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

Chapter II — Of the Fracture, and of the Man Who Proposed to Mend It

Let the reader, who has already condemned me once in these pages for an obscurity I promised and did not supply, sit now at my table; I ask nothing of him but patience, and perhaps a small coin for the waiter, since I intend to keep him here some while.

I had been three months in that city, which I will not name, though the reader may guess it from the rain and from the price of coffee, a sum so modest as to seem an insult to the coffee itself. I worked, if the word applies, for a house in Rio that required of me only a weekly report, transmitted by wire through a machine I understood less than I understood my own liver; my employers never saw my face, nor I theirs, and this arrangement, which the young call by some brisk foreign term I have already forgotten, left me each afternoon with several hours and no one to spend them on. Solitude, they say, refines a man; they say a great many things.

The café where I sat had a mirror behind the counter, gilt-framed, older than the republic that governed neither of us with much conviction. Across its lower left corner ran a fracture no wider than a hair, scarcely to be found unless one already suspected it was there — which is, I have come to think, the condition of most discoveries a man makes about himself.

It was in that mirror, and not directly, that I first observed Xavier.

He introduced himself before I had asked to be introduced, a courtesy that is also a kind of theft. He praised the coffee, which did not deserve it; he praised my Portuguese, which deserved it less; he sat, uninvited and yet somehow expected, the way a debt arrives before the letter announcing it.

"You are new to the city," he said.

"Three months."

"Long enough to be lonely. Not long enough to know it."

I did not answer. Silence, correctly deployed, is worth more than any three sentences a man can construct in his own defense; I had learned this much from years of correspondence, if from nothing else.

He asked what I did. I told him, in the fewest words the wire-machine allowed me. He nodded as if I had confessed something.

"A man who works for people who cannot see him," Xavier said, "is a man who may become anyone he likes."

"Or no one."

"Same privilege, different name."

Here I might set down a maxim, and I will, though I distrust it even as I write it: a stranger's flattery is a loan at very high interest, repayable in confidences one did not mean to lend, — though it must be said some men grow rich precisely by never repaying.

He touched, in the course of some remark I no longer recall, the frame of the mirror; his hand rested there a moment longer than the gesture required, two fingers exactly upon the hairline fracture, as though he had known it before I had, as though the flaw were his and merely stored there for safekeeping. I watched this in the glass, doubled, myself on one side of the crack and slightly displaced on the other, the two halves of my face not quite agreeing on the shape of my own nose.

I have turned that instant over a thousand times since, the way a man turns a suspect coin, testing it against the light for a face that does not belong to the mint. Did he know the mirror was flawed? Did he mean, by resting his hand there, to show me my own division before I had troubled to notice it myself? Or was it merely where a man's hand falls when a café table offers no other ledge — who can say; I have asked myself the question in three languages and it answers in none of them.

"You should have that mended," I said, meaning the glass.

"Some things," he answered, "improve for being cracked. You see two of yourself instead of one. A man alone in a foreign city could do worse than company, even his own, doubled."

I laughed, because the remark deserved it and because I did not yet understand that he had, in that sentence, proposed the entire architecture of what followed, disguised as a compliment to a broken mirror. Diplomacy, I would learn, is the art of offering a service before the need for it has been admitted; all his diplomacy, and much of what came after, resided in that single courteous, uninvited hand.

The coffee went cold; the rain did not stop; the reader, I think, has had patience enough for one chapter, and I am not yet ready to say more than the mirror said — which was very little, and in a language of its own. Let us leave it there for now, and pass, without further ceremony, to what followed.

Chapter III — In Which the Fracture Is Priced

Xavier came again the next day, and the day after, with the regularity of a rent one has not agreed to pay but somehow owes. I will not pretend I disliked it. A man three months in a city that does not know his name will forgive a great deal in exchange for being addressed by it, even by a stranger, even, as I later had cause to suspect, by a stranger who had taken some trouble to learn it beforehand.

He knew people. He knew, that is to say, the sort of people who are useful to know for exactly as long as it takes them to become expensive. Within a fortnight he had procured me an introduction to a family of some standing, a translator's commission that paid better than my wire-machine, and a tailor who let me owe him until the end of the month — three services, each smaller than the last, each quietly indebting me to the man who had supplied it, the way a moneylender first offers matches before he offers money.

"You have done a great deal for a man you met over bad coffee," I said to him once.

"The coffee was not bad. You said so yourself, the first day, though I recall you meant it as a courtesy and I received it as a fact. That is the whole of diplomacy," he added, "receiving a courtesy as a fact, and returning it as a debt."

I laughed, again; I had got into the habit of laughing at his sentences before I had quite finished disliking them.

It was some six weeks into this arrangement — I keep the number for the sake of those readers who prize arithmetic over feeling, though I confess the two rarely disagree as much as we pretend — that I found the mirror mended.

Not mended: replaced. The café's owner, a practical man untroubled by any theory of fractures, had sold the old glass to a dealer and hung a new one, flawless, in its ornate old frame. I stood before it a full minute, seeing myself whole for the first time in that establishment, one face, one nose, no quarrel between the halves of it, and felt — I searched for the word then and I have not improved on it since — cheated.

"You look," said Xavier, arriving at his usual hour, "as though someone had died."

"Someone has been repaired," I said. "It comes to the same thing, in a mirror."

He glanced at the new glass without much interest, the way a man glances at a bill he has already decided not to pay. "You were fond of the crack."

"I had grown used to it. There is a difference, though I no longer trouble to keep the two apart."

He shrugged, and it was in that shrug — I offer this to the reader as evidence, though I warn him in advance that it will not convict anyone — that I first considered the possibility that Xavier had never seen the fracture at all; that his hand had rested on the frame because a hand must rest somewhere, and that the whole architecture I had built upon it, the divided face, the stored-up flaw, the courtesy that was theft, was mine alone, manufactured in the workshop I keep for such things and staffed, so far as I can tell, entirely by myself.

Some weeks later he asked to borrow a sum I will not record, out of consideration for his family, if he has one, and mine. I lent it. I do not say I was deceived; I say only that a man alone in a foreign capital, filing his reports into a machine that answers in numbers and never in a voice, will manufacture company out of whatever presents itself with two hands and a compliment, and will go on paying for the manufacture long after the article has stopped resembling what he ordered.

He left the city before the debt was settled, or before it was demanded — the sequence matters more to my vanity than to the facts, and I have decided, in writing this down, not to determine which came first. The tailor forgave what remained of my account, out of some scruple of his own that I never inquired into. The family of standing continued to receive me, though with a diminishing warmth I attributed, perhaps unfairly, to news of Xavier that had not reached me directly.

As for the mirror, I still take my coffee before it, out of habit rather than conviction. It gives back one face, agreeably, at a fair price. I have looked into it many times since, hoping, I suppose, to find the hairline crack returned to its corner, some proof that a flaw once seen cannot be wholly sold away; it has not returned, and the two men who might have told me whether it was ever there to begin with — the dealer, and Xavier — are both, so far as my inquiries extend, unreachable, one by distance and the other, I think, by design.

I offer no verdict on the man. I offer only the coffee, cold as before, and the rain, which in that city never troubled itself to stop for anyone's reckoning.