#noite na taverna translation

[drinkthemlock]

NIGHT AT THE TAVERN

VI - LAST KISS OF LOVE

The end. Translating this took me over a year. I was in a very different place in my life when I began this project and I’m so glad it stayed with me along the way. Three cheers for weird goth boys from the 1800s!

Text by Álvares de Azevedo, translation my own.

TW: this chapter contains murder and suicide.

[revised August 2024]

VI

LAST KISS OF LOVE

“Well Juliet! I shall lie with you tonight!”

SHAKESPEARE - “Romeo and Juliet”

It was late into the night; the party was over. The fellows slept in the shadows, satisfied.

A light flashed through some cracks on the door. The door opened. A woman in black entered. She was pale; and the light of a lantern, which she held in her hand, poured onto her features and awarded a singular twinkle to her eyes. Maybe once she had been a typical beauty, one of those images that make one blush with desire in boyish dreams. But now, with her livid skin, her alert eyes, her purple lips, her marble hands, and her dark clothes, dripping wet from the rain, one might say instead: “the lost angel of madness”.

The woman bent down: with the lantern in her hand she looked, one by one, for a familiar face amongst the sleeping ones.

When the light hit Arnold, she knelt. She went to kiss him, puckered her lips… but an idea detained her. She rose. When she reached a sleeping Johann, a smile paled her lips, her gaze became sinister.

She knelt down next to him, then placed the lantern on the ground. The faint lumen of the lantern hitting her clothes cast a shadow over Johann. The woman leaned in and her hand fell on his throat. A husky and muffled sob followed. The stranger rose. She trembled; and upon holding the lantern a piece of metal clinked in her hand… It was a dagger… She threw it to the ground. She saw that her hands were red; dried them in Johann’s long hair…

She came back to Arnold; shook him.

“Wake up!”

“What do you want from me?”

“Look at me… can’t you recognize me?”

“You? Is this not a dream? It is you! Oh! Let me hold you, now! Five years without seeing you! Five years! And how much you’ve changed!”

“Yes, I am no longer as beautiful as I was five years ago! It’s true, my blond lover! It’s that the flower of beauty is like all flowers. Nourish them with the dew of virginity, under the wind of purity, and they’ll be beautiful… Cover them in filth… and, like the falling fruit that plunge into the waters of the sea, they’ll be enclosed by an impure and brackish encasement! Once I was Geórgia — the virgin —, but today it is Geórgia— the prostitute!”

“My God! My God!”

The man put his face in his hands.

“Do not curse me, no!”

“Oh! Let me remember: these past five years were a dream. The man from billiards, the point blank duel, waking up at a hospital, this depraved life which desperation pushed me into, are all a dream! Oh! Let us remember the past! When winter darkens the sky, let us close our eyes; poor dead swallows! Let us remember the spring!”

“Your words hurt me… It’s a farewell, a farewell kiss and separation that I come to ask of you; on earth our bed would be impure, the world has tarnished our bodies. The love between the libertine and the whore! Satan would laugh at us. It is in heaven, when the grave has washed us clean, that our loving dawn will rise…”

“Oh! To see you only to leave you again! And didn’t you realize, Giórgia, that it would've been better for me to have died, devoured by the dogs in that empty street where I was carried from, covered in blood? That it would’ve been better if you’d murdered me in drunken sleep, rather than point the wandering star of good fortune to me and then wipe it from the sky? Didn’t you realize that, after five years, five years of fever and insomnia, of waiting and despairing, of living for you, of longing and agony, it would be like hell to see you only to leave you?”

“Have mercy, Arnold! I need this farewell to be as long as life. See, my fate is grim: there’s a vile stain on my memories… today! The venal bed… Tomorrow! I only long for the berth of the grave! Arnold! Arnold!”

“Do not call me Arnold! Call me Artur, like before. Artur! Won’t you listen! Call me that! It’s been so long since I’ve heard anyone call me by that name! I was a madman! I wanted to drown my thoughts and wandered the towns and the mountains, leaving tears everywhere I went… in the lonely caves, on the silent meadows and on the wine-stained tables! Come, Giórgia! Sit here, sit on my knees, nestled well on my heart… your head on my shoulder! Come! A kiss! I want to feel again that perfume which I used to breathe in your lips… let me breathe it and die! Five years! Oh! Such a long time waiting for you, dreaming of just one hour on your breast… Then… Listen… I’ve so much to say to you! So many tears to spill onto your lap! Come! And I will tell you my whole story! My lover’s illusions and the damned nights spent in lasciviousness and the boredom that the cold mouths of the whores that kissed me inspired in me! Come! I’ll tell you all of it, I’ll tell you how I desecrated my soul and my past… and let us cry together… our tears will wash us like the rain washes mud off the leaves!”

“Thank you, Artur! Thank you!”

The woman drowned in tears and the young man murmured in between kisses and words of love.

“Listen, Artur, I came just to tell you goodbye! From the door to my grave; and then I’d close it, content… Artur, I’ll die!”

Both were crying.

“Do you see,” she continued. “Come along: do you see that man?”

Arnold took the lantern.

“Johann! Dead! God protect me! Who killed him?”

“Giórgia did! He was a scoundrel. It was he who left a young man he slapped at a gambling den for dead. Giórgia, the whore! Has avenged Giórgia, the virgin! He was the man who ruined her! Ruined her… she, his sister!”

“Horror! Horror!”

And the man turned his face and covered it with his hands.

The woman kneeled at his feet.

“And now goodbye! Goodbye, for I’ll die! Can’t you see I’m turning pale, that my eyes turn glazed and I tremble… and faint?”

“No! I will not go. If I were alive tomorrow, there would be a horrible memory in my past…”

“And are you not afraid? Watch out! It is death that’s coming! It’s life at its twilight on my forehead. Can’t you see this sliver in between my eyebrows?”

“Why would I care about the sleep of death? My future tomorrow would be terrible: and inside the corpse’s rotting head no memories echo, death seals its lips; the grave is silent. I’ll die!”

The woman retreated… retreated… The young man took her in his arms, nailed his lips to hers… She cried out and fell from his hands. It was horrible to look at. The man took the dagger, closed his eyes, punched it against his chest and fell onto her. Two moans were muffled by the sound of a body hitting the ground…

The lamp went out.

[arttye06k]

Just some story of trilance i wrote

But it's in portuguese, so just translate it, don't be that lazy

Percival tinha acordado no meio da noite. Por mais que o seu primeiro dia em Liones tivesse sido extremamente longo, não conseguia voltar a dormir. Talvez fosse a recente excitação que esquentava seu sangue que estivesse o mantendo acordado.

Na mesma hora em que abriu os olhos depois de várias tentativas de cair no sono, decidiu levantar, avistando Lancelot na porta.

— Sin? — Perguntou enquanto esfregava os olhos.

— Ah, achei que estivesse dormindo.

O loiro deu meia volta.

— Não consegui — Percival sorriu. — Mas por que você está acordado?

— Eu ia chamar vocês para ir comer algo. Mas como estavam dormindo...

— Eu posso ir comer com você! - O garoto imediatamente se levantou, ficando de pé na cama. — Sabe, eu estou morrendo de fome.

Lancelot soltou um riso fraco e baixo.

— É melhor você dormir. Foi um dia cansativo.

— Aah...! — Percival resmungou, a expressão suavizando enquanto ele esperneava.

— "Ah" nada. Vai dormir logo.

— Ei, Sin — O esverdeado voltou a deitar-se na cama, encarando as orbes vermelhas do loiro. — Por que não nos contou antes sobre ser um cavaleiro do apocalipse? E sobre Tristan?

O loiro suspirou, percebendo que devia ao menos tê-lo dado alguma explicação prévia. Bem, agora já foi.

— Por nenhum motivo... que eu já não tenha te falado.

O loiro se escorou na porta.

— Você não gosta do Tristan? — Percival foi direto. Estava curioso sobre muitas coisas: Principalmente a relação do príncipe com Lancelot. — Ele parecia muito feliz em te ver.

— Percy... não comece com esse tipo de pergunta — Lancelot desviou o olhar. Não queria se abrir. Ainda não. — Durma. Eu também já estou indo dormir.

— Eu ainda quero saber.

O garoto se deitou com um suspiro pesado. A curiosidade não o deixaria em paz.

Enquanto isso, Lancelot deu uma curta risada. Ele estava indo para um encontro secreto. Mas não poderia dizer aquilo para Percival.

— A verdade é que eu realmente gosto dele.

O loiro pensou em voz alta enquanto se aproximava de uma rua próxima ao castelo.

— Gosta de quem, Lance?

A voz por trás de si lhe pegou de surpresa. Só existia uma pessoa que fazia isso.

— Já está aqui, Tristan. Pensei que iria chegar atrasado como sempre faz.

— Haha, não dessa vez.

O de cabelos prateados deu um sorriso.

— E então? O que quer fazer?

— Quero te levar em uma taverna! — Tristan gostava de andar na linha, mas de vez em quando, apenas com Lancelot, gostava de dar algumas saídas pedagogicas.

— Taverna? Tem certeza que é uma boa ideia? — O loiro estava sério. — Acho que sua mãe não vai curtir te achar em algum lugar assim.

— Não se preocupe, é um pouco longe do castelo. Eles não vão descobrir — Tristan deu um sorriso perverso, fazendo Lancelot perceber que talvez fosse uma péssima influência para o prateado, este que por sua vez, lhe puxou até o tal lugar.

Era discreto mas parecia decente. Mais do que pensava.

— Tem certeza?

O loiro perguntou novamente ao ver Tristan tremendo.

— T-Tenho... — Ele gaguejou. — Claro que tenho!

— Ah... Sério, cara? Vamos embora logo.

O loiro puxou Tristan, que reclamou de início mas parou na metade do caminho.

— Vamos voltar lá!

— Você não tem coragem, aceita isso.

— Como sabe se eu tenho ou não!? — Tristan emburrou a cara. — E não adianta vir com o papo de que me conhece melhor do que eu mesmo!

— É meio óbvio que eu te conheço melhor do que você mesmo.

— Argh! — O prateado se estressou. — Esquece, melhor eu voltar.

Talvez fosse por puro impulso, mas Lancelot decidiu, naquela hora, se declarar. Apenas saiu de sua boca, não era sua intenção. Detestava demonstrar demais. Ou falar demais.

— Você não percebe?

O prateado se virou quase de imediato, a expressão surpresa e confusa pairando em seu rosto. Os corpos quase grudados.

— O quê? Eu não percebo o quê?

O loiro cruzou os braços.

— Você vai ter que descobrir sozinho.

— Sozinho? — Tristan voltou a se aproximar de Lancelot. — Lancelot, do que está falando!?

O de olhos heterocromáticos sempre fora muito curioso.

O loiro não respondeu no mesmo instante, suspirou profundamente antes de dizer qualquer coisa. Precisava pensar bem antes de cogitar a ideia de abrir a boca.

— Eu... gosto de você — Disse, por fim. — E não só como amigo.

Tristan emburrou o rosto, estava mais confuso.

— Como irmão? Eu também, cara!

Lancelot quis bater na própria testa, mas deu outro suspiro pesado.

— Não, seu idiota! — Emburrou o rosto. — De forma... romântica.

O prateado nem acreditava nos próprios ouvidos. Será que a pessoa de quem gostava estava realmente se declarando para si? Era confuso.

De repente seu corpo começou a esquentar e as bochechas ruborizaram.

— Ah... Lance, eu...

Tristan não sabia o que dizer. Estava surpreso demais, perplexo demais. E então, num ato impulsivo, num reflexo, depositou os lábios nos do loiro, iniciando um beijo.

Era tranquilo e suave, o hálito de morango de Lancelot parecia um entorpecente, junto de sua aura de fada que parecia ter gosto de doce.

O maior obviamente ficou chocado, o sentimento era recíproco? Não deveria pensar muito sobre isso agora, então apenas aproveitou ao máximo aquele momento.

Lancelot tinha suas mãos apertando a cintura do prateado, que sentia seu corpo esquentar mais a cada toque.

— Talvez seja melhor pararmos por aqui.

O loiro se afastou.

— Só porque estava ficando bom?

— É melhor se seus pais não descobrirem. Quer dizer, você nunca contou para eles sobre suas preferências... não é?

Tristan ficou chateado por um momento, mas ficando feliz pela compreensão do amigo, agora talvez namorado.

— Bem, isso significa que nós estamos namorando então?

— Não gosto de como a palavra "namorar" soa — Lancelot disse fazendo o prateado soltar uma risada. — Prefiro "compromissados".

[arquivista]

fuck it. posting a story in porch of geese for my 1 brazilian mutual

ill translate it later

CW: gore, mentions of pedophilia, vomiting, choking, mind control? (i think thats valid), homophobia, idk what else warn me later

— ... Então eu disse: "Não, eu juro no nome da minha mãe que não estou armado." Mas o guarda, que já dava sinais de estar alterado, segurou minhas intimidades e perguntou: "Pois que me dizes dessa espada?"

O Rei Errante

A mesa mergulhou em riso. Altas gargalhadas afogaram a taverna, enquanto outros afogavam-se na bebida. Vários perdiam o fôlego, obrigados a emergir da euforia para respirar, mas um um homem jovem, de cabelos negros e vestes simples, na verdade quase farrapos, permanecia apenas com um grande sorriso estampado no rosto. Um dos seus olhos, castanho como um tronco de árvore, observava cada reação daqueles bêbados, o outro estava completamente costurado, cego. Os homens na mesa pararam de rir apenas ao recuperar o ar dos seus pulmões. Quando o silêncio retornou, finalmente, um dos bêbados perguntou:

— Não tiveste raiva do guarda, Leofwine?

