The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis

by Machado De Assis

  He sat down again, slowly reread the portrait of Elias, pondering its features. While he lacked the necessary knowledge to evaluate the truth of the sketch, he thought that, in many aspects, at least, the portrait was a true likeness. He compared these iconographic notes, so crude and cold, with his uncle’s warm, elegant manners, and felt gripped by a certain fear and disquiet. What, for example, might his uncle have said about him? With this thought, he again leafed through the manuscript, skimming over various ladies and public men, and came upon Fragoso—an extremely brief sketch that came immediately after Galdino and four pages before João Brás. He remembered that the former had, only a short time before, taken a pen as a memento; perhaps the very pen with which the dead man had drawn his portrait. The sketch was only a few lines long, as follows:

  FRAGOSO—Honest, saccharine manners, and handsome. Wasn’t difficult to marry him off; he gets on very well with his wife. I know he adores me—almost as much as he adores himself. Polished, insipid, and commonplace conversation.

  GALDINO MADEIRA—The warmest heart in the world and a spotless character, but the qualities of his mind destroy all the others. I lent him some money for family reasons and because money is not something I lack. There is in his brain a hole of some sort, through which his mind slips and falls into a vacuum. He is incapable of three minutes’ consecutive thought. He subsists mainly on images and borrowed phrases. The “teeth of calumny” and other such expressions are his perennial delight—as worn out as the mattress in a cheap boardinghouse. He is easily vexed at cards, and, once vexed, makes a point of losing, making it clear that this was deliberate. He doesn’t dismiss any employees, however bad. If he didn’t have bookkeepers, it’s doubtful he could keep track of his earnings at all. A friend of mine, who is a civil servant, owed him some money for more than two years and used to say to me with a grin that, whenever Galdino saw him in the street, instead of asking for his money, he would ask him how things were going at the ministry.

  JOÃO BRÁS—Neither foolish nor stupid. Very attentive, despite having no manners. Cannot bear to see a minister’s carriage go by; he turns pale and averts his eyes. I believe he’s ambitious, but at his age, with no settled career, ambition is slowly turning to envy. In the two years he served as a deputy, he performed his duties honorably: he worked hard and made several good speeches; not brilliant, but solid, full of facts, and well thought out. Proof that he retains a residue of ambition lies in his ardent pursuit of certain prominent, honorific posts; a few months ago, he allowed himself to be appointed honorary president of a São José lay brotherhood, and according to what I hear, he performs his duties with exemplary zeal. I believe he is atheist, but I can’t be sure. He smiles little and discreetly. He lives a pure and rigorous life, but his character has one or two fraudulent notes to it, which he lacks the skill to conceal; he lies easily about trivial matters.

  At last, with a feeling of dread, Benjamin found himself described in this diary.

  This nephew of mine [said the manuscript] is twenty-four years of age, engaged on a project for judicial reform, has abundant hair, and he adores me. I adore him no less. Discreet, loyal, and kind—even to the point of gullibility. As firm in his affections as he is fickle in his opinions. Superficial and a lover of novelty; very fond of legal vocabulary and formulas.

  He tried to reread this, but couldn’t bear to; those few lines were like gazing into a mirror. He stood up, went over to the window, looked out at the garden, and came back inside to contemplate once again his own features. He reread what his uncle had written: it was rather scant and thin, but not slanderous. If someone had been there with him, it’s likely that the young man’s feelings of mortification would have been less intense, because the need to dispel the impressions formed by the others would have given him the necessary strength to react against what was written. Alone, however, he had to bear it with no contrasting light and shade. Then he wondered whether his uncle might have composed these pages when he was simply in a bad mood; he compared them to others in which the phrasing was less harsh, but he had no idea whether or not the milder tone was deliberate.

  To confirm his hypothesis, he recalled his uncle’s customary good manners, the happy hours he had spent alone with him or in conversation with his friends. He tried to summon up his uncle’s face, the kindly, amused look in his eyes, and his rather solemn sense of humor; but instead of those innocent, friendly features, all he could see was his uncle lying dead, stretched out on the bed, his eyes open and his lip curled. He tried to banish this image from his mind, but it refused to budge. Unable to drive it away, Benjamin tried mentally to close the man’s eyes and straighten his mouth; but no sooner had he done so than the eyelids would lift once again, and the lips resume that ironic sneer. It was no longer the man he had known, but the author of those portraits.

  Benjamin ate and slept badly. The five friends returned the following afternoon to continue their reading. They arrived eager and impatient, asking many questions and insisting on seeing the notebooks. Benjamin, however, put them off, making one excuse after another; unfortunately for him, there in the room, behind the others, he could still see the dead man’s eternally curling lip, and this made him seem even more awkward and withdrawn. Benjamin’s demeanor toward the others turned chilly, for he wanted them to leave, and to see if that vision would disappear with them. Thirty or forty minutes went by. Eventually, the five friends looked at each other and decided to go; they bade him a ceremonious farewell, and returned to their houses deep in conversation:

  “What a difference from his uncle! What a gulf separates them! Puffed up by his inheritance, no doubt! Well, we’ll leave him to it. Alas, poor Joaquim Fidélis!”

  THE CHAPTER ON HATS

  GÉRONTE: In which chapter, may I ask?

  SGANARELLE: In the chapter on hats.

  —MOLIÈRE

  SING, O MUSE, of the dismay of Mariana, wife of the distinguished Conrado Seabra, on that April morning in 1879. What could be the cause of such upset? A simple hat, light and not inelegant; in short, a bowler hat. Conrado, a lawyer with offices on Rua da Quitanda, wore it to the city every day, and it went with him to all his court hearings; he only refrained from wearing it at receptions, the opera, funerals, and formal social visits. Otherwise, it was a constant feature, and had been so for the entire five or six years of his marriage. Until, on that particular April morning, after finishing their breakfast, Conrado began to roll a cigarette, and Mariana announced with a smile that she had something to ask him.

  “What is it, my angel?”

  “Would you be capable of making a sacrifice for me?”

  “I could make ten or twenty of them!”

  “Then stop wearing that hat to the city.”

  “Why? Is it ugly?”

  “I wouldn’t say ugly, but it’s only meant to be worn locally, when going for a stroll around the neighborhood, in the evenings or at night. But in the city, for a lawyer, well, it hardly seems—”

  “Don’t be so silly, sweetie!”

  “It may be silly, but will you do it as a favor? Just for me?”

  Conrado struck a match, lit his cigarette, and tried to change the subject with an affable wave of his hand, but his wife persisted, and her insistence, at first gently imploring, quickly became harsh and imperious. Conrado was shocked. He knew his wife; she was usually such a passive creature, sweet and gently amenable as the situation demanded, capable of wearing a bonnet, a wimple, or a royal tiara with the same divine indifference. The proof of this is that, having been part of a rather fast set during the two years before marrying, once she did marry, she quickly settled into homelier habits. She did go out from time to time, mainly at the behest of her husband, but she was only truly at ease in her own home. Furniture, curtains, and ornaments made up for the lack of children; she loved them like a mother, and such was the harmony between person and surroundings that she took particular pleasure in everything being in its proper place, the curtains hanging in th
e same neat folds, and so on. For example, one of the three windows that gave onto the street was always left half open, and it was always the same one. Even her husband’s study did not escape her fastidious demands, for she carefully maintained, and at times restored, his books, so that they were always in the same state of disorder. Her mental habits were equally uniform. Mariana possessed very few ideas and read only the same books again and again: Macedo’s Moreninha, seven times; Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and The Pirate, ten times each; Le Mot de l’Énigme by Madame Craven, eleven times.

  In the light of all this, how can one explain this business with the hat? The previous evening, while her husband was attending a meeting of the bar association, Mariana’s father came to their house. He was a kindly old man, wiry and somewhat ponderous, a retired civil servant who was consumed by nostalgia for the days when employees wore frock coats to the office. Even now, a frock coat was what he wore to funerals, not for the reasons a reader might suspect, such as the solemnity of death or the gravity of a final farewell, but for the less philosophical reason that this was how things used to be. He always gave the same reason, whether it was frock coats at funerals, or having dinner at two o’clock in the afternoon, or twenty other such foibles. He was so chained to his habits that, on his daughter’s wedding anniversary, he would go to their house at six o’clock, having already dined and digested, and watch them eat and, at the end, take a little dessert, a glass of port, and some coffee. Given that he was Conrado’s father-in-law, how could he possibly approve of his son-in-law’s bowler hat? He put up with it in silence, in consideration of the man’s other qualities, but nothing more. That day, however, he had caught sight of it in the street, conversing with other hats—top hats belonging to distinguished gentlemen—and never had it seemed so vile. That night, finding his daughter alone, he opened his heart to her, dubbing the bowler hat the “abomination of abominations,” and urging her to banish it.

  Conrado was unaware that this was the origin of the request. Knowing his wife’s docile nature, he did not understand her resistance, and, because he was willful and authoritarian, her stubbornness irritated him deeply. Even so, he kept these feelings to himself, preferring simply to scoff; he spoke to her with such scathing irony and disdain that the poor lady felt utterly humiliated. Twice Mariana tried to leave the table and twice he forced her to stay, the first time by grabbing her lightly by the wrist, the second time by subduing her with a withering look. And he said with a smile:

  “Now, then, sweetie, I have a philosophical reason for not doing as you ask. I have never told you this before, but I will now tell you everything.”

  Mariana bit her lip and said no more; she picked up a knife and began to tap it slowly on the table, just to have something to do, but her husband wouldn’t even allow her this; he delicately took the knife from her and went on:

  “Choosing a hat is no random act, as you might suppose; it is governed by a metaphysical principle. Do not think that a man who buys a hat does so freely and voluntarily; the truth is that he is obeying an obscure form of determinism. The illusion of liberty is deeply embedded in the purchaser’s psyche, and shared by hatters, who, after watching a customer try on thirty or forty hats, then leave without buying a single one, imagine that he is merely searching for the most elegant combination. The metaphysical principle is this: the hat completes the man; it is an extension of his head, a combination decreed ab eterno and that no man may put asunder without committing an act of mutilation. This is a profound question that no one has yet considered. Wise men have studied everything from asteroids to worms, or, in bibliographical terms, from Laplace—you mean you’ve never read Laplace?—well, from Laplace and his Mécanique Céleste to Darwin and his curious book about worms, and yet they’ve never thought to pause in front of a hat and study it from every angle. No one has noticed that there is a whole metaphysics of hats. Perhaps I should write an essay on the subject myself. However, it’s now a quarter to ten and I really must go, but do think about it and you’ll see what I mean. Who knows? Perhaps it’s not even the hat that complements the man, but the man who complements the hat.”

  Mariana finally wrested back her independence and got up from the table. She had not understood a word of his barbed terminology, nor his peculiar theory, but she sensed his sarcasm and, inside, she wept with humiliation. Her husband went upstairs to get dressed to go out, came back down a few minutes later, and stood in front of her with the infamous hat on his head. Mariana really did think it made him look seedy, vulgar, and not at all serious. Conrado ceremoniously bade her good day and left.

  The lady’s irritation had subsided considerably, but her feelings of humiliation remained. Mariana did not wail and weep, as she thought she would, but, thinking it all over, she recalled the simplicity of her request and Conrado’s sarcastic response, and, while she recognized that she had been somewhat demanding, she found no justification whatsoever for such excesses. She paced back and forth, unable to stand still; she went into the drawing room, approached the half-open window, and watched her husband standing in the street waiting for the streetcar, with his back to the house and that eternal, despicable hat on his head. Mariana felt herself overcome with hatred for that ridiculous item; she couldn’t understand how she had put up with it for so many years. And she thought of all those years of docility and acquiescence to her husband’s whims and desires, and wondered if that might not be the very thing that had led to his reaction that morning. She called herself a fool and a ninny; if she had behaved like so many other wives, Clara or Sofia, for example, who treated their husbands as they deserved to be treated, none of this would have happened. One thought led to another, and to the idea of going out. She got dressed and went to visit Sofia, an old school friend, just to clear her head, and certainly not to divulge anything.

