationist party, showed aversion for the wise man. "You shall see, said he, who is this type... A bilk, and adventurer or maybe a thief runaway from Rio."
His opinion was based on nothing, or rather, was based on his occult spite seeing in the homeland a rival for the fame of wise man of which he enjoyed. Not that Pelino was a chemist, far from that; but he was wise, he was a grammarian. No one wrote in Tubiacanga which did not take strike of stick from Captain Pelino, and even when it was spoken of some notable man there in Rio, he did not refrain from saying: "There is no doubt! The man has talent, but writes: 'one other', 'of rest'..." And contracted the lips as if he had swallowed something bitter.
All the village of Tubiacanga accustomed itself to respecting the solemn Pelino, who corrected and amended the greatest national glories. A wise man...
By afternoon, after reading a little Sotero, Cândido de Figueiredo or Castro Lopes, and having once more dyed the hairs, the old school-master got slowly out of house, very buttoned in his mineiro[3] fine canvas jacket, and headed for the drugstore of Bastos to give two fingers of conversation. Conversing is a way of saying, because Pelino was avaricious of words, limiting himself so-only to hearing. When, however, from the lips of someone escaped the least incorrection of language, he intervened and amended. "I assure you, said the Mail agent, that..." By then, the school-master intervened with evangelical mansuetude: "Don't say 'assure' Mister Bernardes; in portuguese it's guarantee."
And the conversation continued after the amendment, to be again interrupted by another one. Because of these and other things, there were many talkers which moved away, but Pelino, indifferent, sure of his duties, continued his apostolate of vernaculism. The arrival of the wise man came to distract him a little from his mission. All his effort was now turned to combat that rival, which appeared so unexpectedly.
They were vain, his words and his eloquence: not only did Raimundo Flamel pay on time his bills, as he was generous --- father of the poverty --- and the pharmacist had seen in a magazine of specifics his name cited as chemist of value.
II
There were already years that the chemist lived in Tubiacanga, when, a beautiful morning, Bastos saw him enter through the drugstore in. The pleasure of the pharmacist was immense. The wise man had not dignated himself until then to visit whoever it was and, a certain day, when the sacristan Orestes dared penetrate in his house, asking him for an alms for the future party of Nossa Senhora da Conceição [Our Lady of Conception], it was with visible displeasure that he received and attended him.
Seeing him, Bastos got out from behind the counter, ran to receiving him with the most perfect demonstration of who knew with whom he was dealing and it was almost in an exclamation that he said:
-- Doctor, be welcome.
The wise man seemed not to surprise himself nor with the demonstration of respect of the pharmacist, nor with the universitary treatment. Sweetly, he looked an instant at the framework filled with medications and answered:
-- I wished to speak to you in private, Mister Bastos.
The pharmacist's astonishment was great. In what could he be useful to the man, whose name ran the world and of whom the newspapers talked with so scoured[4] respect? Would it be money? Maybe... A delay on the payment of the revenues, who knows? And he went conducting the chemist to the interior of the house, under the astonished look of the apprentice which, for a moment, let the "hand" rest on the grail, where he macerated some tisane.
At length, he found at the back, way at the back, the small room which served him for more time consuming medical exams or for the small operations, because Bastos also operated. They sat down and Flamel did not take long to expose:
-- As the mister must know, I dedicate myself to chemistry, and have even a respected name in the wise world...
-- I know it perfectly, doctor, I have even informed of this, here, my friends.
-- Thank you. Now well: I have made a great discovery, extraordinary...
Ashamed with his enthusiasm, the wise man made a pause and then continued:
-- A discovery... But it is not convenient for me, for now, to communicate to the wise world, do you comprehend?
-- Perfectly.
-- That's why I needed three conceptuated persons which would be witnesses of my experience of it and give me an attestation in form, to safeguard the priority of my invention... The mister knows: there are unforeseen happenings and...
-- Certainly! There is no doubt!
-- Imagine the mister that it is about making gold...
-- How? What? made Bastos, gazing with the eyes.
-- Yes! Gold! said, with firmity, Flamel.
-- How?
-- The mister will know, said the chemist drily. The question of the moment are the persons who shall attend to the experience, don't you think?
-- Surely, it is necessary that your rights stay safeguarded, because...
-- One of them, interrupted the wise man, is the mister; the other two, the Mister Bastos will do the favor of indicating to me.
The apothecary was an instant thinking, passing in review his knowledge and, at the end of some three minutes, asked:
-- Does the Colonel Bentes serve you? Do you know [him]?
-- No. The mister knows that I don't interact with no one here.
-- I can guarantee you that he is a serious man, rich and very discreet.
-- And religious? I ask you this question, added Flamel soon, because we have to deal with dead body bones and only these serve...
-- Which! He's almost an atheist.
-- Well! I accept. And the other one?
Bastos went back to thinking and this time took some more time consulting his memory... At length, he said:
-- It will be Lieutenant Carvalhais, the collector, do you know [him]?
-- As I've already told you...
-- It's true. He's a man of trust, serious, but...
-- What about him?
-- He's a freemason.
-- Better.
-- And when is it?
-- Sunday. Sunday, the three will go there at my house to attend to the experience and I hope that you won't refuse me your signatures for authenticating my discovery.
