Part 1 · Chapter 1: The Guitar Lesson

As usual, Policarpo Quaresma, better known as Major Quaresma, arrived home at a quarter past four in the afternoon. He had been doing so for more than twenty years. On leaving the War Arsenal, where he was assistant secretary, he would pick up some fruit at the confectioners’ shops, sometimes buy a cheese, and always buy bread from the French bakery.

These errands took him less than an hour, so that at about three-forty he would board the tram and, without a minute’s deviation, step across the threshold of his house, in a street some distance from São Januário, at precisely a quarter past four, like the appearance of a heavenly body, an eclipse, in short, a mathematically determined phenomenon, foreseen and foretold.

The neighbours already knew his habits so well that at Captain Cláudio’s house, where dinner was generally served at about half past four, as soon as they saw him pass the mistress of the house would call to the maid: “Alice, mind the time; Major Quaresma has gone past.”

And so it went every day, for almost thirty years. Since he owned his house and had other income besides his salary, Major Quaresma could live more comfortably than his civil-service pay alone would have allowed, enjoying among his neighbors the regard and respect accorded to a well-to-do man.

He received no visitors and lived in monastic seclusion, although he was courteous to the neighbours, who thought him eccentric and misanthropic. If he had no friends in the neighbourhood, he had no enemies either; the only dislike he had incurred was that of Doctor Segadas, a physician of local renown, who could not accept that Quaresma should own books: “If he had no degree, what did he want them for? Sheer pedantry!”

The assistant secretary showed his books to no one, but when the windows of the room containing his library were opened, the shelves could be seen from the street, crammed from top to bottom.

Such were his habits; lately, however, they had changed a little, and this gave rise to comment in the neighborhood. Until then, his goddaughter and her father had been his only visitors; but in recent days a short, thin, pale gentleman had been seen entering his house three times a week, on fixed days, with a guitar tucked into a chamois-leather case. From the very first visit, the matter intrigued the neighbors. A guitar in so respectable a house! What could it mean?

That very afternoon, one of the major’s prettiest neighbors invited a friend over, and the two spent a good deal of time pacing up and down the pavement, craning their necks whenever they passed the eccentric assistant secretary’s open window.

Their spying was not in vain. Seated on the sofa, with the fellow beside him and the guitar held ready to play, the major listened attentively: “Look, major, like this.” The strings slowly sounded the note that had been struck; then the teacher added: “That’s D. Have you got it?”

But there was no need to put it in writing; the neighborhood immediately concluded that the major was learning to play guitar. But what a thing! A man so serious getting mixed up in such shenanigans!

One sunny afternoon, under the fierce, relentless March sun, at about four o’clock, the windows on both sides of a deserted street in São Januário suddenly filled with people. Even at the general’s house, the young women came to the windows! What was it? A battalion? A fire? Nothing of the sort: Major Quaresma, head bowed, taking the little steps of a cart ox, was coming up the street with a shameless guitar under his arm.

True, the guitar was decently wrapped in paper, but its clothing did not entirely conceal its curves. At the sight of so scandalous a thing, the regard and respect in which Major Policarpo Quaresma was held around his home diminished a little. He was done for, out of his mind, people said. He, however, serenely continued his studies, all the more easily because he had not noticed this decline.

Quaresma was a small, thin man who wore pince-nez and always looked down, but when he fixed his gaze on someone or something, his eyes took on, behind the lenses, a strong penetrating gleam, as though he meant to reach the soul of the person or thing he was regarding.

Yet he generally kept his eyes lowered, as though guided by the tip of the goatee that adorned his chin. He always wore a morning coat, black, blue or grey, in striped cloth, but always a morning coat; and he seldom went without a very tall, narrow-brimmed top hat, made to an old pattern whose date he could specify exactly.

When he entered the house that day, it was his sister who opened the door, asking:

"Will you have dinner now?"

"Not yet. Wait a little for Ricardo; he is coming to dine with us today."

