MUCH HAS BEEN MADE OF Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s humble beginnings, and yet he, apparently, thought his own life to be of little interest and insisted that what counted was his work. Of course, in general terms, he’s right, but, given his evolution from a poorly educated child of impoverished parents to Brazil’s greatest writer and pillar of the establishment, a brief biographical note would not seem out of place. His paternal grandparents were mulattos and freed slaves. His father, also a mulatto, was a painter and decorator, his mother a washerwoman, a white Portuguese immigrant from the Azores. Both parents, however, could read and write, which was not common among working-class people at the time.
Machado was born in 1839 and brought up for the first ten years of his life on a country estate on the outskirts of Rio owned by the widow of a senator, Maria José de Mendonça Barroso Pereira, who became his godmother. Machado also had a sister, but she died when only four years old. Although he did go to school, he was far from being a star pupil. It seems, however, that Machado helped during mass at the estate’s chapel, and was befriended by the priest, Father Silveira Sarmento, who may also have taught him Latin. Machado’s mother died of tuberculosis when Machado was only ten. He then moved with his father to another part of Rio, and his father remarried. Some biographers say that his stepmother, Maria Inês da Silva, looked after him, and that Machado attended classes in the girls’ school where she worked as a cook. Some say that he learned French in the evenings from a French immigrant baker. Others describe Machado as showing a precocious interest in books and languages. What is certain is that he published his first sonnet in 1854, when he was fifteen, in the Periódico dos Pobres (the Newspaper of the Poor ). A year later, he became a regular visitor to a rather eccentric bookshop in central Rio owned by journalist and typographer Francisco de Paula Brito (the shop is mentioned in “A Strange Thing”), which was a meeting place for all kinds of people, including artists and writers.
At seventeen, Machado was taken on as an apprentice typographer and proofreader at the Imprensa Nacional, where the writer Manuel Antônio de Almeida encouraged him to pursue a career in literature. Only two years later, the poet Francisco Otaviano invited him to work as writer and editor on the Correio Mercantil , an important newspaper of its day and one that is often mentioned in these stories. He wrote two operas and several plays, none of which met with great success, but he loved the theater and became involved in Rio’s theater world from a very young age. Indeed, by the time he was twenty-one, he was already a well-known figure in intellectual circles. He worked as a journalist on other newspapers and founded a literary circle called Arcádia Fluminense. During all this time he read voraciously in numerous languages—it is said that, as well as modern literature, he set himself the lifetime goal of reading all of the universal classics in their original language, including ancient Greek. He built up an extensive library, bequeathed to the Brazilian Academy of Letters (of which he was cofounder and first president) upon his death. Between the ages of fifteen and thirty, he wrote prolifically: poetry, plays, librettos, short stories, and newspaper columns, as well as translations from French and Spanish and all or most of Dickens’s Oliver Twist . It would appear that his reported ill health, notably the epilepsy described by several of his biographers, did not in any way hold him back.
In 1867 he was decorated at the young age of twenty-eight by the emperor with the Order of the Rose and subsequently appointed to a position in the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works. He went on to become head of a department, serving in that same ministry for over thirty years, until just three months before his death. The job, although demanding, left him ample time to write, and write he did: nine novels, nine plays, more than two hundred stories, five collections of poems, and more than six hundred crônicas , or newspaper columns. He also found time to marry, his wife proving crucial both to his happiness and to the expansion of his literary knowledge. Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais, the sister of a close friend, was five years older than Machado; they fell in love almost instantly and were soon married, despite her family disapproving of her marrying a mulatto. Carolina was extremely well educated and introduced him to the work of many English-language writers. They remained happily married for thirty-five years, and when she died in 1904, at the age of seventy, Machado fell into a deep depression. He wrote only one novel after her death, Memorial de Aires (1908), and his last collection of stories, Relíquias de Casa Velha (Relics from an Old House ), published in 1906, is prefaced by a very tender sonnet dedicated to her. On his death in 1908, he was given a state funeral. And yet his occupation on his death certificate was given as “Civil servant,” and when his final work, Memorial de Aires , was published later that year, it went almost unnoticed.
