Who She Is
Portuguese woman, wife of Jerônimo, a diligent washerwoman who arrives with him at room 35 and is described as honest, healthy and a match for her husband. She is the figure through whom the book measures the cost of Jerônimo's change: she senses the danger by instinct, tries to hold him back with baths and charms, loses her husband to Rita Baiana and sinks, from the washtub to drink, until the end of the book, when her daughter falls within the orbit of Pombinha.
Trajectory
She arrives with Jerônimo at number 35, and the narrator measures her by her trade (chapter V).
Piedade merecia bem o seu homem, muito diligente, sadia, honesta, forte, bem acomodada com tudo e com todos, trabalhando de sol a sol e dando sempre tão boas contas da obrigação, Piedade was well worthy of her man, very diligent, healthy, honest, strong, well suited to everything and everyone, working from sunup to sundown and always giving such good accounts of her duty
At Sunday's pagode, she and her husband had declined the invitations from the two tables to dine alone (chapter VII); at night she sees him caught up in Rita's dance and forgetting her (chapter VII). The next day she sees her rival looking after him, and the narrator explains her unease as scent, not reasoning (chapter VIII).
Não era a inteligência nem a razão o que lhe apontava o perigo, mas o instinto, o faro sutil e desconfiado de toda a fêmea pelas outras, quando sente o seu ninho exposto, It was not intelligence nor reason that pointed out the danger to her, but instinct, the subtle and suspicious scent of every female toward the others, when she senses her nest exposed
She changes her habits but not her soul, and grows ever sadder: her husband leaves her bed for a hammock, makes her bathe every day and asks her to learn from Rita how to cook in the local way; she goes to see the Witch, who prescribes baths, rinse water in his coffee and powdered hair in his food (chapter IX). During Jerônimo's fight with Firmo, she cries out that they will kill her man, and afterward tends to the wounded man with Rita (chapter X). She accompanies him to the hospital and, on the first visit, finds him cold, impatient to hear about the other woman, and begins to waste away in tears (chapter XII). When he returns and asks for the coffee made by Rita, she feels the preference as infidelity (chapter XIV).
On the night Jerônimo does not return, she waits awake, imagining disasters; in the morning the affair is the scandal of the day among the washerwomen (chapter XVI). Outraged, she blames the land that stole her man, and after news of Firmo's death she concludes she was traded for Rita.
Parecia rebelar-se contra aquela natureza alcoviteira, que lhe roubara o seu homem para dá-lo a outra, porque a outra era gente do seu peito e ela não., She seemed to rebel against that procuring nature, which had stolen her man to give him to another, because the other was someone dear to his heart and she was not.
Se ele matou o Firmo, dormiu na estalagem e não veio ter comigo, é porque então deixou-me de feita pela Rita!, If he killed Firmo, slept at the tenement and didn't come to see me, then he has left me for Rita for good!
She sees Rita pass by with the agreed move, asks whether she is moving, and the cheeky answer opens the clog-and-nail fight in which she loses (chapter XVI). She falls ill with fever after the fire (chapter XVIII). After the fever, she becomes grumpy and thin and starts drinking parati to drown her sorrows; the daughter starts going to her mother's tenement on Sundays, and when the headmistress threatens to expel her over six months of overdue boarding fees, she turns to Jerônimo, who promises to pay and does not, and on the second visit he sends her away with the daughter (chapter XIX).
On the night of the humiliating dinner, she drinks with the group around das Dores and dances mimicking Rita; João Romão rebukes her, and Pataca takes advantage of her, drunk, in the kitchen, while the daughter, who wakes up, glimpses it and runs away (chapter XX).
Pataca revoltou-se, não com o procedimento de Jerônimo, mas com o dela., Pataca was outraged, not by Jerônimo's conduct, but by hers.
In the end she is evicted, drunk and out of work, and takes refuge with her daughter in Cabeça-de-Gato (chapter XXII).
Apagaram-se-lhe os últimos vestígios do brio; vivia andrajosa, sem nenhum trato e sempre ébria, dessa embriaguez sombria e mórbida que se não dissipa nunca., The last traces of her self-respect were extinguished; she lived in rags, without any care, and always drunk, with that gloomy and morbid drunkenness that never dissipates.
A cadeia continuava e continuaria interminavelmente; o cortiço estava preparando uma nova prostituta naquela pobre menina desamparada, que se fazia mulher ao lado de uma infeliz mãe ébria., The chain went on and would go on interminably; the tenement was preparing a new prostitute out of that poor, helpless girl, who was becoming a woman beside an unfortunate drunken mother.
Themes Embodied
The standard themes that run through her are Nature and Civilization, Corruption and Decay, and Social Class. The symbol that accompanies her is the São Romão tenement, which grows and cleans itself as she sinks (chapter XX) and from which she is expelled to Cabeça-de-Gato (chapter XXII).
The narrator never makes her guilty. She is the one who changes outwardly and not inwardly (chapter IX), the one who blames the land and then Rita, never her husband (chapter XVI), and the one the text leaves on the kitchen floor (chapter XX). The text leaves open why she spares him: love, habit or fear of losing everything (chapter XVI).
Piedade is Rita's counterpart: where the Bahian woman holds no one and lets herself be held by no one, Piedade is tied to her husband and daughter. While the tenement adds floors and gains furniture (chapter XX), she is the one who pays the bill for what Jerônimo does, and the book sets the two trajectories side by side without saying whether one causes the other.
Relationships
- Jerônimo: the husband who pulls away from her, whom she still seeks out for the sake of their daughter.
- Rita Baiana: the rival who looks after her husband and who beats her in the clog-and-nail fight.
- Pombinha: the young woman who, in the end, protects Piedade's daughter with the same kindness that Léonie once showed her.
- João Romão: the owner who rebukes her at the drinking circle.