Select a Portuguese sentence to reveal its English support.
Tap a Portuguese sentence to reveal its English support; tap it again or tap outside to close it.
With a keyboard, focus or activate a sentence. Press Escape to dismiss its English support.
My name is Teodoro and, at that time, I was a copyist at the Ministry of the Realm. I lived at number 106, Travessa da Conceição, in the boarding house of the splendid D. Augusta, widow of Major Marques. I shared the house with Cabrita, an employee in the central district administration, thin and yellow as a funeral candle. The other lodger was the powerful and exuberant Lieutenant Couceiro, a fine player of the French guitar.
My existence passed in a balanced and gentle fashion. At my desk, wearing sleeves of glossy fabric, I filled state paper with a fine cursive hand and formulas that were always the same. 'I have the honour of informing Your Excellency... I have the honour of placing in Your Excellency's hands...' On Sundays, I settled on the dining-room sofa with my pipe between my teeth. On Mass days, I admired D. Augusta as she removed Lieutenant Couceiro's dandruff with egg white. In summer, the breath of the sun entered through the windows, mixed with distant bells, doves on the balcony and flies over the table. Couceiro fell asleep wrapped in a sheet while D. Augusta's affectionate hands drew the fine comb through his hair. Moved, I said that D. Augusta was an angel; she laughed and called me Enguiço.
The name came from my being thin, always entering right foot first, fearing rats and walking with a hunch. At my bedside I kept a lithograph of Our Lady of Sorrows that had belonged to my mother. I said that the hunch had grown from bending my spine so often at university, before my lecturers, like a frightened bird. At the office, I had continued bowing my head to the dust before the directors-general. That posture, by my own account, suited a graduate, maintained state discipline and guaranteed peaceful Sundays. It also gave me some clean linen and a monthly salary of twenty thousand réis.
Despite that humble security, I was ambitious, as D. Augusta and Couceiro could see. I did not dream of commanding vast human herds from a throne or crossing the Baixa in an official carriage. I desired pleasures closer at hand: dining at the Hotel Central with champagne and shaking the delicate hands of viscountesses. I also wanted to fall asleep, twice a week, in silent ecstasy upon the cool breast of Venus. The young men in expensive coats hurrying to São Carlos and the carriages full of Andalusian women going to the bullfight made me sigh. The certainty that my salary and shrinking manner excluded me from those pleasures wounded me like an arrow lodged in a tree.
Even so, I did not gloomily consider myself an outcast, because a modest life also offered pleasures. On a bright morning, it was pleasant to open the Diário de Notícias before a grilled steak, with a napkin round my neck. In the afternoon there were the free benches of the Passeio; at night, coffee at the Martinho and eloquent men insulting the nation. I had never been excessively unhappy, I explained, because I lacked the imagination to create impossible paradises. I did not sigh beneath the stars for a love like Romeo's or for the social glory of a novel. I was a practical man: I aspired to the rational, the tangible and what others in the neighbourhood had already achieved. I resigned myself like someone chewing dry bread while waiting for a rich dessert that is bound to arrive. To hasten those blessings, I did what I considered the duty of a Portuguese constitutionalist. Every night I asked Our Lady of Sorrows for them and bought lottery shares.
As I had no talent for composing odes and my salary barely paid for my room and tobacco, I sought another distraction. I acquired the discreet habit of buying old, unmatched volumes at the Feira da Ladra. At night I fed on books with solemn titles, such as 'Galley of Innocence' and 'Miraculous Mirror'. I was enchanted by the venerable type, the moth-pitted yellow paper, the solemn binding and the green ribbon between the pages. One night, years ago, that innocent language soothed me like an old monastery in a valley at the end of the day, beside running water. Over an old folio opened at the chapter 'Brecha das Almas', I was sinking into pleasant drowsiness.
Then a strange passage stood out from the faded page like a gold medal on dark cloth. 'In the depths of China there is a Mandarin richer than all the kings of Fable and History,' the folio declared. 'You know nothing about him: not his name, his face or the silk he wears.' 'To inherit his endless wealth, you need only ring the bell beside you on a book.' 'He will give only a sigh on the borders of Mongolia; then he will be a corpse, and the gold will lie at your feet.' 'You, who read me and are a mortal man, will you ring the bell?'
I remained motionless before the page; the question seemed bold and comic, yet it disturbed me profoundly. When I tried to continue, the lines fled like frightened snakes and left only the black question behind. Had it been a modern yellow-covered edition, I would have closed the book and overcome the nervous hallucination. The patrol visible in the gaslight reminded me that I was still in Lisbon, not in the forest of a German ballad. Yet the dark folio seemed to breathe magic, with cabalistic letters and commas like the tails of little devils. An influence that I felt to be supernatural slowly drew me away from reality and reason. Two visions formed: a decrepit Mandarin dying painlessly in a distant pavilion and a mountain of gold shining at my feet. I saw the old man's eyes losing their brightness and heard gold coins rolling together. At last I noticed the bell foretold by the book, resting before me on a French dictionary.