— Certamente, afinal, ele violou minha honra... Então levei-o para minha casa para acertar as contas com a minha espada.

Risos encharcaram o estabelecimento novamente, deixando o comediante com um sorriso ainda maior, segurando o seu próprio. Mas uma presença amedrontadora secou as gargantas dos presentes.

Uma figura misteriosa abriu as portas da taverna. Um homem muito mais alto que a porta, de rosto magro e pálido, ostentando uma mandíbula definida e afiada, longos cabelos brancos, alcançando suas próprias pernas, e vestindo uma capa preta adentrou a taverna. Suas vestes, cobrindo-o do pescoço aos pés, davam-lhe a impressão de flutuar no chão quando andou até o balcão. Chegando lá, encarou o dono do local, o taverneiro, o provedor dos licores aos viciados e do abrigo aos errantes, dizendo, em voz grave:

— Quantas pessoas? — O taverneiro perguntou, em voz monótona, não impressionado. Estava ocupado limpando uma garrafa.

— Preciso de um quarto por três noites.

Leofwine engoliu em seco. Já conhecia aquela figura; a última vez que o vira, no entanto, lhe trouxe grande infortúnio.

— Um adulto e uma criança.

— Não aceitamos crianças. — O taverneiro afirmou, depois de um curto segundo de silêncio.

Então, silêncio. As mãos do dono do estabelecimento visivelmente tremiam, logo acompanhadas pelo seu corpo inteiro. Ele rapidamente soltou a garrafa e deixou-a cair no chão, produzindo um curto fragor, que ecoou na taverna devido ao silêncio.

— Aceitarás.

— Uhum... uhum... — O taverneiro balbuciou.

Ninguém mais percebeu, mas Leofwine viu os seus olhos revirarem-se, levando suas pupilas embora.

— Ótimo. — O viajante respirou fundo. — Tu responder-me-ás com franqueza.

— Preciso de um quarto para três noites.

— Sim, meu amo. — O taverneiro disse, engasgando nas próprias palavras.

— Um adulto e uma criança.

— Quantas pessoas, meu amo? — Ele perdia o fôlego.

Ao dar a chave do seu quarto ao viajante misterioso, o taverneiro colapsou com próprio peso, bateu sua face contra o balcão e caiu, imóvel. O errante andou até a porta, quieto, e assobiou. Rapidamente uma garota de pele pálida como a do visitante, tão alta como uma mulher adulta, cabelos tão longos e brancos quanto os dele, mas de rosto levemente redondo e vestes brancas, entrou na taverna, carregando consigo uma leve bagagem. Ela e o homem tiveram um curto diálogo numa língua estrangeira. Ao terminarem a conversa, ela subiu para os alojamentos da taverna, correndo, e ele foi na mesma direção, porém antes de chegar à escada, olhou para Leofwine.

— Sim, meu amo.

— Se tentares algo contra a minha filha mais uma vez, verme, arrancar-lhe-ei o outro olho. — Ele deu-lhe um olhar fatal.

— Sim, Ádhamh.

Ádhamh agarrou o pescoço de Leofwine com sua mão direita, em um gesto brusco e agressivo, quase impulsivo. Apertava-o com força, encarando seus os olhos – não, sua alma.

— É deste modo barbárico que tratas teu superior? — Ele perguntou, cerrando os dentes.

— Não, meu amo... — Leofwine tentava respirar.

— Peça perdão.

— Me perdoe, meu amo...

— Tu não tocarás um dedo na minha filha.

— S- Sim... meu amo.

— Eu sou um alcoólatra asqueroso... e um pedófilo... o mais nojento dos pecadores...

— Repita o que eu disser. "Eu sou um alcoólatra asqueroso e um pedófilo, o mais nojento dos pecadores".

— "Eu não tocarei tua filha."

— Eu não... tocarei tua filha...

— Bom.

Finalmente, Ádhamh soltou o pescoço do comediante, afastou-se dos bêbados e seguiu sua filha. Leofwine, por um breve momento, segurou seu próprio pescoço, sentindo a dor marcá-lo. Sua visão estava embaçada. Levantou-se da mesa, sem dizer mais uma palavra, e cambaleou até a saída da taverna.

Ao pôr os pés do lado de fora, ele sentiu uma dor no seu abdome. Pôs as duas mãos lá, tentando rastejar seus pés até a casa, mas nem mesmo saiu dos arredores da taverna. Ajoelhou-se na sarjeta, com as suas mãos no chão, e libertou uma enxurrada de vômito e sangue, gritando em sofrimento. Então, com a garganta ardendo, barriga vazia e medo nas costas, perdeu a consciência e desabou, afogando na podridão.

[mirtifero]

They should have translated Noite na Taverna it would have been insane

[lungfishpoem]

PLEASE READ LOUI'S NOITE NA TAVERNA TRANSLATION IF YOU CAN'T READ PORTUGUESE AND ENJOY REALLY FUCKED UP STUFF. Aka romantism. PLEASE

[shipcestuous]

Also on books, there's a brazilian collection of shorts stories called Noite na Taverna ( A Night in the Tavern), which has a brother sleeping with his sister (although they are unaware of that). It's not a developed relationship, they only have a few lines together. But it's still canon bro/sis, so I wanted to share. The book doesn't have an english translation, but there is a nice breakdown of it in english (i'll dm you the link)

Thanks for telling us about this!

Link to the article.

And here's the description of the story relevant to our interests:

Johann, the Incestuous

The last tale is perhaps the cruelest of all. Johann tells his friends about a night in a tavern in Paris, playing billiards with a blond-haired man named Arthur. After a banal argument, the two fight, and Johann challenges Arthur to a duel to the death.

They head to a deserted and dark street. Each chooses a pistol, but only one of the weapons is loaded. When they shoot at each other, it is revealed that Johann’s weapon is the one that is loaded. Before dying, Arthur leaves two letters with his rival and asks him to deliver them.

The first letter is addressed to Arthur’s mother, and the other one is addressed to his young girlfriend. Believing that killing the young man is not enough, Johann decides to pretend to be Arthur to enter the girl’s room and have sex with her in the dark, so as not to reveal his true identity.

“I had on my finger the ring I took from the dead man. I felt a small satiny hand take me by the hand, and I went up. The door closed. It was a delicious night! The blonde’s lover was a virgin! Poor Romeo! Poor Juliet! It seems that these two children spent the night in childlike kisses and in pure dreams!”

The next morning, Johann is violently awakened by a man who attacks him, probably trying to defend the girl’s honor.

Without seeing the mysterious man, the protagonist retaliates and kills him. It is only then that he sees the aggressor’s face: Johann has just killed his younger brother.

And yes, Arthur’s girlfriend on the bed, deflowered by Johann the night before, was his own sister!

[drinkthemlock]

NIGHT AT THE TAVERN

V - CLAUDIUS HERMANN

This chapter beat my ass, not gonna lie. It contains a poem, which are extremely hard to translate (especially since it’s an álvares poem…), so forgive me for any inaccuracies in that department. This chapter contains some pretty repulsive stuff, especially regarding sexual assault and abduction (seriously), and I’d go as far as saying it’s the most disturbing one (followed closely by Solfieri’s). Stay safe, and enjoy!

Text by Álvares de Azevedo, translation my own.

TW: this chapter contains several instances of violence against women.

[revised August 2024]

V

Claudius Hermann

… Ecstasy!

My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time

And makes a healthful music. It is not madness that I have utter’d.

SHAKESPEARE - “Hamlet”

“And you, Hermann! Your turn has come. One by one we have invoked a corpse from the cemetery of time. One by one we have lifted its shroud to show you a bloodstain. Speak, for your turn has come.”

“Claudius is dreaming of a sonnet in the manner of Petrarch, some halo of purity like that of the pure spirits from Der Messias[1],” said Johann between a smoke and a laugh, lifting his head from the table.

“Very well! You want a story? I could tell, like you, insanities from nights of debauchery, but why? It was intended as mockery when Faust went to remind Mephistopheles of the hours of damnation he spent with him. You know them… these clouds of the past; you’ve read plenty of them at the faded book of my libertine existence. If you do not remember it, the first woman of the streets you find could remind you. I have also, in this dark river called life, which flows towards the past while we walk towards the future, given up faith and thrown myself, having shed my most perfumed clothing, into wearing the tunic of Saturnalia! The past is what is gone, it’s the flower that has withered, the sun that has set, the corpse that has rotted. To cry for it? What madness. Let it sleep with its dark memories! Come alive, wake only the forget-me-nots in bloom at that swamp! Pour the scent of a pure memory onto that not-being!”

“Bravo! Bravissimo Claudius, you are completely drunk! I’d say you are Romantic!”

“Silence, Bertram! It is true that this is not a legend to be told after yours, one of those things to be told with your elbows on the red cloth and your lips splashed with wine and satiated with kisses… But who cares?”

“All of you who love the game, you that once saw a wave of gold flow in that abyss, eddy in the bottom, like a sea of hopes that crashes on the high tide of fate, know well what haze confuses us then… it is the best insanity that riles us in those games of thousands of men, or of fortune. —Aspirations, life itself are gone at the speed of a race, where this whole complex of miseries and desires, crimes and virtues called existence is gambled on a couple of horses![1]

I bet like a man who wasn’t wounded by becoming poor: luxury also satiates; and what a horrible satiety it is! To it nothing is enough… not the dances from the Orient, nor the Roman Lupercalias, not even the burning of an entire city will quench its thirst for death, this vitality of poison that Byron speaks of[2]. My bet at the turf was my entire fortune. I was rich, very rich then: in London no one boasted more expensive depravities, no nawab splurged as many sums in one evening as I did. I spilled the sweat of three generations on the beds of whores and on the floor of my orgies…

On the moment the races were about to start, when everyone felt feverish with impatience, a murmur ran through the crowds, a smile… and so were the fonts expanding and then a woman ran by on horseback.

Had you seen her, like me, on a black horse, with velvet clothes, a lively face, that ardent look between her eyelashes, transpiring a queen in all those grandiose gestures! Had you seen her, beautiful with her perfect and harmonious beauty, beautiful with her pure and silky coloring, with her black hair and the white skin of her face, the oval of her rosy cheeks, the nacre fire of her thin lips, the perfection of her chest standing out in her riding habit… Had you seen her like this and, believe me, gentlemen, you would not laugh as you are laughing now!”

“Romanticism! You must be very drunk, Claudius, for poetry to still come and slip a kiss on your dry lips of Lovelace and your Don Juan detachment[3]!”

“Laugh, yes! You wretches! Who do not understand what perhaps flows like fire from Lovelace’s lips, how love heaves under the dripping wet clothes of Don Juan, the libertine! Madmen, that have never imagined Lovelace without his mask, perhaps crying for Clarissa Harlowe[4]— poor angel! Whose white wings she was going to shed, cursing this fatality that makes love an infamy and a crime! A thousand times you are madmen! Who never imagined the Spaniard waking up in the lupanar[5], running his hand through his forehead and burning with remorse and longing as he remembers so many beautiful visions from the past!”

“Bravo! Bravo!”

“Poetry! Poetry!” murmured Bertram.

“Poetry! Why pronounce its sacred name to the chaste virgin, like a mystery, in the dark filth of the tavern? Why remind her of the star of love under the light of the orgy’s lamps? Poetry! Do you know what poetry is?”

“Half hundred hollow sonorous words that a handful of pallid men understand, a staircase of sounds and harmonies that seem to those mad souls like ideas and unleash in them illusions like the moon and the shadows… that is, in what one calls poets. Now, in the ideal, in the woman, remnants of the last romance, the delirium and passion of the last novel’s heroine and the vague and uncertain present of a mystical pleasure, for which a virgin writhes in lust, without knowing why…”

“Silence, Bertram! Your brain has been fried by wine, like how lava from a volcano burns the brush and flowers of a meadow. Silence! You are like those plants that bloom and dive into the dead sea: a limestone crystallization covers them, they wither and die. Poetry, I’ll tell you as well on my account, is the flight of the morning birds in the warm embrace of dawn’s red clouds, it is the deer that rolls in the dew of the lush mountain, that forgets tomorrow’s death, yesterday’s agony, in its bed of flowers!”

“That’s enough, Claudius, because no one understands what you say there: they are words, words, words; like Hamlet said; and all of that is empty and lifeless like a dried skull, deceitful like the earth’s infectious vapors that the twilight sun flushes with a thousand colors called clouds or that jeering and cloudy fairy called poetry!”

“The story! The story! Claudius, can’t you see this discussion is making us yawn of boredom?”

“Very well, I shall tell the rest of the story. At the end of that day I had doubled my fortune.

The next day I saw her: it was in the theater. I don’t know which play was it, I don’t know what I saw, or heard; I only knew that there was a woman, as beautiful as every most pure thing created by the sculptor. This woman was the duchess Eleonora… The next day I saw her at a ball… Then… It took long: six months! Can you imagine? Six months of agony and breathtaking desire, six months of love with the thirst of a beast! Six months! How long were they!

One day, I’d had enough. All this time had been spent in contemplation, in seeing her, loving her, dreaming of her; I wrung my hands thinking it would not grow further from that, that it was too much to wait in vain and that if she would not come, like Gulnare at the feet of the Corsair[6], one must go speak to her.

