One night, four or five gentlemen were debating several questions of a transcendental nature; though various views were expressed, the discussion was not a heated one. The house was on Santa Teresa hill, near the centre of Rio de Janeiro, and the room was small, lit by candles whose glow melted mysteriously into the moonlight outside. Between the city, with its excitement and agitation, and the sky, where the stars twinkled through the limpid, calm atmosphere, were our four or five enquirers into metaphysical matters, amicably resolving the most arduous problems of the universe.
Why four or five? To be accurate, there were four people talking; but, in addition to them, there was a fifth personage in the room, silent, thinking, half asleep, whose contribution to the debate was limited to a grunt of approval here or there. This man was the same age as his companions, between forty and fifty; he was from the provinces, rich, intelligent, not uneducated, and, it seems, astute and of a caustic turn of mind. He never argued; and he defended his lack of participation with a paradox, saying that arguing was the polite form of the aggressive instinct, present in man and inherited from animals; and he added that the seraphim and cherubim never questioned anything, and they were eternal, spiritual perfection. When, on this night, he gave the same answer again, one of those present contested what he said, and challenged him to prove it if he was able. Jacobina – that was his name – reflected for a moment, and answered:
‘When I think about it, perhaps you’re right.’
And there, in the middle of the night, this withdrawn individual held forth, not for two or three minutes, but thirty or forty. The conversation, in its meanderings, came to rest on the nature of the soul, a subject which radically divided the four friends. Each one had his own view; not merely was there no agreement, discussion itself seemed impossible, partly from the multiplicity of questions branching from the main trunk, and a little, maybe, from the inconsistency of the views themselves. One of the contenders asked Jacobina to give an opinion – or at least provide some conjecture.
‘No conjectures or opinions,’ he replied, ‘either can give rise to dissension, and, as you know, I never argue. But, if you’ll hear me in silence, I can tell you of something that happened to me, which provides the clearest possible demonstration of what we’re talking about. In the first place, there’s not one soul, but two …’
‘Two?’
‘Two souls, no less. Every human being carries two souls with him: one that looks from inside out, the other from outside in … You can be as astonished as you want; open your mouths, shrug your shoulders, whatever; I’ll brook no answer. If you answer back, in fact, I’ll finish my cigar and be off home to bed. The external soul can be a spirit, a fluid, a man, many men, an object or an operation. There are cases, for example, in which a simple shirt button is a person’s external soul; or a polka, whist, a book, a machine, a pair of boots, a cavatina, a drum, etc. Obviously, the role of this second soul, like that of the first, is to transmit life; the two of them together make a man, who is, in metaphysical terms, an orange. Anyone who loses one of the halves naturally loses half of his existence; and there are not infrequent cases in which losing the external soul means losing an entire existence. Look at Shylock. His ducats were the Jew’s external soul; to lose them meant death. “Thou stick’st a dagger in me,” he says to Tubal, “I shall never see my gold again.” Think about these words – the loss of his ducats, his external soul, was death to him. However, you must know that the external soul is not always the same …’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘By no means; it changes its nature and state. I’m not alluding to certain all-absorbent souls, like love for one’s country – Camões went so far as to say he died with his1 – or power, which was the external soul of Caesar and Cromwell. These are forceful, exclusive souls; but there are others, however forceful, which are also of a changeable nature. There are gentlemen, for example, whose external soul, in their early years, was a rattle or a wooden horse, and later, it’s being president of a charitable institution or something of the sort. For my part, I know a lady – and very charming she is – who changes her external soul five or six times a year. During the season, it’s the opera; when the season’s over, the external soul is exchanged for another: a concert, or a ball at the Cassino, the Rua do Ouvidor, Petrópolis …’
