DOM CASMURRO, a title of some peculiarity even for the Brazilian reader, is nevertheless a suitable entrance to the richly ironic landscape of the fiction of Machado de Assis. We learn in the early pages of the novel that the title is only a nickname bestowed by a disgruntled petitioner.Dom immediately suggests the royal family, since it is the designation of the emperor, Dom Pedro II.Casmurro is defined by the narrator as a ‘morose, tight-lipped man, withdrawn into himself’. The narrator is in fact named Bento Santiago, familiarly called ‘Bentinho’, and it is he who writes of his woeful life and love.
Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839 and is one of those unaccountable talents which appear as they will, tossed up by the winds of chance, that benign, wayward blow that recklessly deposits the artists of the world on highways and byways. Yet Machado does not appear without preparation in the manner of a primitive genius, since he is very much a self-taught product of world culture, as his sly metaphors for the citizens of Rio and environs indicate on almost every page. His characters are provincial philosophers, relentlessly introspective, and likely to see themselves in a tormenting jealousy as Othello, or in madness to send forth a letter announcing, ‘I am St Augustine. I found it out day before yesterday … Everything in our lives coincides.’
Machado’s beginnings were unpromising in the extreme. His father was a mulatto born of freed slaves. Slavery in Brazil was not abolished until 1888, some fifty years after Machado’s birth. In his fiction there are references to people in the countryside having or selling their slaves, references that might appear very casual and offhand to a North American. Although slavery is slavery, the relations between blacks and whites were, according to the distinguished historian Gilberto Freyre and others, of a notable intimacy and relaxation – class rather than colour defining the social situation of mulattoes. Still, Machado’s father was a poor housepainter, as far as we know, and his mother was Spanish, from the Azores. Both parents died when the author was quite young, and he was early on his own. A wealthy and cultivated godmother took an interest in him and he perhaps thereby gained a knowledge of the ways of the world. French he is said to have learnt from a neighbourhood baker.
In addition to having a rather unprotected status in the hierarchical intellectual world of Portuguese colonialism, the future author had abominable health. He seems to have suffered from epilepsy, myopia and general bodily weakness. This storm of afflictions brings to mind the fate of the great Brazilian sculptor, Aleijadinho, born a century earlier, whose carvings of religious figures in the churches of Ouro Prêto are among the nation’s outstanding treasures. Aleijadinho, known as ‘the little cripple’, was maimed in hands and feet. In any case, the sickly Machado was enormously productive. He began his career in his teens with the publication of a poem. Subsequently, he worked as a journalist and wrote stories, plays and novels, the most important of which areDom Casmurro, Epitaph of a Small Winner, andPhilosopher or Dog? Along the way, he was appointed to a position in the Ministry of Agriculture, one of those sinecures, if that is what it was, offered to impecunious talents, like Hawthorne at his post in the Boston Customs House.
Bentinho Santiago inDom Casmurro will write his life backward with the same reflective strategy used inEpitaph of a Small Winn