-- It is set.
Sunday, according to the promise, the three respected persons of Tubiacanga went to the house of Flamel, and, days later, misteriously, he disappeared without leaving vestiges or explanation for his disappearance.
III
Tubiacanga was a little town of three or four thousand inhabitants, very pacific, in whose station, from where to where, the expresses gave the honor of stopping. Since five years it was not registered in it a single theft or robbery. The doors and windows were only used... because Rio used them.
The only crime noted in its poor record had been a murder by occasion of the municipal elections; but, attending that the murderer was from the government party, and the victim from the opposition, the happening did not alter in nothing the habits of the town, continuing it to export its coffee and to stare at its low and bashful houses in the scarce waters of the little river which had baptized it.
But, what was not the surprise of its inhabitants when there came to be verified in it one of the most repugnant crimes of which there is memory! It was not about a quartering or parricide; it was not the murder of a whole family or an assault to the collecting house; it was something worse, sacrilegious to the eyes of all religions and consciences; the sepultures of "Sossego"[5] were being violated, its cemetery, its holy-field.
At the start, the gravedigger judged that it was dogs, but, searching well the wall, did not find but small holes. He closed them; it was useless. On the next day, a perpetual family vault[6] broken in and the bones sacked; on the other one, a charnel house and a shallow sepulture. It was people or demon. The gravedigger did not want anymore to continue the researches on his own, went to the subdelegate and the news spread through town.
The indignation in the town took all the countenances and all the wills. The religion of death precedes all the ones and will certainly be the last to die in the consciences. Against the profanation, claimed the six presbiterians of the place --- the bibles, as they're called by the people; claimed the Surveyor Nicolau, old cadet, and positivist from the rite Teixeira Mendes; claimed Major Camanho, president of the Lodge New Hope [Nova Esperança]; claimed the turk Miguel Abudala, dry goods trader, and the skeptic Belmiro, old student, who lived on the god-will-give, sipping parati[7] at the taverns. The daughter herself of the resident engineer of the railroad, who was always disdaining that little place, without even noticing the sighs of the local passionates, always waiting that the express would bring a prince to marry her ---, the beautiful and disdainful Cora could not refrain from sharing in the indignation and the horror which such an act had provoked in all of the little place. What did she have with the tumulus of ancient slaves and humble back country men[8]? In what could it interest her beautiful brown eyes the destiny of so humble bones? Would by chance their theft perturb her dream of making shine the beauty of her mouth, of her eyes and of her bust in the sidewalks of Rio?
Certainly, not; but it was Death, merciless and omnipotent Death, of which also she felt a slave, and that would not refrain one day from leading her beautiful little skull to the eternal peace of the cemetery. There Cora wanted her bones at rest, quiet and accommodatedly resting in a well-made coffin and in a safe tumulus, after having been her flesh an enchant and pleasure of the worms...
The most indignated one, however, was Pelino. The professor had laid article of back, imprecating, bellowing, shouting: "In the history of crime, said he, already rich enough of repugnant facts, as they be: the quartering of Maria de Macedo, the strangling of the brothers Fuoco, it is not registered one that is so as much as the sack to the sepultures of the 'Sossego'."
And the village lived in jumpiness. In the faces peace was no longer read; the businesses were paralized; the datings suspended. Days and days by above the houses stood dark clouds and, at night, all heard noises, moanings, supernatural sounds... It seemed that the dead were asking for revenge...
The sack, however, went on. Every night it was two, three sepultures opened and emptied of their funereal content. All the population resolved itself to go in mass to guard the bones of its majors. They went early, but, soon, giving up to fatigue and to the sleepiness, one left, then another and, by early morning[9], there was already not one vigilant. Still in this day the gravedigger verified that two sepultures had been opened and the bones taken to mysterious destiny.
They then organized a guard. Ten decided men swore before the subdelegate to watch during the night the mansion of the dead.
Nothing happened of abnormal on the first night, on the second and on the third; but, on the fourth one, when the watchers already disposed themselves to napping, one of them judged to glimpse a shadow cautiously directing itself by between the square of the charnel houses. They ran and managed to catch two of the vampires. The anger and the indignation, until then sopited in their spirit, were not contained anymore and they gave so many strikes at the macabre thieves, that they left them extended as dead.
The news soon ran from house to house and, when, by morning, it was treated of establishing the identity of the two malefactors, it was before the whole population that were recognized in them the Collector Carvalhais and the Colonel Bentes, rich farmer and president of the municipal council. This last one still lived and, to repeated questions they made him, could tell that he was gathering the bones to make gold and that the fellowman that had escaped was the pharmacist.
There was astonishment and there was hope. How to make gold with bones? Would it be possible? But that rich man, respected, how would he lower himself to the role of thief of dead ones if the thing were not true!
If it were possible to do, if from those miserable funereal spoils it could be made some contos de réis, how would it not be good for all of them!
The mailman, whose old dream was the graduation of the son, soon saw there means of getting it. Castrioto, the scribe of the judge of peace, which in the last year managed to buy a house, but still couldn't surround it, thought of the wall, which should protect his vegetable garden and the creation. By the eyes of the owner of a small farm Marques, which since years was confused to arrange a pasture, he thought soon of the green meadow of Costa, where his oxen would gain weight and strengths...
