She had heard, sitting impatiently at the door of her house, eight o'clock, eight-thirty; nine, nine and a half. «What could have happened, Most Holy Mother... For the man was still not ready at all and he was getting out of the way, as soon as he had eaten his dinner, to linger like that?... He who had never been capable of such things? silly!...»
-Ten hours! Help me Our Lord Jesus Christ!
He went to the inn's gate, asked passing acquaintances if they had seen Jeronymo; no one gave news of her. Sahio, she ran to the street corner; a tired silence yawned in that rest of Sunday; at half past ten she went to bed, startled, her heart pounding in her throat, her ear alert, so that she would come to the door at the first knock; she went to bed without taking off her skirt or putting out the lamp entirely. The frugal supper of boiled milk and baked cheese with sugar and butter was left untouched on the table.
He couldn't sleep: he worked on his head, pushing sleep away. She began to imagine dangers, rolls, in which her man received new slashes; Firmo figured in all the delirium scenes; in all of them there was blood. After all, when, after much turning from one side of the mattress to the other, the unfortunate woman was falling into a slumber, the slightest noise outside made her jump up and run to the window. But he wasn't the cowboy, either the first time or the second time or either time.
When it began to rain, Piedade was even more distressed; in her over-excitement it now seemed to her that her husband was on the waters of the sea, on board, entrusted solely to the protection of the Virgin, in the midst of a dreadful storm. She knelt in front of the oratory and prayed, her voice tangled with suffocating agony. With each thunderclap, her shock redoubled. And she, on her knees, her eyes fixed on the image of Our Lady, unaware of the passing of time, gasped, sobbing. Suddenly, she stood up, very surprised to find herself alone, as if she had only noticed at that moment that she was missing her husband. She looked around, terrified, wanting to cry, to ask for help; the shadows stretched around the lamp, shimmering along the walls and ceiling, seemed to want to tell him something mysterious. A pair of pants, hanging from the bedroom door, with a coat and hat on top, he gave him a glimpse of the figure of a hanged man, moving his legs. He blessed himself. I wanted to know what time it was and couldn't; it seemed to him that at least three days had passed during that affliction. He calculated that it would not be long before dawn, if it was at all; if only that hellish night didn't go on endlessly, without the sun ever appearing again! He drank a glass of water, quite full, despite having taken another one shortly before, and remained motionless, listening attentively, in the expectation of hearing the time of a clock in the neighbourhood. it seemed to him that at least three days had passed during that affliction. He calculated that it would not be long before dawn, if it was at all; if only that hellish night didn't go on endlessly, without the sun ever appearing again! He drank a glass of water, quite full, despite having taken another one shortly before, and remained motionless, listening attentively, in the expectation of hearing the time of a clock in the neighbourhood. it seemed to him that at least three days had passed during that affliction. He calculated that it would not be long before dawn, if it was at all; if only that hellish night didn't go on endlessly, without the sun ever appearing again! He drank a glass of water, quite full, despite having taken another one shortly before, and remained motionless, listening attentively, in the expectation of hearing the time of a clock in the neighbourhood.
