A Reading Diary (20 page)

Atwood achieves this ending with astonishing simplicity. Bach explained that playing the clavier was very simple: you just had to strike the right key with the right strength at the right time.

Throughout most of
Surfacing
, the real world appears to the narrator as haunted, incomprehensible; in the last chapter, the haunted world establishes itself as real, makes sense on its own terms. Escaping from the man-made world, the narrator runs naked through the woods like Frankenstein’s Monster, a hunted animal, even believing that she will grow fur like a wild beast. “That is the way they are,” she says of those who are now looking for her, “they will not let you have peace, they don’t want you to have anything they don’t have themselves.”

The only contact she now wants is with the wilderness; she will not tread on the artificial path, “anything that metal has touched, scarred.” Reversing the rituals of Robinson Crusoe (who founded his one-man society with the tools and books rescued from his shipwreck), the narrator enacts the ritual of a contrary foundation: she burns photographs and the Bible, smashes glasses and plates, rips scrapbooks, slashes linen and clothes. “Everything from history must be eliminated,” she says.

Limping, bleeding, “resenting the gods although perhaps they saved me,” she descends towards the lake, “skirting the worn places where shoes have been,” and sees the ghost of her father. Or rather, she sees that which her father
has become, “the thing you meet when you’ve stayed here too long alone,” but he shows no interest in her. Because she too has now embraced the wilderness, she has become not a wild creature but something stony or wooden, Daphne escaping from Apollo. A loon accepts her as a feature of the land. “I am part of the landscape, I could be anything, a tree, a deer skeleton, a rock.” If the sacrifice a god makes is to take on human form, the sacrifice of a human is to become stone, twig, mud. The human Christ cleaves to Adam’s tree.

Surfacing
as Passion narrative.

Saint John of the Cross, describing Christ enamoured of the soul (as translated by Roy Campbell):

It felt warm early this morning; I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and went into the library almost before dawn, waking the cat, who was not pleased.

My German publisher, Hans-Jürgen Balmes, suggests I compile an anthology on the theme of insomnia. I come up with a few bits and pieces:

• “He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.” Nabokov,
  Pnin
  
• “On a certain night, while he lay between sleep and wake, he would be overtaken by a long shuddering sigh, which he learned to know was the sign that his brain had once more conceived its horror, and in time—in due time—would bring it forth.” Kipling, “In the Same Boat”
  
• “What is our insomnia if not the maniacal obstinacy of our intelligence to manufacture thoughts, chains of reasoning, syllogisms and definitions of its own, its
  refusal to abdicate in favour of the divine foolishness of eyes shut fast or the wise madness of dreams? The man who does not sleep (and for the past few months I have been able to observe this on far too many occasions) more or less consciously refuses to trust the mere flow of things.” Marguerite Yourcenar,
  Memoirs of Hadrian
  “He was the solitary and lucid witness of a many-shaped world, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise. … It was difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to become distracted from the world.” Borges, “Funes the Memorious”
  The title of a medieval Egyptian reference book:
  Dawn for the Night-Blind
  .
  “Sleepless night. The third in a row. … I believe this sleeplessness comes only because I write. For however little or badly I write, I am still made sensitive by these minor shocks, I feel, especially towards the evening and even more in the morning, the nearby, imminent possibility of great moments which would rip me open, make me capable of anything, and in the turmoil within me and which I have no time to control I find no rest.” Kafka, 2 October, 1911 “Of restless sleep, streaked with continuous dreams, with frights and anxieties, was the night that preceded publication. Dawn broke at last and Luís Tinoco,
  though he was not an early riser, got up with the sun and went out to read his printed sonnet.” Machado de Assis, “Dawn without Day”
  

Not writing but reading keeps me awake. Reading is the occupation of the insomniac
par excellence
.

In the library it is cool. I look up at the books, just as the light starts to come in, and I have the comforting impression that they contain everything I want to know, as if they were an extension of my skin, tattooed like Queequeg’s in
Moby-Dick
with “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth.”

“Each season of life is an edition that amends the previous one, and that will in turn be amended, until the definitive edition is reached, which the editor will present to the worms.” For Machado de Assis we are, much like the insomniac books we read, full of paragraphs that need revising.

As well as their own secret signs, many of my books carry my signature, the date and place where I first read them, the marginal scribbles of my reading. I share this reflex of possession with the practitioners of other crafts: with architects
who, since Gamier proudly inscribed his name on the cupola of the Paris Opera, sign their buildings; with salt-gatherers in the Camargue who autograph the lids of the boxes of
the fleur de sel
they have collected; with cabinetmakers who, just before finishing a piece, insert in a crack of the wood a slip of paper with their name and the date of completion.

