Read The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas for Free Online

But just to put an end to any doubts I’ll come with Nhonhô.”
    Nhonhô was a lawyer, the only child from her marriage, who at the age of five had been the unwitting accomplice in our love affair. They came together two days later and I must confess that when I saw them there in my bedroom I was taken by a reticence that prevented me from replying immediately to the lad’s affable words, Virgília sensed this and told her son:
    “Nhonhô, don’t pay any attention to that big trickster there. He doesn’t want to talk so he can make you think that he’s at death’s door.’
    Her son smiled. I think I smiled, too, and everything ended up as a big joke. Virgília was serene and smiling. She had the look of immaculate life. No suspect look, no gesture that might have given anything away, a balance in word and spirit, control over herself, all of which seemed—and perhaps was—strange. As by chance we touched upon an illicit love affair, half-secret, half-known, I saw her speak a disdainful word and a bit indignantly about the woman involved, a friend of hers besides. Her son felt satisfied when he heard that strong and fitting word and I asked myself what the hawks might have said about us humans if Buffon had been born a hawk …
    It was the start of my delirium.

VII
Delirium
     
    As far as I know, no one has ever spoken about his own delirium. I’m doing just that and science will thank me for it. If the reader isn’t given to the contemplation of these mental phenomena, he may skip this chapter and go straight to the narrative. But if he has the slightest bit of curiosity, I can tell him now that it’s interesting to know what went on in ray head for some twenty or thirty minutes.
    At the very first I took on the figure of a Chinese barber, potbellied, dexterous, who was giving a close shave to a mandarin, who paid me for my work with pinches and sweets: the whims of a mandarin.
    Right after that I felt myself transformed into Aquinas’
Summa Theologca
, printed in one volume and morocco-bound, with silver clasps and illustrations. This was an idea that gave my body a most complete immobility and even now I can remember that with my hands as the book’s clasps crossed over my stomach, someone was uncrossing them (Virgília most certainly) because that position gave her the image of a dead person.
    Finally, restored to human form, I saw a hippopotamus come and carry me off. I let myself go, silent, I don’t know whether out of fear or trust, but after a short while the running became so dizzying that I dared question him and in some way told him that the trip didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
    “You’re wrong,” the animal replied, “we’re going to the origin of the centuries.”
    I suggested that it must be very far away, but the hippopotamus either didn’t understand me or didn’t hear me, unless he was pretending one of those things, and when I asked him, since he could talk, if he were a descendant of Achilles’ horse or Balaam’s ass, he answered me with a gesture peculiar to those two quadrupeds, he flapped his ears. For my part, I closed my eyes and let myself go where chance would take me. I must confess now, however, that I felt some sort of prick of curiosity to find out where the origin of the centuries was, if it was as mysterious as the origin of the Nile, and, most of all, whether the consummation of those same centuries was really worth anything: the reflections of a sick mind. Since I was going along with my eyes closed I couldn’t see the road. I can only remember that a feeling of cold grew stronger as the journey went on and that a time came when it seemed to me that we were entering the region of perpetual ice. In fact, I opened my eyes and saw that my animal was galloping across a white plain of snow, here and there a mountain of snow, vegetation of snow, and several large animals of snow. Everything’ snow. A sun of snow was coming out to freeze us. I tried to speak but all I