The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis

by Machado De Assis

  “You’re quite right to have him as your friend,” she concluded. “He’s always spoken very warmly about you and said you were a very serious young man.”

  There were fresh flowers in the study and a bird in a cage. All very orderly, everything in its place—clear evidence of his wife’s hand. Elisiário arrived shortly afterward; he was clean-shaven and looking very smart and fresh, complete with a carefully tied cravat. It was only then that I noticed the difference between this Elisiário and the old one. The slight incoherence of his gestures was far less marked now, almost nonexistent. All his former restlessness and awkwardness had vanished. As soon as he entered the room, his wife left us so as to order some coffee to be brought, then returned shortly afterward, carrying some sewing.

  “No, senhora, first we must do our Latin,” Elisiário roared.

  Dona Jacinta blushed scarlet, but obediently went to fetch the book she’d been reading when I arrived.

  “You can trust Tosta,” Elisiário went on. “He won’t say anything to anyone.”

  Then, turning to me, he added:

  “It wasn’t my idea, you know. She was the one who wanted to study Latin.”

  I didn’t believe him, and wanted to spare her the Latin lesson, but she herself gaily took up her grammar book. Once she’d recovered from her embarrassment, she did her lesson like any good pupil. She listened attentively, took pleasure in pronouncing the words, and was clearly keen to learn. When they’d finished their Latin, Elisiário wanted to move on to history, but this time she refused, not wanting to get in the way of our conversation. I was astonished and heaped praise on them both, although, in fact, I found that conjugal Latin lesson so preposterous that I could find no explanation for it, nor did I dare ask for one.

  My visits became more frequent. I would occasionally dine with them, but on Sundays I only ever had lunch there. Dona Jacinta was perfect. You can’t imagine how delightful she was in every way, and yet she never lost her composure and always talked very gravely and sensibly. She was skilled at all kinds of needlework, despite the Latin and history her husband was teaching her. She dressed very simply, her hair combed smoothly back, and she never wore any jewelry; this could have been an affectation, but she was so sincere in everything she did that it seemed as natural in her as did everything else.

  On Sundays, we lunched in the garden. I would find Elisiário waiting eagerly for me at the front door. His wife would be putting the finishing touches to the flowers and foliage that would adorn the table, and she always drew up a menu decorated with poetic emblems and with each course named after one of the muses. Since she and her husband were not rich and our appetites not that large, there was never room for all the muses, but those who could duly joined us for lunch. It was over lunch that, in the early days, Elisiário would improvise, usually poems with ten-line stanzas—his preferred length; later, he reduced the number of stanzas and they rarely went beyond one or two. Then Dona Jacinta asked him to begin composing sonnets, and she and I would copy them down in pencil, making any corrections he asked for. He would laugh and say: “But what do you want with these poems?” In the end, to his wife’s great sadness and to mine, too, he got out of the habit. They were good poems, and they came easily to him. All they lacked was the old fire.

  One day, I asked Elisiário why he didn’t publish a new edition of his poems, which, he had told me, contained a number of errors; I would, I said, gladly help with the proofreading. Dona Jacinta enthusiastically seconded this proposal.

  “All right,” he said. “I will one day. We could even start on Sunday.”

  On Sunday, when Dona Jacinta was alone with me for a moment, she asked me not to forget our proposal.

  “No, don’t worry, I won’t.”

  “And don’t waver if he tries to put off starting work,” she went on. “He’ll probably suggest postponing it for another time, but you must dig your heels in, and say no, that you’ll be angry and never come back . . .”

  She squeezed my hand very hard, and I was astonished to find that her hand was trembling, like the hand of a lover. I did as she asked, and she backed me up, but, even so, it took half an hour before he would sit down to work. In the end, he asked us to wait while he went to fetch the book.

  “This time, we have victory,” I said.

  Dona Jacinta looked doubtful and her mood switched from joy to despair.

  “Elisiário is terribly lazy. We never manage to finish anything. Haven’t you noticed that he only composes poems if we insist, and that now he hardly composes any? He could write prose as well, even if it was only those improvised speeches of his, but even they are getting few and far between. I’m always offering to write down whatever he dictates. I get out pen and paper and I wait, but he just laughs, makes a joke, and says he’s not in the mood.”

  “Well, he probably isn’t always in the mood.”

  “Maybe not, but then I say that I’m ready for whenever inspiration strikes, that he just has to call me, but he never does. He’s always full of plans, and I get all excited about them, but they never go beyond being plans. And yet the book he published in Porto Alegre was well received. You could encourage him.”

  “Encourage him? He doesn’t need encouragement; all he needs is his enormous natural talent.”

  “I know,” she said, coming closer, her eyes aflame. “But it’s a terrible shame to see such talent wasted!”

  “We’ll find that talent again. I’ll have to start treating him as if he were younger than me. We should never have let him fall into such idleness.”

  Elisiário returned with a copy of the book, but without pen or paper, and Dona Jacinta went off to fetch those. We began the work of revision; the plan was to amend not just any typographical errors, but the text itself. The novelty of the exercise kept our poet engaged for nearly two whole hours, although, to be honest, most of that time was filled by him telling us the stories that lay behind the poems or about the various dedicatees, of whom there were many, for a large proportion of the poems were dedicated to friends or to men in the public eye. Inevitably, we got very little done, twenty pages at most. Elisiário announced then that he was tired, and so we stopped working and never returned to it.

  Dona Jacinta even asked her husband to leave it to us to make the corrections; he could check the amended version afterward and that would be that. Elisiário refused, saying that he would see to everything, we just had to wait, there was no hurry. But, as I said, we never returned to that book. He rarely improvised now, and since he lacked the patience to write anything down, he composed fewer and fewer poems. Those he did compose were feeble and repetitive. We nevertheless tried to suggest bringing out another book, collecting together what poems there were, and before we even proposed this to him, she and I actually put together an anthology. All that it needed then was for him to correct it. Elisiário agreed to do this, but, as before, our project came to nothing. He rarely made speeches now. His pleasure in language was dying. He spoke pretty much as we all speak; he was now not even a shadow of that cornucopia of ideas, images, phrases, which revealed the poet behind the orator. In the end, he hardly spoke; he received me cordially, but unenthusiastically. He became deeply bored. After only a few years of marriage, Dona Jacinta found herself with a husband who was orderly and quiet, but cold and uninspired. She began to change, too, no longer urging him to write new poems or to correct old ones. She became as dull as him. Suppers and lunches at their house were like those in any other unlettered household. Dona Jacinta was careful not to touch on a subject that was painful to her and to her husband; I did the same. When I graduated from university, Elisiário wrote a sonnet in my honor, but he found it very hard work, and it wasn’t nearly as good as the sonnets that the old Elisiário used to write.

  Dona Jacinta was not so much sad as disenchanted, and the reason for this would be hard to understand without some knowledge of what had led her into marriage.

  As far as I could gather and observe, she never truly
loved the man she married. Elisiário thought she loved him and said as much, because her father had always believed it to be true love. The truth is, though, that what Dona Jacinta felt for him was merely admiration. She had always nursed a purely intellectual passion for him, and, initially, had never even considered marriage. Elisiário’s visits to Dr. Lousada’s house were the high points of her life, listening to his seemingly endless supply of poems, new and old, those he knew by heart and those he improvised on the spot. And even when he wasn’t reciting poetry, she was content simply to listen to and admire him. Elisiário, who had known her since she was a child, would talk to her as if to a younger sister. Then he realized that she was more intelligent than most women, and had a real feeling for poetry and art, which marked her out as far superior. He genuinely respected her, but it went no further than that.