"Policarpo, you must come to your senses. A man of your age and standing, as respectable as you are, mixing with that serenader, little better than a loafer: it isn’t seemly!"

The major set down his parasol—an old parasol, with an entirely wooden shaft and a curved handle inlaid with small mother-of-pearl lozenges—and replied:

"But you are quite mistaken, my dear sister. It is prejudice to suppose that every man who plays the guitar is disreputable. The modinha is the most genuine expression of our national poetry, and the guitar is the instrument it calls for. We are the ones who have abandoned the genre, but in Lisbon, in the last century, it was held in honor through Padre Caldas, whose audiences were noblewomen. Beckford, a distinguished Englishman, praises him highly."

“But that was in another time; now...”

“What of it, Adelaide? It is fitting that we should not let our traditions, our genuinely national customs, die...”

“Well, Policarpo, I do not want to contradict you; go on with your eccentricities.”

The major entered a room nearby, while his sister went straight toward the interior of the house. Quaresma took off his clothes, washed, put on his house clothes, came to the library, and sat down in a rocking chair, resting.

It was a spacious room, with windows facing a side street, and the whole of it was lined with iron bookshelves.

There were nearly ten bookcases, each with four shelves, besides the smaller ones holding the larger volumes. Anyone who examined that great collection of books at leisure would have been astonished to discover the spirit that governed its assembly.

In fiction there were only Brazilian authors, or those regarded as such: Bento Teixeira, of the Prosopopéia; Gregório de Matos, Basílio da Gama, Santa Rita Durão, José de Alencar (all his works), Macedo, Gonçalves Dias (all his works), besides many others. One could safely say that not a single native or naturalized Brazilian author from 1880 or earlier was missing from the major’s shelves.

Of Brazilian history there was a plentiful harvest: the chroniclers Gabriel Soares and Gandavo; and Rocha Pita, Frei Vicente do Salvador, Armitage, Aires do Casal, Pereira da Silva, Handelmann (Geschichte von Brasilien), Melo Morais, Capistrano de Abreu, Southey, Varnhagen, besides others rarer or less famous. And when it came to travel and exploration, what riches! There were Hans Staden, Jean de Léry, Saint-Hilaire, Martius, the Prince of Neuwied, John Mawe, von Eschwege, Agassiz and Couto de Magalhães; and if Darwin, Freycinet, Cook, Bougainville and even the famous Pigafetta, chronicler of Magellan’s voyage, were also represented, it was because all these latter travelers dealt with Brazil, briefly or at length.

Besides these, there were auxiliary volumes: dictionaries, manuals, encyclopedias, and compendia, in several languages.

Thus his preference for the poetry of Porto Alegre and Magalhães did not arise from an incurable ignorance of Europe’s literary languages; on the contrary, the major knew French, English and German tolerably well, and although he did not speak those languages, he read and translated them correctly. The reason had to be sought in a particular disposition of his mind, in the strong feeling that guided his life. Policarpo was a patriot. Ever since his youth, at about the age of twenty, love of his country had possessed him entirely. It was not the usual empty, talkative love, but a serious, solemn, all-absorbing feeling. There were no political or administrative ambitions; what Quaresma had in mind, or rather, what patriotism led him to contemplate, was a thorough knowledge of Brazil, prompting him to ponder its resources so that he might then propose remedies and measures for progress with full knowledge of the facts.

No one knew quite where he had been born, but it was certainly not São Paulo, nor Rio Grande do Sul, nor Pará. Whoever sought in him any regionalism was mistaken; Quaresma was first and foremost Brazilian. He had no preference for this or that part of his country, so much so that what made him vibrate with passion was not only the pampas of the South with their cattle, not São Paulo’s coffee, not the gold and diamonds of Minas Gerais, not the beauty of Guanabara, not the grandeur of Paulo Afonso, not the gift of Gonçalves Dias or the vigor of Andrade Neves—it was all of it together, fused, gathered beneath the starred banner of the Southern Cross.