That, very briefly, was his life, but, as Machado so rightly said, his writing was his life. He is probably best known to the English-language reader for three novels: Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881; published in English as The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas or Epitaph of a Small Winner ), Quincas Borba (1891; published in English as Philosopher or Dog ?), and Dom Casmurro (1899). And while these are remarkable, groundbreaking works, his stories are often just as remarkable, running the full gamut of subject matter and emotion. This edition brings together, for the first time in English, all of the stories contained in the seven collections published in his lifetime, from 1870 to 1906: Rio Tales , Midnight Tales , Miscellaneous Papers , Undated Stories , Assorted Stories , Collected Pages , and Relics from an Old House . He wrote at least another 129 stories that remained unpublished in book form until after his death. Most of the stories were originally published in daily newspapers—principally Gazeta de Notícias — or in magazines—Jornal das Famílias , A Estação , and Almanaque Brasileiro Garnier —with longer stories being published in serial form, chapter by chapter. Machado was responsible for selecting the stories included in each of these seven collections, so what we have here are the stories that Machado himself considered to be his best.
The stories are predominantly set in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of the Brazilian Empire. (Dom Pedro I had been proclaimed emperor of Brazil following independence from Portugal in 1822.) There are the occasional sorties to places a day or two’s journey from the city, such as Petrópolis, the fashionable summer capital in the mountains just north of the city. Other Brazilian towns, cities, and provinces get an occasional mention, but usually only as places that characters disappear to or return from, and vague references to “the North,” “the South,” and “the interior” abound. Machado himself scarcely traveled beyond the immediate environs of the city, and while his characters do travel widely, including to Europe and especially Paris, we, the readers, bid farewell to them on the quayside and only hear about their distant exploits secondhand.
The city itself is often simply a stage set, almost an outdoor drawing room for his characters—although street names and landmarks are mentioned frequently, there is almost nothing in terms of physical description, and there are only the most fleeting references to its tropical climate. Machado is, of course, describing the city to its own inhabitants, and so the street names he mentions are signposts indicating social status, and the landmarks are the places familiar to the city’s upper classes: the Passeio Público, which were elegant gardens on the shoreline of the bay between the city center and the opulent suburbs of Glória and Catete; the Jardim Botânico, the magnificent botanical gardens a short ride out of the city on the other side of Corcovado Mountain; and, most frequently of all, Rua do Ouvidor, the long, narrow street of fashionable shops, theaters, and cafés—“the Via Dolorosa of long-suffering husbands,” as Machado describes it in “The Lapse.” Occasional references are made to the city’s less salubrious quarters—the port areas of Saúde and Gamboa, and the former Valongo slave market.
In some cases, Machado is describing a city that no longer existed, for Rio, with its burgeoning population, was in the midst of an intense transformation from colonial backwater to imperial metropolis, and many of the stories are set several decades earlier. Events are often given a specific date—not least in the collection mischievously entitled Undated Stories — and geographical signposts are also in some cases historical ones. To a contemporary reader, of course, all of this would have been much clearer than it is to us; reading the stories today, we should simply bear in mind that the Rio the narrator presents as such a concrete and real world is often nothing of the sort.
Political considerations as well as artistic license may have encouraged Machado to place his stories at a discreet distance in time. During most of Machado’s lifetime, Brazil was ruled by a constitutional, although often authoritarian, monarchy that was prone to factionalism and abrupt shifts in political favor. The last of these shifts led to the overthrow of the monarchy itself in 1889, precipitated by the abolition of slavery the previous year. The importation of slaves had been banned, at least in theory, in 1850, and, in 1871, a year after the publication of the first collection of these stories, the “Law of the Free Womb” (or “Law of September 28,” as Machado more discreetly refers to it) granted freedom to all children born to slaves after that date, thus making the eventual abolition of slavery inevitable, even if it took another seventeen years to come about. Machado rarely confronts the issue head-on. (“The Cane” and “Father Against Mother,” both written after abolition, are notable exceptions.) Casual references to slaves abound; sometimes these are fond, sometimes cruel, but most often (and shockingly, to a modern reader) they simply pass without comment as a feature of everyday life. Machado was criticized by some of his contemporaries for not writing more openly about the evils of slavery. And yet, for the grandson of freed slaves writing for a predominantly slave-owning elite, we are left in little doubt about what a controversial and sensitive subject it was for Machado, or where his sympathies lay.
