The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis

by Machado De Assis

  One century ended and another began without Nicolau’s wound healing. His father died in 1807 and his mother in 1809; his sister married a Dutch physician just over a year later. Nicolau now lived alone. He was twenty-three, one of the city’s dandies, and a rather peculiar one at that, for he could not bear to encounter anyone who was either handsomer than he, or wearing some particularly fine item of clothing, without suffering a violent pain, so violent, in fact, that he sometimes had to bite his lip until it bled. There were times when he would nearly collapse, or when an almost imperceptible thread of foam would trickle from one corner of his mouth. And things went from bad to worse. He became harsh and domineering; at home, he found everything bad, troublesome, or infuriating; he smashed plates over the slaves’ heads, and tormented the dogs by kicking them; he couldn’t sit still for ten minutes at a time and he barely ate a thing. Finally, he would fall asleep, and it was just as well that he did. Sleep solved everything. He would wake up feeling affable and affectionate, like a true patriarch, kissing the dogs between the ears, letting them lick his face, giving them the best of everything, calling the slaves the sweetest, most endearing names. And all of them, dogs and slaves alike, forgot about the previous night’s beatings and came running obediently and adoringly when they heard his voice, as if this were their true master, and not the other one.

  One day, when he was at his sister’s house, she asked him why he had not taken up some career or other, something to occupy himself.

  “You’re quite right,” he said. “I’ll look into it.”

  His brother-in-law weighed in and suggested the diplomatic service. The brother-in-law was beginning to suspect that Nicolau did indeed suffer from some sort of malady and thought a change in climate would be just the thing to set him straight. Nicolau obtained a letter of introduction and went to see the minister of foreign affairs. He found the minister surrounded by some of his Portuguese officials, and just about to go to the palace with news of the second fall of Napoleon, news which had arrived only a few minutes earlier. The presence of the minister, the circumstances of the moment, the bowing and scraping of the officials, all this filled Nicolau with such alarm that he could not look the minister in the face. He made several attempts, but the one time he succeeded, his vision was so blurred that he could see nothing at all, or only a shadow, a shape, which made his eyes ache and his face turn green. Nicolau retreated, tremulously reached for the door curtain, and fled.

  “I don’t want to be anything!” he said to his sister when he got home. “You and my friends are enough.”

  His friends were the most disagreeable young men in the city, vulgar and lowborn. Nicolau had chosen them on purpose. To live a life divorced from the leading citizens of his day was for him a great sacrifice, but since he would suffer much more by living with them, he put up with it. This proves that he had a certain empirical awareness of his illness and how to relieve it. The simple fact of the matter was that with his chosen companions all of Nicolau’s physiological disturbances disappeared. He could look at them without turning deathly pale, without his sight blurring or his legs giving way, or anything like that. What’s more, they not only saved him from his natural irritability, they endeavored to make his life, if not delightful, then at least tranquil. To do this, they would shower him with the greatest compliments in the world, delivered in a fawning manner or with a certain deferential familiarity. Nicolau loved all kinds of inferior beings, just as patients love the medicine that restores them to health; he would patronize them, heap them with affectionate praise, lend them money, give them little gifts, even bare his soul to them. Then came the Cry of Ipiranga and the Declaration of Independence; Nicolau threw himself into politics. In 1823 we find him in the Constituent Assembly. It goes without saying that, in fulfilling his legislative duties, he was honest, impartial, and patriotic. However, exercising these public virtues did not come without a price, but at the expense of great mental torment. Metaphorically speaking, one can say that his attendance in the chamber cost him precious blood. Not only because the debates were intolerable, but also because it was hard for him to have to look at certain men, especially on certain days. Montezuma, for example, struck him as utterly shallow, Vergueiro a dullard, and the Andrada brothers detestable. Every speech, not only from the leading orators, but even from the second-rate ones, was sheer torture for Nicolau. And yet he remained steadfast and punctual. He never missed a single vote; never once did his name ring out in that august chamber without him providing an answering echo. However great his desperation, he was able to contain himself and put the national interest above his own discomfort. He may even have secretly applauded the decree of dissolution. I can’t confirm this, but there are good reasons to believe that, despite appearances, Nicolau was happy to see the assembly dissolved. And if that conjecture is true, then this second one is no less so: that the exile of certain leading figures in the assembly, now branded public enemies, came to dilute that pleasure. For Nicolau, who had suffered from their speeches, suffered no less from their exile, since it gave them a certain prominence. If only he, too, had been exiled!

  “You could always get married, brother,” his sister said to him.

  “But I don’t have a fiancée.”

  “I can get you one, if you like.”

  This was her husband’s idea. In his opinion, medical science had discovered the illness plaguing Nicolau: it was a worm in his spleen that fed on the patient’s suffering, that is, a particular secretion that was produced at the sight of certain occurrences, situations, or persons. It was simply a matter of killing the worm. But since there was no known chemical substance capable of destroying the worm, the only solution was to prevent the secretion, since that would produce the same result. It was, therefore, imperative to marry Nicolau to some pretty and talented girl, remove him from the city, and set him up on some country estate, to which he would take his best dinner service, his finest furniture, and his most disreputable friends.

