“Viper!” he said again, and whistled playfully.
Vanda shuddered in her chair and ran her hand over her face. “Can I be going mad?” She felt a need for air; the heat was becoming unbearable, and her head was swimming. Heavy breathing on the stairs: Aunt Marocas, dripping fat, was entering the room. She saw how upset her niece was there on the chair, pale, her eyes fixed on the mouth of the dead man.
“You’re all done in, child. And it’s so hot in this cubbyhole.”
Quincas’s devilish smile got wider when he caught sight of his sister’s monumental bulk. Vanda wanted to cover her ears. She knew from past experience the words he loved to use to define Marocas, but what good were hands held over her ears in shutting out the voice of a dead man? She heard: “Fart-sack!”
Marocas, recovered now after her climb, opened the window wide without even a glance at the corpse. “Did they put perfume on him? It stinks to high heaven.”
The street noises came in through the open window, multiple and merry. The sea breeze put out the candles and drifted over to kiss Quincas on the cheek. The light spread out over him, blue and festive. A victorious smile was on his lips as Quincas settled himself better in the coffin.
7
By that time the news of the unexpected death of Quincas Water-Bray was already circulating through the streets of Bahia. It is quite true that the small merchants at the market didn’t close their doors as a sign of mourning. In compensation, however, they immediately raised the price of the Bahian trinkets, straw bags, and clay statuettes that they sold to tourists, paying their homage to the dead man in that way. All about the market there were hurried consultations, something like emergency meetings, with people going back and forth. The news was in the air, going up on the Lacerda Elevator, traveling along on streetcars to Calçada, by bus to Feira de Santana. Lovely black Paula was breaking up in tears at her tapioca-cake stand. Water-Bray wouldn’t be coming by that afternoon to whisper his well-chosen come-ons to her, peeking into her ample breasts, propositioning her for wicked things, making her laugh.
On the skiffs with lowered sails the men of the realm of Iemanjá, bronzed sailors, were unable to hide their disappointed surprise: How could that death have taken place in a room in Tabuão? How could the old sailor have given up the ghost in a bed? Hadn’t Quincas Water-Bray proclaimed so decisively and so many times with a voice and gesture capable of convincing the strongest doubter that the only tomb worthy of his roguery was the sea, its endless waters all bathed in moonlight?
Whenever he found himself the guest of honor on the poop of a skiff, looking over a sensational fish stew as the clay pot gave off its fragrant fumes and the bottle of cachaça went from hand to hand, there was always a moment, as the guitars began to be plucked, when his maritime instincts would awaken. He would stand up, his body swaying, the cachaça giving him that weaving roll of men of the sea, and he would declare his status of “old sailor.” An old sailor without a sea and without a ship, corrupted on land but through no fault of his own. For he had been born for the sea, for hoisting sails and controlling the tiller of skiffs, conquering the waves on stormy nights. His destiny had been cut off, he who could have gotten to be the captain of a ship, wearing a blue uniform, with a pipe in his mouth. But he never stopped being a sailor. That was because he had been born to his mother, Madalena, granddaughter of a ship’s captain. He was maritime from his great-grandfather on down, and if they had given him that skiff, he would have been capable of taking it out to sea, not just to Maragogipe or Cachoeira close-by but also, yes, to the faraway coasts of Africa in spite of never having sailed. It was in his blood. He didn’t have to learn anything about navigation; he’d been born with the knowledge. If anyone in that select audience harbored any doubts, let him step forth.…He tipped the bottle and drank with great gulps. The skiff masters had no doubts; it could well be the truth. Along the waterfront and on the beaches, boys were born knowing the things of the sea. It wasn’t worth the trouble to look for explanations. Then Quincas Water-Bray would make his solemn pledge: He was reserving the honor of his last hours for the sea, his final moment. They weren’t going to stick him six feet under the ground—oh no, not that! When his time came he would demand the freedom of the sea, the journeys he hadn’t taken when he was alive, the most daring crossings, unmatched deeds. Master Manuel, without nerves or age, the most daring of the skiff captains, nodded his approval. The others, whom life had taught never to doubt anything, also agreed, taking another swig of booze. The guitars were plucked. They sang to the magic of nights at sea, Janaína’s fatal seduction. The “old sailor” was singing louder than all the others.
