Who She Is
Daughter of Dona Eusébia, the sixteen-year-old whom Brás Cubas meets in Tijuca in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, pretty and lame from birth, whom he takes for an illegitimate daughter, born of love and contempt. She answers without hesitation the question that disconcerts him, and is the one who says aloud the phrase Brás had in his head.
Trajectory
Dona Eusébia introduces her to Brás; he gives her seventeen years, the mother corrects it to sixteen, and the girl barely hides her pleasure at being called a young lady; that afternoon, Brás waits in vain for her to turn her head as she passes on horseback (chapter XXX). At the country estate, when he asks whether she hurt her foot, she answers without hesitation that she is lame from birth (chapter XXXII). On Saturday she asks him, "Don't come down," and on Sunday gives him the first kiss; Brás admires her art and suspects tartuffery (chapter XXXIII).
When he announces that he is coming down, she says that he does well to avoid the ridicule of marrying her, and does not believe his oaths (chapter XXXV).
Faz bem em fugir ao ridículo de casar comigo., You do well to avoid the ridicule of marrying me.
Brás later evokes a solitary, silent, hardworking Eugênia (chapter XXXVI). She reappears in a tenement and refuses the money with her gaze: she raises her head and looks at him with great dignity, and Brás holds out his hand as one would to a lady (chapter CLVIII).
Ergueu logo a cabeça, e fitou-me com muita dignidade, She immediately raised her head, and looked at me with great dignity
Themes Embodied
The themes that run through her are Appearance and reality and Desire.
Appearance and reality: Brás separates her crippled body from her upright gaze and finds her dissimulation as natural as appetite, so that she is at once the admired and the suspected (chapter XXXII, chapter XXXIII).
Desire: the kiss she gives him is not enough: the terror of truly loving a lame leg decides the descent (chapter XXXV).
Eugênia speaks little, and each line undoes one of Brás's defenses: the answer about the foot, the remark about the ridicule, the look in the tenement. The book does not say what she thinks of him (chapter XXXII), and the Eugênia that Brás evokes later, solitary and silent, is the image he made himself (chapter XXXVI).
Relationships
- Brás Cubas: the young man who kisses her and leaves her, and whom she meets again later in a tenement.
- Marcela: the other woman from Brás's past whom he meets again on the same day (chapter CLVIII).