Dom Casmurro

by Machado de Assis

VII - D. Gloria

My mother was a good creature. When her husband, Pedro de Albuquerque Santiago, died, she was thirty-one years old, and could return to Itaguahy. No quiz; he preferred to be near the church where my father had been buried. He sold the hacienda and the slaves, bought some that he had earned or rented, a dozen buildings, a certain number of apolices, and left himself at the house of Matacavallos, where he had lived the last two years of his marriage. She was the daughter of a lady from Minas Gerais, a descendant of another paulista, the Fernandes family.

Now, in that year of the grace of 1857, D. Maria da Gloria Fernandes Santiago had forty-two years of age. She was still pretty and young, but she insisted on hiding the balances of youth, however much nature might preserve her from the action of time. She was immersed in an eternal dark dress, unadorned, with a black chandelier, folded in triangle and buckled to the breast by a cameo. The hair, in bandos, was caught on the back of an old turtle's comb; He was always wearing a white bonnet. He read like this, in his shod and deaf corduroy shoes, on one side and another, seeing and guiding the services of the whole house from morning till night.

I have on the wall the portrait of her, next to her husband, in the other house. The painting has darkened a lot, but it still gives an idea of ​​both. It reminds me nothing of him, except that he was loosely tall and wore a large club; the portrait shows round eyes, which accompany me everywhere, the effect of the painting that haunted me in small. The neck leaves a black tie with many turns, the face is all shaved, except for a little bit caught in the ears. My mother's shows that she was beautiful. He was twenty years old, and had a flower between his fingers. In the panel it seems to offer to her husband. What is said in the face of both is that if conjugal happiness could be compared to great luck, they took it out on the ticket bought from society.

I conclude that lotteries should not be abolished. No prizewinner accused them of immorality, as no one badly punched Pandora's cunt for having taken hope in the background; Somewhere she has to stay. Here I have the two well-married formerly, the well-loved, the blessed, who have gone from this to the afterlife, to continue a dream probably. When the lottery and Pandora annoy me, I look up at them, and I forget the white tickets and the fake cunt. They are pictures that are worth by origins. My mother's, stretching out to her husband, seems to say: "I'm all yours, my handsome gentleman!" My father's, looking at us, makes this comment: "Look how this girl wants me ..." suffered discomfort, I do not know, as I do not know if they had dislikes: it was a growth and I started not being born. After her death, she reminds me that she cried a lot; but here are the pictures of both, without the grimy of time taking their first expression. They are like instantaneous photographs of happiness.