The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis

by Machado De Assis

  “Just like Caesar’s death,” he told himself.

  Then he added:

  “No, better than that: no threats, no weapons, no blood, just a fall and it’s over. I wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  Cordovil found himself laughing or smiling, anything to drive away the terror and leave only the sense of freedom. Well, better to die like that than after long days or months and years, like the enemy he had lost a few hours before. It wasn’t even like dying; it was like tipping one’s hat, with the gesture lost in the air along with the hand and mind that had made it. Like nodding off into eternal sleep. He found only one thing wrong with it—the showiness of it. That death in the middle of a dance, in front of the Emperor, to a waltz by Strauss, described, painted, and exaggerated in the newspapers, that death would seem made to order. Never mind, as long as it was quick.

  It could also, he thought, happen in the Chamber, the following day, at the beginning of the debate about the budget. He had the floor; he was already spouting figures and statistics. No, he didn’t want to imagine the scene, there was no point, but it refused to go away and appeared of its own accord. The Chamber, rather than the Cassino, with no ladies present or only a very few in the public gallery. A vast silence. Cordovil, on his feet, would begin his speech, then glance around the room, at the minister and the prime minister: “I thank you, gentlemen, for your time. I will be brief and, I hope, fair . . .” A cloud would pass before his eyes, his tongue would stop, his heart, too, and he would suddenly collapse. Chamber, gallery, benches would freeze. Many deputies would rush to help him; one, who was a doctor, would declare him dead; he wouldn’t say he had simply dropped down dead, as the doctor in the street earlier had put it, but would use some more technical term. Work would be halted, there would be a few words from the prime minister, and a group would be chosen to accompany the dead man to the cemetery . . .

  Cordovil tried to laugh off these imaginings about what would happen after death, the crowds and the funeral, the obituaries in the newspapers, which he quickly had by heart. He tried to laugh, but would have far preferred simply to nod off; however, his eyes, sensing that they were now so close to home and bed, preferred not to spoil their night’s sleep and remained wide awake.

  And that same death—which he had imagined happening at the ball or the following day in the middle of the debate—now entered the carriage. He imagined the footman opening the door and finding his corpse. He would thus leave a very noisy night for a peaceful one, with no conversations, no dances, no meetings, no struggle or resistance. A sudden jolt made him realize this wasn’t true. The carriage had proceeded up the drive to his house and stopped, and Domingos had sprung down from his seat to come and open the door for him. Cordovil climbed out with his legs and soul alive and went in by the side door, where his slave Florindo was waiting for him with a candle. He went up the stairs, and his feet felt that those steps were definitely of this world; had they been of the next world, they would, of course, have been going down. Upstairs, he went into his bedroom and looked at the bed; it was the same bed where he had spent many a long, tranquil night asleep.

  “Any callers?”

  “No, sir,” said the slave distractedly, then corrected himself: “I mean, yes, sir. The doctor who had lunch with you last Sunday, he came to see you.”

  “Did he leave a message?”

  “He said he had some good news and left a note, which I put at the foot of the bed.”

  The note announced the death of his enemy; the doctor was one of the friends who had kept him updated on the progress of his enemy’s illness. He had wanted to be the first to tell him the great news and sent his very best wishes. So the blackguard had died. The friend didn’t actually use that word, but it amounted to the same thing, and he added that this had not been his only reason to call. He had come to spend the evening with him, only to be told that Cordovil had gone to the Cassino. He had been about to leave, when he remembered their mutual enemy’s death and asked Florindo to let him leave a brief message. Cordovil read the note and again felt the dead man’s pain. He made a melancholy gesture and muttered:

  “Poor wretch! Yes, long live sudden deaths!”

  Had Florindo made a connection between the doctor who left the note, that gesture, and those words, he might have regretted taking the trouble to pass on the note, but this never even occurred to him. He helped his master undress, received his final orders, and said good night. Cordovil then climbed into bed.

  “Ah!” he sighed, stretching out his weary body.

  Then he had an idea: What if he were to wake up in the morning dead? This hypothesis—the best of the lot, because it would catch him when he was already half dead—brought with it a thousand other fantasies that drove sleep from his eyes. In part, these were a repetition of the earlier ones, his speech to the Chamber, the prime minister’s words, the funeral cortege, and all the rest. He heard the sad words of friends and servants, read the obituaries, all either flattering or fair. He began to suspect that he was already asleep, but he wasn’t. He brought himself back to the room, to the bed, to himself: he was awake.

  The lamp lent more substance to reality. Cordovil dismissed these gloomy ideas and waited for happier ones to take over and dance him to sleep. He tried to vanquish one vision with another. He even did one rather ingenious thing: he summoned up all his five senses, whose memories were still sharp and fresh, and evoked long-extinct incidents and episodes. Certain gestures, social and family gatherings, panoramic vistas, and many other things he had seen, resurfaced from distant, diverse times. He once again savored a few favorite titbits as if he were eating them now. His ears heard footsteps, light and heavy, songs, cheerful and sad, and words in all their many guises. Touch and smell played their part, too, and he quite lost track of time.

  He tried to sleep and firmly closed his eyes. But he couldn’t sleep, not on his right side or his left, not on his back or his front. He sat up and looked at his watch; it was three o’clock. Unthinkingly, he pressed the watch to his ear to see if it had stopped; it hadn’t; it was fully wound. Yes, he still had time to have a good sleep; he lay down again and covered his head with the sheet to block out any light.

  It was then that sleep tried to enter, silently, soundlessly, cautiously, just as death would if it wanted to carry him off suddenly and for good. Cordovil again squeezed his eyes tight shut, but the effort involved in this only increased his longing to sleep; he managed then to relax his eyelids, and this worked, for sleep, which had been about to retreat, returned and came and lay down next to him, wrapping him in the simultaneously light and heavy arms that deprive a person of all movement. Cordovil could feel them and tried to return their embrace and snuggle up still closer. That is not a good image, but I have no better one at hand and no time to go and find another. I will describe only the result of that gesture, which was to drive away sleep, much to the annoyance of that giver of rest to the weary.

  “What has he got against me tonight?” sleep would have asked if it could speak.

  As you know, sleep is essentially silent. When it does seem to speak, it is a dream opening the dreamer’s mouth; sleep is as silent as a stone, although even a stone can speak if struck, as the road-menders are doing right now outside in my street. Every blow awakens in the stone a sound, and the regularity of those blows makes a noise like the soul of a clock. People talking or selling something, carriage wheels, footsteps, a window blown shut by the wind, none of the things I can hear now enlivened Cordovil’s street or his night. Everything favored sleep.

  And Cordovil was, at last, falling asleep, when the idea of waking up dead reappeared. Sleep drew back and fled. This toing and froing went on for some time. Just as sleep was sealing his eyes shut, the thought of death would open them, until, in the end, he threw back his sheets and leapt out of bed. He opened the window and leaned on the sill. The sky was trying to grow light, a few dark shapes were walking down the street, workers or merchants making their way into town. Cordov
il shivered, but whether from cold or fear, he didn’t know; he went and put on a cotton dressing gown and returned to the window. Yes, it must have been the cold, because he had stopped shivering.

  People continued to pass and the sky continued to lighten; a whistle from the station indicated that a train was about to leave. Men and things emerged from their night’s rest, the sky frugally extinguished the stars as the sun arrived for its shift. Everything made one think of life, and the idea of death gradually slipped away and vanished entirely, while our man, who had sighed for death in the Cassino and wished for it the following day in the Chamber of Deputies, who had come face-to-face with it in his carriage, now turned his back on it when he saw it enter along with sleep, death’s elder brother, or, who knows, its younger one.

  When he did eventually die, many years later, he asked for and received not a sudden death, but a gradual one, the death of a slowly decanted wine, which leaves one bottle and enters another, with all its impurities filtered out. Only the dregs would go to the cemetery. Now he understood the philosophy of death; the wine remained in the bottles, until, drop by drop, it was all decanted into the second bottle. As for what a sudden death meant, he never did grasp that.

  A CAPTAIN OF VOLUNTEERS

  AS HE WAS about to set sail for Europe, immediately following the proclamation of the republic, Simão de Castro collected together all his old letters and notes, and tore them up. The only thing to survive was the story you are about to read; he gave it to a friend to publish as soon as he had crossed the bar. That friend declined because he felt the story might cause some upset, and he said as much in a letter. Simão replied saying that he could do as he wished. Since he himself had no literary ambitions, he really didn’t care if the story was published or not. Now that both men have died, and there is less need for such scruples, the story can at last be sent to the printers.

  At the beginning there were four of us, two young men and two young women. The other man and I used to go there, initially out of habit or boredom and, finally, out of friendship, for I became friends with the owner of the house, and he with me. In the evenings, after supper—people dined early in 1866—I would go there to smoke a cigar. The sun would still be coming in through the window, from which you could see a hill with some houses at the top. The opposite window looked out over the sea. I won’t name the street or the district, although I can name the city: Rio de Janeiro. I will conceal the name of my friend too; let’s call him X. And she, one of the girls, was called Maria.

  When I arrived, X. would already be sitting in his rocking chair. The room was very sparsely furnished and decorated; it was all very simple. X. would hold out his large, strong hand to shake mine, and I would go and sit by the window, looking now at the room and now out at the street. Maria would either already be in the room or appear later on. We meant nothing to each other, and were bound together purely by our affection for X. The three of us would sit and talk; I would go back to my own house or for a walk; they would stay behind and, later, go to bed. We would sometimes play cards, and, toward the end, that was where I spent most of my evenings.

  I found everything about X. imposing. First of all, his physique, for he was robust whereas I was a weakling; my feeble, feminine grace disappeared in the presence of his manly vigor, his broad shoulders and hips, powerful thighs, solid feet, and firm step. Imagine me with a thin, sparse mustache; imagine him with long, thick, curly side-whiskers; one of his habitual gestures, when he was thinking or listening, was to run his fingers through those whiskers, leaving them even curlier. His eyes completed the picture, not just because they were large and beautiful, but because they smiled even more, and more brightly, than his lips. Add to this his age: X. was forty years old, whereas I was not yet twenty-four. And add to that his experience of life: he had lived a great deal, and in another milieu entirely, from which he had escaped to hide himself away in that house with that young lady; I had experienced nothing and never lived with anyone. Finally—and this characteristic is crucial—there was about him a Spanish quality, a drop of the blood that flows through the pages of Calderón, a moral attitude that, without wishing to diminish him or make fun, I would compare to a Cervantes hero.

  How had they met and fallen in love? That went back a long way. Maria was already twenty-seven, and seemed quite well educated. I heard that they had first met at a masked ball in the old Teatro Provisório. She had been wearing a short skirt and dancing to the sound of a tambourine. She had admirable feet, and either they or fate caused X. to fall in love with her. I never asked about the wedding ring she wore; I know only that she had a daughter, who was at school and never came to the house; her mother would always go and see her. We treated each other with the greatest respect, and that respect included accepting their situation unquestioningly.

  When I first began visiting, I was not yet employed at the bank. I only started working there a couple of months later, but this did not interrupt our friendship. Maria would play the piano; sometimes she and her friend Raimunda would manage to drag X. along to the theater, and I would go too. Afterward, we would take tea at someone’s house, and, occasionally, if there was a full moon, we would end the night taking a cab to Botafogo.

  Barreto did not join us on those occasions; he only became a regular visitor later, but he was good company, cheerful and lively. One night, as we were leaving, he turned the conversation to the two women, and suggested that he and I try to seduce them.

  “You choose one, Simão, and I’ll choose the other.”

  I shuddered and stood stock-still.

  “Or, rather, I’ve already chosen,” he went on. “I’ve chosen Raimunda. I really like her. You choose the other one.”

  “Maria?”

  “Who else?”

  I was so taken aback by this tempting idea that I could find no words to reject it, no words and no gestures. It all seemed to me perfectly natural and necessary. And so I agreed to choose Maria; she was only three years older than me, but old enough to teach me the ways of love. Barreto and I embarked on our conquests with ardor and tenacity. Barreto did not have to try very hard; his chosen one had no lover, for she had recently been jilted, with her lover going off to marry a girl from Minas. She soon allowed herself to be consoled. One day, when I was having my breakfast, Barreto came to announce that he had received a letter from her, which he showed to me.

  “So you’re a couple, then.”

  “We are. What about you?”

  “No, not me.”

  “So when will you be?”

  “We’ll see. I’ll tell you later.”

  I felt rather annoyed. With the best will in the world, I could not bring myself to tell Maria how I felt, not that I was in love, you understand, I was merely curious. Whenever I saw her youthful, slender figure, all warmth and life, I was filled with a mysterious new energy; on the one hand, I had never actually been in love, and, on the other, Maria was my friend’s companion. I say this, not in order to explain my scruples, but simply so that you can understand my diffidence. They had been living together for some years and were devoted to each other. X. trusted me completely, telling me about his business dealings and about his past life. Despite the age difference, we were like students in the same year at college.

  Given that I was always thinking about Maria, she had probably guessed my new state of mind from my face; the fact is that, one day, when I shook her hand, I noticed that she allowed her hand to linger a little longer than usual in mine. Two days later, when I went to the post office, she was there buying a stamp for a letter to Bahia. Did I mention she was from Bahia? Well, she was. She spotted me first and came to speak to me. I waited while she put the stamp on her letter, then we said goodbye. At the door, as we were leaving, I was about to say something, when I saw X. standing there before us.

  “I was just sending a letter to Mama,” Maria stammered.

  She said goodbye and went home, while he and I set off in the opposite direction. X. took this opport
unity to praise Maria to the skies. He did not go into any detail about how they had met, but assured me that they had both fallen equally in love with each other and would stay together forever.

  “I won’t get married now, but we live together as man and wife, and I will die at her side. My only regret is that I’m obliged to live apart from my mother. My mother knows, though,” he said, and, for a moment, he stopped walking. Then he went on: “She knows, of course, and has even alluded to it, in a very vague, remote way, but I understood. I don’t think she disapproves. She knows Maria is a kind, serious-minded girl, and as long as I’m happy, she wants nothing more. That’s all I would gain from marriage.”

  He said many other things, which I barely heard, for my heart was pounding furiously and my legs had turned to jelly. I could not find the right response, and any words I tried to say got stuck in my throat. After a while, he noticed this and misinterpreted my feelings, assuming that I found his confidences boring. Laughing, he remarked on this, and I told him very earnestly:

  “No, not at all, I’m very interested. After all, the people you’re talking about are worthy of great consideration and respect.”

  I think now that I was unconsciously giving in to a necessary hypocrisy. The age of passions is a confusing one, and in that situation, I cannot really identify what my feelings were or their precise causes. On the other hand, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that I was trying to drive any flicker of distrust from X.’s mind. And he heard my words with a look of gratitude on his face. He enfolded me in the gaze of his large, childlike eyes, and when we said goodbye, he shook my hand energetically. I think he may even have said: “Thank you.”