  And so the years passed, until Dona Jacinta came up with a plan to dedicate her life to him. She knew about the wasted days, the staying up into the small hours talking or walking, the incoherence and disorder of a life that seemed doomed to end in futility. He lacked all drive or ambition, but Dona Jacinta believed in Elisiário’s genius. He had many admirers, but none of them shared her brightly burning faith or deep, silent devotion. Her plan was to marry him. Once they were married, she would give him the ambition he lacked, the drive, the habit of regular, methodical, and, of course, abundant work. Instead of wasting his time and inspiration on futile things or idle conversations, he would compose brilliant works when he was at his inspired best, which he nearly always was. The great poet would at last be revealed to the world. Once she had decided on marrying him, she easily persuaded her father to collaborate, although without admitting the secret, underlying reason, which would have been to admit to him that she wasn’t marrying for love. Indeed, she told him that she really did love Elisiário.

  True, there was something romantic about her plan, but it was more an act of mercy, with its roots in her deep admiration for him; it could even be seen as a sacrifice. She may have had other suitors, but she had never thought about marriage, until that one generous idea occurred to her, to seduce the poet. And he, as we know, married out of gratitude.

  The result was quite contrary to all her hopes. Far from being crowned with laurels, the poet donned a monkish cowl and sent poetry packing. He became a mere nothing. In the end, he didn’t even read great works of literature. Dona Jacinta suffered greatly; she saw her dream vanishing, and although she did not lose, but rather gained Latin, she lost the sublime language in which she hoped to speak to the ambitions of a great mind. The conclusion she reached was still less consoling. She concluded that marriage had killed an imagination that could only find inspiration in bachelor freedom. She was filled with remorse. And, as well as failing to find the pleasures of marital life with Elisiário, she lost the one advantage of her intended sacrifice.

  She was, of course, wrong. For me, Elisiário remained the same wanderer he had always been, even though he appeared to be entirely settled; but his was a talent that could not last; it would have died even if he hadn’t married. It wasn’t order that took away his inspiration. True, disorder was better suited to someone so restless and solitary, but peace and method would not have destroyed him as a poet if the poetry in him had not been merely a youthful fever . . . Indeed, in my own case, poetry turned out to be nothing more enduring than an adolescent cold. So, concluded Tosta, kissing his wife, ask me for my love and you shall have it, but don’t ask me for poetry, which I abandoned long ago.

  ETERNAL

  “DON’T TELL ME,” I said, going into his room. “It’s that business with

  the baroness, isn’t it?”

  Norberto dried his eyes and sat on the edge of the bed, his legs dangling. I sat astride a chair, resting my chin on the chair back, and gave the following brief speech:

  “How often must I tell you, you little fool, to give up on this ridiculous, humiliating passion of yours? Yes, ‘ridiculous’ and ‘humiliating,’ because she doesn’t even know you exist. Besides, it’s dangerous. You don’t agree? Well, you’ll find out soon enough when the baron starts to suspect you of setting your cap at his wife. He certainly doesn’t look like the sweetest-tempered of men.”

  Norberto clutched his head in despair. Having waited for me in the street until nearly one o’clock in the morning, opposite the boardinghouse where I lived, he had finally written a letter, begging me to go to him and offer comfort and advice; in the letter he told me he hadn’t slept, that he’d received a terrible blow; he even talked of drowning himself. Despite the terrible blow that I, too, had received, I went to see my poor friend. We were both the same age, both of us studying medicine, the only difference being that I was currently repeating my third year, which I had failed out of sheer idleness. Norberto was still living with his parents; I was less fortunate, having lost both of mine, and I lived on an allowance from an uncle in Bahia, and on the debts that this good old man paid off for me every six months. He would then write me a letter full of invective, which always concluded by saying that I must continue my studies and become a doctor. But why? I asked myself. If neither the sun, the moon, the girls, nor the best Villegas cigars were doctors, what was the point in my becoming one? And so I laughed and played and let the weeks and the creditors roll by.

