Brás Cubas

Who He Is

Narrator and protagonist of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, born October 20, 1805, a law graduate of Coimbra, heir to a family that grew rich and then invented a noble origin for itself, a deputy who never rises to minister, and the lover of a married woman. He tells his own life after death, as a "deceased author," in short chapters out of order, and says what the living would keep silent. The book does not decide whether this frankness is the freedom of one who risks nothing more or the pose of one who carefully chooses what to show. The life he narrates runs from the cradle to the reckoning of denials.

Trajectory

The book opens at the end: Brás says he expired on a Friday in August 1869, at sixty-four, unmarried, with about three hundred contos, and that eleven friends took him to the cemetery (chapter I).

He says that a grand and useful idea killed him, that of an anti-hypochondriac plaster, and confesses that the main motive was seeing his own name printed on everything (chapter II). He sketches the genealogy, in which his father, thinking the surname smelled of cooperage, invents that the Cubas came from three hundred taken from the Moors (chapter III), warns the reader against the fixed idea, and defines the book as a work of uneven philosophy (chapter IV), and attributes his death to a chill caught from the air because of the plaster, in a demonstration he himself admits is fragile (chapter V).

Sick, he sees Virgília at the door of the alcove after two years without seeing each other (chapter VI), and the delirium of twenty or thirty minutes carries him, as a hippopotamus, to the origin of the centuries and to a figure who calls herself Nature or Pandora, who denies him more years and shows him the parade of the centuries (chapter VII). On the return of lucidity, Reason wants to evict Folly, who asks for ten more minutes (chapter VIII), and the transition ties the delirium to Virgília and Virgília to the day of his birth (chapter IX).

Once born, he is lifted by his father to be shown to the city, and each relative predicts the career that suits him best (chapter X). A devil of a boy, he makes Prudêncio his horse and confesses that he came out opinionated, selfish, and somewhat contemptuous of people (chapter XI). At nine, annoyed because the dinner for Napoleon's fall delays the compote, he spies on Dr. Vilaça with Dona Eusébia at the country estate and shouts the news of the kiss; his father pulls his ears in secret and the next day laughs (chapter XII). He goes through the school of Master Ludgero, where he meets his classmate Quincas Borba, and jumps to 1822, the year of independence and of what he calls his first personal captivity (chapter XIII).

At seventeen he sees Marcela on the night of the independence illuminations, follows her, and three days later, at the supper to which his uncle João takes him, kisses her on the stairs (chapter XIV). He spends thirty days reaching her heart and finances the reign by exploiting his father, inducing his mother to divert money, and signing bonds against the inheritance (chapter XV); the reflection that he himself calls immoral says that a precious stone does not lessen a beautiful brow (chapter XVI). His father discovers the eleven contos spent and decides to send him to Europe; Brás humbles himself before Marcela and sees her accept leaving only when he brings her an ivory comb with three diamonds (chapter XVII), but he is escorted by his father, his uncle the canon, and a man in livery to a galley bound for Lisbon (chapter XVIII).

Aboard, he finds an occasion to kill himself, but the poet captain occupies him with an ode and sonnets, and in the storm he admits that, having meant to go and meet death, he did not dare look at it when it came (chapter XIX). Flattered by the captain, he trades Marcela for ambition, studies mediocrely at Coimbra, and receives his bachelor's degree with a sense of both fraud and pride (chapter XX). On the road, the muleteer who rescues him from the donkey receives a silver cruzado, and Brás, thinking later that a few vinténs would have sufficed, feels remorse for having paid too much (chapter XXI). Summoned by his father, he returns to Rio (chapter XXII) and witnesses his mother's long agony, the first death he sees up close (chapter XXIII); soon after, he confesses that he was a compendium of triviality and presumption, and that frankness is the first virtue of a deceased man (chapter XXIV).

After the seventh-day mass he isolates himself in Tijuca with Prudêncio, books, and a shotgun, and hypochondria unbuttons in him like a flower (chapter XXV). His father comes up with two projects, a seat as deputy and a marriage, and Brás scribbles words at random until his father reads Virgília's name in the "virumque" (chapter XXVI). Brás portrays the bride at fifteen or sixteen and defines each stage of life as an edition that corrects the previous one (chapter XXVII), agrees to examine candidacy and marriage, and the love of fame replaces hypochondria (chapter XXVIII). He accepts what his father proposes and visits Dona Eusébia (chapter XXIX), where he meets her daughter Eugênia (chapter XXX), kills a black butterfly with a towel and consoles himself with jokes (chapter XXXI), discovers that the girl has been lame from birth (chapter XXXII), and receives from her the first kiss (chapter XXXIII). He answers the tender soul who calls him a cynic that he is not a cynic, he was a man (chapter XXXIV), and, at what he calls his road to Damascus, hears the voice that tells him to go down and leaves her, out of pity and out of dread of truly loving a lame leg (chapter XXXV). He takes off his tight boots and concludes that all human wisdom is not worth a pair of short boots (chapter XXXVI). He visits Councilor Dutra, who finds the candidacy legitimate but asks for months, and within a month he and Virgília are intimate (chapter XXXVII).

He meets Marcela again, old and scarred by smallpox, owner of a goldsmith's shop (chapter XXXVIII), and the vision of the smallpox passes to Virgília's face (chapter XLI). Lobo Neves takes from him both the bride and the candidacy within a few weeks, and Virgília, between the eagle and the peacock, chooses the eagle (chapter XLIII). His father repeats "Um Cubas!" in astonishment and dies four months later (chapter XLIV). In the division of the estate, Brás quarrels with Sabina and Cotrim and does not give in (chapter XLVI); he tries to eliminate the poet Luís Dutra with silence and evasive talk (chapter XLVIII), and gives that gesture a name in the theory of the tip of the nose (chapter XLIX).

He meets Virgília again, married to Lobo Neves, and waltzes with her (chapter L); he sends the police chief a half-dobra in gold found at the door and keeps five contos found on the beach at Botafogo (chapter LI, chapter LII). He tells of the first kiss (chapter LIII), explains love through the opportune moment (chapter LVI), and hands the affair over to Destiny (chapter LVII). He hears from Lobo Neves the confidence that he lacks public glory (chapter LVIII), and in the Passeio Público he meets Quincas Borba, a beggar, who steals his watch in an embrace (chapter LIX, chapter LX). He calls Virgília the pillow of his spirit (chapter LXII) and, three weeks later, proposes flight and feels the first great anger against her (chapter LXIII).

Jealous after a night at the theater he did not attend, he again proposes flight and ends up arranging the little house in Gamboa (chapter LXIV, chapter LXVII). At the Valongo he sees Prudêncio whipping an enslaved man and finds the scene amusing (chapter LXVIII). He pays Dona Plácida for her consent with affection, an invented novel, and five contos (chapter LXX), confesses that he regrets the book, whose greatest defect is the reader (chapter LXXI), hears her story (chapter LXXIV), and, accused by his conscience of having lowered her to the trade of go-between, replies that vice is often the manure of virtue and goes to open the door for Virgília (chapter LXXVI).

Lobo Neves announces the presidency of a province, and Brás leaves the decision to Virgília and goes out (chapter LXXVIII); he accepts being secretary (chapter LXXX), receives Sabina and Cotrim, who propose a truce (chapter LXXXI), and hears from Cotrim that such a case changes its appearance in the province (chapter LXXXIII). The decree dated the 13th falls through because of Lobo Neves's superstition, and Brás hails the fatal number (chapter LXXXIV). Love, he says, then reaches the mountaintop and begins to descend (chapter LXXXV).

When Virgília becomes pregnant, he talks in thought with the embryo (chapter XC). He receives from Quincas Borba a new watch and a letter announcing Humanitism (chapter XCI), and Sabina seats him beside Nhã-loló, saying he is to marry her (chapter XCIII). He loses the embryo (chapter XCV), is disturbed by Virgília's calm before the anonymous letter denouncing them both (chapter XCVI), and thinks the letter restores to the affair the salt of mystery (chapter XCVIII).

