Quincas Borba

by Machado De Assis

  As we come to realize that only one act of infidelity occurs in the text—the narrator’s betrayal of our trust—we cease to believe in the narrator and in the philosophy he is propounding. The narrator goes on to accuse us of being the sort of readers who need detailed chapter titles so that we can understand what is happening, or who claim to have read the text when we have only skimmed the titles (Chapter CXIII). Furthermore, the narrator increasingly ignores Rubião, with whom we have come to identify. We catch only an occasional glimpse of Rubião as he spirals downward to insanity and penury, the narrator, like Rubião’s faithless friends in Rio de Janeiro, is eager to move on to other, more interesting topics. Our frustration turns to shock in the final chapters of the novel; nothing in the text, we feel, has prepared us for the unexpected and miserable deaths of Rubião and Quincas Borba the dog—deaths to which the narrator insultingly suggests we may react with laughter.

  Araripe Júnior was correct, then, in his perception that Machado was manipulating us, as readers, through his text; he was also correct in implying that Machado had his own philosophy—a philosophy very different from Humanitism. That philosophy, moreover, while expressed through the text of Quincas Borba, transcends the particular—the details of nineteenth-century Brazilian life and society upon which this introduction has necessarily focused. Rubião, despite some positive qualities and the affection Machado leads us to feel for him, is very much an antihero; Quincas Borba can usefully be read as an antinovel through which Machado sought to express a skepticism so absolute and universal that it approaches an antiphilosophy.

  Unlike Quincas Borba the philosopher, Machado did not reject the existence of evil in the world; unlike Saint Augustine, the emblem of Quincas Borba’s final insanity, Machado did not believe that any external force—other than the pitiless and unknowable operations of blind chance—controls our lives for good or evil. As suggested by the constantly shifting quote from Hamlet, for Machado all of reality lies beyond human philosophizing. Machado’s friend Jose Verissimo described him, in a 1908 eulogy, as a Tyrrhenian—a believer in an extreme form of philosophical skepticism which holds that the truth is utterly unknowable and that for every possible theory of existence one can find an equally plausible but antithetical theory.8 The only coherent position is to suspend belief—“When in doubt, abstain,” as Teofilo tries to put it in Chapter CXIX.

  Any approach to reality other than pure skepticism is, for Machado, a denial of that reality and, implicitly, a form of insanity. Quincas Borba’s Humanitism, beyond its justification of the social order, represents a failed attempt to deny the ultimate reality of human existence, the inevitability of death; as the doctor points out to Rubião in Chapter IV, “philosophy is one thing and dying is another.” Machado’s skepticism, however, extends beyond philosophical explanations of reality. Any belief around which an individual organizes his or her life can easily become a destructive obsession—Camacho’s politics, Palha’s capitalism, Sofia’s longing to be adored are just a few examples. And while Rubião never quite comprehends Quincas Borba’s grand theories, he has his own philosophic—here not the love of knowledge, but an obsession with Sofia the woman—that likewise leads to madness and to death.

  The most fundamental denial of reality, for Machado, is the belief that an unknowable reality which is based upon blind chance can somehow be ordered and thereby understood. Human consciousness nonetheless seeks order, endeavoring to create structures that are essentially mathematical: time is circular and repetitive, and the events it measures are therefore predictable; events, like numbers, can be sequenced into an order in which the past prepares the future; individuals and circumstances can be described and understood, particularly when they are viewed as replicating or mirroring other individuals and circumstances.

  The ultimate example of this human quest for order is the created, knowable reality of the literary text. The singularity of Quincas Borba lies in its denial of the validity of the text as a version of reality; we are betrayed by the narrator in large measure because he so carefully sets up doublings that we instinctively want to accept: the real Machado and the narrator of Quincas Borba; Quincas Borba and Rubião; Rubião and Napoleon III; Quincas Borba the philosopher and Quincas Borba the dog; the Rubião–Sofia relationship and the Sofia-Carlos Maria relationship.

  Through the narrator’s betrayal, moreover, Machado betrays our expectations as readers and demands the unexpected of us. He presents us with the “tatters of reality” his narrator has stitched together into an ordered sequence, but the narrator’s evident unreliability invalidates that order and forces us to create our own reality from those tatters. A unitary explanation of events, imposed by a narrator or an author, gives way to chaos—a potentially infinite number of possible readers and of possible readings. And, finally, each of those readings may fail to capture an ultimately unknowable reality, since our human vision of our own lives, of the lives of others, of the world in which we live, is vague, fragmentary, and formless—just a bit more complex, perhaps, than “the ideas of a dog, a jumble of ideas” (Chapter XXVIII).

  —David T. Haberly

  NOTES

  1. Antônio Cândido, Váries Escritos (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1970), p. 18.

  2. The chronology of the serialized version and the meaning of some of the changes are discussed by John Gledson, Machado de Assis: Fícção e História (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1986) and by J. C. Kinnear,“Machado de Assis: To Believe or Not To Believe,”Modern Language Review, 71 (1976), 54–65.

  3. “Idéias e Sandices do Ignaro Rubião,” first published on Feb. 5, 1893, in the Gazeta de Notícias (Rio de Janeiro); in Araripe’s Obra Crítica, II (Rio de Janeiro, MEC, 1960), 309.

  4. John Gledson, Machado de Assis: Fícção e História and The Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984). For more general discussions of Machado’s attitude towards the Empire, see Raymundo Faoro, Machado de Assis: A Pirâmide e o Trapézia (São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1976), and Roberto Schwarz, Ao Vencedor as Batatas (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1977).

  5. Agustine’s Confessions, Book Six, chapters 7–9.

  6. For a discussion of Machado and the slavery question, see Gledson, Deceptive Realism, pp. 123–30.

  7. A more detailed analysis of the narrator’s betrayal can be found in Kinnear,“Machado de Assis”

  8. Josć Raimundo Maia Neto traces the influence of this form of skepticism in several of Machado’s novels in Machado de Assis, the Brazilian Pyrrhonian (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994).

  QUINCAS BORBA

  Prologue to the Third Edition

  The second edition of this work sold out faster than the first. Here it is in the third with no changes except for certain typographical corrections, such as they were, and so few that even if they had been left in they would not have altered the meaning.

  An illustrious friend and confrére insisted that I follow this book up with another. “Along with The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, from which this is derived, you should make a trilogy, and the Sofia from Quincas Borba will have the third part all to herself.” For some time I thought that it might be possible, but as I reread these pages now I say no. Sofia is here completely. To have continued her would have been repeating her, and that repetition would be a sin. I think this is how some have found fault with this and a few other books that I’ve gone about putting together, over time, in the silence of my life. There were voices, generous and strong, that defended me then; I’ve already thanked them in private and now I do so cordially and publicly.

  —Machado de Assis, 1899

  I

  Rubião was staring at the cove—it was eight o’clock in the morning. Anyone who’d seen him with his thumbs stuck in the belt of his dressing gown at the window of a mansion in Botafogo would have thought he was admiring that stretch of calm water, but in reality I can tell you he was thinking about something else. He was comparing the past to the present. What was he
a year ago? A teacher. What is he now? A capitalist. He looks at himself, at his slippers (slippers from Tunis that his new friend Cristiano Palha had given him), at the house, at the garden, at the cove, at the hills, and at the sky, and everything, from slippers to sky, everything gives off the same feeling of property.

  “See how God writes straight with crooked lines,” he thinks. “If my sister Piedade had married Quincas Borba it would have left me with only a collateral hope. She didn’t marry him. They both died, and here I am with everything, so what looked like misfortune…”

  II

  What a gulf there is between the spirit and the heart! ex–teacher’s spirit, bothered by those thoughts, changed course, looked for a different subject, a canoe passing by. His heart, however, let itself go on beating with joy. What difference did it make if there was a canoe or a canoeist or that Rubião’s wide-open eyes followed him? It, the heart, goes along saying that since sister Piedade had to die, it was good that she hadn’t married. There might have been a son or a daughter… “What a fine canoe!” So much the better! “The way it follows the man’s paddle!” What’s certain is that they’re in heaven!

