the sugar plantation belt reaching down the coast from Pernambuco to Bahia and, inland, the enormous arid territory that Brazilians call the sertão. The coastal plantation belt of the Northeast was once the social, economic, and political center of Brazil. That was no longer true during the lifetime of Machado de Assis, although the plantation-owning aristocracy of the Northeast still had national clout, and the old port cities of the northeastern provinces, like Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, and Salvador, the capital of Bahia (and, for two centuries, the capital of Brazil), remained important regional centers. The cattle ranchers of the sertão, on the other hand, had (and have) never been particularly prosperous; periodic droughts devastated that already arid country in the 1870s, producing a general exodus. Since then, the sertão has periodically sent migrating workers to other parts of Brazil, especially to the Southeast, the country’s most developed region.
In Machado’s day, the Southeast was already the most important region economically. Rio de Janeiro, the chief Southeastern port, was the national capital. The great Southeastern coffee boom launched the city of São Paulo on the path to becoming the country’s agricultural and industrial powerhouse. Fueled by its vast coffee crop, the province of São Paulo became the fastest-growing part of Brazil and the chief destination of European immigration. Crucially, São Paulo was the only part of the country (arguably, the only place in the world) where a plantation-owning elite built railroads and turned a commodity-export boom into diversified economic growth and, eventually, into self-sustaining industrialization. The city of São Paulo could not yet rival Rio as the country’s chief urban center in 1908, but the twentieth century would not be very old before that happened.
The city of Rio de Janeiro itself was Machado’s most familiar geographical setting. He mentions specific street corners with the confidence that his readers will know the exact location. At the time of his birth in 1839, Rio had little more than two hundred thousand inhabitants, more than half of whom were of African descent and more than a third of whom were enslaved. Rio’s public lighting and sewerage were rudimentary, its plazas unadorned, and its public buildings unimpressive. In contrast to its later reputation, the city’s nightlife was minimal in the nineteenth century. Many of the principal families spent much of their time at country houses in the steep green hills above the small grid of tile-roofed colonial-style buildings and twin-towered churches. The lifetime of Machado de Assis was a period of transformation in Rio—of burgeoning trade, proliferating theaters, hotels, periodicals, clubs, and associations. Yet most of his stories are set before the particularly rapid changes of the 1880s and 1890s, when Italian immigrants and internal migrants arrived by the thousands and civil engineers began to alter the shape of the city by leveling some of its granite hills, filling in low spots, and giving its waterfront something like its modern contours. The iconic beachfront neighborhood of Copacabana was still a sleepy village inaccessible to central Rio until the opening of a tunnel in the last years of Machado’s life. The most glamorous part of nineteenth-century Rio was the narrow downtown thoroughfare called Ouvidor Street, lined for blocks with fashionable European shops and cafés and places of public diversion. Ouvidor Street is a constant, iconic reference point in Machado’s stories and novels.
Women figure prominently in this cityscape. At the time of Machado’s birth, Brazil was only just beginning to lose a reputation for cloistering women. According to the colonial adage, a woman aspiring to respectability should leave her house only three times in her life: for baptism, marriage, and burial—a gross caricature, obviously, but one indicative of historical
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