The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil Read Free Page A

looked nothing like Britain. Most Brazilians shared a popular culture in which European elements combined with non-European ones. One Machado story, “A Famous Man,” describes a composer whose ambition is to write classical music. To make a living, though, he produces dance music of the sort that local musicians performed with a syncopated lilt of African inspiration, the forerunner of twentieth-century samba. The population of Rio avidly consumes his musical creations, but the composer, unable to create within classical forms, considers himself a failure. In Machado’s time the vigorous pre-Lenten carnival celebration shut down Rio for three days a year, but its soundtrack and parade motifs were still more European than Brazilian. In a newspaper column of 1893, Machado de Assis recalled the customary carnival water fight, most especially boys against girls, and the mass production of costumes representing figures of European history: a musketeer, a Venetian doge, an Austrian emperor. In the very hierarchical society of nineteenth-century Brazil (where, it has been said, no one was equal because everyone was somewhere above or below others), a person’s connection to Europe—European genes, European fashion, European science, European art—was a chief sorting principle. To have blue eyes, speak French, wear an English hat, or attend the opera improved one’s social status.
    European travel was prestigious as well, of course. Machado himself never visited Europe, despite his great interest in all things European, probably because of his precarious health. Meanwhile, his elite characters frequently go to Europe on business or for extended vacations, although vacation is not the right word for members of a leisure class. Machado never belonged to that class. He had a secure job and rented a nice house in a pleasant neighborhood, but he was never wealthy. In his newspaper columns he chronicled urban innovations such as telephones and commented on the advent of regular steamship connections linking Rio to Europe and the United States as well as to Brazil’s many provincial capitals, and he rode the streetcar daily but never took a voyage. His most extended residence outside of his beloved Rio de Janeiro was a few weeks at something like a health spa in the mountains above the city when his eyes were so bad that he was nearly blind. Travel in nineteenth-century Brazil was not easy. The country’s roads remained excruciatingly poor, and the relatively few railroads linked coffee plantations to the export facilities rather than knitting the Brazilian nation together. Still, Machado’s characters frequently visit their rural estates or travel to and from the far-flung provinces of the Brazilian empire on government work. A few words about the countryside and the provinces, then.
    The Amazonian north of the country, something like half of the national territory, was particularly remote from life in Rio de Janeiro. The vast rainforest stood largely unaltered since its first exploration by Europeans four hundred years earlier. An extensive river network, including the great Amazon itself, supplied the chief avenues of communication in the North, and most of the Portuguese-speaking population was scattered along the riverbanks. Many indigenous people of the forest tribes did not yet consider themselves Brazilian. Beginning in the 1870s, Brazilians from outside Amazonia came to labor as rubber tappers in isolated forest locations, bleeding white latex sap from wild rubber trees. Machado’s friend, the Amazonian writer José Veríssimo, dramatized the exploitation suffered by rubber tappers, but profitable exportation of latex for rubber tires made a notable Brazilian contribution to European modernization before World War I. Many of the rubber tappers were migrating from the Northeast, a much more populous Brazilian region.
    The Northeast (called simply “the North” in Machado’s day) comprised two contrasting subregions: