A TRIP TO "THE WHEEL OF LIFE"

WHEN IT ALL HAPPENED... 

A PEN LOADED WITH IRONY DIPPED IN THE INKWELL OF MELANCHOLY - LESSONS TAUGHT BY A SORCERER

Chatting with Machado...

“Tight boots are one of life’s blessings,” says Machado.

            "Life is good" (he is said to have babbled, "in extremis")

An old man, in a dark suit, gray hair and beard, wearing spectacles, sits next to me on a bench in Mauá Square, the old Pharoux Docks, in Rio de Janeiro.  He sits down gently, slowly, while he mumbles: "May I?" His manner is austere, his eyes sunken in a swarthy face.

"Tired?" I ask, just trying to strike up a bit of conversation.

"Everything is tiring, even loneliness," he whispers from his end of the bench.

"Did you have a long walk to get here?"

"Not really.  I came from Cosme Velho.  That's where I live, on a street with the same name, number 18."

"From what you say, I gather you live alone."

"Alone, since October 20, 1904."

Something about the old man moved me;  my mind was crowded with memories and thoughts of experiences lived and long gone.

"Excuse me, sir, but don't you have any children?"

"No, I don't.  I didn't transmit to anyone the legacy of our misery."

"But did you avoid children intentionally or did it just happen?

The old man tips his head slightly and meditates for a while.

"I think it just happened that way.  Perhaps it was nature's wish.  And nature can do anything, it can change everything.  Don't go thinking that Carolina and I used that drug that avoids conception forever and that I hear so much about in Ouvidor Street."

He gives a sigh. With some effort, he manages to pull a handkerchief out of his pocket.

"Are you feeling all right?"

"I feel my conscience, my good man.  And our conscience is the cruelest of whips.  The people should have an annual check-up of their conscience."

"At least every four years, on Election Day," I venture to add.

"I agree.  I'm in favor of dissention.  Harmony and swamps are equal sources of miasmas and death."

"Even now, we have that famine up in the Northeast..." I comment as I unfold the newspaper.

"Oh, I don't deny the beauty of fasting, but heaven is so far away that a frail man is liable to collapse on the road if he has nothing in his stomach."

The old fellow leans forward a bit to wipe his lips. ("He must be in his eighties," I say to myself.)

"It says here in the paper that people are sending food for the needy."

"I'm not worried about the food.  Someday, Boston or New York will come up with a process that will allow us to be well-nourished just by breathing."

"In any event, the Government is making believe that it's acting to solve the problem, pressured by public opinion."

"Well, with a bit of patience, we can put up with our neighbors' suffering."

"But what about the pillaging that's going on?  What do you think about the looting of the supermarkets?"

"The occasion doesn't make the thief - it only creates the possibility of the theft.  The thief is already born a thief..."

"I see.  What party do you vote for?"

"None.  That way I don't get upset if the benefits they pay are low.  It's better to fall from clouds in the sky than from a third floor window."

"I get it: you, as so many other Brazilians, have lost faith."

"Well, that's not quite it.  In my heart, I am willing to accept everything, not because I'm so inclined to be agreeable, but because I abhor controversies."

("Where have I heard or read these words before?" I say to myself as I keep thumbing the newspaper.)

"I see that you can't do without the paper," notes the old man.  "The biggest sin, after sin itself, is the publication of sin."

"If you were President of the country, what would you do?"

"Me, President?  Oh, I know that one accepts the presidency...if it's offered. But I lack that special inner strength to betray my friends.  I really would like to be a king without subjects...If I lost one of my feet I wouldn't have the displeasure of seeing my vassals limping along with me.  But who can stop the people from wanting a bad government?  It's their right and it is superior and comes before any law."

"If you think about it, corruption is a law created by men..."

"That's more or less true, my young friend.  Iago's advice is that you stash money away in your pocket.  Concealed corruption is just as important as public corruption;  the only difference is that it doesn't stink.  If you have to dirty your hands and steal, make it worth the risk!"

"In your opinion, how's Brazil doing?  Is it on the right track or will it get lost in the woods?"

"The country itself is doing just fine;  the citizens have shown they have the best of instincts;  but the country's officialdom is a joke and a farce."

That comment brings up the question of the foreign debt, which is bringing the country to its knees.  But the old gentleman, who seems to have an answer for everything, voices an objection:

"What's the payment of a debt?  It's to extinguish, without any urgent need, the proof of credit that a man deserves.  To increase the debt is to better the proof."

"The problem is that such a debt has left us a tragic legacy..."

"Come now...legacies, inheritances.  A man's soul is subject to such terrible struggles.  You see, nobody knows what goes on in the mind of a nephew who has to weep for the death of an uncle while receiving the uncle's inheritance.  Damned contradictions! Apparently, everything would be O.K. if the nephew gave up the inheritance. Of course! But then he'd have two reasons to cry:  the loss of his uncle and the loss of the money."

Discreetly, the old man conceals a brief yawn and, with a slightly ironic smile,  remarks that sleeping is a temporary form of dying.  Suddenly,  he becomes more eloquent.  From sleep as a synonym for death, he jumps to the meaning of time, a synonym for boredom, and suggests a dilemma: we kill time, but in the end it's time that buries us.

We sit and watch closely a group of black men on the dock, unloading a truck, heavy sacks, perhaps over a hundred pounds each.  Is it coffee?  I comment that that type of work is really hard.

"It's honest work.  There are occupations less honest but much more profitable," sighs the old man.

He takes out his handkerchief and cleans his lenses.  There's an absent-minded look about him.  His comment about work makes him think of a related subject.

"Honesty," he mumbles. "Ah, honesty...If you find 'three thousand-reis' turn the money over to the police;  but if you find 'three million' take it to the bank."

"It's all a matter of conscience," I dare to say. "And, very often, only the losers have good consciences."

"Absolutely right, young man.  To the losers, hatred or pity; to the winners, the potatoes."

Brief pause.  The old man's head is bent forward, his chin resting on his chest.  But his eyes seem very alive, with a crude brightness emanating from them.  Suddenly, he begins to speak as if continuing a monologue.

"Ah, if I had to define the human soul..."

"How would you define it?  Can you tell me?"

"I would say, young man, that the soul is a boarding house.  In each room there lives a vice or a virtue.  The good rooms are those where the vices always sleep while the virtues watch over them.  As for the worst rooms..."

He leaves the unfinished phrase hanging in mid-air, bends forward and starts rubbing his foot.

"Corn problems, sir?"

"No.  It's my boots.  Tight boots are one of the life's blessings because, while they make your feet hurt, they also give rise to the pleasure of taking them off."

He adjusts his spectacles on the bridge of his nose, looks at me firmly and says in a loud voice:

"Torture your feet, you wretch; then relieve the pain and there you have a cheap form of happiness, though still at the mercy of shoemakers and of Epicurus."

A vendor of lottery tickets approaches and tries to foist a "winning ticket" upon us.  I say "No." But the old man interjects:

"You should buy one, now and then.  A lottery is like a woman.  If you insist, someday it might just give in."

"I'm not very fond of games..."

"Well, I love chess.  Good Lord, it's such a delicious game!...The Queen eats the Pawn, the Pawn eats the Bishop, the Bishop eats the Knight, the Knight eats the Queen...everybody eats everybody else.  It's a very charming type of anarchy..."

The old man makes a move to get up.  I tell him it's too early to go, that I'm enjoying the conversation.

"It's not because of the hour.  It's because it's going to rain.  Once,  I wrote about a character who, each time his clock stopped, would wind it up not because it had stopped, but because he didn't want the clock to stop counting the moments it had lost."

"Are you sure it's going to rain?"

"Well, that's how you flood the streets...with drops of water. Ah, a tear!  How I wish for just one, single tear!  But the world has grown so much since the Deluge that one tear would only flood Sergipe or Belgium."

Silence.  A drunkard staggers by and shouts: "Long live the Republic."  I look around the square to see if the flooding has begun and, in a split second, the wise old man is gone.  He simply vanished like an ectoplasmic entity.  I wonder:  "Could that have been Machado de Assis, the Sorcerer?" "If so, I stand by the citations I've made in my story, which you, dear reader, will be able to identify. If you can't...Well...I’ll just tap you gently on the head and say good-bye."

TRIPS

He travels around "the wheel of life," as he is accustomed to saying; or, imitating Xavier de Maistre, he travels around his room; or still, following the example of Almeida Garrett, he travels around his home grounds, meaning a few cities near Rio, where he rests and takes care of his health. But he relaxes by carrying stones.

STYLE

He was hardly over twenty and had already gone from apprentice typesetter to being an editor of the newspaper.  Now, Machado de Assis, a sober young man, is given a weekly column.  The former "owner" of the spot  had resigned, for personal reasons, and the editor-in-chief, in a state of high anxiety, must have looked around the room searching for a solution.  His eyes fall upon Machado.  "That fellow over there has a knack for the job," he must be saying to himself.  

Machado listens attentively, his hand and pen poised in mid-air; he shows no emotion as he, a mulatto from a poor background, had learned at an early age. But inside he's burning with excitement. This is his big chance.  He has to grab it and hold on to it. Luck is like a horse with no saddle that swiftly passes by before your eyes.  You either jump on her back and let yourself go on a wild ride or you remain quietly on the banks along the River of Oblivion.  Machado is 22 and he is in a hurry to ride that horse.  

Before he faces that dreaded first column, he does something that is quite different from the usual behavior of  a freshman columnist: he doesn't call upon the Muses for inspiration.  Instead, he prefers to have a down-to-earth conversation with his pen.  It probably is not a quill of the type that makes for sloppy and smeared penmanship.  After all, writing instruments have also been improved by new technologies:  there are now metal pens with adjustable tips attached to small shafts.  The tips, once dipped in an inkwell, will spill words on a blank sheet of paper.  But to do so demands style.  And style, it should be noted, begins with the writing tool itself - the pen.

And so, young Machado de Assis has a serious talk with his pen. To him, some pens seem to be dipped in dew.  There are those that plunge into the dense inkwell of melancholy, like those of the pessimists and the unbelievers. Some are full of wrath, while others are lyrical and sound like arpeggios played on a harp. And, finally, there are those that are flighty and fickle, but we shouldn't lose our time with those.  A pen worth its salt must go way beyond penmanship.

Machado, already riding Lady Luck's horse - it's advisable that you dominate first and then worry about the reins, spurs and stirrups - questions his pen, interrupts it, gives advice and asks for advice.  It's a long session. At one point, Machado says:

-     "The battle of ideas is far worse than the common daily struggles you find out there in the streets;  you are fragile, stay away from the fight and stick to your business when the time comes to write you column."

A conscientious columnist always gets something out of any situation;  if he can't reach the rose, he shakes the rosebush before returning home.  He's like the soccer player who lunges toward his opponent to skin him alive, misses his target, but still manages to step on his toe. A clear example of that is the result of Machado's chat with his pen:  it ended up becoming the subject of a column, his very first, and, over a century later, it is giving me the opportunity to write these comments.

Writing columns is highly contagious stuff;  you catch it in the air, like a cold, and you start sneezing column material.  Columnists band together and brag a lot. What else could one expect? Column writing has it very own type of seduction, sedition and sleight of hand.  So, let's write columns.

DISBELIEF

Machado is intoxicated by pessimism.  He read and absorbed the thinking of English and French pessimists.  Pascal, above all, left an imprint of bitterness.  "And it wasn't because of carelessness," says Machado in a letter to Joaquim Nabuco, journalist, playwright and poet.  The critic Afrânio Coutinho considers Machado's pessimism "more radical because, while pointing to the essential contradiction of human nature, that baroque concept that man is attracted to the two infinities - nothingness and absoluteness, Pascal still had great optimistic hopes for a future life.  Pascal did not believe in man and hated life, but he trusted God.  On the other hand, Machado does not trust man, does not love life, nor does he expect any heavenly happiness in the future."  On his deathbead,  still quite lucid, he refuses any religious comforts.  From his very first fictional writings, he shows disillusionment, when he says: "The distinction between man and dog is that man can make one evening be different from any other."

THE REMEDY

"See if you can exclude the present, the past and the future and create a time that encompasses all three: Prometheus.  Art is the best of remedies." (Letter to his close friend Mário de Alencar).  "Leopardi (the Italian poet) is one of the saints of my church because of his verses, his philosophy and, perhaps, because of some moral refinement; probably, I, too, have some leanings toward the monarchy. (Letter to the diplomat Magalhães de Azeredo, ).

Machado's trajectory goes from the times of the Brazilian Empire (the greatness and decline of the reign of Pedro II) to the first wavering steps of the Republic.  From a literary point of view, he absorbs all the imported models, but knows how to keep his distance from the natural realism of Zola, followed in Portugal by Eça de Queiroz, whom he reproaches. (He criticizes Eça's O Primo Basílio/Cousin Basilio).  His intellectual efforts are all the more remarkable if we consider his color and his humble origins, in a country where there is peaceful racial coexistence but with a background of discrimination.  What further distinguishes him is his concentration on the analysis of human passions, which renders him a conceptual writer.  He must have learned such subtleties with Stendhal, among others.

As far as he is concerned, writers of fiction and historians go hand in hand.  In one of his columns, he writes:  "A storyteller is the exact opposite of an historian, although the historian, in the final analysis, is a storyteller himself.  Why the difference, then?  Nothing could be simpler, dear reader.  The historian was invented by you, a person of culture, well-read, a humanist;  the storyteller was invented by the people who never read Tito Livio and feel that to narrate what happened is nothing more than to fantasize."

Machado puts together social and artistic phenomena.  Biographer Lúcia Miguel-Pereira pictures him as a prisoner of the social conditions of his time, when she writes:  "The characters he creates are extremely human, showing, by their reactions, the inevitable loneliness of being lost in a recognizable world.  At the same time, they are typical Brazilians from Rio de Janeiro, reflecting in every gesture the environment in which they live."   She goes on to describe him as the novelist best representing the period of Emperor Pedro II's rule:  "Under certain aspects, and in a smaller scale, he was for Brazil at that time, what Balzac had been for France in the first half of the 19^th century:  he showed how the special conditions of the society formed during the Empire reflected on the elements that composed the Brazilian personality." 

In his essay Machado de Assis:  The Pyramid and the Trapezium, Raimundo Faoro analyzes the social pyramid, that is, the class structure of society, the web of ambition and influence and the play for power in the shadow of the personal power, now a myth, of the Emperor himself.  The trapezium represents the restlessness that cavorted through Brás Cubas's intelligence, giving him the opportunity to express his critical points of view. 

His fictional work is so descriptive of the social environment that he might be considered to be an historian, a sociologist.  Where does reality end and fiction begin?  In reflecting what he sees, hears and feels, Machado becomes far more than a commentator of sundry events:  he is the researcher, the interpreter and the critic of that same environment.  Through his novels and short stories, as well as his political writings, it is possible to follow the history of events in the last 50 years of the 19^th century in Rio de Janeiro.

He was a simple man - shy, discreet, not given to close relationships and manifestations of emotions.  In Esaú and Jacob there is the episode where Custódio, the owner of Custódio's Bakeshop and Tearoom, was having a new sign painted, changing the name of the establishment to The Empire Bakeshop and Tearoom.  To Custódio's surprise, the monarchy was overthrown.  Immediately, he ordered the sign painter to stop the work, which had made good progress.  Somebody suggested that the name be The Republic Bakeshop and Tearoom.  Custódio scratched his head and said:  "What if the situation reverses itself?"  Another observer, more cautious, chimes in:  "Call it The Government Bakeshop and Tearoom."   To which Custódio replied:  "But every government has an opposition.  And when the opposition takes to the streets they might take it out on me, thinking that I am daring them to do something and then they'll smash my sign.  And all I'm trying to do is to respect everybody's position." Another bit of advice pops up:  "In that case, call it The Catete Bakeshop and Tearoom" (Catete was the name of the street where it was located).  But Custódio preferred to play it safe and continued with the name "Custódio's".

Machado was accused of deliberately ignoring slavery and related racial issues, as opposed to Lima Barreto, his contemporary, who took the  color of his skin and made it the symbol of a type of literature political in nature.  But Machado sees those problems through the same distant perspective as the poet Castro Alves:  they are part of a destiny that transcends events, a fate inherent to the wretched human condition.  His views are expressed in Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, in which the book's narrator confesses that he used to thrash one of his slaves.  When the slave gained his freedom, he bought himself a slave and "would take it out on him, as if paying back, at high interest rates, the amount (of punishment) he had received from me."