How could he have died so suddenly in a room in Tabuão? It was beyond belief. The skiff masters heard the news and couldn’t come to believe it completely. Quincas Water-Bray was given to hoaxes. He’d put one over on everybody more than once.
The gamblers with their games of fist-guess, three-card monte, and blackjack halted their excited play, dazed, all interest in winning lost. Wasn’t Water-Bray their undisputed leader? The late afternoon fell over them like a cloak of deep mourning. In dives, in taverns, over the counters of shops and stores, wherever cachaça was drunk, sadness reigned, and the consumption was directed toward their irremediable loss. Who knew how to drink better than Quincas? He never changed completely. The more firewater he swilled, the more lucid and brilliant he became. Better than anyone else he could guess the brand and the origin of the most diverse drinks, with knowledge of the nuances of color, taste, and aroma in all of them. How long had it been since he had last tasted water? Ever since that day when he came to be called Water-Bray.
Not that it was any memorable event or exciting story, but it’s worth telling because it was from that distant day forward that the epithet “Water-Bray” was definitively added to the name Quincas. He had gone into the store owned by López, a pleasant Spaniard, on the outer rim of the market. As a regular customer he had earned the right to serve himself without the aid of a clerk. On the counter he spotted a bottle filled to the top with clear cachaça, transparent and perfect. He filled a glass, spat to clear his mouth, and tossed it down in one gulp. Then an inhuman bray cut the morning peace of the market, shaking the very foundations of the Lacerda Elevator. It was the cry of a mortally wounded animal, a man who had been betrayed by an evil fate.
“WAUUUU-TUUH!!!”
Filthy, foul bastard of a Spaniard! People came running from all around. Someone most certainly was being murdered. The customers in the store were beside themselves with laughter. That “bray of water” that Quincas gave out then spread around as a great tale, from the market to Pelourinho, from the Largo das Sete Portas to the Dique, from the Calçada to Itapuã. Quincas Water-Bray he remained from then on, and Quitéria Goggle-Eye, during moments of great tenderness, would call him “Brayzie” between her nibbling teeth.
In those houses with the cheapest women too, where tramps and hooligans, petty smugglers, and beached sailors found a home, family, and love in the lost hours of the night after the sad wares of sex when the weary women longed for a little tenderness, the news of the death of Quincas Water-Bray brought on desolation and a flow of sad tears. The women wept as though they’d lost a close relative and suddenly felt unprotected in their poverty. Some added up their savings and resolved to buy the prettiest flowers in Bahia for the dead man. As for Quitéria Goggle-Eye, surrounded by the tearful dedication of her housemates, her wails cut through the neighborhood of São Miguel to die on the Largo do Pelourinho. They were heartrending. She could find consolation only in drink. Between swallows she would exalt the memory of that unforgettable lover, the most tender and the wildest, the merriest and the wisest.
They remembered things, details and phrases that gave the proper measure of Quincas. He was the one who for over twenty days had taken care of Benedita’s three-month-old son when she was in the hospital. All the child was missing was a breast to suckle. Quincas did everything else: changed diapers, c
leaned up doo-doo, bathed the baby, gave him his nursing bottle.
Hadn’t he jumped in just a few days ago, old and drunk as he was, like a fearless champion, to defend Good Clara when two young perverts, sons of bitches from the best families, tried to beat her up in Viviana’s house? And what more pleasant guest than he at the large dining room table at lunchtime? Who knew funnier stories, who could better console the woes of love, who was like a father or an older brother? In the middle of the afternoon Quitéria Goggle-Eye rolled out of her chair and was led to her bed. There she fell asleep with her memories. Several women decided not to look for or to receive any man that night. They were in mourning. As though it were Maundy Thursday or Good Friday.
