Who She Is
Daughter of Dona Isabel, the widow of a hat-shop owner who went bankrupt, and the best-loved girl in the tenement: pale, sickly, with the manners of a girl from a good family, she writes everyone's letters and does everyone's accounts. She would marry João da Costa, a young man in trade, but her mother keeps putting off the wedding until the puberty that has not yet come. Between the Sunday at Léonie's house and the wedding, the narrator makes her see for the first time what the letters were hiding, and the ending shows her living with Léonie, a cocotte, supporting her mother and protecting Piedade's daughter.
Trajectory
She appears on the morning of the tenement, as the flower of the place, and her mother refuses to marry her off before she becomes a woman, even knowing that the marriage would take them out of the tenement (chapter III).
A filha era a flor do cortiço. Chamavam-lhe Pombinha. Bonita, posto que enfermiça e nervosa ao último ponto; loura, muito pálida, com uns modos de menina de boa família., The daughter was the flower of the tenement. They called her Pombinha. Pretty, though sickly and nervous in the extreme; blonde, very pale, with the manners of a girl from a good family.
não era decente, nem tinha jeito, dar homem a uma moça que ainda não fora visitada pelas regras! Não! Antes vê-la solteira toda a vida e ficarem ambas curtindo para sempre aquele inferno da estalagem, it was not decent, nor proper, to give a man to a girl who had not yet been visited by her monthly courses! No! Better to see her single all her life and have the two of them suffer forever in that hell of a tenement
On Sundays, in a new dress, she spends the day writing the letters the residents dictate, one at a time, and the narrator says what this leaves inside her (chapter VI).
a pobre rapariga ia acumulando no seu coração de donzela toda a súmula daquelas paixões e daqueles ressentimentos, às vezes mais fétidos do que a evaporação de um lameiro em dias de grande calor, the poor girl was piling up in her maiden heart the whole sum of those passions and resentments, at times more fetid than the steam rising from a mudhole on a very hot day
At Miranda's townhouse, Henrique flirts with her from the window (chapter X). On the Sunday of the title celebration, she spends the afternoon with her mother at Léonie's house, and Léonie leads her to the alcove and imposes on her a contact that leaves her ashamed; she leaves only after the kiss of reconciliation, accepts the ring at her mother's insistence and returns silent (chapter XI). Two days later, in the grassy lot behind the tenement, she falls asleep under the mango trees and wakes with her first blood (chapter XI).
Trouxe de lá impressões de íntimos vexames, que nunca mais se apagariam por toda a sua vida., She brought back from there impressions of intimate humiliations that would never be erased for the rest of her life.
She runs home, her mother falls to her knees and calls the fiancé to set the wedding (chapter XII). When Bruno asks her to write to Leocádia, she sees for the first time what the letters were hiding, and comes to judge her fiancé good, passive and without ideals.
Uma aluvião de cenas, que ela jamais tentara explicar e que até aí jaziam esquecidas nos meandros do seu passado, apresentavam-se agora nítidas e transparentes., A flood of scenes, which she had never tried to explain and which until then had lain forgotten in the recesses of her past, now presented themselves sharp and transparent.
sentia repugnância em dar-se ao noivo, e, se não fora a mãe, seria muito capaz de dissolver o ajuste, she felt repugnance at giving herself to her fiancé, and, were it not for her mother, she would be quite capable of breaking off the arrangement
Only her mother keeps her from breaking it off, and she leaves dressed as a bride for the church of São João Batista amid the tears and blessings of the neighbors (chapter XII). Leocádia does not even want to hear the letter she wrote in Bruno's name (chapter XIX). She passes in a victoria beside Henrique when João Romão waits for the family of Miranda (chapter XXIII).
After two years of marriage, she does everything to be the wife her husband wanted, slips toward a bohemian poet and then an actor, is abandoned, goes to live with Léonie and becomes a cocotte, supporting her mother until her death (chapter XXII).
escondeu a sua mal-educada e natural intuição pelo que é grande, ou belo, ou arrojado, e fingiu ligar interesse ao que ele fazia, ao que ele dizia, ao que ele ganhava, she hid her ill-bred and natural intuition for what is great, or beautiful, or daring, and pretended to take an interest in what he did, in what he said, in what he earned
A serpente vencia afinal: Pombinha foi, pelo seu próprio pé, atraída, meter-se-lhe na boca., The serpent won in the end: Pombinha, drawn on her own feet, went and put herself in its mouth.
On visits to the tenement, she protects Piedade's daughter with the sympathy Léonie once had for her (chapter XXII).
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 without end; the tenement was preparing a new prostitute in that poor abandoned girl, who was becoming a woman beside an unhappy drunken mother.
Themes Embodied
The standard themes that run through her are Sexuality, Social Class and Corruption and Decay. The symbol that accompanies her in scene is the São Romão tenement: it is there that she grows up, that she knows everyone's secret and that she reappears, at the end, as the protector of another girl (chapter VI, chapter XXII).
The text supports two readings of Pombinha's fall and does not choose. In one, her environment does what her nature demanded: for two years she tried to hide what called for something greater and, when her balance gave way, she fell (chapter XXII). In the other, she is a woman who grew tired of pretending and chose another life (chapter XXII).
Pombinha is the tenement's reader: she writes the letters, keeps the secrets and is the first to understand, in chapter XII, what Bruno's tears hide. What she knows already pulls her away from her fiancé in chapter XII, and it is with this knowledge that she goes through the two years of marriage in which she feigns interest in her husband (chapter XXII). The narrator opens up the fate of Piedade's daughter right after hers (chapter XXII) and neither absolves nor accuses her.