One night all were asleep in the duke’s palace. The duchess, tired from the ball, fell asleep on a divan. The alabaster lamp trembly shone its golden light on her pale face. She looked like a fairy asleep in the moonlight.

The portière fluttered: a man stood there, distracted. His head was so hot and feverish and he rested it in the doorframe.

This weakness was a coward; and more, this man had bought a key and one hour in lewd infamy from a servant, this man had sworn he’d have that woman tonight: though it was poison, he’d drink the nectar of that flower, the scarlet liquor of that glass. As to these losses of honor and adultery, do not laugh at them-- he did not laugh. He loved and he wanted her: his will was like the blade of a dagger— to harm or to crack.

On the table there was a cup and a vial of wine, he filled it: it was Spanish wine… he came close to her, with her velvet clothes untied, her half-loosened hair still woven with gemstones and flowers, her half-bared breasts, where diamonds glittered like dewdrops, he lifted her in his arms, kissed her. Under the heat of that kiss, half-naked, she woke; among her vague dreams where perhaps in illusion she was lost, she murmured ‘love!’ and with heavy lidded eyes she let her head fall and fell asleep again.

The man drew an emerald vial from his breast. He lifted it to her half-opened lips and poured in a few drops that she absorbed without feeling. He laid her down and waited. From then on her sleep was most profound… The liquid was a narcotic in which a few drops of those exciting liquors that inspire fever on the face and voluptuousness in the heart had been mixed.

The man was on his knees, his chest trembled, and he was pale like a man after a long sensuous night. Everything around him seemed to be spinning…

She was naked: neither velvet nor light veil covered her. The man rose and drew the curtains.

The lamp shone brighter and then went out…

That man was Claudius Hermann.

-

When I rose, I covered myself with my cape and walked off into the street. I wanted to retire to my home, but I was dizzy like a drunkard. I was staggering and the floor seemed slippery, like when one feels faint. An idea, though, was chasing me. After that woman there had been nothing else for me. Someone who has drunk from the wine of the ripe grapes of paradise should never again get drunk with mundane nectar…

When the honey has run dry, what is left if not suicide?

A week went on like this: every night I drank a century of pleasure from that sleeping woman’s lips. One month, in which the entrudo balls[7] deliriously went by, more feverish yet she fell asleep hot, with her face on fire…

One night — it was after a ball — I waited for her in her bedroom, hidden behind her bed. I had poured the last drops from the vial in the cup of water beside her bed when she walked in with the duke.

He was a beautiful man! Before leaving her he placed his hands on her brow and kissed her. Giddy with that kiss, the angel rested her head on his shoulder and circled him with her bare arms, glittering with bejeweled bracelets. The duke was thirsty, took the duchess’ cup, drank a few drops; she took the cup away from him, and drank the rest. I watched them like that: that husband, still so young, that woman — ah! So beautiful! With immaculate skin — and squeezed the dagger…

‘Will you come today, Maffio?’

‘Yes, my soul.’

A kiss was whispered, and drowned the two souls. And I smiled in the shadows, for I knew he ought not to come.

-

He left and she began to undress. I watched her shiny clothes, the flowers and the jewels, slip off one by one, saw the dark shiny braids come undone and then appear under the white veil of her transparent robe, like the statues of half-dressed nymphs, with their curves contoured by their tunics drenched in water.

What I saw… It was what I’d much dreamed of, what you all, poor madmen, idealized as the visions of love over a whore’s body! It was her snowy breasts, with bluish veins, trembling with desire, her head lost among that shower of dark hair, her lips heaving, her entire body palpitating: it was the wantonness of imperfection, when beauty’s body is filled with the most beauty, and, like a blooming rose wet with dew, the more it expands, the more it exposes its colors.

The narcotic was very powerful: a feverish suffering parted her lips; exerted and languid, lying on the bed, with colorless eyelids, arms limp and devoid of strength, it felt like kissing a shadow.

I lifted her from the bed; I carried her in her transparent clothes, her satin form, her loose hair still humid with perfume, her breasts still warm…

I ran with her through the deserted corridors, passed through the patio, the last door was closed: I opened it.

There was a coach in the street: the horses neighed and foamed with impatience. I entered the coach with her. We took off.

It took long. An hour later the sun was rising.

Soon we were outside the town.

Dawn was coming alongside its vapors, its rose bushes sprayed with dew, its velvety clouds and its waters peppered with gold and warmth. Nature blushed under the sun’s first kiss, like a pale damsel under her groom’s first kiss: not like the voluptuous night’s stolen lover, as paganism painted her, rather like a virgin awoken from childish slumber, knelt before God, praying and whispering her balsamic prayers to the bluing sky, the glittering earth, the waters turning gold. This dawn fell onto the earth like God’s breath; and, amongst that light and fresh air, the duchess slept, pale like the slumber of those mystical creatures in illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages, beautiful like Titian’s sleeping Venus [8], and voluptuous like one of Veronese’s fallen women [9].

I kissed her: I was feeling the life that was evaporating from her lips. She was startled, half-opened her eyes, but the weight of sleep still burdened her, and so her colorless eyelids closed…

The carriage continued on fast.

-

The sun had reached its apex in the sky— it was noon; the heat was stifling: across the head, the face, drops of sweat rolled down the duchess’ chest like the pearls of a broken necklace…

We stopped at an inn; I threw a veil over her face, took her in my arms and carried her to a room.

She must’ve looked so beautiful like that! The servants stopped by in the corridors: it was from awe at such beauty even more so than just indiscreet curiosity.

The owner of the house came to me.

‘Sir, your wife or your sister, whoever she may be, will certainly need a maid to serve her…’

‘Leave me, she sleeps.’

That was my only answer.

I laid her on the bed, drew the curtains, closed the windows so that the light did not disturb her sleep. There was no one who could see us, we were alone, the man and his angel; and the earthly creature knelt by the bed of the heavenly one.

I do not know how much time went on like that, I’m not sure if I slept, but I know that I dreamt of much love and much hope, I’m not sure if I watched over her, but I always saw her there, I contemplated her every gracious sleeping movement, I shuddered at every breath that made her breast tremble, and everything seemed like a dream to me, one of those dreams in which the soul abandons itself like a swan falling asleep to the sound of the water… I do not know how much time went on like that: I only know that my stillness was broken, the duchess was sitting up in the bed, with her bare arms she brushed off the waves of loose hair that covered her face and chest.

‘Is this a dream?’ she murmured, ‘Where am I? Who is this man leaning on my bed?’

The man did not answer.

She left the bed; her first impulse was modesty: she tried to cover her breasts, palpitating with fear, with her little hands. She felt nearly naked, exposed to the view of a stranger, and she trembled like the poets say Diana trembled when she saw herself exposed, in her bath, to the eyes of Actaeon [10].

‘Tell me sir, for mercy’s sake, if this is all not an illusion… if this was not an injury! I wouldn’t like to even think about it. Maffio won’t be long, won’t he? My Maffio…! This is all a comedy… but what bedroom is this? I fell asleep in my palace… How have I woken in a strange chamber? Tell me, is this not all a joke of Maffio’s? He wants to laugh at me… But, see, I tremble, I am afraid.’

The man would not respond: he had his eyes fixed on that divine form. She’d be a statue of passion in her pallor, her fixed gaze, her wanting lips, if the heaving of her chest did not denounce she was alive.

She knelt; I do not know what she was even saying. I do not know what words evaporated from those lips: they were perfumes, because the roses of heaven have only perfumes; they were harmonies, because the harps of heaven have only harmonies; and the lips of a beautiful woman are a divine rose, and her heart is a heavenly harp. I heard her, but did not understand her; I felt only that those words were very sweet, that that voice held an irresistible talisman to my soul, because only in my boyish, illusionary dreams of love had I come across a voice like that.

The moans of two virgins embracing each other in heaven, made golden by the light of God’s face, pale by the most pure kisses, by the trembling of the most palpitating embraces, would not have been as gentle as that voice!

The girl cried, sobbed; at last she rose.

I saw her run to the window, she was about to open it… I ran and grabbed her by the hands…

‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I’ll scream… if this is not a desert, if someone walks by… They might help me… Help m…’

I shut her mouth with my hands…

‘Silence, madam!’

She fought to free herself from my hands; at last she became tired. I let go of her out of pity.

‘For mercy’s sake then make this doubt of mine clear: what is the reason for all of this that I see? All that I think, that I guess, is too horrible!’

‘Listen then,’ I told her, ‘There was a woman… an angel. There was a man who loved her like the waters love the moon that makes them look silvery, like the eagles in the mountains love the sun that faces them, that fills them with light and love. I don’t know who he even was; one day he rose above a life of fever, forgot it; and forgot the past before a woman’s transparent eyes, forgot the stains of his history in a dawn of pleasures, where the shadow of this angel was drawn… Listen: do not curse him! This man had much dishonor in the past, he had damned his youth, prostituted, like a golden butterfly, his generation, throwing it in the mud; cold, without beliefs, without hopes, he had smothered, one by one, his illusions like the infanticide does to her children… Perhaps God had cursed him! Or he had cursed himself… had forgotten he was a man and had harmonies in his heart as saintly as the poet’s… He had forgotten them and they slept in mystery like the chords of an abandoned guitar. He’d forgotten that nature was beautiful, and very beautiful at that, that the night flowers’ bed was fragrant, that the moon was the lamp of lovers, the breezes of the valley, the perfumes of the poet in his betrothal to the angels, and that dawn held fresh breezes… and with its virginal clouds, its leaves wet with dew, its cloudy waters it had charms that only the pure souls understand! He rejected all of that, forgot it… Only to remember it briefly and mockingly during his sweaty hours of depravity… He was so depraved!’

‘But that does not tell me who you are… nor why am I here…’

‘Listen: the libertine did indeed love the angel, he turned his back to the past, freed himself of it like an impure shroud. Retempered himself in the fire of sentiment, steadied himself in the vision of that virginity, because she was as beautiful as a virgin, and reflected that virginal light of her spirit in the divine soul’s glow that illuminated her forms, that are not from the earth, but from heaven. Time still hadn’t ailed the libertine’s heart with an incurable leprosy, nor had engraved on his brow an inextinguishable mark— impurity! He left behind the life he used to live, ignored his colleagues, his bought lovers, his feverish insomnias, he wanted to erase all the taste of existence, like a man who has lost everything on a gambling table would like to forget reality. And the man was able to forget it all. But he was still not happy. He spent nights around her palace; sometimes he saw her, beautiful and pale beneath the moonlight, or could distinguish her shape in the shadow that passed behind the curtains of her illuminated bedroom’s open window. During the balls he followed that palpitating body with looks of envy. In the theater, between the heaving of the waves of harmony, when ecstasy floated in that balsamic and illuminated room, he saw nothing but her— and only her! And the hours spent in his bed… not his hours of sleep, for he barely slept, because at times they were long hours of impatience and insomnia, at times short hours of ardent dreams! The poor madman had an idea one day: it was grim, yes, but it was what providence demanded. What he did I do not know, nor ever will. And later, drunk enough to dream of you, mad enough to imagine having you in his fiery dreams, was profane enough to dare steal from the temple a ciborium of most pure gold. This man… have mercy on him, for he will love you on his knees… oh angel, Eleonora…’

‘My God! My God! Why such calumny, so much filth about me? Oh Madonna! Why do you curse my life so, why have you let a stain this dark fall upon my head?’

The tears, the sobs muffled her voice.

‘Forgive me, madam, you have me here at your feet! Have pity on me, for I suffered a lot, loved you a lot, l love you a lot! Mercy! For I will be your slave, I will kiss your feet, I will kneel at your doorstep, will listen to your breaths, your prayers, your dreams… and that will suffice… I will be your slave and your dog, I will lie at your feet when you are awake, I will guard you with my dagger when the night falls, and if, one day, if just one day you could love me… then… then…’

‘Oh, leave me be! Leave me be!’

‘Eleonora! Eleonora! To lose nights upon nights on a single hope! To nurture it in your breast like a flower that wilts with cold, to care for it, revive it every day, to see it be defoliated before my face! To drown myself in love and receive only mockery and ridicule in return! Tell the painter to tear his Madonna, the sculptor to break his statue of a woman into pieces.

Insane, poor madwoman that you are! Do you believe that a man should bring life to a thought inside his head, to live out of this rot, to soak himself in the vitality of pain, only to later have it torn from his breast? Do you believe he would allow his heart to be stepped on, to have his… He, poet and lover! the flowers from the crown of illusions, one by one, throughout the night of disgrace, to smother his mad motherly love over his breast, the creature of his blood, the child of his life, the hope of his hopes?’

‘Oh, and do you not feel pity for me also? Do you not know it? This is a disgrace! I am but a poor woman. I beg you to forgive me on my knees if I’ve offended you… I beg of you, leave me be! Why would your dreams, your love matter to me?’

That pain hurt me profoundly: those tears burned me. But my will made itself firm and ferrous like destiny.

‘Why would my dreams matter to you, why would my love matter to you? Yes, you are right! Why would it matter for the water in the desert and the gazelle in the sand that the Arab is thirsty or the lion is hungry? But thirst and hunger are fatal. Love is also like that; do you understand it now?’