8
At day’s end, as the lights were going on in the city and men were leaving work, Quincas Water-Bray’s closest friends—Sparrow, Bangs Blackie, Corporal Martim, and Swifty—were going down the Tabuão hillside on their way to the dead man’s room. It must be said in the interest of truth that they weren’t drunk yet. They’d had their drinks, of course, with all the commotion brought on by the news, but their eyes were red from the tears they had wept in their measureless grief, and the same could be said for their garbled speech and wobbly gait. How could they have kept their minds completely clear when a friend of so many years had died, the best of comrades, the most thoroughgoing vagabond in Bahia? As for the bottle that Corporal Martim carried under his shirt, there was never any proof of it.
At that hour of dusk, the mysterious beginning of night, the dead man looked a little weary. Vanda noticed it. Small wonder: He’d spent the whole afternoon laughing, muttering nasty names, making faces. Not even when Leonardo and Uncle Eduardo arrived around five o’clock, not even then did Quincas take a break. He insulted Leonardo with “Dimwit!” and laughed at Eduardo. When the shadows of evening descended over the city, Quincas grew restless. As though he were waiting for something that was late in coming. Vanda, in order to forget and to pretend to herself, started up an animated conversation with her husband and her aunt and uncle, avoiding any glance at the dead man. She wanted to go home, get some rest, take a pill to help her sleep. Why were Quincas’s eyes going back and forth between the window and the door?
The news hadn’t reached the four friends at the same time. The first to find out was Sparrow. He was putting his multiple talents to use advertising shops in the Baixa dos Sapateiros. He was wearing an old, frayed frock coat, his face painted, and he would station himself alongside the door of a shop and, for a miserable pittance, praise its low prices and fine quality, stopping passersby, telling them limp jokes, inviting them in, almost dragging them. Every so often, when his thirst became pressing—the hellish job left his lips and gullet dry—he’d pop over to a bar close-by and have a drink to put his voice back in tune. On one of these back-and-forths he got the news: brutal, like a sock in the belly, leaving him mute. Head down, he went back into the store and told the Syrian that he wouldn’t be able to use him anymore that afternoon. Sparrow was still young; joys and sorrows affected him deeply. He couldn’t bear that terrible shock all by himself. He needed the company of the other close friends, the usual gang.
The crowds across from the skiff docks, in the Saturday-night market in Água dos Meninos, in Sete Portas, at the capoeira foot-fighting exhibitions on the Estrada da Liberdade, were almost always quite large: sailors, shopkeepers from the market stalls, babalaô priests, capoeira fighters, and hooligans, with their long gabbing, adventures, hectic card games, night fishing in the moonlight, wild goings-on in the red-light district. Quincas Water-Bray had many admirers and friends, but those four were the inseparable ones. For year after year they would get together every day, were together every night, with or without money, stuffed with good food or starving to death, sharing drinks, all together in joy and sadness. Only now did Sparrow realize how they were all joined together. Quincas’s death was like an amputation for him; it was as though someone had stolen an arm, a leg, had torn out an eye. That eye in the heart that the priestess Senhora, mistress of all wisdom, spoke about. All together, Sparrow thought, was how they should put in an appearance at Quincas’s wake.
He went off to look for Bangs Blackie, at that hour most certainly on the Largo das Sete Portas helping out numbers bankers and putting together a little change for his nighttime cachaça. Bangs Blackie stood over six feet tall, and when he puffed out his chest he looked like a statue, so big and strong was he. No one could beat him when he was mad. Fortunately, that rarely happened, because Bangs Blackie was jolly and good-hearted.
Sparrow found him on the Largo das Sete Portas, just as he had figured. There he was, sitting on the pavement by the small market, drenched in tears, clutching an almost empty bottle. Next to him, in the solidarity of grief and cachaça, were several vagabonds, making up a chorus for his lamentations and sighs. He’d already heard the news, as Sparrow could see as soon as he took in the scene. Bangs Blackie would toss down a drink, wipe away a tear, and roar with despair, “Our father, the father of the people, has died…”
“…father of the people…,” the others moaned.
