The Yellow Sofa Read online

  PRAISE FOR EÇA DE QUEIRÓS

  “He is far greater than my own dear master, Flaubert.”

  —Zola

  “Eça ought to be up there with Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy as one of the talismanic names of the nineteenth century.”

  —The London Observer

  “Eça de Queirós has been justly compared with Flaubert and Stendhal.”

  —The London Spectator

  “The making of this novel and indeed all the others, is the restless mingling of poetry, sharp realism and wit. Queirós is untouched by the drastic hatred of life that underlies Naturalism; he is sad rather than indignant that every human being is compromised; indeed this enables him to present his characters from several points of view, and to explore the unexpectedness of human nature.”

  —V.S. Pritchett

  JOSÉ MARIA EÇA DE QUEIRÓS was born in 1843 at Povoa de Varzim in northern Portugal, the son of a local magistrate. He studied law at Coimbra, but came of age intellectually as part of the “generation of 1870,” a group of writers, artists, and thinkers concerned with Portugal’s future after the 1828–1834 civil war. He entered the diplomatic service before marrying and settling down to the life of a comfortable but committed satirist, dandy, raconteur, and aesthete. He served as consul in Havana, Newcastle, Bristol, and finally Paris, where he died in 1900.

  His first writings—travel articles, essays, short stories—were well received by Portuguese critics. But it was his early novels, The Sin of Father Amaro (1876) and Cousin Bazilio (1878), cast in the naturalism of Zola and Flaubert, that won him recognition on a larger European scale. The Maias (1886) confirmed his growing reputation. The voice in these novels is urbane, exact, amused, ironic; but the comedy is tempered by warm sympathy for human frailty and a poignant sense of the fragility of human happiness. His later novels, most notably The Illustrious House of Ramires (1900, New Directions Paperbook 785), are set in the countryside, as Eça turned his ironic gaze from the pretentiousness and greed of fashionable society to less familiar targets: liberal reform and the idea of progress itself.

  Eça’s voice was never easily contained by the realism of his master, Zola. His sensitive wit found perfect foils in both fantasy and satire, making this nineteenth-century master’s novels vibrant, various, and still contemporary.

  PORTRAIT OF EÇA DE QUEIRÓS BY RAFAEL BORDALO PINHEIRO, COURTESY OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE

  by José Maria d’Eça de Queirós

  As I deliver this volume into the hands of readers and critics, I acknowledge disconsolately that I have nothing to say: this novel has no history, it cannot be explained. It is not known whence it came, nor at what date. It is not even known what title the author intended for it. It is anonymous and unknown. The author never referred to it in any letter, any conversation, any article; he never offered it to his publisher, never even mentioned it!

  So what can I say in carrying out my task as ‘writer of prologues’? Only what I know. It is very little.

  Having cut down the normal pompous ‘Introduction’ to the more modest proportions of a ‘Note’, I have decided to confine myself to what is necessary to introduce the little volume and to reproduce here—for those who have not read it—what I have already said in the introduction to Capital.

  It came to light one evening at the beginning of the year 1924, in the now famous trunk in which my father’s unpublished manuscripts had been lying for more than a quarter of a century. There were 115 loose sheets, untitled and undated, covered with his usual rapid handwriting, and, as usual, without any polishing up, any correction. From the make-up of the paper, the handwriting, its compactness, especially its subject, I was at first inclined to think that the manuscript had formed part of the broad initial plan for the ‘Scenes from Portuguese Life’ which would have dated the novel between 1877 and 1889. That, however, was a mere conjecture. Certainly, none of the dozen titles intended for the twelve social—or, more simply, human—studies which were to make up the ‘Scenes from Portuguese Life’ could reasonably be applied to it.

  On the other hand, certain of the novel’s characteristics made my conjecture a reasonable one. My father, in a letter to Chardron quoted in the introduction to Capital, gave the essential features of the future work, to which he referred as ‘A collection of short novels, of no more than 180 to 200 pages, which would be a reflection of contemporary life in Portugal: Lisbon, Oporto, the provinces, politicians, men of affairs, aristocrats, lawyers, doctors, all classes, all manners, would enter into this picture gallery’. And he later added: ‘The attraction of these tales is that there are no digressions, no rhetoric, no philosophising: everything is interesting and dramatic, and quickly narrated.’ These, in fact, are the features which characterise this novel, which is indeed a brief social study of 200 pages, a picture of the petty bourgeoisie of Lisbon, a short novel in which ‘there are no digressions, no rhetoric’, and in which ‘everything is interesting and dramatic and quickly narrated’.