As early as eighteen he had wanted to enter the army, but the medical board judged him unfit. He was disappointed and suffered, but did not curse his country. The ministry was Liberal; he became a Conservative and went on loving, more than ever, the ‘land of his birth.’ Unable to advance beneath the army’s gold braid, he turned to the civil service and chose its military branch.

There he felt at home. Among soldiers, cannon, veterans, paperwork bristling with kilograms of gunpowder, names of rifles and technical artillery terms, he breathed in daily that air of war, of valor, of victory, of triumph, which is indeed the very breath of the Fatherland.

During his bureaucratic leisure, he studied, but he studied the Fatherland: its natural riches, its history, geography, literature, and politics. Quaresma knew the species of minerals, plants, and animals that Brazil contained; he knew the value of the gold and diamonds exported by Minas Gerais, the Dutch wars, the battles of the Paraguayan War, and the sources and courses of all the rivers. With acrimony and passion, he defended the preeminence of the Amazon over all the other rivers in the world. For this, he went so far as the crime of amputating a few kilometers from the Nile, and it was with this rival to his "own" river that he was most given to quarrel. Woe to anyone who cited it in his presence! Generally calm and delicate, the major became agitated and ill-mannered whenever the length of the Amazon was discussed in comparison with that of the Nile.

For the past year he had devoted himself to Tupi-Guarani. Every morning, before “Aurora, with her rosy fingers, opened a path for golden-haired Phoebus,” he would grapple until lunch with Montoya’s Arte y diccionario de la lengua guaraní ó más bien tupí, studying the caboclo tongue with diligence and passion. At the office, the junior employees, amanuenses and clerks, on learning of his study of the Tupiniquim language, had begun, for some unknown reason, to call him Ubirajara. Once, while signing the attendance register, the clerk Azevedo, distracted and unaware of who stood behind him, said in a bantering tone: “Have you noticed that Ubirajara is late today?”

Quaresma was held in respect at the arsenal: his age, his learning, and the modesty and honesty of his life imposed respect upon everyone. Sensing that the nickname was directed at him, he did not lose his dignity or burst into abuse and insults. He squared himself, adjusted his pince-nez, raised his index finger in the air, and replied:

“Mr. Azevedo, do not be frivolous. Do not seek to make ridiculous those who work in silence, for the greatness and emancipation of the Fatherland.”

That day the major spoke little. It was his custom, at the coffee hour, when the employees left their desks, to share with his colleagues the fruits of his studies, the discoveries of national riches he had made in his study at home. One day it was petroleum, which he had read somewhere was to be found in Bahia; another time, a new kind of rubber tree growing along the Pardo River, in Mato Grosso; another, a scholar, a distinguished man whose great-grandmother was Brazilian. When he had no discovery to report, he would turn to geographical description, recounting the courses of rivers, their navigable lengths, the trifling improvements they needed to allow free passage from their mouths to their sources. He loved rivers above all; mountains left him indifferent. Too small, perhaps…

His colleagues listened respectfully, and none but this Azevedo dared raise the slightest objection in his presence or venture a joke, a quip. Once his back was turned, however, they avenged themselves for the tedious lecture by heaping ridicule upon him: “That Quaresma! What a bore! He thinks we’re little children… Good heavens! He never talks of anything else.”

And thus he went through life, half in the office, without being understood, and the other half at home, also without being understood. On the day they called him Ubirajara, Quaresma became reserved, taciturn, mute, and only spoke when, as they washed their hands in a room near the secretariat and prepared to leave, someone sighed: “Ah, my God! When shall I be able to go to Europe?” The major could not restrain himself: he raised his eyes, adjusted his pince-nez and spoke in a fraternal and persuasive tone: “Ungrateful one! You have a land so beautiful, so rich, and you want to visit other people’s! I, if ever I can, shall traverse mine from beginning to end!”

The other objected that there was nothing here but fevers and mosquitoes; the major contradicted him with statistics and even proved exuberantly that the Amazon had one of the finest climates on earth. It was a climate slandered by the hedonists who returned from there ill...

This was Major Policarpo Quaresma, who had just arrived at his residence at four-fifteen in the afternoon, without a minute’s error, as every afternoon except Sunday, precisely, like the appearance of a star or an eclipse.

For the rest, he was a man like everyone else, except for those who have political or fortune-seeking ambitions, because Quaresma did not have them in the slightest degree.

Seated in the rocking chair, right in the center of his library, the major opened a book and began reading it in expectation of his guest. It was the old Rocha Pita, the enthusiastic and gongoric Rocha Pita of História da América Portuguesa. Quaresma was reading that famous passage: "In no other region is the sky clearer, nor does the dawn rise more beautifully; in no other hemisphere are the sun’s rays more golden..." but he could not reach the end. Someone was knocking at the door. He went to open it himself.

“Am I late, major?” the visitor asked.

“No. You arrived on time.”

The man who had just entered Major Quaresma’s house was Mr. Ricardo Coração dos Outros, famous for his skill in singing modinhas and playing the guitar. At first his fame had been confined to one small suburb of the city, at whose musical evenings he and his guitar figured as Paganini and his fiddle did at dukes’ receptions; but gradually, with time, it had spread throughout the suburbs, growing and taking firm root until it was regarded as something peculiarly their own. Do not suppose, however, that Ricardo was just any modinha singer, a mere street loafer. No; Ricardo Coração dos Outros was an artist who visited and honoured the finest families of Méier, Piedade and Riachuelo. Rarely did a night pass without his receiving an invitation. Whether at Lieutenant Marques’s, Doctor Bulhões’s or Mr. Castro’s, his presence was always requested, urged and appreciated. Doctor Bulhões even cherished a special admiration for Ricardo, a delirium, a frenzy, and went into ecstasies when the troubadour sang. “I am very fond of singing,” the doctor once said on the train, “but only two men satisfy me: Tamagno and Ricardo.” This doctor enjoyed a great reputation in the suburbs, not as a physician, for he did not prescribe so much as castor oil, but as an authority on telegraph legislation, being a section head in the Telegraph Secretariat.

In this way Ricardo Coração dos Outros enjoyed the general esteem of suburban high society. It is a very special high society, and high only in the suburbs. It generally consists of civil servants, small shopkeepers, doctors with a modest practice and lieutenants of various militias: an elite that swells with pride along the potholed streets of those distant districts, as well as at parties and balls, more mightily than the bourgeoisie of Petrópolis and Botafogo. This is only there, at the balls, parties and in the streets, where, if one of its representatives catches sight of some rather shabby fellow, he surveys him slowly from head to foot, as much as to say: come round to my house and I’ll give you a plate of food. For the pride of the suburban aristocracy lies in having lunch and dinner every day, plenty of beans, plenty of dried beef, plenty of stew; there, it believes, is the touchstone of nobility, of high breeding, of distinction.

Outside the suburbs, on Rua do Ouvidor, in the theatres and at the great festivities in the city centre, these people shrink, fade, disappear; even their wives and daughters lose the beauty with which, almost daily, they dazzle the handsome gentlemen at the interminable daily dances of those neighbourhoods.

Ricardo, after becoming the poet and singer of this curious aristocracy, overflowed into the city proper. His fame had already reached São Cristóvão, and soon—he expected—Botafogo would invite him, for the newspapers already mentioned his name and discussed the scope of his work and his poetry...

But what had he come to do there, at the house of a man with such lofty purposes and such severe habits? It is not difficult to guess. Certainly, he did not come to assist the major in his studies of geology, poetry, mineralogy, and Brazilian history.

As the neighborhood rightly supposed, Coração dos Outros had come solely to teach the major to sing modinhas and play guitar. Nothing more, and it is simple.

