The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil (13 page)

He went back to his sad provisional residence. Aunt Monica had made supper for the new mother and gotten the baby ready to take to the foundling’s wheel. The new father could hardly conceal his anguish. He refused to eat the plate of food that Aunt Monica had put aside for him. He wasn’t hungry, he said, and it was true. He racked his brain for ways to keep his son, but he could think of nothing. The poor rooms where they had taken shelter reminded him of their desperate situation. He turned to his wife, who seemed resigned. Aunt Monica had painted her a lurid picture of the fate that awaited the child if it were not given for adoption. Cándido Neves found himself obligated to do what he had agreed to do. He asked his wife to feed the child for the last time. She did so, the little one fell asleep, and he gathered it in his arms and went out.

More than once he almost turned around, it’s true—and true, too, that he held his baby tenderly, kissed it, and carefully covered its face to protect it from the night air. When he reached Old Guard Street, his steps began to slow down.

“I won’t give him up until the last minute,” he murmured.

As Old Guard Street is not infinite, however—rather short, in fact—he soon approached the end, and it occurred to him then to turn down a narrow alley connecting Old Guard to the Street of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. As he emerged onto the broader thoroughfare, he was about to go right, toward the church of Perpetual Help, when he noticed the figure of a woman across the street. It was the runaway mulata. I will not try to describe the commotion that Cándido Neves experienced in that moment, because no description could communicate its real intensity. Let’s just say that it was enormous. She continued down the street, he turned in the same direction, and within a few steps he came upon the shop of the apothecary with whom he had spoken earlier. He entered and asked the apothecary to take care of the baby for an instant. He would be right back.

“But—”

Cándido Neves didn’t give him time to finish. He rushed out, crossed the street, and followed the woman at a distance until he could sneak up behind her unseen. It was her, all right, the runaway herself.

“Arminda!” he shouted, remembering the name from the advertisement.

Arminda turned around, suspecting nothing. It was only then, when Cándido Neves pulled a length of rope from his pocket and pounced, grabbing her by the arm, that she understood the danger and tried to flee. But it was too late. Cándido’s powerful hands bound her wrists, and he told her to get moving. The slave wanted to scream, and did produce a small, stifled cry, but immediately realized that it was hopeless. No one would come to her aid—rather, to the contrary, anyone who came would help her assailant, whom she now begged to release her, please, for the love of God.

“I am pregnant, good sir!” she exclaimed. “If the gentleman has any children of his own, I implore him to remember that child and let me go. I will be his slave and serve him as long as he wishes. Please, young sir, please let me go!”

“Get moving!” repeated Cándido Neves.

“Let me go!”

“Get moving! I’m in a hurry!”

A struggle ensued, because the slave would not take a step, forcing Cándido to drag her and her unborn baby along the street. People passing by, or standing in the doorways of shops, recognized what was happening and naturally didn’t interfere. Arminda was protesting that her master was cruel and would probably have her punished with a whip—a punishment that, in her condition, she couldn’t withstand. Yes, he would almost certainly have her flogged!

“It’s your own fault. Who told you to run away pregnant?” asked Cándido Neves.

He was in no mood for foolishness, thinking of his own child, whom he had left waiting with the apothecary. He wasn’t much of a talker, anyway. He dragged the struggling slave down Goldsmith Street toward the corner of Customs House Street, where her master lived. When they got there, the struggle intensified. The slave put her feet against a wall and resisted turning the corner with all her might, but to no avail. All she achieved was a delay, and after more minutes than it should have taken, she arrived at the house, panting and desperate, and there she dropped to her knees, pleading one last time. Her master was at home and, hearing a knock and a scuffle, opened the large door.

“Here’s your runaway,” said Cándido Neves.

“That’s her, all right!”

“Master!”

“Get on inside.”

Arminda fell into the open doorway. The slave’s master promptly pulled out the reward of one hundred milréis. Cándido Neves carefully folded the two bills of fifty milréis, as the master ordered his slave a second time to go on into the house. On the floor, where she lay in exhaustion, pain, and terror, the slave miscarried.

Her half-formed fetus emerged lifeless into the world, amid the groans of its mother and the exasperation of her owner. Cándido Neves took in the whole scene. What time was it? Whatever the time, he needed to get back to the Street of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and he did so, without waiting to see anything else.

When he got there, he found the apothecary alone, with no sign of the child who had been left in his care. Cándido Neves wanted to strangle the man. Fortunately, though, the apothecary explained everything. The child was with his family in his house behind the shop, and the two men went there. The father grabbed his son no less furiously than he had grabbed the runaway slave shortly before, though this was a different sort of fury, of course—the fury of love. He offered hurried and inadequate thanks, raced out the door, and headed not for the foundling’s wheel but for his temporary lodgings, clutching his baby and the reward money. When Aunt Monica heard the whole story, she forgave the baby’s return home along with the one hundred milréis. She did have a few hard words for the slave, a runaway whose miscarriage was a costly loss to the master. Unconcerned about the miscarriage, Cándido Neves cried real tears as he kissed his little son.

“Not all children are meant to make it,” said his beating heart.

THE ALIENIST

The Alienist
, a novella rather than a short story, is one of Machado’s masterworks. (An alienist, one could say, was a psychiatrist before the invention of modern psychiatry.) The novella ran chapter by chapter in the newspaper from October 1881 to March 1882. Notably, Machado has set this story “once upon a time,” vaguely in the late eighteenth century, when Brazil was still a colony and a Portuguese viceroy ruled in Rio de Janeiro. The action takes place in the negligible town of Itaguaí and is narrated with bombastic high-seriousness by a humorless historian. Why all this distancing and whimsy? Because Machado is about to do something very serious. He is about to question the unquestionable. What happens when Science is wrong? This is 1882, recall, when he is just emerging as Brazil’s most important author, still masking his mordant critiques of Brazilian political culture in humor and indirection. And these are the years in which positivism, scientific racism, and social Darwinism took on enormous prestige in the intellectual life of Brazil and the rest of the West. So, to question the infallibility of Science, the greatest hegemonic idea of his century, Machado de Assis wrote a sort of fairy tale and his plot unfolds in a largely imaginative terrain. Secondarily, the novella critiques the idea that revolutions—including democratic revolutions like the French Revolution— are likely to improve the political order. Two final notes: The so-called Pork Chop Revolution is completely fictional, although a bit reminiscent of the liberal uprisings of the 1830s and 1840s that briefly threatened the unity of the Brazilian empire. And the protagonist’s surname, Bacamarte, means “blunderbuss,” an antique weapon that fired scattershot.

I
How Itaguaí Acquired a Lunatic Asylum

T
he chronicles of Itaguaí tell that, long ago, there lived in that town a certain physician, Dr. Simão Bacamarte, son of the local nobility, the greatest physician anywhere in Brazil, Portugal, or Spain. He had studied at the universities of Coimbra and Padua, but, at the age of thirty-four, had returned to Brazil, for the Portuguese king was unable to prevail upon him to remain in Portugal—whether at Coimbra, directing the national university, or in Lisbon, handling the affairs of the monarchy.

“Science,” he said to His Majesty, “is my sole occupation; Itaguaí, my universe.”

And, having said this, he returned to Itaguaí and surrendered himself body and soul to scientific study, alternating therapies with readings, theorems with plasters and poultices. At the age of forty, he married Dona Evarista da Costa e Mascarenhas, twenty-five, the widow of a judge but neither pretty nor charming. One of his uncles, a particularly blunt man, marveled at the choice and told him so. Simão Bacamarte explained that Dona Evarista displayed a number of first-rate anatomical and physiological characteristics—including good digestion and regular sleep patterns, a strong pulse and excellent eyesight—and that she was thus well qualified to give him healthy, robust, and intelligent children. If, in addition to those fine qualities, the only ones worthy of a wise man’s consideration, Dona Evarista was a bit homely, far from disturbing him, he thanked God for it, because that way he ran less risk of losing himself in the trivial and vulgar contemplation of his consort to the detriment of his scientific pursuits.

