Quincas Borba (Library of Latin America) Read Online Free PDF

in private and now I do so cordially and publicly.
    —
Machado de Assis, 1899

I
     
    R ubião was staring at the cove—it was eight o’clock in the morning. Anyone who’d seen him with his thumbs stuck in the belt of his dressing gown at the window of a mansion in Botafogo would have thought he was admiring that stretch of calm water, but in reality I can tell you he was thinking about something else. He was comparing the past to the present. What was he a year ago? A teacher. What is he now? A capitalist. He looks at himself, at his slippers (slippers from Tunis that his new friend Cristiano Palha had given him), at the house, at the garden, at the cove, at the hills, and at the sky, and everything, from slippers to sky, everything gives off the same feeling of property.
    “See how God writes straight with crooked lines,” he thinks. “If my sister Piedade had married Quincas Borba it would have left me with only a collateral hope. She didn’t marry him. They both died, and here I am with everything, so what looked like misfortune…”

II
     
    W hat a gulf there is between the spirit and the heart! ex–teacher’s spirit, bothered by those thoughts, changed course, looked for a different subject, a canoe passing by. His heart, however, let itself go on beating with joy. What difference did it make if there was a canoe or a canoeist or that Rubião’s wide-open eyes followed him? It, the heart, goes along saying that since sister Piedade had to die, it was good that she hadn’t married. There might have been a son or a daughter… “What a fine canoe!” So much the better! “The way it follows the man’s paddle!” What’s certain is that they’re in heaven!

III
     
    A servant brought him coffee. Rubião picked up the cup and while he was putting in the sugar he was surreptitiously looking at the tray, which was silver work. Silver, gold, they were the metals he loved with all his heart. He didn’t like bronze, but his friend Palha told him that it was valuable and that explained the pair of figures here in the living room, a Mephistopheles and a Faust. If he had to choose, however, he would choose the tray—a masterpiece of silver work, of delicate and perfect execution. The servant was waiting, stiff and serious. He was Spanish, and it had only been after some resistance that Rubião accepted him from the hands of Cristiano, no matter how much he argued that he was used to his blacks from Minas Gerais and didn’t want any foreign languages in his house. His friend Palha insisted, pointing out the necessity of having white servants. Rubião gave in regretfully. His good manservant, whom he wished to keep in the parlor as a touch of the provinces, couldn’t even stay in the kitchen, where a Frenchman, Jean, reigned. The slave was downgraded to other duties.
    “Is Quincas Borba getting impatient?” Rubião asked, drinking his last sip of coffee and casting a last glance at the tray.
    “Me parece que si.”
    “I’ll be right there and set him loose.”’
    He didn’t go. He allowed himself to stay there for a while, gazing at the furniture. Looking at the small English prints that hung on the wall over the two bronzes, Rubião thought about the beautiful Sofia, Palha’s wife, took a few steps and went over to sit down on the ottoman in the center of the room, staring off into the distance …
    “It was she who recommended those two small pictures to me when the three of us were out shopping. She was so pretty! But what I like best about her are her shoulders, which I saw at the colonel’s ball. What shoulders! They looked like wax, so smooth, so white! Her arms, too, oh, her arms! So well shaped!”
    Rubião sighed, crossed his legs and tapped the tassels of his robe against his knees. He felt that he wasn’t entirely happy, but he also felt that complete happiness wasn’t far off. He reconstructed in his head some mannerisms, some looks, some unexplained swaying of the body which had to mean