Other historical events and controversies are also noticeable by their near-absence. The earliest of these stories was written in the immediate aftermath of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), a long and bloody conflict between Paraguay on one side, and Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay on the other. And yet, perhaps precisely because memories of it were so raw, Machado refers to it only in passing in a handful of stories. Much later, however, “Maria Cora,” first published in 1898, deals more explicitly with the then-recent, and bloody, civil war of 1893–95 between the new republic and Federalist rebels based in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Machado, characteristically, dwells on the absurdity of the dispute.
To return to the stories themselves, some critics, perhaps somewhat dismissively, describe the early stories as belonging to Machado’s “romantic phase,” and while some of the plots could be viewed as such, the coolly ironic voice in which they are told already seems strikingly modern. In fact, that voice may have had its origins in two books that seem to have been a major influence on Machado’s own writing: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room. For example, in the very first story in this collection, “Miss Dollar,” Machado spends the initial pages playing with our expectations as to what kind of heroine he is about to introduce to us. “Ernesto What’s-His-Name” opens as follows: “That young man standing over there on the corner of Rua Nova do Conde and Campo da Aclamação at ten o’clock at night is not a thief, he’s not even a philosopher.” And we immediately become the eager listeners, plunged into speculations about a character we know nothing about. As readers, we are both fully aware that this is a fiction and simultaneously drawn in as gullible readers. Machado was passionately interested in chess and was himself a brilliant player. In his stories, too, he is very much the grand master, placing his pieces on the board and then seeing what happens, how those pieces react and interact.
Our narrator is often unromantically unreliable, too, claiming that he can’t tell us a character’s name or doesn’t know it or has forgotten, or declaring that what happened next was quite simply indescribable and then going on to describe it in detail. The first-person narrators are no better in this respect and, like us, have faulty memories and cannot necessarily be trusted.
One of Machado’s main themes is obsession, and it is a strong presence from the earliest stories to the last. Some characters are merely obsessed with themselves, with losing their looks or their money; others are obsessed with the past or with rereading the same books over and over, or accumulating as much money as possible, or, in the marvelous Swiftian short story–cum–novella “The Alienist,” with imposing a particular psychological theory on society as a whole. Obsession also veers into outright madness in “Second Life” and the even more chilling “The Secret Cause.” Jealousy, too—another form of obsession—raises its ugly head in many stories; in some cases the characters land safely on the other side of a bout of jealousy, while others are left standing amid the debris of a marriage.
The repeated, seemingly erudite, references—Dante, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Homer, Charles Lamb, Horace, Pascal, Molière, Milton, Heine, Hegel, Descartes, to name but a few—are part of that thread of sly humor running through his work. Is the assumption that we, the readers, are equally erudite or is he just playing with us, as he appears to be with the often slightly inaccurate quotations with which he sprinkles the stories? Not to mention the Latin tags—ab ovo , abyssum abyssus, Eheu! Fugaces . . .—usually left incomplete for us, supposedly, to fill in the blank.
More erudition, serious or otherwise, is on display in the stories that seem to spring straight from Machado’s fertile imagination, spurred on by his own extensive reading. These take us to sixteenth-century Japan (“The Bonze’s Secret”) and an ethereally exotic Thailand (“The Academies of Siam”), to the times of the Ptolemies (“An Alexandrian Tale”) and the sons of Noah (“In the Ark”), and even to the end of time itself, for an imagined encounter between Prometheus and Ahasuerus (“Life!”). The world of books and his imagination were for Machado a very real complement to that of the city and people around him, and they frequently collided, perhaps most vividly in “A Visit from Alcibiades,” where our unnamed narrator sits down after dinner to read a chapter of Plutarch and accidentally summons up the physical presence of the ancient Greek statesman himself, leading to an incident requiring the attention of the Rio chief of police.
Often there are references to the process of writing itself. He mocks the use of literary references in “Much Heat, Little Light.” Nouns and adjectives chase each other around the clergyman’s head in “The Canon, or the Metaphysics of Style.” Both verbosity and literary theory are lampooned in “How to be a Bigwig,” and a composer despairs at his loss of creative inspiration in “Fame.” Machado doesn’t just tell us his stories—he pulls back the curtain and invites us to watch his own process of invention.
