Letter from District Judge “X” to the Rio Chief of Police
Rio de Janeiro, September 20, 1875
SIR,
I trust you will forgive my shaky handwriting and slovenly style; you will soon understand the reason why.
Today, this very evening, just after dinner, while I was waiting for the Cassino to open, I lay down on the sofa and opened a volume of Plutarch. You, sir, who were my schoolroom companion, will remember that ever since I was a boy I have had a passion for Greek, a passion or indeed a mania, which was the name you gave it, and one so intense that it often led me to fail in other subjects. I opened the book and, as always happens when I read some ancient text, I found myself transported back to the period in question, right into the thick of the action or whatever else was going on. Perfect after-dinner reading. In no time at all, one finds oneself on a Roman road, under a Greek portico, or in a grammarian’s workshop. Modern times, the Herzegovina uprising, the Carlist Wars, Rua do Ouvidor, the Chiarini Circus—all vanish into thin air. Fifteen or twenty minutes of ancient life, and all for free. A veritable literary digestif.
That is precisely what happened this evening. The book fell open at the life of Alcibiades. I allowed myself to be seduced by the flow of those Attic cadences; within moments, I was entering the Olympic Games, marveling at that flower of Athenian manhood as he drove his chariot magnificently, with the grace and determination he had always shown on the battlefield, or when curbing his fellow citizens or his own sensual urges. Oh, to be alive then, sir! But then the slave-boy came in to light the gas, and that was enough to put all the archaeology of my imagination to flight. Athens was relegated to history, while my gaze fell from the clouds, or, rather, came to rest upon my white duck trousers, my alpaca jacket, and my cordovan leather shoes. And then I thought to myself:
“What would that illustrious Athenian make of modern-day dress?”
I have been a spiritualist for some months now, because, convinced that all systems are pure nothingness, I decided to adopt the most enjoyable one. The time will come when it is not only enjoyable, but also useful for solving historical problems: it is far quicker to summon the spirits of the dead than to expend one’s own critical energies to no good end, because no rationale or theory can better explain the intention of an act than the author of the act himself. Such was my goal this evening. Wondering what Alcibiades might have thought was a sheer waste of time, with no benefit beyond the pleasure of admiring my own cleverness. I therefore decided to summon up the Athenian, and asked him to appear in my house forthwith, without delay.
And here begins the extraordinary part of the adventure. Alcibiades lost no time in answering my call; two minutes later, he was there, in my parlor, standing by the wall, but he was not the intangible shadow I had expected to summon using our schoolboy methods; it was the real Alcibiades, flesh and blood, the man himself, authentically Greek, dressed like the ancients, and full of that blend of courtesy and audacity with which he used to harangue the great assemblies of Athens, and occasionally its fools. You, sir, who know so much about history, cannot ignore the fact that there were, indeed, some fools in Athens. Yes, even Athens had fools, a precedent that perhaps gives us something of an excuse. I swear I could not believe it; no matter what my senses told me, I could not believe that it was not a ghost standing there before me, but Alcibiades himself, restored to life. I still nurtured the hope that it was nothing more than the effects of indigestion, a simple excess of gastric fluids, magnified through the lens of Plutarch. And so I rubbed my eyes, stared, and . . .
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
On hearing this, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The figure spoke, and spoke Greek, the purest Attic. There was no doubting that it was the man himself, dead for twenty centuries, brought back from the grave, and as alive as if he had come straight from cutting off his poor dog’s tail, as he so famously did. It was clear that, without a moment’s thought, I had just taken a great stride forward along the path of spiritualism. But, silly me, I didn’t, at first, realize this, and I allowed myself to be caught off guard. He repeated the question, looked around him, and sat down in an armchair. He saw that I was cold and trembling (as I still am even now), and spoke to me rather tenderly, even trying to laugh and joke so as to put me at my ease. As deft as ever! What more can I say? A few minutes later, we were chatting away in ancient Greek, he reclining nonchalantly in his chair, I earnestly begging all the saints in heaven to send some sort of distraction—a servant, a visitor, a local constable, or even, should it prove necessary, for a fire to break out.
