A Chapter of Hats

by Machado De Assis

  He should have; there might still have been time to win the battle. He put the revelation off for a week. One day he went to dine with his friend, and after much hesitation told him everything; he loved his cousin and was loved by her.

  ‘Do you approve, Gonçalves?’

  Gonçalves went pale – or, at least, he looked grave; pallor and gravity took on the same aspect with him. But no; really, he went pale.

  ‘Do you approve?’ Quintanilha repeated.

  After some seconds, Gonçalves was going to open his mouth to answer, but he shut it again, and fixed his eyes ‘on yesterday’, to use the words he used of himself when he stared at some point in the distance. In vain Quintanilha insisted on knowing what was the matter, what he was thinking, was this love another piece of ‘foolishness’? He was so used to hearing this word from him that it no longer hurt or affronted him, even in such delicate and personal matters. Gonçalves surfaced from his meditative state, shrugged his shoulders with a disillusioned air, and murmured these words in such a low voice that his friend could hardly hear him:

  ‘Don’t ask me anything; do what you want.’

  ‘Gonçalves, what is this?’ Quintanilha asked, shocked and grasping him by the hands.

  Gonçalves let out a big sigh, which, if it had wings, is still flying around somewhere. That, though he didn’t put it in these paradoxical words, was Quintanilha’s impression. The clock in the dining room struck eight. Gonçalves claimed he had to go and see a judge, and his friend made his farewells.

  In the street Quintanilha came to a halt, stunned. He couldn’t understand those gestures, that sigh, the pallor, the whole mysterious effect of the news of his love. He’d gone in and said his piece, expecting to hear from his friend one or more of the usual, familiar epithets, ‘idiot’, ‘blockhead’, ‘simpleton’, and heard none of them. On the contrary, there was something akin to respect in Gonçalves’s gestures. He couldn’t remember anything at dinner that could have offended him; it was only after he confided his new feelings for his cousin that his friend had been so upset.

  ‘But it can’t be,’ he thought, ‘what is it about Camila that prevents her being a good wife?’

  He spent more than half an hour standing in front of the house in this quandary. Then he noticed that Gonçalves hadn’t gone out. He waited another half-hour; nothing. He was tempted to go back in, hug him, question him … He hadn’t the strength; he went off down the street in despair. He arrived at João Bastos’s house and was unable to see Camila; she’d gone to bed with a cold. He wanted to tell her everything – and here we must explain that he hadn’t yet declared his love to his cousin. Her eyes didn’t avoid his; that was all, and it might have been no more than flirtation. But there could be no better occasion to make the situation clear. If he told her what had happened with his friend, he had the opening to let her know he loved her and was going to ask her father for her hand. It would have been some consolation in the midst of this agony; chance had robbed him of it, and Quintanilha left the house in a worse state than he’d gone in. He retired to his own home.

  He didn’t get to sleep until two in the morning, and then sleep gave him no respite – only made him more perturbed, in new, unfamiliar ways. He dreamed that he was going to cross a long, old bridge, between two mountains, and halfway across a figure rose up and stood firmly in front of him. It was Gonçalves. ‘Villain,’ he said with burning eyes, ‘why have you come to take away the love of my life, the woman I adore, and who is mine? Take my heart, take it, and finish the job.’ And in a trice he opened his chest, tore his heart out and put it in Quintanilha’s mouth. The latter tried to grasp his friend’s vital organ and put it back in Gonçalves’s breast; it was impossible. In the end, his jaws closed round it. He tried to spit it out, but that was worse; his teeth bit into the heart. He tried to speak, but there wasn’t much hope with his mouth full like that. Finally his friend lifted his arms and stretched his hands out to curse him, as he’d seen in melodramas as a boy; immediately after, two immense tears welled up from his eyes, which filled the valley with water; he plunged in and disappeared. Quintanilha awoke hardly able to breathe.

