The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis

by Machado De Assis

  “You see in me the masses enthroned. I am all of you, and all of you are me.”

  The first act of the new king was to abolish barrel-making, immediately rewarding the other barrel-makers, who threatened to overthrow him, with the title of the Magnificent Ones. His second act was to declare that, in order to lend greater luster to the person and position of king, he would, henceforth, be called by the grander name of Bernardão, rather than by the more diminutive Bernardino. He commissioned a great expert in matters of genealogy, who, in no time at all, had traced his ancestry back to some Roman general from the fourth century, Bernardus Barrelius—a name that gave rise to great controversy, which continues to this day, with some saying that King Bernardão must once have been a barrel-maker, and others that this was all a silly confusion arising from the name of the founder of the family. As we have seen, this second view is the only true one.

  Having been bald ever since he was a young man, Bernardão decreed that all his subjects should be equally bald, either naturally or with the help of a razor, and he based this act on a purely political idea, namely, that the moral unity of the state depended on all heads looking the same. A further, equally wise act was one that ordered every left shoe to have a small hole cut in it next to the little toe, thus giving his subjects another opportunity to resemble him, for he had a corn on that very toe. The use of spectacles throughout the kingdom can also only be explained by an eye infection that afflicted Bernardão in the second year of his reign. The illness cost him the sight of one eye, and this was the moment when Bernardão’s poetic vocation was first revealed, because, when one of his two ministers, called Alpha, commented that the loss of one eye made him equal to Hannibal—a comparison he found deeply flattering—the second minister, called Omega, went still further, and remarked that he was superior even to Homer, who had lost the sight of both eyes. This compliment was a revelation, and since this leads us neatly to the matter of his marriage, let us move swiftly on.

  Marriage was, to be honest, a way of securing the Barrelius dynasty. There was no shortage of brides for the new king, but none pleased him as much as a beautiful, rich, illustrious young woman called Estrelada. This lady, who cultivated music and poetry, was much sought-after by certain gentlemen, but remained faithful to the old dynasty. Bernardão plied her with rare, sumptuous gifts, while her family screamed at her to remember that a crown on the head is worth more than any affair of the heart, urging her not to bring shame on them when the illustrious Bernardão was tempting them with a principality, reminding her that thrones were few and far between, etc., etc. Estrelada, however, resisted these temptations.

  She did not resist for very long, but neither did she give in entirely. Since among her suitors she secretly preferred one young man who was a poet, she declared that she was willing to get married, but only to the man who was deemed to have written the best madrigal in a competition created for that purpose. Mad with love and full of confidence, Bernardão accepted this condition; he did, after all, have one eye more than Homer and had achieved homogeneity among feet and heads.

  Twenty suitors took part in the competition, with the entrants’ names kept entirely secret. One madrigal was judged to be better than all the others, and it was written by the poet she loved. Bernardão decreed the competition null and void, and ordered another to be held; then, in a moment of Machiavellian inspiration, he decreed that only words more than three hundred years old could be used. None of the other competitors had studied the classics, and so this seemed a certain way of defeating them.

  He still did not win, though, because the beloved poet had quickly read as many of the classical writers as he could, and his madrigal was again judged to be the best. Bernardão once more declared this second competition to be null and void, and, seeing that in the winning madrigal the use of ancient turns of phrase gave a remarkable elegance to the poem, he decreed that only modern, fashionable terminology could be used. A third competition ended in a third victory for the poet.

  Furious, Bernardão confided in his two ministers, asking them to come up with a swift and energetic remedy, because, if he did not win Estrelada’s hand, he would order three hundred thousand heads to be cut off. The ministers spent some time in discussion, then returned with this proposal:

  “We, Alpha and Omega, are, by virtue of our names, responsible for all matters linguistic. Our idea is that Your Sublimeness should order all dictionaries to be confiscated, and we will then compile a new vocabulary that will ensure your victory.”

