After leaving work, Caetano had had a little “adventure,” a sordid adventure — the kind he liked best. That’s why he was smiling. He enjoyed the good things of life and enjoyed them twice over, once when he was experiencing them and again in retrospect.
Justina came in at that point and spoiled the second part of his pleasure. She entered carrying the lunch tray and placed it on her husband’s lap. Caetano stared at her mockingly, his eyes bright. The lampshade was red and so the whites of his eyes glowed bloodily, reinforcing the malice in his gaze.
Justina was oblivious to his stare, just as she was to the fixity of her daughter’s smile, having grown used to both. She returned to the kitchen, where a frugal, insipid, diabetic lunch awaited her. She ate alone. Her husband was never there for supper, except on Tuesdays, his day off; and at lunch they ate separately, he in bed and she in the kitchen.
The cat leapt up from his cushion beside the fireplace, where he had lain dreaming and drowsing. He arched his back and, tail aloft, rubbed against Justina’s legs. Caetano called to him. The cat jumped onto the bed and stared at his owner, slowly twitching his tail. His green eyes, unaffected by the red light, were fixed on the plates of food on the tray. He was waiting for his friendliness to be rewarded. He knew perfectly well that the only thing he ever got from Caetano were beatings, but he nonetheless persisted. Perhaps in his cat brain he was curious to find out when, if ever, his owner would tire of hitting him. Caetano was not tired yet: he picked up a slipper and threw it. The cat was quicker than he and escaped in one bound. Caetano laughed.
The silence that filled the apartment from top to bottom, like a solid block, shattered at the sound of his laughter. Unaccustomed as it was to the noise, the furniture seemed to shrink in upon itself. The cat, forgetting that he was hungry, and still frightened by that loud guffaw, retreated once more into the oblivion of sleep. Justina remained unmoved, as if she had heard nothing. At home, she spoke only when necessary, and she did not consider it necessary to take the cat’s part. She lived inside herself, as if she were dreaming a dream with no beginning or end, a dream about nothing and from which she did not wish to awaken, a dream composed of clouds that drifted silently past, covering a sky she had long since forgotten.
11
Her son’s illness had completely disrupted Carmen’s peaceful, lazy mornings. Henriquinho had been in bed for two days, suffering from mild tonsillitis. If she’d had her way, they would have called the doctor, but Emílio, thinking of the expense, said it wasn’t worth it, that the illness wasn’t that serious. A bit of gargling, a few applications of mercurochrome, lots of loving care, and their son would soon be up and about again. This provided Carmen with an opening to accuse Emílio of not caring about their child and, once in that accusatory mode, she seized the opportunity to give voice to her innumerable complaints. Emílio spent an entire evening listening to this litany of woes without saying a word. Finally, so that things did not become still more acrimonious and last long into the night, he agreed to do as his wife wanted. This unexpected agreement on his part had the effect of thwarting Carmen’s permanent desire for contradiction. Accepting gracefully would mean that she then had nothing to complain about. She immediately went on the attack, with equal or greater vehemence, opposing the very position she had been defending. Weary and worn down, Emílio abandoned the fight, leaving it to his wife to make whatever decision she chose. This left her in something of a quandary: on the one hand, she wanted to call the doctor; on the other, she could not resist the desire to go against her husband’s wishes, which would now mean not summoning the doctor. Unaware of this whole dispute, Henriquinho took the easiest way out and simply got better. Like any good mother, Carmen was pleased, but, deep down, she would not have minded some worsening of his condition (as long as Henriquinho was not in any real danger), just so her husband could see how reasonable and right she was.
Whatever the end result, however, she was obliged to give up her lazy mornings for as long as Henriquinho lay ill in bed. She had to do the shopping before her husband went off to work and could not spend long about it either for fear of making him late. Had this not also involved some risk to the family budget, she would have leapt at the chance to play a nasty trick on her husband, but life was hard enough without making it worse purely for the sake of some mean-minded act of revenge. Even in this, Carmen felt that she was acting reasonably. Whenever she was alone and could give full vent to her despair, she would weep and feel sorry for herself because her husband did not recognize her many good qualities, while he, of course, had only faults: he was, in her view, either a frivolous spendthrift who took no interest in their home and child, or a self-centered bore with the permanently stricken air of someone who feels unloved and out of place. Early on in their marriage, Carmen had often asked herself what lay behind the constant friction between her and her husband. They had fallen in love like everyone else, they had loved each other, and then it had all ended, to be replaced by arguments, bickering and sarcastic remarks; but it was his air of victimhood that most enraged her. She was convinced now that her husband had a mistress, a girlfriend. That, in her view, was the source of all their marital disagreements. Men are like cockerels, who, even while they’re treading one hen, already have their eye on the next.
That morning, very reluctantly because it was raining, Carmen went out to do the shopping. The apartment was suddenly peaceful, a small island surrounded by the silence emanating from their neighbors’ apartments and by the soft murmur of rain. The building was enjoying one of those marvelous moments of quietness and tranquillity, as if it were inhabited not by flesh-and-blood creatures, but only by inanimate objects.
Emílio Fonseca, however, found nothing soothing about the quietness and peace surrounding him. Instead, he found it positively oppressive, as if the air had grown thick and suffocating. He was enjoying the pause, his wife’s absence, his son’s silence, but what weighed on him was the certainty that it was only a pause, a provisional calm, a postponement that resolved nothing. He was standing at the window that looked out onto the street, watching the gentle rain and smoking, although most of the time he merely played with the cigarette between his nervous fingers.
His son called to him from the next room. He put his cigarette down in an ashtray and went to see what he wanted.
“What is it?”
“I’m thirsty.”
On the bedside table stood a glass of water. He helped his son sit up and gave him a drink. Henrique swallowed carefully, grimacing with pain. He looked so weak and fragile from enforced fasting that Emílio felt his heart contract with fear. “What has he done to deserve this?” he thought. “Or indeed what have I done?” When Henrique had finished drinking, he lay down again and thanked his father with a smile. Emílio stayed where he was and sat on the edge of the bed, saying nothing and looking at his son. At first Henrique returned his gaze and seemed pleased to see him there. Moments later, though, Emílio realized that he was embarrassing the child. He glanced away and made as if to get up, but something stopped him. A new thought had entered his head. (Was it new? Or had he always brushed it aside because he found it too troubling?) Why did he feel so ill at ease with his son? Why was it that his son seemed so decidedly ill at ease with him? What was it that kept them apart? He took out his pack of cigarettes, then immediately put it away again, remembering that the smoke would be bad for Henrique’s throat. He could have gone elsewhere to smoke, but he didn’t. He again looked at his son, then blurted out the question: