The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (31 page)

It was nothing but drollery. I mentioned it to Quincas Borba, however, who looked at me with a certain caution and sorrow, being so good as to inform me that I was crazy. I laughed at first, but the noble conviction of the philosopher instilled a certain fear in me. The only objection to Quincas Borba’s word was that I didn’t feel crazy, but since crazy people generally have no other concept of themselves, such an objection was worthless. And see now if there isn’t some basis to the popular belief that philosophers are men who are far removed from petty things. The next day Quincas Borba sent an alienist to see me. I knew him, I was aghast. He, however, behaved with the greatest delicacy and poise, taking his leave so merrily that it encouraged me to ask him if he really thought I was crazy.

“No,” he said. “There are few men so much in command of their faculties as you.”

“So Quincas Borba was mistaken?”

“Completely.” And then, “On the contrary, if you’re his friend … I ask you to distract him … because …”

“Good heavens! Do you think …? A man of such spirit, a philosopher!”

“That makes no difference. Madness can enter any house.”

You can imagine my affliction. The alienist, seeing the effect of his words, realized that I was a friend of Quincas Borba and tried to lessen the gravity of the warning. He observed that it might not be anything and added even that a grain of folly, far from doing harm, gives a certain spice to life. Since I rejected that opinion with horror, the alienist smiled and told me something extraordinary, so extraordinary that the least it deserves is a chapter of its own.

“You no doubt recall,” the alienist told me, “that famous Athenian maniac who imagined that all ships entering the Piraeus were his property. He was nothing but a poor wretch who probably didn’t even have a tub to sleep in as Diogenes had, but the imaginary ownership of the vessels was worth all the drachmas in Hellas. Well, we all have an Athenian madman in us. And anyone who swears that he didn’t possess at least two or three schooners mentally, has to know that he swears falsely.”

“Including you?” I asked.

“Including me.”

“Including me?”

“Including you. And your servant as well, if that man shaking rugs out the window is your servant.”

As a matter of fact it was one of my servants who was beating rugs while we spoke in the garden alongside. The alienist then noted that he’d opened all the windows wide and kept them that way, had raised the curtains, had revealed the richly furnished room as much as possible so it could be seen from outside, and he concluded, “That servant of yours has the Athenian’s mania. He thinks that the ships are his. One hour of illusion that gives him the greatest happiness on Earth.”

If the alienist is right, I said to myself, there isn’t much to pity in Quincas Borba. It’s a question of degree. Still, it’s only proper to keep an eye on him and prevent manias of other origins from entering his brain.

Quincas Borba differed with the alienist regarding my servant. “It’s possible as an image,” he said, “to attribute the Athenian’s mania to your servant, but images are not ideas or observations taken from nature. What your servant has is a feeling that’s noble and perfectly in line with the laws of Humanitism: it’s the pride of servanthood. His intention is to show that he isn’t
just anybody’s
servant.” Then he called my attention to the coachmen in great houses, more haughty than their masters, to hotel servants, whose solicitude depends upon the social variations of the guest, etc. And he concluded that all of it was an expression of that delicate and noble sentiment—full proof that so many times man, even when shining shoes, is sublime.

“You’re the sublime one,” I shouted, throwing my arms around his neck. Indeed, it was impossible to believe that such a profound man could have reached dementia. That was what I told him after my embrace, revealing the alienist’s suspicions to him. I can’t describe the impression that the revelation made on him. I remember that he trembled and turned pale.

It was around that time that I became reconciled once again with Cotrim, without getting to know the cause of our falling-out. An opportune reconciliation, because solitude was weighing on me and life for me was the worst kind of weariness, which is weariness without working. A short time later I was invited by him to join a Third Order, which I didn’t do without first consulting Quincas Borba.

“Go ahead if you want,” he told me, “but temporarily. I’m trying to attach a dogmatic and liturgical part to my philosophy. Humanitism must also be a religion, the one of the future, the only true one. Christianity is good for women and beggars, and the other religions aren’t worth much more. They’re all equal with the same vulgarity or weakness. The Christian paradise is a worthy emulation of the Muslim one. And as for Buddha’s Nirvana, it’s nothing more than a concept for paralytics. You’ll see what the humanistic religion is. The final absorption, the
contractive
phase, is the reconstitution of substance, not is annihilation, etc. Go where you are called, but don’t forget that you’re my caliph.”

And now have a peek at my modesty. I joined the Third Order of * * * and filled a few positions in it. That was the most brilliant phase of my life. Nevertheless, I shall be silent, I shan’t say anything, I won’t talk about my service, what I did for the poor and the infirm, or the recompense I received, nothing, I shall say absolutely nothing.

Perhaps the social economy could profit somewhat if I were to show how each and every outside reward is worth little alongside the subjective and immediate reward. But that would be breaking the silence I’ve sworn to maintain at this point. Besides, the phenomena of conscience are difficult to analyze. On the other hand, if I told one thing I would have to tell every one that’s connected to it and I’d end up writing a
chapter on psychology. I shall only state that it was the most brilliant phase of my life. The pictures in it were sad. They had the monotony of misfortune, which is as boring as that of pleasure, perhaps worse. But the joy given to the souls of the sick and the poor is a recompense of some value. And don’t tell me that it’s negative because the only one receiving it is the one taken care of. No. I received it in a reflexive way, and even then it was great, so great that it gave me an excellent idea of myself.