In keeping with his ruling passion, Quaresma had long pondered what form of poetry and music best expressed the national soul. He consulted historians, chroniclers and philosophers, and became convinced that it was the modinha accompanied by the guitar. Certain of this truth, he did not hesitate: he set about learning the genuinely Brazilian instrument and entering into the secrets of the modinha. He was still at the beginning in all this, but sought out the city’s foremost player and singer and took lessons from him. His aim was to give the modinha discipline and draw from it a powerful, original artistic theme.

Ricardo had come precisely to give him a lesson, but before that, by special invitation from his pupil, he was to share his dinner; and that was why the famous minstrel had arrived early at the assistant secretary’s house.

“Can you play D-sharp yet, major?” Ricardo asked as soon as he sat down.

“Yes.”

“Let us see.”

As he spoke, he began to take his sacred guitar out of its covering, but there was no time. Dona Adelaide, Quaresma’s sister, came in and invited them to dinner. The soup was already getting cold on the table; they must come at once!

“You must forgive our poor dinner, Mr. Ricardo,” said the old lady. “I wanted to make you chicken with petit-pois, but Policarpo would not let me. He told me that these petit-pois are foreign, and that I should use pigeon peas instead. Who ever heard of chicken with pigeon peas?”

Coração dos Outros ventured that perhaps it would be good, that it would be something new, and that there would be no harm in trying it.

“It is a peculiarity of your friend, Mr. Ricardo, this insistence on wanting only national things, and we have to swallow every concoction, ugh!”

“What nonsense, Adelaide; you have certain dislikes! Our land, which has every climate in the world, can produce everything necessary for the most demanding stomach. You are the one who has taken it into your head to be difficult.”

“For example, butter that immediately turns rancid.”

“That is because it is made from milk; if it were like those foreign ones you have there, manufactured with sewer fats, perhaps it would not spoil... There you have it, Ricardo! They want nothing from our land...”

“That is generally how it is,” Ricardo said.

“But it’s a mistake… They don’t protect our own industries… You won’t find me doing that: whenever there is a Brazilian product, I use no foreign one. I dress in Brazilian cloth, wear Brazilian boots, and so on.”

They sat down at the table. Quaresma seized a small crystal bottle and poured two glasses of parati.

“It’s part of the national programme,” said his sister, smiling.

“Certainly, and it is a magnificent aperitif. Those vermouths you see about are rubbish; this is pure alcohol, good alcohol, made from sugarcane, not potatoes or maize…”

Ricardo took the glass with delicacy and respect, raised it to his lips, and it was as though he drank the national spirit with his whole being.

“Good, eh?” the major inquired.

“Magnificent,” said Ricardo, smacking his lips.

“It’s from Angra. Now you’ll see what magnificent wine we have from Rio Grande… Never mind Burgundy! Never mind Bordeaux! We have far better wines in the South…”

And dinner proceeded in that vein. Quaresma exalted the national products: the lard, the bacon, and the rice; his sister made small objections, and Ricardo said: "Yes, yes, there is no doubt"—rolling his small eyes, wrinkling his little forehead, which disappeared into his coarse hair, and making a great effort to give his small, hard features a sincere expression of delicacy and satisfaction.

When dinner was over they went to see the garden. It was a marvel; it had not a single flower… Surely one could not count as flowers those miserable balsams, gladioli, muddy quaresmeiras, melancholy manacás and other fine specimens from our fields and meadows. As in everything else, the major was essentially Brazilian in his gardening. No roses, chrysanthemums or magnolias, those exotic flowers; our lands had others more beautiful, more expressive, more fragrant, like those he had there.

Ricardo agreed once more, and the two went into the sitting room as dusk crept in slowly, very slowly and lingeringly, as though it were the sun’s long, yearning farewell upon leaving the earth, bestowing on all things its sorrowful poetry and its melting softness.

As soon as the gas was lit, the guitar master took up the instrument, tightened the tuning pegs, ran through the scales, bending over it as if he wished to kiss it. He sounded a few chords to try it out, then turned to his pupil, who already had his own instrument in position:

“Let us see. Run through the scale, major.”

