The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil Read online

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  Interior design and composition by Mary Vasquez

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Machado de Assis, 1839–1908.

  [Alienista. English]

  The Alienist and other stories of nineteenth-century Brazil / [Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis] ; edited and translated, with an introduction, by John Charles Chasteen.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-60384-852-7 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-60384-853-4 (cloth)

  1. Short stories, Brazilian—Translations into English. 2. Brazil—History—19th century—Fiction. 3. Brazil—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Chasteen, John Charles, 1955– II. Title.

  PQ9697.M18A7313 2013

  869.3’3—dc23

  2012036479

  PRC ISBN: 978-1-62466-018-4

  Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing

  Azuela: The Underdogs, with Related Texts, translated and edited by Gustavo Pellón

  Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition, edited, with translations, by Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey

  Latin American Independence: An Anthology of Sources, edited and translated by Sarah C. Chambers and John Charles Chasteen

  Lizardi: The Mangy Parrot, Abridged, translated and edited by David Frye; Introduction by Nancy Vogeley

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Brazil’s Machado, Machado’s Brazil

  Suggested Readings

  To Be Twenty Years Old!

  The Education of a Poser

  The Looking Glass

  Chapter on Hats

  A Singular Occurrence

  Terpsichore

  Father Against Mother

  The Alienist

  Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing

  INTRODUCTION

  Brazil’s Machado, Machado’s Brazil

  When he died in 1908, the passing of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was front-page news in the Brazilian capital, Rio de Janeiro. One Rio newspaper even printed a second edition to announce it, and a cable was sent immediately to the London Times. Brazil’s most famous orator spoke at the funeral, for which the president of Brazil paid out of the national treasury. Machado de Assis, a childless widower, was not wealthy and could not otherwise have received the kind of posthumous tribute that the nation wanted to give him. After all, Machado de Assis was a writer, not a political figure nor an economic mover and shaker—a writer who, for decades, had produced a steady stream of fiction, poetry, and literary criticism for Rio periodicals as well as popular columns on the city’s daily life. His novels gently making fun of Rio society, especially high society, were eagerly awaited and appeared by installment in the newspapers. Until his final years, when his epilepsy got worse and he went out only once a week to take flowers to his wife’s grave, the famous writer could often be seen taking the streetcar or chatting in a bookstore. His color made him easy to spot among the crowd of distinguished (and largely white) literati who surrounded him, because Machado de Assis, the president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, the man whom Brazilians in 1908 consensually regarded as their greatest author (as they had already regarded him, by then, for two decades and as they still do today), was the grandson of freed slaves.

  Here was a surprising situation, to say the least. The Brazilian elite—until 1888 a slave-owning elite, an elite that became, if anything, increasingly racist at the close of the nineteenth century—considered literature the highest expression of national culture. How had this writer of African descent risen so high in their estimation? Machado de Assis had not engaged in the sort of high-profile polemics that had made Victor Hugo or Emile Zola national figures in France. He had written no tear-jerking Uncle Tom’s Cabin to stir public opinion on the issue of slavery, as Harriet Beecher Stowe had done in the United States. Instead, he had written novels and short stories mostly for and about the Brazilian ruling class, satirizing its social manners and mores, exploring its psychology, holding up a mirror in which it could recognize and laugh at itself. And he did that so well, so consistently, so unthreateningly, in a Portuguese prose of such crystalline elegance and simplicity, that Brazilian readers came to love the good-humored voice that always seemed to tell them something true and insightful about themselves. That makes the works of Machado de Assis a privileged source for understanding the cultural history of nineteenth-century Brazil.

  His fiction must, of course, be read in context. Machado de Assis does not paint detailed word pictures of Rio de Janeiro, the city in which he lived his entire life and about which he wrote the great majority of his stories and novels. His fiction explores ideas, attitudes, feelings, motivations, and behavior. Machado rarely describes the city streets through which he and his readers moved every day. Machado’s fiction often leaves the context implicit. To read his stories, therefore, one can benefit from an outline of that context: nineteenth-century Brazil, with particular attention to Rio de Janeiro and to the life of Machado de Assis.

  The boy who made himself the most beloved Brazilian author was born in 1839 in a neighborhood on the edge of Rio de Janeiro that had once been a rural estate worked by African slaves. His father, a literate artisan, was a free descendant of those slaves. His mother was a Portuguese immigrant. The boy’s family was poor but hardworking and respectable, and both parents could read and write, something that most of the population of Rio could not do. In fact, the father subscribed to one of Brazil’s first periodicals devoted to literature and the arts. The boy clearly got some formal schooling, though just how much is not known. Most of his education was informal. It began in earnest when, at the age of about fifteen, he met another self-taught Brazilian, Francisco de Paula Brito, a printer whose shop was a meeting place for local writers because, in the early nineteenth century, writing and printing were two aspects of the same activity. Young Machado became the printer’s apprentice, learning to set type, soaking up the intellectual atmosphere, and making friends with the first generation of Brazilian novelists and playwrights. Soon he was publishing poetry, theatrical sketches, and especially translations from French, for which there was a great demand in Rio, France being by far the country that Brazilian readers most admired.

