The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil

by Machado De Assis

  “You mean fancy language is out?”

  “Not at all! Whenever you are asked to speak at a social gathering, to thank the host, offer a toast, or make a few after-dinner remarks, anything like that, don’t hesitate to include famous quotations, mottos, maxims, and images from Greek mythology such as ‘the head of Medusa’ or ‘the wings of Icarus.’ Phrases in Latin are excellent. Si vis pacem para bellum, ‘if you want peace, prepare for war,’ for example. Best of all are the commonplace expressions and time-honored formulas that everyone already knows by heart. Such formulas possess the immense virtue of familiarity, requiring no mental effort from your listeners.

  “I’ll write a list of the best stock phrases and give it to you later. But just imagine, for example, the following situation. A law is passed but has no effect. The problem continues. At this point, there could be an exhaustive investigation, a tedious analysis of the problem’s nature and its probable causes, a painstaking discussion of the remedy and how to implement it. But why? Why, I ask, when you can save everyone all that trouble by making a little speech that concludes with a wise shake of the head and an old saying such as ‘Reform not legislation, but behavior!’ or even better, ‘People will be people!’ That simple phrase, that clear and irrefutable common sense, accomplishes everything at once, making the problem disappear and brightening parliamentary spirits like a ray of sunlight on troubled waters.”

  “You are always criticizing modern procedures.”

  “Let me be clear. I’m criticizing only the actual application of modern procedures. The terminology is fine. In fact, I’d be the first to recommend memorizing all new scientific and technological terms and using them as frequently as possible. There is no better way to appear up to date. And don’t worry, even, about learning exactly what they mean, because so few of your listeners will know that it won’t matter. Gradually, you’ll pick up the minimum that you really need to understand about the science without reading a pile of boring technical material that may also infect you with new ideas. After all, if you actually mastered the concepts behind all the new terms, you might have the impulse to do something useful with your knowledge. It’s a slippery slope.”

  “I see there is a lot to learn.”

  “And we have not yet mentioned the most crucial part of all, publicity. Emptying your own head will only take you so far. Next you must fill other people’s heads with publicity. Publicity is a beautiful lady whom you must court by showering her with gifts, sweets, attentions, and small gestures signaling the constancy of your affection rather than the boldness of your ambition. Let Don Quixote court his Dulcinea by means of heroic deeds. That’s not your style, it’s his, and a sign of his lunacy. The true poser takes an entirely different approach. He lets others publish their scientific studies of livestock production, for example, and instead slaughters livestock to serve his friends a banquet. Which, I ask you, is more likely to get a notice in the newspaper? And one notice brings another. Get your name in the newspapers five, ten, fifteen, as many times as possible. Join hunting clubs, Catholic lay brotherhoods, and associations devoted to social activities and worthy causes. Organize dances to celebrate the birthdays of rich acquaintances and recognize their minor achievements. It is singularly useful to appear as an organizer of such events. Any trivial occasion is worth publicizing, in fact, if it calls attention to you. Let’s say you fall from a carriage, without any ill effect beyond a nasty scare. Is that worthy of publicity? Of course, it is! The event itself is insignificant, but news of it will remind readers of the public affection for your person. See what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So much for easy, inexpensive, everyday publicity. There is more. A poser has not really arrived until he’s had his portrait done, whether in painting or sculpture. Whatever one’s ideas about art, it is beyond question that family sentiment, friendly regard, and public esteem demand a portrait of worthy and beloved individuals. And why shouldn’t you be the recipient of such a distinction, especially if your friends can tell you want it? Common courtesy requires you to accept the gift of a portrait or bust, and how could you object to its exhibition? That will allow the public to connect your name with your face. Suppose that the speech you gave congratulating the Hairdressers Association at its inaugural meeting has just appeared in the newspapers. Readers will want a look at the man who wrote the phrase ‘scissors of national progress.’ If a group of friends and admirers delivers the portrait to your house, what better occasion to thank them publically by offering them a glass of water and a few words of appreciation? It is an old custom and an opportunity not to be wasted. In addition to friends and relatives, invite a prominent individual or two, and I don’t see how you can decently refuse your hospitality to a few representatives of the press, either. If no reporters are able to attend, you can help them by writing a description of the occasion yourself, or, if you are understandably too modest to apply the glowing adjectives appropriate to the topic, ask a friend or relation to do it.”

  “There is quite a trick to all this, isn’t there?”

  “Exactly right! And it takes time, an enormous amount of time, to learn. It takes years, patience, work. Those who fail will fall into darkness and obscurity. But happy are those who finally make it to the promised land! And you, my son, will make it, believe me. One day you’ll hear the trumpet sound, see the walls of Jericho tumble down. You’ll have become a fixture, an indispensable ornament, an obligatory presence at social functions. No need then to join committees or seek out social occasions, because everyone will come to you. They will come to you like so many boring unmodified nouns in search of an adjective, and you will be the ‘azure’ in their sky, the ‘fragrant’ in their flowers, the ‘upstanding’ in their citizenry, the ‘succulent’ in their scandals. The adjective predominates, you see. It’s the soul of language, the idealistic and metaphysical part, while nouns are unvarnished reality.”

  “And you’re saying that this endeavor serves merely as a backup?”

  “Absolutely, it does not preclude any other activity in life.”

  “Not even politics?”

  “Not even politics. It’s simply a question of respecting the basic rules of posing. You can belong to whatever party, Republican, Liberal, Conservative, or Ultramontane, as long as you attach no meaning to those labels beyond their function of identifying four different groups seeking election. Politics, yes; ideas, no.”

  “Can I give political speeches?”

  “You can and you should. It calls public attention to you. Speak about minor matters and technicalities or, best of all, about abstract principles. One must confess that standing up on the floor of the Assembly to ask jovially about some trivial, material detail does suit the unadventurous style that I have counseled you to adopt. But if you have a choice, stick with abstractions. They’re easier and more attractive. Suppose you ask for an explanation of why the Seventh Infantry Company was recently transferred from Uruguaiana to Canguçu. Who will pay attention? Only the minister of war. He’ll explain the reason for the transfer in ten minutes while your colleagues’ minds wander and yours, too. Ah, but speak about abstract principles, and you’ll arouse passions on all sides. Other members will stand to speak in support or rebuttal with no thought or investigation required, because they will be reciting from memory. When it comes to ideology, everything is already decided, formulated, packaged, and labeled. In short, though, whatever route you choose, never stray from the beaten path.”

  “I’ll do my best. Show no imagination, then?”

  “Of course not. Tell people you haven’t a shred of imagination, and show none.”

  “No real philosophy?”

  “Let me be clear. You can sound a bit philosophical as long as you are not, in reality, being philosophical. ‘Philosophy of history,’ for instance, is a phrase you can employ with some frequency if you keep it vague. Just steer clear of anything that smacks of originality, reflection, etcetera, etcetera.”

  �
��Steer clear of humor, too?”

  “It depends. You’re a playful fellow by nature, and that’s all right. To be sure, you can joke and laugh sometimes. Posing does not mean acting melancholy. Moments of diversion are not incompatible with a poser’s due gravitas, overall. Do listen, though, because this is a crucial point—”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Do be careful to avoid irony. Avoid that subtle movement at the corner of one’s mouth that signals some superior insight or cleverness, an attitude invented by the ancient Greeks and transmitted to us by Swift and Voltaire. Irony is for impudent skeptics and iconoclasts. A poser’s humor should be on the nose, as unsubtle as possible, a good, knee-slapping belly laugh, big and round, nothing barbed or veiled, please. What are you showing me?”

  “It’s midnight.”

  “Midnight? Then you’re already starting your twenty-second year. You’re officially a grown man. Let’s go to bed now, it’s late. Meditate on what I have said, though, my son. It’s as valuable, in its own small way, as what Machiavelli had to say in The Prince.1

  THE LOOKING GLASS

  “O espelho,” subtitled “Outline of a New Theory of the Human Soul,” appeared in 1882, less than a year after “The Education of a Poser,” in the same newspaper. Here Machado takes aim at the landowning gentry that ruled the provinces of the Brazilian empire. Here we encounter slaves, though they hardly play a major role. Instead, the focus remains strictly on the mentality of such people as Jacobina, the secondary narrator of “The Looking Glass.” Jacobina’s name suggests a revolutionary radical, yet here, again, Machado’s radical critique is clothed in indirection. Jacobina’s theory of the human soul contains a large dose of what we might call, with a great deal of precision and appropriateness, bullshit. Yet his narrative paints an eerie picture of psychological instability and dependence. Jacobina’s story shows that his entire self-hood as young man of twenty-one had become invested in his rank as second lieutenant in the National Guard. The National Guard, it should be noted, required little training or actual service, but an officer’s uniform conferred significant prestige. Jacobina learns from the looking glass that, without other people around to admire him, he hardly exists at all. The men who hear his story resist the Jacobin message, and his story seems to affect them like a toxin. This is among Machado’s most frequently anthologized and translated stories.

  Four or five gentlemen of Rio de Janeiro debated the most difficult metaphysical problems of the universe, one evening, without becoming at all perturbed by their differences of opinion. The house stood high on Santa Teresa hill, its small room lit by candles whose illumination mingled mysteriously with the moonlight from outside. There, between the winking stars above and the distant bustle of the city below, our four or five philosophers chatted late into the night.

  Why four or five? Only four debated, strictly speaking, while a fifth meditated silently, as if dozing, his only contribution to the debate being an occasional grunt of approval. This fifth man was the same age as his companions—between forty and fifty years old—a businessman from the provinces, intelligent, not without education, by all appearances a shrewd and gruff sort of fellow. He never argued, he liked to say, because argument was simply a polite form of aggression, a vestige of mankind’s primitive past. He added that the angels, who represented eternal spiritual perfection, never contradicted anyone or anything. That evening, though, one of the other men challenged his aloof silence. Jacobina (for that was the fifth man’s name) reflected for a moment and answered:

  “On second thought, maybe you’re right.”

  And he joined the midnight conversation, not just for two or three minutes, but for thirty or forty. The topic eventually came around to the nature of the human soul, a question that produced radical disagreement. Each of the four friends had a different view. At that point, the discussion lost coherence because of the complexity of the matter and, somewhat, too, because of the inconsistency of the diverging opinions. One of the four arguers demanded that Jacobina give his opinion, a conjecture at least.

  “I’ll give neither an opinion nor a conjecture,” he responded. “Either one might provoke disagreement, and, as you know, I never argue. But if you will be quiet and listen, I’ll tell the story of something that happened to me, a story that provides a very clear answer to the question of the human soul. For starters, we don’t have just one soul, but two.”

  “Two?”

  “That’s right, two. Every human being has two souls, one that’s inside, facing out, and another that’s outside, facing in. Act astonished, throw up your hands, whatever, but listen quietly—otherwise I’ll finish my cigar and say goodnight. The second, external soul can be almost anything: a fluid, an object, an action, another person. For example, the buttons on a shirt can function as a person’s external soul, so can a polka, a card game, a book, a drum, or a pair of boots. The second soul has the same life-giving function as the first. Together, they complete the human spirit in the way that two halves complete a walnut. Both halves are necessary. Not uncommonly, the loss of an external soul becomes life threatening. Remember Shylock, the Shakespearean character? ‘Thou stick’st a dagger in my heart,’ says Shylock when he loses his gold. His gold was his external soul, you see, and losing it meant death to him. However—and this is crucial—the external soul can change over time.”

  “It can?”