‘This lady is related to the devil, and she has the same name – her name is Legion … And there are many other cases like this. I myself have experienced some of these changes. I won’t recount them; it would take too long. I’ll limit myself to the episode I mentioned. It happened when I was twenty-five …’
The four companions, such was their anxiety to hear the promised story, forgot their controversy. Blessed Curiosity! Not only are you civilisation’s nursemaid, you are also the apple of concord, a divine fruit, which tastes completely different from the other one, the one in the myth. The room, which a few moments ago had been full of the noise of physics and metaphysics, is now a dead calm sea; all eyes are on Jacobina, who pares the end of his cigar, as he collects his memories. This is how he began his narrative:
‘I was twenty-five, I was poor, and I had just been made a sub-lieutenant in the National Guard.2 You can’t imagine what an event it was at home. My mother was so proud! So happy! She kept calling me her sub-lieutenant. Uncles, cousins – everybody was simply, sincerely happy. In the town, we might note, some were resentful – there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, as in the Scriptures. The reason was that there had been many candidates for the post, and they were the losers. I suppose a part of the disappointment was completely gratuitous, a simple consequence of the distinction I’d received. I remember some lads, friends of mine, who looked at me sideways, for a time. On the other hand, I had many people who were happy about the appointment; and the proof is that all the uniform was given me by friends … Next thing, one of my aunts, Dona Marcolina, Captain Pessanha’s widow, who lived many leagues from the town, in a lonely, out-of-the-way place, wanted to see me, and asked me to go and stay with her, and bring the uniform. I went, with a servant, who went back to town some days later, because as soon as Aunt Marcolina had me at her farm she wrote to my mother saying she wouldn’t let me go for a month at least. And how she hugged me! She too called me her sub-lieutenant. She told me I was a handsome, strapping young man. She was a bit of a wag, and even confessed she was envious of any girl that married me. She swore no one in the entire province could compete with me. And it was sublieutenant over and over; sub-lieutenant here, sub-lieutenant there, at every minute of the day. I asked her to call me Joãozinho as before; and she shook her head, exclaiming that no, I was ‘Mr Sub-Lieutenant’. A brother-in-law of hers, the late Pessanha’s brother, who was living there, refused to call me anything else. It was ‘Mr Sub-Lieutenant’, and not as a joke, but quite seriously, in front of the slaves, who naturally followed their lead. I had the best position at table, and was the first to be served. You can’t imagine. If I tell you that Aunt Marcolina’s enthusiasm went so far as to have a large mirror put in my room, a rich, magnificent piece, out of keeping with the rest of the house, whose furniture was modest and simple … It was a mirror given her by her godmother, who in her turn had inherited it from her mother, who’d bought it from one of the noblewomen who came with the court of King João VI, in 1808.3 I don’t know how much truth there was in this; that was the traditional story. The mirror, of course, was very old; but you could still see its gilding, partly eaten by time, some dolphins in the top corners of the frame, mother-of-pearl trimmings, and other caprices of the artist. Old, but good quality …’
‘Was it big?’
‘Yes. And, as I say, it was a sign of great kindness, for the mirror was displayed in the drawing room; it was the best thing in the house. But nothing would dissuade her; no one missed it, she answered, and it was only for a few weeks – and in any case, ‘Mr Sub-Lieutenant’ deserved much more. What’s also true is that all these things, the kindnesses and endearments, the deference, operated a transformation in me, which the natural feelings of youth assisted and brought to completion. I expect you can imagine what?’
‘No.’
‘The sub-lieutenant eliminated the man. For some days the two natures were in balance: but it wasn’t long before the original one gave way to the other; only a minimal part of humanity was left to me. At this point, my external soul, which before had been the sun, the air, the countryside, the look in a girl’s eyes, changed its nature, and became the curtseys and the kowtowing in the house, everything that spoke to me of my commission, and nothing of the man. The only part of the citizen I had left was what had to do with my rank; the rest evaporated into the air, and into the past. You find it hard to believe?’
‘I find it hard even to understand,’ replied one of the listeners.