  Later, however, I discovered in another letter, to Luis de Magalhaes, a phrase which left me puzzled. Luis de Magalhaes, then deputy director of the Portuguese Review, had sought an unpublished novel by my father for the Review; to which my father replied: ‘As to the novel, even you cannot realise how long it takes me to work. I have nothing in a drawer ready-made—except a short study which, on account of its rather coarse nature would not suit the Review’. The letter was dated from Paris, in 1891.

  Could this study of ‘a rather coarse nature’ that my father did not wish to see published in the Portuguese Review be this short novel of such delicate irony, the banal drama which for a while so deeply disturbed the petty lives of Alves and his friend? Did the letter actually refer to the manuscript with which we are now concerned? It is quite possible, the more so in that we hear no more of this study of a ‘rather coarse nature’, nor is there anything else among my father’s papers which can be taken to correspond in any way to this description. And so, as the little study did not suit the Review, it doubtless went back into the drawer, where we found it waiting resignedly. However, that too is no more than a conjecture.

  But what is the point of piling up hypotheses which no one will ever be able to verify, or arguments which are merely conjectural?

  In the end, there are only two points in the confused history of the manuscript which can be asserted with safety and precision: that my father wrote it, and that I have brought it to the light of day.

  The first of these points is not open to discussion. It is a fact: it has the indestructibility of a monument from remote Egyptian antiquity.

  As for the second, why add comments to justify it here? The book now enters upon its career; at my hands, it comes into the hurly-burly of publication and faces the verdict of criticism. A work of impulse, put on paper with masterly improvisation, it certainly suffers from the deficiencies of a layman’s editing—and yet it is with confidence that I place this little book in the hands of the public, certain that the truthfulness of its characters, the intense Lisbon flavour, the charm of its dialogues, the balance of its composition, the irony of its situations—in a word, the consummate art which the manuscript reveals—are the surest guarantee of its success and the best justification for the publicity which I now give it. Granja, 1925.

  THE YELLOW SOFA

  Translated by John Vetch

  1 On that fateful day, Godofredo da Conceiçao Alves, stifled by the heat and out of breath through rushing from Black Horse Square, pushed open the green baize door of his office in Gilders Street, precisely when the wall clock over the bookkeeper’s desk was striking two, in that deep tone to which the low entrance ceiling imparted a mournful sonority. He paused, ch
ecked his own watch, hanging on a horse hair fob on his white waist coat, and he did not conceal a gesture of annoyance at having had his morning wasted at the offices of the Ministry of Marine. It was always the same whenever his overseas commission business took him there. Despite the Director-General’s being a cousin of his, and although he had regularly slipped a silver coin into the hand of the commissionaire, and had discounted letters of credit for two minor officials, there was always the same boring wait to see the Minister, endless turning over of papers, hold-ups, delays, all the irregular creaking and disjointed working of an old machine, half falling to pieces.

  ‘Always the same paralysis!’ he exclaimed, putting his hat on the bookkeeper’s desk. ‘It makes one want to goad them on like cattle: Hey! Ruço, Hey! Malhado, get on there. . .’

  The bookkeeper smiled. A youth of pale and sickly aspect, he was scattering sand over the broadsheet which he had been writing and said, as he shook it:

  ‘Senhor Machado has left a note in there. It says he is going to the theatre, the Lumiar.’

  And as he wiped his brow with his silk handkerchief, Alves concealed a smile behind the handkerchief and began to examine the correspondence, while the bookkeeper went on sprinkling sand.

  Outside, for a moment, a wagon shook the narrow street with the clattering noise of horseshoes. Then everything relapsed into an oppressive silence.

  Crouched over a packing case, a clerk was printing a name on the lid. The bookkeeper’s pen scratched, the clock overhead ticked loudly. And in the extreme heat of the day, the oppressiveness of the low ceilings, a vague odour of rancidity and provisions rose up from the packing cases, the bundles, the dusty pile of papers.

