Master Manuel advised, “It’s going to be a stormy night. We’d better get back.”
He intended to get the skiff back to port before the storm broke. But the cachaça was pleasant and the talk agreeable, there was still a lot of ray fish in the kettle floating in the yellow of the dendê oil, and Maria Clara’s voice was filling the air with sadness and a desire to linger on the water some more. Besides, how could they break up the idyll of Quincas and Quitéria on that night of celebration?
So it was that the storm, its whistling winds and curling waves, caught them still out. The lights of Bahia were shining in the distance. A bolt of lightning flashed in the darkness. The rain began to fall. Sucking on his pipe, Master Manuel went back to the tiller.
No one knows how it was that Quincas stood up and leaned against the smaller mast. Quitéria didn’t take her eyes off the figure of the Old Sailor as he smiled at the waves washing over the skiff, at the flashes lighting up the darkness. Men and women tied themselves to the hawsers, clutched the gunwales of the skiff, as the wind whistled and the small vessel threatened to founder at any moment. Maria Clara’s voice had fallen silent. She was beside her man at the tiller.
The sea was sloshing the boat. The wind was trying hard to tear the sails. Only the glow of Master Manuel’s pipe stood out, along with the figure of Quincas as he stood surrounded by the storm, impassive and majestic, the Old Sailor. The skiff was nearing the calm waters of the breakwater slowly and with difficulty. Just a little more and the festivities could begin again.
It was then that five flashes of lightning came, one after the other. The thunderclap echoed as if it were the end of the world. A huge wave picked up the skiff. The men and women cried out, and fat Margô wailed, “Oh, save me, Holy Mother!”
Amidst the roaring of the enraged sea, as the skiff stood in great peril, they saw, in the light of the flashes, Quincas jump, and they heard his last words.
The skiff was finally cutting through the calm waters by the breakwater, but Quincas stayed behind in the storm, wrapped in a sheet of waves and foam, by his own free will.
12
There was no way the undertaking establishment would take back the coffin, not even at half price. They had to pay, but Vanda did get the leftover candles. The coffin sits today in Eduardo’s storeroom, with hopes of being sold secondhand to some corpse. As for Quincas’s last words, there are differing versions. But who could have heard them clearly in the midst of that storm? A marketplace minstrel’s version goes like this:
In the midst of the great uproar,
Quincas was heard to say:
“I’m burying me like I said I would
And just when I want it to be.
Let them keep their old coffin
For some better time.
I won’t let them shove me
Into some shallow ditch in the ground.”
The rest of his prayer
Can never be known.
Rio, April 1959.
Jorge Amado, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends