Who She Is
Daughter of Damasceno, chosen by Sabina to marry Brás Cubas in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, a young woman with proud eyes and a dainty voice. The book shows her by a nickname, Nhã-loló, and only the tombstone gives her name, Dona Eulália Damascena de Brito, and her age, nineteen. She dies at the first arrival of yellow fever, before the marriage.
Trajectory
Damasceno brings Brás an invitation to dinner and, in five minutes, pours out politics, theater, and his daughter's voice (chapter XCII). At dinner, Sabina seats her beside Brás; he notes her proud eyes and her singing (chapter XCIII), and at the theater he finds her prettier and praises her dress (chapter XCVIII). Her candidacy is driven forward by Sabina with impetus (chapter CXVII).
Walking down the Livramento hill with Brás after mass, she sees her father absorbed in a cockfight; she takes Brás away, and at the foot of the hill the two wait for her father, who arrives surrounded by bettors, with Nhã-loló deeply mortified (chapter CXXI). She is ashamed of her father and strives to mask the family's inferiority; Brás reads in this an intention to separate her cause from her father's and resolves to tear her from that environment (chapter CXXII).
vou arrancar esta flor a este pântano, I am going to pluck this flower from this swamp
Cotrim, her uncle, does not give an opinion on the marriage, because praising her would look like self-interest (chapter CXXIII). Two chapters later, the book gives only her epitaph (chapter CXXV).
AQUI JAZ / D. EULÁLIA DAMASCENA DE BRITO / MORTA / AOS DEZENOVE ANOS DE IDADE / ORAI POR ELA!, HERE LIES / D. EULÁLIA DAMASCENA DE BRITO / DEAD / AT NINETEEN YEARS OF AGE / PRAY FOR HER!
She dies at the first arrival of yellow fever; Brás accompanies her to the vault without tears and concludes that perhaps he did not truly love her, and Damasceno complains that of eighty invitations only twelve people came to the burial (chapter CXXVI).
Themes Embodied
The themes that run through her are Appearance and reality and Death.
Appearance and reality: her father's shame and her effort to mask the family's inferiority make her a young woman who tries to seem other than she is in order to be accepted (chapter CXXII).
Death: death arrives dry, through a tombstone without narration and through Brás's doubt about his own feeling (chapter CXXV, chapter CXXVI).
What is known of Nhã-loló's feelings comes from Brás, who reads her shame as kinship with himself. Chapter CXXII sustains two readings, that of a true shame and that of a rescuer in search of a young woman who must owe him her having come out of the swamp.
Relationships
- Brás Cubas: the fiancé who finds her pretty, pulls her from the swamp, and does not mourn her.
- Sabina: Brás's sister, who decides the marriage.
- Cotrim: the uncle who does not give an opinion.
- Quincas Borba: the philosopher who reads her death as a service of the epidemic to the species.