In the opinion of Anton Chekov (one wonders if Machado read his work) descriptions of landscapes should not depend on heavy prose;  they should be achieved with light brushstrokes, as necessary for the composition of a scene or of a state of mind. He said: "If  there is a mention of a rifle hanging on a wall, it must go off sometime." In Machado's work, in spite of the references made to the environment and to the way of life in Rio at the time, the descriptions that predominate reflect the characters'  inner "landscapes," almost always arid and including ravines, open fields, deserts and the abysses over which the characters lean.  Or mirrors, some quite foggy and cracked, in which the characters see themselves.

Someone has already compiled a "dictionary" of Machado characters (Francisco Patty).  And, of course, in the bibliographies of Machado one will find short summaries of his ideas and concepts. His gallery of portraits is large and diversified.  Evil storytellers like Bento Santiago in Dom Casmurro; farcical and cynical characters like the deceased Brás Cubas; sly foxes like Palha and his wife Sofia, in Quincas Borba, who manage to relieve the delirious Rubião of his fortune;  seducers and daring people, like Virgília; the hypocritical, the shameless, the corrupted, the frustrated, the naïve - in short, all of the players in the now tragic, now amusing "human comedy."   But none is as fascinating and enigmatic as Capitu.  Perhaps because the question raised is always the same:  "Did she or didn't she cheat on her husband?"

Not long ago, in one of his columns in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, Otto Lara Resende referred to the "unfaithfulness" of Mrs. Capitolina (Capitu), Bento Santiago's wife, in the novel Dom Casmurro.  A number of female readers were outraged by the assertion, as indicated by the number of letter to the editor.  Many other readers joined in, and the paper encouraged the debate.   It was not the first, nor will it be the last.  

The essayist Eugênio Gomes lets himself be seduced by what had become a legal battle in the courts of literary criticism:  Capitu's faithfulness or lack of it.  Overwhelmed by a Capitu who seems to be slandered by a jealous husband, Gomes takes on a passionate defense of the lady.  It matters little that, at the beginning of the narration, the husband, Bento Santiago, speaks of his "rival Escobar," and finally declares, with no ifs or buts, that his wife, a friend since early childhood, and Escobar, his best friend, had joined forces to betray him. Gomes's basic premise is that (who knows?) Bento Santiago is hiding the truth since, as the narrator of Dom Casmurro, his point of view predominates.

One thing is sure:  Machado created, through Bento's eyes, a fascinating female character, fated to stand as the accused in a long and repetitive process, for generations to come.  The ambivalences are such that, the more convinced the narrator becomes of Capitu's unfaithfulness, the greater the temptations for a suspicious reader to read between the lines and doubt it.

There is something thought-provoking about the reaction of the female writers to the editor, especially in times of such permissiveness as today's.  We witness a growing affirmation of women in our society;  such affirmation precipitated the disintegration of the family.  If we had a Kinsey Report on the sexual behavior of Brazilian women, especially those belonging to the middle class, which in the past was a bastion of conservatism, we would see that, following Bento's point of view, there are Capitus popping up everywhere.  We would also see that sexual jealousy, based on the concept of a woman's being her husband's "object", is breaking down.

It is important to remember that the "point of view" mentioned above is that of the narrator, Bento Santiago, and, certainly, not that of Machado de Assis.  It is up to Bentinho "to establish the criteria for the organization of the narrative, from within the story or outside of it." (I am quoting a definition written by the Argentinean critic, Raul H. Castagnino).  In other words, Bentinho, the narrator, may, at his discretion, emphasize what Castagnino calls "the special angles" of the story.  

Any narrative, whatever the type, makes reference to the past, whether recent or not so recent.  That means that Bentinho will have had time to adjust his motives and feelings while he narrates or prepares to narrate and time to introduce misleading information in order to co-opt the reader.  These elements manage to create that atmosphere of "illusion" that captivates and imprisons us, as if in a cobweb.  After all, who is to say that Bentinho did not exceed himself, or that he did not lie?

The narrator who disguises the facts is a perverse narrator.  He intends to deliberately and coldly mislead others and play the game with a marked deck of cards.  Is this Bentinho's case?  

That possibility grows larger when we note that Dom Casmurro is, essentially, a novel of a very private, very personal nature, not exactly shady, but naturally obscure.  The obscurity in Machado's work would be a reaction to the "solar brightness" of the realistic novel so popular in the last quarter of the 19^th century.  That obscurity, of course, would make it easier for Bento Santiago to perform as the narrator.  But we should note that he is not able to do away with the empathy (Einfuehlung) between the reader and Capitu, if we can say that he even tries.  As Arthur Koestler defined it in The Act of Creation, empathy is the capacity to "enter into a type of mental symbiosis with other beings." For that reason, Bentinho's punishment of his wife at the end of the novel seems to be exaggerated.  It certainly is cruel:  he strangles the love relationship and sends Capitu in exile to Switzerland.  She dies alone and not forgiven.   But some people believe, and among these is the Brazilianist Helen Caldwell, that Bentinho, himself, killed his love, dragged by morbid jealousy similar to the jealousy felt by the Moor of Venice for Desdemona.

Caldwell takes Bento Santiago's confessions for what they are:  a personal version of dramatic incidents, subject to voluntary or casual omissions, and to distortion that might have been preconceived, very probably, as the narrator's defense before his own conscience.   After all, didn't he banish his wife and child, killing them with his contempt?  Two statements led the Brazilianist to raise her doubts:  Dom Casmurro's analysis of other people's faults ("so that I can also correct my own," he significantly adverts); and then there is the comment of the narrator in Esau and Jacob referring to the pair of spectacles necessary so "that the reader is able to penetrate into areas that are less clear or are in absolute darkness." The narrator goes on to make an allusion to a certain chess player (in this case Machado de Assis) and his pieces (his characters and, by extension, the readers). Then, he asks for mutual collaboration, a kind of "exchange of services." 

