The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil (2 page)

The next year, 1889, the emperor of Brazil was dethroned by a bloodless military coup. Machado de Assis was fond of the royal family and especially of Princess Isabel, for whose eighteenth birthday and wedding, years earlier, he had written poems. Just before putting her signature on the document ending slavery, Princess Isabel had promoted him from
cavaleiro
to
oficial
of the Order of the Rose. Her father Pedro II had been a relatively enlightened ruler, a liberal thinker who had freed his own slaves decades before abolition and openly hoped that Brazil would someday no longer need a monarch. Consequently, Pedro made no resistance to the coup of November 1889, dutifully leaving the country within a day, never to return. Machado de Assis was saddened by his sovereign’s somewhat undignified exit. He would always be, in some ways, a man of the empire. He wrote most of his short stories and novels during Pedro’s long reign, 1840–89, and, afterward, the mid-nineteenth-century Brazilian empire remained the predominant setting of his fiction.

Unlike its Spanish-American neighbors—republics, all—Brazil gained national independence as a monarchy because a prince of the Portuguese royal family declared Brazilian independence himself in 1822. With little conflict—when compared with the bloodletting of Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere—he created a constitutional monarchy and allowed a free press and opposition during his (mostly-bungled) decade of rule as Pedro I. The liberal opposition pushed him out in 1831, but he sailed for Portugal leaving his four-year-old son to succeed him as Pedro II. The former opposition accepted the continuation of a monarchy, provided that it be strictly constitutional. The liberals decentralized the empire a bit, giving local and provincial governments more autonomy. They appointed regents to rule during the prince’s minority and to oversee his education. Meanwhile, in the green valleys of the Paraíba River, not far inland from Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian plantations had begun to produce coffee, which was destined to become the empire’s great economic bonanza. Like the sugar plantations that had defined Brazilian society since the 1500s, the profitable coffee plantations of nineteenth-century Brazil were worked by slaves, and the country’s coffee-planting elite found slavery equally indispensable. The 1830s saw a series of revolts in provinces far from the coffee-producing region around Rio, as liberals in the provinces led popular uprisings to strengthen their local power in the absence of a ruling monarch. The central government defeated the revolts and then, beating a retreat from liberal decentralization, it put the fourteen-year-old Pedro II on the throne ahead of schedule in 1840.

The reign of Pedro II began with a powerful pro-slavery consensus in the country’s hereditary Senate and its more accessible Chamber of Deputies. Senators and deputies divided into Liberal and Conservative parties, as in Great Britain; but nothing, it was said, so resembled a Conservative as a Liberal in power. The political life of mid-nineteenth-century Brazil was mostly about power sharing among the urban representatives of the country’s landowning oligarchy. Politics functioned as an arena in which members of this ruling class could win office for themselves and benefits—the spoils of office—for their families, friends, and supporters. It wasn’t
what
you knew but
whom
you knew that determined one’s place in Brazilian society. This, at any rate, was the view of Machado de Assis, and many historians have agreed. During the 1860s, young Machado de Assis got a good look at this system while reporting on sessions of the Senate. In his fiction, he satirized the political culture of self-serving, ideologically flaccid officeholders whose main tool was high-flown rhetoric and whose main goal in public life was self-aggrandizement. In the 1870s and 1880s, as Brazil grew and changed, the political system didn’t. Dissidence arose, especially among young men who believed that they had discovered the key to effective government in something called
positivism
. Positivism, a set of ideas derived from French and British thinkers such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, was an attempt to apply scientific ideas to society and government. In the 1880s, positivist professors held sway at Brazil’s military academy, and their ideas had an impact on the country as a whole when, in 1889, ranking officers called out their troops and put an end to a monarchy that they considered antique and obsolete.

In place of the monarchy, the army erected a federal republic and the positivists got their slogan “Ordem e Progresso” on the new national flag. It seemed at first a sweeping transformation. The centralized Brazilian empire was replaced by a United States of Brazil with a weaker federal government. Individual states developed their own armed forces, and state coffers, not federal ones, now received the proceeds of the country’s all-important export tax. Ultimately, the real locus of national power had not shifted very much with the fall of the empire. It still lay, as it had for many decades, with Brazil’s landowners, whose plantations produced the country’s export wealth. Still, the advent of the republic brought a sense of excitement and potential to city dwellers, especially in the burgeoning south.