  “Yes, sir. External souls are quite mutable. You’ll meet gentlemen whose external soul began, during their first years, as a rattle or a rocking horse and became, later in life, a social distinction of some kind. I know a woman whose external soul changes five or six times a year. During the opera season, it’s the opera, and afterward, it’s a dance at the Cassino, a trip to Petropolis, or, very commonly, a stroll down Ouvidor Street.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “She has a thousand names. Change of external soul is a commonplace phenomenon. I have experienced such changes myself, but let me just tell the story that I mentioned, an episode that occurred when I was twenty-five years old.”

  The four friends, eager to hear the promised story, forgot about their argument and fell silent, their eyes on Jacobina, who trimmed the ash from the end of his cigar, collecting his memories, and began to narrate:

  “I was twenty-five years old and broke, and I had just been named second lieutenant in the National Guard. You can’t imagine what a big deal that was at my house. My mother was so proud of me, so happy. ‘Her lieutenant,’ she called me. My uncles and aunts and cousins, everybody was delighted, pure and simple. In town, of course, a few people got bent out of shape. One heard some ‘wailing and gnashing of teeth,’ as the Scriptures say, because so many other candidates for the distinction were disappointed. And I suppose, too, that part of the unhappiness might have been envy. I remember some fellows, supposedly my friends, who didn’t act so friendly for a while afterward. Then again, a lot of people were delighted, though, and the proof is that the entire uniform—an imposing one, as you know—was given to me by well-wishers.

  “So, anyway, my mother’s widowed sister, Aunt Marcolina, whose husband had been Captain Peçanha of the National Guard, and who lived by herself on a remote, solitary farm many leagues from town, sent word that I should go visit her for a few days and wear my uniform. I went, accompanied only by a servant who returned to town within a few days carrying a letter to my mother. Aunt Marcolina had written her to say that, having me in her clutches, she did not intend to let me leave for at least a month. She hugged me repeatedly, called me ‘her lieutenant,’ and said that I was a fine-looking young man. She joked that she was jealous of whomever I might marry. She swore that there wasn’t another young man in the whole province who could compete with me. It was ‘lieutenant this,’ ‘lieutenant that,’ all the time ‘lieutenant.’ I asked her just to call me ‘João,’ as she always had before, but she shook her head, no sir, I was ‘mister lieutenant.’ An older man who was living there, Captain Peçanha’s brother, c
alled me the same thing, not in jest, but seriously, and in front of the slaves, who were soon doing it, too. I occupied the place of honor at the head of the table, and I was the first one served at dinner. You have no idea. Aunt Marcolina even had a large looking glass moved into my bedroom, a beautiful, old mirror in a standing frame that contrasted with the other furnishings of the house, which were simple and modest. It was an heirloom, a gift from her godmother, who had inherited it from her mother, who had supposedly purchased it from a Portuguese noblewoman, one of the courtiers who came with King João to Brazil in 1808. That’s what they said in the family, at least. I don’t know how much is true. The looking glass was really old, of course, with the gold paint worn off the frame in places. It had dolphins and artistic ornaments sculpted at the upper corners, very nicely done and inlaid with mother of pearl. Old, but nice.”

  “A big mirror?”

  “Full length. And as I say, it was quite an extravagant thing for her to do. The looking glass had stood in the front room, the best piece of furniture in the house. But there wasn’t a power on earth that could dissuade her from the idea. She said that she didn’t need it in the front room, that it was only for a few weeks, and finally that ‘the lieutenant’ deserved the looking glass and much, much more. The truth is that all the attention—the gifts, the honors, the affection—worked a transformation in me, a transformation that the natural feelings of youth encouraged and completed. You can easily imagine, I’m sure.”

  “Not really,” replied one of his listeners.

  “The lieutenant replaced the human being. I mean, for a few days the two existed together in equilibrium, but the newcomer gained ground, and soon only a wisp of my humanity remained. My external soul—that once had been the sun, the air, the countryside, a girl’s look—had changed into something different. Now it was all social courtesies and deference relating to my new rank, nothing relating to the person. Only the lieutenant remained, the plain citizen was left behind, vanished into the air. You find it difficult to believe, I see.”