Since we also know that Machado has the habit of zealously keeping biographical data to himself, and that, to him, a work of art is an object of beauty, we are forced to conclude that the key to an understanding of his major novels is to be found in the novels themselves and not in his biography.  That is why Caldwell limits her investigation to Dom Casmurro, although she finds support in Resurrection, in which Machado begins developing the great theme of love frustrated by jealousy, as well as in Esau and Jacob, Memorial de Aires and in smaller works. 

A piece of evidence in favor of Capitu is found in Machado's critical review of Eça de Queiroz's Cousin Basílio.  There, he states that to substitute the accessory for what should be the principal elements, that the transfer of the action, nature and feelings from the characters to fortuitous events,  seems to him to be incompatible with, if not contrary to, the principles of art.  Desdemona's kerchief has much to do with her death, "but the fiery and jealous soul of Othello, Iago's treachery and Desdemona's innocence - these are the principal elements of the action."

Well, then:  the Shakespearean tragedy serves as the model for Dom Casmurro, where "Desdemona's kerchief" will be represented by the similarity, real or presumed, between Ezequiel and Escobar.  Following Machado's formula for the dramatic action, Caldwell concludes, a priori, that "the drama...is in the nature, the passions and the spiritual condition of Othello-Santiago, Iago-Santiago and Desdemona-Capitu;  the similarity between Ezequiel and Escobar does not control these three characters, from whose passions the action flows."  From that point on, Caldwell focuses her attention on Santiago, the narrator.  What one wishes to prove will depend upon his testimony.  From a thorough examination of the text, one finally infers that it was not Bentinho's intention, through his narrative in the book, to merely conciliate conflicting aspects of his life, but to address a larger audience, punished, as he was, by a tormented soul. 

The records of these proceedings are from 1900.  The readers continue divided.  My dislike is decidedly directed to the austere (was he, really?) Bento Santiago.  A man who deliberately contributes to the tragic fate of his wife and son and, in his refuge in suburban Engenho de Dentro, is still able to eat and sleep well and go to the theater, must be hiding something - who knows, a guilty conscience?

Sources, influences, analogies, approximations.  Whatever the approach, Machado has resisted the test of originality to which he has been put by Comparative Literature in direct confrontation with some English and French classics. 

A good writer sets off another writer;  the literary creative process is a collective one, no matter how individual and isolated it may seem.  Nevertheless, the search for comparisons and approximations continues to be fascinating.  Quite by accident, I came across one of those influences not yet identified by Machado buffs.  It has to do with eyes and I found it in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, the first of four tragic novels written by him.

Hardy's novel was written in 1878.  Could Machado have read it?  He probably did.  Dom Casmurro is published in 1899, by Garnier Publishers, who had it printed in Paris.  The printing was done by December of that year, but Machado receives the first copies only in February of 1900.  Both heroines, Hardy's Eustacia Vuy and Machado's Capitu, have a tragic ending - Eustacia drowns in a reservoir, in a stormy night, as she and her lover try to escape from Egdon Heath;  Capitu dies in forced exile in Switzerland, cloistered by her jealous husband, Bento Santiago.  Both are goddesses of beauty, both are enchanting. However, they evolve in different directions:  while Eustacia grows in the love of men, Capitu becomes the picture of adulterous infidelity, as seen by Bento and according to his sole testimony.

Both of them exercised their charm mainly through their eyes.  Eustacia's were deep blue and she was "capable of sleeping without closing them up." Hardy goes on to tell us: "She had Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as it came and went, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes."  Her eyes were also "tempestuous eyes," he says:  "Eustacia once more lifted her deep stormy eyes to the moonlight and sighing that tragic sighing of hers which was so much like a shudder..."

Stormy eyes, eyes of turbulent spring tides...Capitu's eyes, first brought to Bentinho's attention by the servant José Dias, the user of superlatives, are "light-colored and big," they are "ambiguous and muffled pupils." To the servant, they are the squinty eyes of an underhanded gypsy;  to Bentinho they are "the eyes of a turbulent spring tide with the power to suck you in." Later, when he begins to suspect that there is something between Capitu and his friend Escobar, Bento Santiago sees the treacherous, definitely evil tide in the eyes of his wife.

Like Thomas Hardy, Machado was fond of Greek myths, so he certainly is aware that "Venus rose from the sea," as Helen Caldwell notes. "To Santiago," she says, "the tide in Capitu's eyes was a reflection of her adolescent sexual impulses which frightened him." A treacherous sea that threatened to snatch Bentinho and drown him in its endless depths...  These are none other than the same tragic qualities embibed in the eyes of Hardy's Eustacia.  Machado's romantic triangle - Capitu, her husband Bento and his rival Escobar - is repeated in Hardy's novel:  Eustacia, her husband Clyn Yeobright and the tavern keeper Wildeve.  It is not just Eustacia's eyes, but all of her Pagan charm that attract Wildeve to the reservoir where they both drown.  In Machado's novel, Escobar, known as a good swimmer, inexplicably drowns and Bento Santiago, the narrator, presents no information regarding the occurrence;  Capitu, who is no longer able to captivate her husband because of her alleged infidelity, becomes a castaway, alone in her exile in Switzerland.

Crippled by social mores and by his shyness, in a country that is strongly Catholic and timid, standing at the threshold of a new republic, Machado de Assis disguises sensuality in his work;  it runs underground in his novel and short stories.  Hardy, who had an unhappy first marriage, reacts to the Victorian prejudices of his time.  In Jude The Obscure, Sue Bridehead anticipates modern woman's struggle for freedom to love.

Machado writes his short stories...

