“That’s nothing to worry about!” he exclaimed.
When he opened the door, Sr Souza came face to face with his daughter. At this point something happened so quickly that it is hard to describe. The moment he saw Maria, Sr Souza crumpled. Nobody had had the time to say anything and Souza’s face already looked like a child’s about to burst into tears. Souza’s corpulence dramatically emphasized his impending collapse.
“What are you doing here?” asked Maria in a gentle tone that was quite artificial, a gentleness that masked very visible harshness.
Sr Souza gave no response, but made a mechanical, involuntary gesture, clasping his hands as if begging for forgiveness.
Meanwhile, eyes glued to the ground, Sr Silva nervously scratched his mustache with the nail of his little finger and nodded in a way that seemed to say: “My God, if only your gambling partners could see you now! Who’d have thought it!”
Her forehead a mass of wrinkles, Sra Silva looked Maria up and down. Her normal eye glanced haughtily and provocatively. Her other eye showed itself as it really was, hardly reacted — her fish-eye.
“Who are these people?” Maria asked, looking at them.
“It’s a family … That’s obvious … They’re good people …” said Sr Souza with a manic look that was manic in color …
His expression made Maria’s lips pucker sorrowfully. She stood still for a moment and stared at the ground. Then she gave her father a look of infinite pity, her dark shadow-filled eyes revealed a hint of compassion.
Sr Souza went over to the sink where he’d left his jacket. He struggled to slip it back on. Then he turned to Sra Silva, pointed to his daughter in the doorway and said with a deeply stupid smile, “Senyora, I’d like to introduce you to my daughter Maria …”
“Ha ha!” said Sra Silva, keeping her distance, bowing grotesquely and gesticulating derisively.
Maria’s face shook with indignation. But she continued to restrain herself.
With that Sr Silva rapidly deflated and withered so visibly it was pitiful. He had imperceptibly withdrawn to a corner, from where he was observing everything with an infinitely sad air. Souza noticed and tried to cheer him up — sarcastically.
“Silva! Brighten up, you child of God! What’s wrong? I’ve known you to be brilliant: you’ve raised the dead in my presence, you know every trick in the book, you have such a light touch. I’d never have thought you were so cowardly!” said Souza, indignant and fatherly at the same time.
“Sr Souza, I can’t stand this kind of situation!” said Silva, his mouth shaping up to start sniveling.
A long pause followed that might have been a dramatic silence, if Sr Souza, at a given moment, hadn’t begun to hum snatches of a military march.
Maria gesticulated impatiently and snapped out of her frozen stance.
“Well then, what are you intending to do?”
“Stay here!” said Sr Souza forcefully.
“No! The police are on their way …” said Maria almost choking on her words.
“What?”
“The police are coming …” his daughter repeated timidly, her hands trembling.
“No! Not the police!” shouted Sr Souza like an astonished child. “Why are the police coming? What’s my connection with the police?”
“Why do we have to argue?” asked a weary, edgy Maria.
Sr Silva put his hands over his face. Perhaps he was crying.
“And you, Sr Souza, the most excellent Sr Souza, as you like to be called, why do you place me in this kind of situation?” asked Silva, reacting suddenly, a glint in his eyes. “Who gave you the right to think we poor people don’t have feelings?”
“We poor people? Am I not poor too?” asked Sr Souza, dropping his hands despondently by his side. “The fact is, Silva, that you don’t love me, nobody loves me … he added, limply acknowledging defeat.
After she’d greeted Maria in that derisory, rude fashion we described previously, Sra Silva now surveyed the figure of Srta Souza again, disdainfully and insultingly with the harshness a squint-eye often brings. Her bad eye seemed even more remote — completely absent. Conversely, her good one was active, an intolerable, gimlet presence.
A bell rang. Maria disappeared immediately.
Sr Souza went over to Sra Silva.
“Senyora,” he asked in a defeated, exhausted voice, “what would you do?”
“I would stay!” she retorted defiantly.
And added ironically, “But I am a woman.”
“So you would stay, would you?” drawled Sr Souza, laughing sarcastically, separating out his syllables in a mocking, mortifying manner.
Sra Silva’s whole body shook indignantly. A black line set over her furrowed forehead; she swung round, put her hat on and walked out of the kitchen after scowling contemptuously at the two men.
His wife’s attitude led Sr Silva to react. He stopped daydreaming. He walked boldly over to Sr Souza and poked his arm with a fingertip.
“What did this lady do to you to act like this?” he asked, looking at him askance. “What did she think she was doing? We should sort this out here and now …”
Souza looked at him as if he were gazing at a toad. He didn’t feel compelled to respond.
At that very moment Sra Silva appeared in the doorway flanked by two policemen. Tense and apoplectic under her graveyard wreath of a hat, her forehead knitted, her sinister eyes squinting, she looked like a harpy dressed in rags.
A policeman pointed to Sr Souza and they started to walk. There was complete silence, a damp squib of a finale.
The woman walked in front, and, no doubt to emphasize the dire nature of the situation, she felt obliged to be provocative and sashay grotesquely. Silva had fallen back into daydreaming, but was now openly sobbing. He walked second, his yellow parcel tucked under his arm. Sr Souza came last between the two policemen, his huge, downcast head sunk between his shoulders, his cardboard suitcase in his right hand and his hat in his left.
They walked slowly across the passage like three sleepwalkers. Pacheco opened the garden gate for them. Maria watched her father walk across the top of the stairs from the porthole on the second floor landing. When she did so, she’d have wept profusely if she hadn’t bitten on her handkerchief. Then she watched him leaving the house from her bedroom window that looked over the garden.
The moment he walked through the door to the street, Sr Souza spoke to the policeman to his right.
“You must understand … for a man like me to be in this state …” he said anxiously, with the smile of an ineffably human fool.
The policeman said nothing. He took his arm and made him speed up.
“I’m sorry,” said Sr Souza, “have a little pity. I can’t walk like you. I really can’t.”
Maria stood there, pressing her forehead against the windowpanes for a while, nervously biting her handkerchief. When the group turned the first bend in the road, she collapsed. Sobbing, crying, shaking nervously, her hair disheveled, she took a few tottering steps into her bedroom and collapsed on her bed.