The rain had lessened and the winds were beginning to blow with desperation. Outside, the night told him secrets through the keyhole and through the cracks in the roof and doors; with each whistle, the misera thought she saw a specter appear that came to tell her about Jeronymo's death. The impatient desire to know what time it was was driving her crazy; she went to the window, I opened it; a damp gust entered the room, puffing, and turned off the light. Piedade let out a cry and began to look for the box of phosphoros, bumping into it, unable to recognize the objects she was groping. She had been losing consciousness; at last she found the phosphoros, lit the lamp again and closed the window. A little rain had come into the house; she felt the wet clothes on her body; she had a new glass of water; A feverish chill ran down her spine, and she flung herself onto the bed, hitting her chin, and got under the sheets, shivering with fever. He fell asleep again, closed his eyes; but she immediately got up and sat down on the mattress: she seemed to have heard someone talking outside, in the street; the chill returned; she, trembling, tried to listen. If she wasn't mistaken, she could make out muffled, talking voices, and the voices were men's; she listened, cupping her hand behind her ear; then she heard a knock, not on her door, but farther on, at the house of das Dôres, Rita, or Augusta. «It must have been Alexandre who was returning from work...» she wanted to go to him and ask him for news about Jeronymo, but the chill forced her to stay under the covers. the chill returned; she, trembling, tried to listen. If she wasn't mistaken, she could make out muffled, talking voices, and the voices were men's; she listened, cupping her hand behind her ear; then she heard a knock, not on her door, but farther on, at the house of das Dôres, Rita, or Augusta. «It must have been Alexandre who was coming back from work...» She wanted to go to him and ask him for news about Jeronymo, but the chill forced her to stay under the covers. the chill returned; she, trembling, tried to listen. If she wasn't mistaken, she could make out muffled, talking voices, and the voices were men's; she listened, cupping her hand behind her ear; then she heard a knock, not on her door, but farther on, at the house of das Dôres, Rita, or Augusta. «It must have been Alexandre who was coming back from work...» She wanted to go to him and ask him for news about Jeronymo, but the chill forced her to stay under the covers.
At five o'clock he jumped up again. "There were people out there for sure!..." He had heard the first door creak; he opened the window, but it was still so dark it was barely visible. It was a lazy August morning, foggy, humid; she seemed willing to weather the day. “O gentlemen! Would that hellish night never end?...» Meanwhile, one could guess that dawn was going to come. Piedade I heard inside the courtyard, on the opposite side of her house, a buzz of two voices whispering with interest. "Virgin of Heaven! one would say the voice of her man! And the other was a woman's voice, believe me! Your illusion for sure! that night she was about to hear what was not happening...» But those conversational whispers in the darkness caused her extreme uproar. "No! How could he be?... What madness!
—Jeromo! she shouted.
The voices soon fell silent, making complete silence; then nothing more is heard.
Pity was at the window. The darkness dissolved at last; a sad light formed at the source and was, little by little, spilling over into space. The sky was a greasy gray mortar. The tenement woke up with the aftermath of Mondays; you could hear the throat clearing of the paraty surf. The little houses opened up; sprawling figures came yawning to do their wash at the tap; chimneys were beginning to smoke; smelled of roasted coffee.
Piedade threw a shawl over his shoulders and went out to the courtyard; Machona, who had just appeared at the door of number 7 with a scream to wake up the family at once, shouted to him:
"Good morning, neighbor!" How is your husband doing? best?
Pity heaved a sigh.
—Oh, don't ask me, Sora Leandra!
"Did you get worse, daughter?"
"Didn't come home tonight..."
—Look at the demo! How did it not come? Where was she then?
—Here are those who don't know how to answer you.
"Now, have you seen it?"
—I have the brains that are cod fish! I didn't sleep a wink overnight! Strong misfortune to me!
"Has something happened to him?"
Piedade began to sob, wiping her tears on her woolen shawl; while the other, with her hoarse and strong voice, like the sound of a rusty horn, passed on the news that Jeronymo had not retired to the inn that night.
—Maybe he'd go back to the hospital… said Augusta, who was washing her parrot's cage beside a tub.
—But he came yesterday from mute ... countered Leandra.
"And you don't go in there after eight at night," added another laundress.
And the comments multiplied, throbbing from all sides, in a good mood to make that the scandal of the day. Piety responded coldly to the curious questions put to him by his companions; she was sad and succumbed; she didn't wash, she didn't change her clothes, she didn't eat anything, because the food grew in her mouth and didn't get past her throat; all she did was cry and moan.
"Mighty misfortune to me!" repeated the unhappy woman every moment.
—If you go like this, daughter, you are well-groomed! exclaimed Machona, arriving at the door of her house to bite into a bread stuffed with butter. What the hell, creature! The man didn't die for you, for you to be there now crying like that!
"Do I even know if he died?" said Piedade between sobs. I saw so much tonight!...
"Did she appear in your dreams?" asked Leandra in amazement.
"Not in dreams, that I didn't sleep, but I saw in ways that phantoms..."
And cried.
“Oh my God, daughter!
“I am disgraced!
