The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis

by Machado De Assis

  “What’s that got to do with it?” interrupted the doctor. “No one’s saying there’s anything wrong with his arms or legs . . .”

  “His heart, then? Or his stomach?”

  “Neither heart nor stomach,” replied Dr. Halma, and he continued, very gently, explaining that it was a highly speculative matter, which he could not discuss there on the street, and indeed he wasn’t sure if they would understand him. “If I had to style someone’s hair or cut a pair of breeches,” he added, so as not to upset them, “it’s highly unlikely that I would meet the exacting standards of your respective professions, so useful and indeed essential to the state . . .”

  Chuckling amiably, he bade them good day and continued on his way. The two creditors stood there openmouthed. The wigmaker was the first to speak, saying that the news from Dr. Halma should not discourage them in their efforts to get paid. “If even the dead pay up, or at least someone else does on their behalf,” reflected the wigmaker, “then it’s only right to ask the sick to do the same.” The tailor, envious of the wigmaker’s little joke, stitched on his own witty frill: “Pay up and be cured!”

  This opinion was not shared by Mata the shoemaker, who thought some secret lay behind Dr. Halma’s words, and proposed that, first, they should carefully analyze what this might be, and then decide upon the most appropriate course of action. They then invited other creditors to join them in conclave the following Sunday at the house of a certain Dona Aninha, in the vicinity of Rocio, on the pretext of a baptism. The precaution was a prudent one, so as not to give the superintendent of police reason to suspect that the gathering concerned any shady machinations against the state. As soon as darkness fell, the creditors began to arrive, swathed in cloaks, and, as public street-lighting only came in with the Count of Resende’s viceroyalty, each of them carried a hand lantern as custom then dictated, thereby giving their cabal a touch of the theatrical and picturesque. There were thirty or forty of them, and they were not all of his creditors, either.

  Charles Lamb’s theory about the division of humankind into two great races came after the Rocio cabal, but here we have no better example to demonstrate it. The men’s distressed and downcast demeanor, the despair of some and the anxieties of all, were proof in advance that the distinguished essayist’s theory was indeed true, and that of the two great human races—those who lend and those who borrow—the sad gestures of the former contrast with “the open, trusting, generous manners of the other.” For at that very same hour, having returned home from the procession, Tomé Gonçalves was gaily entertaining some of his friends with the wine and chicken he had purchased on credit, while his creditors, pale and disillusioned, were secretly trying to work out some way of getting their money back.

  The debate was long and no single opinion convinced everyone. Some were inclined to litigate, others to wait, and more than a few were open to consulting Dr. Halma. Five or six partisans of this latter course of action seemed to favor it, but only with the secret and disguised intention of doing nothing whatsoever, for they were the slaves of fear and hope. The wigmaker opposed it, asking what illness could possibly prevent a man from paying what he owed. But Mata the shoemaker said to him: “My good friend, ours is not to reason why; just remember that the doctor is a foreigner, and in foreign parts they know things they wouldn’t even tell the devil. In any case, it wouldn’t take long.” This argument won the day, and they appointed the shoemaker, the tailor, and the wigmaker to speak to Dr. Halma on everyone’s behalf, and the cabal dissolved into general merrymaking. Terpsichore herself, the muse of dance, leapt and spun her joyful graces before them, so much so that some even forgot the secret ulcer gnawing away inside them. Eheu! fugaces labuntur anni . . . Alas! the fleeting years slip by. Even pain is fickle.

  The following day, between seven and eight o’clock in the morning, Dr. Halma received the three creditors, “Come in, come in . . .” And with his broad Dutch face and a laugh that spilled from his mouth like a full-bodied wine from a broken cask, the great physician came in person to open the door to them. At that moment, he was engrossed in studying a snake found dead the previous day on Santo Antônio hill; but, as he liked to say, humanity takes precedence over science. He invited the three men to sit down on the only three empty chairs in the room; the fourth chair was his own, while all the others, some five or six, were piled high with all manner of things.

