Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

by Machado de Assis

Serious people will doubtless feel that the book bears all the hallmarks of a run-of-the-mill novel, while frivolous people will fail to find any of the qualities they have come to expect in a novel; it will thus win neither the respect of the serious nor the love of the frivolous, the two main pillars of popular opinion.

The book is sufficient unto itself: if you like it, dear reader, that is reward enough; if you do not, I reward you with a dismissive snap of my fingers, and bid you good riddance.

I sit midway between the poet and the historian.

I was a handsome lad, handsome and bold, who rode into life wearing boots and spurs, whip in hand and blood in his veins, mounted on a swift, strong, skittish steed, just like a steed out of an old ballad, the kind the Romantics went looking for in a medieval castle, only to find it here in the streets of our own century. The trouble is, they rode the horse too hard, and, in the end, abandoned it by the roadside, where it was found by the realists, so eaten away by hunger and worms that, out of pity, they carried the beast off into their own novels.

But the book is tedious and has a whiff of the grave about it, a certain rigor mortis, which is a serious defect and yet a trifling one too, because the main problem with this book is you, the reader. You’re in a hurry to get old, and the book progresses slowly; you love direct, sustained narrative, a regular, fluid style, whereas this book and my style are like a pair of drunkards: they stagger left and right, start and stop, mumble, yell, roar with laughter, shake their fists at the heavens, then stumble and fall . . . And fall! Miserable leaves of my graveyard cypress, you, too, will fall, just like other showier, more beautiful leaves; if I still had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. This is the great advantage of death: while it leaves no mouth to laugh with, it leaves no eyes to weep with either. You, too, will fall.

We kill time; time buries us.