To the needs of each one, those bones which were gold would come to attend, satisfy and felicitate them; and those two or three thousand of people, men, children, women, young and old ones, as if they were a single person, ran to the house of the pharmacist.
Costly, the subdelegate could prevent them from ransacking the drugstore and he could manage that they stayed in the square, waiting for the man who had the secret of a whole Potosi. He did not take long to appear. Climbed to a chair, having in the hand a little bar of gold which shone to the strong sun of the morning, Bastos asked for grace, promising that he would teach the secret, if they spared his life. "We want to know it now," screamed they. He then explained that it was necessary to redact the recipe, indicate the march of the process, the reactives ---long work which could only be delivered on print on the next day. There was a murmur, some came to shouting, but the subdelegate spoke and responsibilized himself for the result.
Docilely, with that sweetness peculiar to the furious multitudes, each one headed home, having in mind a single thought: to arrange immediatly the larger portion of dead body bones they could.
The success reached the house of the resident engineer of the railroad. By dinner, nothing else was spoken of. The doctor concatenated what he still knew from his course, and declared that it was impossible. That was alchemy, a dead thing: gold is gold, simple body, and bone is bone, a compound, phosphate of lime. To think that it could be made from one thing the other was "folly". Cora took the opportunity of the case to laugh herself petropolily[10] of the cruelty of those botocudos[11]; but her mother, Mistress Emilia, had faith that the thing was possible.
At night, however, the doctor realizing that the wife slept, jumped the window and ran in the direction of the cemetery; Cora, with naked feet, with the house slippers in the hands, looked for the maid for them to go together to the gathering of bones. Didn't find her, went alone; and Mistress Emilia, seeing herself alone, guessed the walk and there she went too. And thus it happened all over the town. The father, without saying anything to the son, got out; the woman, judging to fool the husband, got out; the sons, the daughters, the domestics -- all the population, under the light of the astonished stars, ran to the satanic 'rendez-vous' in the "Sossego". And no one missed it. The richest one and the poorest one were there. It was the turk Miguel, it was professor Pelino, the doctor Jerônimo, the Major Camanho, Cora, the beautiful and mesmerizing Cora, with her beautiful alabaster fingers, revolved the sanies of the sepultures, tore off the meats, still rotten tenaciously held to the bones and with them filled her lap until then useless. It was the dote[12] that she gathered and her nostrils, which opened in rosy and nearly transparent wings, did not feel the fetid of the rotten tissues in stinking mud...
The disintelligence did not take long to appear; the dead were few and were not enough to satisfy the hunger of the living. There were knife-stabbings, shots, blows on the nape of the neck. Pelino knife-stabbed the turk because of a femur and even between the families questions arose. Uniquely, the mailman and his son did not fight. They walked together and in accordance and there was a time when the little one, a smart child of eleven years old, even counseled the father: "Daddy let's go where mommy is; she was so fat..."
By morning, the cemetery had more dead than those that it had received in thirty years of existence. A single person had not been there, had not killed nor profanated sepultures: it was the drunk Belmiro.
Entering in a small store, half opened, and in it not finding no one, he had filled a bottle of parati[7] and had let himself stay drinking sitting at the margin of the Tubiacanga, seeing its waters mildly flow over the rough bed of granite -- both of them, he and the river, indifferent to what they had already seen, even to the escape of the pharmacist, with his Potosi and his secret, under the eternal canopy of the stars.
1910-11-10
Notes:
[1] arrevesado, backwards, intricate.
[2] tinhoso, literally "sufferer from tinea"; evil natured; "Old Nick".
[3] mineiro, from Minas Gerais estate.
[4] acendrado, scoured with ashes.
[5] "Sossego", "Tranquillity".
[6] jazigo perpétuo.
[7] parati, cachaça.
[8] roceiros, men of the back country, frontiersmen, farmers.
[9] madrugada, dawn, early morning or wee hours.
[10] Petropolis, city in Rio de Janeiro estate.
[11] botocudos, a designation for some tribes of native americans.
[12] dote, dote, dowry.
Lima Barreto (Rio de Janeiro, 1881-05-13 -- Rio de Janeiro, 1922-11-01)
From: A Nova Califórnia
Translation by Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto
No one knew where that man had come from. The Mail agent could only inform that he answered to the name of Raimundo Flamel, because thus was subscribed the correspondence he received. And it was big. Almost daily, there went the mailman to one of the extremities of the town, where lived the unknown man, sustaining a robust pack of letters coming from the whole world, thick magazines in obscure[1] languages, books, packages...
When Fabrício, the mason, came back from a service at the house of the new inhabitant, all at the small store asked him what work had been determined to him.
-- I'll make an oven, said the black man, in the dining room.
Imagine the astonishment of the little town of Tubiacanga, in knowing of so extravagant a construction: an oven in the dining room! And, through the next days, Fabrício could tell that he had seen balloons of glasses, knives with no cut, cups as the ones of a pharmacy --- a roll of weird things showing themselves through the tables and shelves as utensils of a kitchen battery in which the devil himself cooked.