  I’ve just mentioned receiving a terrible blow of my own. This came in a letter from that same uncle, and arrived at the same time as Norberto’s, on the same morning. I opened my uncle’s letter first and read it, horrified. He no longer addressed me in his usual familiar way, but stiffly and formally: “Senhor Simeão Antônio de Barros, I have had enough of throwing my money away on you, sir. If you wish to finish your studies, then come and enroll in a university up here and live with me. If not, then you must find your own money, because you will receive nothing more from me.” I crumpled up the letter, stared hard at a very bad lithograph of the Viscount of Sepetiba—which had always been there in my boardinghouse room, hanging from a nail on the wall—and called him every name under the sun, from madman downward. I bawled at him that he could keep his money, that I was twenty years old, which was the very first of the rights of man, and took precedence over uncles and all other social conventions.

  My imagination—always my mother and my friend—immediately came up with endless possible sources of income, which would mean I could dispense with the paltry amount doled out by a miserly old man; however, after that initial defiant response, I reread the letter and began to see that the solution was not as easy as it seemed. Those other possible sources might be good and even reliable, but I had grown so accustomed to visiting Rua da Quitanda to collect my monthly allowance and then spend it twice over, that I would find it very hard to adopt any other system.

  It was then that I opened my friend Norberto’s letter and ran straight to his house. You already know what his letter said and saw him clutch his head in despair. What you do not know is that, having made that gesture, he eyed me gravely and said he had hoped to hear rather different words of advice from me.

  “Such as?”

  He did not respond.

  “Should I tell you to buy a pistol or a lockpick, or perhaps some narcotic or other?”

  “Why are you making fun of me?”

  “To make a man of you.”

  Norberto shrugged, and one corner of his mouth lifted slightly in scornful sneer. What kind of man? What did it mean to be a man if not to love the divinest creature on earth and to die for her?

  The Baroness of Magalhães, the cause of this madness, had recently arrived from Bahia with her husband, who, before he became a baron—a title acquired to please his fiancée—had been just plain Antônio José Soares de Magalhães. They were newly married; the baroness was about twenty-four, some thirty years younger than the baron. She really was very beautiful. Her childhood name had been Iaiá Lindinha, the Pretty Young Miss. The baron was an old friend of Norberto’s father, and the two families were immediately thrown together.<
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  “Die for her?” I said.

  Norberto swore that he truly was capable of killing himself for her sake. She was such a mysterious creature! Her voice seeped into his very bones. And, saying this, he writhed about on the bed, pummeling his head and biting the pillows. He would stop occasionally, panting, then resume these convulsions, muffling his sobs and cries so that no one would hear him on the next floor.

  Since the arrival of the baroness, I had grown accustomed to my friend’s tears, and so I waited for them to cease. When they did not, I left my chair, went over to the bed, and yelled at him that he was behaving like a child, and that I was leaving. Norberto grabbed my hand to make me stay and explained that he had not yet told me the worst part.

  “That’s true. What is it?”

  “They’re leaving. We visited them yesterday, and I heard them say they were taking the boat to Bahia.”

  “To Bahia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they’ll be on the same boat as me.”

  I told him about my uncle’s letter, and how he had ordered me to enroll in a Bahian university and live with him. Norberto listened in astonishment. In Bahia? Then we could go together; we were close friends, his parents would surely not refuse this favor to our youthful friendship. Despite the many tears that she would shed to lose her son, his mother gave in more quickly than we had imagined. His father, however, would not agree. No amount of pleading and persuading could change his mind; I had managed to get the baron involved in our plan, too, but even he could not get his old friend to allow his son to go with him, not even with the promise that he would take him into his own house and watch over him. Norberto’s father proved utterly immovable.

  You can imagine my friend’s despair. I spent Friday night at his house with his family, and stayed until eleven o’clock. On the pretext of spending my last night in Rio together, he came back to my boardinghouse, and the tears he wept were so many and so bitter that I could neither doubt his passion nor presume to console him, it being the first passion he had experienced. Up until then, we had both known only the small change of love; and, alas for him, the first really valuable coin he had found was made not of gold or silver, but of iron, hard iron, like that of old Lycurgus, forged in the fire, then cooled in the same vinegar bath.