Quincas Borba

by Machado De Assis

  CLXXXIX

  They left. Sofia, before she set foot on the street, took a look around to see if anyone was coming. Luckily the street was deserted. On seeing herself free of that pigsty, Sofia recovered the use of fine words, the suave and delicate art of captivating others, and she lovingly took Dona Fernanda’s arms. She spoke to her of Rubião, of the great misfortune of his madness, and, in the same way, about the mansion in Botafogo. Why didn’t she come and see how the work was coming? It was only a question of taking a peek, and they’d leave right after.

  CXC

  An event took place that distracted Dona Fernanda from Rubião. It was the birth of a daughter to Maria Benedita. She hurried to Tijuca, covered mother and child with kisses, gave Carlos Maria her hand to kiss.

  “Always exuberant!” the young father exclaimed, obeying.

  “Always dry!” she retorted. In spite of her cousin’s resistance, Dona Fernanda stayed on for Maria Benedita’s convalescence, so cordial, so good, so merry that it was a delight to have her in the house. The happiness of this place made her forget the unhappiness of the other, but when the new mother was fully recovered, Dona Fernanda turned her attention to the sick man.

  CXCI

  “I’m counting on his recovering his sanity at the end of six or eight months. He’s coming along very nicely.”

  Dona Fernanda sent Sofia that reply from the director of the hospital and invited her to go with her to see the patient if she thought it wouldn’t be bad for him. “What harm could there be?” Sofia replied in a note. “But I don’t feel up to seeing him. He was such a good friend of ours, and I don’t know if I could bear the sight and the conversation of the poor man. I showed the letter to Cristiano, who told me he’d liquidated Mr. Rubião’s holdings. It amounted to three contos two hundred.”

  CXCII

  “Six months, eight months pass quickly,” Dona Fernanda reflected.

  And they went along, leaving events behind—the fall of the government, the accession of a new one in March, her husband’s return, the debate over the law freeing the children born to slaves, the death of Dona Tonka’s fiance, three days before the wedding. Dona Tonica shed her last tears, some out of love, others out of despair, and she was left with eyes so red that they looked ill.

  Teófilo, who enjoyed the same confidence of the new cabinet that he’d had from the old, took a major part in parliamentary debates. Camacho declared in his paper that the law of freeborn children made up for the government’s sterility and crimes. In October Sofia inaugurated her salons in Botafogo with a ball that was the one most talked about that season. She was dazzling. She displayed all of her arms and shoulders without any show of pride. Fine jewelry. The necklace, which was one of Rubião’s earliest presents, showed that in the case of this type of adornment, style stays the same for long periods. Everybody admired that fresh-looking, robust lady in her thirties. Some men spoke (sorrowfully) of her conjugal virtue, of the deep adoration she had for her husband.

  CXCIII

  The day after the ball Dona Fernanda woke up late. She went to her husband’s study. He’d already gone through five or six newspapers, written ten letters, and put some of the books on the shelves in order.

  “I got this letter a while ago,” he said.

  Dona Fernanda read it. It was from the director of the hospital. It notified them that Rubião had been missing for three days, and they’d been unable to find him in spite of all the efforts on his part and that of the police. “I am all the more startled by this flight,” the letter concluded, “since there had been great improvement, and I was sure that he would be entirely well within two months.”

  Dona Fernanda was aghast. She pressed her husband to write the chief of police and the minister of justice asking them to order the most thorough investigation. Teófilo didn’t have the slightest interest in finding Rubião or in his cure, but he wanted to serve his wife, whose charity was well known to him, and, perhaps, he was pleased to be in correspondence with people high in the administration.

  CXCIV

  How could they find our Rubião or the dog, however, if they’d both left for Barbacena? Rubião had written to Palha to come see him. The latter went to the hospital and saw that his reason was clear, without the slightest shadow of delirium.

  “I had a mental breakdown,” Rubião told him. “I’m well now, perfectly well. I’m asking you to get me out of here. I don’t think the director will be against it. In the meantime, since I want to give some remembrances to the people who’ve taken care of me, and Quincas Borba, too, I’d like you to advance me a hundred mil–réts”

  Palha opened his wallet and gave him the money without hesitation.

  “I’m going to see about getting you out,” he said, “but it may take a few days [it was just before the ball]. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be out of here within a week.”

  Before leaving, he consulted the director, who gave him some good news concerning the patient. A week isn’t much time, he said, in order to get him well, completely well, I still need two months. Palha confessed that he found him sane. In any case, the person who knew was in charge, and if six or seven months more were needed, there was no reason to hurry his discharge along.

  CXCV

  Rubião, as soon as he reached Barbacena and began to go up the street that’s now called Tiradentes, exclaimed, stopping:

  “To the victor, the potatoes!”

  He’d forgotten the formula and the allegory completely. Suddenly, as if the syllables had remained intact in the air, waiting for someone who could understand them, he brought them together, recomposed the formula, and brought it forth with the same emphasis as on that day when he took it for the law of life and truth. He didn’t remember the allegory completely, but the words gave him a vague feeling of struggle and victory.