  ‘Senhor Machado was at the Dona Maria theatre yesterday,’ murmured the bookkeeper, as he went on writing.

  With a more lively glance and his interest aroused, Alves put down the letter that he was reading.

  ‘What was the play yesterday?’

  ‘The Snare of Paris.’

  ‘What did you think of it?’

  The bookkeeper looked up from the letter to reply:

  ‘I liked Teodorico very much. . .’

  Alves was expecting more details, an appreciation. But, as the bookkeeper had again taken up his pen, he continued with his reading. For a moment, the task of the crouching clerk caught his attention. He followed the brush, admiring the curves of the letters.

  ‘Give him a tilde accent! Fabião has a tilde. . .’

  And the clerk was momentarily embarrassed, as Alves stooped down, took the brush and gave Fabião his accent.

  He then gave some further instructions to the bookkeeper concerning an order for red felt for Luanda; and pushing open another green door, went down two steps—on that mezzanine floor the levels differed—and going into his own office, he could at last unbutton his waistcoat and stretch out in the green repp chair.

  Outdoors, the July day was sweltering, scorching the paving stones; but here in the office where the sun never penetrated, in the shadow of the high buildings opposite, there was coolness; the green blinds were drawn, making it shady; and the varnish of the two desks—his own and his colleague’s—the rug that covered the floor, the well-brushed green repp of the armchairs, a gilt moulding which framed a view of Luanda, the glaze of a large wall map—everything had an air of tidiness, of orderliness, which made things restful and cooler. There was even a bunch of flowers which his wife, the excellent Lulu, had sent him the previous day, her feelings stirred by knowing that, on a sultry morning, in the oppressiveness of an office, he lacked the bright colour of a flower to gladden his eyes. He had put the bouquet on Machado’s desk; but, lacking water, the flowers were withering.

  The green door opened to reveal the bookkeeper’s pale unhealthy face:

  ‘Did Senhor Machado leave any instructions about the Colares wine for Cape Verde?’

  Alves then remembered his colleague’s note, lying on a scribbling pad. He opened it; the first two lines explained about his visit to the Lumiar, then it went on ‘As regards the Colares. . .’ Alves gave the note to the bookkeeper and when the door closed again, he smiled the same smile as before, but now he did not hide it. Since the month began, this was the fourth or fifth time that Machado had disappeared from the office like this, now to go to the Lumiar to see his mother, then in the opposite direction to visit a consumptive friend, and yet again with no explanation or just a few vague words, ‘a little business matter’. And Alves smiled. He well understood that ‘little business matter’.

  Machado was twenty-six and a handsome fellow. With his blond moustache, wavy hair and elegant manner, the ladies liked him. Since they had become partners, Alves knew him to have had three affairs: a beautiful Spanish girl, infatuated with him, had left her rich Brazilian, an influential former provincial president, who had set her up in a house; then an actress from the Dona Maria theatre who possessed little beyond her beautiful eyes; and now this ‘little business matter’. But this new affair must be more delicate, occupying a more important place in Machado’s heart and life. Alves was well aware of a certain restless and preoccupied air on his colleague’s part, perhaps of self-consciousness, at times of sadness. Yet Machado had never told him anything about his exploits, never shown the least inclination to open up and confide in him. . . They were close friends, Machado spent many evenings at Alves’ home, treated Lulu almost as a sister, dined there every Sunday; yet, either because he had come into the business only three years before, or because he was ten years younger, or because Alves had been one of his father’s friends and executors, or even because he was a married man, Machado maintained towards him a certain reserve, a vague respect, and there had never been established between them a real male comradeship. Nor had Alves ever referred to any of it. The ‘little matter’ was nothing to do with the business of the firm, nor was it any business of his.

  Despite these repeated absences, Machado continued to be very hard-working, stuck to his desk for ten or twelve hours on steamship sailing days—active, shrewd, living entirely for the prosperity of the firm. And Alves could not but admit that if, in the business, he himself stood for good conduct, domestic honesty, a regular life, sobriety of habits, then Machado provided the commercial shrewdness, energy, decisiveness, broad ideas, the business flair.

