The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis

by Machado De Assis

  Standing in front of him, Garcia managed to overcome his repugnance at the spectacle and stared into the man’s face. There was neither anger nor hatred there, simply an immense pleasure, quiet and profound, such as another man might get from hearing a beautiful sonata or gazing at an exquisite statue—something resembling a purely aesthetic sensation. It seemed to him, and indeed it was the case, that Fortunato had forgotten all about him. He could not, therefore, be pretending, and Garcia’s analysis must be correct. The flame was dying down, and the mouse retained perhaps the faintest glimmer of life; Fortunato put this possibility to good use by cutting off the mouse’s nose and, for the last time, lowering the exposed flesh into the flame. Finally, he let the dead body fall into the dish, and pushed the mess of charred flesh and blood away from him.

  When he stood up, he saw Garcia and jumped. Then he put on a display of rage against the animal for having devoured his precious document, but his anger was clearly a sham.

  “He punishes coldly and without anger,” thought Garcia, “driven by the need for a pleasure that only another’s pain can give him: that is his secret.”

  Fortunato stressed the importance of the lost document and the time he had wasted because of it; true, it was only time, but time was now so precious to him. Garcia listened without saying anything, without believing him. He recalled other things he had seen Fortunato do, both the serious and the trivial, and he found the same explanation for all of them. It was the same key change in all of that man’s sensibilities, a peculiar form of dilettantism, a miniature Caligula.

  When, shortly afterward, Maria Luísa returned to the study, her husband went up to her, chuckling, took her hands, and whispered gently: “You big softy!”

  And, turning to Garcia, he said: “Would you believe she nearly fainted?”

  Maria Luísa timidly defended herself, saying she was nervous, and a woman; then she went to sit by the window with her needles and threads, her fingers still trembling, just as we saw her at the beginning of this story. You will remember that, after talking of other matters, the three of them fell silent, the husband sitting, gazing up at the ceiling, the doctor picking at his fingernails. A little later, they sat down to dinner, but it was not a happy occasion. Maria Luísa brooded and coughed; Garcia wondered if the company of such a man might not, perhaps, expose her to some violent excess. It was only a possibility, but his love transformed possibility into certainty; he trembled for her and resolved to keep a close eye on both of them.

  She coughed and coughed, and it wasn’t long before the illness removed its mask. It was consumption, that insatiable old hag that sucks life to the core, leaving only a husk of bare bones. It came as a tremendous blow to Fortunato; he truly loved his wife, in his fashion; he was used to her and it would be hard to lose her. He spared no effort, doctors, medication, changes of air, resorted to every possible remedy and palliative. But all in vain. The illness was fatal.

  During the final days, as Garcia watched the young lady’s terrible suffering, her husband’s inner nature prevailed over any other sentiments he may have had. He never left her side and watched with a cold, dull eye as her life slowly, painfully decayed, drinking in one by one the afflictions of that beautiful creature, now thin and transparent, devoured by fever and consumed by death. His raging egotism, hungry for sensation, would not let him miss one single moment of her agony, nor repay her with a single tear, public or private. Only when she died did the shock hit him. When he came to his senses again, he saw that once again he was alone.

  That night, when a relative of Maria Luísa’s, who had helped her while she was dying, left the room in order to rest, Fortunato and Garcia stayed, watching over the corpse, both of them deep in thought. But the husband was himself exhausted and Garcia told him to rest a little.

  “Go and sleep for an hour or two; afterward, it will be my turn.”

  Fortunato went and lay down on the sofa in the adjoining room, and promptly fell asleep. Twenty minutes later he woke, tried to go back to sleep, dozed for a few moments, then got up and returned to the drawing room. He walked on tiptoe so as not to wake the relative, who was sleeping nearby. As he reached the door, he stopped in astonishment.

  Garcia had gone over to the body, lifted the veil, and gazed for several moments at the dead woman’s features. Then, as if death rendered all things spiritual, he leaned over and kissed her forehead. It was then that Fortunato reached the door. He stopped in his tracks; it could not be a kiss of friendship, but perhaps rather the epilogue to an adulterous novel. Note that he felt no jealousy; nature had formed him in such a way as to give him neither jealousy nor envy, but it had given him vanity, which is no less prone to resentment. He watched in astonishment, biting his lip.