‘Kill me then! Have you not a dagger! A single stab, for the love of God! I swear I will thank you for it…’

‘To die! And you think of dying! Senseless woman! To slide from the warm bed of love onto the cold slab of the dead! You do not know what you’re saying. Do you know what these words are: — to die? It is the doubt that haunts existence, it is the doubt, the premonition that makes the brow of the suicidal man cold, that flows though his hair like wintery winds and turns us pale like Hamlet! To die! It is the end of all dreams, of all palpitations in the heart, of all hopes! It is to be breast to breast with our old lovers and not feel them! You madwoman! The betrothal of the vermin is a frightful one, it’s a very dark sheet that of the burial shroud! Do not speak of this; why think of the gravedigger next to the bed of life? Put your hand on your heart… it beats… and beats with strength, like a fetus in its mother’s womb. There is still much life in there, much love to be loved, much lust for living! Oh! If only you wanted to love me!’

She hid her head in her hands and sobbed.

‘It is impossible, I cannot love you!’

I told her:

‘Eleonora, listen to me, I’ll leave you alone, but I will guard you from that door. Make up your mind, let it be a firm decision indeed, but a thoroughly considered one. Remember that after today you will not be able to return to the world: duke Maffio would be the first to run from you, he would sense the vice of adultery on your face, he would think he was feeling the wetness of a stranger’s kiss on your mouth. He would hate you! See: further along there is hatred and mockery, the ridicule of other women, the vengeful jeers from those that loved you and you did not love in turn. When you walk in, they will say: there is she! She repents! The husband… poor he! He has forgiven her… Mothers will hide their daughters from you, honest wives will be ashamed to touch you… And here, Eleonora, here you will have my breast and my love, a life just for you, a man that will think of you only and always dream of you, a man whose world will be you, your laughter, your gaze, your love, that will forget yesterday and tomorrow to make, like a God, you his Eternity. Think, Eleonora! If you wanted, we’d leave today; a life of adventure awaits us. I am very rich, enough to adorn you like a queen. We’ll run to Europe, we will see France with its luxury, Spain, whose climate invites love, where the afternoons are fragrant with the orangeries in bloom, where the fields turn to velvet filled with a thousand multicolored flowers, we will go to Italy, to your homeland and, in its blue sky, its clear nights, its most tender twilights we will live anew under the meridional sun! If you wanted it… Otherwise it would be too horrible… I do not know what would happen: but whoever entered this room would find their feet covered in blood.’

I left; two hours later I came back.

‘Are you done thinking, Eleonora?’

She did not respond. She was lying with her face between her hands. Hearing sound of my voice, she had risen. There was a piece of paper, wet with her tears, on the bed. I lifted a hand to take it, she handed it to me. They were some verses of mine. I looked at the table: my valise, which I had taken from the coach, was open, the papers were a mess. These were those verses.”

Claudius produced a yellowed and crumpled paper from his pocket and threw it on the table. Johann read it:

“Do not hate me, woman, if in the past

A dark stain faded my life,

– It’s that I’ve burned my lips in the ardent vice

And disbelieved everything with my head held high.

Don Juan’s mask burned my face

In the libertine’s cold pallor:

That gaze made me jaded… and those cold lips

Dare to curse my destiny.

Yes! Long nights in the fervor of gambling

I splurged, feverish and sickly

And entrusted my future to the God of fate

And love I profaned in oblivion!

I wilted the poet’s flowers in mockery,

In the irony of glory and of amours:

To the vapors of wine, insane at night

Leaned over from gambling into fervors!

I profaned the flower of youth

Among the murky waters of the past…

In the brain, fever, on the face, pallor,

I believed only in the calm grave!

And the Angel’s immaculate wings on an impure breast

On the breaths of the sold woman I defiled,

Still darkens my lips the purple brand

Of the loose woman’s kisses.

And the myrrh of songs no longer turns to exhales

Into the cup dishallowed, dark and tainted:

A sea of filth drained into the river of my soul,

Ripped the white flowers off the margins.

Dream of glories! only passes me by too quickly,

Like an open flower, in fear, in tomb-filled floor

— languished and insipid…

My love… the heart silences it:

I keep it deep inside the shadows of the shrine

Where the weeds did not fill the emptiness.

My love… was a white clothed vision

From the orgy to the door, cold and sobbing.

Holy lamp raised in depraved bed,

Tavern’s templar vase at the table,

Pale morning star [11] reflecting

On the mire of crime.

Like the old cities’ leper

I know you ran with horror from [my] kisses,

I know, in the crazy living of those mad years

Faith I deflowered in dark insanity…

– Vestal, I prostituted the virgin forms,

I myself threw into the sea the leaves from the crown,

Exchanged the pink tunic of childhood

For the orgies’s shroud.

Oh! Do not love me at all! Very well! One day

The Lord might say to poor Lazarus:

You there, lift yourself from the Lupanar of death,

Come alive at the freshness of a purer living!

And I will live again: the moth

Shakes its wings, jerks them, shines,

Shedding the dark skin, the filthy goo

Of the faded caterpillar.

Then, woman, I will rise from the filth

Where Satan spent the night with me,

Where still warm he perfumed his proxy,

Satin nudity of snowy forms.

And the blonde whore in her white breasts

Laid my livid head, in the sleeplessness

I came down with the fever of voluptuousness unto thirst

Under those sold kisses.

And so I will wake under the most pure sun,

Fair smelling brow under breezes of hope!

I’ll wash myself of faith in the golden waters

Of Magdalene in tears! and from the angel

That perhaps God may give me, curved and mute,

Steal a kiss in the vapors of love,

And die in his lips!”

“She became quiet: she was crying and moaning.

I came close to her, kneeled as if before God.

‘Eleonora, yes or no?’

She turned her face to the other side, tried to speak… she interrupted herself at every sillable.

‘Wait, let me pray a little, Madonna might forgive me.’

I waited always. She kneeled.

‘Now…’ she said, getting up and extending me her hand.

‘Well?’

‘I’ll go with you.’

And fainted.”

-

Here stopped the story of Claudius Hermann.

He lowered his head onto the table, and spoke no more.

“Are you sleeping, Claudius? My God! You’re either drunk or dead!”

It was Archibald addressing him: he shook him with all his might.

Claudius lifted his head a little, he was sickly, his eyes were hollowed in a dark shadow.

“Leave me be, cursed ones! Leave me be, by hell or heaven! Can’t you see I’m sleepy… sleepy and very sleepy?”

“What about the story, the story?” boomed Solfieri.

“What about the duchess Eleonora?” asked Archibald.

“The duchess… It seems to me as if I’ve heard this name before… To hell with it, why would it matter to me?”

Then he did as if he wanted to proceed, but an invincible force held him back.

“The duchess… it’s true! But how did I forget all that I do not remember? Take this weight off my head… I bet they filled my skull with molten lead!” and he hit his sickly head like a doctor hits the chest of an agonizing man to find an echo of life.

“So?”

“Ah! Ah! Ah!” laughed someone that had kept himself askew to the conversation.

“Arnold! Shut up!”

“You shut up first, Solfieri! I will tell the end of the story.”

It was Arnold-the-blond, who had woken..

“Listen you all,” he said: “one day, Claudius entered his home. He found the bed soaked in blood and a madman embracing a corpse in a dark corner of the alcove. The corpse was Eleonora’s, the madmen’s, you could not even recognize given how much the agony had disfigured him! A rigid, tousled head, with greenish flesh, sunken eyes and spleen where the lumen of insanity timidly scintillated, like the luminous emanation of the marsh amidst the shadows… But he had recognized him… —It was duke Maffio.”

Claudius guffawed. —It was as grim as insanity, as cold as the sword of the angel of darkness. He fell to the ground, livid and sweaty like agony, rigid like death…

He was as drunk as Noah the Patriarch, the vine’s first ever lover, unknown virgin until then and today whore of all mouths… drunk as Noah, the first ever drunkard that history tells of! He slept sound and heavily like Saint Peter the Apostle at the Mount of Olives… The case being that both of them had dined that night…

Arnold spread his cloak on the ground and laid on top of it.

A few moments later his baritone’s snores were mixed with the great concerto of the sleepers’ snoring.

-

[1] Epic poem by Klopstock about the redemption of mankind.

[1] Claudius is talking about gambling and horse racing.

[2] Reference to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III.

[3] Richard Lovelace is a character from Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa and Don Juan is a fictional character appearing in many works, notably Byron’s homonymous poem; both are famed libertines.

[4] Main character from the novel mentioned earlier.

[5] famous brothel in Pompeii.

[6] reference to Byron’s The Corsair.

[7] The word “entrudo” refers to an earlier version of the modern Brazilian Carnaval.

[8] Could be a reference to either of these paintings.

[9] In the original Portuguese “amásia” means a woman living with a man she is not married to. Translated to fallen woman for clarity.

[10] Reference to the myth of Diana and Actaeon in which he, a hunter, sees the goddess naked while she bathes in a stream. To punish him, she turns him into a deer, making him be torn apart and devoured by his own hunting dogs.

[11] In the original “Estrela d’alva”, meaning the planet Venus (morning star).

[drinkthemlock]

NIGHT AT THE TAVERN

VI - JOHANN

This one goes out to the duel enjoyers !!

Text by Álvares de Azevedo, translation my own.

TW: this chapter contains manslaughter and incest.

[revised August 2024]

-

“Pourquoi? C’est que mon coeur au milieu des délices,

D’un souvenir jaloux constamment oppressé,

Froid au bonheur présent, va chercher ses supplices

Dans l’avenir et le passé?”

A. DUMAS [1]

 “Now it’s my turn! I too want to toss a coin into your urn; the tainted copper of the beggar: a poor alm, for sure!”

It was in Paris, at a billiard room. I’m not sure if the fire of the game had carried me away, or if the kirsch and curaçao had burned my brains too much… a youth played against me: he was called Artur. 

He had a soft and blond figure like a maiden’s. Childish pink rouged his cheeks: but it was a pink of faded color. Light hair shadowed his lip, and a golden plumage covered the oval bits of his face like the fuzz that lines a peach. 

My adversary needed one more count to win. I needed not sure how many; I know only that they were many, and so, much cool headedness and care was required in playing. 

I shot the ball. On the occasion the table shook… the blond youth had, voluntarily or not, leaned against the table… the ball shifted, changed its course: with its shift, I lost. Anger took over me. I walked towards him. In response to my burning look, the youth shook his blond hair and smiled as if in mocking. 

It was too much! I walked up to him: a punch resounded. The furious youth walked towards me with a dagger, but our friends contained us.

‘That’s lowly brawling. The duel, that’s the combat of men of honor.’

The youth ripped a glove off with his teeth and threw it in my face. It was insult for insult, filth for filth; it had to be blood for blood. 

Half an hour later I coldly grabbed his hand and spoke into his ear: 

‘Your weapons, sir?’

‘You shall come to know them there.’

‘Your witnesses?’

‘The night and my guns.’

‘The time?’

‘Now.’

‘The place?’

‘You will come with me… where we stop shall be the place.”

“Well, very well: I am ready. Let’s go.”

I gave him my arm and we left. In seeing us so calmly in conversation it was thought that there had been satisfaction. One of the men, though, understood us. 

He came to us and said: 

‘Gentlemen, are there no means of reconciliation then?’

We both smiled. 

‘This is childish,’ he retorted..

We did not reply. 

‘If you need a witness, I am ready.”

We both bowed. 

He understood us: he saw our will was firm and walked away. 

We left.

-

A hotel was open. The youth led me inside.

‘I live here; enter,’ he told me.

We entered.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘there are no means of peace between us: a punch and a glove thrown on the face of a man are stains that only blood can wash off. And so it is a duel to the death.’

‘To the death,’ I repeated, like an echo. 

‘Well then: I only have two people in the world— my mother and… wait a bit.’

The youth asked for paper, quill and ink. He wrote: the lines were few. Having finished the letter, he gave it for me to read. 

‘See, it is not a betrayal,’ he said.

‘Artur, I believe you; I do not want to read this sheet.’

I turned down the paper. Artur closed the letter, and sealed the seal with a ring he had on his finger. Upon seeing the ring, a tear rolled down his face and fell onto the letter.

‘Sir, you are a man of honor. If I die, take this ring; in my pocket you will find a letter, give it all to… later I’ll tell you whom…’

‘Are you ready?’ I asked. 

‘Not yet! Before one of us dies it is only fair that the dead man toasts to the last twilight of life. Let us not be Abyssinians; and more, the sun in the cinnabar hue of the sunset is still beautiful. 

The wine from the Rhine flowed in golden gushes in green crystal cups. The youth rose.

‘Sir, allow me to toast with you.’

‘To whom?’

‘It’s a mystery… a woman, for the name of the one whom one once pressed against one’s lips, whom one loves, is a secret. Won’t you do it?’

‘As you wish.’

We clinked our glasses. The youth walked over to the window. He poured a few drops of the wine from the Rhine for the night. We drank.

‘One of us has toasted his last toast…’ said he, ‘Good night to one of us… and a good bed and restful sleep to the son of the earth!’

He went to a desk, took out two pistols. 

‘This is quicker,’ said he, ‘by the sword the agony takes longer. One of them is loaded, the other is not. Let us draw them at random and shoot at point blank.’

‘It’s murder…’

‘Did we not say that it was a duel to the death, that one of us ought to die?’

‘You’re right. But tell me, where shall we go?’

‘Come with me. In the first deserted corner in the suburb. Any street corner is grim enough for two men of which one has to kill the other.’

At midnight we were outside the city. He put the two pistols on the ground. 

‘Pick, but without touching them.’

I picked.

‘Let’s do it now.’

‘Wait, I have a somber feeling and a sighing voice is moaning in my heart. I want to pray… a longing for my mother.’