  III

  Aservant brought him coffee. Rubião picked up the cup and while he was putting in the sugar he was surreptitiously looking at the tray, which was silver work. Silver, gold, they were the metals he loved with all his heart. He didn’t like bronze, but his friend Palha told him that it was valuable and that explained the pair of figures here in the living room, a Mephistopheles and a Faust. If he had to choose, however, he would choose the tray—a masterpiece of silver work, of delicate and perfect execution. The servant was waiting, stiff and serious. He was Spanish, and it had only been after some resistance that Rubião accepted him from the hands of Cristiano, no matter how much he argued that he was used to his blacks from Minas Gerais and didn’t want any foreign languages in his house. His friend Palha insisted, pointing out the necessity of having white servants. Rubião gave in regretfully. His good manservant, whom he wished to keep in the parlor as a touch of the provinces, couldn’t even stay in the kitchen, where a Frenchman, Jean, reigned. The slave was downgraded to other duties.

  “Is Quincas Borba getting impatient?” Rubião asked, drinking his last sip of coffee and casting a last glance at the tray.

  “Me parece que si.”

  “I’ll be right there and set him loose.”’

  He didn’t go. He allowed himself to stay there for a while, gazing at the furniture. Looking at the small English prints that hung on the wall over the two bronzes, Rubião thought about the beautiful Sofia, Palha’s wife, took a few steps and went over to sit down on the ottoman in the center of the room, staring off into the distance …

  “It was she who recommended those two small pictures to me when the three of us were out shopping. She was so pretty! But what I like best about her are her shoulders, which I saw at the colonel’s ball. What shoulders! They looked like wax, so smooth, so white! Her arms, too, oh, her arms! So well shaped!”

  Rubião sighed, crossed his legs and tapped the tassels of his robe against his knees. He felt that he wasn’t entirely happy, but he also felt that complete happiness wasn’t far off. He reconstructed in his head some mannerisms, some looks, some unexplained swaying of the body which had to mean that she loved him and that she loved him a great deal. He wasn’t old. He was going on forty-one and, quite frankly, he looked younger. That observation was accompanied by a gesture. He ran his hand over his chin, shaved every day, something he hadn’t done before out of frugality and because there was no need. A simple teacher! He wore sideburns (later on he let his full beard grow)—so soft that it was a pleasure to run his fingers through them … And in that way he was remembering the first meeting, at the Vassouras station, where Sofia and her husband were getting on the train, into the same car on which he was coming from Minas. It was there that he discovered that set of luxuriant eyes that seemed to be repeating the exhortation of the prophet: Come unto the waters all ye who thirst. He didn’t have any ideas in response to that invitation, it’s true. He had the inheritance on his mind, the will, the inventory, things that must be explained first in order to understand the present and the future. Let’s leave Rubião in his parlor in Botafogo, tapping the tassels of his robe against his knees and thinking about the beautiful Sofia. Come with me, reader. Let’s have a look at him months earlier by the bed of Quincas Borba.

  IV

  This Quincas Borba, in case you have done me the favor of JL reading The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, is that very same castaway from existence who appeared there, a beggar, an unexpected heir, and the inventor of a philosophy. Here you have him in Barbacena now. No sooner had he arrived than he fell in love with a widow, a lady of middle-class station and with scarce means of livelihood, but so bashful that the sighs of her lover found no echo. Her name was Maria da Piedade. A brother of hers, who is the Rubião here present, did everything possible to get them married. Piedade resisted and pleurisy carried her off.

  It was that little novelistic bit that brought the two men together. Could Rubião have known that our Quincas Borba carried that little grain of lunacy that a doctor thought he found in him? Certainly not. He took him to be a strange man. It’s true, however, that the little grain hadn’t left Quincas Borba’s brain—neither before nor after the malady that slowly devoured him. Quincas Borba had some relatives there in Barbacena, all dead now in 1867. The last was the uncle who left him heir to his goods. Rubião was left as the philosopher’s only friend. At that time Rubião was running a school for children, which he closed in order to care for the sick man. Before being a school teacher, he’d tried his hand at some enterprises that went under.

