“I’m not burning my book,” said Felícia.
“Oh, I’d happily burn mine.”
“Papa would just buy you another one.”
“Before he did, though, I could stay at home and play. School is so boring!”
We were still talking about this when Uncle Zeca and the stranger came over to join us. The stranger gently raised our faces to him and regarded us gravely, then he left, saying:
“Nine o’clock, is it? I’ll be there.”
“Come along,” Uncle Zeca told us, when the man had gone.
I wanted to ask him who the man was; he seemed vaguely familiar. Felícia thought the same, but neither of us could put a name to his face; however, his promise to be there at nine o’clock struck home. It must be a party or a dance, because we were usually sent to bed at nine o’clock. Given the exceptional circumstances, though, we would still be awake. When we reached a muddy puddle, I grabbed Felícia’s hand, and we both leapt over it, so energetically that my schoolbook almost fell out of my pocket. I glanced at Uncle Zeca to gauge his reaction; he was shaking his head disapprovingly. I laughed and Felicia smiled and we continued on down the sidewalk.
It was a day for meeting strangers. The next two strangers were riding donkeys, and one of them was a woman. They had come from the fields. Uncle Zeca went out into the street to talk to them, having first told us to wait. The donkeys stopped, and I said that they had done so of their own accord because they knew Uncle Zeca, too, an idea that Felícia hotly rejected, and which I defended, laughing. I wasn’t really serious; it was all in good fun. Anyway, we waited, studying those two country folk. They were both very thin, the woman even more so than the man, and she was younger too; he had gray hair. We didn’t hear what they said, the man or Uncle Zeca, but we saw the husband eyeing us curiously and saying something to his wife, who then also looked at us, this time with something like pity in her eyes. Then they moved on, Uncle Zeca rejoined us, and we set off again for the house.
Our house was in the next street, near the corner. As we turned that corner, we were horrified to see that all the doors on our house were draped in black cloth. We instinctively stopped and turned to Uncle Zeca. He came over to us, took us each by the hand, and was about to say something, but the words stuck in his throat. He walked on, taking us with him. When we arrived, the doors were both ajar. I don’t know if I mentioned before that the house was a notions store. Inquisitive onlookers were standing in the street. The windows opposite and on either side were filled with heads. There was a sudden buzz of voices as we approached. Needless to say, Felícia and I could not believe what we were seeing. Uncle Zeca pushed open one of the doors, we all went in, and then he shut the door behind us, and led us down the hallway to the dining room and the bedroom. Inside, next to the bed, sat my mother, her head in her hands. When she realized we were there, she leapt to her feet and came to embrace us, weeping and crying:
“My children, your father is dead!”
The shock was enormous, even though confusion and uncertainty partially numbed my ability to grasp this news. I couldn’t move; indeed, I felt afraid to do so. Dead? How? Why? I ask those questions now in order to move the action along, because, at the time, I asked nothing of myself or of anyone else. I could hear my mother’s words echoing inside my head, along with her loud sobbing. She clung to us and dragged us over to the bed, where her husband’s body lay, and she made us kiss his hand. I felt so removed from it all that, despite everything, I did not, at first, understand, although the sadness and silence of the people around the bed helped make it clear that my father really had died. It wasn’t a saint’s day, full of fun and play, it wasn’t a party, we wouldn’t be allowed to idle away the hours, long or short, far from the torments of school. I cannot honestly say whether that fall from such a delightful dream increased my childish grief or not; best not think about it. My father was lying there dead, with no leaping, no dancing, no laughter, no music bands, all of which were also dead. If I had been told when Uncle Zeca came to the school why they had come looking for me, joy would never have entered my heart, from which it was now being soundly beaten out.
