The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis

by Machado De Assis

  As I’m sure you, wise reader, will already have guessed, Quintanilha ended up falling in love with the girl. How could he not, when Camila had such large, fatally beautiful eyes? Not that she often directed them at him, and if she did, she did so with a certain degree of awkwardness at first, like a child reluctantly obeying orders from her teacher or father; but she did sometimes look at him, and those eyes, however unintentionally, inflicted a mortal wound. She also smiled a great deal and spoke very charmingly. At the piano, even when obliged to play, she played well. In short, Camila did not voluntarily weave a spell, but she was no less a sorceress for that. One morning, Quintanilha realized that he had been dreaming about her all night, and that same night he realized he had been thinking about her all day, and he concluded from this discovery that he loved her and was loved. He found this idea so intoxicating that he felt like publishing it in all the newspapers. At the very least, he wanted to tell his friend Gonçalves, and so he hurried to his office. Quintanilha’s affection for Gonçalves was mingled with respect and fear. As soon as he opened his mouth, he immediately swallowed his secret again. He didn’t dare to tell him either that day or the next. He knew that he ought to speak, to declare himself and be done with it, but he put off telling him for a whole week. Then, one evening, he went to supper with his friend and, after much hesitation, told him everything, that he loved his cousin and was loved in return.

  “Do you approve, Gonçalves?”

  Gonçalves turned very pale, or at least grew very serious, but with him seriousness and pallor were often one and the same. But, no, he really did turn pale.

  “So you approve?” asked Quintanilha again.

  After a few seconds, Gonçalves opened his mouth to reply, only to close it again, then he fixed his eyes “on yesterday” as he used to say of himself whenever he sat staring off into the distance. In vain did Quintanilha try to find out what was wrong, what he was thinking, if he thought this love of his was sheer nonsense. He was so used to hearing Gonçalves pronounce these words that it no longer wounded or offended him, even regarding such a delicate, personal matter as this. Gonçalves finally surfaced from his meditation, shrugged indifferently, and, in a barely audible voice, he said:

  “Don’t ask me any more questions, just do what you like.”

  “Gonçalves, what’s wrong?” asked Quintanilha, anxiously clasping his friend’s hands.

  Gonçalves gave a great sigh, which, had it had wings, would still be flying now. That, at least, was Quintanilha’s impression, although not expressed in the same paradoxical form. The clock in the dining room struck eight, and Gonçalves declared that he had to pay a visit to a magistrate, and so Quintanilha said good night.

  He stood out in the street, too stunned to move. He could not understand his friend’s gestures, his smile, his pallor, the whole mysterious effect that the news of his love had provoked in him. He had arrived and spoken, ready to have his friend hurl one of his usual fond epithets at him—idiot, dupe, nincompoop—but had heard none of them. On the contrary, there had been something almost respectful in Gonçalves’s manner. He could think of nothing he had said during supper that could have offended him; his friend had only become distressed when he told him of these new feelings for his cousin Camila.

  “But that’s impossible,” he thought. “Why on earth would Camila not make a good wife?”

  He stood outside the house for more than half an hour. He realized then that Gonçalves had not, as he had announced, left the house. He waited another half an hour, but still no Gonçalves. He was tempted to go back in again, to embrace his friend and question him, but he didn’t have the courage. He set off down the street in a state of despair. He went to João Bastos’s house, but Camila had retired to her room with a cold. He wanted to tell her everything, and I should explain here that he had not yet declared his feelings to his cousin. It was true that she certainly did not now avoid his gaze, but that was all, and this might well have been mere flirtatiousness. This, though, was the perfect moment to clarify the situation. Revealing what had just happened with his friend would give him a chance to disclose his love for her and his intention to ask her father for her hand. It would have been some consolation in the midst of all that anguish. Fate, however, denied him this chance, and Quintanilha left the house feeling worse than when he had arrived. He went straight home.