  His job as nurse lasted more than five months, closer to six. Rubião’s care was superb. It was patient, smiling, multiple, listening to the doctor’s orders, administering medicine at the prescribed time, taking the patient out for a walk, never forgetting anything, neither the management of the house nor the reading of newspapers as soon as they arrived from the capital or from Ouro Preto.

  “You’re a good man, Rubião,” Quincas Borba would sigh.

  “That’s a fine thing to say! As if you were a bad one!”

  The doctor’s considered opinion was that Quincas Borba’s illness would slowly follow its path. One day our Rubião, seeing the doctor to the street door, asked him what was the real state of his friend’s health. He heard that he was done for, completely done for, but he should be cheered up. Why make death all the worse by letting him know the truth … ?

  “None of that, no,” Rubião put in. “For him dying is an easy matter. You’ve never read a book he wrote years ago, I can’t remember, some kind of philosophy…”

  “No. But philosophy is one thing and dying is another. Goodbye.”

  V

  Rubião had a rival for Quincas Borba’s heart—a dog, a hand-Some dog, medium–sized, lead–colored with black markings. Quincas Borba took him everywhere. They slept in the same room. In the morning it was the dog who would awaken his master by climbing onto the bed, where they would exchange their first greetings. One of the master’s eccentricities was to give it his own name, but he explained that it was for two reasons, one doctrinal, the other personal.

  “Since Humanitas, according to my doctrine, is the principle of life and is present everywhere, it also exists in the dog, so, therefore, he can have a human name, be it Christian or Muslim …”

  “Fine, but why don’t you give him the name Bernardo?” Rubiao asked, thinking of a political rival in the region.

  “That brings us to the personal reason. If I should die first, as I presume I shall, I will survive in the name of my dog. It makes you laugh, doesn’t it?”

  Rubião made a negative gesture.

  “Well, you should be laughing, my dear fellow, because immortality is my lot or my spot or whatever name you can come up with for it. I will live in perpetuity through my great book. Those who can’
t read, however, will call the dog Quincas Borba and …”

  The dog, hearing his name, ran to the bed. Quincas Borba, touched, looked at Quincas Borba.

  “My poor friend! My good friend! My only friend!”

  “Only?”

  “Pardon me, you are, too, I know that quite well and I thank you very much. But you’ve got to forgive a sick man everything. Maybe my delirium is starting. Let me see the mirror.”

  Rubião gave him the mirror. For a few seconds the sick man studied the thin face, the feverish eyes that revealed the suburbs of death, towards which he was walking with a slow but certain step. Afterwards, with a pale and ironic smile:

  “Everything on the outside there corresponds to what I feel inside here. I’m going to die, my dear Rubião … Don’t wag your finger, I’m going to die. And what is dying, for you to look so horrified?”

  “I know, I know, you have your philosophy… But let’s talk about dinner, what will it be today?”

  Quincas Borba sat on the bed letting his legs hang down and their extraordinary thinness could be imagined through his trouser legs.

  “What is it? What do you want?” Rubião came over.

  “Nothing,” the sick man replied, smiling. “Philosophy! You use such disdain when you say that to me! Say it again, go ahead, I want to hear it again. Philosophy!”

  “But it wasn’t disdain … Am I capable of disdaining philosophy? All I’m saying is that you can believe that death isn’t anything because you’ve got your reasons, your principles …”

  Quincas Borba searched for his slippers with his feet. Rubião pushed them over to him. He put them on and began to walk to stretch his legs. He petted the dog and lighted a cigarette. Rubião tried to dress him and brought him a morning coat, a vest, a dressing gown, a cape, whatever he could find. Quincas Borba rejected them with a gesture. He had a different look now. His eyes, turning inward, saw his own brain thinking. After several steps he stopped for a few seconds in front of Rubião.