  He went along accompanied by the dog and stopped in front of the church. No one opened the door for him. He didn’t see any sign of the sexton. Quincas Borba, who hadn’t eaten for several hours, stayed close to his legs, downcast, expectant. Rubião turned and from the top of the street cast his eyes down and into the distance. There it was, it was Barbacena, his old home town was becoming familiar out of the deep reaches of his memory. There it was. Here was the church, there was the jail, beyond it the pharmacy from which the medicines for the other Quincas Borba had come. He knew that this was it when he arrived, but, as his eyes looked all about, reminiscences kept coming along, more and more, in droves. He didn’t see anyone. A window on the left seemed to have someone there peeping out. Everything else was deserted.

  “Maybe they don’t know I’ve come,” Rubião thought.

  CXCVI

  Suddenly there was a flash of lightning, clouds were piling up fast. A stronger lightning flash and a peal of thunder. It began to rain heavily, more heavily still, until the storm broke. Rubião, who had left the church with the first drops, was walking down the street, always followed by the dog, famished and faithful, both dazed, in the cloudburst, with no place to go, with no hope of rest or food … The rain was beating down on them mercilessly. They couldn’t run because Rubião was afraid of slipping and falling, and the dog didn’t want to leave him. Halfway down the street the pharmacy returned to Rubião’s memory. He turned back, going against the wind, which was hitting him in the face, but within twenty paces the idea was swept out of his head. Goodbye pharmacy! Goodbye shelter! He no longer remembered the reason for changing direction and he went on down again with the dog behind, neither understanding nor running off, both of them soaked, confused, to the sound of the strong, continuous thunder.

  CXCVII

  They wandered without any direction. Rubião’s stomach questioned, exclaimed, hinted. Luckily, delirium came on to deceive necessity with its banquets in the Tuileries. Quincas Borba was the one who didn’t have any recourse like that. And he began to walk back and forth. Rubião, from time to time, would sit down on the flagstones, and the dog would climb onto his legs to sleep away
his hunger. He found the trousers wet and dropped back down, but he would climb up again. The night air was so cold, late night now, dead night now. Rubião ran his hands over him, muttering some sparse words.

  If, in spite of everything, Quincas Borba did manage to fall asleep, he would wake up immediately and start going up and down the hill again. A sad wind that was like a knife was blowing and made the two vagabonds shiver. Rubião walked slowly. His very weariness wouldn’t allow him the great strides he’d made at the start when the rain was falling in buckets. The halts were more frequent now. The dog, dead with hunger and fatigue, couldn’t understand that odyssey, was ignorant of its reasons, had forgotten the place, didn’t hear anything except his master’s dull words. He couldn’t see the stars that were twinkling now, free of clouds. Rubião discovered them. He’d come to the door of the church, as when he’d arrived in the town. He’d just sat down when he discovered them. They were so beautiful. He recognized them as the chandeliers in the main salon and he ordered them to be extinguished. He was unable to see his order carried out. He fell asleep right there with the dog at his feet. When they awoke in the morning they were so close together that they seemed glued to one another.

  CXCVIII

  “To the victor, the potatoes!” Rubião exclaimed when his eyes hit the street, without night, without water, kissed by the sun.

  CXCIX

  It was Rubião’s old friend Angelica who took him in along with the dog when she saw them pass by her door. Rubião recognized her and accepted her shelter and breakfast.

  “But what’s this all about, old friend? How did you get this way? Your clothes are soaked. I’m going to give you a pair of my nephew’s pants.”

  Rubião had a fever. He ate little and without any relish. His friend asked him questions about the life he’d led in the capital, to which he replied that it would take a long time and only posterity could finish it. Your nephew’s nephews, he concluded magnificently, are the ones who will see me in all my glory. He began a brief account, however. At the end of ten minutes his old friend didn’t understand a thing, the facts and ideas were so confused. Five minutes later she began to feel afraid. When twenty minutes had passed, she excused herself and went to tell a neighbor woman that Rubião seemed to have lost his mind. She came back with her and a brother, who only stayed for a short time and went out to spread the news. Other people came by in twos and fours, and before an hour had passed a great crowd of people was there looking on from the street.

  “To the victor, the potatoes!” Rubião shouted to the onlookers. “Here I am, the emperor! To the victor, the potatoes!”

  That obscure and incomplete expression was repeated in the street, examined, without anyone’s making any sense out of it. A few of Rubião’s old enemies were going in, uninvited, the better to enjoy it. And they told his old friend that it wasn’t good for her to have a crazy man in her house, it was dangerous. She should have him put in jail until the authorities could send him away. A more compassionate person suggested the recourse of sending for the doctor.

  “Doctor? What for?” one of the first put in. “This man’s crazy.”

  “It could be delirirum from a fever. You can see he’s running a temperature.”

  Angélica, at the urging of so many people, took his pulse and found him feverish. She sent for the doctor—the same one who’d treated the late Quincas Borba. Rubião recognized him, too, and answered that it was nothing. He’d captured the King of Prussia and didn’t know as yet whether to have him shot or not. It was certain, however, that he would demand an enormous monetary indemnification—five billion francs.

  “To the victor the potatoes!” he concluded, laughing.

  CC

  A few days later he died … He didn’t die vanquished or defeated.

  Before the start of his death agony, which was short, he put the crown on his head—a crown that wasn’t even an old hat or a basin, where the spectators could touch the illusion. No, sir. He took hold of nothing, lifted up nothing, and put nothing on his head. Only he saw the imperial insignia, heavy with gold, sparkling with diamonds and other precious stones. The effort he made to lift his body up halfway didn’t last long and his body fell back again. His face maintained a glorious expression, however.

  “Take care of my crown,” he murmured. “To the victor …”

  His face grew serious, because death is serious. Two minutes of agony, a horrible grimace, and his abdication was signed.

  CCI

  I should like to speak here of the end of Quincas Borba, who also fell ill, whined ceaselessly, ran off unhinged in search of his master, and was found dead on the street one morning three days later. But on seeing the death of the dog told in a separate chapter, it’s possible that you will ask me whether it is he or his late namesake who gives the book its title and why one instead of the other—a question pregnant: with questions that would take us far along… Come now! Weep for the two recent deaths if you have tears. If you only have laughter, laugh! It’s the same thing. The Southern Cross that the beautiful Sofia refused to behold as Rubião had asked her is so high up that it can’t discern the laughter or the tears of men.

  The Misadventures of Unity:

  An Afterword

  Heir to a great fortune and, perforce, to a dog, Rubião moves from Barbacena to Rio de Janeiro toward the end of the Empire. He had previously tried his hand, unsuccessfully, at business and had been a school teacher before he dedicated himself entirely to caring for the eccentric philosopher Quincas Borba; the latter had returned, sick and delirious, from the Court in Rio de Janeiro to the interior city of Barbacena, in the province of Minas Gerais. Rubião is credulous and a believer in moral principles; easily offended and without any opinions of his own, he aspires to all the advantages wealth can confer. When he is named the sole heir of Quincas Borba, who had himself unexpectedly inherited a fortune, Rubião sees a chance to fulfill his dreams and aspirations for greatness in the capital city of the Brazilian Empire; he is convinced that the mere possession of wealth will afford him luxury, power, glory—in short, all of the progress of modern life. It is also his chance for revenge, “to get one up on the people who’d paid scant attention to him,” those who laughed at his friendship for the mad philosopher and for the philosopher’s homonymous dog (Chapter XV).

  Rubião is unfamiliar with the complexities of the nourishing bourgeois lifestyle of the elite in Rio de Janeiro, unaware of stratagems for upward social mobility, of Court intrigues, of all the nuances of modern behavior and the wiles of power. He is, therefore, easy prey for social climbers who pretend to be eager to introduce him to business and to politics, but who exploit his trust. Filled with romantic fantasies, Rubião falls madly in love with Sofia, who seduces and abandons him; unfamiliar with business, he delegates the management of his capital to Cristiano Palha, Sofia’s husband; aspiring to political power, he is deceived by Camacho. Confused and disillusioned, unprepared for the pretense and selfishness that are the rule in the elite circles he has so suddenly entered, Rubião slowly loses his way and breaks apart. He loses his moral bearings, his unity, his identity. Fragmented, the victim of “diverse and contrary sensations” (Chapter XLIX), he is stripped of his money, of his dreams of greatness, of his fantasies of love and power; he oscillates between bedazzlement and disenchantment, between excitement and boredom, between lust for power and delirious megalomania. He wanders joylessly through salons, down avenues, through the Chamber of Deputies; he takes refuge in dreams and seeks spiritual repose in the “glow of luxury” of his house, reading novels that describe “a noble and royal society” (Chapter LXXX). Bereft of ideas, like Madame Bovary he compensates by using imagination to escape reality and to reconstitute his lost unity of consciousness. Split in two, existing at the “extremes of heart and spirit” (Chapter XL), he shifts back and forth between madness and a certain lucidity. Abandoned by those who once besieged him with protests of friendship, Rubião is now reborn as the image of Quincas Borba,
with all the philosopher’s eccentricity and his inheritance of madness—confirming the theory of Humanitism the philosopher devised. Finally, Rubião disappears from Rio de Janeiro and returns to Barbacena; sick and in rags, his only companion is the dog. There he dies insane, crowning himself like the Napoleon of his delusions: “He took hold of nothing, lifted up nothing, and put nothing on his head.” Going from nothingness to nothingness, Rubião brings the pitiful illusion of human destiny full circle, showing us “the laughter or the tears of men” (Chapters CC and CCI).

  Such, in brief, are the plot and themes of Quincas Borba, a novel which is also a continuation of an earlier novel by Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, in which the philosopher Quincas Borba also appears. It is a social, political, and philosophical satire; more precisely, it is an allegory of bourgeois modernization in late nineteenth-century Brazil. Superficially, it is a typical novel of the period, dealing with the topics of love, family, social life, and politics with all the usual plot lines. Its method of composition, however, displaces the clichés that appear in fictional narratives, a displacement that implies a critique of literature, of mimetic Naturalism, of the novels then in fashion. And, as allegory, it is a terrifying compendium of the asynchronisms inherent in nineteenth-century Brazilian efforts to adopt modern European mores and mechanisms.