Machado de Assis did not share the general enthusiasm. He felt that Pedro II, who died soon after going into exile, had been badly treated. He mistrusted the positivist zeal of the new republican rulers, with their activist plans to transform Brazil along the lines dictated by their scientific theories. Machado de Assis believed in the value of nineteenth-century science, but he doubted that science held the answer to all of Brazil’s problems. Now in his early fifties (which was relatively older then than now, so to speak), he was feeling a bit curmudgeonly, perhaps, but it was more than that. The positivists believed that scientific logic and assessment of evidence would automatically produce wise social policies, and they had little time for anyone disposed to question the certainty of their beliefs. “Positive certainty,” one could say, was a typically positivist attitude, and Machado de Assis mistrusted it. Scientists, after all, were human, and Machado de Assis had made a long study of human failings. Many of his stories show how often selfishness masquerades as pure logic in people’s minds. Among the things that Brazilian positivists did not question were theories of European racial superiority. This was the heyday, in fact, of scientific racism and social Darwinism—two misguided attempts to apply evolutionary theory to contemporary societies. The positivists believed that government application of these ideas to Brazil would result in an “improved” (which to them meant “more European”) population. Eugenics, the science of “improving” populations, would gain many adherents around the world until the 1930s, when the Nazis finally gave racial science a bad name, hopefully forever.

The vogue for European genes may seem a bit less grotesque when one sees it as simply part of a more general vogue for all things European. Indeed, the mystique of Europe had a powerful hold on the minds of nineteenth-century Brazilian readers—which is to say, on the upper crust of a few cosmopolitan cities, among which Rio de Janeiro was first and foremost. Twenty-first-century readers of English are likely to be surprised by the slight presence of local color in most of Machado’s writing. Change the names to French, delete the few references to slavery and African descent, and one could often think that Machado’s characters inhabited a fictional Paris. The women’s clothing is very carefully modeled on the most recent French fashion plates, the men’s suits, cut on English lines and usually of dark wool more appropriate to a London fog than a tropical sun. His stories are peppered with references to European authors like Voltaire or Shakespeare, mention of European composers like Mozart and Beethoven, and allusions to the history and mythology of classical Greece and Rome. None of this was particular to Machado de Assis; rather, it illustrates the extent to which the ruling classes of nineteenth-century Brazil had a Eurocentric worldview. Britain and, above all, France were most central to this perspective; Portugal was distinctly less important. Britain stood for trade and political stability; France, for artistic and intellectual achievement. The economically dynamic United States also had its admirers, though it could not compete in the minds of nineteenth-century Brazilian readers with the prestige of Britain and France. Likewise, Brazilian readers had very little interest in their South American neighbors (whom they compared unfavorably to Brazil, with its coffee-driven prosperity and its monarchical stability) until the closing years of the century. By the 1880s, though, Buenos Aires, with its Italian-immigrant population and urban reforms based on a Parisian model, had taken the lead in the continental contest to imitate Europe. Rio de Janeiro (and Mexico City) hurriedly followed that lead and created their own simulated Parisian avenues shortly before Machado’s death in 1908.

The Brazilian elite’s self-refashioning on a European model was not so much actual as aspirational. Aside from the renovated downtowns and the best neighborhoods of a few cities, little about nineteenth-century Brazil reminded anyone of France. Brazil’s tropical plantations with their enslaved workforce and its interminable cattle ranches sprawling across arid plains looked nothing like Britain. Most Brazilians shared a popular culture in which European elements combined with non-European ones. One Machado story, “A Famous Man,” describes a composer whose ambition is to write classical music. To make a living, though, he produces dance music of the sort that local musicians performed with a syncopated lilt of African inspiration, the forerunner of twentieth-century samba. The population of Rio avidly consumes his musical creations, but the composer, unable to create within classical forms, considers himself a failure. In Machado’s time the vigorous pre-Lenten carnival celebration shut down Rio for three days a year, but its soundtrack and parade motifs were still more European than Brazilian. In a newspaper column of 1893, Machado de Assis recalled the customary carnival water fight, most especially boys against girls, and the mass production of costumes representing figures of European history: a musketeer, a Venetian doge, an Austrian emperor. In the very hierarchical society of nineteenth-century Brazil (where, it has been said, no one was equal because everyone was somewhere above or below others), a person’s connection to Europe—European genes, European fashion, European science, European art—was a chief sorting principle. To have blue eyes, speak French, wear an English hat, or attend the opera improved one’s social status.