The funeral took place the next day at nine o’clock in the morning, and the friend my Uncle Zeca had met in the street was probably there, too, the one who had said goodbye with a promise to be there at nine. I didn’t see the ceremony; I remember only a few figures, not many, all dressed in black. My godfather, who owned an import-export business, was also present, as was his wife, and she took me to a room at the back of the church to show me some engravings. When we left, I heard my mother’s cries, the muffled sound of footsteps, a few murmured words from the people taking hold of the coffin handles, something like: “turn to the side . . . slightly more to the left . . . that’s it, hold on tight . . .” Then, in the distance, I saw the hearse followed by the closed carriages . . .
There went my father and the holiday! A day off from school, but no rest! It wasn’t just one day, either, it was eight, eight days of grief, during which I occasionally thought about school. My mother would weep as she made our mourning clothes, in between visits from people offering their condolences. I cried too; I didn’t see my father when I would usually see him, didn’t hear his voice at the table or at the counter, or the tender words he addressed to the birds, for he was a great lover of birds, and kept three or four of them in cages. My mother barely spoke, or, when she did, it was only to outsiders. That is how I learned that my father had died of apoplexy. I heard this over and over, because visitors always asked how he had died, and she would tell them everything, the hour, the expression on his face, the circumstances; he had gone to get a drink of water, and was just filling his glass and standing at the window that looked out onto the courtyard. I learned the story by heart just from hearing her tell it so often.
And yet, even so, my schoolfellows still came to peer inside my mind. One of them even asked when I would be back.
“On Saturday, my dear,” said my mother, when I repeated this imagined question. “Although, since the mass will be on Friday, perhaps it would be best if you went back on the Monday.”
“I’d prefer Saturday,” I said.
“As you wish,” she said.
She didn’t smile, but if she’d been able to, she would have smiled with pleasure to see that I actually wanted to return to school earlier. And since she knew how I hated school, I wonder what she made of this sudden eagerness on my part. She probably attributed some loftier meaning to it, a message from heaven or from her husband. And if you’re reading this with a smile on your face, I certainly wasn’t idle during that time. No, I had no rest, because my mother made me study, and I not only hated studying, I hated having to be seated, with the book in my hands, in a corner or at the table. I cursed the book, the table, and the chair. I resorted to something that I heartily recommend to other idle boys: I left my eyes on the page and opened the door to my imagination. I ran to snatch up skyrockets, to listen to hurdy-gurdies, to dance with girls, to sing, to laugh, to have fights, whether pretend or in play, whichever is the more appropriate term.
Once, when my mother found me in the parlor without my book, she told me off, but I explained that I’d been thinking about my father. This explanation made her cry, and it wasn’t a complete lie on my part, either, for I had been remembering the last little gift he gave me, and I could see him with it in his hand.
Felícia lived as sadly as I did, but, I must confess, the main cause of her sadness was not the same as mine. She liked to play, too, but she didn’t really miss playing, she spent all her time with our mother, sewing with her, and, once, I even saw her wiping away her tears. Slightly annoyed, I considered imitating her, and put my hand in my pocket to take out my handkerchief. My hand entered my pocket with no real feeling and, finding no handkerchief there, withdrew with no real regret. I think that my gesture lacked not only originality, but sincerity too.
Don’t think badly of me. I was genuinely sad during those long
, silent, reclusive days. Once, I decided to go into the store, which had opened again immediately after the funeral, and where the clerk continued to work. I could talk to him, watch him selling cotton and needles, measuring out ribbons, or I could go to the door, out onto the sidewalk, even as far as the street corner . . . My mother smothered that dream soon after it was born, sending the slave-woman to fetch me and bring me back into the house to study. I tore at my hair, clenched my fists like someone about to land a punch, and, possibly, even wept with rage.
The book I was studying reminded me of school, and the image of school consoled me. I was really missing it by then. I could see from afar the faces of the other boys, the silly expressions we all put on as we sat at our desks, and our sheer glee as we gamboled home. I felt on my face one of those little paper pellets we used to provoke each other with, and I made one of my own and threw it at my imaginary provoker. As often happened, the pellet hit someone else’s head, and he soon took his revenge, although when it hit one of the shyer boys, he would merely pull a face. It wasn’t proper fun, but it was enough. The exile I had so blithely abandoned when Uncle Zeca came to fetch me seemed to me now like a remote heaven, and I was afraid of losing it. There was no gaiety at home, hardly a word spoken, barely a movement made. It was around this time that I started drawing endless cats in the margins of my schoolbook, cats and pigs. They didn’t exactly cheer me up, but they were a distraction.
The seventh-day mass restored me to the street. As it happened, I didn’t go back to school on the Saturday, I went to my godfather’s house, where I was free to talk a little more, and on the Sunday, I was allowed to stand outside the shop door. This wasn’t complete happiness, though. Complete happiness came on Monday, at school. I arrived all dressed in black and the other boys eyed me curiously, but it felt so different to be back beside my schoolfellows that I forgot that joyless holiday and discovered instead a different joy, with not a holiday in sight.
EVOLUTION
MY NAME IS Inácio and his is Benedito. I won’t give our last names out of a sense of decorum, which I’m sure all people of discretion will appreciate. Inácio is quite enough to be going on with, and you’ll have to make do with Benedito. It’s not much, but it’s something, and chimes with Juliet’s philosophy: “What’s in a name?” she asked of her lover. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Let us move on to Benedito’s particular smell.
And let us state at once that he was the most unlikely Romeo in the world. He was forty-five when I met him, although I won’t say precisely when we met, because everything in this story is going to be mysterious and incomplete. As I say, he was forty-five and endowed with a lot of black hair; and any hair that wasn’t black he treated with a chemical substance so effective that you couldn’t tell black from black—except when he got out of bed, but when he got out of bed, there was no one to see him. Everything else was entirely natural: legs, arms, head, eyes, clothes, shoes, watch chain, and cane. Even the diamond tie pin—one of the loveliest I’ve ever seen—was natural and genuine, and had cost him a fair penny too; I myself saw him buy it at . . . ah, but I nearly gave the name of the jeweler; let’s just say it was on Rua do Ouvidor.
Morally, he was entirely himself. No one really changes his character, and Benedito was of good character, or, rather, he was a quiet soul. Intellectually, he was less original. He could be compared to a popular inn, where ideas of all kinds and from all over would visit and sit down at the table along with the family. Sometimes two enemies would be staying there or else people who simply disliked each other; they would not quarrel, though, for the landlord imposed on his guests a reciprocally indulgent attitude. Thus he was able to reconcile a vague kind of atheism with the two fraternities he had founded, possibly in Gávea or Tijuca or Engenho Velho. He thus made promiscuous use of devotion, irreligion, and silk socks. Not that I ever saw his socks, but he had no secrets from his friends.
We met on a trip to Vassouras. We had left the train and got into the cab that would take us from the station to the city. We exchanged a few words and were soon conversing freely, borne along on the circumstances that had brought us together, even before we really knew each other.
Naturally, the first topic of conversation was the enormous progress brought to us by the railroads. Benedito recalled the days when every journey was made by donkey. We told a few anecdotes then, mentioned a few names, and agreed that the country’s progress was conditional on the existence of the railroads. Only those who have never traveled can possibly be ignorant of the value of these exchanges of grave, solid banalities, which help to dissipate the tedium of a journey. One’s mind breathes more freely, one’s very muscles revel in that pleasant interchange, the blood flows easily, one feels at peace with God and with mankind.
“Even our children won’t see this country crisscrossed by railroads,” he said.
“No, you’re right. Do you have children yourself?”
“No, none.”
“Nor do I. Anyway, it’ll be another fifty years before we get the railroads we need, and yet it’s what we most need. I always compare Brazil to a child who is only at the crawling stage, and who will only begin to walk when we have a whole network of railroads.”
“What a fine image!” cried Benedito, his eyes shining.
“I don’t know about fine, but it is, I hope, at least fitting.”
“It’s both fine and fitting,” Benedito said warmly. “You’re quite right. Brazil is only at the crawling stage, and will only begin to walk when we have a whole network of railroads.”
