The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

by Machado De Assis

  With that said, I expired at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon in the month of August, 1869, at my beautiful suburban place in Catumbi. I was sixty-four intense and prosperous years old, I was a bachelor, I had wealth of around three hundred cantos, and I was accompanied to the cemetery by eleven friends. Eleven friends! The fact is, there hadn’t been any cards or announcements. On top of that it was raining—drizzling—a thin, sad, constant rain, so constant and so sad that it led one of those last-minute faithful friends to insert this ingenious idea into the speech he was making at the edge of my grave: “You who knew him, gentlemen, can say with me that nature appears to be weeping over the irreparable loss of one of the finest characters humanity has been honored with. This somber air, these drops from heaven, those dark clouds that cover the blue like funeral crepe, all of it is the cruel and terrible grief that gnaws at nature and at my deepest insides; all that is sublime praise for our illustrious deceased.”

  Good and faithful friend! No, I don’t regret the twenty bonds I left you. And that was how I reached the closure of my days. That was how I set out for Hamlet’s undiscovered country without the anxieties or doubts of the young prince, but, rather, slow and lumbering, like someone leaving the spectacle late. Late and bored. Some nine or ten people had seen me leave, among them three ladies: my sister Sabina, married to Cotrim—their daughter, a lily of the valley,—and … Be patient! In just a little while I’ll tell you who the third lady was. Be content with knowing that the unnamed one, even though not a relative, suffered more than the relatives did. It’s true. She suffered more. I’m not saying that she wailed, I’m not saying that she rolled on the ground in convulsions, or that my passing was a highly dramatic thing … An old bachelor who expires at the age of sixty-four doesn’t seem to gather up all the elements of a tragedy in himself. And even if that were the case, what least suited that unnamed lady was to show such feelings. Standing by the head of the bed, her eyes cloudy, her mouth half open, the sad lady had a hard time believing my extinction.

  “Dead! Dead!” she kept saying to herself.

  And her imagination, like the storks that an illustrious traveler watched taking flight from the Ilissus on their way to African shores without the hindrance of ruins and times—that lady’s imagination also flew over the present rubble to the shores of a youthful Africa … Let it go. We’ll get there later on. We’ll go there when I get my early years back. Now I want to die peacefully, methodically, listening to the ladies sobbing, the men talking softly, the rain drumming on the caladium leaves of my suburban home, and the strident sound of a knife a grinder is sharpening outside by a harness-maker’s door. I swear to you that the orchestra of death was not at all as sad as it might have seemed. From a certain point on it even got to be delightful. Life was thrashing about in my chest with the surging of an ocean wave. My consciousness was evaporating. I was descending into physical and moral immobility and my body was turning into a plant, a stone, mud, nothing at all.

  I died of pneumonia, yet if I tell my reader that it wasn’t so much the pneumonia that caused my death but a magnificent and useful idea he might not believe me and, nevertheless, it’s the truth. Let me explain briefly. You can judge for yourself.

  II

  The Poultice

  As it so happened, one day in the morning while I was strolling about my place an idea started to hang from the trapeze I have in my brain. Once hanging there it began to wave its arms and legs and execute the most daring antics of a tightrope-walker that anyone could imagine. I let myself stand there contemplating it. Suddenly it took a great leap, extended its arms and legs until it took on the shape of an X: decipher me or I’ll devour you.

  That idea was nothing less than the invention of a sublime remedy, an antihypochondriacal poultice, destined to alleviate our melancholy humanity. In the patent application that I drew up afterward I brought that truly Christian product to the government’s attention. I didn’t hide from friends, however, the pecuniary rewards that would of needs result from the distribution of a product with such far-reaching and profound effects. But now that I’m on the other side of life I can confess everything: what mainly influenced me was the pleasure I would have seeing in print in newspapers, on store counters, in pamphlets, on street corners, and, finally, on boxes of the medicine these three words: Brás Cubas Poultice. Why deny it? I had a passion for ballyhoo, the limelight, fireworks. More modest people will censure me perhaps for this defect. I’m confident, however, that clever people will recognize this talent of mine. So my idea had two faces, like a medal, one turned toward the public and the other toward me. On one side philanthropy and profit, on the other a thirst for fame. Let us say:—love of glory.

  An uncle of mine, a canon with full prebend, liked to say that love of temporal glory was the perdition of souls, who should covet only eternal glory. To which another uncle, an officer in one of those old infantry regiments called terços, would retort that love of glory was the most truly human thing there was in a man and, consequently, his most genuine attribute.

  Let the reader decide between the military man and the canon. I’m going back to the poultice.

  III

  Genealogy

  Now that I’ve mentioned my two uncles, let me make a short genealogical outline here.

  The founder of my family was a certain Damião Cubas, who flourished in the first half of the eighteenth century. He was a cooper by trade, a native of Rio de Janeiro, where he would have died in penury and obscurity had he limited himself to the work of barrel making. But he didn’t. He became a farmer. He planted, harvested, and exchanged his produce for good, honest silver patacas until he died, leaving a nice fat inheritance to a son, the licentiate Luís Cubas. It was with this young man that my series of grandfathers really begins—the grandfathers my family always admitted to—because Damião Cubas was, after all, a cooper, and perhaps even a bad cooper, while Luís Cubas studied at Coimbra, was conspicuous in affairs of state, and was a personal friend of the viceroy, Count da Cunha.

  Since the surname Cubas, meaning kegs, smelled too much of cooperage, my father, Damião’s great–grandson, alleged that the aforesaid surname had been given to a knight, a hero of the African campaigns, as a reward for a deed he brought off: the capture of three hundred barrels from the Moors. My father was a man of imagination; he flew out of the cooperage on the wings of a pun. He was a good character, my father, a worthy and loyal man like few others. He had a touch of the fibber about him, it’s true, but who in this world doesn’t have a bit of that? It should be noted that he never had recourse to invention except after an attempt at falsification. At first he had the family branch off from that famous namesake of mine, Captain-Major Brás Cubas, who founded the town, of São Vicente, where he died in 1592, and that’s why he named me Brás. The captain-major’s family refuted him, however, and that was when he imagined the three hundred Moorish kegs.

  A few members of my family are still alive, my niece Venância, for example, the lily of the valley, which is the flower for ladies of her time. Her father, Cotrim, is still alive, a fellow who … But let’s not get ahead of events. Let’s finish with our poultice once and for all.

  IV

  The Idée Fixe

  My idea, after so many leaps and bounds, had become an idée fixe. God save you, dear reader, from an idée fixe, better a speck, a mote in the eye. Look at Cavour: It was the idée fixe of Italian unity that killed him. It’s true that Bismarck didn’t die, but we should be warned that nature is terribly fickle and history eternally meretricious. For example, Suetonius gave us a Claudius who was a simpleton—or “a pumpkinhead” as Seneca called him—and a Titus who deserved being the delight of all Rome. In modern times a professor came along and found a way of demonstrating that of the two Caesars the delight, the real delight, was Seneca’s “pumpkinhead.” And you Madame Lucrezia, flower of the Borgias, if a poet painted you as the Catholic Messalina, along came an incredulous Gregorovius who did a great deal to q
uench that quality and even if you didn’t come out a lily, you weren’t a smelly fen either. I’ll take my position between the poet and the savant.

  So, long live history, voluble history, which is good at anything, and, getting back to the idée fixe, let me say that it’s what produces strong men and madmen. A mobile idea, vague or changeable, is what produces a Claudius—according to the formula of Suetonius.

  My idea was fixed, fixed like … I can’t think of anything fixed enough in this world: maybe the moon, maybe the pyramids of Egypt, maybe the dead German Diet. Let the reader find the comparison that fits best, let him find it and not stand there with his nose out of joint just because we haven’t got to the narrative part of these memoirs. We’ll get there. I think he prefers anecdotes to reflections, like other readers, his confreres, and I think he’s right. So let’s get on with it. It must be said, however, that this book is written with apathy, with the apathy of a man now freed of the brevity of the century, a supinely philosophical work, of an unequal philosophy, now austere, now playful, something that neither builds nor destroys, neither inflames nor cools, and, yet, it is more than a pastime and less than an apostolate.

  Let’s go. Straighten out your nose and let’s get back to the poultice. Let’s leave history with its whims of an elegant lady. Neither of us fought the battle of Salamina or wrote the Augsburg Confession. For my part, if I can ever remember Cromwell it’s only because of the idea that His Highness, with the same hand that locked up Parliament might have imposed the Brás Cubas poultice on the English. Don’t laugh at that joint victory of pharmaceutics and puritanism. Who isn’t aware that beneath every great, public, showy flag quite often there are several other modestly private banners that are unfurled and waving in the shadow of the first, and ever so many times outlive it? To make a poor comparison, it’s like the rabble huddled in the shadow of a feudal castle, and when the latter fell, the riffraff remained. The fact is they became big shots and castellans… No, that’s not a good comparison.

  V

  In Which a Lady’s Ear Appears

  When I was busy preparing and refining my invention, however, I was caught in a strong draft. I fell ill right after and I didn’t take care of myself. I had the poultice on my brain. I was carrying with me the idée fixe of the mad and the strong. I could see myself from a distance rising up from the mob-ridden earth and ascending to heaven like an immortal eagle, and before such a grand spectacle no man can feel the pain that’s jabbing at him. The next day I was worse. I finally did something about it, but in an incomplete way, with no method or attention or follow-through. Such was the origin of the illness that brought me to eternity. You already know that I died on a Friday, an unlucky day, and I think I’ve shown that it was my invention that killed me. There are less lucid and no less winning demonstrations.

  It might not have been impossible, however, for me to have climbed to the heights of a century and figure in the pages of newspapers among the great. I was healthy and robust. Let it be imagined that, instead of laying down the bases for a pharmaceutical invention, I was trying to bring together the elements of a political institution or a religious reformation. The current of air came and efficiently conquered human calculations and there went everything. That’s the way man’s fate goes.