The alarm was made in the village. To some, the most advanced ones, it was a maker of fake currency; to others, the believers and simple ones, a type that had part with the Evil One[2].
Chico da Tirana, the carter, when he passed in front of the house of the mysterious man, next to the hissing car, and looked at the chimney of the dining room smoking, didn't refrain from crossing himself and praying a "credo" in low voice; and, were it not for the intervention of the pharmacist, the subdelegate would have gone give a siege to the house of that suspect individual, which uneased the imagination of a whole population.
Taking in consideration the information from Fabrício, the apothecary Bastos had concluded that the unknown man must be a wise man, a great chemist, in refuge there to more tranquilly take forward his scientific works.
Graduated man and respected in the city, councilman, doctor too, because doctor Jerônimo did not like to prescribe and had made himself an associate of the pharmacy to more in peace live, the opinion of Bastos took tranquillity to all the consciences and made the population surround with a silent admiration the person of the great chemist, which had come to inhabit the town.
By afternoon, if they saw him striding by the margin of the Tubiacanga, sitting here and there, looking lostly at the clear waters of the little river, preoccupied before the penetrating melancholy of the crepuscle, all uncovered themselves and it was not rare that to the "good evening" they added "doctor". And it touched the heart of that people very much the profound simpathy with which he treated the children, the way by which he contemplated them, seeming to take pity that they had been born to suffer and die.
In truth, it was to be seen, under the smooth sweetness of the afternoon, the goodness of Messiah with which he caressed those black children, so smooth of skin and so sad of ways, dived in their moral captivity, and also the white ones, of dark-complexioned, fissured and rough skin, living supported in the necessary cachexia of the tropics.
Sometimes, it came upon him the will to think what the reason was of having Bernardin de Saint-Pierre spent all his tenderness with Paul and Virginia and forgotten the slaves which surrounded them...
In few days the admiration for the wise man was almost general, and it wasn't so only because there was someone who didn't hold in great account the merits of the new inhabitant.
Captain Pelino, school-master and redactor of the ''Gazeta de Tubiacanga'', local organ and affiliated to the situationist party, showed aversion for the wise man. "You shall see, said he, who is this type... A bilk, and adventurer or maybe a thief runaway from Rio."
His opinion was based on nothing, or rather, was based on his occult spite seeing in the homeland a rival for the fame of wise man of which he enjoyed. Not that Pelino was a chemist, far from that; but he was wise, he was a grammarian. No one wrote in Tubiacanga which did not take strike of stick from Captain Pelino, and even when it was spoken of some notable man there in Rio, he did not refrain from saying: "There is no doubt! The man has talent, but writes: 'one other', 'of rest'..." And contracted the lips as if he had swallowed something bitter.
All the village of Tubiacanga accustomed itself to respecting the solemn Pelino, who corrected and amended the greatest national glories. A wise man...
By afternoon, after reading a little Sotero, Cândido de Figueiredo or Castro Lopes, and having once more dyed the hairs, the old school-master got slowly out of house, very buttoned in his mineiro[3] fine canvas jacket, and headed for the drugstore of Bastos to give two fingers of conversation. Conversing is a way of saying, because Pelino was avaricious of words, limiting himself so-only to hearing. When, however, from the lips of someone escaped the least incorrection of language, he intervened and amended. "I assure you, said the Mail agent, that..." By then, the school-master intervened with evangelical mansuetude: "Don't say 'assure' Mister Bernardes; in portuguese it's guarantee."
And the conversation continued after the amendment, to be again interrupted by another one. Because of these and other things, there were many talkers which moved away, but Pelino, indifferent, sure of his duties, continued his apostolate of vernaculism. The arrival of the wise man came to distract him a little from his mission. All his effort was now turned to combat that rival, which appeared so unexpectedly.
They were vain, his words and his eloquence: not only did Raimundo Flamel pay on time his bills, as he was generous --- father of the poverty --- and the pharmacist had seen in a magazine of specifics his name cited as chemist of value.
II
There were already years that the chemist lived in Tubiacanga, when, a beautiful morning, Bastos saw him enter through the drugstore in. The pleasure of the pharmacist was immense. The wise man had not dignated himself until then to visit whoever it was and, a certain day, when the sacristan Orestes dared penetrate in his house, asking him for an alms for the future party of Nossa Senhora da Conceição [Our Lady of Conception], it was with visible displeasure that he received and attended him.
Seeing him, Bastos got out from behind the counter, ran to receiving him with the most perfect demonstration of who knew with whom he was dealing and it was almost in an exclamation that he said:
-- Doctor, be welcome.
The wise man seemed not to surprise himself nor with the demonstration of respect of the pharmacist, nor with the universitary treatment. Sweetly, he looked an instant at the framework filled with medications and answered:
-- I wished to speak to you in private, Mister Bastos.
The pharmacist's astonishment was great. In what could he be useful to the man, whose name ran the world and of whom the newspapers talked with so scoured[4] respect? Would it be money? Maybe... A delay on the payment of the revenues, who knows? And he went conducting the chemist to the interior of the house, under the astonished look of the apprentice which, for a moment, let the "hand" rest on the grail, where he macerated some tisane.