Charlotte tells us the story of the local carpenter who built the shelves. The aptly named M. Dubois lacks all four fingers of his right hand. He was sawing a plank of wood and it slipped sideways towards the blade. A neighbour found him lying bleeding and unconscious on the workshop floor and took him to the hospital, but forgot to take the severed fingers. When M. Dubois returned, he found only one of the fingers. He picked it up and kept it on a shelf in his house, and he would point it out to visitors with ghoulish delight. One day he noticed that it too had disappeared; he assumed it had been carried away by a hungry mouse. Dutifully, M. Dubois wrote out the story of what had happened and inserted the slip of paper in the piece of furniture he had been making at the time of the accident.

For Machado de Assis (as for Diderot and for Borges), the title page of a book should carry the names of both the author and the reader, since they share its paternity.

“The worst defect of this book is you, reader,” says Machado de Assis accusingly, halfway through
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
(which I pulled off the shelf on another sleepless night). “You are in a hurry to grow old and the book progresses all too slowly; you like your stories straightforward and packed with action, told in a measured and easy-flowing style, and this book and my style are like two drunkards, swaying from left to right, starting and stopping, complaining, shouting, laughing out loud, threatening heaven above, slipping and falling. …”

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
is a hodgepodge of very brief chapters that are barely more than notes, snatches of dialogue, truncated love scenes, short character sketches and mini-essays, the lot building up the autobiography of a reluctant hero, the despondent Brás Cubas, already dead when the book begins.

Machado de Assis was a curious man. Born in 1839, he was the son of a Carioca mulatto painter and gilder, and of a white Portuguese washerwoman who worked for the widow of a senator and who died while Machado was still a small child. The aristocratic widow was chosen as the boy’s godmother and the boy spent his childhood shifting between the poor and the rich household. His father
remarried and it was his stepmother who taught him to read and write. Later, the neighbourhood baker, who was from Paris, persuaded the boy to study French and to read the works of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. These two remained, throughout Machado’s life, among his favourite authors. He grew up with a romantic, laconic, critical, ironic view of the world, evident on every page he wrote. “I grew up; my family had no hand in this. I grew naturally, as magnolia trees and cats grow.”

In Brazil, Machado de Assis is classed among the Romantics, and yet I feel that his sensibility is deeply baroque. In baroque literature, something is true only if it means something else.

I have such great fondness for
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
that I’m always surprised to discover how few of my friends have read it. We assume that what delights us must delight others; in fact, we all realize in the end that our private circle of fellow readers, those who share our intimate loves, is very small. (Eleven friends attend the funeral of Brás Cubas as he begins to tell his sorry life—only eleven.)

I count on my shelves five editions of
Brás Cubas
(three in translation) and several biographical studies.
Considering the popularity of Sterne, of Pynchon (undeserved, I believe, I have no patience with him), of Cortázar, I find it hard to understand why Machado de Assis remains (outside Brazil, of course) a secret writer. There is no one quite like him; all three authors I mentioned share with him a concern with how fiction should handle a fractured, changing, time-riddled reality, but Machado de Assis is alone in telling a story that is allowed to show itself to the reader unassembled, as it were, like a Meccano kit, so that in the end it is up to us to put the parts together, constructing, as we read, a narrative that, though entirely comprehensible, follows no visibly pre-established pattern.

Machado’s writing constantly subverts the reader’s trust in the faithfulness of fiction. Reading him, I have the impression of watching a seemingly impossible conjuring trick. I see it, and yet I know it isn’t real.

Chateaubriand would have approved of the very first sentence of
Brás Cubas:
“For some time I hesitated as to whether I should open these memoirs at the beginning or at the end; that is to say, whether I should place first my birth or my death.” Machado chooses to begin at the last page. Is this the impulse that makes me flip to the back of a book to glimpse, however briefly, the last words first?

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
is a perfect book to read when it is raining.

Unlike the heroes of Greek tragedies, whose fate is linked to that of past and future generations, Brás Cubas’s sad story ends with his telling it. The last line of the book: “I did not bestow on any other creature the legacy of our misfortune.”

Perhaps most novels could be called posthumous memoirs, since they are told only once the end has been reached. “Die! We all must die; all it takes is being alive.” For Brás Cubas there is no sleep in death, only a kind of literary insomnia. Death is for him a point of departure, the moment in which we can conclusively consider life because there will be no more of it. He is, among other things, an incarnate
memento mori
. Not only is the protagonist dead from pneumonia at the beginning of the book; most of the other characters die as well. His mother suffers a slow and painful death; his first mistress, the Spanish Marcella, dies in hospital of smallpox; lame Eugenia ends miserably; Eulalia succumbs to yellow fever on the day before their wedding; the husband of Virgilia, his second mistress, falls dead at the very moment of becoming a minister; Brás Cubas’s best friend dies after realizing that his madness is incurable. Death, though rarely easy, allows Brás Cubas to
intuit an answer to the ancient question of why we are born. As in a detective novel, the resolution of the mystery requires that someone be no more.

“I’ll die,” Machado de Assis once said, “as I’ve lived, with a book in my hand.” According to José Verissimo, who saw him in his final hours, Machado’s last words were “Life is good.” In
Brás Cubas
he wrote, “Frankness is a dead man’s primary virtue.”