—If souls appeared to you, of course; but put your faith in God, woman! and don't worry about it that way, because the misfortune can be greater! Crying pulls a lot!
“Alas, my rich man!
And the mournful lowing of that poor abandoned creature preceded the rude agitation of the tenement with a mournful and sad note of a cow calling in the distance, lost at nightfall in an unknown and wild place. But the work was already heating up from one end of the inn to the other; one laughed, sang, the tongue was loosened; the anthill was busy shopping for lunch; merchants came and went: the pasta machine began to snort. And Piedade, seated on her doorstep, patient and howling like a dog waiting for its master, cursed the hour when she had left her land, and seemed ready to die right there, on that granite threshold, where she, so many Sometimes, with her head resting on her man's shoulder, she would sigh happily, hearing the dear fados from beyond the sea moan on his guitar.
And Jeronymo didn't show up.
Ella finally got up, went outside to the grass, began to walk agitated, talking to herself, gesticulating loudly. And in her movements of despair, when she raised her closed fists towards the sky, one would have said that it was not against her husband that she was rebelling, but against that cursed hallucinating light, against that crapulous sun, which made the blood boil in her eyes. men and put the lusts of goats into their bodies. She seemed to rebel against that pandering nature, which had stolen her man to give him to another, because the other was her own people and she was not.
And sobbing cursed the hour when he left his land; this good land tired, old, as if sick; that good peaceful land, without the ups and downs of youth. Yes, there the fields were cold and melancholy, of a golden green and quiet, and not burning and emerald and drowned in as much sun and in as much perfume as those of this hell, where in every leaf that you step on there is a poisonous reptile , as in every flower that unbuttons and in every fly that flies there is a virus of lasciviousness. There, in the nostalgic fields of their land, on clear moonlit nights the jaguar and the margay could not be heard snoring, nor in the morning, at daybreak, the truculent band of peccaries snarled; there the ugly and terrible tapir did not pierce through the forests, breaking trees; there the sucurujú did not rattle its funeral bell, announcing death, nor did the choir expect the careless traveler to be a traitor to give him the right and decisive strike; there your man would not be stabbed by the jealousy of a capoeira; there Jeronymo would still be the same chaste, silent and gentle husband, he would be the same sad and contemplative farmer, like the cattle that in the afternoon raise their humble, pitying and biblical gaze to the opal sky.
Cursed the hour she came! damn! a thousand times damn!
And returning to the house, Piedade became even more angry, because there opposite, in number 9, the Bahian mulatta, the dancer of crying, the frantic snake, sang happily, arriving from time to time at the window to come blow out the ash from the furnace. from his iron, looking right and left in passing, showing indifference to what was none of his business, and then disappearing, without interrupting the song, which was too steeped in his service. Oh! this one did not comment on Master Jeronymo's strange behavior, nor did she even want to hear from him; she barely left the house and, in that little time that I left, she went in a hurry and without giving anyone a leash.
Anything! that sorrows and sorrows did not put the pot on fire!
However, ah! ah! she was very worried. In spite of the relief that the death of Firmo had brought to her mind, and in spite of her contentment at passing for once into the arms of the digger, a vague and oppressive shock crushed her heart and killed her with impatience to throw herself in search of of news about the events of the night; so much so that, at eleven o'clock, she barely noticed that Piedade, after waiting in vain for her husband, was leaving in anguish in search of him, ready to go to the hospital, the police, the morgue, the devil, so long as she didn't return without For some clarification, she immediately threw her work into the corner, put on a skirt, crossed her shawl over her shoulder, and went out into the world, also willing not to return without knowing every now and then what was new.
They went their separate ways and only returned in the afternoon, almost at the same time, finding the tenement already full and excited with the news of Firmo's death and the terrible effect it had caused in the Cat's Head, where the crime was attributed to the Carapicús. , against whom extreme vengeances of defiance were sworn. It blew from there, growling, a warm breath of ill-suffered and thirsty cholera that grew with the approach of night and seemed to wave the restless yellow pennant in the air menacingly.
The sun was sinking into the sunset, helpless and naked, dyeing the sky a foreboding and sinister red.
