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My name is Teodoro, and I was a copyist at the Ministry of the Realm. At that time I lived at number 106, Travessa da Conceição, in the boarding house of the splendid D. Augusta, widow of Major Marques. My companions were Cabrita, an employee in the central district administration, slender and yellow as a funeral candle, and the powerful, exuberant Lieutenant Couceiro, a notable player of the French guitar.
My existence was balanced and gentle: throughout the week, at my desk wearing sleeves of glossy fabric, I set down in a fine cursive hand, on state paper, the easy phrases of administration. - Most Illustrious and Excellent Sir, I have the honour of informing Your Excellency... I have the honour of placing in Your Excellency's hands...
On Sundays I rested, settled on the dining-room sofa with my pipe between my teeth, contemplating D. Augusta. On Mass days, she used to remove Lieutenant Couceiro's dandruff with egg white, an operation I found especially delightful on summer afternoons. Through the half-closed windows came the breath of the sun, a distant peal from the bells of Conceição Nova and the cooing of doves on the balcony. The flies murmured over the old cambric, Madame Marques's former bridal veil, which now covered the plates of cherries on the sideboard. Wrapped in a sheet like an idol in his robe, Couceiro fell asleep beneath the rubbing of D. Augusta's affectionate hands while she drew a fine comb through his hair. - Ah, D. Augusta, what an angel you are! - I would say, moved. She laughed and called me Enguiço; I smiled without taking offence.
The nickname was easily explained: I was thin, always entered right foot first, trembled before rats, kept a devotional lithograph at my bedside and was stooped. The lithograph represented Our Lady of Sorrows and had belonged to my mother. The hunch, I claimed, had been produced by many years of bending my spine at university, shrinking like a frightened bird before my lecturers. Later, at the office, I had bowed my brow to the dust before the directors-general. Such a posture suited a graduate, maintained discipline in a well-organised state and guaranteed me peaceful Sundays, some clean linen and twenty thousand réis a month.
I cannot deny, however, that I was ambitious, as Madame Marques and the lively Couceiro shrewdly recognised. No heroic ambition burned in my breast to lead vast human herds from the height of a throne. Nor did my soul aspire to cross the Baixa in a company carriage followed by a courier at a trot. My greed was more sensible: dining at the Hotel Central with champagne, shaking the delicate hands of viscountesses and, twice a week, falling asleep in silent ecstasy upon the cool breast of Venus. The young men hurrying to São Carlos, swathed in expensive coats and evening ties, made me sigh. The carriages crowded with Andalusian women, moving cheerfully towards the bullfight, wounded me too. The certainty that my twenty thousand réis and shrinking manner excluded me for ever from those pleasures lodged in my breast like an arrow in a tree and went on quivering.
For all that, I did not gloomily consider myself an outcast: humble life had its pleasures. It was pleasant, on a sunny morning, to open the Diário de Notícias before a grilled steak, with a napkin round my neck. On summer afternoons, the free benches of the Passeio offered an idyllic gentleness; at night, in the Martinho, I drank coffee and listened to the talkers abusing the nation. Besides, I had never been excessively unhappy because, by my own explanation, I had no imagination. I did not waste away longing for imaginary paradises, born from the soul like clouds rising from an evaporating lake. I did not gaze at the stars sighing for a love like Romeo's or for social glory like Camors's. I was a practical man: I aspired only to the rational, the tangible, to what others in the neighbourhood had already attained and what seemed accessible to me. I resigned myself like a diner chewing dry bread at a common table while waiting for the rich dessert to reach him. Happiness was bound to come; to hasten it, I did everything I considered my duty as a Portuguese citizen and a constitutionalist. Every night I asked Our Lady of Sorrows for them and bought lottery shares.
Meanwhile, I sought distraction: the workings of my brain did not allow me to compose odes, as so many colleagues did to avenge themselves on the boredom of the profession. After paying for my room and tobacco, my salary did not permit me a vice either. I had therefore adopted the discreet habit of buying old, unmatched volumes at the Feira da Ladra, which I devoured at night in my room. They bore weighty titles: 'Galley of Innocence', 'Miraculous Mirror', 'Sorrow of the Disinherited'. I was enchanted by the venerable type, the yellowed, moth-pitted paper, the binding of conventual gravity and the green ribbon that marked the page. One night, years ago, the innocent language printed in heavy type soothed my entire being like the enclosure of an old monastery in a valley at the gentle end of the day, with sad water running. In one of those old folios, the chapter entitled 'Brecha das Almas' was letting me sink into pleasant drowsiness.
It was then that a strange passage stood out from the neutral tone of the page, with the relief of a new gold medal on a dark carpet. 'In the depths of China there is a Mandarin richer than all the kings told of by Fable or History.' 'You know nothing of him: not his name, his face or the silk he wears.' 'To inherit his endless wealth, you need only ring the bell placed beside you on a book.' 'He will give only a sigh on those borders of Mongolia; he will then be a corpse, and you will see at your feet more gold than a miser's ambition can dream of.' 'You, who read me and are a mortal man, will you ring the bell?'
I stopped before the open page, astonished; the question seemed bold, almost roguish, and yet it disturbed me prodigiously. I tried to continue reading, but the lines fled and undulated like frightened snakes, leaving the black challenge gleaming in the empty space. Had the volume been an honest modern edition with a yellow cover, I would have closed the book and dispelled the nervous hallucination. After all, I was not lost in the forest of a German ballad: from the balcony I could see, in the gaslight, the patrol's white belts. But that dark folio seemed to breathe magic; every letter took the unsettling form of a sign from the ancient cabala, bearing a destiny. The commas had the insolent curl of little devils' tails glimpsed in moonlight, and the question mark resembled the Tempter's hook fishing for souls without prayer. An influence that I felt to be supernatural took possession of me and slowly tore me away from reality and reason.
Two visions formed in my mind: on one side, the decrepit Mandarin dying painlessly in a Chinese pavilion at the bell's faint ring; on the other, an entire mountain of gold glittering at my feet. The vision was so clear that I saw the old man's slanting eyes covered by a fine dust and heard the tinkling of sovereigns rolling together. Motionless and shivering, I fixed my eyes on the bell resting peacefully before me on a French dictionary: the very one the folio had foretold.
It was then that, from the other side of the table, an insinuating metallic voice broke the silence. - Come, Teodoro, my friend, stretch out your hand, ring the bell, be strong! The candle beneath its green shade left the room in half-light; trembling, I raised the shade and saw a stout individual sitting in absolute calm. He was dressed entirely in black, wore a top hat and black gloves, and rested both hands gravely on the handle of an umbrella. There was nothing fantastical about him: he seemed as contemporary, as regular and as middle class as if he had come from my own department. His singularity was concentrated in the beardless face, with its strong, hard lines: an abrupt aquiline nose, aggressive as an eagle's beak, and firm lips like a mouth of bronze. When his eyes fixed upon something, they were two flashes of gunfire amid the dark thicket of his joined eyebrows; blood-red veins ran through the pallid skin like those in an old Phoenician marble.
It suddenly occurred to me that the Devil was before me; at once, however, my entire reason rebelled against that imagining. I had never believed in the Devil, just as I had never believed in God; I simply did not say so aloud or write it in the newspapers, so as not to displease the authorities charged with enforcing respect for such entities. They seemed to me two characters as old as matter, good-natured rivals occupied with petty provocations: one, with a white beard and blue robe, established in the luminous heights; the other, sooty, cunning and horned, in the lower flames. Heaven and Hell, I proclaimed, were social conceptions for the use of the common people; and I belonged to the middle class. I did pray to Our Lady of Sorrows, it is true; but I understood prayer according to the same logic that had led me to ask a lecturer's favour to pass my examination and a member of parliament's kindness to obtain my salary. To defend myself against tuberculosis, angina, a razor, fever from the gutter, the orange peel on which a leg is broken and other public evils, I also needed superhuman protection. By bow or by incense, a prudent man had to distribute wise flatteries from the offices of the Arcada all the way to Paradise. With a protector in the district and a mystical protectress in the heights, a graduate's destiny was secure.
Free, in my own view, from crude superstitions, I addressed the individual familiarly. - Then do you truly advise me to ring the bell?
He raised his hat a little, revealing a narrow forehead beneath a curly black lock, and replied word by word. - Here is your case, my dear Teodoro: twenty thousand réis a month is a social disgrace. Across the globe, he explained, there were prodigious things: Romanée-Conti of 1858 and Chambertin of 1861, at ten or eleven thousand réis a bottle. Anyone who drank the first glass, he assured me, would not hesitate to murder his own father to obtain the second. In Paris and London they made carriages with springs so smooth and upholstery so delicate that it was better to cross Campo Grande in them than to travel through the heavens on the clouds of the ancient gods. Modern houses, he continued, attained a style and comfort that fulfilled better than anything else the old imaginary delight called Blessedness. Out of supposed delicacy, he refrained from elaborating on the pleasures of the Palais Royal, the Laborde ball or the Café Anglais and drew my attention to Women. He separated those beings from those I knew, whom he labelled 'females', and recalled that, at the beginning of the Bible, they wore only a vine leaf. Now they were a symphony and an ingenious poem of lace, fine cloth, satin, flowers, jewels, cashmere, gauze and velvet. He invited me to imagine the pleasure of a Christian's five fingers passing over those soft marvels and observed that the bills of those cherubs could not be paid with the change from an honest coin worth five tostões. Hair the colour of gold or darkness contained, according to him, the two great human temptations: hunger for precious metal and knowledge of the absolute. The arms had the colour of marble and the coolness of a wet lily; the breasts repeated the pure line with which Praxiteles had modelled his Cup. The maternal purpose of those breasts, he added scornfully, had been abandoned by rational mothers: they now served to shine amid lace in the light of parties, and for other secret uses. Decency prevented him from completing his exposition of the Fatal Feminine; yet, noticing my shining eyes, he observed that all those pleasures lay infinitely beyond my salary. He asked me to admit that his words bore the venerable seal of truth; my face burned. - They do.
