The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray Read Online Free PDF

was bellowing out the superiority of a real estate firm’s sales plan.

6
    Uncle Eduardo went back to his store. He couldn’t leave it alone in the hands of his workers, a bunch of hoodlums. Aunt Marocas promised to come back later for the wake. She had to stop by her home; she’d left everything in a mess in the flurry of receiving the news. Leonardo, on the advice of Vanda herself, was taking the afternoon off from his office in order to visit the real estate company and complete the sale of a lot they were buying on an installment plan. One day, God willing, they would have their own house.
    They had set up a kind of rotation, taking turns with the body: Vanda and Aunt Marocas in the afternoon, Leonardo and Uncle Eduardo at night. The Tabuão hillside neighborhood wasn’t any place for a lady to be seen at night; it was a section with a bad reputation, filled with hooligans and ladies of the evening. The next morning the whole family would come together for the burial.
    That was how Vanda found herself alone in the afternoon with her father’s corpse. The sounds of a poor and intense life just reached the third floor of the tenement where the dead man was resting after the fatigue of having his clothes changed.
    The men from the funeral parlor had done a good job. They were competent and well trained. The image vendorhad said when he stopped by for a moment to see how things were going, “He doesn’t even look dead.” His hair combed, shaved, dressed in black, a white shirt, and a tie, with a pair of shined shoes, it really was Joaquim Soares da Cunha who was resting in the coffin—a splendid casket (Vanda stated this with satisfaction), with gold handles and frills on the edges. They had improvised a kind of table with some boards and sawhorses, and onto it they’d lifted the noble and austere casket. Two large candles—the kind used on a main altar, Vanda boasted—were giving off a weak illumination because the light of Bahia was coming in through the window and filling the room. All that sunshine, so much merry light, seemed to Vanda to be a disrespect for the dead as it negated the candles, taking away their august light. For a moment she thought about snuffing them out, for reasons of economy. But since the undertaker would no doubt charge the same for the use of two or of ten candles, she decided to shut the window, and shadows took over the room as the holy flames leaped up again like tongues of fire. Vanda sat down on a chair (a loan from the image vendor), feeling satisfaction. Not the simple satisfaction of having fulfilled her daughterly duty, but something deeper.
    A complacent sigh escaped her breast. She fixed her brown hair with her hands. It was as though she had finally tamed Quincas, as though she were holding the reins again, the ones he had torn from Otacília’s strong hands one day as he laughed in her face. The shadow of a smile bloomed on Vanda’s lips, and it might have been beautiful and desirable had not a certain firm hardness marked it. She felt avenged for everything that Quincas had made the family suffer, especially herself and Otacília. The humiliation of all those years. There had been ten of them since Joaquim had begun to lead that absurd life. “The king of the tramps of Bahia,” the crime blotter in the newspapers had saidabout him, a street type mentioned in the chronicles by literary people, avid for something quick and picturesque. Ten years of shame for the family as it was splashed with the shame of that disreputable celebrity, the “boozer in chief of Salvador,” the “tatterdemalion philosopher of the market dock,” the “senator of honky-tonks,” “Quincas Water-Bray, tramp par excellence”—just look at the treatment he received from the newspapers, where they would sometimes print a picture of him, all covered in filth. My God: how much a daughter can suffer in this world where fate has reserved for her the cross of a father with no awareness at all