  It was Mata the shoemaker who explained the problem; of the three he was the most endowed with diplomatic talents. He began by saying that the good doctor’s skill was going to save a large number of families from destitution, and it would be neither the first nor the last great work of a doctor who—with no disrespect to the local doctors—was the wisest to have been seen there since the days of Gomes Freire’s government. Tomé Gonçalves’s creditors had no one else to turn to. Knowing that the good doctor attributed Gonçalves’s arrears to an illness, they had decided that a cure should first be attempted, before resorting to legal proceedings. They would keep litigation as a last resort, if all else failed. This was what they had come to tell him, on behalf of dozens of creditors. They wanted to know if it was true that, on top of all the other possible human ailments, the nonpayment of debts was yet another illness, and whether it was incurable, and, if it wasn’t, whether the tears of so many families might—

  “There is a rather unusual illness,” interrupted Dr. Halma, visibly moved by their plight, “known as a ‘memory lapse.’ To put it quite simply, Tomé Gonçalves has lost all notion of paying for anything. The reason he fails to settle his bills is neither a deliberate ploy nor mere carelessness; rather, the idea of paying, of handing over the price of a thing, has been entirely erased from his mind. I discovered this two months ago when I was at his house, and the prior of the Carmo monastery called by, saying he had come to ‘pay him the courtesy of a visit.’ No sooner had the prior left than Tomé Gonçalves asked me what ‘pay’ meant and added that, several days earlier, an apothecary had used the same word, without any further explanation, and he thought he had also heard it from other people. Hearing the prior say it, he supposed it must be Latin. I understood everything then; I had studied this condition in various parts of the world, and I understood that he was suffering an attack of ‘memory lapse.’ It was for this very reason that I said to these two gentlemen the other day that they should not issue proceedings against a sick man.

  “But then,” ventured Mata, turning pale, “our money is completely lost . . .”

  “The illness is not incurable,” said the doctor.

  “Ah!”

  “Indeed not. I both know of and possess the drug that will cure it, and I have already employed it in two major cases: a barber who had so entirely lost any notion of space that one night he reached up to pluck the stars from the sky, and a lady from Catalonia who had lost all notion of her husband. The barber risked his life many times trying to jump out of the highest windows in the house, as if he were on the ground floor . . .”

  “Good gracious!” exclaimed the three creditors.

  “My feelings exactly,” the doctor continued calmly. “As for the Catalan lady, at first she confused her husband with a graduate called Matias, who was tall and slim, whereas her husband was short and fat; then with a captain called Hermógenes, and, at the time I began to treat her, with a clergyman. In three months she was completely cured. Her name was Dona Agostinha.”

  It was a truly miraculous drug. The three creditors were radiant with hope; everything indicated that Tomé Gonçalves was indeed suffering from that ‘lapse,’ and since a drug existed, and the doctor had it in his house . . . Ah! but there was the rub. Although the doctor was on good terms with the man, Tomé Gonçalves was not one of Dr. Halma’s regular patients, and he could scarcely turn up at his house offering his services. Tomé Gonçalves had no close family to take responsibility for calling a doctor, and the creditors could scarcely assume the burden themselves. Silent and perplexed, the creditors exchanged glances. Those of
the tailor, like the wigmaker’s, expressed the following desperate suggestion: that the creditors should all chip in, and, by means of a fat and appetizing sum, invite Dr. Halma to perform his cure. Perhaps the money . . . But the illustrious Mata saw the danger in such a proposal, since the patient might not recover and their losses would thereby be doubled. Great was their anguish; all seemed lost. The doctor twirled his snuffbox between his fingers, waiting for them to leave, not impatiently, but cheerfully. It was then that Mata, like a captain in the grand old days of yore, saw the enemy’s weak point. He had noticed that his opening words had moved the doctor, and so returned to his theme of their families’ tears and their children’s empty stomachs, for they were but humble artisans or tradesmen of little means, whereas Tomé Gonçalves was rich. Shoes, breeches, cloaks, cough syrups, wigs, all these things cost them time, money, and health . . . Yes, sir, health; the calluses on his hands showed clearly that his trade was a hard one, and his good friend the tailor, standing here among them, who spluttered and coughed with consumption night after night by the light of a candle, endlessly stitching away with his needle and thread . . .