  He, Alves, had always been naturally indolent, like his father, who chose to move from room to room in a wheeled chair.

  Yet, despite his strong principles—of a boy strictly educated by the Jesuits, full of proper beliefs—and one who had never before his marriage had a single adventure or illicit love affair, he nevertheless felt a vague and indulgent sympathy with those ‘affairs’ of Machado’s. First, on account of friendship—he had known Machado as a little boy, pretty as a cherub. Then, his colleague’s good family had never ceased to impress him—his uncle, the Viscount of Vilar, his society connections, the fuss that Dona Maria Forbes made of him when she invited him to her Thursdays, despite his being in commerce. He admired the man’s good manners and certain elegant refinements; and he was depressed by his own inability to keep up with Machado’s air of distinction. And there was another reason, one of temperament, why despite himself he did not cease to sympathise with Machado’s amorous affairs. It was because, at bottom, this man of thirty-seven, already rather bald, with a full black moustache, was still something of a romantic. He had inherited this from his mother, a skinny lady who played the harp and spent her time reading poetry. She it was who had given him that ridiculous name, Godofredo. Later on, the sentimentality which she had for many years devoted to literary matters, to moonlight, to romantic love affairs, was turned towards religion; with the onset of religious mania, this reader of Lamartine became a fanatical follower of the Lord; it was then that she had decided to have him educated by the Jesuits and her last days had been a perpetual fear of Hell. From her he had inherited something of all this. As a boy, he had all sorts of crazes which did not last, wavering between the poetry of Garrett and
the Sacred Heart of Jesus. After an attack of typhoid fever, he calmed down; and when the opportunity arose to take over his uncle’s commission business, he was practical and faced up to life in its material and serious aspects. Yet, in his soul, there remained a vague romanticism which was not disposed to die. He was fond of the theatre, of melodramas, of violent events. He read a lot of novels; great deeds and grand passions excited him. He sometimes felt himself capable of heroism or tragedy. But all this was vague, almost subconscious, silently stirring in his inmost heart. Above all, romantic love affairs interested him, but he never thought of actually experiencing their sweetness or their bitterness. He was a virtuous man who loved his Lulu. . . but he enjoyed seeing these things in the theatre or reading about them. And now, the romance which he detected by his side, in his own office, interested him. It was as though the merchandise, the mass of paper, had been enlivened by that vague odour of romance emanating from Machado.

  Again the door opened and the bookkeeper’s wan countenance appeared. He had come to return Senhor Machado’s note and before he withdrew, he said through the half-open door:

  ‘The annual general meeting of the Transtagana Company is today.’

  Alves was somewhat startled.

  ‘But it’s held on the ninth of the month!’

  ‘Today is the ninth.’

  Of course, he was well aware that it was the ninth. But the thought of the annual meeting of the Transtagana had reminded him sharply of his wedding anniversary. In the first two years, it had been a day for an intimate celebration, a pleasant dinner with the family, a little dancing in the evening to the sound of a simple piano. After that, the third anniversary had coincided with the early days of mourning for his mother-in-law, the house still melancholy and Lulu in tears. And now this festive day was passing, almost over, and neither of them had remembered. Lulu certainly had not remembered. When he had left home that morning, she had been doing her hair and had said nothing to him. It would be a pity for that auspicious day to pass without a bottle of port being drunk, with a special sweet for dessert. Moreover, his father-in-law and sister-in-law should have been invited, especially as their good relationship had cooled recently, an estrangement on account of a new maidservant who was dominating the widower’s household. After all, on such a day, as on a birthday, such matters were forgotten, family feeling holding sway. And he decided to go home at once to São Bento Street, to remind Lulu of the important date, and to send a greeting to his father-in-law who was living at Santa Isabel. It was almost three o’clock, the letters had been signed, there was no more business to attend to that day in the lull which invariably followed the turmoil of the steamship for Africa. So he took up his hat and rejoiced in the half-holiday, which gave him the happy idea of going and surprising his darling Lulu with a warm embrace. Normally, that would happen only after half past four, when the office closed. Only one thing disappointed him, that Machado was at the Lumiar and would not be able to dine with them.