The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil (3 page)

The city of Rio de Janeiro itself was Machado’s most familiar geographical setting. He mentions specific street corners with the confidence that his readers will know the exact location. At the time of his birth in 1839, Rio had little more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, more than half of whom were of African descent and more than a third of whom were enslaved. Rio’s public lighting and sewerage were rudimentary, its plazas unadorned, and its public buildings unimpressive. In contrast to its later reputation, the city’s nightlife was minimal in the nineteenth century. Many of the principal families spent much of their time at country houses in the steep green hills above the small grid of tile-roofed colonial-style buildings and twin-towered churches. The lifetime of Machado de Assis was a period of transformation in Rio—of burgeoning trade, proliferating theaters, hotels, periodicals, clubs, and associations. Yet most of his stories are set before the particularly rapid changes of the 1880s and 1890s, when Italian immigrants and internal migrants arrived by the thousands and civil engineers began to alter the shape of the city by leveling some of its granite hills, filling in low spots, and giving its waterfront something like its modern contours. The iconic beachfront neighborhood of Copacabana was still a sleepy village inaccessible to central Rio until the opening of a tunnel in the last years of Machado’s life. The most glamorous part of nineteenth-century Rio was the narrow downtown thoroughfare called Ouvidor Street, lined for blocks with fashionable European shops and cafés and places of public diversion. Ouvidor Street is a constant, iconic reference point in Machado’s stories and novels.

Women figure prominently in this cityscape. At the time of Machado’s birth, Brazil was only just beginning to lose a reputation for cloistering women. According to the colonial adage, a woman aspiring to respectability should leave her house only three times in her life: for baptism, marriage, and burial—a gross caricature, obviously, but one indicative of historical attitudes. Poor women—the enormous majority—who had to work in public places or other people’s houses, could obviously not hope for much status under those rules. The poor women in Machado’s stories go out whenever need arises. As Rio’s social activities multiplied after 1850, women of respectable families, too, began to broaden their horizons and to move around the city more freely. Machado wrote both for and about these women. His early stories, published in a women’s periodical, depicted characters whose lives before marriage turned centrally on their marriage prospects (which was surely representative of his readers) and whose lives after marriage turned on occasional love affairs (which probably wasn’t). Machado’s women are often strong and resourceful figures, especially when compared with his feckless and spoiled men. Widows—independent women of means, a rare thing in nineteenth-century Brazilian society—are among his favorite characters, especially young, attractive widows. Because Machado’s mother died when he was quite young and he seems to have gotten along badly with his stepmother, the only woman who played an important role in his own life was Carolina, the intelligent and educated Portuguese woman whom he married over the objection of her family and with whom he lived in quiet domestic bliss for more than thirty years. When his eyesight became bad, she read and wrote for him, and he never really got over her death a few years before his.

One might expect that, as a nineteenth-century Brazilian, Machado de Assis would be religious, and that, given his conservative temperament, he would be a devout Catholic. The vast majority of people in nineteenth-century Brazil never questioned Catholic teachings, after all. The Catholic Church constituted the official religion of the Brazilian empire; church baptismal records were the country’s only official registries of birth. Yet mild-mannered Machado was a free thinker who rejected the Catholic Church and sought spiritual consolation in philosophy. There were a few Presbyterian and Baptist missionaries from the United States in Brazil during those years, but he was not interested in them. Nor was he attracted to any of the many variants of Afro-Brazilian religions that then existed in Brazil. During the nineteenth century, the forerunners of today’s
candomblé
and
umbanda
(the two best-known Afro-Brazilian religions) were not openly practiced, although the poor neighborhood on the edge of Rio de Janeiro where Machado lived his first years was, in fact, the sort of place where West African deities called
orixás
occasionally descended into the bodies of men and women who invoked them in secluded, nighttime ceremonies involving drums. The upper-middle-class suburb where he lived with Carolina in a little cottage surrounded by gardens that he loved to tend—the cottage where, on his death bed, he refused to accept Catholic last rites—was a long, long way from such ceremonies; a long way, too, from the millenarian prophets who gathered tens of thousands of pious peasant followers in the arid
sertão
of the Northeast. Machado was an ironic but also affectionate observer of human nature, an enemy of hypocrisy wherever he saw it, and he saw plenty in the Catholic Church, but no more than in any other sphere of human activity. The priests who staff his fictional version of nineteenth-century Brazil are no better and no worse than anyone else.

One can always count on Machado de Assis to be good-humored and tolerant. Be on guard, however. The voice that narrates these stories seldom embodies the ideas and attitudes of the author in a straightforward way. The narrator is often a character in the story or an unidentified voice with incomplete knowledge of the events described. Machado’s narrators are often unreliable—far from objective or omniscient. Their tone ranges from intimate to mock epic. The shifting and sometimes inscrutable perspectives of Machado’s narration are among the most fascinating aspects of his art. It is one thing to understand what the narrator says happened in one of these stories. It is something else to decide what we, as readers, think happened. Thus, the short stories of Machado de Assis often constitute puzzles, especially psychological puzzles, to be resolved. Enjoy them. Along the way you will learn a lot about the lives and attitudes of people in nineteenth-century Brazil.
¹

____________

1
. The source of the following translations is Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis,
Contos: uma antologia
, selection, introduction, and notes by John Gledson (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998).

SUGGESTED READINGS

Barman, Roderick J.
Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825–91
. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

The story of Pedro II’s long reign, which defines the setting of almost all the short stories of Machado de Assis.

———.
Princess Isabel of Brazil: Gender and Power in the Nineteenth Century.
Wilmington: SR Books, 2002.

The biography of Machado’s special patroness, the woman who signed the decree abolishing slavery in Brazil.

Conrad, Robert Edgar.
Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

A collection of translated primary source materials on Brazilian slavery, from the colonial period to abolition, covering all parts of the country.

———.
The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888.
Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Co., 1993.

A broad view of the decline and abolition of slavery in Brazil. See especially the first chapter, on the ubiquity of slavery.

da Costa, Emilia Viotti.
The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

A classic of Brazilian historiography, this collection of essays covers a variety of political, social, and economic topics.

de Assis, Machado.
A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories
. Translated by John Gledson. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.

More of Machado’s best short stories, superbly translated. Also, don’t miss John Gledson’s critical introduction.

Graham, Richard.
Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.
Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 1990.

An indispensable historical study of the political culture that Machado de Assis portrays in many of his stories.

Karasch, Mary C.
Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

A richly detailed and illustrated guide to be consulted especially as a reference on particular topics.

Kirkendall, Andrew J.
Class Mates: Male Student Culture and the Making of a Political Class in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

This book on the education of Brazil’s ruling class helps us understand the values and behavior revealed in Machado’s fiction.

Needell, Jeffrey D.
A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

An evocative exploration of the Brazilian elite’s vision of its place in a Eurocentric world.

Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz.
The Emperor’s Beard: Dom Pedro II and the Tropical Monarchy of Brazil
. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

A nuanced cultural history of many aspects of nineteenth-century Brazil, not just beards!

Shultz, Kirsten.
Tropical Versailles: Monarchy, Empire, and the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821
. New York: Routledge, 2001.

A close-up study of a defining moment in the history of Brazil, the dozen years in which the king of Portugal ruled from Rio de Janeiro.

TO BE TWENTY YEARS OLD!

Our first story portrays a moment in the life of a twenty-year-old student, very probably a medical student, given that the medical school was Rio de Janeiro’s principal institution of higher education in the mid-1800s. The student fashions of the day—including walking canes and fur coats—may strike twenty-first-century students as odd, but many things about the world of young Gonçalves (as he is known, always by his last name, the Portuguese equivalent of González) will seem familiar enough. For one thing, studying is not his main activity, although the author clearly indicates the excitement associated with European authors. Young men from all over the Brazilian empire converged on the two medical schools in Salvador and Rio, and on the two law schools in São Paulo and Recife. The result of their training and, even more crucially, their socialization at these four institutions of higher education was a fairly unified imperial elite. Law students, especially, went on to staff the imperial bureaucracy as judges and administrators. As such, they constituted an “old boy” network of powerful men who often knew each other from their student days. Exercising power is a birthright of Gonçalves, and he knows it. This brief portrait of him is straightforward, not particularly puzzling. The story (entitled in Portuguese “
Vinte anos! Vinte anos!
”) was published in the Rio periodical
A Estação
in 1884, and the setting is more or less “the present.”

G
onçalves, insulted and furious, crumpled the sheet of paper and bit his lip. He took five or six steps across the room, lay down on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and thought for a while. Then he went to the window and stood there for ten or twelve minutes, tapping his foot on the floor and looking out at the street, a backstreet in the Lapa district.

Surely, there isn’t a man reading this, and much less, a woman, who won’t assume immediately that the paper that young Gonçalves has crumbled into a ball is a letter, a love letter, expressing a girl’s ill temper, for example, or informing him that her father opposes their relationship, that the father is packing her out of Rio that very day for some weeks in the country. Erroneous guesses! It isn’t a love letter, not a letter at all, really, even though it is addressed to him and signed and dated at the bottom. Here is what this is about: Gonçalves is a student whose family lives in the provinces. His father has an agent in Rio who doles out the young man’s monthly living allowance. Gonçalves gets his allowance punctually every month, he spends it immediately, and most of the time he has no money. He gets along fine, though, because to be twenty years old itself constitutes great wealth. On the other hand, to be twenty also means to be inexperienced and headstrong, so Gonçalves slips here and there and occasionally commits major blunders. Not long ago he saw a coat, a fur coat of the sort that stylish students wear, unbelievably nice, and a walking cane to go with it, nothing fancy, but in excellent taste. He had no money, so he bought them on credit. It wasn’t his idea, mind you; a friend encouraged him. That was four months ago, and the store owner won’t leave him in peace. Gonçalves decided to send the bill to his father’s agent describing the situation in terms that would melt the hardest heart on earth.

The agent did not have a hard heart; being an agent, he had none at all. He went rigidly by the book, or rather, according to the letters of instruction sent to him by the father, who said that his son was a spendthrift and required discipline. When Gonçalves sent him the bill, though, the agent saw that it needed to be paid. How to do so without encouraging the young man to keep buying things on credit? The agent sent word that he would pay the bill, but not without first writing to the father, asking for instructions, and informing him of other, less consequential bills that he had already paid. All this was written in two or three lines at the bottom of the bill itself, which he had returned to Gonçalves.

One understands the young man’s unhappiness. The bill had not been paid, and worse, now his father was going to hear about it. If it were for something different, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the bill was for an unnecessary luxury, a fur coat, an enormous encumbrance really, heavy and hot … Gonçalves swore at the shop owner and even more at his father’s agent. Why had the man gone and told his father? What a letter his father was going to write now! What a letter! Gonçalves could just imagine what it would say, because it wouldn’t be the first. Last time his father had threatened to cut off his money completely.