The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray by Jorge Amado Read Free Book Online

large dining room table at lunchtime? Who knew funnier stories, who could better console the woes of love, who was like a father or an older brother? In the middle of the afternoon Quitéria Goggle-Eye rolled out of her chair and was led to her bed. There she fell asleep with her memories. Several women decided not to look for or to receive any man that night. They were in mourning. As though it were Maundy Thursday or Good Friday.

8
    At day’s end, as the lights were going on in the city and men were leaving work, Quincas Water-Bray’s closest friends—Sparrow, Bangs Blackie, Corporal Martim, and Swifty—were going down the Tabuão hillside on their way to the dead man’s room. It must be said in the interest of truth that they weren’t drunk yet. They’d had their drinks, of course, with all the commotion brought on by the news, but their eyes were red from the tears they had wept in their measureless grief, and the same could be said for their garbled speech and wobbly gait. How could they have kept their minds completely clear when a friend of so many years had died, the best of comrades, the most thoroughgoing vagabond in Bahia? As for the bottle that Corporal Martim carried under his shirt, there was never any proof of it.
    At that hour of dusk, the mysterious beginning of night, the dead man looked a little weary. Vanda noticed it. Small wonder: He’d spent the whole afternoon laughing, muttering nasty names, making faces. Not even when Leonardo and Uncle Eduardo arrived around five o’clock, not even then did Quincas take a break. He insulted Leonardo with “Dimwit!” and laughed at Eduardo. When the shadows of evening descended over the city, Quincas grew restless. As though he were waiting for something that was late in coming. Vanda, in order to forget and to pretend to herself,started up an animated conversation with her husband and her aunt and uncle, avoiding any glance at the dead man. She wanted to go home, get some rest, take a pill to help her sleep. Why were Quincas’s eyes going back and forth between the window and the door?
    The news hadn’t reached the four friends at the same time. The first to find out was Sparrow. He was putting his multiple talents to use advertising shops in the Baixa dos Sapateiros. He was wearing an old, frayed frock coat, his face painted, and he would station himself alongside the door of a shop and, for a miserable pittance, praise its low prices and fine quality, stopping passersby, telling them limp jokes, inviting them in, almost dragging them. Every so often, when his thirst became pressing—the hellish job left his lips and gullet dry—he’d pop over to a bar close-by and have a drink to put his voice back in tune. On one of these back-and-forths he got the news: brutal, like a sock in the belly, leaving him mute. Head down, he went back into the store and told the Syrian that he wouldn’t be able to use him anymore that afternoon. Sparrow was still young; joys and sorrows affected him deeply. He couldn’t bear that terrible shock all by himself. He needed the company of the other close friends, the usual gang.
    The crowds across from the skiff docks, in the Saturday-night market in Água dos Meninos, in Sete Portas, at the capoeira foot-fighting exhibitions on the Estrada da Liberdade, were almost always quite large: sailors, shopkeepers from the market stalls,
babalaô
priests, capoeira fighters, and hooligans, with their long gabbing, adventures, hectic card games, night fishing in the moonlight, wild goings-on in the red-light district. Quincas Water-Bray had many admirers and friends, but those four were the inseparable ones. For year after year they would get together every day, were together every night, with or withoutmoney, stuffed with good food or starving to death, sharing drinks, all together in joy and sadness. Only now did Sparrow realize how they were all joined together. Quincas’s death was like an amputation for him; it was as though