‘You’ll understand. My actions will explain the feelings better; the actions are everything. The best definition of love is nothing to kissing the girl you love; and, if I remember rightly, an ancient philosopher demonstrated movement by walking. Let’s get to the action, then. We’ll see how, at the same time as the consciousness of the man was being obliterated, the sub-lieutenant’s was becoming vivid and intense. Human sufferings, human joys, if that was all they were, hardly got a nod of apathetic compassion or a condescending smile from me. After three weeks I was another person, completely changed. I was, exclusively, the sub-lieutenant. Well, one day Aunt Marcolina got some bad news: one of her daughters, married to a farmer and living five leagues away, was ill, at death’s door. Goodbye, nephew! Goodbye, sub-lieutenant! She was a doting mother, and soon readied herself for the journey, asked her brother-in-law to go with her, and me if I would take care of the farm. If she’d not been so worried, she’d have done the opposite; she’d have left the brother-in-law, and taken me with her. Whatever the truth of that, I was left alone, with the few slaves in the household. I confess to you that I immediately felt a great sense of oppression, as if the four walls of a prison had suddenly been erected around me. It was the external soul growing smaller; now it was limited to a few uncouth individuals. The sub-lieutenant was still dominant in me, although less intensely so, as my awareness of it weakened. The slaves put a note of humility into their courtesies, which in some way took the place of my relatives’ affection and the warmth and intimacy of the household which had now been interrupted. I even noticed, that night, that they redoubled their respect, their cheerfulness, their protestations. It was Massa Sub-Lieutenant at every moment. Massa Sub-Lieutenant’s a handsome lad; Massa Sub-Lieutenant’ll soon be a colonel; Massa Sub-Lieutenant’ll marry a pretty girl, a general’s daughter; a symphony of praises and prophecies, which left me in a state of ecstasy. Oh, what traitors! Hardly could I suspect the scoundrels’ secret intention.’
‘To kill you?’
‘I wish it had been.’
‘Worse than that?’
‘Hear me out. The next morning I found I was alone. The rogues, whether lured by others or on their own initiative, had resolved to abscond during the night; no sooner said than done. I found myself alone, with no one else, between four walls, facing the deserted terrace and the abandoned fields. Not a breath of human life. I ran round the entire house, the slave quarters, and there was nothing, nobody, not even a slave-boy left. Just some cocks and hens, a pair of mules philosophising about life, flicking off the flies, and three oxen. The slaves had even taken the dogs. Not a human being to be seen. You think this was better than having died? It was worse. Not from fear; I swear to you I wasn’t afraid; I was a little cocksure, so I wasn’t at all upset, for the first few hours. I was worried because of the loss caused to Aunt Marcolina; I was also in somewhat of a quandary, not knowing if I ought to go to her and give her the bad news, or stay and look after the house. I decided to stay, so as not to leave the house unprotected, and because, if my cousin really was seriously ill, I would only increase her mother’s worries, without bringing any remedy; lastly, I expected Uncle Pessanha’s brother to come back that day or the next, for they’d been gone for a day and a half. But the morning went by with no sign of him; and in the afternoon I began to feel I’d lost all sensation in my nerves, and could no longer feel my muscles move. Uncle Pessanha’s brother didn’t come back that day, or the next, nor that whole week. My solitude took on gigantic proportions. Never had the days been so long, never had the sun burned the earth so obstinately, so exhaustingly. The hours chimed from century to century on the old clock in the drawing room, whose pendulum – tick-tock, tick-tock – wounded my internal soul, like a continuous mocking gesture from eternity. When, many years later, I read an American poem, by Longfellow I think, and came across this famous refrain: ‘For ever – never! Never – for ever!4 I confess to you that a shiver ran down my spine: I remembered those terrible days. That was exactly what Aunt Marcolina’s clock said: ‘Never, for ever! – For ever, never!’ They weren’t pendulum beats; they were a dialogue with the abyss, a whisper from nothingness. And then at night! It wasn’t that the night was quieter. The silence was just the same as during the day. But the night was the darkness, it was a wider, or a narrower solitude. Tick-tock, tick-tock. No one in the rooms, on the veranda, in the corridors, on the terrace, no one anywhere … You’re laughing?’
‘It does seem you were a bit afraid.’
‘Oh, it would have been all right if I could have been afraid! I’d have been alive. But the chief thing about the situation is that I couldn’t even be afraid, that is, afraid in the normal sense. I had an inexplicable sensation. I was like a walking corpse, a sleep-walker, a mechanical doll. Sleeping was different. Sleep gave me relief, not for the commonplace reason of being the close relative of death, but because of something else. I think I can explain the phenomenon this way: sleep, by eliminating the necessity for an external soul, left the internal soul to its devices. In dreams, I put my uniform on, proudly, in the presence of my family and friends, who praised my military bearing, called me sub-lieutenant; a friend from home came and promised me promotion to lieutenant, another to captain or major – all this brought me to life. But when I awoke, in daylight, all this disappeared with the sleep, this awareness of my new, unique self – for the internal soul had lost its exclusive sway, and became dependent on the other, which refused to return … It wouldn’t return, come what may. I went outside, pacing from one side to another, to see if I could discover some sign of anyone coming back. Soeur Anne, soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?5 Nothing, not a thing, just as in the French story – only the dust on the road and the grass on the hills. I went back to the house, desperate, in a nervous state, and stretched out on the drawing-room sofa. Tick-tock, tick-tock. I got up, walked to and fro, drummed on the window panes, whistled. On one occasion I had the notion to write something, a political article, a novel or an ode; I couldn’t finally decide on anything; I sat down and jotted some odd words and sentences, to insert as appropriate. But my style, like Aunt Marcolina, refused to budge. Soeur Anne, soeur Anne … nothing. At most, I watched the ink blacken and the paper shine whiter.’