  He did not get to sleep until at least two in the morning, not that this brought him any rest, it only increased his anxiety. He dreamed that he was about to cross a very long, old bridge between two mountains, when, halfway across, rising up from below, a figure appeared and stood before him. It was Gonçalves. “Wretch,” Gonçalves said, his eyes ablaze, “why have you come to take from me my heart’s belovèd, the woman whom I love and who is mine? Why not take my whole heart and be done with it?” And with a rapid gesture he wrenched open his chest, tore out his heart, and thrust it into Quintanilha’s mouth. Quintanilha tried to remove this piece of his friend’s viscera from his mouth and put it back in Gonçalves’s chest, but this proved impossible. His jaws locked tight. He tried to spit the thing out, but that only made matters worse, for his teeth only sank deeper into the heart. He tried to speak, but how could he speak with his mouth stuffed full like that? Finally, his friend reached out his arms and hands to him as if to curse him, a gesture Quintanilha recalled from the melodramas of his youth. Two vast tears flowed from Gonçalves’s eyes, filling the whole valley with water; then Gonçalves threw himself off the bridge and disappeared. Quintanilha woke, struggling for breath.

  The nightmare had seemed so real that he again put his hands to his mouth, as if to remove his friend’s heart. He found only his own tongue. He rubbed his eyes and sat up in bed. Where was he? What was he? And where was the bridge? And Gonçalves? Finally, he came to his senses, realized that it had all been a dream, and lay down again for another bout of insomnia, fortunately briefer than the first, falling asleep at around four o’clock.

  During the day, going over what had happened the previous night, both reality and dream, he reached the conclusion that Gonçalves was his rival, that he loved his cousin and was perhaps loved by her. Yes, that was it. Two very painful hours passed. In the end, he got a grip on himself and went to Gonçalves’s office determined to learn the whole truth, and if it was true, then, yes, if it was true . . .

  Gonçalves was drafting a statement for the defense. He stopped what he was doing and looked at Quintanilha for a moment, then he stood up, opened the safe where he kept confidential documents, took out the will, and handed it to Quintanilha.

  “What’s this for?”

  “You’re about to marry, aren’t you?” said Gonçalves, sitting down again.

  Quintanilha heard how his voice almost broke when he said this, or so it seemed to him. He asked him to put the will away, saying that he was still its natural depositary, but the only response he received was the scratching of his friend’s pen racing over the paper. Actually, Gonçalves’s pen stumbled rather than raced, his writing was shaky, with far more emendations than usual, the dates doubtless wrong. And when he consulted one of his books, he did so with a look of such melancholy that it saddened even his friend. Sometimes he would stop everything—writing and consulting books—and fix his eyes “on yesterday.”

  “I understand,” Quintanilha said suddenly. “She will be yours.”

  “Who?” Gonçalves was about to ask, but his friend was already flying down the stairs like an arrow, and Gonçalves continued his scribbling.

  No need to guess what happened next, it’s enough to know the ending. You won’t guess or even believe what happened, but the human soul is capable of doing great things, both for good and ill. Quintanilha made another will, leaving everything to his cousin, on condition that she marry his friend. Camila would not accept the will, but was so happy when Quintanilha told her of Gonçalves’s tears that she accepted both Gonçalves and the tears. Then Quintanilha felt that the only remedy was to draw up a third
will, leaving everything to his friend.

  The end of the story was spoken in Latin. Quintanilha was best man to the groom and godfather to the couple’s first two children. One day, during the disturbances of 1893, when he was crossing Praça Quinze de Novembro to take some sweets to his godchildren, he was hit by a stray bullet, which killed him almost instantly. He is buried in the cemetery of São João Batista; the grave is a simple one, with an epitaph that concludes with this pious phrase: “Pray for him!” And that is also the end of my story. Orestes is still alive, feeling none of the remorse felt by his Greek counterpart. And, as in Sophocles’s play, Pylades is completely silent. Pray for him!

  THE TALE OF THE CABRIOLET

  “THE CABRIOLET’S HERE, sir,” said the slave who had been dispatched to the mother church of São José to summon the priest to give the last rites to not one but two individuals.

  Today’s generation witnessed neither the arrival nor the departure of the cabriolet in Rio de Janeiro. Nor will they know about the days when the cabriolet and the tilbury filled the role of carriage, public and private. The cabriolet did not last very long. The tilbury, which predates both, looks likely to last as long as the city does. When the city is dead and gone and the archaeologists arrive, they will find a skeletal tilbury waiting for its usual customer, complete with the skeletons of horse and driver. They will be just as patient as they are today, however much it rains, and more melancholy than ever, even if the sun shines, because they will combine both present-day melancholy with that of the spectral past. The archaeologist will doubtless have some strange things to say about the three skeletons. The cabriolet, on the other hand, had no history, and left only the tale I’m about to tell you.

  “Two?” cried the sacristan.

  “Yes, sir, two: Senhora Anunciada and Senhor Pedrinho. Poor Senhor Pedrinho! And Senhora Anunciada, poor lady!” said the slave, moaning and groaning and pacing up and down, quite distraught.

  Anyone reading this with a darkly skeptical soul will inevitably ask if the slave was genuinely upset, or if he simply wanted to pique the curiosity of the priest and the sacristan. I’m of the view that anything is possible in this world and the next. I believe he was genuinely upset, but then again I don’t not believe that he was also eager to tell some terrible tale. However, neither the priest nor the sacristan asked him any questions.

  Not that the sacristan wasn’t curious. Indeed, he was more than curious. He knew the whole parish by heart; he knew the names of all the devout ladies, knew about their lives and those of their husbands and parents, their talents and resources, what they ate, drank, said, their clothes and their qualities, the dowries of the unmarried girls, the behavior of the married women, the sad longings of the widows. He poked his nose into everything, and, in between, helped at mass and so on. His name was João das Mercês, a man in his forties, thin, of medium height, and with a sparse, graying beard.

  “Which Pedrinho and Anunciada does he mean?” he wondered, as he accompanied the priest.

  He was burning to know, but the presence of the priest made any questions impossible. The priest walked to the door of the church so silently and piously that he felt obliged to be equally silent and pious. And off they went. The cabriolet was waiting for them; the driver doffed his hat, and the neighbors and a few passersby knelt down as priest and sacristan climbed into the vehicle and headed off down Rua da Misericórdia. The slave hurried back on foot.

  Donkeys and people wander the streets, clouds wander the sky, if there are any clouds, and thoughts wander people’s minds, if those minds have thoughts. The sacristan’s mind was filled with various thoughts, all of them rather confused. He was not thinking about Our Holy Father, although the sacristan knew how He should be worshipped, nor about the holy water and the hyssop he was carrying; nor was he thinking about the lateness of the hour—a quarter past eight at night—and, besides, the sky was clear and the moon was coming up. The cabriolet itself—which was new in the town, and had replaced, in this case, the chaise—even that did not occupy the whole of João das Mercês’s mind, or only the part that was preoccupied with Senhor Pedrinho and Senhora Anunciada.

  “They must be young people,” the sacristan was thinking, “staying as guests in someone’s house, because there are no empty houses to be had near the sea, and the number he gave us is Comendador Brito’s house. Relatives, perhaps? But I’ve never heard any mention of relatives. They could be friends or possibly mere acquaintances. But in that case why would they send a cabriolet? Even the slave is new to the house; he must belong to one of the two people who are dying, or to both.”

  Such were João das Mercês’s thoughts, although he didn’t have much time to think. The cabriolet stopped outside a two-story house, which was indeed the house of the comendador, José Martins de Brito. There were already a few people waiting outside, holding candles. The priest and the sacristan stepped out of the cabriolet and went up the stairs, accompanied by the comendador. On the landing above, his wife kissed the priest’s ring. Grown-ups, children, slaves, a murmur of voices, dim light, and the two people who were dying, each waiting in their respective rooms at the back.

