The lawyer was concentrating on his food and said nothing. He was completely absorbed in eating the salt cod. “I don’t know if you grasp the concept,” said Firmino, taking over the lawyer’s formula.
“I do not grasp the concept,” replied the lawyer.
“Well,” continued Firmino, “what I mean is that my paper is the paper you know it to be, while you, well, you are a leading lawyer, you have the surname you have, and in a word I wanted to say you have a reputation to keep up, if you see what I mean.”
“You continue to disappoint me, young man,” replied the lawyer, “you do everything in your power to be a lesser person than you really are, we must never be less than we really are, what was it you said about me?”
“That you have a reputation to keep up,” said Firmino.
“Listen to me,” murmured the lawyer, “I don’t think we’ve understood each other, so I’ll tell you something once and for all, but open your ears and hear. I defend the unfortunates of this world because I am like them, and that is the pure and simple truth. Of my ancient lineage I exploit only what material inheritance is still left to me, but like the unfortunates whom I defend I think I have experienced the miseries of life, have understood them and even taken them on myself, because to understand the miseries of life you have to put your hands in the shit, if you will excuse the expression, and above all be aware of it. And kindly don’t force me to be rhetorical, because this form of rhetoric is cheap.”
“But what do you believe in?” asked Firmino impulsively.
He had no idea what had made him ask such an ingenuous question at that moment, and even as he spoke it seemed to him one of those questions you ask of a schoolmate, that make you both blush. The lawyer raised his head from his plate and looked at him with those inquisitorial eyes of his.
“Are you asking me a personal question?” he inquired with explicit annoyance.
“Let’s call it a personal question,” replied Firmino bravely.
“And why do you ask this question?” insisted the lawyer.
“Because you don’t believe in anything,” Firmino burst out, “I get the impression that you don’t believe in anything.”
The lawyer smiled. Firmino felt that he was ill at ease.
“I might, for example, believe in something that to you seems insignificant,” he answered.
“Give me a convincing example,” said Firmino. He had got himself into this and wanted to keep up his role.
“For example a poem,” replied the lawyer, “just a few lines, it might seem a mere trifle, or it might also be a thing of the essence. For example:
Everything that I have known
You’ll write to me to remind
Me of, and likewise I shall do,
The whole past I’ll recount to you.
The lawyer fell silent. He had shoved away his plate and sat fumbling with his napkin.
“Hölderlin,” he went on, “it’s a poem called Wenn aus der Ferne, which means ‘If From the Distance,’ it’s one of his last. Let us say that there might be people who are waiting for letters from the past, do you think that a plausible thing to believe in?”
“Perhaps,” replied Firmino, “it might be plausible, though really I’d like to understand it a bit more.”
“Nothing to it,” murmured the lawyer, “letters from the past which give us an explanation of a time in our life which we have never understood, an explanation whatever it might be that enables us to grasp the meaning of the years gone by, a meaning that eluded us then, you are young, you are waiting for letters from the future, but just suppose that there are people waiting for letters from the past, and maybe I am one of these, and maybe I go so far as to imagine that one day I shall receive them.”
He paused, lit one of his cigars, and asked: “And do you know how I imagine they will arrive? Come on, try and think.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Firmino.
“Well,” said the lawyer, “they will arrive in a little parcel done up with a pink bow, just like that, and, scented with violets, as in the most trashy romantic novels. And on that day I shall lower my horrible old snout to the package, undo the pink bow, open the letters, and with the clarity of noonday I shall understand a story I never understood before, a story unique and fundamental, I repeat, unique and fundamental, such a thing as can happen but once in our lives, that the gods grant only once in our lives, and to which at the time we did not pay enough attention, for the simple reason that we were conceited fools.”
Another pause, longer this time. Firmino watched him in silence, taking stock of his fat old droopy cheeks, his almost repulsively fleshy lips, and the expression of one lost in memories.
“Because,” the lawyer went on in a low voice,“que faites-vous faites-vous des anciennes amours?. It’s a line from a poem by Louise Colet, and goes on like this: les chassez-vous comme des ombres vaines? Ils ont été, ces fantômes glacés, coeur contre coeur, unepart de vous même* There’s no doubt the lines were addressed to Flaubert. I should add that Louise Colet wrote very bad poems, poor dear, even if she thought of herself as a great poetess and wanted to make a hit in all the literary salons in Paris, really mediocre stuff, no doubt about it. But these few lines really get to one, it seems to me, because what in fact do we do with our past loves? Push them away in a drawer along with our socks full of holes?”
He looked at Firmino as if expecting confirmation, but Firmino said not a word.
“Do you know what I say,” continued the lawyer, “that if Flaubert didn’t understand her then he was really a fool, in which case we have to agree with that smarty-pants Sartre, but maybe Flaubert did understand, what do you think, did Flaubert understand or not?”
“Maybe he understood,” replied Firmino, “I couldn’t say offhand, maybe he did understand but I’m not in a position to swear to it.”
“I beg your pardon, young man,” said the lawyer, “but you claim to be studying literature, indeed that you intend to write a paper on literature, and you here own up to me that you can’t say anything for sure on the fundamental question, whether Flaubert did or did not understand Louise Colet’s coded message.”
“But I’m studying Portuguese literature in the 1950s,” Firmino defended himself, “and what has Flaubert to do with Portuguese literature in the 1950s?”
“Apparently nothing,” said the lawyer, “but only apparently, because in literature everything has to do with everything else. Look, young man, it’s like a spider’s web, you know what a spider’s web is like? Well think of all those complicated threads woven together by the spider, all of which lead to the center, looking at those at the outer edge you wouldn’t think it, but everything leads to the center, I’ll give you an example, how could you understand L’éducation sentimentale, a novel so terribly pessimistic and at the same time so reactionary, because according to the criteria of your friend Lukács it is terribly reactionary, if you don’t know the tasteless novelettes of that period of appalling bad taste that was the Second Empire? And along with this, making the proper connections, what if you were to be unaware of Flaubert’s state of mental depression? Because, you know, when Flaubert was shut up there in his house at Croisset, peering out at the world through a window, he was fearfully depressed, and all this, even though it seems not so to you, forms a spider’s web, a system of underground connections, of astral conjunctions, of elusive correspondences. If you want to study literature at least learn that you must study correspondences.”