The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas Read Online Free PDF Page A

was the pleasure I would have seeing in print in newspapers, on store counters, in pamphlets, on street corners, and, finally, on boxes of the medicine these three words:
Brás Cubas Poultice
. Why deny it? I had a passion for ballyhoo, the limelight, fireworks. More modest people will censure me perhaps for this defect. I’m confident, however, that clever people will recognize this talent of mine. So my idea had two faces, like a medal, one turned toward the public and the other toward me. On one side philanthropy and profit, on the other a thirst for fame. Let us say:—love of glory.
    An uncle of mine, a canon with full prebend, liked to say that love of temporal glory was the perdition of souls, who should covet only eternal glory. To which another uncle, an officer in one of those old infantry regiments called
terços
, would retort that love of glory was the most truly human thing there was in a man and, consequently, his most genuine attribute.
    Let the reader decide between the military man and the canon. I’m going back to the poultice.

III
     

Genealogy
     
    Now that I’ve mentioned my two uncles, let me make a short genealogical outline here.
    The founder of my family was a certain Damião Cubas, who flourished in the first half of the eighteenth century. He was a cooper by trade, a native of Rio de Janeiro, where he would have died in penury and obscurity had he limited himself to the work of barrel making. But he didn’t. He became a farmer. He planted, harvested, and exchanged his produce for good, honest silver
patacas
until he died, leaving a nice fat inheritance to a son, the licentiate Luís Cubas. It was with this young man that my series of grandfathers really begins—the grandfathers my family always admitted to—because Damião Cubas was, after all, a cooper, and perhaps even a bad cooper, while Luís Cubas studied at Coimbra, was conspicuous in affairs of state, and was a personal friend of the viceroy, Count da Cunha.
    Since the surname Cubas, meaning kegs, smelled too much of cooperage, my father, Damião’s great–grandson, alleged that the aforesaid surname had been given to a knight, a hero of the African campaigns, as a reward for a deed he brought off: the capture of three hundred barrels from the Moors. My father was a man of imagination; he flew out of the cooperage on the wings of a pun. He was a good character, my father, a worthy and loyal man like few others. He had a touch of the fibber about him, it’s true, but who in this world doesn’t have a bit of that? It should be noted that he never had recourse to invention except after an attempt at falsification. At first he had the family branch off from that famous namesake of mine, Captain-Major Brás Cubas, who founded the town, of São Vicente, where he died in 1592, and that’s why he named me Brás. The captain-major’s family refuted him, however, and that was when he imagined the three hundred Moorish kegs.
    A few members of my family are still alive, my niece Venância, for example, the lily of the valley, which is the flower for ladies of her time. Her father, Cotrim, is still alive, a fellow who … But let’s not get ahead of events. Let’s finish with our poultice once and for all.

IV
     

The Idée Fixe
     
    My idea, after so many leaps and bounds, had become an
idée fixe
. God save you, dear reader, from an
idée fixe
, better a speck, a mote in the eye. Look at Cavour: It was the
idée fixe
of Italian unity that killed him. It’s true that Bismarck didn’t die, but we should be warned that nature is terribly fickle and history eternally meretricious. For example, Suetonius gave us a Claudius who was a simpleton—or “a pumpkinhead” as Seneca called him—and a Titus who deserved being the delight of all Rome. In modern times a professor came along and found a way of demonstrating that of the two Caesars the delight, the real delight, was Seneca’s “pumpkinhead.” And you Madame Lucrezia, flower of