The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Copyright © 2013 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

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Printed in the United States of America

17  16  15  14  13                            1  2  3  4  5  6  7

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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.