Piedade scowled into the inn; she didn't come sad, she came enraged; she had learned more about her husband on the street than she had expected. She had known in the first place that he was alive, perfectly alive, as she had been seen that same day, more than once, in Garnizé and on Praia da Saudade, wandering about in a dark mood; she had learned, through a friend of Alexandre's, that Jeronymo had appeared early in the morning from the grass near João Romão's quarry, which led one to believe that he had come from the house at that moment, going out through the back of the tenement; he had also learned that the caveman had gone to the Order to get his box of clothes and that, the day before, he had been drinking heavily at Pépé's shop, having a good time with Zé Carlos and Pataca, and that later they went to the beach. , all three more or less in the sip. Without the slightest suspicion of crime, the unfortunate woman was convinced that her husband had not retired to the house that night, because he had been in a big brawl with his friends and that, having returned late and drunk, he had decided to make out with the mulatto woman, who immediately accepted him. "I could! After all, she didn't want anything else for a long time!..." With this conviction, a ball of jealousy suddenly swelled up inside her, and she immediately ran to the inn, certain that she would find the man and throw that whole thing on him. tremendous storm of accumulated resentment and spite, which threatened to suffocate her if they didn't break out for good. She crossed the tenement without a word to anyone and went straight to the house; he expected to find it open and her disappointment was cruel to see it closed as he had left it. He asked Machona for the key, who, when he handed it over,
With this new one, Piedade did not count. She was livid; a dreadful presentiment pierced his mind like lightning. She walked away immediately, afraid to speak, and it was trembling and panting that I opened the door and got into number 35.
He threw himself into a chair. She was dead tired; she hadn't eaten anything that day and wasn't hungry; her head was spinning, her legs felt like lead.
Could it be him?!... she asked herself.
And the reasonings began to deaf to him en masse, tangled up, trampling his reason. He couldn't coordinate them; among them all, one idea rebelled more stubbornly, disturbing the others, becoming superior, like a card bigger than the rest of the deck: "If he killed Firmo, I was sleeping at the inn and didn't come to me, it's because then he left him." Made me by Rita!”
He tried to evade such a hypothesis; I repel it indignantly. No! it was not possible that Jeronymo, her husband for so long, the father of her daughter, a man to whom she had never given any reason to complain and whom she had always respected and wanted with the same affection and dedication, to abandon her for a long time. moment to another, and by whom?! for one I don't know what to say! a devil of a hot-tempered mulatto woman, who was Pedro's as quickly as Paulo's! a minx, who lived more for fun than for work! a pest, that... No! Which! Was it possible?! But then why hadn't he come?... why didn't he come?... why didn't he give him any news?... why had he gone to the Order in the morning to fetch the box of clothes?... Roberto the Funeral had told him that he had found him at two in the afternoon nearby, around the corner from Rua Bambina, and they had even stopped for a moment to talk. A few more steps would have reached the house! It would be possible, saints of heaven! that her man was willing never to return to her?
Into this the other entered, accompanied by a small barefoot. I came satisfied; she had been with Jeronymo, they had dinner together in a eating house; she was all set; the nest had been arranged. She wouldn't move right away so as not to talk about it at the inn, but she would take some clothes and the most essential items that wouldn't be visible on the occasion of the transport. She would return the next day to the tenement, where she would continue to work; in the evening she would go to her new lover, and at the end of a week—zaz! the complete change was made, and goodbye, heart! —This is the way! The cowboy, for his part, would send a letter to João Romão, saying goodbye to his service, and another to his wife, saying with good words that, due to one of those fatalities that no creature is free, he stopped living in the company of others. of her, but that he would keep the same esteem and continue to pay for his daughter's school; and, done that, prompt! he would enter into a new life, master of his mulatta, free and alone, independent, living for each other, in an eternal drunkenness of pleasure.
But on the occasion when the bahiana, followed by the little one, was passing in front of Piedade's door, the latter lifted her chair and shouted:
-Please?
-What is? grumbled Rita, stopping without turning back but her face, and already saying in all her impatience that she wasn't in the mood for much conversation.
—Tell me something, I ask that one; do you move?
The mulatto woman didn't count on such a question, so point-blank; She was silent, not finding what to say.