His first book of short stories, Contos Fluminenses, was published in 1870, before Resurrection, his first novel.  The second group of short stories, Histórias da Meia Noite (Midnight Stories), comes out in 1873, before his second novel A Mão e a Luva (The Hand and the Glove).  Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, considered to have laid the foundations for the short story, were born, the first two in 1809, and Maupassant in 1850.  Chekov was born in 1860.  Based on these "landmarks," we could say that this was a generation of storytellers who not only gave the short story its structure as an independent literary form, but also gave us the forms to express it.  And these forms remain with us to the present day, in spite of literary experimentation. 

According to Arthur Voss, "the short story, as a literary form, is a century and a half old." The existence of a great number of literary magazines helped to propagate the new form which began to captivate the public since it demanded less time, approached the emancipation of women, then in its beginnings, and, starting with Poe, showed the disintegration of the personality, reflected the abolition of social classes, the disruption of the Church and family, the breakdown of standards of morality, the bankruptcy of empires, the development of science, and the deflation of hyper-fantasies which were now being replaced by irony.  And, of course, we should make special mention of the practice of analytical psychology that revealed - or accentuated - the mysteries of the personality.

Our man Machado de Assis, then, belongs to a generation of storytellers.  Once, he declared that the short story has an advantage over the novel when both are mediocre - the element of conciseness.  But, setting irony aside, Machado is the first Brazilian writer to realize the importance of the short story, thanks to his readings of Diderot, de Mérimée, Poe and Maupassant, and to treat it with the respect it deserves.  His performance as a storyteller rivals with that of the novelist - in the opinion of some, it actually surpasses it.  His short story writing was developed simultaneously with his poetry, theater reviews, novels and newspaper columns. After Machado, and, who knows, perhaps because of the brilliance of his tales, the short story only regains its status as an independent literary form in the hands of more recent writers, particularly after 1945.

Using English and French literary works as models, Machado writes four types of short stories:  the anecdotal story, Maupassant style; the personality story, following Mérimée, but containing, above all, that singular and unique effect drawn from extreme emotional states to which Edgar Allan Poe refers;  the story with a moral, a moral allegory, Diderot style;  the impressionistic short story, as Chekov might have written it.

The classical short story, as structured by its inventors Gogol and Poe, and developed by Maupassant, had as the principal elements of composition:  a) the plot, which, according to Aristotles's Poetica, is the main occurrence or, better still, the consequence of its development upon the fate of the main character and, when they exist, upon secondary characters; b) the point of view which, with its positive or negative characteristics, is the sum total of the reactions of the main character to his problems, as seen and judged by the reader; c) the scenery, the dialogue or monologue, the timing, the conflicts, the opening and the closing.

The Maupassant-style short story features an ending generally unexpected and meant to last in the mind of the reader.  This feature is very common in  today's mass culture when we see stories with police, erotic, cowboy or outer space themes.

Machado's "A Cartomante" (The Fortuneteller), from the book Papéis Avulsos (Loose Papers), 1882, is generally considered to be an anecdote in Maupassant's style.  Machado tells the story of a love triangle - the husband, Vilela; the wife, Rita; and the couple's friend, Camilo.  The consequences will be painful because Vilela does, in fact, love his wife and thinks the world of Camilo, a friend since childhood.  With detachment, using plain language, Machado comes upon the three characters at Court, follows the affair between Camilo and Rita, the growth of an intimacy that turns into carnal passion: the secret meetings, the insecurity of the lovers lead to the consultation of a fortuneteller.

Camilo makes fun of Rita's consulting the seer.  He doesn't believe in palm or card readings, but, out of fear, he ends up consulting the same soothsayer on his way to Vilela's house where he has been called with urgency.  The fortuneteller puts him at ease;  Camilo overcomes his fears and, soon thereafter, walks into his friend's house without a care.  He doesn't even have a chance to properly greet him.  As the narrator tells it: "In the back of the room, on the couch, Rita lay, dead and covered with blood.  Vilela grabbed him by the collar, fired two shots and laid him dead on the floor." A shocking and brutal end.

In light of this brief description, The Fortuneteller is, undoubtedly, an anecdote reflecting so many other everyday occurrences.  But, due to Machado's critical demands, his story, although in the style of Maupassant, is not susceptible of such a synopsis. Behind what seem to be important events, there is a hidden facet, a drama that takes place backstage. A careful reading between the lines reveals that Machado is playing fair with the reader, hiding not one fact that will lead to the coming tragedy.  He warns us that Vilela, the deceived husband, had been downcast and reserved; that, probably, he had received anonymous letters; that, his invitation to Camilo to go see him at his house without delay, would be a trap.  He informs us of all the fears that fill Camilo's fickle soul.  Nevertheless, the bloody ending surprises us like the foreboding strike of a pendulum.

In this short story, Machado is equal or superior to his French master, through the skill of the narrator, the supreme craft of diction, his somewhat perverse, though complete, narrative and thanks to the use of an interior monologue in which Camilo's thoughts suggest a happy ending for the conflict involving the three characters.

These variations produce what Louise Bogess calls "the story's internal conflict." Machado goes beyond the anecdote, pure and simple, and produces a long lasting work of art when he further introduces Vilela's ruminations, developing simultaneously with the rest of the story, like an underground river which suddenly erupts to the surface and brings a violent solution to the adultery problem.  Of course, Machado shows the action as it develops, similar to Maupassant's stories, imitating the ebb and flow of a theater play - but he insinuates that the short story, like a play, has a submerged mysterious portion and that perhaps the consequences, more than the plot, are really relevant.