‘But didn’t you eat?’
‘Not much: fruit, manioc flour, preserves, some roots toasted at the fire, but I’d have happily put up with everything if it hadn’t been for the terrible moral situation I was in. I recited verses, speeches, passages in Latin, poems by Gonzaga,6some of Camões’s lyrics, sonnets – an anthology in thirty volumes. At times I did gymnastic exercises; at others I gave myself pinches on my legs; but the only effect was a physical sensation of pain or fatigue, nothing more. Everything was silent, a vast, enormous, infinite silence, underlined only by the eternal tick-tock of the pendulum. Tick-tock, tick-tock.’
‘You’re right; it was enough to send anyone mad.’
‘There’s worse to come. First I should tell you that, since I’d been alone, I’d not looked in the mirror one single time. I hadn’t deliberately abstained from doing so, there was no reason for that; it was an unconscious impulse, a fear of finding that I was one person and two at the same time, in the solitary house. If that’s the right explanation, nothing proves human contradiction better, for after a week, I decided on a whim to look in the mirror, precisely with the aim of seeing myself duplicated. I took one look, and fell back. The glass itself seemed to have conspired with the rest of the universe; it didn’t show a clearly outlined silhouette, but something vague, hazy, diffuse, the shadow of a shade. The reality of the laws of physics doesn’t allow me to deny that the mirror reproduced me exactly, with the correct outlines and features; it must have done. But that wasn’t the sensation I had. Then I was afraid; I attributed the phenomenon to my state of nervous over-excitement; I was afraid of staying there longer, and going mad. “I’m getting out of here,” I said to myself. And I lifted my arm in a gesture at once ill-humoured and decisive, looking at the glass; there was the gesture, but dissolved, faded, mutilated … I got on with dressing myself, mumbling to myself, coughing though I had no cough, shaking my clothes noisily, getting unnecessarily irritated with the buttons, just to say something. From time to time, I took a furtive look at the mirror; the image had the same confused profile, the same blurred outlines … I went on dressing myself. Suddenly, by some inexplicable inspiration, a spontaneous impulse, I decided … If you can guess the idea I had …’
‘Tell us.’
‘I was looking at the glass, with the insistence of a desperate man, looking at my own floating, unfinished features, a cloud of loose, shapeless lines, when I had an idea … No, you’ll never guess.’
‘Go on, tell us, tell us.’
‘I had the idea of putting the sub-lieutenant’s uniform on. I did just that, and dressed from top to toe; and, since I was in front of the mirror, I lifted my eyes, and … I’ll say no more; the glass then reproduced my whole figure; there wasn’t a feature missing, no outline was out of place; it was I myself, the sub-lieutenant, who had finally found his external soul. This soul, which had gone missing with the owner of the farm and dispersed and fled with the slaves, there it was, reconstituted in the mirror. Imagine a man who, little by little, emerges from a state of lethargy, opens his eyes without seeing, then begins to see, distinguishes people from objects, but still can’t recognise each one individually; then finally he’s aware that this is Tom, that’s Dick, that’s Harry; here’s a chair, there’s a sofa. Everything returns to what it was before he went to sleep. That’s how it was with me. I looked at the mirror, went from one side to another, took a step back, gesticulated, smiled, and the glass expressed everything. I was an automaton no longer; I was an animated being. From that day on, I was another person. Each day, at a given hour, I dressed as a sub-lieutenant, and sat down in front of the mirror reading, looking, meditating; at the end of two or three hours, I undressed again. With this system I was able to get through six more days of solitude, without noticing them …’
When the others came back to their senses, the storyteller had gone down the stairs.