The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil

by Machado De Assis

  “I find it difficult to understand.”

  “You’ll understand when I tell you what happened next. My actions will explain my feelings. Actions are everything. The most perfect definition of love cannot equal a lover’s kiss, and, if I remember correctly, an ancient philosopher explained movement by walking away. Let’s go to what happened next. As the consciousness of the human being faded, that of the lieutenant became brighter and more intense. Human joys and sufferings could hardly, any longer, awaken in me a smile or a nod of compassion. After three weeks I had become a different person, or, rather, not fully a person at all.

  “One day Aunt Marcolina got some alarming news. One of her married daughters, who lived about five leagues distant, had taken ill, deathly ill. Goodbye, nephew! Goodbye, mister second lieutenant! The distraught mother packed her bags at once. She asked for her brother-in-law to go with her and for me to take care of the estate in her absence. I believe that, had she not been so upset, she would have done the opposite, asking him to take care of the estate and me to go with her. As it was, I soon found myself alone with the household servants. Immediately I felt panicked, as if the walls of a prison had risen around me on all sides. My external soul was contracting, you see, limited now to the presence of a few simple slaves. The lieutenant still dominated in me, but my entire being had grown weaker and less intense. Meanwhile, the slaves addressed me with an admiration and humility that compensated, somewhat, for the loss of family affection. That evening, they fussed over me endlessly. ‘Mister lieutenant is so handsome!’ ‘Mister lieutenant is going to be a colonel and marry a general’s daughter.’ … It was music to my ears. I was ecstatic. But little did I suspect their evil intentions, the traitors!”

  “To kill you?”

  “If only it had been that.”

  “What could be worse?”

  “Just listen. The next morning I awoke to find myself alone. The scheming traitors, whether of their own accord or seduced by someone else, had decided to run away during the night, and that’s what they did. I found myself utterly alone, staring at the four walls of the house, the deserted outbuildings, and the fields beyond, with not a soul in sight. I ran through the house and the slave quarters, everywhere, and saw nothing, nobody, not a living soul. Not even a little slave kid. No, only cocks and hens, a couple of mules philosophically twitching away flies, and three oxen. Even the dogs had gone with the slaves. Not a single human being. Do you think that was better than being killed? It was worse. Not because of fear, though. I was plucky enough to feel no fear, I swear to you, during the first hours. I felt bad for Aunt Marcolina’s financial loss, and I wondered whether I should deliver the sad news to her immediately or stay with the house and take care of it. I adopted the latter plan. My cousin was seriously ill just now. Why should I burden her mother with this further catastrophe that she could do nothing about? And anyway, I expected the return of Uncle Peçanha’s brother that day or the next. He had traveled merely to accompany my aunt, and they had been gone already thirty-six hours. But the morning went by without a trace of him, and in the afternoon I was troubled by an odd sensation, something like a vague numbness affecting my entire body. Peçanha’s brother did not appear that day, nor the next, nor for the rest of that week. My solitude assumed enormous proportions. Days were never longer. Never did the sun scorch the earth with a more grueling obstinacy. The clock struck the hour regularly every century it seemed, and the tick-tock, tick-tock of its pendulum tapped at my internal soul like an eternal torment. When, many years later, I read an American poem, by Longfellow I think, ‘The Old Clock on the Stair,’ I confess that I got chills. The pendulum in the poem says ‘Never, forever / Forever, never,’ and that’s just what Aunt Marcolina’s clock said. It wasn’t so much the sound of a pendulum as a dialog in the abyss. The whisper of the void. And, oh, the night! Not that the night was more silent. The silence was the same, day and night. Night was shadow, and the dark made the loneliness simultaneously vaster and more constricted. Tick-tock. No one in the sitting room, or on the veranda, or outside, no one anywhere. … Do you think this is funny?”

  “It sounds as though you were a little frightened.”