The overall tone of the stories is one of ironic distance, an assumption that we share the author’s bemused fascination with the foibles and fates of these strange creatures, real or imagined. And while Machado gives us many male characters in all their flawed variety, there are possibly even more notable female characters, some faithful unto death and utterly decent, some infinitely vain, some maligned or scheming or flirtatious or indolent. Many of the stories appear to be filled with a kind of nostalgia for the past, as if the present were unsatisfactory or too shallow and transient, and yet the past is seen as something both irretrievable and inscrutable. One of Machado’s most famous stories, “Midnight Mass,” begins: “I’ve never quite understood a conversation I had with a lady many years ago, when I was seventeen and she was thirty.” Machado’s characters are often still puzzling over some past event, or hoping to set the record straight or to revive long-lost feelings. There are a few happy endings and happy marriages, but the stories abound in thwarted ambitions or loves unspoken or unrequited, even, in one story (“The Mirror”), a loss of all sense of identity, which can only be retrieved by the narrator standing in front of a mirror in his lieutenant’s uniform to remind himself that he does exist.
Machado is also a brilliant stylist, but not in any flamboyant way. He writes in a Portuguese that is deceptively simple and straightforward, but he chooses his words with great precision, and has a superb ear for how people speak, whether it be a jaded old man, a frivolous young woman, or a ten-year-old boy. Machado’s translator needs to remain very alert if he or she is to capture every nuance. For example, in “Much Heat, Little Light,” he describes Luís Tinoco’s literary efforts thus: “He bespattered his borrowed ideas with a selection of allusions and literary names, which was the full extent of his erudition . . .” The Portuguese word we have translated as “bespattered” (“respingava ”) means “splashed,” but carries within it notions of “soiling” and “staining,” which the English version must reflect. The translator must also resist normalizing oddity, for Machado does sometimes say some very odd things. In “The Holiday,” for example, the young narrator says: “And yet even so, my schoolfellows still came to peer inside my mind.” The translation has to respect the oddness of those schoolboys peering into someone’s mind.
Machado sprang from the romantic-realist school of literature in Brazil, and his early stories were clearly written for the largely female readership of magazines and newspapers. His contemporaries, and Brazilians today, consider him to be Brazil’s greatest writer largely because of the stories and novels he published from 1881 onward, when he brought out, within a year of each other, both The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Miscellaneous Papers . For whatever reason, from that point on, his writing took a radically different path from that of his contemporaries. In the case of his short stories, we see a greater inventiveness in form and subject matter, frequently delving into the wilder reaches of his imagination in a way that is often thought to prefigure magical realism—“The Most Serene Republic” (Miscellaneous Papers ), “The Canon, or the Metaphysics of Style” (Assorted Stories ), and “Canary Thoughts” (Collected Pages ) being but three examples. Other stories, particularly in the final collection, Relics from an Old House , have their feet more firmly rooted in reality, with a mature and almost elegiac tone. This is not to denigrate the earlier stories, which, if more conventional, are, by turns, touching and funny and satirical, and always hold the reader’s attention, perhaps because of that alluring, coaxing, and often unreliable narrator.
It is difficult fully to measure the influence of Machado de Assis in other Latin American countries, or indeed elsewhere, but the first English translation of three of his short stories did not appear until 1921, and it was another thirty years before English translations of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (under the title Epitaph of a Small Winner ) and Dom Casmurro were published. Other translations followed, including somewhat wider selections of his short stories (but never the complete collections), and it was not until the 1990s that eminent American and British writers began to take notice, notably Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Harold Bloom, and Salman Rushdie. One could put this belated recognition down to a certain parochialism among British and American publishers and readers, or to a twentieth-century disdain for so much that was handed down from the nineteenth (ironical in Machado’s case, given that he prefigured so much of what we think of as quintessentially “twentieth” century), but whatever the reason, we can at least take comfort that his precocious genius is being recognized now.
One reason for this may be that his stories bear witness to a desire to map the human psyche in all its endless variety. Is there perhaps a self-portrait in “The Tale of the Cabriolet,” the last story in the last collection, published two years before his death? Machado introduces us to a sacristan who is obsessed (yet another one) with hearing and collecting other people’s stories, not in order to approve or disapprove or to gossip about them, but for the sheer pleasure of the story itself, however mundane, bizarre, or terrible. This sounds very much like Machado himself, an avid and, yes, obsessive collector of other people’s lives. As the narrator in “The Blue Flower” says: “There are no mysteries for an author who can scrutinize every nook and cranny of the human heart.”
Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson