The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil Read Online Free PDF Page A

were for something different, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the bill was for an unnecessary luxury, a fur coat, an enormous encumbrance really, heavy and hot … Gonçalves swore at the shop owner and even more at his father’s agent. Why had the man gone and told his father? What a letter his father was going to write now! What a letter! Gonçalves could just imagine what it would say, because it wouldn’t be the first. Last time his father had threatened to cut off his money completely.
    After swearing at the agent and changing his mind several times about what to do next, Gonçalves decided that the best plan was to go straight to the fellow’s house armed with his walking cane, tell him a thing or two, and give him a thrashing if he answered back. It was an energetic and immediate response, a fairly easy one, and (his heart said) it would set an example for the ages.
    “Don’t bother me, scoundrel, or I’ll smash your face!”
    Agitated and tremulous, he dressed in a hurry and, wonder of wonders, didn’t even put on a necktie until, halfway down the stairs, he noticed its absence and went back to choose one. He brandished his walking cane in the air like a sword to see if it was ready for action. It was.
    “Take that, you scoundrel!”
    He apparently then delivered several loud blows to the chairs and floorboards, provoking a shout from an irritable neighbor. Finally, he left, his twenty fervent years boiling in his veins, incapable of swallowing the insult and disguising his annoyance.
    Once outside, Gonçalves passed the Ocean Walk, Our Lady of Perpetual Help Street, and Goldsmith Street. He went all the way to Ouvidor Street, and it occurred to him he could go that way to the agent’s house. So he took Ouvidor, but he didn’t turn to look at fellows who waved at him there, or even at the pretty girls who were out for a walk. Like a charging bull, he looked neither left nor right. Someone called his name.
    “Gonçalves! Gonçalves!”
    He charged ahead as if he hadn’t heard. The voice came from the open front of a café. The caller called again, then emerged and grabbed him by the shoulder.
    “Where are you going?”
    “I’ll be right back—”
    “Come here for a moment.”
    And he pulled Gonçalves by the arm into the café where three other young men were sitting at a table. They were his classmates, all the same age as he. They asked where he was going. “To punish an uppity scoundrel,” replied Gonçalves, by which his four friends knew that his target was neither church nor state, but, rather, someone to whom he owed money or, very probably, a rival. One of them went so far as to say that he should leave Brito alone.
    “What about Brito?”
    “What about him? What about Brito, the chosen one, the big man with the mustache, whom Chiquinha Coelho liked better than you? Or don’t you remember Chiquinha anymore?”
    With a shrug, Gonçalves summoned a waiter and ordered a small cup of black, sweet coffee. This wasn’t about Chiquinha, and it wasn’t about Brito. It was about something quite serious. The coffee came, and he rolled a cigarette while one of his friends confessed that Chiquinha was the prettiest girl that he’d seen since coming to Rio de Janeiro. Gonçalves said nothing. He smoked his cigarette, drank his coffee in small, slow sips, and gazed into the street. Then he interrupted his friends to declare that Chiquinha was pretty, but not the prettiest, and he cited five or six others. Some of his friends agreed entirely, some partly, and some not at all. Chiquinha, the incomparable. Various analyses. A lengthy debate.
    “More coffee,” ordered Gonçalves.
    “Some cognac?”
    They drank coffee and cognac. One of the beauties that they were talking about passed by, at that point, strolling down Ouvidor Street on the arm of her father, a deputy in the National Assembly. The father’s appearance turned the debate in a political direction. He was about to be named head of an imperial