At length, he found at the back, way at the back, the small room which served him for more time consuming medical exams or for the small operations, because Bastos also operated. They sat down and Flamel did not take long to expose:
-- As the mister must know, I dedicate myself to chemistry, and have even a respected name in the wise world...
-- I know it perfectly, doctor, I have even informed of this, here, my friends.
-- Thank you. Now well: I have made a great discovery, extraordinary...
Ashamed with his enthusiasm, the wise man made a pause and then continued:
-- A discovery... But it is not convenient for me, for now, to communicate to the wise world, do you comprehend?
-- Perfectly.
-- That's why I needed three conceptuated persons which would be witnesses of my experience of it and give me an attestation in form, to safeguard the priority of my invention... The mister knows: there are unforeseen happenings and...
-- Certainly! There is no doubt!
-- Imagine the mister that it is about making gold...
-- How? What? made Bastos, gazing with the eyes.
-- Yes! Gold! said, with firmity, Flamel.
-- How?
-- The mister will know, said the chemist drily. The question of the moment are the persons who shall attend to the experience, don't you think?
-- Surely, it is necessary that your rights stay safeguarded, because...
-- One of them, interrupted the wise man, is the mister; the other two, the Mister Bastos will do the favor of indicating to me.
The apothecary was an instant thinking, passing in review his knowledge and, at the end of some three minutes, asked:
-- Does the Colonel Bentes serve you? Do you know [him]?
-- No. The mister knows that I don't interact with no one here.
-- I can guarantee you that he is a serious man, rich and very discreet.
-- And religious? I ask you this question, added Flamel soon, because we have to deal with dead body bones and only these serve...
-- Which! He's almost an atheist.
-- Well! I accept. And the other one?
Bastos went back to thinking and this time took some more time consulting his memory... At length, he said:
-- It will be Lieutenant Carvalhais, the collector, do you know [him]?
-- As I've already told you...
-- It's true. He's a man of trust, serious, but...
-- What about him?
-- He's a freemason.
-- Better.
-- And when is it?
-- Sunday. Sunday, the three will go there at my house to attend to the experience and I hope that you won't refuse me your signatures for authenticating my discovery.
-- It is set.
Sunday, according to the promise, the three respected persons of Tubiacanga went to the house of Flamel, and, days later, misteriously, he disappeared without leaving vestiges or explanation for his disappearance.
III
Tubiacanga was a little town of three or four thousand inhabitants, very pacific, in whose station, from where to where, the expresses gave the honor of stopping. Since five years it was not registered in it a single theft or robbery. The doors and windows were only used... because Rio used them.
The only crime noted in its poor record had been a murder by occasion of the municipal elections; but, attending that the murderer was from the government party, and the victim from the opposition, the happening did not alter in nothing the habits of the town, continuing it to export its coffee and to stare at its low and bashful houses in the scarce waters of the little river which had baptized it.
But, what was not the surprise of its inhabitants when there came to be verified in it one of the most repugnant crimes of which there is memory! It was not about a quartering or parricide; it was not the murder of a whole family or an assault to the collecting house; it was something worse, sacrilegious to the eyes of all religions and consciences; the sepultures of "Sossego"[5] were being violated, its cemetery, its holy-field.
At the start, the gravedigger judged that it was dogs, but, searching well the wall, did not find but small holes. He closed them; it was useless. On the next day, a perpetual family vault[6] broken in and the bones sacked; on the other one, a charnel house and a shallow sepulture. It was people or demon. The gravedigger did not want anymore to continue the researches on his own, went to the subdelegate and the news spread through town.
The indignation in the town took all the countenances and all the wills. The religion of death precedes all the ones and will certainly be the last to die in the consciences. Against the profanation, claimed the six presbiterians of the place --- the bibles, as they're called by the people; claimed the Surveyor Nicolau, old cadet, and positivist from the rite Teixeira Mendes; claimed Major Camanho, president of the Lodge New Hope [Nova Esperança]; claimed the turk Miguel Abudala, dry goods trader, and the skeptic Belmiro, old student, who lived on the god-will-give, sipping parati[7] at the taverns. The daughter herself of the resident engineer of the railroad, who was always disdaining that little place, without even noticing the sighs of the local passionates, always waiting that the express would bring a prince to marry her ---, the beautiful and disdainful Cora could not refrain from sharing in the indignation and the horror which such an act had provoked in all of the little place. What did she have with the tumulus of ancient slaves and humble back country men[8]? In what could it interest her beautiful brown eyes the destiny of so humble bones? Would by chance their theft perturb her dream of making shine the beauty of her mouth, of her eyes and of her bust in the sidewalks of Rio?
Certainly, not; but it was Death, merciless and omnipotent Death, of which also she felt a slave, and that would not refrain one day from leading her beautiful little skull to the eternal peace of the cemetery. There Cora wanted her bones at rest, quiet and accommodatedly resting in a well-made coffin and in a safe tumulus, after having been her flesh an enchant and pleasure of the worms...
The most indignated one, however, was Pelino. The professor had laid article of back, imprecating, bellowing, shouting: "In the history of crime, said he, already rich enough of repugnant facts, as they be: the quartering of Maria de Macedo, the strangling of the brothers Fuoco, it is not registered one that is so as much as the sack to the sepultures of the 'Sossego'."
