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

Author:Machado de Assis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Hackett Publishing Co.
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

FATHER AGAINST MOTHER

We come at last to a story by Machado de Assis in which a slave plays a central role: “Pai contra mãe.” Even in this story, the slave catcher is the protagonist, although not because the author has any liking for him. Cándido, a good-natured good-for-nothing, is the father of the title. The mother is the escaped slave Arminda, who is pregnant when Cándido catches her. Cándido and his wife, Clara, another seamstress, are threatened with the loss of their newborn son, whom they may have to leave in something called the “foundling’s wheel,” which is a small rotating door to a convent, where nuns would find the infant and care for it as an orphan. The story was published in 1906, shortly before the author’s death, and, unlike the enormous majority of his stories, this one did not appear first in the newspaper. It was written well after the abolition of slavery, when slaves had not been numerous for decades. Improvidence and debt are on the prowl again in this second story about life among the not-so-rich majority in nineteenth-century Rio. But the great evil here is unmistakably slavery itself. There is a powerful sense, in this story, that the author is saying things he often would have liked to say in the past. And this time, quite unusually, the narrator is none other than Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis himself, more or less unmediated and in person.

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