Virgília

Who She Is

Woman who crosses the life of Brás Cubas in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas: the bride the father chooses for him, the wife of Lobo Neves, the lover of the little house in Gamboa, and the visitor who finds him ill. The narrator portrays her at fifteen or sixteen as pretty, fresh, headstrong, ignorant, and childish, and later shows her as a woman who keeps her composure, who does not separate love from public regard, and who gives the orders when danger comes. The book leaves open whether this calm is virtue or the long habit of dissimulating.

Trajectory

She appears without a name at the hour of Brás Cubas's death, as the third lady present (chapter I), and Brás goes back to her at fifty-four, before naming her (chapter V). Sick, he sees her at the door of the alcove after two years without seeing each other; she grows angry when he talks of dying and, two days later, returns with her son, Nhonhô, and speaks with contempt of a friend's illicit love affairs (chapter VI). Brás calls her his great sin of youth (chapter IX).

Brás's father finds her name in a scribble (chapter XXVI); Brás portrays her at fifteen or sixteen (chapter XXVII), and his father describes her as the daughter of Councilor Dutra, a political influence (chapter XXVIII). Brás visits the Councilor, who finds the candidacy legitimate but asks for months, and within a month he and Virgília are intimate (chapter XXXVII). She receives him in a bad mood; when Brás sees in her face the smallpox of Marcela, he makes a gesture of revulsion, and she withdraws and then looks down at him, silent, cracking her fingernails (chapter XLI). When Lobo Neves takes his bride, Virgília asks him when he will be a minister and whether she will be made a baroness, and he answers that he will make her a marquise (chapter XLIII).

She reappears married to Lobo Neves, so polished that Brás does not recognize her; she tells him that he is to waltz with her, and during the waltz he leaves her hand pressed in his (chapter L). The first kiss is hers, trembling with fear, at the gate of the country house, and the love between the two rests on patient and systematic hypocrisy (chapter LIII). Brás understands the affair as a matter of the opportune moment only when she complains of an importunate suitor (chapter LVI). She confesses to Brás moments of remorse, hears that remorse is a lack of love, and answers that loving him is Heaven's will; she prays drowsily, fears thunderstorms, and keeps a rosewood oratory (chapter LVII).

She appears downcast, because her husband, whom she calls Damião, seems to suspect her, and because she dreamed that he was killing her; she turns pale at the proposal of flight, and soon brightens at the news of a box at the theater for Candiani (chapter LXIII). Offended at having been treated like a dog, she answers the idea of flight with the image of a little house hidden in a garden, and says she will not leave her son (chapter LXIV). She sends Brás a box of cigars with a note saying that they are suspected, refuses flight with a "Never," and accepts the little house, because in her mind love and public regard are bound together (chapter LXVII).

She showers the old relative Viegas with affection, hoping for a codicil (chapter LXXXVIII); the will leaves her nothing, and she flies into a rage, until Brás tells her to think of the child of the two of them, of whom she is pregnant (chapter XC). She sulks when he talks of the son, and he judges it fear of childbirth and embarrassment at the pregnancy (chapter XCIV). When Lobo Neves receives the anonymous letter, she calls it slander in front of her husband and gets away with it, and tells Brás everything at Gamboa with a calm that disturbs him (chapter XCVI).

When her husband knocks at the door of the Gamboa house, once the first shock passes she hides Brás in the alcove, has Plácida go back to the window, receives her husband, and leaves with him (chapter CIV). She writes to Brás that nothing happened, but that her husband suspects, serious and silent, and asks for great caution (chapter CVII). On the eve of departure, she asks him not to forget Plácida and says that the husband speaks of only until the elections (chapter CXIV).

In 1855, at a ball, she appears in blue gorgorão, a ribbed silk, still lovely with an autumnal beauty, and the two talk at length without alluding to the past (chapter CXXX). She writes in disguised handwriting asking Brás to put Plácida, very ill, in the Misericordia (chapter CXLII). She weeps in earnest at her husband's burial (chapter CL), and Brás solves the riddle of the betrayal and the weeping with Vespasian's coin (chapter CLII).

Themes Embodied

The themes that run through her are Desire, Appearance and reality, and Ambition.

Desire: she is the woman Brás wants to make his alone (chapter LXIV), in an affair that, over time, loses its delirium.

Appearance and reality: the calm before the anonymous letter and the patient hypocrisy of their love make composure the brake on passion (chapter XCVI, chapter LIII).

Ambition: the title of baroness she asks of Lobo Neves while he is still a suitor, and the promise of a marquise he gives her, decide the choice between the eagle and the peacock (chapter XLIII).

The book never enters Virgília's mind: everything known about her comes from Brás, who reads her to his own advantage. This leaves two readings in almost every scene, that of the woman who calculates and that of the woman who suffers without being able to speak (the weeping of chapter LXIV, the calm of chapter XCVI, the weeping of chapter CL), and the text supports both.

Relationships

• Brás Cubas: the lost bride, the lover, and the visitor who finds him ill.
• Lobo Neves: the husband, from whom she expects a title and whom she deceives.
• Dona Plácida: the former dependent of her family, who keeps the little house and calls her Iaiá.
• Marcela: the Spaniard whose smallpox-scarred face Brás sees in hers during the hallucination.