  Everything happened as it always does on such occasions, according to rules and customs. Senhor Pedrinho was absolved and anointed, as was Senhora Anunciada, and the priest left the house to return to the church with the sacristan. The latter just had time to ask the comendador discreetly if the two were relatives of his. No, they weren’t, said Brito; they were friends of his nephew, who lived in Campinas; a terrible story. João de Mercês’s wide eyes drank in those three words and said, without actually speaking, that they would return to hear the rest—perhaps that same night. All this happened very quickly, because the priest was already going down the stairs, and he had to follow.

  The fashion for the cabriolet was so short-lived that this one probably never took another priest to administer the last rites to anyone else. All that remained was this brief, insubstantial tale, a mere bagatelle that I’ll have finished in no time. Not that its substance or lack of it mattered to the sacristan, for whom it was another welcome slice of life. He had to help the priest put away the Communion wafers, take off his surplice, and do various other things, before they could say good night and go their separate ways. When he was finally able to get away, he walked along by the shore as far as the comendador’s house.

  On the way, he reviewed the comendador’s life, before and after he had received that title. He began with his business—which was, I think, that of ship’s supplier—then moved on to his family, the parties he had given, the various parish, commercial, and electoral posts he had held, and it was only a step or two from that to sundry rumors and anecdotes. João das Mercês’s vast memory stored away every fact and incident, however large or small, so vividly that they might have happened yesterday, and so completely that not even the people involved could have recounted them in such detail. He knew these things as he knew the Our Father, that is, without having to think about the words—indeed, he would pray as if he were eating or chewing the prayer, which emerged unthinking from his mouth. If the rule was to say three dozen Our Fathers on the trot, João das Mercês would do so without even counting. So it was with other people’s lives; he loved knowing about them, finding out about them, and memorizing them so that he would never again forget them.

  Everyone in the parish loved him, because he never meddled or gossiped. With him it was a case of art for art’s sake. Often it wasn’t even necessary to ask any questions. José would tell him about Antônio’s life and Antônio about José’s life. What he did was ratify or rectify one version with the other, then compare their two versions with Sancho’s, then Sancho’s version with Martinho’s and vice versa, and so on and on. This is how he filled his empty hours, of which there were many. Occasionally, while at mass, he found himself thinking about some tale he had heard the previous evening, and the first time this happened, he asked God’s forgiveness, but immediately canceled this re
quest when he realized that he had not missed a single word or gesture of the holy sacrament, so consubstantiate were they with him. The tale he had briefly relived was like a swallow flitting across a landscape. The landscape remains the same, and the water, if there is water, murmurs the same song. This comparison was of his own invention and was more fitting than he imagined, because the swallow, even when it’s flying, is part of the landscape, and the tale was part of him as a person; it was one of the ways in which he lived his life.

  By the time he had reached his destination, he had told every rosary bead of the comendador’s life, and he entered the house with his right foot first for luck. He had decided that, despite the sadness of the occasion, he would stay there for some time, and luck was on his side. Brito was in the front room, talking to his wife, when he was told that João das Mercês was asking after the two people who had received the last rites. His wife withdrew, and the sacristan entered, apologizing profusely and saying that he would not stay long. He had just been passing and wondered if they had already gone up into heaven or were still in this world. He was, naturally, interested in anything that affected the comendador.

  “No, they haven’t died, and may yet live, although I think it highly unlikely that she will survive,” said Brito.

  “They both seemed to be in a very bad way.”

  “Oh, yes, especially her, because she’s the worst affected by the fever. They fell ill here, in our house, soon after they arrived from Campinas a few days ago.”

  “So they were already here?” asked the sacristan, astonished that he had known nothing of their arrival.

  “Yes, they arrived nearly two weeks ago. They came with my nephew Carlos, and caught the fever here—”