Dona Evarista disappointed Dr. Bacamarte, however, giving him no children, whether robust or frail. But Science is naturally patient, and our doctor waited three years, then four, then five. At the end of that time, he made a profound study of the matter, reread the authoritative texts that he had brought with him to Itaguaí, consulted by post with the faculties of Italian and German universities, and finally prescribed a special diet that his wife, preferring to subsist exclusively on the tasty local pork, refused to eat. And to her explicable but unfortunate stubbornness we owe the total extinction of the Bacamarte line.

But Science has the ineffable ability to cure all suffering, so our physician buried himself in the study and practice of medicine. It was then that a particular corner of medical science came to his attention: psychiatry, cerebral pathology, in sum, the work of the alienist. Neither Portugal nor its Brazilian colony boasted a single authority in that understudied—or rather, entirely unstudied—subject. Simão Bacamarte realized that this unexploited field of endeavor afforded Portuguese, and more particularly Brazilian, science the opportunity to win “imperishable laurels,” an expression that he himself used in the privacy of his home, although in public he maintained the modest demeanor appropriate to a scientist.

“The health of the soul,” he cried, “is the worthiest concern for a doctor.”

“For a true doctor,” corrected Crispim Soares, the town apothecary, one of Bacamarte’s friends and associates.

Among the defects that local chroniclers attribute to the Itaguaí town council of those years was inattention to the needs of lunatics. Violent lunatics were locked away at home by their families, ignored and untreated, until death finally came for them, while the nonviolent ones wandered loose in the streets. Simão Bacamarte set out to remedy this situation. He informed the town council of his intention to house and treat the insane of Itaguaí and all the surrounding area in a specially constructed building, and he requested public funding to defray the costs of patients whose families could not afford treatment. His proposal raised the curiosity of everyone in town and provoked great opposition, showing how difficult it is to eliminate deeply rooted habits, even absurd or pernicious ones. The idea of gathering the town’s lunatics to live in one house seemed itself a symptom of dementia, as someone even dared insinuate to the doctor’s wife.

“See here, Dona Evarista,” said Father Lopes, the local vicar, “try to get your husband to take a nice trip to Rio de Janeiro. Studying all the time isn’t good. It makes people loony.”

Terrified, the illustrious Dona Evarista went straight to tell her husband that she had conceived a strong desire to travel to Rio de Janeiro, where she promised to eat everything that he recommended for her special diet. But the great man, with typical sagacity, recognized his wife’s intentions and merely replied, smiling, that she had nothing to fear. He went from there to the town hall, where the council was debating his proposal, and so eloquently did he defend it that the majority authorized the project and also voted for a tax to pay for the treatment, room, and board of the indigent lunatics. It was difficult to find anything to put a tax on, however, because everything in Itaguaí had been taxed already. After extensive study, the council decided to allow, for a fee, two plumes on the heads of horses used in funerals. Anyone wanting to befeather his horse-drawn hearse would have to pay for the privilege, at an hourly rate to be charged from the time of death to the moment of the final blessing over the tomb. As the council scribe lost himself in arithmetic calculations of the revenues hypothetically to result from the new tax, a councilman who did not believe in the doctor’s project suggested that the scribe be excused such a useless task.

“No calculations are necessary,” he said, “because Dr. Bacamarte won’t accomplish anything. Who ever heard of putting a lot of crazy people in the same house?”

But the worthy magistrate was wrong; the doctor accomplished it all. As soon as he was in possession of the license, he began construction of his asylum. It stood on the Rua Nova, Itaguaí’s most elegant street in those days, and had fifty windows on each side, a courtyard in the center, and scores of small bedrooms for the residents. An avid student of Islamic medical texts, the doctor found a passage in the Quran declaring mad people saintly, because Allah took their wits so they wouldn’t sin. He found the idea appealing and profound and had it engraved on the front of the building, but because he was worried about the disapproval of the vicar and, ultimately, the bishop, he attributed the thought to Pope Benedict VIII. His punishment for this small, pious fraud was to hear Father Lopes recount at lunch the entire biography of that eminent pontiff.