  The illusion caused by the nightmare was such that he put his hands to his mouth, to pull his friend’s heart out. He found only his tongue, rubbed his eyes and sat up. Where was he? What was going on? What was the bridge? And Gonçalves? He came fully to his senses, realised what was happening and lay down again, unable to sleep, though this time he lay awake for less time; he fell asleep at four.

  When dawn came, remembering the previous day, both the reality and the dream, he came to the conclusion that his friend Gonçalves was his rival, loved his cousin, and maybe was loved by her … Yes, yes, it might be so. Quintanilha spent two agonising hours. Finally he pulled himself together and went to Gonçalves’s office, to know his fate; and if it was true, yes, if it was true …

  Gonçalves was drawing up a legal document. He paused to look at him for a moment, got up, opened the steel cabinet where he kept important papers, took out Quintanilha’s will, and gave it to the testator.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘You’re going to change your legal status,’ Gonçalves replied, sitting down at the table.

  Quintanilha heard tears in his voice; at least, it seemed so to him. He asked him to keep the will; he was its natural guardian. He pressed him; the only reply was the harsh sound of the pen on the paper. The pen wasn’t running smoothly, the writing was shaky, and there were more corrections than usual – probably he was getting the dates wrong. He consulted the books with such a melancholy air that it saddened his friend. Sometimes he stopped everything, the pen and the consulting, to fix his gaze ‘on yesterday’.

  ‘I understand,’ said Quintanilha, ‘she’s yours.’

  ‘Who d’you mean, she?’ Gonçalves went to ask, but his friend was already shooting down the stairs like an arrow; he went on drawing up his document.

  The sequel needn’t be guessed at; all we need to know is the end. It can’t be guessed at or even believed; but the human soul is capable of great feats, good and evil. Quintanilha made another will, leaving everything to his cousin, on condition she married his friend. Camila wouldn’t accept the will, but she was so happy when her cousin told her about Gonçalves’s tears that she accepted both, Gonçalves and the tears. Then Quintanilha could find no better solution than to make a third will leaving everything to his friend.

  The end of the story was told in Latin. Quintanilha was a witness at the wedding, and godfather to the first two children. One day, when he was taking sweets to his godchildren, as he was crossing Fifteenth of November Square, he was hit by a rebellious bullet (this was in 1893, during the naval revolt), which killed him almost instantaneously. He’s buried in the cemetery of St John the Baptist; it’s a simple grave, and the stone has an epitaph which ends with these pious words: ‘Pray for him!’ And that’s the end of my story. Orestes is still alive, with none of the remorse of his Greek prototype. Pylades is now a silent character, just as in Sophocles’ play.1 Pray for him!

  Father against Mother

  When slavery ended, it took with it certain trades and tools; the same must have happened with other social institutions. I’ll only mention some of the tools because of their link with certain trades. One of them was the neck iron, another was leg irons; there was also the tin-plate mask. The mask cured the slaves of the vice of drunkenness by shutting their mouths. It had only three holes in it, two to see, one to breathe, and it was fastened behind the head with a padlock. Not only did this curb the vice of drinking: the slaves also lost the temptation to steal because they generally used their master’s small change to slake their thirst, and so two sins were eliminated, and honesty and sobriety were assured. The mask was grotesque, but order in the human and social realm is not always achieved without grotesquery – cruelty, even, sometimes. Tinsmiths used to hang them up, for sale, in the doorways of their shops. But let’s not think about masks.

>   The neck iron was applied to slaves with the habit of running away. Imagine a thick collar, with an equally thick shaft on one side, left or right, which went up to the top of the head, and which was locked behind with a key. It weighed a lot, naturally, but it was less a punishment than a sign. A slave who fled with one of these showed that he was a repeated offender, and wherever he went was easily caught.