  Let’s consider the situation of this grandson of freed slaves in the context of nineteenth-century Brazilian ideas about race. Unlike the United States, Brazil never had a “one-drop rule” dividing black and white. Historically, any kind of African descent defined a person as black in the United States. Nineteenth-century Brazilians, on the other hand, thought in degrees of blackness and whiteness, considering people to be biracial if their descent was substantially both African and European. Biracial was not their word, of course; they used mestiço, mulato, pardo, and scores of other terms to describe mixture of various sorts and degrees. Nineteenth-century Brazilians conceived of race as a continuum. Biracial Brazilians did not escape race prejudice, certainly, but they were less disadvantaged than darker-skinned people, and they enjoyed considerable social mobility. That was the case of Machado de Assis. The budding writer of the 1860s did not have to break through a U.S.-style color line. Instead, he had to climb a professional ladder made a lot
more difficult by his dark coloring.

  Like all poor Brazilians of his day, young Machado de Assis needed a hand from well-placed patrons to make his ascent. No one knows how he learned French as a boy, but it was certainly a resident European who taught him, for Rio had an influential presence of French merchants and professionals in the 1850s. As noted, the printer Francisco de Paula Brito (biracial, like Machado) recognized the boy’s talent and gave him a hand up. Machado’s next patron was another printer-author, Manuel Antonio de Almeida, who directed the Brazilian National Press, where Machado got his first paying job and where, it is said, the patron was concerned to learn that the young employee sometimes slept in the shop. Machado made good use of the help he got, and by his mid-twenties he had become a full-time journalist, reviewing theatrical productions and reporting on sessions of the Brazilian senate. The concise elegance of his language distinguished itself early. Now his patrons were the publishers of the newspapers for which he wrote—and even, in a way, the greatest of all Brazilian patrons, the imperial family itself. Some of Machado’s early published verses were dedicated to the Brazilian emperor Pedro II and to his daughter, Princess Isabel. In 1867, Machado was granted a government job by a cabinet minister, bringing him financial security for the first time. He also received a formal honor, the Order of the Rose, the sort of distinction that meant much in the hierarchical society of nineteenth-century Brazil. The Brazilian empire awarded many such honors, even including titles of nobility, and Machado’s honorific rank of cavaleiro was relatively modest. Still, at the age of not-quite-thirty, the grandson of freed slaves had reason to feel proud.

  It makes sense, in light of his experience, that neither race nor slavery is a major topic of his fiction. Brazilian readers (who were largely white) found it easy to like Machado de Assis in part because he did not usually rub their noses in their racism or their dependence on slave labor. Slaves who appear in his stories, for example—the ubiquitous servants, chambermaids, drivers, laundresses, and porters who wait on the protagonists hand and foot—are often identified by their jobs alone. In order to visualize the scenes in Machado’s fiction, today’s readers must simply remember that virtually any servant or laborer waiting on the wealthy protagonists could well be a slave. In addition, many characters who are not servants or menial laborers but not wealthy would, like the author himself, be biracial, a circumstance that also goes mostly unmentioned.

  In the 1870s and 1880s, as Machado de Assis continued to enjoy official patronage—occupying a succession of posts in the Ministry of Trade, Agriculture, and Public Works, where he had to go only in the afternoons, leaving him the mornings to write—he consolidated his reputation with a steady stream of short stories and novels. In the meantime, Brazilian slavery was becoming obsolescent. Beginning in 1871, the children of enslaved mothers were officially born free, although obligated to work for their mothers’ owners until the age of twenty-one. Machado supported the abolitionist movement that arose in those years, but he could take no credit for the end of slavery in Brazil. His health had begun to deteriorate with the onset of epilepsy, asthma, and vision problems. Still, as a ministerial bureaucrat he worked on the application of the 1871 Law of Free Birth, and as a newspaper columnist he described the cruel treatment of those still in bondage. In the 1880s, the owners of Brazilian plantations began to promote the immigration of free laborers from Italy to replace the rapidly dwindling enslaved workforce. Seeing the collapse of the system that held them in bondage, slaves began to leave the plantations in droves, and in 1888 Brazil finally abolished slavery. The conservative, reticent Machado de Assis surprised himself by rushing into the street—no doubt wearing his customary suit and tie and his pince-nez spectacles—to join the deliriously celebrating crowd, which hauled him into an open coach and made him part of the parade.

  The next year, 1889, the emperor of Brazil was dethroned by a bloodless military coup. Machado de Assis was fond of the royal family and especially of Princess Isabel, for whose eighteenth birthday and wedding, years earlier, he had written poems. Just before putting her signature on the document ending slavery, Princess Isabel had promoted him from cavaleiro to oficial of the Order of the Rose. Her father Pedro II had been a relatively enlightened ruler, a liberal thinker who had freed his own slaves decades before abolition and openly hoped that Brazil would someday no longer need a monarch. Consequently, Pedro made no resistance to the coup of November 1889, dutifully leaving the country within a day, never to return. Machado de Assis was saddened by his sovereign’s somewhat undignified exit. He would always be, in some ways, a man of the empire. He wrote most of his short stories and novels during Pedro’s long reign, 1840–89, and, afterward, the mid-nineteenth-century Brazilian empire remained the predominant setting of his fiction.