  “Every morning,” the brother-in-law explained to his wife, “Nicolau will receive a newspaper that I will have specially printed with the sole aim of telling him the most agreeable things in the world, listing them one by one, recalling his modest yet useful work on the Constituent Assembly, and attributing to him many amorous adventures, along with sundry flashes of wit and courage. I have already spoken to my fellow Dutchman, the admiral, about getting some of our officers to go and see Nicolau from time to time and tell him how they could not possibly return to The Hague without doing themselves the honor of setting eyes on so charming and eminent a citizen, one who combines so many qualities rarely found in one individual. If you, my dear, could only persuade one of your fancy dressmakers—Gudin, for example—to name one of their hats or frilly lace capes after Nicolau, that would greatly help in your brother’s cure. Anonymous love letters, sent by the post, are another remarkably efficient remedy. But first things first; let’s get him married.”

  Never was a plan more conscientiously executed. The bride chosen was the most elegant, or one of the most elegant, in the capital. The bishop himself married them. When they duly withdrew to the country estate, only a few of Nicolau’s coarsest friends went with him. The newspaper was set up, letters were sent, and visits were paid. For three months everything went swimmingly. But nature, always ready to wrong-foot us, showed yet again that it can never be predicted. One of the methods used to please Nicolau was to praise the beauty, elegance, and virtues of his wife; but his illness had grown worse, and what had seemed like an excellent remedy now simply aggravated his condition. After a while, Nicolau found all these paeans to his wife pointless and excessive, and that was enough to make him irritable, and for his irritability to provoke the inevitable secretion. It seems he even reached the point of not being able to look at her for very long, and then scarcely at all; several rows ensued, which would have signaled the beginnings of a separation had she not died shortly after. Nicolau’s grief was profound and genuine, but the cu
re was soon interrupted because he went back to Rio de Janeiro, where we will find him some time later among the revolutionaries of 1831.

  Although it may seem rash to state the reasons that led Nicolau to join the jeering crowds at the Campo da Aclamação on the night of the sixth of April, I think it would not be far from the truth to suppose that it was the words of a famous but anonymous Athenian. Those who spoke ill of the Emperor were just as pleasing to Nicolau as those who spoke well. That man, who inspired such enthusiasm and hatred and whose name was endlessly repeated wherever Nicolau happened to be, whether in the street, the theater, or other people’s houses, had become a truly unhealthy obsession, from which flowed the fervor with which he involved himself in the events of 1831. The abdication came as a great relief. It is true that the ensuing Regency soon found him among its adversaries, and there are some who assert that he joined the Caramuru, or “Restoration” Party, although there is no proof of this. What is certain is that Nicolau’s public life ended with the events surrounding the new Emperor’s coming of age.

  The disease had now taken definitive hold over his whole organism. Little by little, Nicolau retreated into seclusion. He could no longer visit certain people or frequent certain houses. Even the theater was no longer a distraction. The state of his auditory organs was so delicate that the sound of applause caused him excruciating pain. The enthusiasm of the city’s inhabitants for the famous sopranos Candiani and Meréa, but principally for Candiani, whose carriage was drawn by willing fans—a distinction even more remarkable in that they wouldn’t have done it for Plato himself—such enthusiasm was one of Nicolau’s greatest torments. He reached the point where he stopped going to the opera altogether, finding Candiani utterly unbearable, and finding the organ grinders’ version of Norma preferable to that of the prima donna. It was not out of a sense of exaggerated patriotism that he enjoyed listening to João Caetano in the early days, but eventually Nicolau gave him up, too, and the theaters almost entirely.

  “It’s hopeless,” thought the brother-in-law. “If we could only give him a new spleen . . .”

  How could he think something so ridiculous? Nicolau was, indeed, a hopeless case. Domestic pleasures no longer sufficed. His literary endeavors—family verses, prized ditties, and political odes—were short-lived, and may even have made him worse. In any case, it struck him one day that this occupation was the most ridiculous thing in the world, and the endless praise heaped on the works of Gonçalves Dias, for example, suggested to him a nation slipping into banal bad taste. This literary sentiment, the fruit of his wounded self, acted further upon the same wound to the point of producing a string of serious crises that confined him to bed for some time. His brother-in-law took the opportunity to clear the house of all books of a certain tenor.

  Less explicable is why, in a matter of months, he began to take so little care over his appearance. Brought up to be always elegantly dressed, he had been a long-standing customer of one of the leading tailors in Rio, a man called Plum, and not a single day would go by without him having his hair tended to by Messrs. Desmarais & Gérard, coiffeurs de la cour, on Rua do Ouvidor. It seems, however, that he found this “hairdressers to the court” designation excessively conceited, and punished them by taking his business to a backstreet barber. As to why he changed his attire, I can only say that it remains a mystery and, unless attributable to age, utterly inexplicable.