The consoling bottle was passed around, and tears formed in the black man’s eyes as his suffering grew greater.
“The good man has died…”
“…the good man…”
From time to time a new element would join the group, sometimes without knowing what it was all about. Bangs Blackie would pass him the bottle and let out the cry of someone who had been stabbed.
“He was so good…”
“…so good…,” repeated the others, except for the newcomer, who was waiting for an explanation for the lamentations and the free cachaça.
“You say it too, damn you.” Bangs Blackie, without standing up, stuck out his powerful arm and was shaking the newcomer, an angry gleam in his eyes. “Or do you think he was no good?”
Someone hurried to explain before things got ugly.
“It was Quincas Water-Bray who died.”
“Quincas? He was a good man,” the new member of the chorus said, both convinced and terrified.
“Another bottle!” Bangs Blackie demanded between sobs.
An agile little black boy jumped up and ran to a nearby stall. “Bangs wants another bottle.”
Wherever the news arrived, Quincas’s death increased the consumption of cachaça. Sparrow was observing the scene from a distance. The news had traveled faster than he had. The black man saw him too and gave out with a fearsome roar, lifting his hands up to the sky, standing up.
“Sparrow, little brother, our father, the father of the people, is dead.”
“…our father, the father of the people…,” the chorus repeated.
“Shut up, you bastards. Let me give my little brother Sparrow a hug.”
They observed the rites of courtesy of the people of Bahia, from the poorest to those properly brought up. Mouths fell silent. Sparrow’s coattails were flapping in the breeze; the tears began to run down his painted face. Bangs Blackie and he embraced three times, their sobs mingling. Sparrow drank from the new bottle, seeking consolation in it. Bangs Blackie wasn’t finding any consolation.
“The light of the night has gone out…”
“…the light of the night…”
Sparrow proposed, “Let’s go find the others and pay him a visit.”
Corporal Martim might be in any of three or four places. Either sleeping at Carmela’s, still tired from the night before, chatting by the market docks, or playing cards in the Água dos Meninos market. Martim had dedicated himself to those three occupations only after he was discharged from the army some fifteen years earlier: love, conversation, gambling. He’d never followed any other known trade, with women and fools providing him with enough to live on. To work after having worn his glorious uniform would have been an obvious humiliation for Corporal Martim. His haughty pride of a handsome mulatto and the agility of his hands with a deck of cards brought him respect. Not to mention his skill on t
he guitar.
He was exhibiting his way with cards at the Água dos Meninos market. By doing it with such ease, he was contributing to the spiritual happiness of bus and truck drivers, playing a part in the education of two black urchins just beginning their practical apprenticeship in life, and helping any number of vendors to spend the profits they had made from their sales that day in the market stalls. In that way he was undertaking work of the most praiseworthy kind. It goes unexplained, then, why one of the vendors wasn’t all that enthusiastic about Martim’s virtuosity in dealing, as the man kept muttering, “Luck like that’s got a fishy smell about it.” Corporal Martim raised his eyes, brimming with blue innocence at the hasty critic, passed him the deck to deal if he wanted to and if he thought he had the necessary competence. As for himself, Corporal Martim preferred to bet against the bank, breaking it and reducing the banker to the most abject poverty. And he would not tolerate insinuations concerning his honesty. As an old soldier he was particularly sensitive to whispers that cast doubt on his upright character. So sensitive was he that any new provocation would oblige him to bust somebody in the face. The enthusiasm of the urchins grew; the drivers rubbed their hands together, all excited. Nothing better than a good fight, spontaneous and unexpected like that. Just when everything was all set to start, Sparrow and Bangs Blackie appeared, bearing the tragic news and the bottle of cachaça, with just a tiny bit left in it. They were already shouting to the corporal from a distance.
“He died! He died!”
Corporal Martim stared at them, his good eye lingering on the bottle with quick calculations, and he commented to the group, “Something important must have happened for them to have drunk a whole bottle already. Either Bangs Blackie hit the numbers or Sparrow’s got himself engaged.”