  Bernardão did as they proposed, and the two ministers remained closeted in the palace for three whole months, after which they placed in his august hands the finished work, a book they entitled the Dictionary of Babel, because it really was no more than a jumble of letters. No word bore any resemblance to the spoken language; consonants climbed on top of other consonants, vowels dissolved into other vowels, words of two syllables now had seven or eight and vice versa, everything was muddled up and switched around, with no verve, no elegance—a language of fragments and scraps.

  “Your Sublimeness has only to impose this language by decree, and our job is done.”

  Bernardão rewarded them each with an embrace and a large pension, and decreed that this new vocabulary would, from then on, be the official vocabulary. He also declared that there would be one final competition to win the hand of the lovely Estrelada. The jumble in the dictionary was transferred to people’s minds; everyone lived in a state of utter confusion. Jokers would greet each other in the street, using the new phrases; for example, instead of saying: “Good morning, how are you?” they would say: “Pflerrgpxx, rouph, aa?” Fearing that her beloved poet would finally lose the competition, the young lady herself suggested that they elope together. He, however, answered that, first, he would see what he could do. Entrants were given ninety days to compose their poem, and again there were twenty entries. The best of these, despite that barbarous new language, was the one written by the poet. Half mad with rage, Bernardão ordered the hands of his two ministers to be cut off, but that was his only act of revenge. Estrelada was so wonderfully beautiful that he did not dare to harm her, and so he gave in. Greatly displeased, he shut himself up for a week in the library, reading, pacing, and thinking. It seems that the last thing he read was a satire by the poet Garção, in particular these lines, which seemed as if made to order:

  It was not the paints that made them eternal,

  Those three rare, inimitable artists—

  Apelles, Rubens, and Raphael—

  But the elegant way they blended them.

  A WANDERER

  THE DOOR OPENED . . . No, let me tell the tale as if it were a novel, said Tosta to his wife when, a month after they were married, she asked him about the man she had seen in an old photograph on her husband’s desk. The door opened, and that same man appeared, tall and serious, rather dark-complexioned, and wearing a vast snuff-brown overcoat, which the lads called his cope.

  “Here’s Elisiário’s cope again.”

  “Come in, cope!”

  “No, keep the cope out and let Elisiário in instead, but, first, he must complete a rhyming couplet. Who has a first line ready?”

  No one. The “house” was merely a room, sublet by a tailor, who lived in the back of the house with his family; Rua do Lavradio in 1866. It was only the second time Elisiário had gone there, at the invitation of one of the regulars. You simply cannot imagine what that room and that life were like, or only if you can imagine some bohemian outpost, all disorder and confusion; for, apart from a few battered bits of furniture belonging to the tailor, there were two hammocks, a laundry basket, a coat stand, a tin trunk, books, hats, and shoes. Five young men lived there, but were often joined by a motley assortment of other young men: students, translators, editors, philanderers, who, nevertheless, still found time to produce a political and literary magazine, which was published every Saturday. Ah, the long debates we had! We regularly demolished the very foundations of soc
iety, discovered new worlds, new constellations, new freedoms. Everything was spanking new.

  Finally, one of the lads said:

  “I’ve got one. ‘Such was the scope of Elisiário’s cope . . .’ ”

  Standing in the doorway, Elisiário closed his eyes for a few moments, then opened them, mopped his brow with the screwed-up ball of a handkerchief he was carrying, and instantly improvised a second line. We all laughed long and loud; I, who had no idea that he really was improvising, thought, at first, that it was one he’d made up before and that they were merely trying to impress me. Elisiário removed his overcoat, raised it up on one end of his cane, and walked triumphantly twice around the room before hanging it on a nail in the wall, because the coat rack was full. Then he threw his hat into the air, caught it, and went over to place it on the sideboard.

  “Room for one?” he said at last.

  I hurriedly surrendered the sofa to him, and he lay down, knees bent, and asked what the latest news was.

