The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil

by Machado De Assis

  “No calculations are necessary,” he said, “because Dr. Bacamarte won’t accomplish anything. Who ever heard of putting a lot of crazy people in the same house?”

  But the worthy magistrate was wrong; the doctor accomplished it all. As soon as he was in possession of the license, he began construction of his asylum. It stood on the Rua Nova, Itaguaí’s most elegant street in those days, and had fifty windows on each side, a courtyard in the center, and scores of small bedrooms for the residents. An avid student of Islamic medical texts, the doctor found a passage in the Quran declaring mad people saintly, because Allah took their wits so they wouldn’t sin. He found the idea appealing and profound and had it engraved on the front of the building, but because he was worried about the disapproval of the vicar and, ultimately, the bishop, he attributed the thought to Pope Benedict VIII. His punishment for this small, pious fraud was to hear Father Lopes recount at lunch the entire biography of that eminent pontiff.

  The Casa Verde was the name given to the asylum (alluding to the building’s green window frames, the first to be painted that color in Itaguaí), and it was inaugurated with enormous pomp. People came from all the surrounding towns and villages, from near and far, and even from Rio de Janeiro, to attend the ceremonies, which lasted seven days. Many patients had already been admitted, and their families were able to witness the paternal affection and Christian charity with which the demented would be treated. Dona Evarista, delighted by her husband’s success, dressed luxuriously during those memorable days, covering herself with jewels, silks, and flowers. She was the queen of the occasion, and although, in those days, ladies rarely paid social visits, Dona Evarista received repeated ones during the inaugural ceremonies. She was much praised, and if she was envied as well, because the town saw in her the fortunate wife of a noble spirit, it was with the honorable envy of worthy admiration.

  At the end of seven days the public festivities were concluded; Itaguaí had a lunatic asylum.

  II

  A Flood of Lunatics

  Three days later, the alienist revealed his heart’s desire to his confidant, the apothecary Crispim Soares.

  “Charity figures among the motives of my actions to be sure, Soares, but as a seasoning, rather than the meat of the matter, for thus I interpret the message of Saint Paul to the Corinthians: ‘Though I understand all mysteries and all knowledge … and have not charity, I am nothing.’ The principal part of my work in the Casa Verde, however, is to study lunacy profoundly, in its various degrees, classifying its diverse manifestations, to find both its basic cause and its universal cure. That is my inmost desire, my humble service to humanity.”

  “Your enormous service,” corrected Soares.

  “Without this asylum,” continued the alienist, “I would be able to accomplish little. It offers my study greater scope.”

  “Much greater,” affirmed the apothecary.

  And they were right. From all the surrounding towns and villages, lunatics streamed into the Casa Verde. There were violent ones, nonviolent ones, monomaniacal ones, and the whole family of desolated human spirits. After four months, the Casa Verde had become a village. Space was exhausted, and the alienist added a new wing containing thirty-seven more cubicles with beds. Father Lopes confessed he had never imagined that so many madmen, and such mysterious cases of madness, could exist in the world. One, for example, a rude and rustic youth, every day, after lunch, launched into oratory, adorned with academic allusions and rhetorical tropes, studded with Greek and Latin, embroidered with quotations from Cicero, Apuleius, and Tertullian. The vicar was amazed. How could it be? A lad that he had seen, just three months earlier, playing in the street!

  “Incredible, no doubt,” said the alienist, “but undeniably real. We see such things every day.”

  “The Tower of Babel, as described in Scripture, must be the explanation,” replied the clergyman. “All languages were once mixed together, so they can become easily confused when the mind is not functioning correctly.”

  “That may indeed be the explanation of the phenomenon at the divine level,” agreed the alienist after a moment’s reflection, “but there may be another, purely scientific explanation at the human level. That is what I intend to discover.”

  “If you find it, I’m eager to hear about it. Truly.”

  Among the patients, there were three or four driven mad by love. One, a youth of twenty-five, believed himself to be the morning star. He opened his arms and stretched wide his legs to create the impression of rays of light, and stood there for hours, inquiring repeatedly whether the sun had yet risen so that he could rest. Another fellow roamed the building incessantly, through the rooms, up and down the halls, and around the courtyard looking (so he said) for the ends of the earth. The poor devil’s wife had left him for a young twit and, seizing a club, he went after the fugitive lovers, found them after two hours on the shore of a lake, and cruelly killed them both. His jealous rage then abated but left him quite mad, still in pursuit of his wife and her paramour, whom he vowed to follow, even to the ends of the earth.

  There were noteworthy examples of megalomania, as well. One measly clerk thought he was the Grand Vizier. A poor countryman of Minas Gerais imagined himself the owner of vast herds of cattle, and he went around giving them away, three hundred to you, five hundred to me, and so on and on. Then there was an attorney-at-law who, astonishingly, kept his mouth shut, convinced that his eloquence was such that a single word from him would cause the sun to explode. At least, that is what he wrote with a pencil and paper that the alienist supplied him, less out of kindness than from scientific curiosity. I prefer not to speak of the many religious megalomaniacs. One fellow thought he was God himself. Most remarkable of all, however, was a poor tailor’s son who spent the day reciting (to nobody in particular) his illustrious genealogy, as follows:

  “God begat an egg, the egg begat the sword, the sword begat King David … the King begat the duke, the duke begat the count, and … I’m the count!” And then he would snap his fingers, slap his forehead, and start over.

  More extraordinary than any delusion was the patient labor of Simão Bacamarte. As a first organizational measure (recommended by his friend Crispim Soares), he hired a staff of two young men (also recommended by Soares, their uncle) to keep the records of the asylum and handle its daily administration, such as the distribution of food and clothing as approved and funded by the town council. The alienist could thus concentrate his full attention on alienism.

  “The Casa Verde is now a world unto itself,” he joked to Father Lopes. “It cares for its patients in both body and soul.”

  “Don’t try to take over my function, now,” laughed the vicar, adding, merely for the sake of jest: “Or I’ll report you to the pope!”

  Once relieved of administrative burdens, the alienist began a thorough classification of his patients. He divided them first into two main categories, violent and nonviolent, and then into subcategories, according to their various manias, delusions, and hallucinations. Then he proceeded to study each of them closely, analyzing the habits of each lunatic, his predilections and aversions, his speech and gestures, the normal hours of delirium and, if there were any, of lucidity. He inquired about the profession and habits of each patient, about other illnesses that each had suffered, about any antecedents of lunacy in the family, and about childhood experiences that might explain the onset of each case. Simultaneously the alienist experimented with treatments and medicinal substances, whether curative or merely palliative. And the result of his meticulous study was a plethora of unprecedented observations, each new phenomenon more extraordinary than the last. He worked almost constantly, hardly stopping to eat or sleep, often pondering an intractable problem or consulting an ancient text at the dinner table without speaking a single word, during the entire meal, to Dona Evarista.

  III

  God Knows What He Is Doing

  At the end two months, that illustrious lady considered herself the most wre
tched of women. She sank into a deep melancholy, her complexion sallow, her thin frame wracked by sighs. She respected her husband too much to utter a word of complaint but, rather, suffered in silence and, day by day, simply wasted away. One day at dinner, her husband asked what was wrong, and at first she replied that nothing was, but then screwed up her courage to say that, lately, she felt like a widow again. And she added:

  “And to think that just a bunch of lunatics …”

  She did not finish the sentence, or, rather, finished it by raising aloft her eyes—those eyes that were her finest feature, large, dark, moist, and insinuating as the pale light of dawn. It was the same gesture that she had employed years ago to induce a proposal of marriage from Simão Bacamarte. The chronicles of Itaguaí do not record her motives on this occasion, but we may reasonably conjecture that she desired nothing less than to truncate the progress of Science. In any case, the alienist supposed exactly that and nothing less. The great man betrayed no agitation whatsoever. His gaze remained steely and serene, almost eternal, and not the slightest wrinkle crossed his brow, as untroubled as the waters of Botafogo Bay, but perhaps his lips did curl in a faint smile as he whispered:

  “Why don’t you visit Rio? You have my permission.”

  Dona Evarista felt the earth move beneath her feet. She had never, ever been to Rio de Janeiro, which, while not yet what it is today, was considerably grander than Itaguaí, and she had long since given up hope of seeing our fair city. But now, when she least expected it, her husband offered her the opportunity to realize her girlhood dreams, and she could not disguise her satisfaction. Simão Bacamarte took her by the hand and smiled a conjugal—as well as a somewhat philosophical—smile that seemed to say: “How mysterious is therapy for an ailing spirit! This woman was wasting away, thinking I didn’t love her, when a trip to Rio was all she really needed.” And being a studious man, he made note of the observation.

  Dona Evarista had a sudden apprehension. If he didn’t go to Rio, she told him, well, she wouldn’t go either, because she couldn’t very well travel the highways by herself.

  “You can go with your aunt,” replied the alienist.

  Now, Dona Evarista had thought of this already but had refrained from suggesting it. Her aunt’s travel expenses implied additional costs, and, besides, it was better that the suggestion came from him.

  “So much money we’ll have to spend!” she protested without conviction.

  “What does it matter? We’ve earned quite a lot,” said her husband. “Would you like to see?”

  He took her to see the account books, but Dona Evarista found the myriad of numbers bewildering, so he led her to the money chest and, Good Heavens, there were piles of gold coins, a fortune! As she devoured the sight, the alienist spoke roguishly in her ear:

  “And to think that just a bunch of lunatics …”

  And so Dona Evarista cheerfully resigned herself:

  “God knows what he is doing!”

  Three months later, on a May morning, a small crowd bid Dona Evarista farewell as she left for Rio accompanied by her aunt, by the wife and a third nephew of the apothecary, by a clergyman whom the alienist had befriended in Lisbon and who just happened to be in Itaguaí, and by nine or ten slaves, including male attendants and maidservants. The farewells were heartbreaking for everyone except the alienist. Dona Evarista’s tears, although abundant and sincere, did not move the man of science. His only concern, as he calmly inspected the crowd that had gathered around the travelers, was to discern the presence of any demented countenances among the faces of the sane.

  “Farewell,” sobbed the ladies.

  “Farewell,” sobbed Crispim Soares.

  And the group departed. On the way home, the apothecary hung his head, gazing at his horse’s ears and at the ground in front of the plodding beast. Simão Bacamarte, on the other hand, scanned the horizon and let his horse make its way unsupervised. Behold the contrast between the vulgar throng and a man of genius! The common man sees only the present, with its tears and regrets, while the genius surveys the future with all its auroras.

  IV

  A New Theory

  As Dona Evarista made her tearful way toward Rio de Janeiro, Simão Bacamarte began to study every aspect of a bold new idea, one that promised to revolutionize psychopathology. Each day, upon concluding his work at the Casa Verde, he strode through the streets and visited people’s houses, conversing with them on countless topics, punctuating his utterances with looks so piercing as to terrify the hardiest spirit.

  Then, one morning after about three weeks, Crispim Soares was busy in his shop with his medications when a messenger came to inform him that the alienist required his presence.

  “It’s urgent, from what he said,” added the messenger.

  The apothecary turned pale. What could be so urgent, if not news of Dona Evarista and his wife? Now, the chronicles of Itaguaí are specific on this point: Crispim loved his wife, and, during their thirty years of marriage, the two had not previously slept apart during a single night. No doubt that explains the things that the distraught apothecary said aloud to himself, according to the servants, after his wife’s departure: “So you miss Cesárea, do you? Well, it serves you right for consenting to let her make that trip just to please Dr. Bacamarte. You go along with everything, and this is the result. So now you have to put up with it, you miserable good-for-nothing!” And he added many other ugly names that a man shouldn’t call his worst enemy, and much less himself. It is therefore easy to deduce the effect of that morning’s message. Dropping everything, the apothecary ran to the Casa Verde.

