Who She Is
Seamstress and former dependent of the family of Virgília, to whom Brás Cubas entrusts the keeping of the little house in Gamboa in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. The natural daughter of a sacristan of the Sé cathedral and a confectioner, she supported her daughter and her mother with sweets, sewing, and lessons, and fears ending up begging. She accepts the role with difficulty, eyes lowered, and the book always shows her through what Brás owes her; she is the character in whom his conscience accuses him most.
Trajectory
Brás chooses her for the little house: a former seamstress and dependent of Virgília, she would accept without being told everything (chapter LXVII). She accepts with difficulty, eyes lowered for the first two months; Brás invents a novel of loves before Virgília's marriage, which she accepts whole, and after six months anyone who saw them would say she was his mother-in-law; he gives her five contos of savings, and she starts praying for him every night (chapter LXX). She never agrees to sit at the table with the lovers; when Virgília says she seems no longer to like her, she exclaims that she likes Iaiá and stares at her until her eyes well up, and Brás leaves a little silver coin in the pocket of her dress (chapter LXXIII).
Não gosto de Iaiá! Mas então de quem é que eu gostaria neste mundo?, I don't like Iaiá! Then whom on earth would I like?
Days later, alone with Brás, she tells her story: she married a consumptive tailor, supported her daughter and her mother, resisted the suitors her mother pushed on her, saw her daughter run off with a man, was a dependent in Iaiá's family, and left when Iaiá married. When she says she fears ending up begging, she realizes to whom she is speaking, laughs, and calls herself a fool (chapter LXXIV).
Não se cria isto à toa, meu senhor; Deus sabe como é que isto se cria, One does not raise a child like this for nothing, sir; God knows how it is done
Eu tinha um medo de acabar na rua, pedindo esmola, I was so afraid of ending up in the street, begging alms
Brás answers with a farce about her birth, in which her parents would have called her to burn her fingers on the pans and her eyes at the sewing (chapter LXXV), and his conscience accuses him of having lowered her to the trade of go-between (chapter LXXVI). When Virgília tells her everything before asking that Brás go with them (chapter LXXVIII), Plácida, more naive, knows only that a shoe turned up toward the sky does harm (chapter LXXXIV).
Anxious because Brás arrives an hour late, she asks him not to abandon Iaiá (chapter CIII); she sees Iaiá's husband through the window and closes the lattice, then fills the room with exclamations to hide her trembling (chapter CIV), holds Brás by the arm when he wants to leave (chapter CV), and offers to go to Lobo Neves's house (chapter CVI). On the eve of the departure, Virgília asks Brás not to forget Plácida and to visit her a few times, and says that Plácida went to say goodbye in tears (chapter CXIV).
Ill, she is the subject of Virgília's request to the Misericordia; Brás decides not to go (chapter CXLII, chapter CXLIII), but the next day, out of courtesy, he goes to her house, gives her some money, and has her transferred to the Misericordia, where she is found dead at dawn, and he concludes that her life served his loves (chapter CXLIV). The money ends up taken by a stonemason, who sells the bonds and runs off (chapter CXLV). Brás mentions her again in the final reckoning (chapter CLX).
Themes Embodied
The themes that run through her are Appearance and reality and Meaning of life.
Appearance and reality: she is the nominal mistress of the little house, and she accepts the whole novel because she needs a version in which she is not an accomplice (chapter LXX).
Meaning of life: Brás's farce about her birth makes life a sentence handed down at birth, and the usefulness he gives her at the end is the answer to the "what for?" (chapter LXXV, chapter CXLIV).
Plácida speaks little, and each time she speaks it is to defend herself: she accepts the novel because her conscience asks it of her, and she laughs and calls herself a fool when she realizes she has said too much. Brás pays her with a little silver coin, five contos, and a moralist's phrase, and the book lets her speak of herself in full only once, in the story where the fear of ending up in the street explains the little house (chapter LXXIV).
Relationships
- Brás Cubas: Iaiá's lover, who pays her, listens to her, and absolves himself.
- Virgília: the Iaiá from whose household she came and whom she says she likes.
- Lobo Neves: Iaiá's husband, whom she sees coming through the window.