He confesses that he was blessing the revolution that removed from his path Count B. V., of the Dalmatian legation, who had courted Virgília for three months (chapter CI). He is an hour late for a meeting, says it was absentmindedness, and recommends the gesture of looking down to whoever has no ready answer (chapter CIII); hidden in the alcove, he peeks through a keyhole as Lobo Neves takes Virgília away (chapter CIV), explains his leaving through the law of the equivalence of windows (chapter CV), imagines himself married (chapter CVI), and refuses to analyze her note (chapter CVIII). He discovers that Lobo Neves's decree is dated the 31st (chapter CX), decides to go to the meeting he thinks is set in a note on the low wall, finds that the note is old, from the start of their affair (chapter CXI), and concludes that the husband fears public opinion (chapter CXII). He takes leave of Virgília before people who are watching them (chapter CXIV), has lunch on the day of departure (chapter CXV), and rereads the old letters (chapter CXVI).

He hears Humanitism from Quincas Borba over chicken and coffee (chapter CXVII), and, pushed by Sabina, agrees to marry (chapter CXX). He goes down the Livramento hill with Nhã-loló and loses years along the way (chapter CXXI); when she dies of yellow fever, he does not weep and concludes that perhaps he did not truly love her (chapter CXXVI). As a deputy, he says he has no remorse, only the wish to be a minister (chapter CXXIX). In 1855 he speaks to Virgília at a ball (chapter CXXX), confesses an indiscretion to a naval officer (chapter CXXXI), and, at fifty, finds his age at the bottom of the carriage (chapter CXXXIV).

He gives a speech on the National Guard's cap to reach a cabinet post, and backs off when he sees opposition in it (chapter CXXXVII). He loses his seat as deputy, and the chapter about the ministry he never got comes only in dots (chapter CXXXIX, chapter CXL). On Quincas Borba's advice, he founds an opposition newspaper (chapter CXLVI, chapter CXLVII), which Cotrim disowns in the press (chapter CXLVIII) and which dies within months, when Lobo Neves also dies (chapter CL). He first says he will not go see Dona Plácida ill, but the next day, out of courtesy, he goes to her house and has her transferred to the Misericordia, and concludes that her life served his loves (chapter CXLIII, chapter CXLIV). He joins the Third Order and begins to think well of himself (chapter CLVII); on one and the same day he sees Marcela die in the hospital and meets Eugênia in a tenement (chapter CLVIII). Quincas Borba dies in his house (chapter CLIX).

Throughout the book, the voice comments on its own work: it warns that the work is one of uneven philosophy (chapter IV), places the greatest defect on the reader (chapter LXXI), announces the suppression of a chapter that remains written (chapter XCVIII), explains to the critic that death does not grow old and that it is the style that changes with the phase narrated (chapter CXXXVIII), and anticipates the reader's judgment by calling a one-line chapter useless (chapter CXXXVI). The last chapter takes stock of what he was not and did not have (chapter CLX).

Themes Embodied

The themes that run through him are Death, Language and narration, and Ambition.

Death: he is a dead man who writes, and he opens the memoirs at the end because the writing stays fresher that way (chapter I).

Language and narration: the voice corrects itself, digresses, suppresses, and justifies itself before the reader and the critic, so that the manner of telling becomes a subject of the book (chapter IV, chapter LXXI, chapter CXXXVIII).

Ambition: from the plaster with the name on display to the ministry that never came, what he wants is position, not work (chapter XX).

The book gives Brás the alibi of death to say everything, and each confession (Marcela's comb, the poet he tries to eliminate, the door opened to Virgília after listening to his conscience) comes with a theory that explains or absolves it. The reader is left between admiring his lucidity and noticing that each theory arrives in time to be convenient.

Relationships

• Virgília: the great sin of his youth, the lost bride, the lover, and the visitor who finds him ill.
• Marcela: the first attachment, paid for with fifteen months and eleven contos, and found again old and scarred by smallpox.
• Eugênia: the lame girl he kisses and leaves.
• Lobo Neves: the rival who takes his bride and candidacy, and the husband he deceives.
• Quincas Borba: the schoolmate, the beggar who steals his watch, and the philosopher of Humanitism who dies in his house.
• Dona Plácida: the keeper of the little house, whom he pays and whose old age his conscience obliges him to defend.
• Prudêncio: the house boy who was his horse and who repeats the violence at the Valongo.
• Bento Cubas: the father who displays him, sends him to Europe, and plans his marriage to Virgília.
• Sabina: the sister he quarrels with over the inheritance and who pushes him toward marriage.
• Cotrim: the brother-in-law who warns him and who later separates from him through the press.
• Nhã-loló: the bride chosen by Sabina, who dies before the wedding.