After a few years, three or four, I’d had enough of the service and I left it, not without a substantial donation, which gave me the right to have my portrait hung in the sacristy. I won’t finish this chapter, however, without mentioning that in the hospital of the Order I witnessed the death of—guess who …?—the beautiful Marcela. And I watched her die on the same day that, while visiting a slum to distribute alms, I found … you’re incapable of guessing now … I found the flower of the shrubbery, Eugênia, the daughter of Dona Eusébia and Vilaça, as lame as I’d left her and sadder still.

When she recognized me she turned pale and lowered her eyes. But it was only a matter of an instant. She immediately raised her head and looked straight at me with dignity. I understood that she wouldn’t accept alms from my pocket and I held out my hand to her as I would have to the wife of a capitalist. She greeted me and shut herself up in her tiny room. I never saw her again. I learned nothing about her life or whether her mother was dead or what disaster had brought her to such poverty. I know that she was lame and sad. It was with that profound impression that I reached the hospital where Marcela had been admitted the day before and where I saw her expire a half hour later, ugly, thin, decrepit …

I understood that I was old and needed some strength. But Quincas Borba had left for Minas Gerais six months earlier and he’d taken the best of philosophies with him. He returned four months later and came into my house one certain morning almost in the state in which I’d seen him in the Passeio Público. The difference was that his gaze was different. He was demented. He told me that in order to perfect Humanitism he’d burned the whole manuscript and was going to start all over again. The dogmatic part was finished, although not written down. It was the true religion of the future.

“Do you swear by Humanitas?” he asked me.

“You know I do.”

My voice could barely come out of my chest and, besides, I hadn’t discovered the whole cruel truth. Quincas Borba was not only mad, but he knew that he was mad, and that remnant of awareness, like a dim lamp in the midst of the shadows, greatly complicated the horror of the situation. He knew it and wasn’t bothered by the illness. On the contrary, he told me, it was one more proof of Humanitas, which in that way was playing with itself. He recited long chapters of the book to me, and antiphonies, and spiritual litanies. He even got to go through a sacred dance he’d invented for the rites of Humanitism. The lugubrious grace with which he lifted up and shook his legs was singularly fantastic. At other times he would sulk in a corner with his eyes staring into space, eyes in which, at long intervals, a persistent ray of reason would gleam, as sad as a tear …

He died a short time later, in my house, swearing and repeating always that pain was an illusion and that Pangloss, the calumnied Pangloss, was not as dotty as Voltaire supposed.

Between Quincas Borba’s death and mine the events narrated in the first part of the book took place. The principal one was the invention of the
Brás Cubas Poultice
, which died with me because of the illness I’d contracted. Divine poultice, you would have given me first place among men above science and wealth because you were the genuine and direct inspiration of heaven. Fate determined the contrary. And so, all of you must remain eternally hypochondriac.

This last chapter is all about negatives. I didn’t attain the fame of the poultice, I wasn’t a minister, I wasn’t a caliph, I didn’t get to know marriage. The truth is that alongside these lacks the good fortune of not having to earn my bread by the sweat of my brow did befall me. Furthermore, I didn’t suffer the death of Dona Plácida or the semidementia of Quincas Borba. Putting one and another thing together, any person will probably imagine that there was neither a lack nor a surfeit and, consequently, that I went off squared with life. And he imagines wrong. Because on arriving at this other side of the mystery I found myself with a small balance, which is the final negative in this chapter of negatives—I had no children, I haven’t transmitted the legacy of our misery to any creature.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
thwarts the reader’s expectations in more than just its disenchanted narrator’s sarcastic tone. Within the corpus of nineteenth-century Brazilian letters it is something of an anomaly: for instance, it challenges the accepted modes of representation, best exemplified by Zola. And like the work of Sterne, it takes stylistic liberties, both typographically (LV, CXXXX) and through its oblique plot and frequent digressions. Over time, however, the interest in this curious amalgam has only grown more keen.

Brazilian history from the days of João VI’s arrival in 1808 to the end of the Second Empire in 1889—the fall of Napoleon, the Regency, the winning of independence, slavery, and political life—makes discreet incursions into this text permeated by European literary and historical references and quotes. Thus we approach the fictional realm dominated by Brás Cubas, a wealthy, indolent bachelor who enjoys his good fortune in the agrarian slave-based economy of nineteenth-century Brazil. He hobnobs with the epoch’s elite in a cultural milieu given to the pleasures of reading and traveling.

The stage is set for a novel of a very special character, one in which a peculiar dialogue with European literature is continually taking place. The reader is as likely to bump up against Buffon as Shakespeare or
Voltaire. Our deceased narrator leads the reader on a fascinating journey through a diverse realm where fiction is overlaid by fiction.

Many of Machado de Assis’ French contemporaries set their unique stamp on the momentous developments of their century, pondering in their major works the seminal historical, events they observed as partisans in the play of shifting ideologies. There was Chateaubriand with his
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
, Napoleon dictating
Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène
to Las Cases. Stendhal, Musset, Vigny, and Alexander Dumas, as well, left records of their impressions of the great evens in which they took part.

But our narrator, unlike his French confreres, is not interested in projecting himself onto the broad canvas of history but in recording the significant moments of a far from exemplary life, often exposing the least savory aspects of an existence he doesn’t seek to embellish.