The Looking-Glass Read online

  MACHADO DE ASSIS

  THE

  LOOKING-GLASS

  Essential Stories

  Translated from the Portuguese

  by Daniel Hahn

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  THE LOOKING-GLASS

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  The Fortune-Teller

  The Posthumous Portrait Gallery

  The Loan

  The Tale of the Cabriolet

  The Stick

  The Secret Cause

  The Canon, or Metaphysics of Style

  The Alienist

  The Looking-Glass

  Midnight Mass

  Machado De Assis

  Translator’s Note

  Copyright

  THE FORTUNE-TELLER

  Hamlet remarks to Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. This was the same explanation that the lovely Rita gave to the youth Camilo, one Friday in November 1869, when he was teasing her over her previous night’s visit to a fortune-teller; she used different words, though.

  “Go on, laugh away. You men are all alike; you don’t believe in anything. But you should know that I went, and that she guessed the reason for my visit before I had even told her. She was only just starting to lay out the cards and she said, ‘There is somebody that Miss likes …’ I admitted that I did indeed like somebody, and then she went on laying out the cards, then she rearranged them, and finally she declared that I was afraid you would forget me, but that no such thing would happen …”

  “She was mistaken!” Camilo interrupted her, laughing.

  “Oh, do not say such things, Camilo. If you only knew the state I have been in lately, on your account. You do know; I have told you already. Do not laugh at me, do not …”

  Camilo took her hands and stared at her, serious. He swore that he loved her very much, that her feelings of alarm were as a child’s; in any case, he said, whenever she had any fears, he was himself the best fortune-teller she could find. Then he scolded her; he said it was reckless to go to such places. Vilela might learn of it, and then …

  “What do you mean, learn of it! I took the greatest of care when entering the house.”

  “Where is this place?”

  “Not far from here, on the Rua da Guarda Velha; there was nobody around when I went. You can rest easy, Camilo; I am not mad.”

  Camilo laughed again.

  “You truly believe in such things?” he asked her.

  It was then that she, not realising that she was translating Hamlet into the vernacular, told him that there were many things in this world that were mysterious and true. If he did not believe, no matter; but the fact was, the fortune-teller had divined everything. And what else? The proof was that she was now calm and contented.

  I think he was about to speak, but he held back. He did not want to snatch away her illusions. He, too, as a child, and even for some time afterwards, had been superstitious, he had held an entire arsenal of beliefs, which his mother had instilled in him and which disappeared when he was twenty. On the day when he let all that parasitic vegetation fall away, leaving nothing but the trunk of religion, he, having learned both teachings from his mother, enveloped both in the same doubt, then straight away in one single total denial. Camilo did not believe in anything. Why? He could not say, he possessed not one single argument: he merely denied everything. But I misspeak, because to deny is still to make a statement, and he never formulated his unbelief into words; faced with mystery, he contented himself with a shrug, and walked on.

  They parted happy, he more so than she. Rita was sure that she was loved; Camilo not only had that certainty, but he had also seen her tremble and take risks for him, resorting to fortune-tellers, and however much he scolded her, he could not help but feel flattered. The site of their encounter was a house on the old Rua dos Barbonos, home to a woman from Rita’s province. Rita walked down the Rua das Mangueiras, towards Botafogo, where she lived; Camilo went down Guarda Velha, giving the fortune-teller’s house a passing glance.

  Vilela, Camilo and Rita, three names, one love affair and no explanation of origins. So let us do that. The first two were childhood friends. Vilela went into the magistracy. Camilo joined the civil service, against the wishes of his father who had hoped to see him a doctor; but his father died, and Camilo preferred to be nothing at all, until his mother procured a government job for him. At the start of 1869, Vilela returned from the provinces, where he had married a beautiful and silly woman; he quit the magistracy and came here to open a lawyer’s office. Camilo procured a house for him over by Botafogo, and he boarded ship to receive him.