So we see in "The Fortuneteller" that a short story may be an anecdote, but that does not invalidate the study of behavior and character. Along with that fictional model, Machado engages in the writing of another, the personality story, which, more than likely, was inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe.  This creator of the short story, in general, and of the police story, in particular, is characterized by two aspects:  the grotesque, which, as the name implies, is a satire, and the arabesque, a type of gothic prose through which he explored singular psychological states, according to Daniel Hoffman's conclusion.

The grotesque and the arabesque are also present in Machado's work, mainly the arabesque, and it would be convenient here to remember his tendency to write dark tales.  The difference is that Poe sees death through the personal emotions of an embittered symbolism, while the Brazilian treats it now with the respect inspired by fatalism, now with the lighthearted irony of a Brás Cubas. In Relíquias da Casa Velha (Relics from the Old House), published in 1906, almost all the stories are gloomy:  "Cabriolet's Anecdote" is the story of a curious sexton who makes a human inventory of the parish members;  the admirable "Funeral March," where Cordovil, a politician, has a monologue describing something like a game of chess with death, which, he suspects, is drawing  near and which, in a way, he wishes for and anticipates.  Do you remember the ending?  In one of his flashes of intuition, or wisdom, Machado composes the metaphor of the wine that is impure while in the bottle of life, but is purified as it is filtered and passes to the other bottle, leaving the grounds, naturally, to be taken to the cemetery...Let's not forget that his wife, Carolina, to whom he dedicates an emotional sonnet, one of the most perfect in the Portuguese language, had died two years before, in 1904.

Still in Relíquias da Casa Velha, there is another high point in "School Vacation," as good as "The School Story," in which he describes a boy's first contact with death.  In Várias Histórias (Several Stories), an anthology published in 1896, a frustrated composer holds watch over his wife's body on Christmas Eve.  In "A Desejada das Gentes" (The People's Favorite), from which the poet Manuel Bandeira took the euphemism "a indesejada das gentes" (rejected by the people), Machado tells the story of Quintília, a pretty young lady with many suitors, who keeps postponing her opportunities to marry and, when she finally does, she dies in the arms of her bridegroom.  In "A Causa Secreta" (The Secret Cause), Maria Luiza is a victim of her husband's sadism and dies of tuberculosis.  In "O Enfermeiro" (The Male Nurse), Valongo strangles a patient and becomes his sole heir.  "Mariana" is almost a gothic tale, also built around the shadow of death.

Machado's dark palette rivals with his palette for painting frustrated love affairs.  And so, by showing the frailty of life and the uselessness of almost everything, he brings Eros and Thanatos closer together, much like Edgar Allan Poe, whose poem The Raven he translated into Portuguese.  "The Male Nurse" is one of his most perverse tales.  It tells of Valongo, hired to take care of a rich and short-tempered patient who ends up being strangled after mistreating the nurse a number of times.  Once again, Machado goes beyond his adopted model, by the use of a brand of sarcasm so peculiar to him:  the victim leaves an inheritance for his killer who, trying to assuage his conscience, has a marble tomb built in honor of his benefactor. In the nurse's notebook, one of the final entries is:  "Blessed are the possessors, for they shall be comforted." In "The Secret Cause," another perverse tale, Fortunato - a name that reminds us of  Poe's The Cask of Amontillado - takes great pleasure in observing, and even bringing about, other people's misfortunes.  In "Mariana," Evaristo returns home after 18 years of voluntary exile, caused by a love affair gone sour, and looks up his beloved who, in his long absence, has married someone else.  As he sits in the living room, expecting that the woman of his dreams, totally changed, will give him a cold reception, Evaristo sees the lady stepping out of a painting on the wall, sit beside him and, together, they rekindle the flames of an everlasting love.  And there are other examples of how Machado found inspiration in Poe's work, whether in poetic composition or in the choice of openly bizarre themes, as in "O Alienista" (The Alienist).

Let us now take a look at a tale with a philosophic theme that Machado de Assis obtained from Diderot, the encyclopedist.  The quotation at the beginning of "Várias Histórias" (Several Stories) comes from Diderot:  "My friend, let us always tell stories.  Time goes by, the story of life completes itself and we do not even notice it."  Among his definitive writings of moralistic or moralizing content, Machado has left us the anthological "To Live!" which is a dialogue between Ashaverus, the last man on Earth, and Prometheus;  "A Igreja do Diabo" (The Devil's Church), a shrewd study on the human contradiction;  "Um Apólogo" (A Moral Allegory), in which a humble needle spends its life making way for a common thread; and many, many others.

The practice of writing this type of short story, forcing the author to make a philosophical summary, must have opened up for Machado another area, which is remarkable for its economy of means:  the fiction writer becomes deeply concerned with the essential, stripped of affectation, dry, direct extremely conceptual.  Let us return to Diderot's quotation, which the philosopher José Guilherme Merquior considered to be a bittersweet epigram: "The story of life completes itself..." It completes itself with the passage of time, in the crystallization of time, but it will also complete itself with the complicity of the reader, through his empathy, which Machado, as do other masters of the short story, calls upon quite frequently.  If this type of short story, built as it is on illusory truths, does not reproduce external life, and does not intend to be a picture of such life, it is because it greatly limits verbal ostentation.  Sherwood Anderson once noted that the most important element in a story is not what the characters are saying (and we would add: doing), but what they are thinking. Well then, that leads the fiction writer to refining a type of diction that is more implicit than apparent.  This is the quality that survives in Machado, the storyteller, along with his short stories, whether in the Maupassant or in the unrealistic style.   H. E. Bates once remarked that the structure of the short story is too delicate, too tenuous to be overworked by verbal ostentation.