He kneeled. To the sight of that kneeling youth— perhaps over a grave— I remembered that I also had a mother and sister… and that I was forgetting them. As to lovers, my desires were like the thirst of street dogs: they were satisfied with water or mud… I’d only loved fallen women.

‘It’s time,’ said he. 

We walked facing each other. The pistols touched our chests. The pistols sounded, only one shot, he fell down, dead… 

‘Here,’ mumbled the dying youth, showing me his pocket.

I threw myself at him. He was drowning in blood. He shuddered three times and turned cold… I took the ring off of his hand. Shoved my hand in his pocket as he’d requested. I found two notes.

The night was dark: I was unable to read them. 

I returned to the city. I looked at the notes under the foggy light of the first streetlamp I found. The first one was a letter to his mother. The other was opened, it read:

At one o’ clock in the morning at … Street n. 60, 1st floor; you’ll find the door open. 

—Your G. 

There was no other signature. 

I did not know what to think. I had an idea; it was a depraved one.

I went to the rendezvous. It was dark. I had the ring I’d brought from the dead man on my finger… I felt a little velvety hand take me by the hand, went upstairs. The door closed.

It was a delicious night! The blond’s lover was a virgin! Poor Romeo! Poor Juliet! It seems that these two children spent their nights with childish kisses and pure dreams!”

(Johann filled his glass, drank it, but shuddered)

“When I was about to leave, I ran into a shadow at the door.

‘Good evening, gentleman… I’ve been waiting for you a while.’

That voice seemed familiar to me. However my wits were scrambled… 

I did not respond: it was a most singular occurrence. I continued down the stairs, the shadow followed me. When we reached the door I saw the tinkle of a knife’s blade. I moved and the blade slid by my shoulder. The fight was made terrible in the dark. Two men that did not know each other, that did not think they’d ever seen each other in the light, and that with luck would not have to see each other alive.

The dagger escaped from his hands, was lost in the dark: I subdued him. An infernal scene, a man in the dark muffling another man’s mouth with his hand, suffocating his throat with his knee, the other hand feeling for an iron in the shadows. 

In this moment I felt a terrible pain: pain and cold flowed down my hand. The man had choked to death, and in his agony had sunk his teeth into my flesh. It was with great difficulty that I released my bloody and dilacerated hand from the corpse’s mouth. I rose.

As I left I ran into an object. I bent down to see what it was. It was a dark lantern. I wanted to see who the man was. I lifted the lamp…

Its last flash bathed the dead man’s head in light… and went off…

I could not believe it: that whole night was some fantastic dream. I dragged the corpse on my shoulders… I carried him through the sidewalk slabs up to the streetlamp, brushed the blood soaked hair off his face…” (a fearful spasm horribly contorted the narrator’s face… He took the cup to drink… his teeth chattered as if he was cold… the cup cracked in his lips.)

“That man— do you understand!? Was blood of my blood, the child of my mother’s entrains, as I was… he was my brother! An idea flew before my eyes like an anathema. I anxiously climbed up the building. I entered. The girl had fainted in fear from hearing the fight. Her face was as cold as marble. Her bare virgin breasts were cold and still like a statue’s… I felt her half naked snowy form between her undone skirts, where depravity had assailed a lost flower. 

I opened the window, took her there…

In truth I am a cursed man! Oi, Archibald, give me another glass, fill it with cognac, fill it to the brim! See! I feel cold, so cold… I tremble from shivering and sweat runs down my face! I crave the fire of spirits! The burning in the brain to the dizzying vapor… I want to forget!”

“What’s the matter with you, Johann? You ramble like a hundred-year-old man!”

“What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with me? Can’t you see it then? It was my sister!”

-

[1] “Why? It’s that my heart, amongst delights,

By a jealous memory constantly oppressed,

Indifferent to the present happiness, goes searching for torments

In the future and in the past.”

A. Dumas

[drinkthemlock]

NIGHT AT THE TAVERN

IV - GENNARO

The Return of the King, haha. But seriously, I’m sorry for taking so long with these translations. Here is Gennaro’s chapter. Unlike his peers, he doesn’t commit any actual atrocities, but be aware of murder, adultery, descriptions of corpses and just general scary goth stuff. He’s Italian like Solfieri, but since Álvares had an obsession with southern Italy (Sorrento and Naples in particular) I’m guessing he’s a southerner, while Solfieri lived in Rome.

Text by Álvares de Azevedo, translation my own.

TW: this chapter contains attempted murder, gore, suicide and abortion.

[revised July 2024]

IV

GENNARO

Meurs ou tue…

CORNEILLE[1]

“Gennaro, do you sleep, or are you soaking on the taste of the last drop of your wine, on the last puff of your cigar?”

“No: while you were telling your story, I was remembering one leaf of my life, dried and red like those of autumn, swept by the wind.”

“A story?”

“Yes: it is one of my stories. You know, Bertram, I am a painter… It's a sad memory that I am about to reveal, because it is the story of an old man and two women, beautiful like visions of light.”

"Godofredo Walsh was one of those sublime old men on whose heads the white strands resemble the silver diadem of geniuses. Old as he was, he was married a second time to a beauty of twenty years. Godofredo was a painter: some said that the marriage was an artistic love for that Roman beauty, made as if in the image of ancient beauties; others thought he took pity on the poor girl who lived off posing as a model. The fact was that he loved her as a daughter, like Laura, the only daughter from his first marriage, Laura… blushed as a rose and blonde as an angel.

I was young at the time; I was a painting apprentice in Godofredo’s house. I was pretty then; thirty years have passed since, so my hair and my face hadn’t yet faded like in these long forty two years of life! I was that type of young man still pure from transpiring childhood, pensive and melancholic like how Rafael portrayed himself on the portrait in the Barberini gallery. I was almost as old as the master’s wife. Nauza was twenty and I was eighteen.

I loved her; but my love was as pure as my dreams of eighteen years. Nauza loved me as well: it was such a pure feeling! It was a lonely and fragrant emotion like the Spring, full of of flowers and breezes, that swaddled us under Italy's sky.

As I'd said: the master had a daughter named Laura. She was a pale girl, with brown hair and blueish eyes; her skin was white; only sometimes, when bashfulness overtakes her, two roses would redden her face and stand out against the marble background. Laura seemed to love me like a brother. Her laughter, her kisses of a child of fifteen were just for me. At night, when I went to retire, as I walked through the dark hallway with my lamp, a shadow would put out the light and a kiss would land on my face, in the dark.

Many nights were like that.

One morning – I slept still – the master had left and Nauza had gone to church, Laura entered my room and shut the door: she laid beside me. I woke up in her arms.

The fire of my eighteen years, the virginal spring of a beauty still innocent, the half-naked heart of a damsel beating over mine, all of that… after waking me from the light dreams of the night, made me go mad…

Every morning Laura would come to my room…

Three months went by like this. One day, she entered my room and told me:

'Gennaro, I’m dishonored forever. At first I tried to fool myself, now I can no more, I’m with child.'

A lighting striking by my feet wouldn’t have scared me so.

'You must marry me, must ask my father, do you hear, Gennaro?'

I was silent.

'Do you not love me then?'

I was silent still.

'Oh! Gennaro! Gennaro!'

And she fell onto my shoulders, come undone with sobs. I carried her out like this, cold and out of her mind, to her bedroom.

Never again did she speak of marriage to me.

What could I do? Tell everything to her father, and ask to marry her? It was madness… He would kill her and me; or at least he’d banish me from his house… And Nauza? Every day I loved her more. It was a terrible fight that was being waged between duty and love and between duty and remorse.

Laura spoke to me no more. Her smile was cold; every day she turned more pale, but the pregnancy didn’t grow, and no other signs could be noticed...

The old man spent the nights wandering in the dark. He painted no more. Watching his daughter dying to the secret sounds of a harmony of death, growing more and more pale, the wretched man ripped out his white hairs.

Although I had not forgotten Nauza, nor had she forgotten me. My love was always the same: always nights of hopes and thirst that bathed my pillow in tears. Only sometimes the shadow of remorse passed through me, but the image of her dissipated all of these hazes…

One night… it was terrible… someone came to fetch me: Laura was dying. In her fever she mumbled my name and words no one could understand, so hurried and confused they sounded.

I entered her bedroom: the ailing girl recognized me. She rose, pale, her face damp with abundant sweat, and called me. I sat down beside her bed. She squeezed my hand in her cold hands and murmured in my ears:

'Gennaro, I forgive you, I forgive you for it all… you were a rascal… I’ll die… I was mad… I’ll die because of you… your child… mine… I’ll see him still… but in heaven… my child whom I killed… before he was born.'

She yelped, extended her arms convulsively as if to repeal an idea, ran her hand over her lips as if to dry the last drops of a liquid, twisted in the bed, livid, cold, bathed in icy sweat, and gasped… It was her last breath.

An entire year went by in this manner to me. The old man seemed maddened. Every night he'd close himself off in the room where Laura had died: he spent the entire night there in solitude. Did he sleep? Not so! For long hours I listened to him pant eagerly in the silence, at other times drown himself in sobs. Afterwards it all went silent: the silence lasted hours; the room was dark; and later the heavy steps of the master were heard around the room, but faltering like those of a stumbling drunk.

One night I told Nauza I loved her: knelt beside her, kissed her hands, showered her lap in tears. She turned her face: I thought it was disdain, so I rose.

'So, Nauza, you do not love me,' I said.

She remained with her face turned.

'Adieu, then; forgive me if I offended you[2]; my love is an insanity, my life a hopelessness— what is left for me? Adieu, I’ll go far, far away from here… perhaps then I could cry without remorse…'

I took her hand and kissed it.

She kept her hand pressed against my lips.

When I raised my head, I saw her: she was covered in tears.

'Nauza! Nauza! A word, do you love me?'

-

Everything else was a dream: the moonlight seeped through the glass panels of the open window, hit her; never had I seen her so pure and divine!

-

And the nights the master spent weeping over his daughter’s empty bed I spent in his bed, in Nauza’s arms.

One night there was a haunting occurrence.

The master came to Nauza’s bed. He was moaning and crying in that cavernous and raspy voice; he took me by the arm with great strength, woke me up and dragged me to Laura’s bedroom…

He threw me to the ground; closed the door. A lamp was lit before a canvas in the room. He pulled the sheet that covered it— it was dead Laura! And I, gaunt like her, trembled like a condemned man. The girl was whispering in my ear with her pale lips…

I trembled seeing my likeness so livid in the canvas and remembered that in that day, while leaving the dead girl’s room, I was horrified at seeing myself cadaverous in her mirror, that was still hung by the window…[3]

A tremor, a shiver took hold of me. I knelt and cried burning tears. I confessed everything: it seemed to me that it was her that commanded it, that it was Laura that rose from the sheets of her bed and set me ablaze in remorse and in remorse tore at my chest.

By God! It was an agony!

The next day the master spoke to me coldly. He lamented the loss of his daughter, but without a single tear. About the past night, not a word.

Every night was the same torture, every day the same coldness.

The master was walking in his sleep…

And so I did not think myself lost…

Although, I remembered that one night, as I left Laura’s room with the master, I saw a white dress pass by me in the dark, was brushed by a few loose locks and a few timid steps of bare feet sounded on the slabs of the corridor… It was Nauza, who had seen and heard everything, who had woken up and felt my absence in bed, who had heard these sobs and whimpers and ran to see…

-

One night after supper master Walsh took his cape and a lantern and called me to accompany him. He had to leave town and didn’t want to go alone. We left together; the night was dark and cold. Autumn had bared the trees and the first blows of winter roared in the dried leaves on the ground. We walked together for a long time; each time we went further and further into the mountains, each time the path became more and more sequestered. The old man stopped. We were at the edge of a mountain. On the right the rocks split into a trail: on the left the stones loosened by our feet at each step fell and rolled down the hill and, instants later, one heard a sound like when something heavy hits water…

The night was very dark. Only the lantern lit the tortuous path that we followed. The old man set his eyes on the abyss of darkness and laughed.

'Wait for me there,' he said, 'I’ll come soon.'

Godofredo took the lantern and carried on to the summit of the mountain; I sat down on the path, waiting for him; watched that light at times be lost, at times reappear amidst the trees on the zigzags of the trail. At last I saw it stop. The old man knocked on the door of a cabin: the door opened. He walked in. What happened there I do not know; when the door opened again a livid and disheveled woman appeared with a torch in hand.

The door closed. A few minutes later the master was with me.

The old man put down the lantern on a rock, removed his cloak and told me:

'Gennaro, I want to tell you a story. It is a crime, I want you to be its judge. An old man was married to a beautiful woman. He had a daughter from another marriage, beautiful as well. An apprentice— a wretch he raised from the dust, like the wind sometimes raises a leaf, but whom he could reduce to dust whenever he wished to…'

I shuddered, the old man’s glares seemed to wound me.

'Have you never heard this story, my good Gennaro?'

'Never,' I said with difficulty, trembling.

'Very well, this scoundrel dishonored the poor old man, betrayed him like Judas betrayed Christ.'

'Master, mercy!'

'Mercy? And did this rascal have mercy on the old man’s heart?'

'Have pity!'

'Did he pity the virgin, the dishonored, the infanticide?'

'Ah!' I screamed.

'What is the matter? Do you know this criminal?'

His tone of mockery stifled me.

'You see, then, Gennaro,' he said, changing his tone, 'if there were a punishment worse than death, I’d give it to him. Look at this precipice! It is frightening! If you saw it during the day, your eyes would go dark and perhaps you’d roll down it out of dizziness! It is a safe grave; and it will keep the secret, like a breast keeps the dagger. And so, if you still have in your damned heart an ounce of remorse, pray your last prayer, but let it be quick. The executioner is expecting his victim, the hyena is hungry for a corpse…'

There I stood alongside death. I could only choose between suicide and being murdered. Killing the old man was impossible. A fight between him and me would be madness. He was robust, his stature high, his muscular arms would break me like the wind snaps a dried twig. Furthermore, he was armed. I… I was a frail child: at my first step he would push me off that rock on the edge of which I was perched… All that was left for me was dying with him, dragging him down while as I fell. But what for?

I looked down the abyss: all was dark, the wind howled along the bare branches, in the heathers, in the withered briers down there, and the river on the bottom roared and crashed against the rocks.

I was scared.

Prayers, threats, all would be in vain.

'I am ready,' I said.

The old man laughed: infernal was that laugh from his lips, cracked with fever. I could only see that laughter… Afterwards was a blur… the air that suffocated, a weight that dragged me, like in those nightmares where one falls from a tower and is left holding on with one's hand, but the hand gets tired, falters, sweats, gets cold… It was horrible: branch by branch, leaf by leaf the shrubs snapped in my hands, the dried roots that shot out of the cliff cracked under my weight and my chest bled against the thorns. The fall was very fast… suddenly I did not feel anything anymore… When I woke up I was close to the cabin of peasants that had found me next to the river, stuck in the branches of a giant holm oak that shadowed it.

It was after a day and a night of delirium that I woke up. As soon as I was healed, an idea came to me: going to speak with the master. At seeing me survive such a horrible death, it was possible he might take pity on me, that he might forgive me, and then I’d be his slave, his dog, everything there is of more degrading in a man that humiliates himself – everything! – as long as he forgave me. Living with that remorse seemed impossible. I left then; on the way I came across a dagger. I lifted it: it was the master’s. Then an idea of revenge and presumption came to me. He had wanted to kill me, he had laughed at my agony, and I was going to cry at his feet so he could push me away again, spit on my face and look for a safer form of revenge tomorrow? I, humiliate myself when he had wounded me! The hairs on my head stood up and cold sweat rolled down my face.

When I arrived at the master’s house, I found it locked. I knocked… no one opened. The garden of the house faced the street; I jumped over the wall: everything was deserted and the doors that faced it were also locked. One of them was weak: with little effort I forced it open. At the bang of the fallen door, only the echo answered throughout the rooms. All the windows were closed; there was not a single lit lamp. I felt my way to the painter’s studio. I got there, opened the windows and daylight poured into the empty room. I got to Nauza’s room then, opened the door and a sickening stench came out. A sunbeam hit a table. Beside it was the shape of a woman with her face down against the table and her hair loose; a figure covered by an overcoat was thrown over an armchair. Between them there was a cup in which a powdery residue had settled. At their feet, an empty vial. Later I found out— the old woman from the cabin sold poison and it was certainly her that had sold it, since that’s what the white powder from the cup seemed to be...

I brushed off the woman’s hair, lifted her head… —it was Nauza, but corpse Nauza, already faded by decay. It wasn’t that most fair statue from before, with a soft face and snowy bosom… it was a yellowed corpse… I lifted the edge of the other’s cape: the body on its belly with its head down; the crack of its skull sounded on the floor… —it was the old man! Dead too, purple and rotten! I saw him— a greenish foam ran down his mouth."

-

[1] “Be killed or kill”. This quote, like most of the quotes in foreign languages that begin these chapters, is likely misspelled. I couldn’t find the original passage the author wanted.

[2]Gennaro uses the formal second person plural here (vós).

[3] This passage is confusing even in the original; Gennaro is dragged into Laura’s room by the painter where he reveals to him a painting of Gennaro with his dead daughter.

I hope you enjoyed! Next up is Claudius Hermann.

[drinkthemlock]

NIGHT AT THE TAVERN

III - BERTRAM

Here is the chapter following Solfieri's.

Text by Álvares de Azevedo, translation my own. TW: this chapter contains murder, infanticide, gore and anthropophagy.

[revised July 2024]

III

BERTRAM

But why should I for others groan,

When none will sigh for me?

BYRON - “Childe Harold, Canto I"

Another comrade rose.

A red head, pale skin, one of those phlegmatic creatures that didn't hesitate when they stumbled upon a corpse to achieve an end.

He emptied his wine-filled glass and, with his beard in his pale hands, with those sea-green eyes fixed, he spoke:

“You know, a woman led me to doom. It was she who burned my temple in the orgies, and discolored my lips in the ardor of wine and in the softness of her kisses, who made me debauch myself, livid in the long nights of insomnia at the gambling tables, and in the earnestness of the tortured hugs with which she pressed me to her chest! It was she, as you know, who made me in one day have three duels with my three best friends, open three graves for those who loved me most in the world— and afterwards, feel myself alone and abandoned in the world, like the infanticide who killed his son, or that unhappy Moor next to his pale Desdemona! 

Very well, I’ll tell you a story that begins with the memory of that woman… 

There was in Cadiz a damsel— so beautiful with that dark hair of the Andalusians, such that one cannot look at them beneath the fringes of the satin mantillas with their delicate feet, their alabaster hands, their shiny eyes and their lips, pink like Gallic roses, without going mad with dreams of them through long ardent nights! 

Andalusians! You are most beautiful! If the wine, the nights of your land, the moonlight of your nights, your flowers, your perfumes are sweet, pure, intoxicating, you are more still! Oh! Throughout the defilement of a fiery life's row of pleasures, I could never forget thee!

Gentlemen! We have here the wine of Spain, fill the glasses: — to the health of Spanish ladies! 

-

I loved this girl dearly, she was called Ângela. When I was decided to marry her, after so many nights wasted out in the open waiting for the shadow of a wave, an adieu, a flower, when after so much desire and so much hope I stole her our first kiss, I had to leave Spain for Denmark, where my father was asking for me. 

That night was one of sobs and tears, of cries and hopes, of kisses and promises, of love, of voluptuousness in the present and dreams in the future… I left. I would only return two years later. When I entered my father’s home, he was dying; he knelt in his sickbed and thanked God for still seeing me, put his hands on my head, showered my temple with tears – those were his last – then let himself fall back, put his hands on his chest, and with his eyes on me he mumbled: ‘God!’

His voice was choked in his throat; all were crying. 

I cried too, but it was for missing Ângela…

As soon as I could reduce my fortune to money I put it in the Hamburg bank and left for Spain. 

When I got back, Ângela was married with a son… 

Though my love hadn’t died! Nor had hers! Very ardent were those hours of love and tears, of longing and kisses, of dreams and curses, were we to forget one another. 

-

One night, two figures appeared in the shadows of a garden, the leaves trembled at the flutter of a dress, the breeze sobbed at the sobs of two lovers, the aroma of the violets that they trod on and of the roses and honeysuckles that bloomed around them were even sweeter, lost in the perfume of a woman’s loose hair…  

That night— it was insane! The hours were few and the dreams fiery! And how quickly they passed! After that night another followed, then another… and on many nights the leaves whispered at the brush of a mysterious step and the wind was intoxicated with the delight on our pale faces… 

But one day the husband found out everything: he wanted to play Othello with her. Madman...

It was late into the night: I waited to see from behind the curtains the shadow of the angel. When I passed by, a voice called me. I entered— Ângela, with her feet bare, her dress loose, her hair disheveled and her eyes ardent, took me by the hand… I felt her hand wet… The stairs we climbed were dark; I brushed my hand, wetted by hers, against my lips. It tasted of blood. 

‘Blood, Ângela! Whose blood is this?’

The Spaniard shook her long dark hair and chuckled. 

We entered a room. She went to fetch a light and left me in the dark. 

I looked, feeling around, for a place to sit. I touched a table. But after touching it I felt it was bathed in wetness; further ahead I felt a head, cold as snow and wet with a thick and slightly clotted liquid. It was blood… 

When Ângela came back with the light, I saw it… it was horrible… The husband had his throat cut.

It was like a gesso statue washed with blood… Over the chest of the murdered man there was a child lying on their belly. She pulled them up by the hair… They were dead too; the blood that flowed from the slashed veins of their chest mixed with their father’s! 

‘Do you see, Bertram, this was my gift: it now shall be, though dark, a figure of my past. I am yours and yours only. It was because of you that I had enough strength for such a crime… Come, all is ready, let’s run away! To us, the future!’

-

It was an insane life of mine with that woman! An endless traveling. Ângela dressed as a man: she looked like a beautiful youth in that manner. At all else she was like every young libertine that clinked glasses with her at the orgy tables. She drank like an Englishwoman, smoked like a Sultana, rode horses like an Arab, and shot guns like a Spaniard. 

When the vapors of liquor hurt my head, she’d lay it on her knees, pick up a mandolin and sing me the songs of her homeland…

Our days were set to sleep like pearls of love; our nights were truly beautiful! 

-

One day she left; left, but left me with my lips still burning of hers and my heart filled with the ill vices that she cast there. She left; but her memory stuck with me like the ghost of a fallen angel at my bedside. 

I tried to forget her in gambling, in liquor, in the passion of duels. I became a cheater at cards, a man lost in women and orgies, a terrifying and heartless swordsman. 

-

One night I’d fallen, drunk, at the gates of a palace; a carriage's horses trampled me when entering and split my head on the cobblestone. The people in the palace came to my aid. Then they grew to love me: the family was an old widowed nobleman and a peregrine beauty of eighteen years. It certainly wasn’t love that I felt for her… I don’t know what it was… it was an infernal fatality. The poor innocent girl loved me; and I, received like God’s guest under the roof of the old nobleman, dishonored his daughter, stole her, ran away with her… And the old man had to regret his stained silvery hair at the dishonor of his daughter, unable to seek revenge. 

Later I grew tired of that woman. Satiety is a terrible bore. One night in which I played with Siegfried, the pirate, after losing her last jewels, I sold her. 

The girl poisoned Siegfried on the very first night, then drowned herself… 

-

See, this is who I am: if you wished me to tell you long stories of my life, you would fall asleep in no time… 

One day— it was in Italy— satisfied of wine and women, I was going to kill myself. The night was dark and I barely reached the beach. I climbed a rock: there my last word was a blasphemy, my last goodbye a curse, my last… I say it wrongly, since I felt myself being pulled out of the water by the hair.

And then, in the blur of drowning, the yearning for life awoke inside me. At first it was like blindness, a cloud before my eyes, like of those who toil in the dark. The thirst for life came ardently; I grabbed the man who helped me; did it so that, in a word, without wishing it, I killed him. Tired from the struggle, I fainted...

When I regained my senses I was in the rowboat of some mariners who rowed towards the open sea. Then I found out my savior had drowned because of me. He was a fatality, and black; and for that I laughed; laughed, while then sons of the sea wept. 

We reached a sloop that was weighing anchor. 

The captain was a beautiful man. Down his reddened face fell curly blonde locks on which old age had sprinkled some silver hairs. 

He asked me:

‘Who are you?’

‘A wretch that cannot live on land and wasn’t allowed to die at sea.’

‘Do you want to come aboard then?’

‘Unless you'd rather throw me into the sea.’

‘I wouldn’t do it; you have a beautiful figure. I’ll take you with me. You’ll work…’

‘Work?!’ I laughed; then answered him coldly: ‘Let me be thrown into the sea…’

‘Do you not want to work? Do you want to travel idly then?’

‘No; when it's time for maneuvers I’ll sleep, but when time for combat comes no one will be braver than I…’

‘Very well: I like you,’ said the old sea-wolf. ‘Now that we are acquainted, tell me your name and your story.’

‘My name is Bertram. My story? Listen: the past is a grave! Ask the sepulcher the story of the corpse! It keeps its secret… it will tell you only that it has a rotting body in its bosom! You’ll read a name on the stone— and nothing more!’

The captain furrowed his brows, and went forward to command the maneuver. 

The captain had a pretty girl on board. Pale creature, she looked to the poet like the angel of hope falling asleep forgotten amongst the waves. The sailors respected her: when during the moonlit nights she rested her arm on the bulwark and her face in her hand, those who passed by her removed their hats in reverence. Never had anyone seen looks of pride from her, nor heard words of anger: she was a saint. 

She was the captain’s wife. 

Between that brutal and valiant man, courageous king of the high seas, married, like the Venetian Doges to the Adriatic, to his adorned sloop— between that man and that madonna there was a man’s love which palpitates the heart that for long nights opened only to the moons of the lonely ocean, that fell asleep thinking of her in the cold of the arctic and in the warmth of the tropics, that sighed during the watch, late in the night at the ship’s railing, that remembered her on the late night fog, on the afternoon clouds… Poor madmen! Looks like these men love deeply! On board I heard many sailors going on about their ingenuous loves: blonde girls from Brittany and Normandy or some dark-haired Spanish woman seen while passing by— sitting at the beach with her basket of flowers, or asleep amongst the fragrant orange trees, or dancing the lewd fandango at the outdoor dances! There were... many faces alongside me, rough and burned with the sea’s sun, that were bathed in tears… 

Let's come back to the story. —The captain loved her like a madman... a little less than his honor, a little more than his sloop. 

And she?! She, in the midst of her melancholy, of her sadness and pallor, she smiled sometimes, when she was alone, but it was such a sad smile that it hurt. Poor thing! 

