Machado de Assis — Chapter 1: A clockwork mechanism ticking backwards in the archive — Novella Movement 2

Chapter One: A Clock That Counts Backward

Reader, you have come at a bad hour, and I confess I am glad of it. Bad hours suit confessions; the good ones we keep for ourselves. Sit, if you will, on that stool by the shelf marked Óbitos, 1850–1860; I promise not to detain you longer than the matter requires, though matters of this kind, I have observed, require rather more than they announce at the door.

I had gone to the archive of the parish — the reader may call it what he likes, notarial or ecclesiastical, the distinction mattered less to me than the dust — to verify a date concerning my late uncle's estate; thirty-one contos, if the figure interests anyone besides the tax collector. I was forty-eight years old that winter, an age at which a man begins to consult archives about other men's deaths in order to postpone thinking of his own. In the third room, between two cabinets that had not been opened, I was told, since the Regency, stood a clock.

It was not a handsome clock. Its case was walnut gone the color of strong tea, its face cracked in a manner that suggested not accident but opinion. And it ran backward. I do not mean the hands were reversed by some clever mechanism of the maker's fancy, a toy for idle gentlemen; I mean that whoever wound it had wound it wrong, or rightly, depending on one's theology, so that the hour retreated as the minutes advanced, twelve sliding toward eleven, eleven toward ten, with the fidelity of true machinery applied to a false purpose. The archivist, a small dry man named Serapião, whom I had not yet met but would soon come to know rather better than I wished, informed me that no one troubled to fix it.

"It keeps the archive's time," he said, "not the street's."

I might have let the remark pass, as one lets pass most remarks that sound wiser than they are; but Serapião was a man who did not let his own epigrams pass unadvertised, and he drew me, by degrees I will not now reconstruct, toward a locked case at the room's far end. Within it, catalogued under a heading whose Latin I no longer trust myself to render honestly, lay what he called the Matrimonial Ledger of the parish: a bound volume in which, some sixty years before, an enterprising vicar's clerk had recorded, against each unmarried parishioner of means, a column of virtues, a column of defects, a sum representing dowry, and a final column, left mostly blank, for Disposição do Coração — disposition of the heart.

"A curiosity," said Serapião, "though some called it a service. For a small fee the clerk would consult the ledger and propose a match; he claimed a method, a calculation. Whether it succeeded I cannot say. The book stopped before the results were entered."

I confess the thing interested me more than my uncle's contos. Here was a machine, however crude, for producing affection out of arithmetic; a courtship reduced to rows and sums, much as, they tell me, is now managed by cleverer instruments in cleverer cities, where a young man may consult a catalogue of temperaments before he has troubled to consult his own. I do not condemn the method; I have tried worse ones myself, and called them love.

"You will find your uncle's family in it," Serapião added, with the particular gentleness of a man about to charge for information he has not yet been asked to supply. "And, if I am not mistaken, an entry that concerns yourself."

I did not answer at once. Silence, I have found, is the cheapest form of dignity, and often the only one a man can afford.

"Concerns me?"

"Your grandmother, sir. Before your grandfather. There was another suitor entered here, ranked above him in the column of virtues, ranked below him in the column of dowry. The heart's disposition," he said, tapping the blank space, "was never filled in. Some clerks are conscientious to a fault."

The clock behind us ticked its hour backward; eleven, once more, sliding toward ten. I understood, though I could not have said by what proof, that I had been brought to that room not to verify a sum but to begin an inquiry whose verdict I would not live to deliver — an inquiry into whether the disposition of a heart, left blank in one ledger, might not be filled in, wrongly or rightly, by a grandson eighty years too late.

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Serapião named his fee. I paid it, I regret to say, without haggling; a scruple I have paid for since in coin less easily counted. But that arithmetic, reader, belongs to another chapter, and I find myself, like the archive's clock, more inclined to retreat than to arrive.
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Chapter Two: The Column Left Blank

Serapião fetched the ledger down as a sacristan fetches a relic, that is, with a show of reverence calculated to remind the onlooker what the relic had cost the parish to keep. It was heavier than its size promised, bound in calf that had gone the color of an old bruise, and it smelled, I noted with the precision a man reserves for facts he intends to distrust later, less of piety than of tallow and mice.

"Here," he said, opening to a page marked by a ribbon so faded I could not swear to its original color, red or penitential purple, the distinction being, in that light, academic. "Your grandmother's name. Maria Cândida de Alencar Osório. Eighteen years of age, dowry assessed at four contos and some odd milréis, virtues: modesty, industry, a fine hand at the needle. Defects: given to reverie."

"Given to reverie," I repeated, because there are phrases a man must say aloud to believe a clerk once wrote them of his own blood.

"A common enough defect, in the clerk's arithmetic. It lowered a lady's rank by exactly one point, no more, no less; he was scrupulous even in his prejudices." Serapião ran a finger down the column, a finger I observed was not entirely clean, though I forgive dust its trespasses in a room devoted to dust. "Two suitors are entered opposite her. Your grandfather, ranked second in virtue, first in dowry offered — he had, it seems, an uncle in the salt trade. And above him, ranked first in virtue, a certain Bernardo Coutinho Ramalho, dowry offered: none stated. Beneath his name, in a hand rather less steady than the rest, someone had begun to write in the final column, and stopped."

I leaned close enough to read it myself, unwilling to accept the transaction secondhand. The clerk, or someone after him, had written a single word — talvez — perhaps — and no more; the ink trailed off as if the pen, or the conviction behind it, had simply lost its nerve.

Here the reader may expect me to fall into raptures over what a man of feeling would call the tragedy of the unfinished word, the life my grandmother might have lived under a Ramalho instead of an Osório, the whole conditional architecture of an existence built on four unspent letters. I confess I did feel something of the kind, standing there with the archive's cold coming up through the stone floor into my boots, which were not, I should mention, new boots, and let in cold at the seam. But sentiment, in my experience, arrives always in company with its own contradiction, and mine arrived accompanied by the entirely unromantic thought that I did not, in fact, know whether the surviving arithmetic — the four contos, the uncle in salt — had made my grandmother happy or merely comfortable, and that I had spent some years confusing the two conditions in my own house without once consulting a ledger to correct me.

"What became of Ramalho?" I asked, because a man under interrogation, even self-administered, will always ask after the other suspect first.

Serapião permitted himself something between a smile and a wince, an expression I came to recognize, in our later dealings, as his invoice face. "He is recorded twice more in the parish books, sir, if you wish to pay for the searching. Once as a debtor to the Irmandade, and once, some years after, as deceased, of a fever, unmarried. Whether he loved your grandmother, or merely calculated toward her four contos and lost the sum to a better bidder, the ledger does not say. Ledgers rarely say the thing that would settle a man's mind; that is not their office."

I have thought since of the clerks of our own day, who compile, for a fee rather steeper than Serapião's, the virtues and defects of the marriageable, the given-to-reverie among them sorted now by some mechanism of wires rather than ink, promising a science the old clerk would have envied and, I suspect, recognized; the same blank column persists under a new name, filled in by nobody, called by us compatibility rather than disposição do coração, as though a Latin phrase retired and an English one hired in its place, at the same insufficient wage.

The clock ticked its hour further backward — ten now, sliding toward nine — and I found I had no further questions worth Serapião's fee, and one question, the only one that mattered, that no fee on earth would answer: whether talvez was hope abandoned, or mercy, the clerk sparing the record a certainty he had no right to enter.

I closed the ledger myself, an act of familiarity Serapião permitted with visible reluctance, as though I had picked up his child. My uncle's thirty-one contos, and the date I had come to verify, waited for me in a different volume entirely, one with no opinions and no cracked face; I attended to it before the light failed, and paid the six hundred réis the search properly cost. The rest — Ramalho, the fever, the salt, the word begun and abandoned — I carried out with me unpriced, which is, I have come to think, the only way such goods are ever carried, and the only way, perhaps, they ought to be.