  Kind, generous Jeremias! His eyes had filled up with tears before the shoemaker could finish. The awkwardness of his manner was compensated by the effusions of a devout and human heart. Yes, of course he would try to cure him; he would place science at the service of a just cause. Moreover, the main beneficiary would be Tomé Gonçalves himself, for his reputation was now in tatters on account of something for which he was as blameless as a blasphemous lunatic. Naturally the delegation’s delight translated into endless bows and extravagant praise for the doctor’s exemplary qualities. The latter modestly cut this short by asking them to join him for breakfast, an honor which they declined, meanwhile thanking him most cordially. Even when they were out in the street where the doctor could no longer hear them, they did not tire of praising his wisdom, goodness, generosity, and courtesy. Such simple, natural good manners!

  From that day on, Tomé Gonçalves began to notice that the doctor had become an assiduous visitor, and—with no ulterior motive, because he genuinely liked him—he did everything he could to attach him to his household once and for all. His “lapse” was indeed complete; not just the idea of paying, but also the related notions of creditor, debt, bills, and so on, had been completely erased from his memory, forming a large hole in his mind. I fear I may be accused of making fanciful comparisons, but Pascal’s abyss is the one that most readily comes to mind. Tomé Gonçalves had Pascal’s abyss not beside him, but within his very being, and it was so deep that it held within it more than sixty creditors, thrashing around down there with a wailing and gnashing of teeth, as the Scriptures put it. It was an urgent matter to fish out all those unhappy creatures and fill in the hole.

  Jeremias convinced the patient that he was under the weather, and, to reinvigorate him, began administering the drug. On its own, the drug was not enough; an accompanying therapy was also necessary, because the cure operated on two levels. The general or abstract level, i.e., restoring the idea of paying, along with all other related notions, was the part entrusted to the drug; whereas the specific or concrete level, i.e., the suggesting or naming of a particular debt and a particular creditor, fell to the doctor. Let’s suppose that the first chosen creditor was the shoemaker. The doctor would take the patient to various shoe shops in order to witness the sale and purchase of the merchandise, and watch again and again the action of paying; he would talk about the manufacture and sale of shoes throughout the world, and compare the price of footwear in that year of 1768 with the prices of thirty or forty years earlier; he would get the shoemaker to visit Tomé Gonçalves’s house ten or twenty times to present his bill and ask for his money; and a hundred other such stratagems. One by one, the same thing happened with the tailor, the wigmaker, the coachmaker, and the apothecary; it took longer with the ones who went first, for the perfectly natural reason that the illness was more ingrained, whereas the preceding efforts benefited those who went later, and compensated them for the delay.

  All bills were paid. The creditors’ joy was indescribable, the blessings they heaped upon the name of Dr. Halma too numerous to mention. “Yes, sir, a great man,” they shouted high and low. “Sounds like witchcraft to me,” ventured the women. As for Tomé Gonçalves, astonished at so many old debts, he never tired of praising his creditors’ forbearance, and at the same time reprimanded them for letting them accumulate.

  “From now on,” he told them, “I want to be billed every week.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll remind you,” was the creditors’ wholehearted response.

  There remained, however, one creditor. This was the most recent, Dr. Halma himself, for his fees for that valuable service rendered. But, alas, modesty tied his tongue. As generous of heart as he was awkward of manner, he planned three, even five attempts, but didn’t manage even one. And yet it would have been the easiest thing in the world; he merely needed to suggest the debt using the same method employed in relation to the others. But was that appropriate? he asked himself; was it decent? So he waited, and waited. Not wanting to appear too brazen, he began to visit less frequently, but Tomé Gonçalves would go to the doctor’s modest house on Rua do Piolho and take him out to dinner or supper and discuss foreign affairs, about which he was very curious, but never saying a word about paying. Dr. Halma began to think that perhaps the creditors might do so, but even though the thought of reminding Tomé Gonçalves about the unpaid doctor’s bill might have crossed their minds, the creditors did nothing, because they presumed it had been paid first, before all the others. That, at least, is what they told each other, clothed in many formulations of popular wisdom—Look first to your own, Matthew—Charity begins at home—A fool asks God to kill him and the devil to take his soul, etc. All false; the truth is that on the day he died, Tomé Gonçalves had only one creditor in the world: Dr. Halma.