  “Is it really you, senhor?” exclaimed Rita, holding out her hand. “You cannot imagine how highly my husband esteems you, he never stops speaking of you.”

  Camilo and Vilela exchanged a tender look. Truly, they were friends.

  Later, Camilo admitted to himself that Vilela’s wife did not belie her husband’s letters. It was indeed so, she was charming and lively in gesture, her eyes warm, her mouth delicate and questioning. She was a little older than the two of them: she had turned thirty, Vilela twenty-nine and Camilo twenty-six. However, Vilela’s serious bearing made him seem older than his wife, while Camilo was a naïve man in moral and practical experience alike. He lacked both the effects of time and those crystal spectacles that nature puts on some people’s cradles to hasten their years. Neither experience, nor intuition.

  The three of them formed a close bond. Familiarity brought intimacy. Not long afterwards, Camilo’s mother died, and in this calamity, for such it truly was, the couple proved great friends to him. Vilela took care of the burial, the service and the probate arrangements; Rita dealt especially with his heart, and no one could have done it better.

  How they proceeded from there to love, he would never know. The truth is, he enjoyed spending his hours by her side; she was his spiritual nurse, almost a sister, but most of all she was a woman and beautiful. Odor di feminina: that is what he inhaled from her, and around her, incorporating it into himself. They read the same books, they went to the theatre and took walks together. Camilo taught her draughts and chess and they would play in the evenings – she badly – he, as a kindness to her, only slightly less so. Thus it was, so far as things are concerned. But now comes the person herself, Rita with her wilful eyes, which often sought out his, consulted his before they did her husband’s, with her cold hands, her unusual attitudes. One day, his birthday, he received from Vilela the gift of a fine walking-stick and from Rita only a card with a common greeting in pencil, and it was then that he was able to read within his own heart; he could not take his eyes off the little note. Just a few common words; and yet common things can sometimes be sublime, or, at the very least, delightful. The old calèche for hire, in which you first took a ride with your beloved, the two of you shut cosily away, is worth no less than Apollo’s chariot. Thus man is; thus are the things that surround him.

  Camilo sincerely wanted to escape, but he no longer could. Rita, like a serpent, was closing in, enfolding him entirely, making his bones spasm and crack, and dripping venom into his mouth. He was dazed and overpowered. Shame, fears, remorse, desires, every feeling seemed mixed together, but the battle was a short one and the victory thrilling. Farewell, scruples! It was not long before the shoe was fitting comfortably onto the foot, and off they both went, up the road, arm in arm, treading carelessly over grasses and gravel, suffering nothing more than a faint pang of heartache whenever they were apart. Vilela’s trust and affection continued unchanged. One day, however, Camilo received an anonymous letter, which called him immoral and treacherous, and declared that the affair was known to all. Camilo was afraid, and, to deflect any suspicions, he took to visiting Vilela’s house less and less often. His friend noticed his absences. Camilo replied that the cause was some frivolous boyish passion. Innocence bred cunning. The absences stretched out further, then the visits ceased entirely. It could be that a little self-regard also came into this, an intention to diminish the husband’s kindnesses, so as to soften the betrayal in the act.

  It was around this time that Rita, suspicious and fearful, visited the fortune-teller to consult her as to the true cause of Camilo’s behaviour. As we have seen, the fortune-teller did restore her trust, and the young man scolded her for having done what she did. A few more weeks went by. Camilo received another two or three letters, so impassioned a warning that they could not originate purely from virtue, but rather from the spite of some rival; this was Rita’s opinion, who, though using less well-shaped words, formulated this thought: virtue is lazy and mean, it does not expend time or paper; only self-interest is active and lavish.

  Not that Camilo was any more reassured by this; he was fearful lest the anonymous person go to Vilela, at which point the disaster would become irredeemable. Rita agreed that this was a possibility.