  “How I wish I could have been frightened! At least I would have felt alive. In that situation, though, I couldn’t even feel fear, not what people usually call fear, anyway. I was like a zombie, a sleepwalker, a mechanical doll. Sleeping was entirely different from waking, though. Sleep brought relief, and not because it brought oblivion, but for another reason. I think that I can explain the phenomenon this way. Sleep eliminated the need for an external soul and allowed the internal soul to act, instead. In my dreams, I proudly put on my uniform for my family and friends, who repeated that I was handsome and called me ‘lieutenant.’ A close friend of the family arrived, saying I was to be promoted to first lieutenant or captain or major. All that revived me. Then I woke up and, in the light of day, my revived self faded with the dream, my internal soul lost efficacy, and once again I depended on the exterior version, which seemed to have gone away entirely. And it didn’t come back. Where was everyone? I went outside and wandered here and there like Bluebeard’s wife begging to be rescued by her sister in the French legend. ‘Soeur Anne, she calls, soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?’1 Nothing, nothing at all. Nothing but the dust in the road and the grass on the hillsides. Back in the house, more than a little spooked, I lay down on the sofa. Tick-tock, tick-tock. I got up and walked from room to room, drumming my fingers on the window glass, whistling. Once I got the idea of writing something, a newspaper editorial, a novel, an ode—I couldn’t make up my mind. I sat down and wrote a few random words and phrases to combine thematically, but the theme, like Aunt Marcolina, refused to materialize. Soeur Anne, soeur Anne … but no, nothing at all. As I stared at the paper, the ink only looked blacker, and the page, whiter.”

  “Weren’t you eating?”

  “I ate poorly—fruit, handfuls of manioc flour, roots roasted in the fire—but I would have endured it all cheerfully were it not for my deep depression. I recited passages of Latin oratory, half of the great epic by Camões,2 and all manner of other verses, a thirty-volume anthology, more or less. Sometimes I did gymnastic exercises; other times I pinched my legs. The effect was a slight physical sensation, pain or fatigue, nothing more. Everything silent, a colossal, infinite silence, only underscored by the eternal tick-tock of the pendulum. Tick-tock, tick-tock …”

  “It does sound like enough to drive one crazy.”

  “You haven’t heard the worst. I should tell you first that, since I had been left alone, I had not looked in the mirror even once. I had no conscious reason to avoid it. I just hadn’t done it—maybe because, unconsciously, I didn’t want to see two of me in that lonely house. If that is the true explanation, nothing better demonstrates the contradictions of the human condition because, after a week, I got a sudden urge to look in the mirror precisely to see myself duplicated. I took one look, and backed away. The looking glass seemed part of the universal plot against me. It did not show a sharp, complete image, but rather, something blurred, shadowy, diffuse, fragmentary. Unless one questions the laws of physics, we must accept that the mirror reflected my outlines and features accurately. It must have shown me as I was. But that was not my feeling at the moment. On the contrary, I attributed the phenomenon to my upset state, and then I did feel fear. If this situation lasted much longer, I could go mad. ‘I’m getting out of here,’ I said to myself. I raised my arm in a gesture of irritation, and also, of decision. Looking in the mirror, I saw the gesture repeated, but in an unraveling, mutilated way.

  “I started to get dressed, muttering aloud, coughing for no reason, noisily shaking each garment, and voicing my annoyance with the buttons, just to hear myself speak. Every now and then I glanced furtively at the looking glass. The image was still blurred and confused … I continued to dress. And then I had an unthinking impulse, an inexplicable inspiration. Can you guess what it was?”

 
; “Tell us.”

  “I was staring, horrified, at the jumbled outlines of my own slowly dissolving features … when it came to me. No, you’ll never guess what I did.”

  “Tell us, then. Tell us.”

  “I went to get my uniform. I put it on, laced and buttoned it. When I was entirely ready, I raised my eyes again to the mirror and … do I need to tell you? There in the looking glass was a sharp image of my full self with nothing missing, not a line out of place, a second lieutenant in the National Guard who had recovered his external soul. The soul that had departed with Aunt Marcolina and her runaway slaves reappeared to me on the surface of the glass. Imagine a man who emerges, little by little, from a deep lethargy. He opens his unseeing eyes, then begins to distinguish people from objects but without recognizing them. Then he sees this is So-and-So, and that’s somebody else. This is a chair, and that’s a sofa. Gradually, everything returns to what it was before he lost consciousness. That is how it was with me. I walked here and there, raised my arms, smiled, always watching the mirror—and the image reproduced my actions precisely. I no longer felt like a mechanical doll but like a living being. From then on, I was a different person. Every day at a certain time, I put on my uniform and sat in front of the looking glass to read, meditate, and gaze at myself. After two or three hours, I took it off again and, in that manner, was able to get through six more days of solitude without trouble …”

  When his listeners regained their senses, the narrator had gone.

  CHAPTER ON HATS

  In 1883, the year after “The Looking Glass,” Machado published two excellent stories in which women are central characters. “Capítulo dos chapeus,” which takes its title from a play by Moliere, is told as a mock epic: “Sing, Muse!” Rather than epic heroism, however, the story involves a domestic spat. Though he often wrote for women, Machado de Assis wasn’t a feminist, and we are invited to laugh here at the expense of the story’s female protagonists, Mariana and Sophia. But even Machado’s flawed characters, which includes about all of them, usually manage to be sympathetic to some degree. This story is lighthearted satire rather than deadly irony. In it, we see the world of women of the elite class whom a gentleman might invite to drop by the Chamber of Deputies. Like Gonçalves and his student friends, they go to see and be seen on Ouvidor Street, but only during the day. As respectable ladies, they could never be out at night without a male escort. They rule over homes in comfortable residential neighborhoods (served by streetcars) and over domestic slaves, who appear in this story hardly at all. Their lives are consumed by an annual round of elite activities: attending operas, horse races, and fancy balls, going to spend the hottest months of the year in Petrópolis, the mountain resort city not far from Rio de Janeiro, where Pedro II built a summer palace. Welcome to their world.

  Muse, sing of the annoyance of Mariana, wife of the right honorable Conrado Seabra, on that April morning in 1879. What was the cause of all the fuss? Just a hat! Lightweight, rather natty, not an elegant, top hat …

  Conrado, a lawyer with an office on Quitanda Street, wore it every day on his way downtown and to court hearings, as well. He only didn’t wear it to formal receptions, the opera, funerals, and other such ceremonious occasions. Otherwise, he had worn it constantly for the last five or six years, the entire length of his marriage. Then, on that particular April morning, having finished his breakfast, Conrado began to roll himself a cigarette, and Mariana announced with a smile that she had a small request.

  “What is it, my angel?”

  “Could you do something for me, make a sacrifice on my behalf?”

  “One sacrifice? Why … ten or twenty!”

  “Then don’t wear that hat anymore to go downtown.”

  “Why? Is it hideous?”

  “I’m not saying it’s hideous. It’s a hat for around the neighborhood, a hat to wear in the afternoon or at night. But downtown? For a lawyer? I can’t see it.”

  “That’s just silly, dear.”

  “Okay, but will you do it as a favor to me?”

  Conrado struck a match, lit his cigarette, and made a humorous gesture, preparing to change the subject. But his wife insisted, and her insistence, which had been gentle and imploring, turned suddenly rough and imperious. Conrado was shocked. He knew his wife, who was ordinarily a passive creature, soft and tender, of great plasticity. She could wear a royal diadem or a common scarf with the same, blissful indifference. The proof was that, after her footloose and fancy-free last two unmarried years, the wedding had made her a homebody. She rarely went out, did so only at the urging of her consort, and always seemed happiest at home. Curtains, furnishings, and beautiful objects made up for the absence of children; she loved them like a mother. To see the curtains creased just so, each piece of furniture in its place, produced visceral pleasure in Mariana. Of the three windows that looked onto the street, for example, one was always precisely half open, and always the same one. Not even her husband’s study escaped her need for reliable regularity. If he happened to straighten his books, she might intervene to restore disorder. Her mental habits displayed the same monotonous uniformity. Mariana read the same books over and over, all standard fare for a proper young Brazilian lady: Joaquim Macedo’s Moreninha, seven times; Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, ten times; Madame Craven’s Mot de l’énigme, eleven times.1

  In other words, how to explain her sudden desire to change his hat? The night before, while her husband attended a meeting of the bar association, Mariana’s father had visited his daughter. He was a good old man, lean and slow moving, a retired career bureaucrat nostalgic for the days when government offices were full of men in long tailcoats. A tailcoat was what he still wore to funerals decades later, and not, as one might expect, because of the solemnity of death or the gravity of the last farewell, but simply because he had the habit of doing so. He gave the same reason for dining daily at two o’clock in the afternoon and for twenty other precisely repeated customs. He was so rigid about his habits that he dined at two even on his daughter’s wedding anniversary, when, every year, he was invited to a six-o’clock dinner at her house. He sat at her table, on those days, and watched everyone else eat, although afterward he did usually accept a bite of dessert, a glass of wine, and some coffee. That was Conrado’s father-in-law. How, indeed, could he approve of his son-in-law’s failure to wear a top hat downtown? He couldn’t; he endured the natty little hat silently, at best, in recognition of Conrado’s fine qualities. He endured it until he happened to see it one day, on a downtown street, conversing with the elegant top hats of several distinguished gentlemen, and he found it disgraceful. That evening, going to Mariana’s house and finding his son-in-law out, he opened his heart. The little hat was an abomination, and it must be banished forever.

  Conrado did not know about these origins of the request. In view of his wife’s well-known docility and his own authoritarian inclinations, he couldn’t understand her stubbornness, and it annoyed him profoundly. He contained himself, even so, preferring to make fun of her request. He spoke with such irony and disdain that the poor woman felt humiliated. Twice, Mariana tried to rise from the table, so Conrado held her there, the first time with a light grip around her wrist, the second time with his domineering gaze. And with a smile, he said:

  “Look, dear, I have a philosophical reason not to do what you ask. I’ve never told you about this, and now I’m going to confide in you totally.”

  Mariana bit her lip and said nothing more. She picked up a table knife and began idly to tap the table, just to do something, but her husband did not permit even that. Gently, he took the knife from her hand and continued:

  “Choosing a hat is not as random a thing as you may suppose. To the contrary, the choice is governed by metaphysical principles. He who chooses a hat does not exercise his free will. An obscure determinism is at work. Hat buyers cherish the illusion of free will, and hat sellers who watch a customer try on thirty or forty hats without buying any likewise imagine free will to
be at work. But, no, there is a metaphysical principle involved: The hat completes the man; it is an extension of his being, decreed for all eternity. Changing a hat is an act of mutilation. Oddly, this principle has so far remained unremarked. Wise men have studied everything from the stars to earthworms—Laplace with his Mécanique Céleste, for example, or Darwin with his book On the Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms—you haven’t read Laplace? And yet no one has thought to examine a hat exhaustively from all angles. No one has noticed the metaphysics of hats. I may write a study of the matter myself. Now, though, it’s a quarter to ten o’clock. You can reflect on what I’ve said. Who knows? It may be, in fact, that the man completes the hat, rather than vice versa …”

  Mariana finally managed to get up and leave the table. She had understood nothing but his sarcastic tone, and inside she was weeping with humiliation. Her husband went upstairs to dress and came back down a few minutes later to stand in front of her with the famous hat on his head. Mariana found it disgraceful, just as her father had said, vulgar and disgraceful. Conrado took his leave with considerable ceremony and went out.

  The lady’s irritation had lessened somewhat, but the taste of humiliation remained in her mouth. Mariana did not clamor and cry as she had expected to do, however. She reviewed the situation to herself, remembering Conrado’s sarcasm and the simplicity of her request, which might be a little demanding, she recognized, but which hardly justified such rude behavior. She paced back and forth restlessly. She went into the front room and looked from the half-opened window at her husband standing on the street below, waiting for the streetcar, his back to the house, the eternal, disgraceful little hat on his head. Mariana was overcome by hatred of the ridiculous little thing. How had she stood it for so many years? She considered all those years, how docile she had been, consenting always to her husband’s desires and whims, and she asked herself if that weren’t precisely the cause of his behavior that morning. She was a patsy, a pushover. If she had done the same as countless other wives—Clara and Sophia, for example—who treated their husbands as husbands should be treated … well, she would not have suffered the man’s sarcasm that morning, not by half. One thought led to another, and she decided to go out. She dressed and went to visit Sophia, a friend from school, just for a breath of fresh air, not intending to tell her anything.