The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil by Machado de Assis

bags at once. She asked for her brother-in-law to go with her and for me to take care of the estate in her absence. I believe that, had she not been so upset, she would have done the opposite, asking him to take care of the estate and me to go with her. As it was, I soon found myself alone with the household servants. Immediately I felt panicked, as if the walls of a prison had risen around me on all sides. My external soul was contracting, you see, limited now to the presence of a few simple slaves. The lieutenant still dominated in me, but my entire being had grown weaker and less intense. Meanwhile, the slaves addressed me with an admiration and humility that compensated, somewhat, for the loss of family affection. That evening, they fussed over me endlessly. ‘Mister lieutenant is so handsome!’ ‘Mister lieutenant is going to be a colonel and marry a general’s daughter.’ … It was music to my ears. I was ecstatic. But little did I suspect their evil intentions, the traitors!”
    “To kill you?”
    “If only it had been that.”
    “What could be worse?”
    “Just listen. The next morning I awoke to find myself alone . The scheming traitors, whether of their own accord or seduced by someone else, had decided to run away during the night, and that’s what they did. I found myself utterly alone, staring at the four walls of the house, the deserted outbuildings, and the fields beyond, with not a soul in sight. I ran through the house and the slave quarters, everywhere, and saw nothing, nobody, not a living soul. Not even a little slave kid. No, only cocks and hens, a couple of mules philosophically twitching away flies, and three oxen. Even the dogs had gone with the slaves. Not a single human being. Do you think that was better than being killed? It was worse. Not because of fear, though. I was plucky enough to feel no fear, I swear to you, during the first hours. I felt bad for Aunt Marcolina’s financial loss, and I wondered whether I should deliver the sad news to her immediately or stay with the house and take care of it. I adopted the latter plan. My cousin was seriously ill just now. Why should I burden her mother with this further catastrophe that she could do nothing about? And anyway, I expected the return of Uncle Peçanha’s brother that day or the next. He had traveled merely to accompany my aunt, and they had been gone already thirty-six hours. But the morning went by without a trace of him, and in the afternoon I was troubled by an odd sensation, something like a vague numbness affecting my entire body. Peçanha’s brother did not appear that day, nor the next, nor for the rest of that week. My solitude assumed enormous proportions. Days were never longer. Never did the sun scorch the earth with a more grueling obstinacy. The clock struck the hour regularly every century it seemed, and the tick-tock, tick-tock of its pendulum tapped at my internal soul like an eternal torment. When, many years later, I read an American poem, by Longfellow I think, ‘The Old Clock on the Stair,’ I confess that I got chills. The pendulum in the poem says ‘Never, forever / Forever, never,’ and that’s just what Aunt Marcolina’s clock said. It wasn’t so much the sound of a pendulum as a dialog in the abyss. The whisper of the void. And, oh, the night! Not that the night was more silent. The silence was the same, day and night. Night was shadow, and the dark made the loneliness simultaneously vaster and more constricted. Tick-tock. No one in the sitting room, or on the veranda, or outside, no one anywhere. … Do you think this is funny?”
    “It sounds as though you were a little frightened.”
    “How I wish I could have been frightened! At least I would have felt alive. In that situation, though, I couldn’t even feel fear, not what people usually call fear, anyway. I was like a zombie, a sleepwalker, a mechanical doll. Sleeping was entirely different from waking, though. Sleep brought relief, and not