The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil (11 page)

Getting home to São Diogo Street, he was going to show his wife the lottery ticket, but he changed his mind and decided to wait. The lottery would not occur for two days. Gloria asked him if he’d found a house, and on Sunday she told him to go look for one. Porfirio went out and found none but returned in a good mood. That afternoon he asked his wife laughingly what she would do if he brought her a silk dress that week? Gloria shrugged, silk was not for them. And why shouldn’t it be? Who was more deserving than she? Why, if he had the means, he’d see that she went around in a coach!

“But that’s just it, Porfirio. We don’t have the means.”

Yes, but God sometimes remembers everybody, okay, that’s all he could say for now. He’d have to explain later. He was superstitious and did not want to tempt fate by revealing that he held the winning ticket. And mentally he removed his wife’s faded, wrinkled, cotton print dress and replaced it with another of blue silk—it had to be blue—with lace or something else that would show off her beautiful body … and he forgot himself and said aloud:

“There can’t be too many other bodies like it.”

“What bodies, Porfirio? Have you gone nuts?” asked Gloria in confusion.

No, he wasn’t nuts. He was thinking about that body that God had given her … and Gloria writhed hilariously in her chair because she was always ticklish, and finally he withdrew his hands and reminded her of the twist of fate by which he happened to go down Empress Street that night and see her dancing, all sultry. And talking, he put his arm around her waist and started to dance with her, humming a polka. Dragged along at first, Gloria started to dance in the narrow room, without music or spectators. Neither bills nor demands for back rent came to intrude on them for a while.

But good fortune did come—when the lottery happened—and Porfirio won five hundred milréis. Overjoyed, he ran toward his house, unable for a while to control his leaping spirit. He finally got a grip on himself as he crossed the parade ground at the edge of town as evening shadows lengthened. The five hundred milréis sparkled like five hundred thousand stars in the imagination of the poor devil, who could not see anything else, not other passersby, nor the streetlamps that were being lit here and there. Those five hundred milréis were all he saw. He’d been right to say that he’d get out of this quagmire and that God takes care of his own. He mumbled and laughed to himself, and at other moments strutted with a superior air. As he entered São Diogo Street, he bumped into a friend, who consulted him about the parish celebration for the Feast of São Carlos. Porfirio responded casually:

“First of all you’ll need to raise maybe two hundred or three hundred milréis.”

He felt quite comfortable tossing around large sums now. The friend explained, however, that getting members for the group was the first step and that the money would come later. Porfirio, who was already thinking about something else, agreed and went on his way. He got home, looked in the window, saw his wife sewing by candlelight in the front room, and bellowed for her to open the door. Gloria ran to the door, startled, and he almost bowled her over, hugging her tightly, talking, laughing, hopping, they had money, everything paid off, a dress. Gloria asked what was going on, asked him to explain, but to calm down. How could that be? Five hundred milréis? She refused to believe it. Where did he get five hundred milréis? So Porfirio told her everything, how he’d bought two tenths of a hot lottery ticket a few days ago, and not told her, to see if he’d win something first. But he had been sure, really, because he’d had a hunch, and the heart doesn’t lie.

Gloria embraced him tearfully. Thank Heavens, they were saved! And would it be enough to pay all their debts? Yes, it would. Porfirio showed her that there would even be some money left over, and he went to do the arithmetic with her on the corner of the pine table. Gloria listened and trusted him because she could only count by dozens and couldn’t get hundreds of milréis into her head at all. She listened and trusted in silence, with her eyes fixed on him as he counted, slowly, not to make a mistake. When all the debts were subtracted, almost two hundred milréis remained.

“Two hundred? Let’s put it in the bank.”

“Except,” he insisted, “except for a certain thing that I have to buy … a certain thing. Guess what it is!”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, who is it that needs a chic silk dress, tailor-made?”

“Forget it, Porfirio. What dress? Luxury isn’t for poor people. Put the money in the bank.”

