Machado de Assis — Chapter 4: A forgotten maritime map in an attic — Novella Movement 1

Chapter 4: A Forgotten Maritime Map in an Attic

I shall not swear that the map caused what followed; I will only say that it preceded it, and that in the private tribunal I hold within myself — a court without robes, without a public, without even, on most days, a judge willing to sit — precedence has often been mistaken for cause. The reader who requires certainty should close this chapter now and open another man's book. I offer only what I found in the attic of my uncle Vaz Pinto, on a Tuesday of 1873, among trunks that smelled of camphor and a mortality nobody had yet announced.

The house was his, the attic was nobody's, which is the condition of most attics; and it was there, between a broken sextant and a chest of ecclesiastical vestments nobody in the family had worn nor, I think, deserved to wear, that I unrolled a chart of the southern ocean, its coastline drawn by some Portuguese hand three or, who knows, four generations removed, the paper gone the color of weak tea, a compass rose in one corner still faintly rouged with vermilion. Along the coast, in a script smaller than the rest, someone had written a single word, half eaten by damp: aqui — here. Here what? The map did not say. Maps rarely do; they mark the shore and leave the drowning to memory.

I confess I stood before it longer than the object warranted. A man of fifty-one does not usually linger over paper unless the paper flatters him, and this flattered me in a manner I did not immediately recognize: it asked to be interpreted, and interpretation was, by then, the only office I still held with any diligence. I had resigned, the reader will recall — or will not, since we have not spoken of it before, and perhaps never shall, for the sake of economy — I had resigned from several ambitions considered serious by the world, and had kept only this one, unsalaried and unrecognized: the reading of signs.

It was at this juncture that Fortunato Sampaio arrived, my late brother-in-law's second cousin, a man whose visits to any house corresponded, with an almost astronomical regularity, to the moment that house came into money, or the appearance of it. He found me on the attic stairs, map in hand, and his eyes — I must be exact, for a great deal turns on this — his eyes went first to the map, rested there one second, no more, and then rose to my face with an interest so sudden it might have been mistaken for affection.

"An old chart," he said. "Worth nothing, of course. Paper and ink." And having pronounced its worthlessness with the haste of a man closing a door before the wind can catch it, he asked whether he might borrow it, only to show a friend, an antiquarian, purely out of curiosity.

Now, the reader may ask why I record so small a scene at such length, when greater matters — sums, inheritances, the whole disposition of Vaz Pinto's estate — waited below in the drawing room for settlement. I record it because scruple, in my experience, announces itself first in trifles; the soul rehearses its larger deceptions upon small properties, the way an actor tries his voice upon an empty house before the curtain rises on the paying one. Fortunato's haste to devalue what he wished to acquire was, I thought, itself a kind of valuation, more honest than any appraiser's.

I did not lend him the map. I told him I required it myself, for a private purpose, which was true in the sense that all my purposes are private, having no public to receive them.

Let me be practical, since even confession must eventually pay its way. I carried the chart to my nephew Godofredo, a young man employed — the phrase itself still sits oddly on my late-century tongue — at a firm that trades stocks and bonds by means of machines so swift that a fortune may be made and unmade between one heartbeat and the next; his desk holds a terminal, humming, green-lit, upon which numbers arrive faster than any eye, faster I daresay than any soul, can weigh them. He glanced at the map with the tolerant contempt the young reserve for paper. "Coordinates," he said, "are coordinates, uncle, whether inked three centuries ago or blinking on a screen this instant. The ocean hasn't moved. Only the instruments got faster; the drowning is the same."

A tolerable maxim, though I suspect he borrowed it, as young men often borrow gravity before they have earned it. But it lodged in me, and lodges still: that the interval between a sign and its meaning may shrink from months to milliseconds, and yet the fundamental transaction — a mark set down, a mark misread, a fortune built on the misreading — persists unaltered beneath every century's machinery.

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Whether the map concealed treasure, a coastline, a lie, or nothing at all, I did not then know, nor am I now in haste to say; the chapter that would settle it, I promise the reader, will follow — though promises of this kind, in my experience, are the cheapest currency a narrator issues, and the reader would do well to bank on nothing.
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Meanwhile the days did what days do, which is to say they passed, and took with them three weeks — not long, except to a man waiting to be proved right, to whom three weeks can stretch into a small geological era. I kept the map in a drawer of my writing desk, beneath a stack of unanswered letters that grew, as such stacks do, less by my negligence than by some natural law governing paper; and I took it out perhaps four times, always at night, always alone, holding the candle at the angle my uncle Vaz Pinto — dead eleven years now, and no better remembered for it — used to hold his missal, as though light itself were a form of exegesis.
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The antiquarian, it turned out, existed; his name was Bicudo, and he kept a shop on the Rua do Ouvidor so narrow that two customers could not examine the same shelf without becoming, briefly, intimate. Fortunato had not lied about him, only about the urgency, and this distinction — between the lie of substance and the lie of tempo — occupied me longer than it deserved. Bicudo turned the map over twice, held it to the window, and pronounced it "a coastal chart, mid-eighteenth century, of no unusual value, though pleasant," a verdict so close to Fortunato's own that I began to suspect collusion, and then, examining my suspicion the way one examines a coin for a counterfeit ring, found no evidence for it whatsoever — only the coincidence of two men agreeing, which happens, the reader will concede, even among the honest.

I record the disappointment, if it was one, without dressing it in larger clothes than it wore. There was no treasure. There was no hidden island, no rendezvous of pirates, no second word beneath the damp-eaten aqui waiting for a chemist's reagent to raise it into legibility, though I confess I did try a solution of my own devising, one part vinegar and considerable faith, and succeeded only in blurring further what little remained. A man who goes looking for Spanish gold in his uncle's attic and finds instead a lesson in the futility of looking for Spanish gold has, at least, gotten value for his trouble, though it is not the value he priced.

Godofredo, when I told him the map was worthless, received the news with the equanimity of a man for whom worthlessness was simply another figure to be entered in a column, positive or negative according to taste. "The interesting instrument," he said, not looking up from his terminal, where green numbers climbed and fell in a rhythm too fast for any single glance to certify as rising or falling at all, "isn't the map. It's you, holding it up to the light four times in three weeks." I asked what he meant. "You were hoping it would tell you something about Fortunato. It told you nothing. So now you're deciding what to believe instead, and calling the deciding a discovery." A tolerable insight, for a young man; I have noticed that the young, having no history yet to defend, make excellent judges of other people's, though they will grow duller at it, as I have, in proportion to the history they accumulate.

As for Fortunato, he never asked after the map again, which I have entered, for what it is worth, on the side of his acquittal; a guilty man, in my long observation of guilty men — an observation conducted, I grant, from the bench of a court that convenes only in my own skull — a guilty man does not forget so easily what he once wanted badly enough to lie about, even mildly, even in the matter of an old chart's price. But it is equally true, and I set it down with the same hand, that an innocent man forgets more easily still, having nothing to protect by remembering. The two behaviors are, on the outside, indistinguishable; only God, if He keeps ledgers, could tell them apart, and I have my doubts He bothers with sums so small.

I sold the map eventually to Bicudo, for eighteen mil-réis, a figure I record not for its melancholy exactness but because Godofredo's server, in the seconds it took me to pocket the coin, moved sums a thousand times larger, unattended by any hand, decided by no scruple, weighed by no tribunal at all — and it occurred to me, walking home along the Rua do Ouvidor with the coin light in my pocket and the chart lighter still on Bicudo's shelf, that I had spent three weeks prosecuting a case the world had already, everywhere and always, declined to hear.

The reader who wants a verdict on Fortunato Sampaio will have to furnish one himself; I have none to spare, having used my whole stock, as usual, on cases that will not close.