And the village lived in jumpiness. In the faces peace was no longer read; the businesses were paralized; the datings suspended. Days and days by above the houses stood dark clouds and, at night, all heard noises, moanings, supernatural sounds... It seemed that the dead were asking for revenge...
The sack, however, went on. Every night it was two, three sepultures opened and emptied of their funereal content. All the population resolved itself to go in mass to guard the bones of its majors. They went early, but, soon, giving up to fatigue and to the sleepiness, one left, then another and, by early morning[9], there was already not one vigilant. Still in this day the gravedigger verified that two sepultures had been opened and the bones taken to mysterious destiny.
They then organized a guard. Ten decided men swore before the subdelegate to watch during the night the mansion of the dead.
Nothing happened of abnormal on the first night, on the second and on the third; but, on the fourth one, when the watchers already disposed themselves to napping, one of them judged to glimpse a shadow cautiously directing itself by between the square of the charnel houses. They ran and managed to catch two of the vampires. The anger and the indignation, until then sopited in their spirit, were not contained anymore and they gave so many strikes at the macabre thieves, that they left them extended as dead.
The news soon ran from house to house and, when, by morning, it was treated of establishing the identity of the two malefactors, it was before the whole population that were recognized in them the Collector Carvalhais and the Colonel Bentes, rich farmer and president of the municipal council. This last one still lived and, to repeated questions they made him, could tell that he was gathering the bones to make gold and that the fellowman that had escaped was the pharmacist.
There was astonishment and there was hope. How to make gold with bones? Would it be possible? But that rich man, respected, how would he lower himself to the role of thief of dead ones if the thing were not true!
If it were possible to do, if from those miserable funereal spoils it could be made some contos de réis, how would it not be good for all of them!
The mailman, whose old dream was the graduation of the son, soon saw there means of getting it. Castrioto, the scribe of the judge of peace, which in the last year managed to buy a house, but still couldn't surround it, thought of the wall, which should protect his vegetable garden and the creation. By the eyes of the owner of a small farm Marques, which since years was confused to arrange a pasture, he thought soon of the green meadow of Costa, where his oxen would gain weight and strengths...
To the needs of each one, those bones which were gold would come to attend, satisfy and felicitate them; and those two or three thousand of people, men, children, women, young and old ones, as if they were a single person, ran to the house of the pharmacist.
Costly, the subdelegate could prevent them from ransacking the drugstore and he could manage that they stayed in the square, waiting for the man who had the secret of a whole Potosi. He did not take long to appear. Climbed to a chair, having in the hand a little bar of gold which shone to the strong sun of the morning, Bastos asked for grace, promising that he would teach the secret, if they spared his life. "We want to know it now," screamed they. He then explained that it was necessary to redact the recipe, indicate the march of the process, the reactives ---long work which could only be delivered on print on the next day. There was a murmur, some came to shouting, but the subdelegate spoke and responsibilized himself for the result.
Docilely, with that sweetness peculiar to the furious multitudes, each one headed home, having in mind a single thought: to arrange immediatly the larger portion of dead body bones they could.
The success reached the house of the resident engineer of the railroad. By dinner, nothing else was spoken of. The doctor concatenated what he still knew from his course, and declared that it was impossible. That was alchemy, a dead thing: gold is gold, simple body, and bone is bone, a compound, phosphate of lime. To think that it could be made from one thing the other was "folly". Cora took the opportunity of the case to laugh herself petropolily[10] of the cruelty of those botocudos[11]; but her mother, Mistress Emilia, had faith that the thing was possible.
At night, however, the doctor realizing that the wife slept, jumped the window and ran in the direction of the cemetery; Cora, with naked feet, with the house slippers in the hands, looked for the maid for them to go together to the gathering of bones. Didn't find her, went alone; and Mistress Emilia, seeing herself alone, guessed the walk and there she went too. And thus it happened all over the town. The father, without saying anything to the son, got out; the woman, judging to fool the husband, got out; the sons, the daughters, the domestics -- all the population, under the light of the astonished stars, ran to the satanic 'rendez-vous' in the "Sossego". And no one missed it. The richest one and the poorest one were there. It was the turk Miguel, it was professor Pelino, the doctor Jerônimo, the Major Camanho, Cora, the beautiful and mesmerizing Cora, with her beautiful alabaster fingers, revolved the sanies of the sepultures, tore off the meats, still rotten tenaciously held to the bones and with them filled her lap until then useless. It was the dote[12] that she gathered and her nostrils, which opened in rosy and nearly transparent wings, did not feel the fetid of the rotten tissues in stinking mud...
The disintelligence did not take long to appear; the dead were few and were not enough to satisfy the hunger of the living. There were knife-stabbings, shots, blows on the nape of the neck. Pelino knife-stabbed the turk because of a femur and even between the families questions arose. Uniquely, the mailman and his son did not fight. They walked together and in accordance and there was a time when the little one, a smart child of eleven years old, even counseled the father: "Daddy let's go where mommy is; she was so fat..."
By morning, the cemetery had more dead than those that it had received in thirty years of existence. A single person had not been there, had not killed nor profanated sepultures: it was the drunk Belmiro.