Quaresma set his fingers and tuned the guitar, but his playing had neither the assurance nor the coaxing grace with which the master performed the same operation.

“Look, major, like this.”

And he demonstrated the position of the instrument, which extended from his lap to his outstretched left arm, lightly steadied by his right; then he added:

“Major, the guitar is the instrument of passion. It needs a chest to speak... It must be held close, but held close with softness and love, as though it were the beloved, the bride, so that it may say what we feel...”

Before the guitar, Ricardo became loquacious, full of maxims, the whole man quivering with passion for the despised instrument.

The lesson lasted about fifty minutes. The major felt tired and asked the master to sing. It was the first time Quaresma had made that request; though flattered, professional vanity made Ricardo inclined, at first, to refuse.

“Oh! I have nothing new, no composition of my own.”

Dona Adelaide then interposed:

“Sing something by someone else.”

“Oh! For heaven’s sake, madam! I sing only my own songs. Bilac, you know him? He wanted to write me a modinha, but I refused: you don’t understand the guitar, Mr. Bilac. The point isn’t to write well-formed verses that say pretty things; what matters is finding the words the guitar asks for and desires. For example, if I were to say, as I first intended, in ‘The Foot,’ a modinha of mine, ‘your foot is a clover leaf,’ it wouldn’t go with the guitar. Would you like to hear?”

And he rehearsed in a low voice, accompanied by the instrument: your—foot—is—a—clo—ver—leaf.

“You see,” he continued, “how it doesn’t work. Now listen: your—foot—is—a—rose—of—myrrh. That’s quite different, don’t you think?”

“There is no doubt about it,” said Quaresma’s sister.

“Sing this one,” the major invited.

“No,” Ricardo objected. “That one’s old. I’ll sing ‘Promise.’ Do you know it?”

“No,” said the two siblings.

“Oh! It’s everywhere, like Raimundo’s ‘Doves.’”

“Do sing, Mr. Ricardo,” Dona Adelaide asked.

Ricardo Coração dos Outros finally tuned his guitar once more and began in a soft voice:

I promise by the Most Holy Sacrament

That I shall be your passion…

“You see,” he said during an interval, “how much imagery, how much imagery!”

And he continued. The windows were open. Young women and young men began to crowd onto the pavement to hear the minstrel. Sensing that the street was interested, Coração dos Outros sharpened his diction, assuming a fierce air that he supposed expressed tenderness and enthusiasm; and when he finished, applause sounded from outside, and a young woman entered looking for Dona Adelaide.

“Sit down, Ismênia,” she said.

“I shan’t stay long.”

Ricardo straightened himself in his chair, looked at the young woman for a moment, and continued his dissertation on the modinha. Taking advantage of a pause, Quaresma’s sister asked the young woman:

“So when are you getting married?”

It was the question always asked her. She would then tilt her sad little head to the right, crowned with magnificent chestnut hair touched with gold, and reply:

“I don’t know... Cavalcânti graduates at the end of the year, and then we’ll set the date.”

This was said in a drawl, with an astonishing languor.

The girl, the daughter of the general who lived next door to Quaresma, was not ugly. She was even quite pleasant-looking, with her small, ill-defined features suffused with touches of kindness.

Her engagement had lasted for years. Her fiancé, the aforementioned Cavalcânti, was studying dentistry, a two-year course he had been dragging out for four, and Ismênia always had to answer the familiar question: “Well, when are you getting married?” “I don’t know… Cavalcânti graduates next year, and…”

Inwardly, it did not bother her. In life, for her, there was only one important thing: marrying; but she was in no hurry, and nothing in her demanded it. She had already secured a fiancé; the rest was a matter of time...

After answering Dona Adelaide, she explained the reason for her visit.

She had come on her father’s behalf to invite Ricardo Coração dos Outros to sing at her house.

“Papa,” said Dona Ismênia, “likes modinhas very much... He is from the North; you know, Dona Adelaide, that northern people appreciate them greatly. Come.”

And off they went.