  Meanwhile, Garcia leaned over to kiss the corpse again, but this time he could no longer contain himself. That kiss became a sob, and his eyes could not hold back the tears that streamed down his face, tears of silent love and unquenchable despair. Still standing at the door, Fortunato quietly savored this outburst of spiritual pain, which went on, and on, for a deliciously long time.

  TRIO IN A MINOR

  I

  ADAGIO CANTABILE

  MARIA REGINA ACCOMPANIED her grandmother to her bedroom, said good night, and retired to her own room. Despite the familiarity that existed between them, the slave-woman who attended to her could not get a word out of her and left, half an hour later, saying that mistress was in a very serious mood. As soon as she was alone, Maria Regina sat down on the end of the bed, legs outstretched, ankles crossed, thinking.

  Truth requires me to tell you that the young lady was thinking simultaneously and equally amorously about two men; one of them, Maciel, was twenty-seven, while the other, Miranda, was fifty. Quite abominable, I agree, but I cannot change the facts, nor can I deny that if the two men were both smitten with her, she was no less smitten with both of them. In short, a most peculiar young lady or, as her old school chums from the convent would have put it, a bit of a scatterbrain. No one would deny her excellence of heart and purity of mind; the problem lay in her imagination: an ardent, covetous imagination, insatiably so, a stranger to reality, superimposing its own inventions on everything around her, and from that flowed all sorts of curious consequences.

  The visit of these two men (who had been courting her for only a short while) lasted around an hour. Maria Regina chatted gaily with them and played a classical piece, a sonata, on the piano, which sent her grandmother into a light doze. Later on, they all discussed music. Miranda made some pertinent comments about modern and not-so-modern music; the grandmother was devoted to Bellini and Norma, and she talked about the tunes from her youth: dreamy, delightful, and above all clear. The granddaughter sided with Miranda; Maciel politely agreed with everyone.

  As she sat on the end of the bed, Maria Regina went over it all again: the visit, the conversation, the music, the discussion, the qualities of the two men, Miranda’s words, and Maciel’s beautiful eyes. It was eleven o’clock, the only light in her bedroom was a little night lamp, and everything lent itself to dreams and reveries. As Maria Regina reconstructed the evening’s events, she saw the two men standing there before her, heard them, and spoke with them for quite some time, thirty or forty minutes, accompanied by the sound of the same sonata she had played earlier; da, da, dum . . .

  II

  ALLEGRO MA NON TROPPO

  The following day, grandmother and granddaughter went to visit a friend in Tijuca. On the way back, their carriage knocked down a little boy running across the street. Someone who witnessed the incident grabbed the horses and, at much risk to himself, managed to hold them back and save the child, who was only slightly injured and had merely fainted from the shock. A crowd gathered and uproar ensued; the boy’s mother rushed into the street in tears. Maria Regina got out of the carriage and accompanied the injured child into his mother’s house, which was immediately opposite where the accident had happened.

  Anyone familiar with the
workings of destiny will already have guessed that the person who saved the little boy was one of the two men from the other night: Maciel. Once he and Maria Regina had made sure the boy had received proper treatment, he accompanied her back to the carriage and accepted the grandmother’s offer of a ride into town (at this point they were in Engenho Velho). It was only in the carriage that Maria Regina noticed Maciel’s bloodied hand. The grandmother kept asking if the little boy was badly hurt, if he would pull through. Maciel told her that his injuries were very slight. Then he described the incident in full: he had been standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a cab, when he saw the boy crossing the street in front of the horses; he realized the child was in danger and tried to prevent, or at least diminish, any risk of injury.

  “But you’re hurt,” said the old lady.

  “Oh, it’s nothing.”

  “But you are, you are!” cried the young lady. “We should have bandaged you too.”