A poet would worship her on his knees[1]. One night— for sure I was drunk— I wrote her some verses. In languorous poetry I spilled a clear and precious essence that hadn’t yet been polluted by the world…

I’ll admit I cried while writing those verses. One day, months later, I read them, laughed at them and at myself and then tossed them into the sea… it was the last page of my virginity that I hurled into oblivion… 

Now, fill thy glasses: what I’m about to tell you is dark, and a horrible memory, like nightmares in the Ocean. 

With her tears, with her smiles, with her wet eyes and breasts heaving with sighs, that woman made my nights maddening. It was like a new life being born filled with desires, when I’d believed all them dead like children drowned in blood at birth. 

I loved her: why should I say more? She loved me too. One night the light shone clear and serene onto the waters, the clouds were white like a veil embroidered with night’s pearls, the wind sang in the rigging. I drank her in the purity of this moonlight, to the freshness of this night, a thousand kisses upon her face wet with tears, as one drinks the dew of a full lily. That palpitating breast, the silky outline, I pressed them against me… 

The captain slept. 

-

One time as the night fell the foretopman sighted a ship. Half an hour later he suspected it was a pirate…

We got closer and closer. A warning shot fired from the sloop called for their flag. They did not answer. A second shot was fired: nothing. And then a cannon ball fell in the waters around the unknown ship like a duel’s glove. The ship, that until then had followed a route opposite to ours and came with its bow against ours, turned to the side and showed us its smoky flank; a thunder raged in the pirate’s battery, a blast followed, and a cloud of shot came to die close to the sloop. 

She was not asleep, turned to starboard; the ships were side to side. The pirate trembled at the warship's broadside as if it was about to go under. 

-

The pirate ran; the sloop took chase; then blasts were exchanged with more strength from both sides. 

Finally the pirate seemed to surrender. The two ships were joined as if for a fight. The sloop hurled its crew on board the enemy’s. The combat turned bloody— it was a slaughter! The deck of the ship was slippery with so much blood, the sea bubbled with foam at the floating of so many corpses. In that moment some smoke that came from below deck was noticed. The pirate had set fire to the powder kegs… Only with a daring maneuver was the sloop able to get away from danger. But the explosion dealt her great damage. Some minutes later the pirate ship went up in the air. It was a frightful scene to witness among that bonfire of flames, to the blast of the powder, to the dazzling reverberation of the fire on the waters, the men that’d been thrown up into the air fall back into the ocean. 

Some, half burned, jumped into the water, others with members toasted and skin peeling off their bodies swam still in horrible pain and died twisting in curses. 

One league away from the scene of the combat there was an untouched beach, cut by rock mounds... The pirates that managed to escape saved themselves there. 

And while the captain beat his chest like a savage, I dishonored him like a coward. 

I don’t know how all the time after that was spent. It was a vision of doomed delights! Those were the loves of Satan and Eloah, of life and death, in the bosom of the sea. 

When I woke one day from that dream, the ship had run ashore at a sand bank; the rumbling of the keel biting the sand froze everyone in place… what woke me was a scream of agony…”

“Oi, woman, damned wench, can’t you see there’s no more wine?”

“Afterwards was a horrible picture! It was us in a raft on the open sea. Those who have read Don Juan, who perhaps made that venom your Bible, who slept the nights of satiety like I, who came to see dawn so many times with my face over it and my eyes still fixed upon it, will know how much one is filled with horror at those men being hurled into the sea, on a horizonless ocean, to the swing of the waters that seem to drown their derision in the cold muteness of fatality! 

One night, the storm came… we only had time to tie up our provisions… one must see the ocean growling in the dark like a band of hungry lions to know what a storm is! One must see it from a raft to the light of the storm, to the blasphemies of those who don’t believe and curse, to the tears of those who wait and despair, to the sobs of those who tremble and quiver with fright like when the door is suddenly knocked on… and I, I laughed: I was like the genius of skepticism in that desert. Every wave that swept our boards dragged a man, but every wave that roared at my feet seemed to respect me. It was an Ocean like that fiery one where Milton, the blind,'s lost angels fell; when they swam through them, the waters of the lava swamp gave way: death was for the children of God, not for the bastard of evil!  

I spent that whole night with the captain’s wife in my arms. It was a terrible entanglement that which was consummated between an infidel and a pale woman who was losing her mind: the marriage bed was the ocean, the foam of the waves was the silk that covered our bed. Among that concerto of howls going on at our feet, the moans suffocated us and we rolled together, tied to a rope in the raft, over the planks… 

When dawn came, there were five of us left: I, the captain’s wife, he and two sailors… 

For some days we ate some crackers salted with sea water’s salt. Then all of the most horrible things came to pass…

Why so pale, Solfieri? This is how life is. You know it as well as I do. What is man? It’s the scum that seethes in the storm today and dissolves tomorrow: something mad and moving like the waves, fatal like the grave! What is existence? In youth it is the kaleidoscope of illusions; then, one lives off the dew of the future. Then we grow old: when we reach thirty and the sweat of agonies whitened our hair before due time and withered, like our faces, our hopes, we oscillate between the visionary past and this tomorrow of old, cold and lonely— like a corpse that’s washed before being committed to the grave! Misery! Madness!”

“Very good! Misery and madness!” a voice interrupted.

The man who spoke was old. His head was balding and long and deep wrinkles made it gaunt: those were waves that the wind of old age had carved into the sea of his life… brown eyes shone under thick gray eyebrows and a thick mustache covered part of his lips. He wore a worn dark jacket and a faded cloak of the same color hung from his shoulders. 

“Who are you, old man?” asked the narrator. 

“I was walking by outside: the rain was pouring, the storm was frightful, so I entered. Good evening, gentlemen! If there be another glass in your table, fill it to the brim and I’ll drink with you.”

“Who are you?”

“Who am I? In truth tis’ hard to say: I’ve traveled much in the world, changing names and lives at every moment. I’ve been a poet, and as a poet I sang. I’ve been a soldier and bathed my young head in the last sunlight rays of the eagle of Waterloo. Shook in the heat of battle the hand of the man of the century. I drank at a tavern with Bocage, the Portuguese, knelt at the tomb of Dante in Italy and went to Greece to dream like Byron on that tomb of glories past— who am I? I was a poet at twenty, a libertine at thirty, I’m a vagabond without country or faith at forty. I sat in the shadow of all suns, kissed the lips of women from all around the world; and this entire pilgrimage brought only two memories— the love of a woman who died in my arms on the first night of intoxication and fever— and a poet’s agony… From her, I have a withered rose and the ribbon that bound her hair. From him, look…” 

The old man took a package from his pocket: the wrapper was a red fabric; untied it: a skull was inside. 

“A skull!” men yelled around him. “Are you a grave robber?”

“Look, young man, if you understand the science of Gall and Spurzheim[2], tell me, by the protuberance of this forehead and the humps of this head, who could've been this man?”

“Perhaps a poet… perhaps a madman.”

“Well done! You have guessed. You’re only wrong by not saying that he could be these two things at once. Seneca said it: poetry is madness. Perhaps genius is a hallucination and enthusiasm requires intoxication to write the fervent and sanguinary anthem of Rouget de l’Isle[3] or to, in the creation of the frightening panel of dead Christ by Holbein, study the decay of a corpse. In the mysterious life of Dante, in the orgies of Marlowe, in the pilgrimages of Byron there was a shadow of Hamlet’s ailment: who knows?”

“But what does this all come to?”

“Did you not cry out ‘misery and madness’! You, souls where perhaps once the breath of God bubbled, brains that genius’ divine light enlightened and that wine filled with vapors and the satiety of jeers? Fill the glasses to the brim! Fill them and drink them; drink to the memory of the brain that burned in this skull, to the soul that inhabited it, to the mad poet— Werner! And I shall cry out once again— misery and madness!”

The old man emptied his cup, shrouded himself and left. Bertram continued his story:

“I was telling you that something terrible was about to come to pass: there was no more food, and the voice of instinct, of the hungry guts, pleading for their sustenance like a dog at a slaughterhouse, though [that sustenance] was blood, awakened in man.

Hunger! Thirst! Everything there is of most horrible! 

In truth, gentlemen, is man a perfect creature? Sublime sculptor, God exhausted all His diligence in the carving of this marble. Divine Prometheus, He filled his protuberant skull with the light of genius. He lifted him by the hand, showed him the world from the mountain, like Satan did to Christ forty centuries later, and told him: see, all of this is beautiful— valleys and mountains, sea water that foams, leaves in the forests that tremble and whisper like my angels' wings— all of this is yours. I made you the beautiful world in the purple veil of twilight, made it golden with the rays of my face for you. Behold, king of the Earth! Bathe thy Olympic temple in these breezes, in this dew, in the foam of these waterfalls. Dream like the nights, sing like the angels, sleep amidst the flowers! Look! Amidst the flowery leaves of the valley sleeps a creature, pale like the veil of my virgins, blonde like the reflex of my clouds, harmonious like the sky's breezes in the forests of the earth. She’s yours: wake her, love her and she will love you; drown in her breast, in the waves of her hair like the sun between vapors. King in her bosom, king on earth, live off of love and faith, off of poetry and beauty, get up, go and you shall be happy! 

This is all beautiful, yes! But it is the most bitter irony, the disappointment most arid of all the ironies and all the disappointments. All of this fades before two most prosaic facts— hunger and thirst. 

The genius, the haughty eagle that loses itself in the clouds, that warms itself on the irradiance of the most ardent light from the sun— to fall like that in the mud of the moors, with lousy and verminous wings? Poet, why is it that in the middle of the most sublime ecstasy of spirit, a sarcastic and mephistophelian voice yells at you: ‘My Faust, illusions… is reality matter?!’ God wrote Λνα ́γκη[4], on the forehead of his creature!— Don Juan! Why do you cry to this warm kiss of Haidée's as she faints in your arms[5]?! A whore will sell those to you tomorrow more burning! Misery! And to say that everything there is of the most divine in man, most holy and perfumed in the soul melts away in the filth of reality, revolves in the swamp and still finds one infamous convulsion to say ‘I am happy!’…

All of that, gentlemen, to tell you something very simple… an old and beaten fact, a practice of the sea, a law of shipwreck— anthropophagy. 

Two days after we ran out of food there were three people left: myself, the captain, and her— we were three emaciated figures like corpses, whose naked chests heaved with agony, whose deep and dark stares were bloodshot like madness. 

The custom of the sea— I don’t mean to say the voice of physical nature, the cry of man’s egotism— commands the death of one for the life the rest. We cast our lots... by law the captain had to die.

And then the instinct of life woke him still. For one more day of existence, one more day of hunger and thirst, of a bed humid and swept by the cold winds of the north, a few more dead hours of blasphemy and agony, of hope and desperation, of prayers and disbelief, of fever and eagerness, the man knelt, cried, moaned at my feet…

‘Look,’ said the miserable man, ‘let us wait until tomorrow… God will have mercy on us… by your mother, by the entrails of your mother! By God if he exists! Let me, let me live still!’

Oh! Hope is like a parasite that bites and tears a tree trunk apart, and when it falls, when it dies and rots, still squeezes it in its shaking arms! To wait! When the sea wind whips the waves, when the sea foam washes your livid and naked body, when the horizon is deserted and endless and the sails that whiten afar the distance seem to flee! Poor madman! 

I laughed at the old man. My guts were on fire. To die today, tomorrow, or later… I was indifferent to everything, but today I was hungry, and I laughed because I was hungry.

The old man reminded me that he took me aboard his ship out of pity for me, reminded me that he loved me… and a storm of sobs and tears drowned the brave man that had never paled before death. 

It seems like death in the ocean is terrible to other men: when blood sprays their face, drenches their hands, they run towards death like a river towards the sea, like a rattlesnake to fire. But like this… in the watery desert… they fear it, they tremble before the cold skull of death! 

I laughed because I was hungry. 

Then the man rose. Fury rose in him with his last agony. He was staggering, and a cold sweat ran down his rawboned chest. He squeezed me in his yellowed arms, and we fought, chest to chest, foot for foot… for one day of misery! 

The yellowed moon raised her faded face, like a whore tired from a night of debauchery, the dark sky seemed to mock these two dying men that fought for one hour of agony…

The combat's bravest became faint… he fell; I put my foot against his throat, suffocated him and he died… 

Do not cover your face in your hands— you would’ve done the same… That corpse was our nourishment for two days… 

Later, the seabirds flew lower to share my prey; and during my nights of satiety a shadow came to claim its ration of human flesh…

I threw the remains into the sea…

The captain’s wife and I spent one day, two, without eating or drinking…

And so she proposed to die with me— I told her yes. That day was the last agony of the love that burned us; we spent it in convulsions to feel one last time the fresh honey of voluptuousness bathe our lips… it was the feverish rapture that two creatures in deathly delirium may have. When I freed myself from her arms the weakness was making her delirious. The delirium grew longer and longer, she'd lean over the waves and drink the salt water and offer it to me in her pale hands saying it was wine. The cold laughter came more and more erratically...

She was mad.

I did not sleep, could not sleep: an ardent torpor boiled my eyelids, the breath from my chest felt like fire, my dry, split lips just oozed blood.

I had fever in the brain... and hunger in my stomach. Hunger like a beast.

I squeezed her in my arms, pushed my burning mouth against her lips, squeezed her convulsively, suffocated her. She was still so beautiful!

