The Yellow Sofa (New Directions Classics)     by Eca De Queiroz and Eca De Queiros, Translated by John Vetch Published by New Directions Pub. Date: November 1996 Format: 114 pages Dimensions: 0.40 x 7.97 x 5.21 in. ISBN: 0811213390 List Price: $10.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $8.76

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In The Yellow Sofa one of Eça’s clerky Lisbon characters, Godofredo Alves, is resoundingly cuckolded by his supposed best friend and office colleague the elegant Machado. Over the span of a hundred-odd pages Godofredo goes from a world of innocent domestic bliss where ‘when one is well brought up, everything turns out right’ through the trauma of losing friend and wife in one blow, his subsequent loneliness and then, finally, to a reconciliation with wife/adulteress and friend/adulterer.

The genius of the book is how Eça captures all the emotional fluctuations the eminently weedy and Pooterish Godofredo endures during this trajectory, and with such accuracy. The result is an enjoyably humorous novella that is simultaneously breathtakingly ironic.

Godofredo Alves seems like a marvellous example of a benighted conformist, the man who will put up with anything for the sake of a quiet, moderately comfortable existence. In that way he seems very English, a ‘Portuguese soul’ with the opposite of the fiery jealous temperament that Latin peoples are supposed to possess. Eça brings us this character in a treatment that is both sardonic and tender, achieving the effect of his famous and genial truthfulness.

‘But worst of all were the lonely evenings. He had always been a home-loving man, fond of coming home early putting on his slippers, enjoying his own domestic scene. In the old days, Ludovina would play the piano in the drawing room for a while; he would go round and light the lamps, like a devotee preparing an altar, for he loved music and he would finish his cigar in his armchair, listening to her playing, gazing at the mass of her dark hair hanging over her shoulders in graceful abandon and intimacy. Certain pieces that she played him gave him a feeling of having his heart caressed by something soft and velvety, and made him swoon; one especially, a certain waltz, Souvenir of Andalusia... How long it had been since he had heard it played!

While the summer lasted, he went for a walk every evening. But even the sight of the streets revived memories of lost happiness. There would be an open balcony, with a young woman in a bright dress, enjoying the air, and this made him think of his lonely house, now lacking the swirl of a woman’s skirts; and at nightfall, there was a window which revealed the subdued light of a pleasant evening party, and coming from it the gentle sound of a piano...And worn out, his shoes dusty, he then acutely felt the unhappy evidence of his loneliness.’ pp90-91