  Half a century ago, slaves frequently ran away. There were lots of them, and not all of them liked being slaves. From time to time they would be beaten, and not all of them liked being beaten. Many were simply reprimanded; there was someone in the household who acted as their godfather, and the owner himself wasn’t a bad man; besides, the sensation of ownership acted as a softener, for money hurts, too. Escapes happened repeatedly, however. There were even cases, exceptional though they were, when a contraband slave, no sooner had he been bought in the Valongo, took to his heels, even though he was unfamiliar with the city streets.1 Some of those who went into private houses, as soon as they were used to their surroundings, asked their masters to fix a rent, and went to earn it outside, selling items in the street.

  When someone’s slave escaped, they offered a sum of money to whoever returned them. They put advertisements in the newspapers, with the distinguishing marks of the escapee, his name, clothes, physical defects if he had any, the neighbourhood where he might be and the amount of the reward. When the amount wasn’t mentioned, there was a promise: ‘There will be a generous reward’, or: ‘You will be well rewarded’. Often the advertisement carried above it, or at the side, a little vignette of a black man, barefoot, with a stick over his shoulder and a bundle on the end. Anyone who gave the slave shelter was threatened with the full rigour of the law.

  Well then, catching runaway slaves was one of the trades of the time. Maybe it wasn’t a noble one, but since it was the forcible instrument whereby law and property were safeguarded, it had that other implicit kind of nobility we owe to the law and its demands. No one entered the trade out of a desire for entertainment, nor did it require much study; poverty, a sudden need for money, unsuitability for other jobs, chance, and sometimes a pleasure in serving too, though in another walk of life, provided the incentive to anyone who felt strong enough to impose order on disorder.

  Candido Neves – Candinho to his family – is the person linked to the story of an escape; he gave in to poverty when he took up the trade of catching runaways. This man had a grave defect – he never lasted in any job or trade, and lacked the necessary stability; that’s what he called a run of bad luck. He began by wanting to learn typesetting, but soon saw it would take some time to learn the job well, and even then perhaps he might not earn enough; that was what he said to himself. The retail trade attracted him – a fine career was to be had there. However, the obligation of attending to everyone and serving them touched a raw nerve of pride in him, and after five or six weeks he was back in the street of his own free will. An assistant in a notary’s office, office boy in a government department attached to the ministry of the interior, postman and other jobs were abandoned soon after they were obtained.

  When he fell for young Clara, all he owned was debts, though not that many since he lived with a cousin, a wood carver by trade. After several attempts to get a job, he decided to opt for his cousin’s profession, and in fact had already taken some lessons. It was no bother to take some more, but since he tried to learn in a hurry, he learned badly. He couldn’t do delicate or complicated work, only claw-feet for sofas and common decoration for chair backs. He wanted to have something to work at when he married, and marriage wasn’t long in coming.

  He was thirty years of age, and Clara twenty-two. She was an orphan who lived with an aunt, Monica, and did sewing jobs with her. Her sewing didn’t stop her flirting a bit, but her suitors only wanted to pass the time of day; that was as far as it went. They came by of an afternoon, looked her up and down, and she them, until night fell and she went back to her sewing. What she noticed is that she regretted none of them, nor did she feel any desire for them. In many cases, she may not even have known their names. She wanted to get married, of course. As her aunt said to her, it was like fishing with a rod to see if the fish would bite – but they kept their distance; all they did was swim round the bait, looking at it, sniffing it, then leaving it for others.

  Love has ways of making itself known. When the girl saw Candido Neves, she felt that he was the husband-to-be, the real, the only one. They met at a dance; such was – in keeping with her suitor’s first trade – the first page of this book, which would be published badly typeset and with its stitching in a worse state. The marriage happened eleven months later, and it was the biggest party they’d had all the time they’d known one another. Some of Clara’s friends, less out of friendship than envy, tried to prevent her taking this step. They didn’t deny he was a nice lad, nor that he loved her – some virtues couldn’t be denied; what they said was that he was too fond of a good time.

  ‘Well, thank goodness for that,’ replied the bride, ‘at least I’m not marrying a corpse.’