  Sofia was thirty, two years older than Mariana. She was tall, sturdy, and very sure of herself. She greeted her friend with the usual show of affection and, when Mariana said nothing, she guessed at once that something was very much amiss. Adieu to Mariana’s best intentions! Within twenty minutes she had told her friend everything. Sofia laughed, shrugged her shoulders, and told her it wasn’t her husband’s fault at all.

  “Oh, I know, it’s my fault entirely,” agreed Mariana.

  “Don’t be silly, my dear! You’ve just been far too soft with him. You must be strong, for once; take no notice; don’t speak to him for a while, and when he comes to patch things up, tell him he must first change his hat.”

  “Goodness, but it seems such a trivial thing . . .”

  “At the end of the day, he’s just as right as all the others. Take that chump Beatriz: Hasn’t she gone and disappeared off to the country, just because her husband took a dislike to an Englishman who was in the habit of riding past their house every afternoon? Poor Englishman! Naturally, he didn’t even notice she’d gone. We women can live very happily with our husbands, in mutual respect, not frustrating each other’s desires and without resorting to stubborn outbursts or despotism. Look, I get on very well with my Ricardo, perfectly harmoniously. Whatever I ask him to do, he does immediately, even when he doesn’t want to; I only need to frown and he obeys. He wouldn’t give me any trouble over a hat! Certainly not! Where would that lead? No, he’d jolly well get a new hat, whether he wanted to or not.”

  Mariana listened enviously to this delightful description of conjugal bliss. The clarion call of Eve’s rebellion reverberated within her, and meeting her friend gave her an irresistible itch for independence and free will. To complete the picture, Sofia was not only very much her own mistress, but also the mistress of everyone else too; she had eyes for all the Englishmen, whether on horseback or afoot. She was an honest woman, but also a flirt; the word is rather crude, but there’s no time now to find a more delicate one. She flirted left, right, and center, out of a necessity of nature, a habit of her maiden days. It was the small change of love, and she distributed it to all the paupers who knocked on her d
oor: a nickel to one, a dime to another, never as much as five mil-réis, still less anything more substantial. These charitable urges now induced her to propose to Mariana that they take a stroll together, see the shops, and admire some fine, dignified hats while they were at it. Mariana accepted; a little demon was firing up within her the furies of revenge. Moreover, her friend had Bonaparte’s powers of persuasion and gave her no time to reflect. Of course she would go; she was tired of living like a prisoner in her own home. She, too, wanted to live a little.

  While Sofia went to dress, Mariana remained in the drawing room, restless and rather pleased with herself. She planned out what remained of her week, marking the day and time for each appointment like fixtures on an official journey. She stood up, sat down, went over to the window, while she waited for her friend.

  “Has she died or something?” she said to herself from time to time.

  Once, when she went to the window, she saw a young man pass by on horseback. He wasn’t English, but he made her think of Beatriz, whose husband had taken her off to the country due to his distrust of an Englishman, and she felt swelling within her a hatred of the entire masculine race—except, perhaps, for young men on horseback. To be honest, this one was far too affected for her taste; he stuck out his legs in the stirrups just to show off his boots, and rested one hand on his waist as if he were a mannequin. Mariana noted these two defects, but thought that his hat made up for them. Not that it was a top hat; it was a bowler, but entirely appropriate for equestrian purposes. It was not covering the head of a distinguished lawyer on his way to the office, but that of a man simply enjoying himself or passing the time.