Needless to say, I gave up on the idea of consulting him on modern-day dress; I had summoned a ghost, not a “real-life” man, as children say. I limited myself to replying to his questions; he asked me for news about Athens, and I obliged; I said that Athens was finally the capital of a unified Greece; I told him about the long years of Muslim domination, then about independence, Botsaris, and Lord Byron. The great man hung on my every word and, when I expressed surprise that the dead had told him nothing of all this, he explained to me that when one stood at the gates of the other world, one’s interest in this world waned considerably. He had met neither Botsaris nor Lord Byron—firstly, because there is such a vast multitude of spirits that it’s very easy to miss someone, and secondly, because there the dead are grouped not according to nationality or some similar category, but according to their temperament, customs, and profession. Thus he, Alcibiades, forms part of a group of elegant, passionate politicians, alongside the Duke of Buckingham, Almeida Garrett, our very own Maciel Monteiro, etc. Then he asked me about current affairs; I briefly told him what I knew; I spoke of the Hellenic parliament and the rather different way in which his compatriot statesmen, Voulgaris and Koumoundouros, are going about imitating Disraeli and Gladstone in taking turns at government, and, just like them, trading oratorical blows. Alcibiades, a magnificent orator himself, interrupted me:
“Bravo, Athenians!”
I enter into such minutiae only so as to omit nothing that might give you a more precise understanding of the extraordinary events I am describing. I have already mentioned that Alcibiades was listening to me avidly; I should also add that he was clever and shrewd, very quick on the uptake. He was also somewhat sarcastic, or at least that’s how he came across at one or two points in our conversation. But, in general, he showed himself to be simple, attentive, polite, sensitive, and dignified. And quite the dandy, too, as dandyish as in ancient times; he was always glancing sideways at the mirror, just as women and others do in our own century, admiring his buskins, adjusting his cloak, and striking sculptural poses.
“Go on,” he would say to me, whenever I paused.
But I couldn’t. Having entered into the realm of the inextricable and the marvelous, I believed that anything was possible, and just as he had come to meet me in this world, I couldn’t see why I couldn’t go and join him in eternity. I froze at this idea. For a man who has just had his dinner and is waiting for the Cassino to open, death would be a joke in the very worst possible taste.
“If only I could get away . . .” I thought to myself. Then I had an idea: I told him I was going to a ball.
“A ball? What’s a ball?”
I explained.
“Ah! You’re going to dance the Pyrrhic dance!”
“No,” I replied. “The Pyrrhic dance has been and gone. My dear Alcibiades, every century changes its dances just as it changes its ideas. We no longer dance as we did a century ago; probably the twentieth century won’t dance as we do now. The Pyrrhic dance is long gone, like Plutarch’s men and Hesiod’s gods.”
“Even the gods?”
I explained that paganism had come to an end, that the august academies of the last century had still given it shelter, but with little real soul or conviction, and that even Arcadian drunkenness—Evoe! Father Bassareus! Evoe!, etc.—the honest pastime of certain peace-loving district judges, had been eradicated. From time to time, I added, some writer of poetry or prose alluded to the remnants of the pagan theogony, but only for show or amusement, while science had reduced the whole of Olympus to the merely symbolic. Dead, all dead.
“Even Zeus?”
“Even Zeus.”
“Dionysus? Aphrodite?”
“All dead.”
Plutarch’s man stood up and took a few paces, containing his indignation, as if saying to himself, as someone else once did: “Ah! I must be there, too, along with my Athenians!” And from time to time, he would murmur: “Zeus, Dionysus, Aphrodite . . .” I then recalled that he had once been accused of disobeying the gods, and wondered to myself where this posthumous and, therefore, artificial indignation came from. I was forgetting—me, a devotee of Greek!—I was forgetting that he was also a consummate hypocrite, an illustrious fraudster. However, I scarcely had time to think this, because Alcibiades suddenly stopped his pacing and declared that he would go to the ball with me.
“To the ball?” I repeated in astonishment.
“Yes, to the ball. Let’s go to the ball.”
I was terrified and told him that it was impossible, that they wouldn’t let him in wearing that outfit; he would look ridiculous; unless, of course, he wanted to go there to perform one of Aristophanes’s comedies, I added, laughing so as to hide my fear. What I really wanted was to leave him there in the house, and, once I was outside, rather than going to the Cassino, I would come straight to see you. But the wretched man would not budge; while listening to me, he stared down at the floor, as if deep in thought. I stopped talking; I began to think that the nightmare would soon end, that the apparition would disappear, and that I would be left there alone with my trousers, my shoes, and my century.
“I want to go to the ball,” he repeated. “I can’t go back without comparing dances.”
“My dear Alcibiades, I really don’t think it wise. It would certainly be a great honor, and give me enormous pride, to introduce you, the most genteel and charming of Athenians, to the Cassino. But the other men, the young lads and lasses, the older folk . . . Well, it’s just impossible.”
“Why?”
“I’ve already told you; they will think you’re a lunatic or a comedian, because of your clothes . . .”
