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)