  Simão Bacamarte greeted him with quiet enthusiasm.

  “I’m elated,” he said.

  “News of our wives?” asked Crispim Soares, his voice tremulous.

  The alienist gestured magnificently.

  “No, something of a higher order, a scientific experiment! I call it an experiment because I’m not yet certain of my idea, and because Science is nothing, Soares, if not an ongoing experiment. This experiment, however, is destined to change the world. Lunacy, the object of my constant investigation, has been regarded until now as a small island in an ocean of sanity. But I am beginning to see it, rather than an island, as an entire continent.”

  And he fell silent to savor the apothecary’s astonishment, then explained his idea at length. Proposing that madness affected all sorts of minds previously unsuspected of insanity, he developed that concept using a vast array of arguments, examples, and texts. He took many examples from observations made in Itaguaí, but he also cited numerous cases from European history, some famously horrible and some merely peculiar or ridiculous. Socrates thought himself accompanied by a sort of fairy, Pascal felt a precipice always at his left hand, and so on.

  “And all these diverse manifestations, Soares, whether ferocious or grotesque, are rooted in the same phenomenon.”

  “How can it be?” exclaimed the apothecary, throwing up his hands.

  He found the notion of radically expanding the definition of insanity farfetched, but modesty, his finest quality, prevented him from saying so. Instead, he declared the idea sublime and self-evident, and he even called it “something for the noisemaker.”

  This last phrase cannot be translated into a modern idiom and will have to be explained. Itaguaí, like the other localities of colonial Brazil, had no newspaper, and there were only two ways of publicizing anything. The first method was posting a hand-lettered announcement on the door of the church or the town hall, and the second was by means of the noise-maker. Here is how the second method functioned. A man was hired to walk up and down through the streets for one or more days getting people’s attention with a wooden noise-making device. When a crowd had gathered to hear him, he announced whatever he had been paid to announce: a cure for fevers, a house for rent, whatever. He might even recite a sonnet or read an oration. In truth, the noisemaker could be a nuisance, but it was also highly effective. For example, one of the town counc
ilmen of Itaguaí—the very one who had opposed the construction of the Casa Verde—periodically hired the noisemaker to publicize his skill as a snake charmer. The reputation was entirely undeserved; he had, in fact, never charmed any sort of reptile. And, yet, many townspeople did not hesitate to affirm that they had seen rattlesnakes dance on the councilman’s chest. Truth be told, the past can still teach our modern age a thing or two.

  “Putting my idea into practice will be better than publicity,” said the alienist, in response to the apothecary’s suggestion.

  And the apothecary, declining to differ from that view, agreed that, yes, it was better to put the idea into practice first.

  “There will always be time later for the noisemaker,” he concluded.

  Simão Bacamarte reflected for a moment, and said:

  “Let us suppose, my good Soares, that the collective human spirit resembles a great oyster. My goal is to extract the pearl. The pearl is reason itself, pure sanity. I must therefore define the precise boundaries of what is reasonable; anything else is madness, madness pure and simple. And here is the definition. Sanity is the perfect equilibrium of all the faculties, neither more, nor less.”

  Father Lopes, another to whom the alienist confided the basic principles of his theory, declared flatly that he failed to understand it, or, rather, that he found it absurd, and if not absurd, then at least unrealistic, and he recommended against any attempt to implement it.

  “The current definition has always served to distinguish sanity from insanity well enough. One knows who is mad and who isn’t,” he said. “Why open up a new box of worms?”

  The slightest hint of a smile curled across the thin lips of the alienist, suggesting a mix of disdain and pity. He was far too tactful to make the other feel his superiority, however. Instead, he simply let Science inform Theology with such supreme self-assurance that Theology did not know what to believe. Itaguaí, and the whole world, stood on the brink of revolution.