The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil Page 2

  The vogue for European genes may seem a bit less grotesque when one sees it as simply part of a more general vogue for all things European. Indeed, the mystique of Europe had a powerful hold on the minds of nineteenth-century Brazilian readers—which is to say, on the upper crust of a few cosmopolitan cities, among which Rio de Janeiro was first and foremost. Twenty-first-century readers of English are likely to be surprised by the slight presence of local color in most of Machado’s writing. Change the names to French, delete the few references to slavery and African descent, and one could often think that Machado’s characters inhabited a fictional Paris. The women’s clothing is very carefully modeled on the most recent French fashion plates, the men’s suits, cut on English lines and usually of dark wool more appropriate to a London fog than a tropical sun. His stories are peppered with references to European authors like Voltaire or Shakespeare, mention of European composers like Mozart and Beethoven, and allusions to the history and mythology of classical Greece and Rome. None of this was particular to Machado de Assis; rather, it illustrates the extent to which the ruling classes of nineteenth-century Brazil had a Eurocentric worldview. Britain and, above all, France were most central to this perspective; Portugal was distinctly less important. Britain stood for trade and political stability; France, for artistic and intellectual achievement. The economically dynamic United States also had its admirers, though it could not compete in the minds of nineteenth-century Brazilian readers with the prestige of Britain and France. Likewise, Brazilian readers had very little interest in their South American neighbors (whom they compared unfavorably to Brazil, with its coffee-driven prosperity and its monarchical stability) until the closing years of the century. By the 1880s, though, Buenos Aires, with its Italian-immigrant population and urban reforms based on a Parisian model, had taken the lead in the continental contest to imitate Europe. Rio de Janeiro (and Mexico City) hurriedly followed that lead and created their own simulated Parisian avenues shortly before Machado’s death in 1908.

  The Brazilian elite’s self-refashioning on a European model was not so much actual as aspirational. Aside from the renovated downtowns and the best neighborhoods of a few cities, little about nineteenth-century Brazil reminded anyone of France. Brazil’s tropical plantations with their enslaved workforce and its interminable cattle ranches sprawling across arid plains looked nothing like Britain. Most Brazilians shared a popular culture in which European elements combined with non-European ones. One Machado story, “A Famous Man,” describes a composer whose ambition is to write classical music. To make a living, though, he produces dance music of the sort that local musicians performed with a syncopated lilt of African inspiration, the forerunner of twentieth-century samba. The population of Rio avidly consumes his musical creations, but the composer, unable to create within classical forms, considers himself a failure. In Machado’s time the vigorous pre-Lenten carnival celebration shut down Rio for three days a year, but its soundtrack and parade motifs were still more European than Brazilian. In a newspaper column of 1893, Machado de Assis recalled the customary carnival water fight, most especially boys against girls, and the mass production of costumes representing figures of European history: a musketeer, a Venetian doge, an Austrian emperor. In the very hierarchical society of nineteenth-century Brazil (where, it has been said, no one was equal because everyone was somewhere above or below others), a person’s connection to Europe—European genes, European fashion, European science, European art—was a chief sorting principle. To have blue eyes, speak French, wear an English hat, or attend the opera improved one’s social status.

  European travel was prestigious as well, of course. Machado himself never visited Europe, despite his great interest in all things European, probably because of his precarious health. Meanwhile, his elite characters frequently go to Europe on business or for extended vacations, although vacation is not the right word for members of a leisure class. Machado never belonged to that class. He had a secure job and rented a nice house in a pleasant neighborhood, but he was never wealthy. In his newspaper columns he chronicled urban innovations such as telephones and commented on the advent of regular steamship connections linking Rio to Europe and the United States as well as to Brazil’s many provincial capitals, and he rode the streetcar daily but never took a voyage. His most extended residence outside of his beloved Rio de Janeiro was a few weeks at something like a health spa in the mountains above the city when his eyes were so bad that he was nearly blind. Travel in nineteenth-century Brazil was not easy. The country’s roads remained excruciatingly poor, and the relatively few railroads linked coffee plantations to the export facilities rather than knitting the Brazilian nation together. Still, Machado’s characters frequently visit their rural estates or travel to and from the far-flung provinces of the Brazilian empire on government work. A few words about the countryside and the provinces, then.

  The Amazonian north of the country, something like half of the national territory, was particularly remote from life in Rio de Janeiro. The vast rainforest stood largely unaltered since its first exploration by Europeans four hundred years earlier. An extensive river network, including the great Amazon itself, supplied the chief avenues of communication in the North, and most of the Portuguese-speaking population was scattered along the riverbanks. Many indigenous people of the forest tribes did not yet consider themselves Brazilian. Beginning in the 1870s, Brazilians from outside Amazonia came to labor as rubber tappers in isolated forest locations, bleeding white latex sap from wild rubber trees. Machado’s friend, the Amazonian writer José Veríssimo, dramatized the exploitation suffered by rubber tappers, but profitable exportation of latex for rubber tires made a notable Brazilian contribution to European modernization before World War I. Many of the rubber tappers were migrating from the Northeast, a much more populous Brazilian region.