I don’t know what strange delirium took hold of me. Some vertigo surrounded me. The sea seemed to laugh at me and circled around, foaming and greenish, like a whirlpool. The clouds that hovered above hurried by and seemed to filter black blood. The wind that blew through my hair seemed to whisper a memory…

Suddenly I felt alone. A wave had stolen my corpse. I saw it float as pale as its white clothing, half-naked, with its hair soaked in water; I saw it rise in the foam of the waves, like a sheet thrown to the waters…

How many hours, how many days I spent in that torpor, I do not know… When I woke from this waking man’s nightmare, I was aboard a ship.

It was the English brig Swallow that had saved me…[6]”

“Oi, barmaid, Satan’s bastard! Can’t you see I’m thirsty and the bottles are dry, dry like your face and our throats?”

-

Note: In the original text, the captain is referred to by the word "comandante" throughout, the direct translation of which is "commander", but I decided that the context in which it is used in the text best fits the word "captain" in English.

[1] In a letter from May 11th 1848 to his friend Luís Antônio da Silva, Álvares says of a girl he’s attracted to: “she’s the kind of woman to place inside a bell jar and worship on your knees”.

[2] Allusion to the pseudoscience of phrenology. Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) and his disciple Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832) thought that measuring the bumps on a human’s skull could predict mental traits. Very popular concept with the Romantics.

[3] Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (spelled here as L’Isle): French army officer who wrote the words and music to La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. 

[4] Greek word intended to mean fate, destiny, fatality; though it seems to be misspelled.

[5] Haidée is a character from Byron's Don Juan; she is the homonymous main character's bride (and savior).

[6] There were several English brigs named Swallow, but since it is unclear when the story is set, there's no way to know which one this is in reference to. And since it is such a common name, Álvares may have just seen it written on the hull of one of the countless English ships on the Guanabara Bay.

I hope you enjoyed! Next up is Gennaro. :)

[drinkthemlock]

NIGHT AT THE TAVERN

II - SOLFIERI

Hi! I decided I’d post the translations here- since the story is public domain, and I’ve got no one else to share it with. Chapter one (which i’m not done with presently) presents the characters, chapter 2 begins their gothic horror stories. This is Solfieri’s.

Text by Álvares de Azevedo, translation my own.

TW: this chapter contains rape and allusions to necrophilia and being buried alive.

[Revised June 20 2024]

-

The glasses fell empty atop the table.

“Now listen to me, gentlemen! Between one cheer and one puff of smoke, when heads burn and elbows extend atop the wine-stained tablecloth, like the arms of the butcher in the market drip, what befits us is a gory story, one of those fantastical tales— like Hoffmann delirious in the golden gleam of Johannesburg!”

“A frightening story, no, Archibald?” said a pale man that raised his yellowed head at this proclamation. “Very well, I’ll tell you a story. But about this one you may tremble much, you may sweat cold streams of terror from your foreheads. It is not a tale, but a memory from the past.”

“Solfieri! Solfieri! There you go with your dreams!

“Tell us!”

Solfieri spoke; the others were silent.

II

SOLFIERI

“Yet one kiss on your pale clay

And those lips once so warm- My heart! My heart!”

BYRON - “Cain”

You know it. Rome is the city of fanaticism and doom; in the priest’s alcove sleeps the concubine, above the bed of the whore hangs the livid crucifix. It is a refinement that mixes sacrilege with the convulsion of love, the lewd kiss with the intoxication of faith!

It was in Rome. One night, the moon shone on beautifully through that warm sky like it does in summer, the freshness of the water exhaled like a sigh from the banks of the Tiber. The night was beautiful. I strolled alone along the […] bridge. The lights were extinguished one by one in the palaces, the streets became solitary, and the sleepy moon hid in the bosom of the clouds. A woman’s shadow appeared in a lone and dark window. It was a white shape— that woman’s face was like a pale statue’s in the moonlight. Down her face, like drops from a fallen chalice, rolled streaks of tears.

I leaned against the edge of a palace. The vision disappeared in the dark of the window and from there a song unfurled. It wasn’t just a melodious voice: there was in that singing something like a frenetic cry, like the moaning of insanity; that voice was grim like the wind's at night in the cemetery, singing the swan song of death’s withered flowers.

After that the singing ceased. The woman appeared at the door. She seemed to spy if there was someone out in the street. She saw nobody— left. I followed her.

It grew later and later into the night: the moon had disappeared from the sky, and rain fell in heavy drops; only I felt thick tears of water roll down my face, like under the weeping of an orphan over a grave…

We walked for a long time through those labyrinthine streets; she finally stopped. We were in a field.

Here and there were crosses that rose over the tall grass. She knelt. She looked like she was sobbing; around her the birds of the night flew.

I don’t know if I fell asleep, I only know that when I woke up I found myself alone in the cemetery. But the pale creature had not been an illusion— the heathers, the hemlocks of the holy ground had been trodden around a cross.

The cold of the night, the night spent under the rain, had caused me a fever. In my delirium I thought again and again about the fairness of that woman, moaned those sobs, and all of those reveries were lost in that gentle singing…

A year later I came back to Rome. Women’s kisses did nothing to satisfy me: in the sleep of satiety that vision would come to me.

One night, after an orgy, I left the contessa Barbara asleep in her bed. I gave one last look at that naked and sleeping form with fever in her cheeks and lewdness in her wet lips, still moaning in her dreams as in the voluptuous agony of love. I left, I don’t know if the night was light or dark, I only know that my head hurt with intoxication. The glasses had been left empty on the table; from the lips of that creature I had drunk the wine of delight until the last drop.

When I took hold of myself I was in a dark place: the stars pierced the windowpanes of a church with their rays. The light of four tapers hit a half-opened casket. I opened it: it was a girl’s. The white from the shroud, the wreath of death on her brow, on the livid and misty skin of her face, the stare of her half-lidded eyes… It was a corpse! And those features reminded me of a forgotten idea— was she the angel from the cemetery? I closed the church’s door which, no matter why, I had found open. I took the corpse out the casket in my arms. It was as heavy as lead.

Do you know the story of headless Mary Stuart and the executioner, ‘of the headless corpse and the heartless man’, as Brantôme tells it? It was a singular idea that which I had. I pulled her into my lap. I pressed a thousand kisses to her lips. She looked beautiful like this; I ripped her shroud, pulled off her veil and her wreath like a groom undressing his bride. She was a form most pure… My dreams had never evoked so perfect a statue. She was truly a statue; so fair was she. The light from the torches gave her that amber pallor that illuminates ancient marbles. The sex was passionate— I reaped those hours in wantonness. To that heat in my chest, that fever on my lips, that convulsion of my love, the pale damsel seemed to come to life. Suddenly she opened her eyes. Somber light illuminated them like a star in the haze — she held me in her arms, a sigh curled her blueish lips… It wasn’t death just then— she’d fainted. Although in the squeeze of those arms there was something of horrible. The stone bed on which I had spent an hour intoxicated was making me cold. I painstakingly managed to release myself from that embrace of her chest... In that instant she woke…

Have you ever heard of catalepsy? It is a horrible nightmare that comes to the waking one being walled up in a tomb; an icy dream in which you feel your members numb and your face washed with others’ tears without being able to reveal you’re alive!

The girl revived little by little. After waking, she fainted. I hid under my cloak and took her into my arms covered in her shroud like a child. In approaching the door I ran into a body; I looked down— it was some gravedigger of the church’s cemetery that there had fallen asleep from drink, having forgotten to close the door...

I left. While crossing the square I was met with a patrol.

‘What have you there?’

It was so late into the night— perhaps they thought me a thief.

‘It’s my wife, she’s passed out.’

‘A woman! But with those long white clothes? Are you by any chance a grave robber?’

One guard approached. He touched her temple— she was cold.

‘It’s a corpse…’

I approached her lips with mine. I felt a warm breath— she still lived.

‘See,’ said I.

The guard approached her face; his coarse lips brushed the girl’s. If I heard the smack of a kiss… The dagger laid unsheathed in my cold hands…

‘Good night, lad. You may go,’ he said.

I walked away— I was tired. Carrying my burden was hard and I felt the girl would wake. Fearing someone would hear her scream and come to her aid, I quickened my step.

She woke when I crossed the door. The first sound that left her mouth was a fearful scream…

I had barely closed the door when someone knocked on it. It was a bunch of libertines, my comrades returning from the orgy. They called out for me to open it.

I locked the girl in my room, then opened it.

Half an hour later I left them in the parlor, still drinking. The confusion of intoxication made them not notice my absence.

When I entered the room I saw that the girl had risen. She laughed a laugh troubled like insanity and cold like a sword’s blade. I overflowed with pain in hearing her like that.

For two days and two nights she carried on with that fever… There was nothing that could be done to free her from that delirium or the laughing of phrenitis. She died after two nights and two days of delirium.

At night I left— I went to speak with a statuary that worked perfectly with wax— and commissioned a statue of that virgin.

When the sculptor left, I lifted the marble slabs of my room and dug a grave there with my hands. Then I took her into my arms one last time, pressed her to my chest, silent and cold, kissed her and covered her with her bedsheet, asleep in eternal slumber. I enclosed her in her grave and placed my bed above it.

For a year— night after night— I slept over the slabs that covered her… One day the statuary brought me his work. I paid for it and paid for his discretion…

Don’t you recall, Bertram, the white shape of a woman that you glimpsed behind my curtains’ veil? Don’t you remember I told you it was a sleeping virgin?”

“And who was that woman, Solfieri?”

“Who was she? Her name?”

“Who cares about one word when you feel that the wine burns your lips just enough? Who asks the name of a whore with whom one slept and felt die under one’s kisses, when one is not even obliged to write her name on the gravestone?”

Solfieri filled a glass— drank it. He was about to rise from the table when one of his comrades grabbed him by the arm.

“Solfieri, is this not all just a tale?”

“By hell it isn’t! By my father who was a count and a criminal, by my mother who was the beautiful Messalina of the streets— by perdition it isn’t! Ever since I sealed that woman in her grave of dirt with my own feet— I swear to ye— I kept the dead girl’s wreath as an amulet. Here it is!”

He opened his shirt, and there at his neck they saw a wreath of withered flowers. “Look at it, wizened and dry like her skull!”

-

[drinkthemlock]

tell em solfieri!!!!

the girls are fighting!!! (about philosophical materialism)

[drinkthemlock]

under the cut is an “amor e medo” essay on álvares rant because it pisses me off but tldr: oh! years of untreated mental illness and looming inevitable death by consumption (on top of going through the ordeal of living in 19th century Brazil) took a toll on a young man’s abilities to relate to people? extremely shocking.

most ridiculous thing about that homophobic essay written about álvares saying that his writing was effeminate and “unvirile” and he was afraid of women and sex because he was “raised amongst skirts” is the fact that he absolutely was not raised amongst skirts. he deeply respected his mom and loved his sister greatly yes but he also went to all boys’ boarding schools, university, students’ lodgings, etc. basically navigating all-male spaces his entire life (despite the fact that spaces in Brazil at that time were not as gender segregated as we may think, esp. in Rio). like there’s literally zero evidence (that I know of) that he even had any female friends besides his sibling. also, to pathologize even the few relationships he had with the women he was related to is not only lame but feels really sexist in its core as well? like god forbid this sixteen year old boy be friends with his sister and trust his mother! he must secretly want to fuck them! and maybe, just maybe they played such a constant role in his writing because he… loved them? his elevating of his kinswomen with the purpose of tearing other women down and his possessiveness towards them is not necessarily evidence of oedipal inclinations, but of being misogynistic. which he definitely was. “oh, but there’s brother-sister incest in noite na taverna!” for god’s sake……. noite na taverna is the fucked-up-people-doing-fucked-up-things novel. the incest itself is not even romanticized! it’s rape! the sister kills her rapist later!

most of his writing is indeed about longing and love and unconsummated relationships but that’s because he’s a romantic poet. his style is unique in its execution, not in its themes. and not to play armchair therapist with a long dead teenager (but since the author of the essay already did), his personal letters reveal a difficulty in his relationships with people, full stop. women especially, yes, but most people in general as well. there are letters of his to Luís during his stay in São Paulo which are exactly about how he could not get close, how cold and unfeeling people think he is and how that makes him feel even more alone in the world. azevedo from rosaura (a book by one of álvares’ São Paulo friends that includes him and other law students as characters) is so bitter and cruel you would think the author hated álvares. how can someone who loved his friends more than nearly everything in the world (he literally says as much in the “my dearest” letter to Luís, which I’ve translated here if you’d like to read it) feel such an all-consuming loneliness? because he’s depressed! here’s the crux of it: his poems are all about those things i’ve mentioned earlier because 1. he’s a romantic poet following the style of the time and 2. because he was The Saddest Boy in The Whole Wide World. that’s literally it.

[drinkthemlock]

• i’m loui (she/her) 🇧🇷

• noite na taverna by álvares de azevedo translated by me into english >here<

• my pfp is an illustration of werther from the “sorrows of young werther” and my header is “eugene onegin’s duel” by ilya repin

• sideblog where I rb and talk about art -> @marblegauze

• pt/eng/fr

• official french revolution enjoyer (critically)

• romanticism freak

• other late 18th/early 19th century history/lit as well

xx

(was once astronaut-oxylotl and effeuiller-la-marguerite)

[drinkthemlock]

new chapter translation of noite na taverna incoming girls !!!!!!

[drinkthemlock]

putting a pause on the translation to noite na taverna bc I realized I got too into it and it was messing me up (too many Atrocities) but I’ll post what’s done with Bertram’s chapter :)