We reached Vassouras, and I made my way to the house of the municipal judge, an old friend of mine, while Benedito was only staying in Vassouras for a day before traveling into the interior. A week later, I returned to Rio de Janeiro, alone this time, and he returned shortly afterward. We met at the theater and talked at length, exchanging news; Benedito ended by inviting me to have lunch with him the following day, and he gave me a lunch fit for a prince, followed by good cigars and animated talk. I noticed, however, that his conversation made less of an impression on me than it had during the journey, where it had refreshed the mind and left us both at peace with God and with mankind; but maybe the lunch was to blame for that. It really was magnificent, and it would be quite wrong to place Lucullus’s lavish table in Plato’s modest house. Between the coffee and the cognac, he leaned one elbow on the edge of table, gazed at his lit cigar, and said:
“On my recent journey, I had occasion to see how right you were about Brazil still being only at the crawling stage.”
“Really?”
“Yes, it’s exactly as you were saying in the carriage that took us to Vassouras that day. We will only start to walk when we have a proper network of railroads. That is so true.”
And he spoke of many other things, about life in the interior, how difficult things were there, how backward, although he also remarked on the kindness of the people and their hopes for progress. Unfortunately, the government was not responding to the needs of the country; indeed, it seemed intent on holding the country back, keeping us lagging behind the other American nations. However, we had to convince ourselves that principles are everything and mankind nothing. The people are not made for the government, the government is made for the people, and abyssus abyssum invocat. Then he showed me the other rooms, all of which were furnished impeccably. He showed me his collections of paintings, coins, antiquarian books, stamps, and weapons, including swords and rapiers, while admitting that he knew nothing about fencing. Among the paintings, I noticed a lovely portrait of a young woman, and when I asked who she was, Benedito smiled.
“Say no more,” I said, smiling too.
“No, I won’t deny it,” he went on. “She was a young woman of whom I was very fond. She’s pretty, isn’t she? You can’t imagine how beautiful she was in the flesh. Her lips were carmine-red, and her cheeks like roses, and her eyes as dark as night. And her teeth! Like pearls they were. Sheer perf
ection.”
We then went into his study. It was vast and elegant, but somehow rather banal, although it lacked for nothing. There were two bookcases full of beautifully bound volumes, a mappa mundi, and two maps of Brazil. The desk was made of exquisitely turned ebony, and lying casually open on the desk was a copy of Laemmert’s Almanac. The inkwell was made of crystal, “rock crystal,” he informed me, explaining this as he had explained all the other furnishings. In the next room, there was an organ, which he himself played, for he was a great lover of music and spoke about it with enthusiasm, citing his favorite operas and their best arias. He added that, as a boy, he had learned to play the flute, but had soon abandoned it, which, he concluded, was rather a shame, since the flute is the most nostalgic of instruments. He ushered me into still more rooms, then we went out into the garden, which was truly splendid, with art working hand in hand with nature, and nature crowning art. There were roses, for example, of every type and from every region. “There’s no denying,” he said, “that the rose is the very queen of flowers.”
I left feeling utterly charmed. We met on other occasions, too, in the street, at the theater, in the houses of mutual friends, and I grew quite fond of him. Four months later, I traveled to Europe on business that would require me to be absent for a whole year; he had an election to deal with, for he wanted to be a deputy. In fact, I was the one who encouraged him in this ambition, albeit without any real political intention, but simply to be agreeable; if you’ll forgive the comparison, it was rather as if I had complimented him on the cut of his vest. He took up the idea and duly stood for election. One day, as I was crossing a street in Paris, who should I bump into but Benedito.
“What are you doing here?” I cried.
“I lost the election,” he said, “and so decided to visit Europe instead.”
He did not leave my side then, and we traveled together for what remained of our stay. He confessed that, despite losing the election, he was still keen to get into parliament, indeed, he was even keener. He told me of his grand plan.
The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis Page 104