The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis

by Machado De Assis

  “But Mama, we’re only going for three months, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, three . . . or possibly two.”

  “Well, then, it isn’t worth it. Two trunks will suffice.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  “Well, if they aren’t enough, we can always buy another one just before we leave. And you should go and choose it yourself—that would be much better than sending someone who knows nothing about trunks.”

  Dona Benedita thought this wise advice, and held on to her money. Her daughter smiled secretly. Perhaps she was repeating to herself the same words she had spoken at the window: “This can’t go on.” Her mother went to make arrangements, choosing clothes, making lists of things she needed to buy, a present for her husband, and so on. Oh, he would be so happy! In the afternoon, they went out to place orders, pay visits, buy tickets—four tickets, since they would each take a slave-woman with them. Eulália tried again to dissuade her, proposing that they delay the journey, but Dona Benedita declared that this was out of the question. At the offices of the steamship company, she was informed that the northbound steamer would leave on Friday of the following week. She asked for four tickets, opened her purse, pulled out a banknote, then two, then thought for a moment.

  “We could just buy our tickets the day before, couldn’t we?”

  “You could, but there might not be any tickets left.”

  “All right, what if you set aside four tickets for us, and I’ll send for them.”

  “Your name?”

  “My name? No, better not take my name. We’ll come back three days before the steamer leaves. There are sure to be tickets then.”

  “Possibly.”

  “No, there will be.”

  Once out in the street, Eulália remarked that it would be better to buy the tickets straightaway; and, since we know that she did not wish to travel either North or South, save on the frigate carrying the man we saw in that portrait the previous evening, one must assume that the young lady’s comment was profoundly Machiavellian. It wouldn’t surprise me. Dona Bene­dita, meanwhile, informed her friends and acquaintances of their forthcoming journey and none of them was surprised. One did ask if, this time, she really was going. Dona Maria dos Anjos had heard about the proposed trip from the canon, but the only thing that alarmed her when her friend came to say goodbye was Dona Benedita’s icy demeanor, her silence and indifference, and the way she kept her gaze fixed on the floor. A visit of barely ten minutes, during which Dona Benedita said only six words at the beginning: “We are going to the North.” And one at the end: “Farewell.” Followed by three sad, corpse-like kisses.

  Chapter IV

  The journey did not take place, for superstitious reasons. On the Sunday night, Dona Benedita realized that the steamer would be leaving on a Friday, which seemed to her a bad day to travel. They would go instead on the next steamer. However, they did not go on the next one, but this time her reasons lay entirely beyond the reach of human understanding; in such cases, the best advice is not to attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible. The fact of the matter is that Dona Benedita did not go, saying that she would go on the third steamer, unless, of course, something happened to change her plans.

  Her daughter had come up with a party and a new friendship. The new friendship was with a family in Andaraí; no one knows what the party was for, but it must have been a splendid affair, because Dona Benedita was still talking about it three days later. Three days! It really was too much. As for the family, they could not have been kinder; the whole thing had made the most tremendous impression on Dona Benedita. I use this superlative because she herself used it: a document made by human hands.

  “Those people made the most tremendous impression on me.”

  And she began going for strolls in Andaraí, enchanted by the company of Dona Petronilha, Counselor Beltrão’s wife, and her sister Dona Maricota, who was going to marry a naval officer, the brother of that other naval officer whose mustache, eyes, hair, and bearing match those of the portrait the reader glimpsed earlier in that drawer. The married sister was thirty-two, and her earnestness and charming manners entirely bewitched Dona Benedita. The unmarried sister was a flower, a wax flower, another expression of Dona Benedita’s, which I have left unaltered for fear of watering down the truth.

  One of the most obscure aspects of this whole curious story is the speed with which friendships blossomed and events unfurled. For example, another regular visitor to Andaraí, along with Dona Benedita, was the very naval officer pictured on that little card. He was First Lieutenant Mas­carenhas, whom Counselor Beltrão predicted would become an admiral. Note, however, the officer’s perfidy: he came in uniform; and Dona Bene­dita, who adored any new spectacle, found him so distinguished, so handsome compared with the other men in civilian clothes, that she preferred him to all of them, and told him so. The officer thanked her earnestly. She told him he must come and see them; he begged permission to pay a visit.

  “A visit? Why, you must come and dine with us.”

  Mascarenhas assented with a bow.

  “Look here,” said Dona Benedita, “why don’t you come tomorrow?”

  Mascarenhas came, and came early. Dona Benedita talked to him about life at sea; he asked for her daughter’s hand in marriage. Dona Benedita was speechless, indeed shocked. She remembered, it is true, that, one day in Laranjeiras some time ago, she’d had her suspicions about him, but now her suspicions were long gone. Since then, she hadn’t seen the couple speak or look at one another even once. But marriage! Was that possible? It could not be anything else; the young man’s serious, respectful, and imploring behavior said clearly that he had indeed meant marriage. A dream come true! To invite to one’s home a friend, and open the door to a son-in-law: it was the very height of the unexpected. And the dream was a handsome one; the naval officer was a courteous young man; strong, elegant, friendly, openhearted, and, more importantly, he seemed to adore her, Dona Benedita. What a magnificent dream! Once she had recovered from her astonishment, Dona Benedita said, yes, Eulália was his. Mascarenhas took her hand and kissed it with filial devotion.

  “But what of your husband?” he asked.

  “My husband will agree with me.”

  Everything proceeded at great speed. Certificates were obtained, banns were read, and a date for the wedding set; it would take place twenty-four hours after the judge’s response was received. Dona Benedita, the good, kind mother, was beside herself with joy, busily caught up in preparing the trousseau, in planning and ordering the festivities, in choosing the guests! She rushed hither and thither, sometimes on foot, sometimes by carriage, come rain or shine. She did not linger over any one thing for very long; one day it was the trousseau, the next it was preparations for the wedding reception, the next there were visits to be made; she switched from one thing to another, then back again, and it was all somewhat frenetic. But the daughter was always there to make up for any shortcomings, to correct any mistakes, and trim back any excesses, with her own natural talent for such things. Unlike other bridegrooms, the naval officer did not get in their way; he did not take up Dona Benedita’s invitation to dine with them every evening; he dined with them only on Sundays, and paid them a visit once a week. He kept in touch through long, secret letters, as he had during their courtship. Dona Benedita could not explain such diffidence when she herself had fallen head over heels in love with him; and she would avenge his strange behavior by falling even deeper in love, and telling everyone the most wonderful things about him.

  “A pearl! An absolute pearl!”

  “He’s certainly a fine young man,” they all agreed.

  “Isn’t he just? First-rate!”

  She repeated the same thing in the letters she wrote her husband, both before and after receiving his reply to her first letter. In that reply the eminent judge gave his consent, adding that it pained him greatly that, due to a slight indisposition, he would be unable to attend the nuptials; however, he gave them his pater
nal blessing, and asked for a portrait of his new son-in-law.

  His wishes were followed to the letter. The wedding took place twenty-four hours after his letter arrived from Pará. It was, as Dona Benedita told certain friends later on, an admirable, splendid affair. Canon Roxo officiated, and it goes without saying that Dona Maria dos Anjos was not present, still less her son. Up until the very last minute, she had expected to receive a wedding announcement, an invitation, or perhaps a visit, even if she would, naturally enough, refrain from actually attending the ceremony; but nothing came. She was frankly astonished, and scoured her memory again and again for some inadvertent slight on her part that could explain this new coolness. Finding nothing, she imagined some intrigue. But she imagined wrongly, for it was a simple oversight. On the day of the wedding, it suddenly occurred to Dona Benedita that she had forgotten to send Dona Maria dos Anjos a wedding announcement.

  “Eulália, it seems we didn’t send the announcement to Dona Maria dos Anjos,” she said to her daughter over breakfast.

  “I don’t know, Mama. It was you who organized the invitations.”

  “Well, it seems that I didn’t,” said Dona Benedita. “More sugar, João.”

  The footman handed her the sugar, and, stirring her tea, she remembered the carriage that would be going to fetch the canon, and repeated one of the orders she had given the day before.

