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

that she loved him and that she loved him a great deal. He wasn’t old. He was going on forty-one and, quite frankly, he looked younger. That observation was accompanied by a gesture. He ran his hand over his chin, shaved every day, something he hadn’t done before out of frugality and because there was no need. A simple teacher! He wore sideburns (later on he let his full beard grow)—so soft that it was a pleasure to run his fingers through them … And in that way he was remembering the first meeting, at the Vassouras station, where Sofia and her husband were getting on the train, into the same car on which he was coming from Minas. It was there that he discovered that set of luxuriant eyes that seemed to be repeating the exhortation of the prophet: Come unto the waters all ye who thirst. He didn’t have any ideas in response to that invitation, it’s true. He had the inheritance on his mind, the will, the inventory, things that must be explained first in order to understand the present and the future. Let’s leave Rubião in his parlor in Botafogo, tapping the tassels of his robe against his knees and thinking about the beautiful Sofia. Come with me,reader. Let’s have a look at him months earlier by the bed of Quincas Borba.

IV
     
    T his Quincas Borba, in case you have done me the favor of
JL
reading
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
, is that very same castaway from existence who appeared there, a beggar, an unexpected heir, and the inventor of a philosophy. Here you have him in Barbacena now. No sooner had he arrived than he fell in love with a widow, a lady of middle-class station and with scarce means of livelihood, but so bashful that the sighs of her lover found no echo. Her name was Maria da Piedade. A brother of hers, who is the Rubião here present, did everything possible to get them married. Piedade resisted and pleurisy carried her off.
    It was that little novelistic bit that brought the two men together. Could Rubião have known that our Quincas Borba carried that little grain of lunacy that a doctor thought he found in him? Certainly not. He took him to be a strange man. It’s true, however, that the little grain hadn’t left Quincas Borba’s brain—neither before nor after the malady that slowly devoured him. Quincas Borba had some relatives there in Barbacena, all dead now in 1867. The last was the uncle who left him heir to his goods. Rubião was left as the philosopher’s only friend. At that time Rubião was running a school for children, which he closed in order to care for the sick man. Before being a school teacher, he’d tried his hand at some enterprises that went under.
    His job as nurse lasted more than five months, closer to six. Rubião’s care was superb. It was patient, smiling, multiple, listening to the doctor’s orders, administering medicine at the prescribed time, taking the patient out for a walk, never forgetting anything, neither the management of the house nor the reading of newspapers as soon as they arrived from the capital or from Ouro Preto.
    “You’re a good man, Rubião,” Quincas Borba would sigh.
    “That’s a fine thing to say! As if you were a bad one!”
    The doctor’s considered opinion was that Quincas Borba’s illness would slowly follow its path. One day our Rubião, seeing the doctor to the street door, asked him what was the real state of his friend’s health. He heard that he was done for, completely done for, but he should be cheered up. Why make death all the worse by letting him know the truth … ?
    “None of that, no,” Rubião put in. “For him dying is an easy matter. You’ve never read a book he wrote years ago, I can’t remember, some kind of philosophy…”
    “No. But philosophy is one thing and dying is another. Goodbye.”

V
     
    R ubião had a rival for Quincas Borba’s heart—a dog, a hand-Some dog, medium–sized, lead–colored with black markings. Quincas Borba took him everywhere. They slept in the same room.