  “Well,” she said, “I will take the addressed envelopes to compare their handwriting with the letters that arrive at home; if any of them are the same, I will remove them and tear them up …”

  None came; but a while later Vilela started to appear grim, speaking little, as if distrustful. Rita hurried to tell the other man this, and they pondered it. Her opinion was that Camilo ought to return to their house, to sound her husband out, possibly learning from him of some private business concern. Camilo disagreed; to show up now after so many months’ absence would be to confirm a suspicion or accusation. Better that they tak
e great care, making the sacrifice for a few weeks. They agreed upon their means of communication, in case of necessity, and parted with tears.

  The following day, while at work, Camilo received this note from Vilela: “Come now, right now, to our house; I must speak to you without delay.” It was gone noon. Camilo left at once; on the street, he realised that it would have been more natural to summon him to his office; why home? Everything suggested that this was an uncommon matter, and the handwriting, whether reality or illusion, looked shaky to him. He combined all these things with the previous day’s news.

  “Come now, right now, to our house; I must speak to you without delay,” he repeated to himself, his eyes on the piece of paper.

  In his mind, he saw the emerging climax of a drama, Rita subdued and tearful, Vilela outraged, taking his nib and writing this note, certain that Camilo would present himself, and waiting there to kill him. Camilo shuddered, afraid: then he gave a half-hearted smile, for in any case the idea of refusing appalled him, and he walked on. On the way, he thought to go home; he might find some message from Rita, explaining everything. He found nothing, and no one. Back out on the street, he found the idea of their having been discovered more and more believable; an anonymous accusation was quite plausible, even from the same person who had threatened him previously; perhaps Vilela knew everything now. That suspension of his visits, for no apparent reason, on a trivial pretext, would only have confirmed the rest.

  Camilo kept walking, anxious and on edge. Although he was not rereading the note, its words were memories, fixed right there before his eyes, or otherwise – which was even worse – they were murmured into his ear, in Vilela’s own voice. “Come now, right now, to our house; I must speak to you without delay.” Spoken like this, in the other man’s voice, their tone was mysterious and threatening. Come now, right now, for what? It was nearly one in the afternoon. His distress was growing by the minute. No question but that he was afraid. It occurred to him that he might go armed, considering that, if there was nothing to it, there was no harm done, and the precaution could be useful. Then straight away he rejected the idea, annoyed at himself, and continued, picking up pace, towards the Largo da Carioca, in order to take a tilbury. He arrived, climbed in, and ordered the coachman to proceed at a canter.

  “The sooner the better,” he thought. “I cannot continue like this …”

  But even the trotting of the horse seemed to worsen his distress. Time was flying, and he would not be long in facing the danger. Almost at the Rua da Guarda Velha, the tilbury had to stop, the street obstructed by an overturned cart. Deep down, Camilo was glad of the obstacle, and he waited. After five minutes, he noticed that beside him, on the left, exactly beside the tilbury, was the house of the fortune-teller whom Rita had once consulted, and he had never been so eager to believe in the lessons of cards. He looked over at the house and saw its windows closed, while all the rest were open and swarming with people curious about the incident on the road. One might think it the home of an indifferent Fate.

  Camilo sat back in the tilbury, so as not to see anything. His agitation was great, extraordinary, and from the depths of his spiritual layers, ghosts from another time were emerging, his old beliefs, his early superstitions. The coachman suggested that they return to the first side street and take another route; he replied no, that they would wait. And he leaned forward to look at the house … Then he made a gesture of disbelief: it was the notion that he could hear the fortune-teller, an idea flapping past him, in the distance, on vast grey wings; it disappeared, reappeared, and faded away again in his brain; but soon it moved its wings once more, closer now, circling … On the street, the men were shouting, trying to free the cart:

  “Do it! Now! Push! Go on, go on!”

  Soon enough, the obstacle would be removed. Camilo shut his eyes, thought about other things; but the husband’s voice was whispering the words from the letter into his ear: “Come now, right now …” And he beheld the twists of the drama and trembled. The house was looking at him. His legs wanted to get out of the cab and go inside. Camilo seemed to be standing before a long opaque veil … he thought for a moment about the inexplicability of so many things. His mother’s voice was repeating a host of extraordinary stories, and the same line from the Prince of Denmark echoed within him: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” What would he stand to lose, if …?

  He found himself on the pavement, at the door; he instructed the coachman to wait, moved quickly down the hallway, and climbed the stairs. The light was dim, the steps were worn, the bannister sticky; but he saw nothing, felt nothing. He climbed and knocked. Nobody appeared; he considered going back down, but it was too late, curiosity lashed his blood, his temples throbbed; he knocked again, one, two, three blows. A woman appeared; it was the fortune-teller. Camilo said he had come to consult her; she led him inside. From there, they climbed to the attic, up a staircase even worse than the first and darker. At the top, there was a small parlour, poorly lit by one window, which overlooked the roof at the back. Old pieces of furniture, dark walls, an air of poverty, which increased rather than destroyed the place’s prestige.

  The fortune-teller had him sit at the table, and she sat opposite him, her back to the window, so that what little light there was from outside struck Camilo full in the face. She opened a drawer and pulled out a deck of long, creased cards. While she shuffled them, quickly, she watched him, not directly face-on, but from beneath her lids. She was a woman of forty, Italian, dark and thin, with large, sly, sharp eyes. She turned three cards over onto the table, and said:

  “Let us see, first of all, what has brought you here, senhor. Ah, you are having quite a scare …”

  Camilo, marvelling, nodded.

  “And you want to know,” she continued, “if something is going to happen to you or not …”

  “To me and to her,” he explained, animatedly.

  The fortune-teller did not smile; she merely told him to wait. Quickly she picked up the cards again and shuffled them with her long thin fingers, their nails neglected; she shuffled them well, cut the decks, once, twice, thrice; then she began to spread them out. Camilo kept his eyes on her, curious and worried.

  “The cards tell me …”

  Camilo leaned forward to imbibe each one of her words. Then she declared that he had nothing to fear. Nothing would happen to him, nor to anybody else; he, the third party, knew nothing. This notwithstanding, a great deal of caution was essential: spites and envies were bubbling up around them. She talked to him about the love that bound them, about Rita’s beauty … Camilo was amazed. The fortune-teller concluded her task, gathered the cards back up and shut them in the drawer.

  “You have restored some peace to my soul, senhora,” he said, reaching his hand across the table and squeezing the fortune-teller’s.

  She stood up, laughing.

  “Go,” she said, “go, ragazzo innamorato …”

  And standing there before him, with her index finger, she touched his forehead. Camilo shuddered, as if hers were the hand of the sibyl herself, and he stood, too. The fortune-teller went to the bureau, on which there sat a dish of raisins; she took a bunch, began to pull them off the stalk and eat them, showing two rows of teeth that belied the neglect of her nails. Even in this commonplace action, there was something unusual about the woman. Camilo, though anxious to leave, was unsure how to pay; he did not know the price.

  “Raisins cost money,” he said at last, taking out his wallet. “How many would you like to send for?”

  “Ask your heart,” she replied.

  Camilo removed a ten-mil-réis note, and handed it to her. The fortune-teller’s eyes flashed. The usual price was two mil-réis.

  “I can see you like her very much, senhor … And so you should; she likes you very much, too. Go, go, easy now. Take care on the staircase, it’s dark; put on your hat …”

  The fortune-teller had already put the banknote into her pocket, and she accompanied him down, talking, with a slight accent. Camilo said goodbye to her downstairs, and descended the lower staircase that took him to the street, while the fortune-teller, happy with her payment, went back up, humming a barcarole. Camilo found the tilbury waiting; the road was clear. He got in and they resumed their journey at a canter.