  The Northeast (called simply “the North” in Machado’s day) comprised two contrasting subregions: the sugar plantation belt reaching down the coast from Pernambuco to Bahia and, inland, the enormous arid territory that Brazilians call the sertão. The coastal plantation belt of the Northeast was once the social, economic, and political center of Brazil. That was no longer true during the lifetime of Machado de Assis, although the plantation-owning aristocracy of the Northeast still had national clout, and the old port cities of the northeastern provinces, like Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, and Salvador, the capital of Bahia (and, for two centuries, the capital of Brazil), remained important regional centers. The cattle ranchers of the sertão, on the other hand, had (and have) never been particularly prosperous; periodic droughts devastated that already arid country in the 1870s, producing a general exodus. Since then, the sertão has periodically sent migrating workers to other parts of Brazil, especially to the Southeast, the country’s most developed region.

  In Machado’s day, the Southeast was already the most important region economically. Rio de Janeiro, the chief Southeastern port, was the national capital. The great Southeastern coffee boom launched the city of São Paulo on the path to becoming the country’s agricultural and industrial powerhouse. Fueled by its vast coffee crop, the province of São Paulo became the fastest-growing part of Brazil and the chief destination of European immigration. Crucially, São Paulo was the only part of the country (arguably, the only place in the world) where a plantation-owning elite built railroads and turned a commodity-export boom into diversified economic growth and, eventually, into self-sustaining industrialization. The city of São Paulo could not yet rival Rio as the country’s chief urban center in 1908, but the twentieth century would not be very old before that happened.

  The city of Rio de Janeiro itself was Machado’s most familiar geographical setting. He mentions specific street corners with the confidence that his readers will know the exact location. At the time of his birth in 1839, Rio had little more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, more than half of whom were of African descent and more than a third of whom were enslaved. Rio’s public
lighting and sewerage were rudimentary, its plazas unadorned, and its public buildings unimpressive. In contrast to its later reputation, the city’s nightlife was minimal in the nineteenth century. Many of the principal families spent much of their time at country houses in the steep green hills above the small grid of tile-roofed colonial-style buildings and twin-towered churches. The lifetime of Machado de Assis was a period of transformation in Rio—of burgeoning trade, proliferating theaters, hotels, periodicals, clubs, and associations. Yet most of his stories are set before the particularly rapid changes of the 1880s and 1890s, when Italian immigrants and internal migrants arrived by the thousands and civil engineers began to alter the shape of the city by leveling some of its granite hills, filling in low spots, and giving its waterfront something like its modern contours. The iconic beachfront neighborhood of Copacabana was still a sleepy village inaccessible to central Rio until the opening of a tunnel in the last years of Machado’s life. The most glamorous part of nineteenth-century Rio was the narrow downtown thoroughfare called Ouvidor Street, lined for blocks with fashionable European shops and cafés and places of public diversion. Ouvidor Street is a constant, iconic reference point in Machado’s stories and novels.

  Women figure prominently in this cityscape. At the time of Machado’s birth, Brazil was only just beginning to lose a reputation for cloistering women. According to the colonial adage, a woman aspiring to respectability should leave her house only three times in her life: for baptism, marriage, and burial—a gross caricature, obviously, but one indicative of historical attitudes. Poor women—the enormous majority—who had to work in public places or other people’s houses, could obviously not hope for much status under those rules. The poor women in Machado’s stories go out whenever need arises. As Rio’s social activities multiplied after 1850, women of respectable families, too, began to broaden their horizons and to move around the city more freely. Machado wrote both for and about these women. His early stories, published in a women’s periodical, depicted characters whose lives before marriage turned centrally on their marriage prospects (which was surely representative of his readers) and whose lives after marriage turned on occasional love affairs (which probably wasn’t). Machado’s women are often strong and resourceful figures, especially when compared with his feckless and spoiled men. Widows—independent women of means, a rare thing in nineteenth-century Brazilian society—are among his favorite characters, especially young, attractive widows. Because Machado’s mother died when he was quite young and he seems to have gotten along badly with his stepmother, the only woman who played an important role in his own life was Carolina, the intelligent and educated Portuguese woman whom he married over the objection of her family and with whom he lived in quiet domestic bliss for more than thirty years. When his eyesight became bad, she read and wrote for him, and he never really got over her death a few years before his.

  One might expect that, as a nineteenth-century Brazilian, Machado de Assis would be religious, and that, given his conservative temperament, he would be a devout Catholic. The vast majority of people in nineteenth-century Brazil never questioned Catholic teachings, after all. The Catholic Church constituted the official religion of the Brazilian empire; church baptismal records were the country’s only official registries of birth. Yet mild-mannered Machado was a free thinker who rejected the Catholic Church and sought spiritual consolation in philosophy. There were a few Presbyterian and Baptist missionaries from the United States in Brazil during those years, but he was not interested in them. Nor was he attracted to any of the many variants of Afro-Brazilian religions that then existed in Brazil. During the nineteenth century, the forerunners of today’s candomblé and umbanda (the two best-known Afro-Brazilian religions) were not openly practiced, although the poor neighborhood on the edge of Rio de Janeiro where Machado lived his first years was, in fact, the sort of place where West African deities called orixás occasionally descended into the bodies of men and women who invoked them in secluded, nighttime ceremonies involving drums. The upper-middle-class suburb where he lived with Carolina in a little cottage surrounded by gardens that he loved to tend—the cottage where, on his death bed, he refused to accept Catholic last rites—was a long, long way from such ceremonies; a long way, too, from the millenarian prophets who gathered tens of thousands of pious peasant followers in the arid sertão of the Northeast. Machado was an ironic but also affectionate observer of human nature, an enemy of hypocrisy wherever he saw it, and he saw plenty in the Catholic Church, but no more than in any other sphere of human activity. The priests who staff his fictional version of nineteenth-century Brazil are no better and no worse than anyone else.

  One can always count on Machado de Assis to be good-humored and tolerant. Be on guard, however. The voice that narrates these stories seldom embodies the ideas and attitudes of the author in a straightforward way. The narrator is often a character in the story or an unidentified voice with incomplete knowledge of the events described. Machado’s narrators are often unreliable—far from objective or omniscient. Their tone ranges from intimate to mock epic. The shifting and sometimes inscrutable perspectives of Machado’s narration are among the most fascinating aspects of his art. It is one thing to understand what the narrator says happened in one of these stories. It is something else to decide what we, as readers, think happened. Thus, the short stories of Machado de Assis often constitute puzzles, especially psychological puzzles, to be resolved. Enjoy them. Along the way you will learn a lot about the lives and attitudes of people in nineteenth-century Brazil.1

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  1. The source of the following translations is Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Contos: uma antologia, selection, introduction, and notes by John Gledson (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998).

  SUGGESTED READINGS

  Barman, Roderick J. Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825–91. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

  The story of Pedro II’s long reign, which defines the setting of almost all the short stories of Machado de Assis.

  ———. Princess Isabel of Brazil: Gender and Power in the Nineteenth Century. Wilmington: SR Books, 2002.

  The biography of Machado’s special patroness, the woman who signed the decree abolishing slavery in Brazil.

  Conrad, Robert Edgar. Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

  A collection of translated primary source materials on Brazilian slavery, from the colonial period to abolition, covering all parts of the country.

  ———. The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Co., 1993.

  A broad view of the decline and abolition of slavery in Brazil. See especially the first chapter, on the ubiquity of slavery.

  da Costa, Emilia Viotti. The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

  A classic of Brazilian historiography, this collection of essays covers a variety of political, social, and economic topics.

  de Assis, Machado. A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories. Translated by John Gledson. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.

  More of Machado’s best short stories, superbly translated. Also, don’t miss John Gledson’s critical introduction.

  Graham, Richard. Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 1990.

  An indispensable historical study of the political culture that Machado de Assis portrays in many of his stories.

  Karasch, Mary C. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

  A richly detailed and illustrated guide to be consulted especially as a reference on particular topics.

  Kirkendall, Andrew J. Class Mates: Male Student Culture and the Making of a Political Class in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

  This book on the educatio
n of Brazil’s ruling class helps us understand the values and behavior revealed in Machado’s fiction.

  Needell, Jeffrey D. A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

  An evocative exploration of the Brazilian elite’s vision of its place in a Eurocentric world.

  Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz. The Emperor’s Beard: Dom Pedro II and the Tropical Monarchy of Brazil. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004.

  A nuanced cultural history of many aspects of nineteenth-century Brazil, not just beards!

  Shultz, Kirsten. Tropical Versailles: Monarchy, Empire, and the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821. New York: Routledge, 2001.

  A close-up study of a defining moment in the history of Brazil, the dozen years in which the king of Portugal ruled from Rio de Janeiro.

  TO BE TWENTY YEARS OLD!

  Our first story portrays a moment in the life of a twenty-year-old student, very probably a medical student, given that the medical school was Rio de Janeiro’s principal institution of higher education in the mid-1800s. The student fashions of the day—including walking canes and fur coats—may strike twenty-first-century students as odd, but many things about the world of young Gonçalves (as he is known, always by his last name, the Portuguese equivalent of González) will seem familiar enough. For one thing, studying is not his main activity, although the author clearly indicates the excitement associated with European authors. Young men from all over the Brazilian empire converged on the two medical schools in Salvador and Rio, and on the two law schools in São Paulo and Recife. The result of their training and, even more crucially, their socialization at these four institutions of higher education was a fairly unified imperial elite. Law students, especially, went on to staff the imperial bureaucracy as judges and administrators. As such, they constituted an “old boy” network of powerful men who often knew each other from their student days. Exercising power is a birthright of Gonçalves, and he knows it. This brief portrait of him is straightforward, not particularly puzzling. The story (entitled in Portuguese “Vinte anos! Vinte anos!”) was published in the Rio periodical A Estação in 1884, and the setting is more or less “the present.”