Entering in a small store, half opened, and in it not finding no one, he had filled a bottle of parati[7] and had let himself stay drinking sitting at the margin of the Tubiacanga, seeing its waters mildly flow over the rough bed of granite -- both of them, he and the river, indifferent to what they had already seen, even to the escape of the pharmacist, with his Potosi and his secret, under the eternal canopy of the stars.
1910-11-10
Notes:
[1] arrevesado, backwards, intricate.
[2] tinhoso, literally "sufferer from tinea"; evil natured; "Old Nick".
[3] mineiro, from Minas Gerais estate.
[4] acendrado, scoured with ashes.
[5] "Sossego", "Tranquillity".
[6] jazigo perpétuo.
[7] parati, cachaça.
[8] roceiros, men of the back country, frontiersmen, farmers.
[9] madrugada, dawn, early morning or wee hours.
[10] Petropolis, city in Rio de Janeiro estate.
[11] botocudos, a designation for some tribes of native americans.
[12] dote, dote, dowry.
Old Lima
Artur Azevedo
From: Contos Fora de Moda
To Fricinal Vassico
Translation by Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto
Old Lima, who was an employee -- old employee -- at one of our public partitions, and resided at Engenho de Dentro, fell to bed, seriously ill, on the day 14 of november of 1889, that is, on the eve of the proclamation of the Republic of the United States of Brazil.
The sick man did not consider the illness as a thing of care, and so much thus it was that he didn't want no doctor: it sufficed him some home remedies, caringly administrated by a glossy[1] mulatta which since twenty-five years treated him with equal solicitude of love and of kitchen. However, old Lima was homesick for eight days.
Our man had the habit of not reading newspapers, and, as at home nothing was told to him (because nothing they knew), he ignored completely that the Empire had transformed into a Republic.
On day 23, reestablished and ready for another one he bought a ticket, following his custom, and took a place on the train, next to commendatary Vidal, who received him with these words:
-- Good morning, citizen.
Old Lima estranged the ''citizen'', but from him to himself thought that the commendatary had said that as he could have said ''illustrious'', and gave no major importance to the compliment, limiting himself to answer!
-- Good morning, commendatary.
-- Which commendatary! Call me Vidal! There are no commendataries already!
-- Now this one! Then why?
-- The Republic gave closure to all the commends! They're over!...
Old Lima faced the commendatary, and silenced, fearing not having understood the joke.
Some minutes later, asked him the other one:
-- How are you going with Aristides?
-- Which Aristides?
-- The Silveira Lobo.
-- Me?... where?... how?...
-- What the hell! but isn't Aristides your minister? Are you not employee at a partition of the Ministry of the Interior?
This time there was not inside old Lima's spirit the least doubt that the commendatary had gone insane.
-- What will be doing at these hours Pedro II? asked Vidal, some moments later. Sonnets, naturally, which is of what more occupies himself that type!
-- Now look, reflected old Lima, now look what it is to lose reason: this man when he was in his judgement was so monarchist, so friend to the emperor.
However, old Lima indignated himself, seeing that the subdelegate of his parish, seated at the train, facing him, approved with a smile the commendatary's perfidy.
-- A police authority! murmured old Lima.
And the commendatary added:
-- I just want to see how the Brazilian minister receives Pedro II in Lisbon; he shall get there at the start of the month.
Old Lima was moved:
-- Doesn't say thing with thing, poor one!
-- And the flag? What do you say of the flag?
-- Ah, yes... the flag... yes... repeated old Lima not to contradict him.
-- How do you prefer it: with or without lemma?
-- Without lemma, answered the good man in a tone of profound grief; without lemma.
-- The same as I; I don't know what it means, a flag with a writing.
As the train took a little longer at one of the stations, old Lima turned to the subdelegate, and told him:
-- It seems we're going to stay here! it's getting worse, the service of Pedro II!
-- Which Pedro II! shouted the commendatary. This is no longer of Pedro II! Let him content himself with the five thousand contos!
-- And let him go to the house of the devil! added the subdelegate.
Old Lima was astonished. Took the resolution of silencing.
Arriving at the Acclamation square, he got in a street-car and went to his secretariate without noticing anything nor hearing anything that could put him in the knowing of what had passed.
He noticed, however, that a vandal was very busy tearing off the imperial crowns which adorned the grating of the Acclamation square...
Entering the secretariate, a black and poorly dressed servent did not compliment him with the usual humbleness; limited himself to say:
-- Citizen!
-- They're on today to calling me citizen! thought old Lima.
Going up, he crossed at the stairs with an acquaintance of old date.
-- Oh! you around here! A revolutionary in an Estate partition!...
The friend complimented him cerimoniously.
-- They want to see he's already someone! reflected old Lima.
-- Tomorrow I leave for Paraiba, said the cerimonious subject, extending to him the tips of the fingers; as you know, I'll exercise the charge of chief of police. There I am at your disposal.
And left.
-- I soon saw! But what a shameless one[2]! A most exalted republican!...
Entering his section, old Lima noticed that the portieres had disappeared.
-- Very well! he said to himself; it was a good measure to suppress such heavy portieres, now that we're going to enter the calmous season.