In the silence, an insinuating metallic voice spoke from the other side of the table: - Come, Teodoro, my friend, ring the bell and be strong. Trembling, I raised the candle's green lampshade and discovered a man sitting in perfect calm. He was stout, dressed entirely in black and rested his black gloves gravely on the handle of an umbrella. His top hat and regular appearance made him seem as contemporary and bourgeois as an official from my own department. Only his face was extraordinary: an eagle's nose, a bronze mouth, joined eyebrows and eyes that fired like weapons. His pale skin was crossed by red veins, like an ancient Phoenician marble.
It occurred to me that the Devil was before me, but my reason immediately rebelled against that hypothesis. I had never believed in the Devil, just as I had never believed in God, although I avoided declaring it so as not to annoy the authorities. They seemed to me very old social characters: a white-bearded God in the heights and a horned Devil in the lower flames. Heaven and Hell, I concluded, were inventions for the use of the common people, while I belonged to the middle class. I did pray to Our Lady of Sorrows, it is true, but I explained that devotion as a form of practical protection. I had already asked a lecturer for kindness to pass an examination and a member of parliament to obtain the twenty thousand réis. Now I asked for higher protection against tuberculosis, angina, razors, fevers from the gutter and falls in the street. A prudent man, I thought, should distribute flattery from earthly offices all the way to Paradise. Free, in my own view, from crude superstitions, I asked the man whether he truly advised ringing the bell.
The visitor raised his hat and patiently replied that twenty thousand réis a month was a social disgrace. He listed Burgundy wines costing ten or eleven thousand réis a bottle and joked that a second glass would lead a man to kill his own father. He spoke of carriages with springs so smooth that they would be better than the clouds used by the ancient gods. Modern houses, he assured me, achieved what was called blessedness better than the old Heaven did. Then he reached the chief pleasure: certain beings called Women, whom he distinguished from those I knew and labelled 'females'. He described them as poems made of lace, fine cloth, satin, flowers, jewels, cashmere, gauze and velvet. He suggested the pleasure of a man's hand passing over those soft materials and observed that such pleasure required a great deal of money. Hair, he said, bore the colour of gold or darkness and represented two great human temptations. He compared arms to cool marble and breasts to antiquity's purest line, as though bodies were works that could be bought. He mocked breastfeeding and claimed that, for rational mothers, breasts now served to shine at parties and for secret uses; then he asked me to admit the truth of his words, and I felt my face grow hot. - Yes, they were true.
With the same gentleness, he asked what I would say to one hundred and five or one hundred and six thousand contos. He called them a trifle, although they were a first qualification for conquering happiness. The Mandarin, according to him, was decrepit, suffered from gout and was of no use in Peking or to humanity. He then presented the transformation of matter as a law: a man decayed here and returned elsewhere as a scented rose or tasty cabbage. He imagined a poor London seamstress who wanted a flower in her attic, while the necessary matter existed in the Baixa in the form of a statesman. A man with a razor killed the politician; after death and burial, the matter became a pansy to cheer the seamstress. - The murderer is a philanthropist! - proclaimed the visitor, concluding that false philosophy.
He summarised that the death of the foolish old man would give me thousands of contos, the pleasure of scorning the authorities and the glory of appearing in the newspapers. He assured me that he was no barbarian: he understood that blood and agony offended a gentleman, but here I would see none of those sights. Ringing would merely be like calling a servant, and the reward would be one hundred and five or one hundred and six thousand contos, a figure he said he could not remember. He then claimed to be a gentleman and recalled the fall he had suffered when fighting a tyrant in the first revolt of justice. He also alluded to his old adversary and to the danger posed by a man armed only with a pen and a notebook. At last he contradicted the earlier figures: - In any case, it is six thousand contos. Come, Teodoro, ring the bell, be a man.
I knew the answer a Christian should give if the tempter took him to a mountain in Palestine and offered him cities, peoples and empires. I would then know how to raise my finger to the stars and declare that my kingdom was not of this world. But the offer came by the light of an ordinary candle, in Travessa da Conceição, made by a man in a top hat leaning on an umbrella. It was more than a hundred thousand contos; therefore I did not hesitate and, with a steady hand, rang the bell. Perhaps it was an illusion, but it seemed to me that a bell as vast as the sky was ringing through the darkness of the Universe.
The visitor put a finger to his eyelid, wiped a tear from his bright eye and murmured: - Poor Ti-Chin-Fú! I asked whether he had died, and the visitor said that Ti-Chin-Fú had been peacefully preparing a paper kite in his garden to launch into the air. The ring had surprised him in that innocent pastime, and now he lay beside a stream, dead, on his back upon the grass. He wore yellow silk and held the paper kite in his cold arms, as still as its owner. The visitor announced the funeral for the following day and hoped that the wisdom of Confucius would help the soul migrate safely.
He rose, respectfully removed his hat and left with the umbrella under his arm. When the door slammed shut, I had the impression of emerging from a nightmare and ran into the corridor. I heard a cheerful voice beside D. Augusta and saw the door to the staircase close; sweating, I asked who had left. - It was little Cabrita, who is going to gamble for a while - she replied, without mentioning any visitor in black. I returned to the room, where everything lay peaceful, unchanged and real. The folio remained open at the frightening page, but rereading revealed only the old-fashioned, lifeless prose of a stern moralist.
I went to bed and dreamt that I was beyond Peking, near the borders of Tartary, in the pavilion of a lamas' monastery. There I listened to prudent, gentle maxims that came from the lips of a living Buddha with a delicate scent of tea.