  ‘No, not a corpse; it’s just that …’

  But they didn’t finish the sentence. Aunt Monica, after the marriage, in the impoverished house where they lodged, spoke to them about possible children. They wanted one, just one, even if it made their poverty worse.

  ‘If you have a child, you’ll die of hunger,’ said the aunt to her niece.

  ‘Our Lady will feed us,’ replied Clara.

  Aunt Monica should have warned or threatened them this way when Candido came to ask for the girl’s hand; but she liked a good time as well, and there’d be a great party at the wedding, as in fact there was.

  All three of them were happy. The happy couple laughed at everything. Even their names, Clara, Neves, Candido, were the subject of jokes;2 they didn’t provide food, but they made you laugh, and the laughter was easily digested. She did more sewing now, and he went out on odd jobs; he had no fixed employment.

  But none of this made them give up on the child. This creature, however, ignorant as it was of this procreative urge, lay waiting in the eternal realms. One day, however, it announced its presence; male or female, it was the blessed fruit that would bring them the happiness they longed for. Aunt Monica was dismayed, but Candido and Clara made fun of her fears.

  ‘God will come to our aid, Auntie,’ insisted the mother-to-be.

  The news went round the neighbourhood. All they had to do was wait for the great day. The wife was working with a greater will, which was the way it had to be, since, as well as the sewing she was paid for, she had to make the baby’s clothes with offcuts. She was looking forward to it so much, measuring nappies, sewing shirts. There wasn’t much material, and she could only do it from time to time. Aunt Monica helped, it’s true, though she complained.

  ‘Yours is a sad lot,’ she sighed.

  ‘Other children come into the world, don’t they?’ asked Clara.

  ‘Yes, and they always find something certain to eat, even if it’s not much …’

  ‘What d’you mean, certain?’

  ‘Certain – a job, a profession, something to do, but how does the father of this unfortunate creature spend his time?’

  As soon as he heard about this warning, Candido Neves went to talk to the aunt, not harshly, but much less mildly than usual, and asked if she’d ever gone without food.

  ‘You’ve only ever fasted in Holy Week, and that’s when you don’t want to eat your supper with us. We’ve always had our salt cod on Good Friday …’

  ‘I know that, but there are three of us.’

  ‘So now there’ll be four.’

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘What do you want me to do, more than I do already?’

  ‘Something more fixed. Look at the joiner on the corner, the man who keeps the store, that typesetter who married last Saturday, all of them have got a fixed job … Don’t get angry; I’m not saying you’re a layabout, but your
job’s too uncertain. You go for weeks without a penny to your name.’

  ‘Yes, but then one night I’ll make up for it all, and more. God doesn’t abandon me, and runaway slaves know I’m not to be trifled with; hardly any of them put up any fight, many give themselves up on the spot.’

  He was proud of this, and talked of this hope as if it was secure capital. Soon he was laughing and making the aunt laugh; she was naturally jolly, and looked forward to a great party at the christening.

  Candido Neves had lost his job as a wood carver, just as he’d given up on many others better or worse than that one. Catching slaves had novel charms for him. He didn’t have to sit down for hours at a stretch. All it needed was strength, a sharp eye, patience, courage and a bit of rope. Candido Neves read the advertisements, copied them out, put them in his pocket and went out to do his research. He had a good memory. When he’d memorised the distinguishing marks and the habits of a runaway, in no time he found him, caught, bound and returned him. A lot of strength was needed, and agility. More than once, on the street corner, talking of something else altogether, he saw a slave pass by like any other, realised he’d escaped, who he was, his name, who his owner was, where he lived and what the reward was; he interrupted the conversation and went after the criminal. He didn’t catch him straight away, but waited to find a suitable spot, then one leap, and the reward was his. He didn’t always get away without losing some blood, as the victim’s nails and teeth did their work, but usually he subdued them without the least scratch.