  “Supper looks unlikely,” said the chief editor of the magazine. “Chico went out to see if he could get some subscription money in, and, if he succeeds, then he’ll bring supper straight back here. Have you already eaten?”

  “I have, indeed, and very well too,” answered Elisiário. “I dined at a local restaurant. But tell me, why don’t you just sell Chico? He’s a handsome Negro. True, he’s not actually a slave, but I’m sure he’d understand that if he allowed himself to be sold as a slave, then you’d be able to pay his wages. Will two mil-réis be enough? Romeu, have a look in my overcoat pocket. There must be two mil-réis in there.”

  There was only one and half mil-réis, but they proved unnecessary. Five minutes later, Chico returned, bearing a tray containing their supper and what remained of a week’s subscription.

  “Amazing!” cried Elisiário. “A subscription! Come here, Chico. Who paid you? What did the man look like? Was he short? No, he can’t have been short; no short man would be capable of making such a sublime gesture. He was tall, wasn’t he? Or at the very least of medium height. He was, wasn’t he? Good. What’s his name? Guimarães? Lads, let us have that name engraved on a bronze plaque. I assume you didn’t give him a receipt, Chico.”

  “I did, sir.”

  “A receipt! But you must never give a paid-up subscriber a receipt, because if you don’t give him a receipt, you can always gull him into paying again. Hope springs eternal, Chico.”

  All of this, when spoken by him, was far wittier than it sounds. I can’t begin to describe his gestures, his eyes, the unique laugh that wasn’t a laugh, but left his face utterly impassive and afforded not a glimpse of teeth. That was his least attractive feature, but everything else, his voice, his ideas, and, above all, his youthful, fertile imagination, out of which flowed sayings, anecdotes, epigrams, poems, descriptions, now serious, almost sublime, now familiar, almost humble, but always original, yes, everything about him drew you in. He was unshaven, his hair cut very short, his high forehead marked by two vertical lines. When silent, he appeared to be deep in thought, but he fidgeted constantly, getting up from the sofa, sitting down again, lying back. He was still there when I left at nine o’clock that night.

  I became a regular visitor to the house in Rua do Lavradio, but initially there was no sign of Elisiário. I was told he was a very unreliable guest. He went through phases, sometimes joining us every day, then disappearing for one, two, or even three weeks or longer. He worked as a Latin teacher and mathematics tutor. He had no qualifications, even though he had studied engineering, medicine, and law, always moving from faculty to faculty and leaving behind him the same reputation, that of a highly talented student who lacked application. He would have been a fine prose writer if he could have made himself sit down for more than twenty minutes and write; he was an improviser of poems, but never put pen to paper, and although others who heard these verses would set them down and give him copies, he would usually lose these. He had no family, although he did have a protector, a certain Dr. Lousada, a surgeon of some renown, who owed Elisiário’s father many favors and wished to repay these through the son. He could be prickly, too, because he was extremely sensitive to any perceived slight. In that house in Rua do Lavradio, though, he was on good terms with everyone. He was thirty-five, whereas the oldest of the other lads was only twenty-one. His relationship with them resembled that of uncle and nephews, with a little less authority and a little more freedom.

  After a week had passed, Elisiário finally turned up again at Rua do Lavradio. He wanted to write a play and needed to dictate it to someone. I was chosen because I could write quickly. This mental and manual collaboration went on for two and half nights. He wrote one whole act and the first few scenes of the second, but then refused to finish it. At first he said he would do so later on, that he was feeling unwell, and then he simply changed the subject. In the end, he declared that the play was no good anyway. This statement was greeted with general amazement, because we had all thought the play excellent, and I still think so now. The author, however, disagreed and demonstrated that the writing was feeble and the rest of the plot useless. He spoke as if he were speaking of someone else. We argued back, and I, in particular, thought it a crime and repeated that word with real feeling and fire—I genuinely did think it a crime not to finish the play, which really was first-rate.