  His dismissal of his cook is another enigma. At the instigation of his brother-in-law, who was doing his best to keep him entertained, Nicolau gave two dinners a week, and his guests were, of course, unanimous in their opinion that Nicolau’s cook surpassed all others in the city. The dishes really were rather good, some of them excellent, but the praise was a little too emphatic, a little too excessive, for it to be entirely agreeable to Nicolau, and this went on for some time. How to explain, then, that one Sunday, just after a magnificent dinner, he dismissed the remarkable man who had been the indirect cause of some of his most delightful moments on Earth? Another impenetrable mystery.

  “He was a thief!” was the answer he gave his brother-in-law.

  Neither the efforts of his brother-in-law, sister, and friends, nor his wealth, improved the lot of our poor, sad Nicolau. The secretion in his spleen became continual and the worms multiplied by the millions—I have no idea whether this theory is true, by the way, but it was, after all, his brother-in-law’s. Nicolau’s final years were extremely cruel. He lived in a state of almost continual debilitation, irritable and almost blind, suffering far more acutely than those around him. The slightest thing would set his nerves on edge: a good speech, a clever artist, a carriage, a cravat, a sonnet, a witty remark, an interesting dream—everything brought on an attack.

  Did he want to die? One might suppose so, seeing the indifference with which he rejected all the remedies of the city’s leading physicians. Eventually it was necessary to resort to deception and tell him they had been prescribed by some ignorant quack. But it was too late. Death carried him off a couple of weeks later.

  “Joaquim Soares?” cried the brother-in-law in astonishment, when he learned of the clause in the dead man’s will specifying who should make his coffin. “That oaf’s coffins are no good at all, and—”

  “There’s no point arguing,” interrupted his wife. “We must respect my dear brother’s wishes.”

  Author’s Preface

  Of all the stories found herein there are only two that effectively contain no explicit date; all the others do, and this will cause some readers to find the title Undated Stories either unintelligible or perplexing. Supposing, however, that my purpose is to define these pages as dealing, in substance, with things that do not belong to any particular date or time, that, I think, would explain the title. Which is the worst thing that could possibly happen to it, for the best titles are always those that need no explanation.

  M. de A.

  THE DEVIL’S CHURCH

  Chapter 1

  A MARVELOUS IDEA

  AN OLD BENEDICTINE MANUSCRIPT tells how, one day, the Devil had the idea of founding a church. Although he was making steady and substantial profits, he felt humiliated by the rather isolated role he had played down the centuries, with no organization, no rules, no canon law, and no rituals, indeed nothing much at all. He lived, so to speak, on divine leftovers, on human oversights and favors. Nothing fixed, nothing regular. Why shouldn’t he have his own church? A Devil’s Church would be the best way to take on the other religions and destroy them once and for all.

  “Yes, a church of my own,” he concluded. “Scripture against Scripture, breviary against breviary. I’ll have my own mass, with wine and bread aplenty, my own sermons, bulls, novenas, and all the other ecclesiastical bells and whistles. My creed will be the universal nucleus of souls, my church a tent of Abraham. And then, while other religions quarrel and split, my church will stand united and alone, with no Muhammad or Luther to oppose me. There are many ways to affirm a belief, but only one way to deny it.”

  As he said this, the Devil shook his head and stretched out his arms in a magnificently manly gesture. Then he remembered that he really ought to go and see God, to tell him his plan and throw down this challenge; he raised his eyes, burning with hatred and bitter with revenge, and said to himself: “Yes, it is time.” And with a beat of his wings—which set off a rumble that shook all the provinces of the abyss—he flew swiftly up from the shadows into the infinite blue.

  Chapter 2

  BETWEEN GOD AND THE DEVIL

  When the Devil arrived in Heaven, God was just welcoming an old man. The seraphim who were busily garlanding the recent arrival immediately stopped what they were doing, and the Devil stood waiting at the entrance with his eyes fixed on the Lord.

  “What do you want with me?” asked the Lord.

  “I haven’t come for your servant Faust,” replied the Devil, laughing and pointing at the old man, “but for all the Fausts of this and every century.”

  “Explain
yourself.”

  “The explanation is easy, Lord. But let me first say this: take in this worthy old man, give him the best place in Heaven, command your most tuneful zithers and lutes to receive him with their divinest choruses . . .”

  “Do you have any idea what he did?” asked the Lord, his eyes filled with tenderness.

  “No, but he’s probably one of the last who will come to you. It won’t be long before Heaven is like an empty house, on account of its high rent. I’m going to build a cheap boardinghouse; in short, I’m going to set up my own church. I’ve had enough of my lack of organization, my haphazard, spur-of-the-moment kingdom. It’s time I won a complete and final victory. And so I have come to tell you this, in all loyalty, so that you can’t accuse me of any deception. Good idea, don’t you think?”

  “You came to tell me, not seek my approval,” commented the Lord.

  “Yes, you’re right,” replied the Devil. “But vanity likes to hear its master’s applause. True, in this case it will be the applause of a defeated master, and as such . . . Lord, I’m going down to Earth. I’m going to lay my foundation stone.”