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Quincas Borba · Chapters XC to CII

The Suspicion and Rubião's Candidacy

AmbitionAppearance and RealityDesire

Chapter XC: Dead Ants and a Cicada

Section summary

At home, dressed in black, Rubião tries to forget the story the coachman told, of a young man and a veiled lady who meet in a house with a lattice window on Rua da Harmonia, but the vision of Sofia entering a house on Rua da Harmonia pursues him. He imagines knocking at the door, seizing the seamstress by the neck, and demanding the truth or his life, and that the woman shows him a lady who is not Sofia. Vexed, while buttoning his waistcoat he kills with towel blows a number of ants that cross the sill, and at once regrets it; a cicada begins to sing, and its song sounds like Sofia's name ("Sôôôô... fia, fia"): he stops at the fourth button of his waistcoat, all ears.

Analysis

The suspicion is the work of desire: reason refutes it, "but the good effect was short-lived," because the vision returns. In the scene he imagines with the seamstress, Rubião demands the truth or his life, and his imagination gives him the answer he wants: the lady is someone else. The ants pay for what the imagination cannot do, and he, vexed, regrets the blow.

puts a live cicada beside twenty dead ants, to make amends to them
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Chapter XCI: Rubião Nearly Offers His Hand to Be Kissed

Section summary

When the dinner bell rings, Rubião composes his face so that the regulars of the house, four or five friends who always surround him, will not notice his torment. He finds them in the parlor, and they rise eagerly to shake his hand. Rubião then has the inexplicable impulse to offer them his hand to kiss, and he restrains himself in time, astonished at himself.

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Chapter XCII: Sofia and the Ladies' Committee

Section summary

In the evening at Flamengo, Sofia receives Rubião in a study where two seamstresses are making mourning dresses, and she talks to him about many subjects. She says she is forming a committee made up only of ladies to solicit alms for an epidemic in a town in Alagoas, and Rubião immediately subscribes a large sum; the narrator says the committee will also put Sofia in the spotlight. When she asks why he disappears for days, Rubião answers that it is for nothing, so moved that one seamstress bumps the other's foot. Maria Benedita is upstairs, with two friends.

Analysis

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Chapter XCIII: Dondon and Rua da Harmonia

Section summary

When Sofia goes upstairs to see her cousin, Rubião is left alone with the two seamstresses; he paces back and forth and hears in the distance Cristiano Palha talking with the director of a bank, who has come to pay condolences. One of the seamstresses, Dondon, gathers up her sewing to leave. Rubião asks her why she does not wait for her colleague, and she replies that she is only waiting for Dona Sofia, and that she is going to drag her bones back to Rua da Harmonia.

Analysis

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Chapter XCIV: Rubião Leaves Without Tea

Section summary

When Sofia comes down, she finds Rubião upset and avoiding her eyes; he says it is a headache. Dondon leaves, and Cristiano Palha takes his leave of the bank director, bowing in thanks. Sofia, feeling Rubião's cold hand, offers him melissa water, and Palha wants to call a Tilbury and offers him tea, but he refuses everything and leaves on foot, saying that the night air will do him good and that he will find transport at Catete.

Analysis

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Chapter XCV: Behind the Figure on Rua do Príncipe

Section summary

Leaving, Rubião decides to catch the seamstress before he reaches Catete, and he climbs Rua do Príncipe, reckoning that she has gone that way. In the distance he sees some figures, one of them a woman, and quickens his step, his head dazed with Rua da Harmonia, the seamstress, the lady, and open lattice windows. He bumps into a man who was walking slowly, head down, and does not even ask his pardon.

Analysis

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Chapter XCVI: The Bank Director and the Obsequious Bows

Section summary

The man he pushed, whom Rubião does not even see, is the bank director who had visited Palha, and he does not get angry, because within an hour he has had two opposite shocks. Humiliated at a minister's house, where he was handling a petition for his brother, he had left, vexed by the bows he made; in the house of Cristiano Palha, the host's bows restored his self-esteem, and he began to imitate the minister's slow gesture. In the street he now savors Palha's bows and receives the bump with indifference.

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Chapter XCVII: The Seamstress and the Southern Cross

Ambition

Section summary

When Rubião reaches the corner of Catete, the seamstress is talking with a man who was waiting for her, and she goes off with him, arm in arm, toward Glória. Rubião, standing still, recalls the coachman, the lattice, and Rua da Harmonia, and concludes that Dondon must be the third party in the love affair, and he plans to offer her money the next day to make her confess. At the window he looks at the Southern Cross and laments that Sofia did not gaze at the constellation with him; then he thinks of the Southern Cross as an honorary order and finds the idea of a rare distinction excellent.

Analysis

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Chapter XCVIII: Sofia's Note and the Garden

Desire

Section summary

The next morning, the Spanish servant brings Rubião a note from Sofia, asking how he slept, since the couple has been worried, and sending regards from Maria Benedita. Rubião replies through the boy who brought the note, gives him ten tostões, calls him back, and remains silent for two minutes, with nothing to say. Looking at the garden, he seems to hear the flowers asking him to put an end to desire, and he takes his leave, sending his regards to the ladies.

Analysis

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Chapter XCIX: The Letter Found in the Flower Bed

Section summary

After thinking of sending flowers to Sofia, running to the gate when the boy was already far off, and consoling himself with the idea that mourning excludes cheerful memories, Rubião finds at the foot of a flower bed a letter in her handwriting, addressed to Carlos Maria, which he imagines fell from the boy who carried her reply. He imagines its contents as perversity and lust, and has impulses to open it, but restrains himself, because the letter belongs to another, like a bundle of money; he decides to hand it to Sofia, so as to read the truth on her face.

Analysis

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Chapter C: Camacho Proposes the Candidacy

Ambition

Section summary

None of the regulars comes to lunch, and Rubião lunches alone, tormented by the letter: sometimes he wants to read the face of Sofia, sometimes he does not, for the desire to know everything is the hope of discovering that there is nothing. Between the cheese and the coffee, Camacho arrives, back from Vassouras, like David who, in the Bible, soothed King Saul tormented by an evil spirit, and tells him that he has prepared his candidacy for Deputy for Minas, writing to the influential people there and proposing him as the solution to the disagreement between two other candidates. Speaking of sacrifices and vengeance, Camacho grows drunk on his own hopes; Rubião listens, subjugated, and, standing, imagines himself in the Chamber taking the oath, with a shiver.

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Chapter CI: Freitas's Burial

AmbitionAppearance and Reality

Section summary

News arrives of Freitas's death. Rubião sheds a tear in secret, pays the funeral expenses, and follows the coffin to the cemetery the next afternoon; he embraces the dead man's old mother to keep her from kneeling at his feet. His coupé at the door, among the old calashes, confirms what was already said about that friend of the deceased, and the dead man begins to be treated with a certain consideration. At the cemetery, Rubião throws the first spadeful of earth and tips his hat to all the heads with a single bow; as he gets into the coupé, he hears someone say, in an undertone, that he looks like a senator or a judge.

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Chapter CII: The Minister's Horses

Ambition

Section summary

Late in the evening, on the way back from the funeral, Rubião crosses on Rua de São Cristóvão the coupé of a minister going to the imperial audience, with two outriders behind. He puts his head out, draws it back in, and stays to listen to the outriders' horses, so very alike and so very distinct, even after the distance no longer allows him to hear them.

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