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The Slum · Chapters XII to XIV

Marriage, a Rival Tenement and a Plan for Revenge

AmbitionSocial ClassSlaverySexuality

Chapter XII: Bruno's Letter and Pombinha's Wedding

AmbitionSocial ClassSexuality

Section summary

Pombinha runs home and shows her mother the blood of puberty, and Dona Isabel, who sees in it the future of both of them, falls to her knees, announces the news across the yard and sends for the fiancé João da Costa to set the wedding without delay, because the blood is, for her, the guarantee that the marriage will take place. Meanwhile, after the razor slashing, a gloom spreads through the tenement: Rita Baiana has been out of sorts since Jerônimo went to the Order, Firmo has been forbidden to return under threat of police, and Piedade, who found her husband cold at the hospital, is wasting away with weeping.

One day the blacksmith Bruno, who is separated from Leocádia, asks Pombinha to write to her, and she does, until he finally breaks down in sobs and delivers the message he had meant to send: that his wife should come back, that he forgets everything. Faced with his tears, Pombinha, who had written so many letters under those conditions, sees for the first time what the letters were hiding. She puts together the scenes she witnessed, the photographs Léonie had shown her, the secrets of the residents, and begins to judge her fiancé as a spiritless man, a good but passive young man she will never love. She only holds back from breaking off the arrangement because of her mother. A week later, dressed as a bride, she leaves the tenement for the São João Batista church amid the tears and blessings of the neighbors, with Libório complaining that he has lost his sweetheart and Neném asking for a bud from her wreath.

Analysis

She kissed her belly again and again, and seemed to want to kiss that blessed blood too, the blood that opened up the horizons of life for them and guaranteed their future

Dona Isabel thanks God on her knees because her daughter's blood is, for her, the way into marriage, and her haste to summon João da Costa shows that the promise of status matters to her as much as the puberty celebration. The text does not show her as calculating: her relief is that of someone who spent years waiting for the future of both of them.

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Chapter XIII: Cabeça-de-Gato and the Baron's Dinner

AmbitionSocial ClassSlavery

Section summary

With some residents leaving, there are plenty of applicants for the rooms, and João Romão's tenement fills up, despite the yellow fever that carries off two Italians. Nearby another tenement springs up, the Cabeça-de-Gato, whose nominal owner is a Portuguese shopkeeper who runs a grocery store, though the real proprietor is a councillor who prefers not to show himself. João Romão sees it as competition, hounds his rival with inspectors and guards, and plants a partisan hatred among the tenants, and the two tenements divide into cabeças-de-gato and carapicus, with flags of different colors, washerwomen's brawls, and a fishmonger nearly killed for speaking from the other side. Firmo moves to the Cabeça-de-Gato, where he is protected and becomes a gang leader, which cools his romance with Rita Baiana, who will not set foot there. Three months later, noticing that the rivalry brings him no profit, João Romão returns to what truly drives him, the comparison with Miranda, and remakes himself from the inside out: fine clothes, dance lessons, a watch, a wood-floored room, a napkin, newspapers, theater, shares, until Miranda begins to tip his hat to him. Bertoleza gains nothing from this and grows more enslaved and more sad.

Botelho, a parasite in the Baron's household, approaches the shopkeeper and offers to act as go-between for a match with Miranda's daughter, described as a good catch, with buildings and bank shares, but he asks for twenty contos de réis; João Romão offers ten, then fifteen, and settles on twenty, and Botelho then secures the dinner invitation. The shopkeeper prepares for the dinner as one prepares for an exam: he bathes, perfumes himself, rehearses in front of the mirror, and at the Baron's house he breaks into a sweat, slips, nearly tips over a wheeled chair, and makes Zulmira laugh, but he leaves satisfied and cheerful. At home, lying down beside Bertoleza, who snores, he realizes she will be an obstacle to the marriage and spends the night awake. The next day, seeing her cleaning fish at the door of the grocery store, a thought occurs to him: what if she died?

Analysis

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Chapter XIV: Jerônimo's Return and the Arranged Beating

AmbitionSocial ClassSexuality

Section summary

More than three months after the razor slashing, Rita comes to her meetings with Firmo rushed and irritable, and he, jealous, suspects a rival. One Sunday he waits for her in vain and, at the Garnisé bar, hears from a resident of the Cabeça-de-Gato that Jerônimo has been discharged from the hospital and returned to the tenement: he then understands why Rita has changed, and swears to take revenge on both of them that night. In the tenement, the quarryman, thin and unshaven, returns leaning on a bamboo cane, received in respectful silence, and asks for a coffee made by Rita Baiana instead of the one made by Piedade, which she feels as infidelity. At the mulata's house he complains about his wife, asks whether Firmo still seeks her, hears that she dismissed him and wants no man at all, and grips her by the waist, asking for a meeting that she postpones.

Then Jerônimo leaves with his companions Zé Carlos and Pataca for Manuel Pepé's grocery store, where they agree to give Firmo a beating at the Garnisé, which he frequents every night: Jerônimo says he is still weak, Pataca replies that his stick is strong, and Jerônimo sets aside eighty milreis for the deal between them. On Sunday afternoon the tenement rests; at Miranda's window, João Romão, in a light wool suit, talks with Zulmira and looks down with contempt on the people below. At nightfall the three drink at the grocery store and head for the Garnisé with their clubs wrapped in a mat.

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