The short story also completes itself in the mysterious labyrinths between the lines - or, who knows, it transforms itself, it becomes diversified, depending on the reader's point of view.  Machado opens the door to suggestions - the type of suggestion Stevenson was referring to as being able to turn a daily newspaper into the Iliad.  Machado's contribution to modern literature rests upon this mode of short story, as squinty and underhanded as the eyes of Capitu.  In this connection, it is true that in his masterpieces, whether short stories or novels, Machado anticipates Joseph Conrad's ambiguity, Faulkner's ambivalent narrative, which is of the most perverse kind,  Proust's impressionism, and Chekov's eloquent silences.

Here we should, perhaps, make some comparisons with the Russian master, who freed the short story from its carcass and made it float by injecting it with pure oxygen.  Machado and Chekov belong in the same productive phase - their best work is written during the last 20 years of the 19^th and the first years of the 20^th centuries. 

They have several things in common:  a background of poverty, a troubled adolescence, the intellectual efforts of the self-taught.  Chekov is able to support his family and manages to put himself through medical shool by writing short stories for newspapers and magazines.  Machado survives thanks to his journalistic activities as critic, as columnist and short story writer for periodicals in Rio de Janeiro, simultaneously with his activities as a civil servant.  At one time, Chekov is advised by the novelist D. Grigorovitch to stop being lighthearted about his writing and dedicate himself more seriously to his literary work, otherwise he would be wasting his talent.  There must have been a moment when Machado, extremely self-critical, begins to have doubts about the light substance of the short story as it appears in the newspapers or magazine columns or as pure anecdote.  So he chooses the path that leads to the higher literature of ambivalence.

In the words of Chekov, the short story must obey "the basic unity of modulation and development." The Russian also advises a certain "artistic reticence" in benefit of the short story.  We realize, of course, that Chekov and Machado do not belong to the same generation.  Machado does not mention the Russian, which indicates that he did not read him, either in French or in English.  Yet, how close they are!  The "artistic reticence" and other processes in Chekov's set of ideas are present in Machado's "Noite de Almirante" (A Night for Admirals), "Galeria Póstuma" (Posthumous Gallery), "Cantiga de Esponsais" (Wedding Song), "Uns Braços" (That Pair of Arms!), "Trio in La Menor", "Missa do Galo" (Christmas Midnight Mass), "Pilades and Orestes," Um Capitão de Voluntários" (A Captain of Volunteers) - just to mention a few.

Let us examine "Uns Braços" (That Pair of Arms!).  This story was first published on November 5, 1885, in the Gazeta de Notícias, in Rio de Janeiro.  Two years later, Chekov's "The Kiss" comes out in a Russian magazine.  "Uns Braços" retells the overworked story of a love triangle.  However, it never becomes reality - it remains implicit.  Inácio, a young assistant in a solicitor's office, falls in love with D. Severina, owner of the house where he is staying. It is a platonic relationship.  After being mistreated by Borges, the solicitor, Inácio dreams of finding in the arms of D. Severina, the solace, the escape, the tenderness he so badly needs, and a positive response to his first sexual overtures.  In his dreams, his beloved Severina kisses him in the mouth.  As it happens, the kiss was real because D. Severina, in a moment of weakness, or self-assertion, gives in to her instincts.  Inácio leaves and, from then on, lives enthralled by the taste of that kiss.  In Chekov's "The Kiss," we find a similar mistaken interpretation.  A modest, shy and clumsy army officer is kissed, by mistake, in a dark room, by an unknown woman during a reception held in his regiment's honor. The incident leaves its mark for the rest of his life.  Who could she have been?  Was it the lady in the lilac dress or was it the blonde in a black dress?  Could it be the lady now dancing with his fellow officer or the one sitting in front of him at the table? 

Another of Machado's masterpieces, "Noite de Almirante," whose theme is disappointment in love or the failure to get  together in a relationship, has all the poignancy of a Chekov story.  It is the story of lost illusions.  But, perhaps, "Christmas Midnight Mass" is the best example of reticence and indirectness, as Chekov would have it.  There, a boy from the interior is having a conversation with a lady, in her house, while they wait for the arrival of his friend who is taking him to Mass. The lady is romantically involved with someone else.  In that story, there is a parallel language that is suggested not by what is said, but by what is thought.  There is a throbbing of sexual desire present between the lines.  Machado manages to pull off the miracle of disguising the libido which, precisely because it is disguised, or repressed, is greater than the explicit eroticism of Eça de Queiroz.  The pauses in "Missa do Galo" speak;  they shout as loud as the silences in a Chekov play.  We are thinking, particularly, of The Three Sisters or The Cherry Orchard, where what is not said, but merely insinuated or thought, has greater weight than any spoken word.

In another of Machado's tales, "Pilades and Orestes," we have two friends who are inseparable: Quintanilha, a rich young man, and Gonçalves, a poor lawyer.  Except that, as far as Gonçalves is concerned, the friendship is self-seeking, false and shrewd.  Only the reader knows the subtle game of deceit and treachery that will render Quintanilha its gullible victim. 

In these short stories the incidents do not count that much;  what matters, above all, is the narrative fluency.  The artificially built plot will give way to the impressionism of a picture or a gallery of pictures; the story being told is not competing with life, in search of effects, but rather reflects life and interprets it; being less descriptive, the short story becomes more suggestive; the indirect narrative uses movie symbols and sequences and the composition comes close to that of a poem in that it transfigures immediate reality to the maximum degree.

I knew that question would come up.  For such a great prose writer, it is natural that his poetry be of lesser importance.  But there are isolated compositions that qualify Machado de Assis as a poet:  his translation of "The Raven"; "Círculo Vicioso" (Vicious Circle);  the epigram on the firefly and the frog;  and the always praised sonnet "A Carolina" (To Carolina), resounding with  "thoughts of experiences lived and long gone."