The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis

815 Pages·2018·4.45 MB·English

by  Machado de Assis

CONTENTS
FOREWORD by Michael Wood
INTRODUCTION
RIO TALES (1870)
Miss Dollar
Luís Soares
The Woman in Black
Augusta’s Secret
Confessions of a Young Widow
Straight Line, Curved Line
Brother Simão
MIDNIGHT TALES (1873)
The Blue Flower
Luís Duarte’s Wedding
Ernesto What’s-His-Name
Much Heat, Little Light
The Gold Watch
Point of View
MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS (1882)
The Alienist
How to Be a Bigwig
The Turkish Slipper
In the Ark
Dona Benedita
The Bonze’s Secret
Polycrates’s Ring
The Loan
The Most Serene Republic
The Mirror
A Visit from Alcibiades
Testamentary Disposition
UNDATED STORIES (1884)
The Devil’s Church
The Lapse
Final Chapter
Nuptial Song
A Strange Thing
Posthumous Picture Gallery
The Chapter on Hats
An Alexandrian Tale
Cousins from Sapucaia!
A Lady
Pecuniary Anecdote
Fulano
Second Life
Admiral’s Night
A Sacristan’s Manuscript
Ex Cathedra
Galvão’s Wife
The Academies of Siam
ASSORTED STORIES (1896)
The Fortune-Teller
Among Saints
Her Arms
Fame
The Object of Desire
The Secret Cause
Trio in A Minor
Adam and Eve
The Gentleman’s Companion
Mr. Diplomat
Mariana
A School Tale
An Apologue
Dona Paula
Life!
The Canon, or the Metaphysics of Style
COLLECTED PAGES (1899)
The Cane
The Dictionary
A Wanderer
Eternal
Midnight Mass
Canary Thoughts
Xerxes’s Tears
Old Letters
RELICS FROM AN OLD HOUSE (1906)
Father Against Mother
Maria Cora
Funeral March
A Captain of Volunteers
Into the Mire!
The Holiday
Evolution
Pylades and Orestes
The Tale of the Cabriolet
FOREWORD
J
OAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS wrote short stories throughout his career,
publishing seven collections between 1870 and 1906, interspersed with his nine
novels. Critics like to divide the novels into two sets, seeing the first four as
slender and “romantic” (the author’s own term) and the last five as complex,
ironic masterpieces. We can’t do anything like this with these stories, although
we may say that with the years the continuing lightness of touch is applied to
darker subjects. This is certainly the impression the full set of stories gives. We
move from young love and shallow social ambition to suicide and slavery, from
portraits of manners to deep philosophical questions. But even this impression
calls out for some correction. There are early stories about memory and late
stories about youth, and it is hard to think of anything darker than the early piece
“Brother Simão” (1870), where a monk dies filled with loathing for humanity
because of a lie told to him long ago. So perhaps the firmer truth is that as we
read the stories we get better at registering the darkness, at seeing through the
light, so to speak.
Machado’s short stories resemble those of Chekhov in their talent for saying
too little (that is, just enough), but his closest literary companion, if we are
looking for comparisons, is his almost exact contemporary Henry James, and
especially in his longer pieces, where he appears as a great master of the form
that James called “our ideal, the beautiful and blest nouvelle.” In this respect, we
might think especially of “The Woman in Black,” “The Blue Flower,” and “The
Alienist.”
But more than either of these writers, Machado constantly engages in an open
playfulness with the reader. In the stories as in the novels, his style of wit
belongs with that of Henry Fielding or Laurence Sterne, whose work he knew
well. We could also cite the excellent company he could not know he would
come to keep, that of Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino.
Machado has generally been well served by translators, although many of his
Machado has generally been well served by translators, although many of his
stories have not until now appeared in English versions. But no one has caught
the ease and grace of his prose as Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson have.
This achievement is important not only because it allows us actually to see a
style traveling from one language to another but because the apparently casual
movement of Machado’s writing, so well rendered here, allows all kinds of
implications to arise as if of their own accord.
In one story, a single narrator tells us both that “there are no mysteries for an
author who can scrutinize every nook and cranny of the human heart” and that
one of his characters “had a series of thoughts that remained hidden from the
author of this story.” In others we meet imagined readers who are “less canny,”