  Unlike its Spanish-American neighbors—republics, all—Brazil gained national independence as a monarchy because a prince of the Portuguese royal family declared Brazilian independence himself in 1822. With little conflict—when compared with the bloodletting of Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere—he created a constitutional monarchy and allowed a free press and opposition during his (mostly-bungled) decade of rule as Pedro I. The liberal opposition pushed him out in 1831, but he sailed for Portugal leaving his four-year-old son to succeed him as Pedro II. The former opposition accepted the continuation of a monarchy, provided that it be strictly constitutional. The liberals decentralized the empire a bit, giving local and provincial governments more autonomy. They appointed regents to rule during the prince’s minority and to oversee his education. Meanwhile, in the green valleys of the Paraíba River, not far inland from Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian plantations had begun to produce coffee, which was destined to become the empire’s great economic bonanza. Like the sugar plantations that had defined Brazilian society since the 1500s, the profitable coffee plantations of nineteenth-century Brazil were worked by slaves, and the country’s coffee-planting elite found slavery equally indispensable. The 1830s saw a series of revolts in provinces far from the coffee-producing region around Rio, as liberals in the provinces led popular uprisings to strengthen their local power in the absence of a ruling monarch. The central government defeated the revolts and then, beating a retreat from liberal decentralization, it put the fourteen-year-old Pedro II on the throne ahead of schedule in 1840.

  The reign of Pedro II began with a powerful pro-slavery consensus in the country’s hereditary Senate and its more accessible Chamber of Deputies. Senators and deputies divided into Liberal and Conservative parties, as in Great Britain; but nothing, it was said, so resembled a Conservative as a Liberal in power. The political life of mid-nineteenth-century Brazil was mostly about power sharing among the urban representatives of the country’s landowning oligarchy. Politics functioned as an arena in which members of this ruling class could win office for themselves and benefits—the spoils of office—for their families, friends, and supporters. It wasn’t what you knew but whom you knew that determined one’s place in Brazilian society. This, at any rate, was the view of Machado de Assis, and many historians have agreed. During the 1860s, young Machado de Assis got a good look at this system while reporting on sessions of the Senate. In his fiction, he satirized the political culture of self-serving, ideologically flaccid officeholders whose main tool was high-flown rhetoric and whose main goal in public life was self-aggrandizement. In the 1870s and 1880s, as Brazil grew and changed, the political system didn’t. Dissidence arose, especially among young men who believed that they had discovered the key to effective government in something called positivism. Positivism, a set of ideas derived from French and British thinkers such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, was an attempt to apply scientific ideas to society and government. In the 1880s, positivist professors held sway at Brazil’s military academy, and their ideas had an impact on the country as a whole when, in 1889, ranking officers called out their troops and put an end to a monarchy that they considered antique and obsolete.

  In place of the mon
archy, the army erected a federal republic and the positivists got their slogan “Ordem e Progresso” on the new national flag. It seemed at first a sweeping transformation. The centralized Brazilian empire was replaced by a United States of Brazil with a weaker federal government. Individual states developed their own armed forces, and state coffers, not federal ones, now received the proceeds of the country’s all-important export tax. Ultimately, the real locus of national power had not shifted very much with the fall of the empire. It still lay, as it had for many decades, with Brazil’s landowners, whose plantations produced the country’s export wealth. Still, the advent of the republic brought a sense of excitement and potential to city dwellers, especially in the burgeoning south.

  Machado de Assis did not share the general enthusiasm. He felt that Pedro II, who died soon after going into exile, had been badly treated. He mistrusted the positivist zeal of the new republican rulers, with their activist plans to transform Brazil along the lines dictated by their scientific theories. Machado de Assis believed in the value of nineteenth-century science, but he doubted that science held the answer to all of Brazil’s problems. Now in his early fifties (which was relatively older then than now, so to speak), he was feeling a bit curmudgeonly, perhaps, but it was more than that. The positivists believed that scientific logic and assessment of evidence would automatically produce wise social policies, and they had little time for anyone disposed to question the certainty of their beliefs. “Positive certainty,” one could say, was a typically positivist attitude, and Machado de Assis mistrusted it. Scientists, after all, were human, and Machado de Assis had made a long study of human failings. Many of his stories show how often selfishness masquerades as pure logic in people’s minds. Among the things that Brazilian positivists did not question were theories of European racial superiority. This was the heyday, in fact, of scientific racism and social Darwinism—two misguided attempts to apply evolutionary theory to contemporary societies. The positivists believed that government application of these ideas to Brazil would result in an “improved” (which to them meant “more European”) population. Eugenics, the science of “improving” populations, would gain many adherents around the world until the 1930s, when the Nazis finally gave racial science a bad name, hopefully forever.