  “No, no, it’s worthless,” he said, smiling kindly at me. “How old are you, boy?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Ah, everything is sublime when you’re eighteen. Wait until you grow up. The play is a failure, but don’t worry, we’ll write another in a few days’ time. I already have an idea for a plot.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, a very good idea,” he went on, a dreamy look in his eyes. “An idea that really could make quite a decent play. Five acts, possibly in verse. That would suit the subject matter perfectly.”

  He never again mentioned the idea, but that first fragment of a play brought us slightly closer together. Whether it was genuine sympathy or satisfied pride when he saw how violently I reacted to his decision to abandon the play—something I even condemned as a dereliction of duty—or whether it was for some other reason unknown to me and which I see no point in trying to fathom out, Elisiário began to pay more attention to me. He asked about my parents and asked me what I did. I told him I had no mother, but that my father was a farmer in Baturité, that I was studying for my university entrance exams, in between writing popular verses, and that I had ideas for a poem, a play, and a novel. Indeed, I already had a list of subscribers for my popular verses. It seems that something—perhaps those literary ambitions of mine or perhaps my youthful enthusiasm—sparked his interest. He suggested helping me with my studies, by teaching me Latin, French, English, and history. Bursting with pride and rather touched, too, I made some flattering comment, to which he responded gravely:

  “I want to make a man of you.”

  We were alone at the time, and I said nothing about this remark to the others, so as not to cause any ill feeling, although they may not even have noticed any change in Elisiário’s attitude toward me. Not that the change was particularly marked, and his plan “to make a man of me” went no further than kindness and sympathy. He did teach me a few things when I asked him for help, but that was not very often. I wanted only to listen to him, then listen some more. You cannot imagine how eloquent he was, he could speak warmly and forcefully, gently and sweetly, and the images he came out with, the ideas, the startlingly elegant turns of phrase! We were often left alone in Rua do Lavradio, with him talking and me listening. Where did he live? The others said vaguely that he lived somewhere over toward Gamboa, but he never invited me there, and no one knew his actual address.

  If you met him in the street, though, he seemed slow, upright, and circumspect. There was not a hint of the gawky, ebullient man I knew from Rua do Lavradio, for, if he spoke at all, he spoke very little. At first, if we ever did meet in the street, he showed no pleas
ure or excitement, he would simply listen to me intently, make some brief reply, then shake hands and go on his way. He walked everywhere; he could be found in the most disparate places, in Botafogo, São Cristóvão, Andaraí. When he felt like it, he would take the boat over to Niterói. He said of himself:

  “I’m a wanderer, and the day I stop wandering, you can be sure I’ll be dead.”

  One day, I met him in Rua de São José, and when I told him I was going to Castelo to see the Jesuit church, which I had never visited before, he said:

  “Let’s go together, then.”

  We walked up the hill, found the church open, and went in. While I was looking at the various altars, he talked, but it took only a matter of minutes for him to become the one thing worth looking at, a living spectacle, as if everything had been reborn as it once was. I saw the city’s first churches, the Jesuit priests, monastic life, and secular life, all the key names and climactic moments. When we left the church and went over to the wall, looking out over the sea and part of the city, Elisiário carried me two centuries back. I saw the French being driven off, as if I had been commander-in-chief and had myself joined battle with them. I breathed the air of colonial Brazil, saw people long since dead. Elisiário’s great gift was his ability to evoke the past, breathing life into things extinct and reality into mere inventions.

  But his knowledge extended beyond local history or his own imaginings. You see that little statuette over there? It’s a miniature of the Venus de Milo. Once, I went to an art exhibition, and there I found Elisiário, walking gravely up and down in his vast overcoat. He joined me, and as we entered the sculpture hall, I spotted a copy of that same Venus. It was the first time I had seen the statue, and I recognized it at once because of its missing arms.