The patient, gentle voice then asked what I thought of one hundred and five or one hundred and six thousand contos. He knew well that they were a trifle, but they constituted a beginning and a small qualification for conquering happiness. The Mandarin in the depths of China, he declared, was decrepit and suffered from gout; as a man and official of the celestial empire, he was of less use in Peking and to humanity than a stone in a hungry dog's mouth. The transformation of matter, he continued, allowed the earth to gather a decayed man here and return him elsewhere as a vigorous plant. Perhaps the useless Mandarin might become useful in another land as a scented rose or a tasty cabbage; killing would almost always mean balancing the needs of the Universe. To prove his philosophy, he invented a poor London seamstress who longed to see a flower in an attic, although the matter destined to be a rose then existed in the Baixa in the form of a statesman. A man with an open razor then arrived, slashed the statesman and let the flood carry off his entrails; after the solemn funeral, the matter entered the evolution of atoms. The superfluous statesman ended by cheering the fair-haired seamstress's attic in the form of a pansy. - The murderer is a philanthropist!
He then summarised my case: the death of that foolish old Mandarin would bring thousands of contos into my pocket. - From that moment on, you can kick the public authorities and see your name quoted in the newspapers, the highest human glory. He declared that he was no barbarian and understood a gentleman's distaste for murdering a contemporary: blood stained one's cuffs and the agony of a human body was unpleasant. Here, however, there would be no repulsive sight: it would be like calling a servant with a simple ring. And it was one hundred and five or one hundred and six thousand contos; he could not remember, he said, but had the figure in his notes.
He claimed to be a gentleman and to have proved it when, warring against a tyrant in the first uprising of justice, he had been cast down from heights I could not even imagine. It comforted him to know that the Other was also shaken: a Jehovah had defeated a Satan with legions of archangels, but would be lost before a man with a quill pen and a white notebook. The conclusion, however, brought a figure incompatible with the earlier ones. - In any case, it is six thousand contos. Come, Teodoro, there is the bell, be a man.
I knew what a Christian owed himself and knew my authors. If that character took me to the summit of a mountain in Palestine and, beneath the full moon, offered me sleeping cities, peoples and empires, I would know how to answer according to an illustrious example. I would raise my finger towards the starry depths and declare: - My kingdom is not of this world! But it was more than a hundred thousand contos, offered by the light of a stearin candle, in Travessa da Conceição, by a fellow in a top hat leaning on an umbrella. Then I did not hesitate and, with a steady hand, rang the bell. Perhaps it was an illusion; yet it seemed to me that a bell with a mouth as vast as the sky itself rang through the darkness across the Universe, waking sleeping suns and drowsy planets upon their axes.
The individual put a finger to his eyelid and wiped away the tear that had clouded his bright eye for an instant. - Poor Ti-Chin-Fú! - Is he dead? - I asked. The visitor said that Ti-Chin-Fú had been peaceful in his garden, assembling a paper kite to launch into the air, the innocent pastime of a retired Mandarin. The ring had surprised him; now he lay beside a singing stream, dressed in yellow silk, dead on his back upon the green grass. In his cold arms he held the paper kite, which seemed as dead as he was. The funeral would be the following day; may the wisdom of Confucius help him conduct his soul safely elsewhere.
The fellow rose, respectfully removed his hat and left with the umbrella under his arm. On hearing the door slam, I had the sensation of emerging from a nightmare and sprang into the corridor. A cheerful voice was speaking with Madame Marques, and the door to the staircase closed discreetly. - Who has just gone out, D. Augusta? - I asked, covered in sweat. - It was little Cabrita, who is going to gamble for a while...
I returned to the room: everything lay peaceful, unchanged and real. The folio remained open at the terrible page; I read it again, but now found in it only the old-fashioned prose of a stern moralist, every word like extinguished charcoal.
I went to bed and dreamt that I was far away, beyond Peking, on the borders of Tartary, in the pavilion of a lamas' monastery. There I heard prudent, gentle maxims flowing from the lips of a living Buddha, accompanied by a delicate scent of tea.