What It Is
The black butterfly is the creature that Brás Cubas kills with a towel in chapter XXXI, on the day after another, also black, came into Dona Eusébia's porch. Brás laughs at the first, kills the second out of irritation, and consoles himself with jokes: it should have been blue, and it took him for the inventor of butterflies. The episode echoes in Eugênia, the girl lame from birth whom he meets in the same chapter as the first butterfly.
Where It Appears
In chapter XXX, at Dona Eusébia's house, a black butterfly enters the porch just as Brás has met her daughter, Eugênia. Dona Eusébia cries out against it, Brás drives it out, laughing, and in the afternoon he waits in vain for the girl to turn her head as she passes on horseback.
um rir filosófico, desinteressado, superior, a philosophical, disinterested, superior laugh
The next day, in chapter XXXI, another black butterfly, larger, enters Brás's room and lands on his forehead and on his father's portrait. Irritated by her scornful air, he kills her with a towel, takes pity, and consoles himself with jokes.
Também por que diabo não era ela azul?, Also why the devil was she not blue?
Vejam como é bom ser superior às borboletas!, See how good it is to be superior to butterflies!
Chapter XXXII opens with a circumspect reader, who asks whether the chapter about the butterfly is dullness or humbug, and then moves on to Eugênia. At the country estate, Brás notices that she limps and asks whether she hurt her foot.
Não, senhor, sou coxa de nascença., No, sir, I am lame from birth.
In chapter XXXIII, Brás chews over the enigma of the pretty, lame girl and treats her body as a riddle of nature, an immense mockery.
Por que bonita, se coxa? por que coxa, se bonita?, Why pretty, if lame? why lame, if pretty?
In chapter XXXVI, after the courtship ends, Brás takes off his tight boots and draws from them a theory of cheap happiness. His heart shakes off Eugênia, whom he evokes solitary and silent until her death.
Talvez um comparsa de menos fizesse patear a tragédia humana., Perhaps one less supporting actor would make the human tragedy be hissed.
In chapter CLVIII, on the same day he sees Marcela die in the hospital, Brás meets Eugênia in a tenement. She refuses the alms with her gaze, and he holds out his hand as one would to a lady.
Ergueu logo a cabeça, e fitou-me com muita dignidade, She immediately raised her head, and looked at me with great dignity
What It Means
In the two chapters of the butterfly, Brás is a small, sure power unto himself. He kills out of nerves, and the consolation he makes shifts the guilt to the color of the victim. The fable in which the butterfly takes him for its creator is a mirror: the power she does not understand, and which kills her with two hand-spans of raw linen, is his, and the opposite conclusions at the end show that the consolation does not hold.
Eugênia enters the story in the same chapter as the first butterfly, and the scene returns on another scale. Faced with a young woman lame from birth, a daughter of uncertain origin, Brás asks why she is pretty if lame, and turns her body into a mockery of nature instead of thinking about her. When the affair ends, he describes her limping in leg and in love, and wonders whether her existence was necessary to the century, reducing her to a supporting player in the human tragedy.
The butterfly rehearses what Brás does to Eugênia: in both cases he names a difference of birth, the color or the foot, and treats it as a defect of the one who has it, and in both the text leaves in the reader's hands the question of whose the lack is. Eugênia is the one who does not accept the role: she answers without hesitation in chapter XXXII and, in chapter CLVIII, refuses Brás's money with her gaze. The scene of chapter XXXI also recalls the jaguar and the calf of the delirium, in Pandora and the Delirium, with a towel in place of Nature.
Relationships
- Work: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.
- Standard themes: Appearance and reality, Desire.
- Characters: Brás Cubas, who kills it, and Eugênia, in whom the episode echoes.
- Neighboring symbols: Pandora and the Delirium, where Nature defines the law of the strongest.