European travel was prestigious as well, of course. Machado himself never visited Europe, despite his great interest in all things European, probably because of his precarious health. Meanwhile, his elite characters frequently go to Europe on business or for extended vacations, although
vacation
is not the right word for members of a leisure class. Machado never belonged to that class. He had a secure job and rented a nice house in a pleasant neighborhood, but he was never wealthy. In his newspaper columns he chronicled urban innovations such as telephones and commented on the advent of regular steamship connections linking Rio to Europe and the United States as well as to Brazil’s many provincial capitals, and he rode the streetcar daily but never took a voyage. His most extended residence outside of his beloved Rio de Janeiro was a few weeks at something like a health spa in the mountains above the city when his eyes were so bad that he was nearly blind. Travel in nineteenth-century Brazil was not easy. The country’s roads remained excruciatingly poor, and the relatively few railroads linked coffee plantations to the export facilities rather than knitting the Brazilian nation together. Still, Machado’s characters frequently visit their rural estates or travel to and from the far-flung provinces of the Brazilian empire on government work. A few words about the countryside and the provinces, then.

The Amazonian north of the country, something like half of the national territory, was particularly remote from life in Rio de Janeiro. The vast rainforest stood largely unaltered since its first exploration by Europeans four hundred years earlier. An extensive river network, including the great Amazon itself, supplied the chief avenues of communication in the North, and most of the Portuguese-speaking population was scattered along the riverbanks. Many indigenous people of the forest tribes did not yet consider themselves Brazilian. Beginning in the 1870s, Brazilians from outside Amazonia came to labor as rubber tappers in isolated forest locations, bleeding white latex sap from wild rubber trees. Machado’s friend, the Amazonian writer José Veríssimo, dramatized the exploitation suffered by rubber tappers, but profitable exportation of latex for rubber tires made a notable Brazilian contribution to European modernization before World War I. Many of the rubber tappers were migrating from the Northeast, a much more populous Brazilian region.

The Northeast (called simply “the North” in Machado’s day) comprised two contrasting subregions: the sugar plantation belt reaching down the coast from Pernambuco to Bahia and, inland, the enormous arid territory that Brazilians call the
sertão.
The coastal plantation belt of the Northeast was once the social, economic, and political center of Brazil. That was no longer true during the lifetime of Machado de Assis, although the plantation-owning aristocracy of the Northeast still had national clout, and the old port cities of the northeastern provinces, like Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, and Salvador, the capital of Bahia (and, for two centuries, the capital of Brazil), remained important regional centers. The cattle ranchers of the
sertão,
on the other hand, had (and have) never been particularly prosperous; periodic droughts devastated that already arid country in the 1870s, producing a general exodus. Since then, the
sertão
has periodically sent migrating workers to other parts of Brazil, especially to the Southeast, the country’s most developed region.

In Machado’s day, the Southeast was already the most important region economically. Rio de Janeiro, the chief Southeastern port, was the national capital. The great Southeastern coffee boom launched the city of São Paulo on the path to becoming the country’s agricultural and industrial powerhouse. Fueled by its vast coffee crop, the province of São Paulo became the fastest-growing part of Brazil and the chief destination of European immigration. Crucially, São Paulo was the only part of the country (arguably, the only place in the world) where a plantation-owning elite built railroads and turned a commodity-export boom into diversified economic growth and, eventually, into self-sustaining industrialization. The city of São Paulo could not yet rival Rio as the country’s chief urban center in 1908, but the twentieth century would not be very old before that happened.