Machado de Assis — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 1

Chapter II: A Perfectly Ordinary Tuesday

Reader, you will forgive me for calling a Tuesday ordinary before I have shown you a single thing that happened on it; but I want you to enter this chapter already suspicious of my adjectives, since I intend, before its close, to make considerable use of them and no honest use at all.

I had been eleven months in the city — a capital I will not name, out of courtesy to it and to myself — earning a Brazilian salary by means of a screen, a headset, and a punctuality that no one in that office would ever see me exercise in person. This is called, I am told, remote work; the term is modern, the condition is not. Robinson Crusoe worked remotely too, though his employer was Providence and his salary was survival. I answered to a director in São Paulo who had met me twice, liked me moderately both times, and would not have recognized me a third. Between us stretched an ocean, a time difference of four hours, and a fidelity that cost him nothing and me everything, since I performed it daily and he merely received it, the way a landlord receives rent without asking after the tenant's cough.

Each afternoon, at four, I left my apartment — two rooms and a window facing a wall — for the Café Modelo, which was neither modern nor, so far as I could discover, anyone's model of anything, but which possessed a mirror of considerable age set into the wall behind the zinc counter. This mirror had a flaw: a hairline fracture running diagonally from the upper left corner, the kind of imperfection that a jeweler would call a flaw and an appraiser would call character, the two words meaning the same thing until money changes hands. I mention the fracture now because I did not notice it for the first several weeks; a man newly arrived in a foreign capital notices faces, not mirrors, and I had not yet understood that in that city the mirror would prove more reliable than any face in it.

It was at the Modelo that I made the acquaintance of a countryman, one Vicente Falcão, who introduced himself with a bow so complete it seemed rehearsed, and who was rehearsed, though I did not yet know for what performance. He was some years my junior, unemployed by profession and employed, it seemed, by opportunity; he spoke four languages badly and one — the language of being useful before being asked — fluently. He knew where to have a suit mended cheaply, which official at the consulate could be flattered into speed, which brand of coffee the Modelo secretly diluted. Such knowledge is called local expertise; it is also called, in less generous chapters than this one aims to be, the currency of the parasite. I will not use that word again. I have used it once, which is enough for any careful reader to remember it without my repeating the insult.

"You work alone," he said to me one afternoon, not as a question. "That must be a great solitude."

I told him it was efficient.

"Efficient," he repeated, turning the word in his mouth as though it were a coin of foreign mintage, uncertain of its value. "I have never met a man who used that word about his own loneliness before to me."

I did not answer, and my silence, dear reader, was the first document in a file I did not yet know I was keeping.

He glanced, while I hesitated, toward the mirror behind the counter — not at himself, as vanity would suggest, but at me, at my reflection, which the fracture crossed just below the left eye, dividing my face along a seam that had nothing to do with my features and everything, it seemed to me afterward, to do with my situation. A man split by an accident of glass into two men who did not quite align: this struck me, at the time, as merely decorative. I record here, for the sake of later chapters, that it was not.

"That crack," Falcão said, "has been there longer than either of us. The owner won't replace the glass. Sentiment, he says. I say it's cheaper to call a flaw a sentiment than to pay for a new mirror."

I laughed, because the remark was clever, and because laughing cost me nothing, whereas thinking about it, as I have done in the years since, has cost me a great deal more than I can enter under any single heading of this account. But the accounting of that cost — what Falcão came afterward to ask of me, what the mirror came afterward to show me, and whether the two debts were ever, in truth, the same debt — deserves a fuller telling than I have given it here, and must wait for the pages that follow.

Chapter III: A Debt Repaid in Full, More or Less

I will spare the reader any suspense I do not intend to satisfy: Vicente Falcão asked me for money, and I gave it to him, and this fact, stated so early and so plainly, is itself a kind of deflation, since a subtler narrator would have made you wait three pages for it. I am not subtler. I am merely retrospective, which sometimes amounts to the same economy of patience.