“What about them? Clothes change. I’ll go in modern clothes. Don’t you have anything you can lend me?”
I was about to say no, but then it occurred to me that the most urgent thing was to get out of the house and that, once outside, I’d have more chance of escaping, and so I told him that I did.
“Well, then,” he replied as he stood up, “I’ll go in modern clothes. All I ask is that you get dressed first, so that I can learn and then copy you.”
I, too, stood up, and asked him to follow me. He paused in astonishment. I saw that only then had he noticed my white trousers, and was staring at them, eyes bulging, mouth agape; after a long pause, he asked why I was wearing those cloth pipes. I replied that it was for reasons of comfort and convenience, adding that our century, more reserved and practical than artistic, had decided to dress in a manner compatible with our sense of decorum and gravity. Furthermore, not everyone could be Alcibiades. I think this flattered him, for he smiled and shrugged.
“In that case . . .”
We made our way to my dressing room, and I quickly began to change my clothes. Alcibiades reclined lazily on a divan, complimenting me on it, the mirror, the wicker chair, and the paintings. As I say, I got dressed quickly, keen to get out of the house and jump in the first cab that passed.
“Black pipes!” he exclaimed.
These were the black trousers I had just put on. He shrieked and laughed, a sort of giggle mingling surprise with scorn, which greatly offended my modern sensibilities. Because, as I’m sure you will agree, sir, while we may consider our own times worthy of criticism, even execration, we do not like it when one of the ancients comes and makes fun of it to our faces. I did not answer the Athenian; I merely frowned a little and carried on buttoning my suspenders. Then he asked me why on earth I wore such an ugly color.
“Ugly, but serious,” I told him. “And observe the elegance of the cut, see how it falls over the shoe, which is patent leather, albeit black, and very shapely too.”
And, seeing him shaking his head, I added:
“My dear friend,” I said, “you can certainly insist that your Olympian Jupiter is the eternal emblem of majesty: his is the domain of ideal, disinterested art, superior to the passing of the ages and the men who inhabit them. But the art of dressing is another matter. What may appear absurd or ungainly is perfectly rational and beautiful—beautiful in our way, for we no longer wander the streets listening to poets reciting verses, or orators giving speeches, or philosophers explaining their philosophies. You yourself, were you to grow used to seeing us, would end up liking us, because—”
“Stop, you wretch!” he yelled, hurling himself at me.
I felt the blood drain from my face, until I realized the reason for this violent response. It was all down to a misunderstanding. As I looped the tie around my neck and began to tie the knot, Alcibiades assumed, as he told me afterward, that I was about to hang myself. And he did, indeed, turn very pale, trembling and sweating. Now it was my turn to laugh. I chuckled, and explained the use of a necktie to him, noting that it was a white tie, not black, although we did wear black ties on certain occasions. Only after I’d explained all this would he agree to give it back to me. I put it on and then put on my vest.
“For the love of Aphrodite!” he exclaimed. “You are the oddest thing I’ve ever seen, alive or dead. You’re entirely the color of night—a night with only three stars,” he continued, pointing to the buttons on my shirtfront. “The world must be a very melancholy place for you to choose to wear such a sad, dead color. We were a far jollier lot, we lived . . .”
He couldn’t finish the sentence; I had just put on my tailcoat, and the Athenian’s consternation surpassed description. His arms drooped by his sides, he struggled for air, unable to utter a word, and stared at me with wide, bulging eyes. Believe me, sir, I was truly afraid now, and made even more haste to leave the house.
“Are you finished?” he asked.
“No, there’s still the hat.”
“Oh! Please let it be something that’ll make up for all the rest!” replied Alcibiades in a pleading voice. “Please, please! Has all the elegance we bequeathed to you been whittled away to a pair of closed pipes and another pair of open pipes (as he said this he lifted up my coattails), and all in this boring, depressing color? No, I can’t believe it! Please let there be something that makes up for it. What is it you say that’s missing?”
“My hat.”
“Well, whatever it is, put it on, dear fellow, put it on.”
I obeyed; I went over to the coat stand, took down my hat, and put it on my head. Alcibiades looked at me, swayed, and fell. I rushed to the illustrious Athenian’s side to help him up, but (and it pains me to say this) it was too late; he was dead, dead for the second time. I therefore request, sir, that you see fit to issue the requisite orders for the corpse to be taken to the morgue, and proceed with the corpus delicti. Please excuse my not coming to your house in person at this hour (it being ten o’clock at night), on account of the deep shock I have just experienced, and rest assured that I will do so tomorrow morning, before eight o’clock.