Original subtitles

THE STIGMA BY MONTEIRO LOBATO

Fausto?

Laurita?

Dead.

And...

your wife? Your children?

The wife, dead as well.

The children, around.

Some married. The youngest, still with me.

My dear Bruno...

money is not everything in life.

And above all...

nor is it a lightning rod

to save one's head from the bolts.

But come.

Come in and let us dine.

Then I will tell you my story.

And take pride

in that to you alone

I will speak of the hell

which this Paradise has become.

When Laura became orphaned,

I, as her relative in the best condition,

brought her in to live with us.

Even as a child,

Laura, in her childish graces, already gave signs

of the enchanting young girl she would grow up to be.

Hey there!

-Give it back! -No!

Young sir is up there, in the big house.

Is your father home?

-Morning. -Morning.

Is the owner home?

Please, come in.

Please, sit and wait just a little while.

-Are you the daughter of... -No, sir, his cousin.

I have lived here since my parents died.

-So young, to be orphaned. -Both father and mother.

I was six when I lost them. My cousin brought me here to-

Bruno?

Now there's a miracle!

Fausto!

Look from where I dig you out!

How long since we last saw each other?

Ten years, at least, right?

Ever since we were robed for graduation.

Then, my dear Bruno,

I'll keep you here.

Please. You will not depart

without seeing my own bosom of Abraham

and well making up for our time apart.

Laurita, my cousin.

We have met.

-Where? -Here... five minutes ago.

A rascal!

Look, Laura, tell them to bring us coffee.

A beauty, isn't she?

Beautiful.

So fresh and rosy.

The rosiness is from standing at the oven.

Have you met my wife?

Leme family, from Pedra Fria.

I married after graduating,

and came to live here,

spending some months at the farm and some at the capital.

An excellent life.

One we all long for.

I don't complain. Nor do I want another.

You have picked the fruit of happiness, Fausto.

Laura!

I would suppose

you have, with your own hands, rolled this one.

Which one? The one with cutter marks?

The ones with marks are Lucrécia's.

-These ones are mine. -These ones.

You're too wild with your advances.

Thank you, Laura.

Come, Bruno.

Come see the livestock.

Best we do that.

Aside from the crops, there's livestock of all kinds.

You have, my dear friend, from here the widest view

of our farm.

In the back you can see the pigsty.

We have also a small lake with rare fish.

Up the grasslands, a few heads of Jersey cattle,

which I mean to expand on.

But above all,

my greatest pride are my horses.

See that mare?

That is my... Herma.

I was newly married

and had erred in marrying.

My wife, she...

You didn't suspect anything when we dined?

My wife was viscerally evil.

So?

What say you of this place?

I like it.

Very much.

Then why not take a few days off the city

and come spend some time here with us?

That's good whisky.

It is. Some more?

Now, Bruno, you can't fool me.

I know you never stopped.

I have to go.

Always worried about the time.

Let me accompany you

in one last walk.

I admit I didn't marry for love.

I was a graduate, and poor.

Before me I saw

the tedium of civil office or swift victory.

I had no curiosity as to where

that golden path would lead me.

The dowry, a large one,

was worth...

or seemed to be worth the sacrifice.

I erred.

"Evil" in a woman says all.

It dismisses further expense

of expression.

When you hear of a woman that she's evil

ask for no more.

Flee with your every breath.

Laura, are you alright?

I lost my thread.

And all the horror we felt

at the matrimonial leash?

How we would throw injuries onto the sacred love.

Blessed by the priest.

Blessed by the priest, noted by the scribe.

Well do you remember.

We are paying for our insults.

Such is life, my dear Bruno.

Above, free theory;

underneath, the iron weave of the inevitable.

And in marriage?

It's important that he man yield 50%,

and the woman likewise,

so that there might be a reasonable equilibrium.

That which is called

marital happiness.

In your case, have you been happy?

I don't know.

I know I have yielded my fifty.

And hope my wife will follow me in this act of abnegation.

But she is more tenacious.

Steadfast in withholding her part.

We are still searching for equilibrium.

And Laura?

With the experience I have now,

I would have grasped at the lowest office.

Bruno,

do you know the meaning of "the Norway side"?

Here's one.

Many leaves, much vigor,

heavy with green,

but not a fruit, not a flower in sight.

Laura

is like a ray of morning sun

that dances and laughs in the Norway side of my life.

Have a good trip.

-Give it back! -No!

Give it back!

If I were to remake Hell,

I would remove the circles put there by Dante

and instate, as guardians of the damned,

half a dozen shrews.

All would see what paradise were,

compared to that, the circles.

The Norway side,

how exact a comparison.

Icy,

as our marital life had become

when we deceived ourselves and compromised,

striving for impossible balance.

Afterwards,

it became infernal.

Laura,

as she blossomed, gathered in herself

all the beauty

of body, soul and spirit

as a poet might, in his dreams, conceive of

and put to verse.

In her were assembled

the beauty of the Devil,

befitting her age,

and the beauty of God,

which is timeless.

The heart,

virgin in love,

could not tame itself

and succumbed.

In the chest I had thought barren

came to life

the dangerous love of the thirty years.

Laura

radiated beauty,

happiness and grace.

She gradually became

my reason for being.

All the generosities

and all the courages of the teenage years

smoldered in my chest.

I was victim to that worst caste of love.

Secret love.

Dazzled,

I saw, from my confinement,

dawn,

light, life.

All inaccessible.

Why are you doing this?

Clean it!

Clean it.

I then discovered

a ghastly portion of my soul.

I understood my disgrace.

Months passed.

In the end,

either because my inner fire betrayed me,

or because jealousy gave my wife a lynx's sight,

she read all inside me.

As if my heart pulsated

within a crystal chest.

For the first time since we had married,

I resisted her.

And such was my firmness as to dismay the lady.

In my eyes I hold

the spiteful smirk

that contorted her mouth then.

And in my soul I bear

the scars from the embers that leapt from her eyes.

I wrote to some relatives

and was beginning to make arrangements for Laura, when...

one day I went out hunting.

Less for the hunt itself

than to find some respite from my domestic war

in the peace of the woods.

As I got on my horse,

I saw Laura

making her way there

with her sewing basket.

Do you remember

the pine grove

planted near the orchard?

The Azambuja pine,

that was Laura's favorite roaming place.

She'd retire there with a book

or her sewing,

so as to find solace,

for a moment, from her domestic hell.

I took longer than usual,

and brought home with me

a wearying meditation.

Father!

-Have you seen Laura? -Laura?

What of my lady?

My heart pounded violently

and I went searching for Laurinha.

I asked around the property.

Nobody had seen her.

I remembered the pine

and we made our way there.

We broke through the dark of night.

Nothing.

I was giving up hope of finding her

when the foreman, ahead of me, cried.

There they were.

The small sewing basket

and further ahead,

the girl's body.

Her half-open blouse

showed, in her bosom,

a wound.

A small black hole

from which flowed,

to her ribs, a fine line of blood.

Beside her lifeless right hand,

my revolver.

Suicide?

I can't tell you my despair.

I forgot the world,

proprieties, everything.

And kissed her longly in despaired heaves and spasms.

We brought her in arms

and my wife, then pregnant,

refused to see the corpse...

Pregnant?

And Laura

was laid to rest

without, for one moment,

my wife leaving her cloister.

Mark this.

My wife didn't see the girl's body .

Days later, she rejoined the human race,

leaving her cell to return to her usual habits.

Although much changed in her temper.

As for me, Laura's suicide,

beyond shaking my organism

like the direst earthquake,

was an enigma.

I never understood that.

Her last words at home.

Her last acts.

Nothing pointed towards

such horrible unraveling.

Why would Laura kill herself?

Why?

How

had she acquired the revolver

that was always kept in our bedroom?

We inspected her belongings,

but that shed no light on it.

No letter.

No note.

A mystery.

A mystery.

But the months went by

until, one fine day,

my wife gave birth

to a boy.

This time it's a strong boy.

But he was born marked.

Marked?

Has my lady seen this?

I came near the child,

undoing the swaddling clothes

just enough

to see his small chest.

I saw it.

I saw the stigma that reproduced to exactitude

the wound on Laurinha.

A black core

that imitated the bullet hole.

And the small "serpent".

A slithering line

that wove down his ribs.

Look at this.

See, woman,

see well that which condemns you.

She sat up from the bed

and, for the first time,

those hard eyes

blurred before the intensity of my own.

Then,

her body went limp,

falling back onto the pillows,

bested.

A crisis came unto her at night.

The doctors came to her aid,

it was a serious fever.

She obstinately refused all medication

and died without saying a word.

Aside from

unconscious ravings in her delirious moments.

Son,

show Bruno your mark.

How strange they are,

the whims of nature.

The whims of Nemesis.

subtitles Rafael Brandão