"Move, don't you?" I insisted the other, turning red.
"And what's with you?" Change me or not, I don't have to answer you! Get in there with your life! Here it is!
—You messed with my life, gypsy! exclaimed the Portuguese, without holding back and advancing towards the door with impetuosity.
-Huh?! Repeat, ordinary poke! she yelled the mulatto, taking a step forward.
"Do you think I don't know everything already?" You harmed the man and now you carry me with him! Let the bad thing know you, bitch from hell! But let it be that you have to embitter what the devil didn't want! who swears it is me!
—Get out of here, you dumb turkey, if you can!
Around Rita, the populace was already bustling together; the washerwomen immediately left the tubs and came, with their bare arms, full of soap suds, to park nearby, forming a circle, silent, without any of them wanting to get involved in the noise. The men laughed and threw chufas at the two contestants, as always happened when in the slum any woman fought with another.
-Bait! Bait! they shouted.
At the mulatto's challenge, Piedade had jumped to the courtyard, armed with one of her clogs. A stone received her on the way, splitting the skin of her chin, to which she responded by delivering a formidable blow to the head against her adversary.
And they soon caught up with each other tooth and nail.
For some time they struggled on their feet, grappling, in the midst of the great uproar of the bystanders. João Romão acudio and wanted to separate them; everyone protested. Miranda's family appeared at the window, still drinking their after-dinner coffee, indifferent, already used to those scenes. Two parties still formed around the fighters; almost all Brazilians were for Rita and almost all Portuguese for the other. The superiority of each of them was discussed feverishly; shouts of enthusiasm broke out at every dent that either of them received; and these, without having torn their nails, already had scratches and bites all over the bust.
When you least expected it, a heavy thud was heard and Piedade was seen on her stomach on the floor and Rita was on top, straddling her broad hips, punching her neck with continuous punches, disheveled, broken, panting, her hair hanging over her face, screaming victoriously, her mouth dripping with blood:
—Drink your tobacco! Here, rotten chicken! Here, so you don't mess with me! Take it! Here, puffer fish from the beach!
The Portuguese rushed to take Piedade from under the mulatto woman. Brazilians were fiercely opposed.
-Can not?
—Fill!
-Do not let!
-Do not take!
-Goes into! Goes into!
And the words «Gallego» and «goat» crossed each other at all points, like slaps. There was a quick, muffled vavao, and immediately afterwards a formidable roll, a real roll, not more than two women, but some forty-odd men with a pulse, erupted like an earthquake. The fences and gyraos disappeared from the ground and shattered in the air, crackling with discharge; while in an infernal roar, in a close-up of an anthill at war, that living wave washed away whatever it came across; tents and tubs, buckets, watering cans and plant coffins, everything rolled between those hundred confused and crazy legs. From Miranda's windows, the beeping was furious; from the street, all over the block, new whistles answered; from the back of the tenement and ahead came people and more people. The courtyard was almost full; no one else understood each other; everyone gave and everyone took; women and children screamed. João Romão, crying out in fury, felt powerless to contain such demons. "To roll around at that hour, what imprudence!" I could not close the doors of the shop, nor the gate of the inn; he hurriedly put the cash in the drawer into the donkey, and, arming himself with an iron bolt, stood sentry to the shelves, ready to open the hull to the first one who dared to jump over the counter. Bertoleza, inside the kitchen, was readying a large kettle of hot water to defend her man's property with it. And the rôlo boiling outside, more and more inflamed with a terrible breath of national rivalry. They were heard, in a clamor of plagues and groans, cheers to Portugal and cheers to Brazil. From time to time, the populace, which continued to grow, it went away en masse, roaring with fear, but it soon returned, like a wave in the ebb of the seas. The police showed up and didn't feel like going in, before a reinforcement of soldiers arrived, who had a permanent gallop to fetch!
And the roll boiled.
But at the best of the fight, a chorus of voices could be heard in the street approaching from the bands of Cabeça de Gato. It was the war song of the capoeiras from the other tenement, who came to fight the Carapicús, to avenge the death of Firmo, their chief of staff, with blood.
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