“I’ll put the rest of it in the bank, but there’s going to be a dress. I don’t want a raggedy wife. Poor people wear clothes, too, right? I’m not saying buy a dozen dresses, but what harm can one dress do? You might need to go somewhere a little more dressed up. And anyway, you’ve never had a dress made in a French shop before.”

Porfirio paid all their debts and bought the dress. His creditors frowned when they saw him coming, but instead of excuses he gave them money—as naturally as though he had never done anything else. Gloria put up a bit more opposition to the dress, but being a woman she eventually succumbed to the lure of looks and fashion. She did not consent to have the dress made by a tailor, however, and she wanted the savings deposited in the bank with the rest of what remained after paying their debts.

“And why does it have to be deposited in the bank?” he asked a week later.

“In case we need it,” answered his wife.

Porfirio thought about this, walked around the room twice, approached her, and put his hand under her chin. He stood there for a moment gazing at her.

Then, shaking his head:

“You’re a saint. You sit here working, month in, month out, and never have any fun, never have a day off. That’s got to be bad for your health.”

“Well, let’s go out for a walk.”

“Don’t say that. Walking around is not enough. Otherwise, dogs would never get mangy,” he said, laughing uproariously at his own idea. “I’m saying something different. I mean … let’s have a party.”

Gloria was instantly and firmly against it. She begged, argued, and even got angry, but her husband had an answer for everything. Had they been counting on this money? No! Imagine how they had been, owing the hair off their heads, whereas now they were all paid up and could enjoy themselves. It could even be a way to thank the Good Lord for his blessings. You can’t take it with you, after all. Everybody gets to have some fun occasionally. Even the worst-off people get a holiday sometimes. Why should the two of them have to slave for years without a break? And actually, he did get out a bit, but she didn’t. What did she ever get to see? Nothing! Just work and more work. And, after all, when else was she going to wear her new silk dress?

“On the day of Our Lady of Gloria we can go the parish fair, all right?”

Porfirio thought about this for a moment.

“We can do both,” he said. “I won’t invite too many people. A family affair. I’ll invite Firmino and his wife, old Ramalho’s daughters, now that he has passed away, and Borges, of course …”

“Nobody else, Porfirio, that’s enough!”

Porfirio agreed to everything, and he was probably sincere, but the preparations worked him up to a fever pitch. He wanted the party to be a real blowout, something that people would talk about. After a week, the guest list had risen to thirty. They were deluged with inquiries. There was all sorts of talk about Porfirio’s party, about his winning the lottery, some said two thousand milréis, some said three thousand, and when they asked him, he smiled, avoided answering, and offered no clarification. Some concluded that he must have won four thousand, and he smiled even more mysteriously.

The day arrived. Gloria, who had eventually caught her husband’s infectious enthusiasm, proudly wore her new dress. Every now and then, she thought about the money and told her husband to control himself and save something to put in the bank. He said yes, but did not count very carefully, and the money evaporated. After a simple, high-spirited dinner, the dancing started, a real blowout. The place was so crowded that you could hardly move.

Gloria was the queen that night. Her husband stopped fidgeting with his brand-new, shiny shoes to watch her, elatedly. They danced together many times, and the general opinion was that nobody could top them, but they also danced with their guests, a family affair. It got to be three o’clock, four o’clock, five o’clock in the morning. At five o’clock, a third of the guests were still there, “the imperial guard,” according to Porfirio, who was everywhere at once, covered with sweat, his tie twisted to one side, straightening up the floral decorations, scooping up a child who had gone to sleep in a corner, carrying it to a bedroom carpeted with sleeping children. And then he was back in the front room, clapping his hands, let’s go people, don’t let the dancing stop, they could sleep when they went home.

And instruments wailed again, as the last candles flickered low.

FATHER AGAINST MOTHER

We come at last to a story by Machado de Assis in which a slave plays a central role: “
Pai contra mãe
.” Even in this story, the slave catcher is the protagonist, although not because the author has any liking for him. Cándido, a good-natured good-for-nothing, is the father of the title. The mother is the escaped slave Arminda, who is pregnant when Cándido catches her. Cándido and his wife, Clara, another seamstress, are threatened with the loss of their newborn son, whom they may have to leave in something called the “foundling’s wheel,” which is a small rotating door to a convent, where nuns would find the infant and care for it as an orphan. The story was published in 1906, shortly before the author’s death, and, unlike the enormous majority of his stories, this one did not appear first in the newspaper. It was written well after the abolition of slavery, when slaves had not been numerous for decades. Improvidence and debt are on the prowl again in this second story about life among the not-so-rich majority in nineteenth-century Rio. But the great evil here is unmistakably slavery itself. There is a powerful sense, in this story, that the author is saying things he often would have liked to say in the past. And this time, quite unusually, the narrator is none other than Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis himself, more or less unmediated and in person.

L
ike other social institutions, slavery brought with it a number of activities and artifacts. Let me mention a few artifacts associated with a particular activity of interest to our story. A sort of iron collar is one; an iron chain attached to the ankle, another; and, third, a metallic mask. The mask eliminated the vice of drunkenness among slaves by covering their mouths. It had only three openings—two for the eyes and one to breathe through—and it was fastened with a lock behind the head. Without the vice of drunkenness, slaves lost the temptation to steal, because it was commonly a coin or two belonging to the master that they used to buy a drink. So the mask eliminated not one vice, but two, and guaranteed both sobriety and honesty. The mask was grotesque, admittedly, but social order is not always achieved without grotesquery and, sometimes, cruelty. Tinsmiths hung these masks for sale by the doors of their shops. But let’s not worry about masks.

The iron collar was locked around the neck of slaves who had attempted to escape, following their recapture. Imagine a thick iron ring and, on it, to the left or the right of the wearer’s neck, a thick iron bar extending up to the height of the wearer’s head. It was heavy, of course, but it was less a punishment than a marker. Any slave who ran away again wearing such a collar would be noticed wherever he went and quickly recaptured.

Half a century ago, slaves ran away frequently. There were a lot of slaves, back then, and not all of them liked slavery. They were occasionally beaten, and not all of them liked to be beaten. Many were merely scolded, of course, because someone in the household defended them or because their owners were not mean or simply did not want to damage their property. Money, apparently, can feel pain, too. Still, slaves kept running away. Sometimes—although this was rare—a recently imported slave would sprint away from the Valongo slave market through the streets of Rio de Janeiro without any idea of where he was going. Newly imported slaves who were purchased and taken home soon learned their way around the streets and acquired the rudiments of Portuguese. Then they would ask the master to let them go out daily and earn money for him as street vendors or slaves for hire, and these had many opportunities to run away.

The owner of a runaway slave offered a monetary reward to whoever brought him back. He put an advertisement in the newspaper with a description of the runaway—name, clothing, any noticeable physical defect, the neighborhood where the slave was last seen, and the amount offered in bounty. When the ad mentioned no specific amount, it promised “a generous reward.” Such ads often contained a small illustration of a barefoot black man running, a sack with his few belongings slung over his shoulder on a stick. They invoked the full rigor of the law against anyone who aided or abetted the escape.

Now, catching escaped slaves was then a common occupation, useful, if not exactly noble, and, because it enforced the law and the sanctity of property, it had a secondhand sort of respectability. No one studied slave catching or took it up merely as a pastime, however. Poverty, a chance occurrence, the desire to serve, a lack of aptitude for other sorts of work, but most often the simple need to make ends meet—such were the motivations of the valiant men who imposed order on disorder in midcentury Rio de Janeiro.

Cándido Neves—Candy, to friends and family—the person about whom this story of a slave catcher is being told, was motivated by poverty, pure and simple. He couldn’t tolerate any sort of trade or employment. He was “jinxed,” he said. His first idea was to learn typesetting, but he quickly saw that it would take time to master and, even then, he told himself, might not pay enough. He liked the idea of business, which was an excellent career, and so became cashier at a small store. In practice, though, serving customers at the counter annoyed him and wounded his pride, so he quit after five or six weeks. Letter carrier, notary’s assistant, messenger for an imperial ministry, and other jobs—were jettisoned soon after he got them.