“less demanding,” or “more experienced,” and in “Miss Dollar,” the first story in
The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, the author goes to town on this topic.
The narrator thinks melancholy readers will imagine the female of the title as
“a pale, slender Englishwoman” and devotes a whole paragraph to creating this
pre-Raphaelite possibility. The description ends, “Her voice should be like the
murmurings of an aeolian harp, her love a swoon, her life a contemplation, her
death a sigh.” The next sentence begins, “All very poetic, but nothing like the
heroine of this story.” The narrator offers “a robust American girl” as an
alternative, more in keeping with the currency of her name, no doubt, and also a
well-off middle-aged English lady, who will arrive in Brazil and marry the
reader—or at least the reader who imagines her in this incarnation. The “more
astute reader” will have none of these fantasies, of course, and will be sure that
Miss Dollar is “Brazilian through and through,” although still as rich as her
name makes her sound.
None of this is true, the narrator now tells us, meaning none of this matches
the fiction he has in mind, because Miss Dollar is “a little Italian greyhound
bitch.” And the story is not about her anyway, but about the man who finds her
when she is advertised as lost, and who falls in love with her owner.
Machado teases his readers, but he also relies on them to be his accomplices;
and sometimes he makes our complicity distinctly uncomfortable. In the last
story in this volume, “The Tale of the Cabriolet” (1906), a slave arrives at the
church of São José in Rio de Janeiro and asks the priest to perform the last rites
at a nearby house. The man seems “quite distraught” about the news he is
carrying, and the narrator comments:
Anyone reading this with a darkly skeptical soul will inevitably ask if the
slave was genuinely upset, or if he simply wanted to pique the curiosity
of the priest and the sacristan. I’m of the view that anything is possible in
this world and the next. I believe he was genuinely upset, but then again
I don’t not believe that he was also eager to tell some terrible tale.
The sacristan in fact spends the rest of the story sniffing out the tale for
himself, not because he is a gossip or a meddler but because he loves tales.
“With him it was a case of art for art’s sake.” And with us? With Machado
himself? Aren’t we looking for tales, terrible or not? How far are we from being
upset?
The wit and grace of Machado’s writing never diminish in these stories, and
the scene is almost always the same. We are watching the bourgeoisie of Rio
Janeiro at play, and occasionally trying to be serious. They misunderstand each
other, they get married, they worry about dying, there is the occasional violent
murder. Money and the business of keeping up appearances are large questions.
The characters read Hugo and Feydeau, Dumas père and Dumas fils, and indeed
the general tone is that of nineteenth-century Paris as reconstructed in so many
Latin American locations of that time. Machado is gently mocking this class that
believes only in borrowed culture, or in what the Brazilian critic Roberto
Schwarz calls “misplaced ideas,” but he is not advocating any kind of nativism.
When the chief character of “The Alienist,” refusing distinguished positions
offered to him by the king of Portugal, refers to the Brazilian city of Itaguaí as
“my universe,” we laugh because he seems to have made his world so small. But
then we may also feel that his grandiose claim for his hometown and the
exclusive fascination of others with the culture of Europe are simply rival forms
of provincialism. There is a third way. We can take all culture, local and
international, as our own, and this is the practice suggested by Machado’s own
allusions, as it is by those of Jorge Luis Borges, writing a little later in a
neighboring Latin American country. “We cannot confine ourselves to what is
Argentine in order to be Argentine,” Borges says, and Machado might add that
we don’t have to believe that Paris is the capital of the world in order to read
French literature.
In “Father Against Mother,” first published in 1905, near the end of
Machado’s life, the stage belongs not to the bourgeoisie but to a lower social
sector, that of a man who has been a clerk in a store, a bookkeeper to a notary,
an office boy, and a postman, and is now a slave catcher. This was “one of the
trades of the time,” the narrator says, and of course “not . . . a very noble
profession.” This understatement has considerable force because the story has