  With that reflection I took leave of the woman, I won’t say the most discreet, but certainly the most beautiful among her contemporaries, the one whose imagination, like the storks on the Ilissus … She was fifty-four then, she was a ruin, a splendid ruin. Let the reader imagine that we had been in love, she and I, many years before and that, one day, when I was already ill, I see her appear in the door of my bedroom.

  VI

  Chiméne, Qui L’eût Dit?

  Rodrigue, Qui L’eût Cru?

  I see her appear in the door of my bedroom—pale, upset, dressed in black—and remain there for a minute without the courage to come in, or held back by the presence of the man who was with me. From the bed where I was lying I contemplated her all that time, neglecting to say anything to her or make any gesture. We hadn’t seen each other for two years and I saw her now not as she was but as she had been, as we both had been, because some mysterious Hezekiah had made the sun turn back to the days of our youth. The sun turned back, I shook off all my miseries, and this handful of dust that death was about to scatter into the eternity of nothingness was stronger than time, who is the minister of death. No water from Iuventus could match simple nostalgia in that.

  Believe me, remembering is the least evil. No one should trust present happiness, there’s a drop of Cain’s drivel in it. With the passing of time and the end of rapture, then, yes, then perhaps it’s possible really to enjoy, because between these two illusions the better one is the one that’s enjoyed without pain.

  The evocation didn’t last long. Reality took over immediately. The present expelled the past. Perhaps I’ll explain to the reader in some corner of this book my theory of human editions. What matters now is that Virgília—her name was Virgília—entered the room with a firm step, with the gravity that her clothes and the years gave her, and came over to my bed. The outsider got up and left. He was a fellow who would visit me every day and talk about exchange rates, colonization, and the need for developing railroads, nothing of greater interest to a dying man. He left. Virgília stood there. For some time we remained looking at each other without uttering a word. What was there to say? Of two great lovers, two great passions, there was nothing left twenty years later. There were only two withered hearts devastated by life and glutted with it; I don’t know whether in equal doses, but glutted nonetheless. Virgília now had the beauty of age, an austere, maternal look. She was less thin than when I saw here the last time at a Saint John’s festival in Tijuca and, as she was someone who had a great deal of resistance, only now were a few silver threads beginning to mingle with her dark hair.

  “Are you making the rounds visiting dying men?” I asked her. “Come now, dying men!” Virgília answered with a pout. And then, after squeezing my hands, “I’m making the rounds to see if I can get lazy loafers back out onto the street.”

  It didn’t have the teary caress of other times, but her voice was friendly and sweet. She sat down. I was alone in the house except for a male nurse. We could talk to each other without any danger. Virgília gave me lots of news from the world outside, narrating it with humor, with a certain touch of a wicked tongue, which was the salt of her talk. I, ready to leave the world, felt a satanic pleasure in making fun of it all, in persuading myself that I wasn’t leaving anything worthwhile.

  “What kind of ideas are those?” Virgília interrupted me, a little annoyed. “Look, I’m not going to come back. Dying! We all have to die. It’s enough just being alive.”

  And looking at the clock:

  “Good heavens! It’s three o’clock. I’ve got to go.”

  “So soon?”

  “Yes. I’ll come back tomorrow or sometime later.”

  “I don’t know if you’re doing the proper thing,” I replied. “The patient is an old bachelor and the house has no women in it…”

  “What about your sister?”

  “She’s going to come and spend a few days here, but she can’t get here until Saturday.”

  Virgília thought for a moment, straightened up, and said gravely:

  “I’m an old woman! Nobody pays any attention to me anymore. But just to put an end to any doubts I’ll come with Nhonhô.”

  Nhonhô was a lawyer, the only child from her marriage, who at the age of five had been the unwitting accomplice in our love affair. They came together two days later and I must confess that when I saw them there in my bedroom I was taken by a reticence that prevented me from replying immediately to the lad’s affable words, Virgília sensed this and told her son:

  “Nhonhô, don’t pay any attention to that big trickster there. He doesn’t want to talk so he can make you think that he’s at death’s door.’

  Her son smiled. I thin
k I smiled, too, and everything ended up as a big joke. Virgília was serene and smiling. She had the look of immaculate life. No suspect look, no gesture that might have given anything away, a balance in word and spirit, control over herself, all of which seemed—and perhaps was—strange. As by chance we touched upon an illicit love affair, half-secret, half-known, I saw her speak a disdainful word and a bit indignantly about the woman involved, a friend of hers besides. Her son felt satisfied when he heard that strong and fitting word and I asked myself what the hawks might have said about us humans if Buffon had been born a hawk …

  It was the start of my delirium.

  VII

  Delirium

  As far as I know, no one has ever spoken about his own delirium. I’m doing just that and science will thank me for it. If the reader isn’t given to the contemplation of these mental phenomena, he may skip this chapter and go straight to the narrative. But if he has the slightest bit of curiosity, I can tell him now that it’s interesting to know what went on in ray head for some twenty or thirty minutes.

  At the very first I took on the figure of a Chinese barber, potbellied, dexterous, who was giving a close shave to a mandarin, who paid me for my work with pinches and sweets: the whims of a mandarin.