The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray Read Free Page A

Which leads one to attest that there had indeed been a first death, if not physical, a moral one at least, dating back some years earlier, which brings the total to three, making Quincas some kind of record holder in matters of death, a champion at dying, and gives us the right to think that posterior events—beginning with thedeath certificate right up to his plunge into the sea—were a farce he put together in order to molest his relatives’ lives once more, to bring some annoyance into their existence, lowering them into the shameful gossip of the street. He wasn’t a man for respect and convention, in spite of the respect he was paid by his card-playing partners as a gambler of outsized luck or as a drinker of storied amounts of cachaça.
    I don’t know if this mystery of the death (of the successive deaths) of Quincas Water-Bray will ever be completely deciphered, but I shall make an attempt, as he himself advised, because the important thing is to try, even with the impossible.

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    The rascals who told the story of Quincas’s final moments up and down the streets in the hillside neighborhoods, across from the market and in the stalls at Água dos Meninos (there was even a handbill with some doggerel composed by the improviser Cuíca de Santo Amaro that was widely sold), were therefore an affront to the memory of the deceased, according to his family. And the memory of the dead, as is well known, is a sacred thing, not meant for the unclean mouths of cachaça-swillers, gamblers, and marijuana smugglers. Nor to serve as the basis for the vulgar poetry of the singers of popular songs by the entrance to the Lacerda Elevator, which so many proper people pass through, including the colleagues of Leonardo Barreto, Quincas’s humiliated son-in-law. When a man dies he is reintegrated into his most authentic respectability, even having committed the maddest acts when he was alive. Death, with its unseen hand, erases the stains of the past and leaves the dead man’s memory gleaming like a new-cut diamond. This was the thesis put forth by the family and seconded by neighbors and friends. According to them, Quincas Water-Bray, upon dying, went back to being that once respectable Joaquim Soares da Cunha, of good family; an exemplary employee of the State Bureau of Revenue, with a measured step, a closely shaved chin, a black alpaca jacket, and a briefcase under his arm;someone listened to with respect by his neighbors as he rendered his opinions on politics and the weather, never seen in any bar, with only a modest drink of cachaça at home. In reality, in an effort worthy of applause, the family had managed to arrange for Quincas’s memory to gleam forth without a flaw only a few years after having publicly declared him to be dead. They spoke of him in the past tense when circumstances obliged them to make mention of him. Unfortunately, however, every so often some neighbor, some colleague of Leonardo’s, a talkative friend of Vanda’s (his shamed daughter) would run into Quincas or hear something about him from some third party. It was as if a dead man had risen from his tomb to cast a stain on his own memory: lying drunk in the sun at the height of morning near the Rampa do Mercado, or, filthy and ragged, leaning against some greasy cart by the steps of the church of Pilar, or even singing in a hoarse voice on the arms of black and mulatto streetwalkers along the Ladeira de São Miguel. A horror!
    When finally on that morning a vendor of holy images who had a shop on the Ladeira do Tabuão arrived in great affliction at the small but well-kept home of the Barreto family and brought the daughter, Vanda, and the son-in-law, Leonardo, the news that Quincas had indeed kicked the bucket, found dead in his miserable hovel, a sigh of relief arose in unison from the breasts of the couple. From now on it would no longer be the memory of the retired employee of the State Bureau of Revenue overturned and dragged through the mud by