He sat down, and saw that they had taken from the wall an old lithograph representing D. Pedro of Alcântara. As at the occasion an office boy passed by, he asked him:
-- Why did they take from the wall the portrait of his majesty?
The office boy answered in a slowly disdainful tone:
-- Well, citizen, what was it doing there the figure of Pedro Banana?
-- Pedro Banana! repeated, angry, old Lima.
And, sitting down, he thought with sadness:
-- I don't give it three years for this to be a republic.
Notes:
[1] nédia, sleek, glossy, plump.
[2] descarado, faceless one.
Artur Azevedo
From: Contos Fora de Moda
To Fricinal Vassico
Translation by Herculano de Lima Einloft Neto
Old Lima, who was an employee -- old employee -- at one of our public partitions, and resided at Engenho de Dentro, fell to bed, seriously ill, on the day 14 of november of 1889, that is, on the eve of the proclamation of the Republic of the United States of Brazil.
The sick man did not consider the illness as a thing of care, and so much thus it was that he didn't want no doctor: it sufficed him some home remedies, caringly administrated by a glossy[1] mulatta which since twenty-five years treated him with equal solicitude of love and of kitchen. However, old Lima was homesick for eight days.
Our man had the habit of not reading newspapers, and, as at home nothing was told to him (because nothing they knew), he ignored completely that the Empire had transformed into a Republic.
On day 23, reestablished and ready for another one he bought a ticket, following his custom, and took a place on the train, next to commendatary Vidal, who received him with these words:
-- Good morning, citizen.
Old Lima estranged the ''citizen'', but from him to himself thought that the commendatary had said that as he could have said ''illustrious'', and gave no major importance to the compliment, limiting himself to answer!
-- Good morning, commendatary.
-- Which commendatary! Call me Vidal! There are no commendataries already!
-- Now this one! Then why?
-- The Republic gave closure to all the commends! They're over!...
Old Lima faced the commendatary, and silenced, fearing not having understood the joke.
Some minutes later, asked him the other one:
-- How are you going with Aristides?
-- Which Aristides?
-- The Silveira Lobo.
-- Me?... where?... how?...
-- What the hell! but isn't Aristides your minister? Are you not employee at a partition of the Ministry of the Interior?
This time there was not inside old Lima's spirit the least doubt that the commendatary had gone insane.
-- What will be doing at these hours Pedro II? asked Vidal, some moments later. Sonnets, naturally, which is of what more occupies himself that type!
-- Now look, reflected old Lima, now look what it is to lose reason: this man when he was in his judgement was so monarchist, so friend to the emperor.
However, old Lima indignated himself, seeing that the subdelegate of his parish, seated at the train, facing him, approved with a smile the commendatary's perfidy.
-- A police authority! murmured old Lima.
And the commendatary added:
-- I just want to see how the Brazilian minister receives Pedro II in Lisbon; he shall get there at the start of the month.
Old Lima was moved:
-- Doesn't say thing with thing, poor one!
-- And the flag? What do you say of the flag?
-- Ah, yes... the flag... yes... repeated old Lima not to contradict him.
-- How do you prefer it: with or without lemma?
-- Without lemma, answered the good man in a tone of profound grief; without lemma.
-- The same as I; I don't know what it means, a flag with a writing.
As the train took a little longer at one of the stations, old Lima turned to the subdelegate, and told him:
-- It seems we're going to stay here! it's getting worse, the service of Pedro II!
-- Which Pedro II! shouted the commendatary. This is no longer of Pedro II! Let him content himself with the five thousand contos!
-- And let him go to the house of the devil! added the subdelegate.
Old Lima was astonished. Took the resolution of silencing.
Arriving at the Acclamation square, he got in a street-car and went to his secretariate without noticing anything nor hearing anything that could put him in the knowing of what had passed.
He noticed, however, that a vandal was very busy tearing off the imperial crowns which adorned the grating of the Acclamation square...
Entering the secretariate, a black and poorly dressed servent did not compliment him with the usual humbleness; limited himself to say:
-- Citizen!
-- They're on today to calling me citizen! thought old Lima.
Going up, he crossed at the stairs with an acquaintance of old date.
-- Oh! you around here! A revolutionary in an Estate partition!...
The friend complimented him cerimoniously.
-- They want to see he's already someone! reflected old Lima.
-- Tomorrow I leave for Paraiba, said the cerimonious subject, extending to him the tips of the fingers; as you know, I'll exercise the charge of chief of police. There I am at your disposal.
And left.
-- I soon saw! But what a shameless one[2]! A most exalted republican!...
Entering his section, old Lima noticed that the portieres had disappeared.
-- Very well! he said to himself; it was a good measure to suppress such heavy portieres, now that we're going to enter the calmous season.
He sat down, and saw that they had taken from the wall an old lithograph representing D. Pedro of Alcântara. As at the occasion an office boy passed by, he asked him:
-- Why did they take from the wall the portrait of his majesty?
The office boy answered in a slowly disdainful tone:
-- Well, citizen, what was it doing there the figure of Pedro Banana?
-- Pedro Banana! repeated, angry, old Lima.
And, sitting down, he thought with sadness:
-- I don't give it three years for this to be a republic.
Notes:
[1] nédia, sleek, glossy, plump.
[2] descarado, faceless one.
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