Read The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray for Free Online Page B

louder than all the others.
    How could he have died so suddenly in a room in Tabuão? It was beyond belief. The skiff masters heard the news and couldn’t come to believe it completely. Quincas Water-Bray was given to hoaxes. He’d put one over on everybody more than once.
    The gamblers with their games of fist-guess, three-card monte, and blackjack halted their excited play, dazed, all interest in winning lost. Wasn’t Water-Bray their undisputed leader? The late afternoon fell over them like a cloak of deep mourning. In dives, in taverns, over the counters of shops and stores, wherever cachaça was drunk, sadness reigned, and the consumption was directed toward their irremediable loss. Who knew how to drink better than Quincas? He never changed completely. The more firewater he swilled, the more lucid and brilliant he became. Better than anyone else he could guess the brand and the origin of the most diverse drinks, with knowledge of the nuances of color, taste, and aroma in all of them. How long had it been since he had last tasted water? Ever since that day when he came to be called Water-Bray.
    Not that it was any memorable event or exciting story, but it’s worth telling because it was from that distant day forward that the epithet “Water-Bray” was definitively added to the name Quincas. He had gone into the store owned by López, a pleasant Spaniard, on the outer rim of the market. As a regular customer he had earned the rightto serve himself without the aid of a clerk. On the counter he spotted a bottle filled to the top with clear cachaça, transparent and perfect. He filled a glass, spat to clear his mouth, and tossed it down in one gulp. Then an inhuman bray cut the morning peace of the market, shaking the very foundations of the Lacerda Elevator. It was the cry of a mortally wounded animal, a man who had been betrayed by an evil fate.
    “WAUUUU-TUUH!!!”
    Filthy, foul bastard of a Spaniard! People came running from all around. Someone most certainly was being murdered. The customers in the store were beside themselves with laughter. That “bray of water” that Quincas gave out then spread around as a great tale, from the market to Pelourinho, from the Largo das Sete Portas to the Dique, from the Calçada to Itapuã. Quincas Water-Bray he remained from then on, and Quitéria Goggle-Eye, during moments of great tenderness, would call him “Brayzie” between her nibbling teeth.
    In those houses with the cheapest women too, where tramps and hooligans, petty smugglers, and beached sailors found a home, family, and love in the lost hours of the night after the sad wares of sex when the weary women longed for a little tenderness, the news of the death of Quincas Water-Bray brought on desolation and a flow of sad tears. The women wept as though they’d lost a close relative and suddenly felt unprotected in their poverty. Some added up their savings and resolved to buy the prettiest flowers in Bahia for the dead man. As for Quitéria Goggle-Eye, surrounded by the tearful dedication of her housemates, her wails cut through the neighborhood of São Miguel to die on the Largo do Pelourinho. They were heartrending. She could find consolation only in drink. Between swallows shewould exalt the memory of that unforgettable lover, the most tender and the wildest, the merriest and the wisest.
    They remembered things, details and phrases that gave the proper measure of Quincas. He was the one who for over twenty days had taken care of Benedita’s three-month-old son when she was in the hospital. All the child was missing was a breast to suckle. Quincas did everything else: changed diapers, cleaned up doo-doo, bathed the baby, gave him his nursing bottle.
    Hadn’t he jumped in just a few days ago, old and drunk as he was, like a fearless champion, to defend Good Clara when two young perverts, sons of bitches from the best families, tried to beat her up in Viviana’s house? And what more pleasant guest than he at the