Brito suddenly broke off, or so it seemed to the sacristan, who adopted the expression of someone eager to know more. Brito, however, sat for a moment biting his lip and staring at the wall, and did not notice the expectant look on the sacristan’s face, and so both sat on in silence. Brito ended up walking the length of the room, and João das Mercês thought to himself that there was clearly more to this than a mere fever. He wondered, at first, if perhaps the doctors had made a wrong diagnosis or prescribed the wrong medicine; or if there was some other concealed illness, which Brito was calling a fever in order to cover up the truth. He kept his eyes fixed on the comendador as he paced up and down the room, treading very softly so as not to disturb anyone else in the house. From within came the occasional faint murmur of conversation, a call, an order, a door opening or closing. None of this would have been of any importance to those with their minds on other things, but our sacristan had but one thought, to find out what he did not already know. At the very least, some information about the patients’ family, their social position, whether they were married or single, some page from their lives; anything was better than nothing, however removed it was from his own little parish.
“Ah!” cried Brito, stopping his pacing.
There seemed to be in him a great desire to recount something, the “terrible story” he had mentioned to the sacristan shortly before, but the sacristan did not dare ask him and the comendador, not daring to tell the sacristan, resumed his pacing.
João das Mercês sat down. He knew that, in the circumstances, the polite thing would be to leave, proffering a few kind, hopeful, comforting words, and then to return the following day. He, however, preferred to sit and wait, and saw no sign of disapproval on the other man’s face; indeed, the comendador stopped pacing for a moment and stood before him, uttering a weary sigh.
“Yes, it’s a very sad business,” said João das Mercês. “And they’re good people, too, I imagine.”
“They were going to be married.”
“What, to each other?”
Brito nodded in a melancholy way, but there was still no sign of the promised terrible story, for which the sacristan continued to wait. It occurred to him that this was the first time he had heard about the lives of people unknown to him. All he had seen of these people, shortly before, were their faces, but his curiosity was no less intense for that. They were going to be married. Perhaps that was the terrible story; to have fallen mortally ill on the eve of a new life, that was terrible indeed. About to be wed and about to die.
Someone came to summon the comendador, and he excused himself so hurriedly that the sacristan had no time to take his leave. The comendador disappeared for about fifty minutes, at the end of which time the sacristan heard something like muffled sobbing coming from the next room. The comendador returned shortly afterward.
“What was I saying just now? That she, at least, would die. Well, she’s dead.”
Brito said this unemotionally, almost indifferently. He had not known the dead woman very long. The sobbing the sacristan had heard came from Brito’s nephew from Campinas and a relative of the dead woman who lived here in Mata-porcos. It took only an instant for the sacristan to imagine that the comendador’s nephew must have been in love with the dying man’s bride, but this idea proved short-lived, for the nephew had, after all, traveled to Rio with both of them. Perhaps he was to have been the best man. As was only natural and polite, he asked the name of the dead woman. However, either because he preferred not to say or because his thoughts were elsewhere—or perhaps for both those reasons—the comendador did not give her name, nor that of her fiancé.
“They were to be married . . .”
“May God receive her and keep her safe, and him, too, if he should die,” said the sacristan sadly.
And that was enough to draw forth half of the secret that seemed so eager to leave the comendador’s lips. When João das Mercês saw the look in his eyes, the gesture with which he beckoned him over to the window, and the promise he exacted from him, he swore on the souls of all his loved ones that he would listen and say nothing. He was not a man to divulge other people’s confidences, especially those of honorable persons of high rank like the comendador, who, satisfied with these assurances, finally plucked up the courage to tell him the first half of the secret, which was that the engaged couple, who had been brought up together, had come to Rio in order to get married, when that same relative from Mata-porcos had given them some dreadful news . . .
“Which was?” João das Mercês prompted, sensing some hesitation on the part of the comendador.
“That they were brother and sister.”
“What do you mean? Blood relatives?”
“Yes, they had the same mother, but different fathers. Their relative did not explain in detail, but she swore this was the truth, and for a day or more, they were both in a state of shock . . .”
João das Mercês was no less shocked, but he nonetheless determined not to leave without hearing the rest of the story. He heard ten o’clock strike and was prepared to hear the clock chime throughout the night and to watch over the corpse of one or both, as long as he could add this page to his other parish pages, even though these people were not from the parish.
“So was that when they fell ill with the fever?”
Brito clenched his jaw as if he would say nothing more. However, when he was once again summoned, he hurried off and returned half an hour later, with the news of the second death, news to which the sacristan had already been alerted by the sound of weeping, quieter this time, although not unexpected, since there was no one from whom it needed to be concealed.
“The brother, or bridegroom, has just passed away too. May God forgive them! I’ll tell you the whole story now, my friend. They loved each other so much that, a few days after learning of the natural and canonical impediment to their marriage, they decided that, since they were only half-siblings, they would elope, and they fled in a cabriolet. The alarm was given, and the cabriolet was stopped on its way to Cidade Nova. They, however, were so distraught and angry at being captured that they both fell ill with the fever from which they have now died.”
It is impossible to describe the sacristan’s feelings when he heard this tale. He managed, with some difficulty, to keep it to himself for a while. He found out the names of the couple from the obituary in the newspaper, and supplemented the details the comendador had given him with others. In the end, without feeling he was being indiscreet, he divulged the story—without naming names—to a friend, who told it to another, who told it to another, and so on and so forth. More than that, he got it into his head that the cabriolet in which the couple had attempted to elope could well have been the same one that had carried him and the priest to offer them the last rites; he went to the coach house, chatted to an employee, and discovered that it was indeed the same one, which is why this story is called “the tale of the cabriolet.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS was born in 1839. His paternal grandparents were mulattoes and freed slaves. His father, also a mulatto, was a painter and decorator, his mother a washerwoman, a white Portuguese immigrant from the Azores. His mother died of tuberculosis when Machado was only ten and he lived with his father and stepmother until he was seventeen, thereafter earning his own living, first as an apprentice typographer and proofreader, and, only two years later, as a writer and editor on the Correio Mercantil, an important newspaper of the day. By the time he was twenty-one, he was already a well-known figure in intellectual circles. During all this time he read voraciously in numerous languages, and between the ages of fifteen and thirty he wrote prolifically: poetry, plays, librettos, short stories, and newspaper columns. In 1867 he was decorated by the Emperor with the Order of the Rose, and subsequently appointed to a position in the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, where he served for over thirty years, until just three months before his death. Fortunately, this job left him ample time to wr
ite: nine novels, nine plays, over two hundred stories, five collections of poems, and more than six hundred crônicas, or newspaper columns. In 1897, he was unanimously elected the first president of the newly established Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was fortunate, too, in his marriage to Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais, to whom he was married for thirty-five years. Following her death in 1904, at the age of seventy, Machado fell into a deep depression, and published only one more novel and a collection of stories dedicated to her. On his death in 1908, he was given a state funeral, and to this day is considered Brazil’s greatest writer.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
MARGARET JULL COSTA has been a literary translator for over thirty years and has translated works by novelists such as Eça de Queiroz, José Saramago, Javier Marías, and Bernardo Atxaga, as well as poets such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ana Luísa Amaral. ROBIN PATTERSON has translated works by José Luandino Vieira and José Luís Peixoto. Their co-translation of the Brazilian novelist Lúcio Cardoso’s Chronicle of the Murdered House won the 2017 Best Translated Book Award.
Copyright © 2018 by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
Foreword copyright © 2018 by Liveright Publishing Corporation
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The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis Page 107