  By then, in 1798, Dr. Halma was virtually a saint. “Farewell to a great man!” Mata, now ex-shoemaker, said to him, as they sat in the chaise taking them both to Tomé Gonçalves’s requiem mass at the Carmelite church. And Dr. Halma, bent with age and gazing sadly down at the tips of his shoes, replied: “A great man, poor devil.”

  FINAL CHAPTER

  MANY SUICIDES HAVE the excellent custom of not departing this life without setting out the reason and circumstances that have turned them against it. Those who go silently rarely do so out of pride; in most cases they either lack time or don’t know how to write. It is an excellent custom for two reasons: first, it is an act of courtesy, for this world is not a ball from which a man can sneak away before dancing the cotillion; second, the newspapers collect and publish these posthumous scribbles, and thus the deceased lives on for a day or two, sometimes even a week.

  Notwithstanding the excellence of the custom, it was originally my intention to go silently, because, having been unlucky my whole life, I feared that any final words might cause complications in the hereafter. But a recent incident made me change my plans, and I am leaving behind not one document, but two. The first is my will, which I have just finished drafting and sealing; it’s here on the table, beside the loaded pistol. The second is this outline of an autobiography. Note that I am leaving the second document only because it is needed to clarify the first, which would seem absurd or unintelligible without some commentary. In my will I state that my few books, old clothes, and the little house I own in Catumbi, which I rent out to a carpenter, should be sold and the proceeds used to buy new boots and shoes to be distributed in the manner indicated, which, I confess, is rather extraordinary. Without an explanation for such a legacy, I risk doubt being cast on the will’s validity. The reason behind the legacy stems from a recent incident, and the incident, in turn, is connected to my entire life.

  My name is Matias Deodato de Castro e Melo, son of Sergeant-Major Salvador Deodato de Castro e Melo and Dona Maria da Soledade Pereira, both deceased. I come from Corumbá, in the state of M
ato Grosso; I was born on March 3, 1820, and am, therefore, fifty-one years of age today, March 3, 1871.

  As I said, I am an unlucky fellow, if not the unluckiest of all men. There is even an old proverb that I have quite literally fulfilled. It happened in Corumbá, when I was nearly eight years old. I was swinging back and forth in my hammock during siesta time, in a little room directly under the roof tiles. Now, either because the hook was loose, or because I was swinging too vigorously, the hammock came away from one of the walls and I found myself flat on the floor. I had fallen on my back, but even so I managed to break my nose, because a loose piece of roof tile, which was just waiting for an opportunity to fall, took advantage of the commotion to come crashing down as well. The wound inflicted was neither serious nor of long duration; indeed, my father teased me mercilessly about it. When Canon Brito came to sip a cool glass of guaraná with us that evening and was told all about the episode, he cited the proverb, saying that I was the first person actually to achieve the absurd feat of falling flat on my back and breaking my nose. Neither the canon nor my father could have imagined that the incident was simply a sign of things to come.

  I won’t dwell on the other misfortunes that blighted my childhood and youth. I want to die at noon, and it is already eleven o’clock. Besides, I’ve sent my manservant out, and he might come back early and interrupt the execution of my deadly project. If I had time, I would recount in detail several painful episodes, including a beating I received by mistake. It concerned the rival of a friend of mine—a rival in love and, naturally, one who had been defeated. My friend and the lady in question were most indignant when they found out about the beating I had received, but secretly they were rather pleased that I had been beaten and not him. Nor will I speak of certain illnesses I have suffered. I will hasten to the point when my father, having been poor all his life, died in extreme poverty, and my mother survived him by less than two months. Canon Brito, who had just been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, proposed taking me with him to Rio de Janeiro with the idea of making a priest of me; however, five days after we arrived, he died. You see what I mean when I say I have always been unlucky.