  “It’s nothing at all,” he insisted. “Just a scratch. I’ll just use my handkerchief.”

  Before he could pull out his handkerchief, Maria Regina offered him hers. Touched by this offer, Maciel took the handkerchief, but was reluctant to dirty it. “Go on,” she said, and, noting his diffidence, took the handkerchief from him, and she herself wiped the blood from his hand.

  It was an attractive hand, as attractive as its owner, but he seemed less concerned about the wound than about his rumpled cuffs. As he spoke, he kept glancing down at them surreptitiously and trying to hide them. Maria Regina did not even notice, for she saw only him and, above all, the noble action he had just performed, and which had, in her eyes, bestowed on him a halo. She understood that the young man’s generous nature had overcome his usual elegant reserve in order to snatch from death a child he didn’t even know. They talked of nothing else until they reached the ladies’ house; Maciel thanked them, but refused their offer of the carriage, and said that he would see them again that evening.

  “Yes, till this evening!” called out Maria Regina.

  She waited anxiously for him. He arrived at around eight o’clock, his hand wrapped in a black bandage. He apologized for his appearance; he had been told to put something on the wound, and had obeyed.

  “You do seem much better!”

  “I am indeed—it was nothing at all.”

  “Come over here,” said the grandmother, from the other side of the room. “Come and sit next to me: you are a hero, sir!”

  Maciel smiled. His generous impulse had passed, and he was now reaping the rewards of his sacrifice. The best of these was Maria Regina’s admiration, so heartfelt and so great that she forgot entirely about her grandmother and the room. Maciel sat down beside the old lady, with Maria Regina facing them. While the grandmother, now quite recovered from her earlier shock, described the torments she had suffered, not knowing at first what had happened, and then imagining that the child had died, the two young people gazed at each other, at first discreetly, and then quite openly. Maria Regina wondered where she would ever find a better suitor. However, since there was nothing wrong with the grandmother’s eyesight, she eventually found their doe-eyed gazing rather too much and, changing the subject, asked Maciel for the latest society gossip.

  III

  ALLEGRO APPASSIONATO

  As Maciel himself would have said in French, he was très répandu. He plucked out of the air all kinds of interesting titbits, the most titillating of which was that the wedding of a certain widow had been called off.

  “You don’t say!” exclaimed the grandmother. “How has she taken it?”

  “It seems that she herself put a stop to it: she was certainly in very high spirits at the ball the night before last, dancing and chatting. Oh, and aside from the news itself, what most caught my attention was the necklace she was wearing, with a magnificent—”

  “Was it a cross made out of diamonds?” asked the old lady. “Yes, I’ve seen it; it’s very becoming.”

  “No, not that one.”

  Maciel knew the one with the cross, which she had worn at the house of a certain Mascarenhas. No, it wasn’t that one. This new one had been in Resende’s only a few days earlier and was a thing of real beauty. And he described in detail the number, arrangement, and cut of the stones, and concluded by saying that it was the most splendid piece of jewelry at the ball.

  “If she wants luxury like that she’d be better off marrying,” the grandmother commented snidely.

  “I agree that her fortune doesn’t run to such things. Now, here’s an idea—I’ll go to Resende’s tomorrow, just out of curiosity, to find out how much he sold it for. It wasn’t cheap, it can’t have been.”

  “But why was the wedding called off?”

  “That I wasn’t able to find out, but I’m dining with Venancinho Correia on Saturday, and he’ll tell me everything. He’s related to her in some way, you know. A fine fellow, but at daggers drawn with the baron, of course . . .”

  The grandmother hadn’t heard about this falling-out. Maciel told her the story from beginning to end, giving all the background and further aggravating circumstances. The last straw had been some scathing comment made at the card table about Venancinho’s left-handedness. Venancinho got wind of it and broke off all relations with the baron. The best bit was that the baron’s fellow cardplayers all accused each other of having spilled the beans. Maciel declared it was a rule of his never to repeat anything he heard at the card table, since it was a place where people often spoke somewhat too freely.

  Then he gave a full account of Rua do Ouvidor the previous day, between one and four in the afternoon. He knew the names of all the fabrics and the latest colors. He described the latest outfits: first, that of Madame Pena Maia, a distinguished lady from Bahia, which was judged très pschutt. Second, that of Mademoiselle Pedrosa, the daughter of a São Paulo judge, acclaimed as adorable. He mentioned a further three, then compared all five and drew his conclusions. At times, he forgot himself and spoke in French; or perhaps he did so on purpose, for he knew the language well, spoke it fluently, and had once pronounced the following ethnological axiom: “Everywhere there are Parisians.” Then he launched into an explanation of what to do in a card game if you were dealt a particular hand:

  “Say you have five trumps, both spadille and manille, along with a king and queen of hearts . . .”

  Maria Regina’s admiration was slowly descending into boredom; she clung on as best she could, gazed at Maciel’s youthful face, and recalled his noble actions earlier that day, but down and down she slipped, and it wasn’t long before tedium overwhelmed her. There was no help for it. Then she resorted to an unusual expedient. She tried to combine the two men, the present and the absent, looking at one while listening to the other from memory. It was an extreme and painful way to proceed, but so effective that for some time she was able to contemplate one single, perfect creature.

  At that moment, the other man arrived, Miranda himself. The two men greeted one another coolly. Maciel stayed for a further ten minutes, then left.

  Miranda remained. He was tall and angular, with hard, icy features. He looked tired, and his fifty years were evident in his grizzled hair and wrinkled, aging skin. Only his eyes retained something a little less decrepit. They were small, almost hidden beneath the enormous arch of his eyebrows, but deep down, when not lost in thought, they still sparkled with youth. As soon as Maciel left, the old lady asked Miranda if he had heard about the accident at Engenho Velho, and recounted the tale in elaborate detail, but Miranda listened to it all with neither admiration nor envy.

  “Isn’t that wonderful?” she asked, once she had finished.

  “He may, of course, have saved the life of some worthless individual who, one of these days, not recognizing him, will stick a knife in his belly.”

  “Surely not!” the grandmother protested.

  “Or even if he did recognize him,” added Miranda, correcting himself.

  “Now, don’t be spiteful,” retorted Maria
Regina. “No doubt you would have done the same, had you been there.”

  Miranda smiled sardonically. The smile accentuated the harshness of his features. Egotistical and ill-spirited, Miranda distinguished himself in one aspect only: his intellect, which was unsurpassed. Maria Regina found in him the most marvelous and faithful translator of the clatter of ideas that battled vaguely within her, without form or expression. He was clever and refined, even profound, and always kept to the open plains of normal conversation rather than plunging into thickets of pedantry, for the true worth of things lies in the ideas they instill in us. Both men had the same artistic inclinations: Miranda had studied law only to obey his father; his true vocation was music.

  Anticipating the sonata, the grandmother prepared herself for a little nap. Besides, she could not bear to let a man like Miranda into her affections, for she found him dull and disagreeable. After a few minutes, she fell silent. Then came the sonata, in the midst of a conversation that Maria Regina found perfectly delightful; indeed, it came entirely at Miranda’s request, for he would gladly hear her play.

  “Granny,” she said, “now, do please bear with us . . .”

  Miranda moved closer to the piano. Next to the glow of the lamp, his head revealed all the weariness of the passing years, while the expression on his face was all granite and spleen. Maria Regina noted the change in his demeanor and played without looking up at him—a difficult thing to do, because whenever he spoke, his words penetrated her soul so deeply that the young lady could not help but look up, only to find herself face-to-face with a decrepit old man. That was when she remembered Maciel in the flower of youth, his sincere, tender, warmhearted expression, and his actions earlier that day. A comparison just as unfair to Miranda as her earlier comparison of their respective intellects had been to Maciel. And the young lady resorted to the same expedient. She completed one man with the other: she listened to this one while thinking of the other one, and the music helped her with this fiction, which, hesitant at first, soon became intense and complete. Thus Titania, listening enamored to the weaver’s song, admired his handsome figure, not noticing that he had the head of an ass.