The sum was four hundred and twenty crowns of that country's currency, a figure I remember with the fidelity one reserves for insults rather than kindnesses. He asked it on a Thursday, over coffee he did not offer to pay for, framing the request as a favor to me rather than to himself — his sister in Salvador was ill, he said, or perhaps it was his mother; the ailing relative of the opportunist is a movable feast, celebrated wherever convenient. I did not entirely believe him. I did not entirely disbelieve him either, and it is in that comfortable middle distance, reader, where most of us conduct our worst business.

"You'll have it back within the month," he said, and pressed my hand — not shook it, pressed it, holding a half-second longer than courtesy required, the way a man presses a document he wants you to feel has already been signed.

I have turned that half-second over many times since, the way a jeweler turns a stone to catch the flaw in better light. Was it warmth, or calculation, or merely the ordinary excess of a man unused to gratitude and therefore clumsy in its expression? I confess I cannot certify which. I offer you all three, and I will not choose among them; a narrator who chooses for you has stolen the one privilege a reader is still permitted in this age of increasing efficiencies — the privilege of suspicion, exercised at leisure, at no cost to anyone but himself.

He did not have it back within the month. He did not have it back within three. By the fourth he had stopped appearing at the Modelo at four o'clock, and the owner — a taciturn man named Osório, who dusted the same four bottles daily as though dusting were itself the business, coffee an afterthought — told me, without being asked, that Falcão owed money elsewhere too, to persons less patient than a Brazilian remote-working correspondent with an ocean's worth of excuses for his own patience.

"He's not a bad sort," Osório said, wiping a glass that did not need it. "He's a sort who needs, which is different."

I found this distinction more comforting than it deserved to be, and I record it here as a small example of how a man will manufacture absolution out of any material available, the way a poor household makes soup from bones a rich one would throw away.

It was on that same afternoon, alone at my usual table, that I looked up into the mirror and saw, for the first time with any clarity, how precisely the fracture divided my reflection: not down the center, as I had lazily supposed in the previous chapter, but along a diagonal that gave more of my face to the left than to the right, so that the man in the mirror was not two equal halves but two unequal claims, one larger than the other and neither, quite, the whole of me. I want to make something of this. I want, very much, to tell you that I understood in that moment the shape of my own complicity, that the glass had been teaching me all along to see myself as divided between the man who lent money out of loneliness and the man who would have refused it out of prudence, had prudence ever been given a vote in the matter.

But let us leave that metaphor where it stands, admired and unpursued; I have found, in a life devoted mostly to explaining myself to myself, that the mirrors which teach us the most are precisely the ones we misread most confidently, and a man who claims to have learned his own portrait from a crack in secondhand glass is asking you to believe rather more than four hundred and twenty crowns' worth of vanity.

I never saw Falcão again. I heard, eighteen months later, from a countryman who had heard it from another, that he was in Lisbon, doing something with imports, or exports, the two being indistinguishable at that distance and probably at any distance. The debt was never repaid, and I have stopped, this last year, expecting that it would be; a debt uncollected long enough stops being an account and becomes, instead, a kind of furniture — you arrange your other feelings around it and forget to ask what it originally cost.

The café is still there, I am told, though I no longer go at four o'clock, having found, in the interval, an office to work from and colleagues to disappoint in person rather than by screen, which is its own chapter and a duller one. The mirror, Osório informs me by the sort of letter men write only to settle small matters, was finally replaced last spring — cracked clean through, at last, by nothing more dramatic than the weight of a shelf badly hung above it. He apologizes for the sentiment lost. I have written back that no apology is necessary, that the sentiment, whatever it was, had already been collected in full by the only creditor who ever really mattered in the transaction, and that this creditor was not Vicente Falcão, and was not, though I toyed with the vanity of it for the length of one chapter, the mirror either. Who, then, the reader may ask. I have my candidate. I decline, for now, to swear him in.