  But fortune is a capricious thing. Two weeks after the wedding, they received news of the judge’s death. I will not describe Dona Benedita’s grief; it was deep and sincere. The young newlyweds, lost in their own world up in Tijuca, came down to see her; Dona Benedita wept the tears of a heartbroken and devotedly faithful wife. After the seventh-day mass, she consulted her daughter and son-in-law on the idea of her going to Pará and having a tomb built for her husband, where she could kiss the earth in which he now lay. Mascarenhas exchanged a look with his wife, and then said to his mother-in-law that it would be better for them to go together, since he was due to go to the North in three months’ time on a government commission. Dona Benedita resisted somewhat, but accepted the three-month delay, meanwhile setting about giving all the necessary instructions for the building of the tomb. And so the tomb was built, but Mascarenhas’s commission did not materialize, and Dona Benedita was unable to go.

  Five months later, there occurred a small family incident. Dona Bene­dita had arranged to build a house on the road to Tijuca, and her son-in-law, using an interruption in the building work as a pretext, proposed that he should finish it. Dona Benedita agreed, and her agreement was all the more to her credit given that she was finding her son-in-law increasingly unbearable with his love of discipline, his obstinacy and impertinence. In fact, he didn’t need to be obstinate; rather, he had only to rely on his mother-in-law’s good nature and merely wait a few days for her to give in. But perhaps it was precisely this that vexed her. Happily, the government decided to dispatch him to the South, and the pregnant Eulália stayed with her mother.

  It was around this time that a widowed merchant took it upon himself to ask Dona Benedita for her hand in marriage. The first year of widowhood had passed. Dona Benedita received his proposal kindly, albeit with little enthusiasm. She looked to her own interests; her son’s age and studies would soon take him away to São Paulo, leaving her all alone in the world. The marriage would be a source of consolation and company. In her own mind, at home or out and about, she developed the idea, adorning it with her quick and lively imagination; it would be a new life for her, for it could be said that she had been a widow for a long time, even before her husband’s death. The merchant had a sound reputation: it would be an excellent choice.

  She did not marry. Her son-in-law returned from the South, her daughter gave birth to a strong, beautiful baby boy, who became his grandmother’s passion for the next few months. Then her son-in-law, daughter, and grandson all left for the North. Dona Benedita found herself alone and sad; her son was not enough to fill her affections. Once again the idea of traveling glimmered briefly in her mind, but only like a match that quickly burned out. Traveling alone would be tiring and dull; she decided it was better to stay.

  A poetry recital she happened to attend helped her shake off her torpor, and restored her to society. Society once again suggested the idea of marriage, and quickly put forward a candidate, this time a lawyer, also a widower.

  “Shall I marry or shall I not?”

  One night, as Dona Benedita was turning this problem over in her mind while standing at the window of the house on the shore at Botafogo, where she had moved to some months earlier, she saw a most unusual spectacle. It began as an opaque glow, like a light filtered through frosted glass, filling the inlet of the bay beyond. Against this backdrop appeared a floating, transparent figure, wreathed in mist and veiled in shimmering reflections, its shape disappearing into thin air. The figure came right up to Dona Benedita’s windowsill, and, drowsily, in a childish voice, spoke these meaningless words:

  “Marry . . . don’t marry . . . if you do marry . . . you will marry . . . you won’t marry . . . you will marry . . . get married . . .”

  Dona Benedita froze in terror, but still had strength enough to ask the figure who she was. The ghostly figure began to laugh, but that laughter quickly faded, and she replied that she was the fairy who had presided over Dona Benedita’s birth. “My name is Indecision,” said the fairy, and, like a sigh, dissolved into the night and the silence.

  THE BONZE’S SECRET

  An unpublished chapter from The Travels of Fernão Mendes Pinto

  I HAVE SET OUT ABOVE the events that occurred in the city of Fucheo,* capital of the kingdom of Bungo, in the company of Father Master Francisco Xavier, and of how the king behaved toward Fucarandono and the other bonzes, who had seen fit to enter into theological disputations with the saintly priest regarding the superiority of our holy religion. I will now speak of a doctrine as curious as it is salutary to the spirit, and worthy of being revealed to all the republics of Christendom.

  One day, while out taking a stroll with Diogo Meireles, in that same city of Fucheo in the year of our Lord 1552, we happened upon a crowd of people gathered at a street corner. They were standing around a local man who was holding forth, gesturing and shouting. The crowd numbered, at the lowest estimate, more than a hundred people, all of them men, and all with mouths agape. Diogo Meireles, who knew the local language better than I, for he had previously spent many months there in the company of a band of merchant-adventurers (he was now engaged in the practice of medicine, which he had studied to useful advantage and in which he now excelled), repeated for me in our language what the speaker was saying, which was, in short, as follows: that he desired only to proclaim the true origin of crickets, which were born out of thin air and the leaves of coconut palms during the conjunction of the new moon. He went on to add that this discovery, impossible to anyone who was not, like him, a mathematician, physician, and philosopher, was the fruit of long years of application, experiment, study, hard work, and even danger to life and limb. All of this he had done for the praise and glory of the kingdom of Bungo, and, in particular, the city of Fucheo, of which he was a loyal son, and if he must pay with his life for postulating such a sublime truth, then so be it, so sure was he that science was a far richer prize than the pleasures of life itself.

  As soon as he had finished, the crowd almost deafened us with their tumultuous cries of acclamation, and hoisted the man aloft onto their shoulders, shouting: “Patimau! Patimau! Long live Patimau, who has discovered the true origin of crickets!” And they carried him off to the porch outside a merchant’s emporium, where they gave him refreshments and bowed ceremoniously according to the customs of this country, which are obsequious and courtly in the extreme.

  Diogo Meireles and I turned back the way we had come, discussing this singular discovery about the origin of crickets, when, only a short walk from the merchant’s emporium, no longer than it would take to say the creed six times, we came upon a
nother crowd of people, on another street corner, listening to another man. We were taken aback by the similarity of the situation, and, as this other man also spoke very quickly, Diogo Meireles once again translated the tenor of his speech for me. The man was saying, to great admiration and applause from the people surrounding him, that he had at last discovered the font of the future life that would surely follow upon the Earth’s utter destruction, and that this was neither more nor less than a single drop of cow’s blood; this was why the cow proved such an excellent habitation for the human soul, and explained the fervor with which so many men, at the hour of their death, sought out this remarkable animal. It was a discovery in which he had complete faith and confidence, resulting as it did from his own repeated experiments and deep cogitations, for which he neither sought nor desired any reward greater than that of glorifying the kingdom of Bungo and receiving from it the esteem due to all loyal sons. The people, who had listened to this speech with great veneration, greeted it with the same hullabaloo as before, and took the man to the aforementioned merchant’s emporium, with the difference that this time they carried him on a palanquin. Upon arriving there, he was showered with the same favors and attentions as had been shown to Patimau, with no distinction being made between them, and their grateful hosts were unsparing in the generous thanks they gave to their two honored guests.

  We could make neither head nor tail of any of this, for the exact similarity between the two encounters seemed to us scarcely accidental, nor did we find Patimau’s theory of the origin of crickets any more rational or credible than the font of future life discovered by Languru, which was the other man’s name. However, we happened to be passing the house of a certain sandal-maker called Titané, who rushed out to speak to Diogo Meireles, with whom he was acquainted. After exchanging greetings, in which the sandal-maker addressed Diogo Meireles as “golden truth and sun of thought” and other such gallant names, the latter told the former what we had just seen and heard, to which Titané replied with great enthusiasm: “It may well be that they are followers of a new doctrine, said to be invented by a very wise bonze who dwells in one of the houses on the slopes of Mount Coral.” And because we were eager to hear more about this doctrine, Titané agreed to go with us the following day to visit the bonze, adding: “They say he will only confide his doctrine to those who truly desire to adhere to it; if that is true, we can pretend that we have come with the sole purpose of hearing his doctrine, and then, if we like it, we may do with it as we see fit.”