THE LAST JUDGEMENT

ON MACHADO DE ASSIS & JAVIER MARÍAS

My parents were friends with this couple, let’s call them Guy and Debby. Guy is a classic Steubenville character. He was a trash baby (disposed of literally into a dumpster where his adoptive parents found him), and bootstrap raised himself—if you hear him tell it—from sweeping streets for 20 cents to owning a million dollar business. 

But of course, being a trash baby can leave a spiritual blight. A severe wound he tourniquets by blowing 200 grand at the casino; buying myriad Corvettes; throwing big parties filled with moochers drinking his lavishly expensive whiskey; one time he even gave 100 grand to a guy who was an extra in the Sopranos to write a screenplay about Steubenville (doesn’t appear as if a screenplay is forthcoming). Needless to say, everyone thinks he’s a wonderful dude.

He was 21 when he met Debby. She was 14. He basically gave her mother 500 bucks for her. Debby had an incredibly difficult childhood. Like harder than you’re thinking: her tyrannical father ended up murdering her brother and got life in prison. Debby was my mom’s best friend. And, though I’m skeptical of hagiography, as long as I knew her I’d be hard-pressed to pin some moral failing on her. She was wonderful. 

So we’ve always had an inkling that Guy was a pervert. One time Debby caught him watching some nasty porn, and he said he was just watching it cause there was a couch in the video he wanted to buy. Also, due to the downstream effects of being a trash baby, for him to go to sleep, he had to latch on tightly to Debby’s breast; like tighter than you’re imagining: one night he popped her implant. I would maybe hesitate to share this lurid detail if I hadn’t already told everybody. It’s a joke between me and my girlfriend if I grip her too hard she goes, “you’re being like Guy.”

I’ll cut to the chase. One day, Debby was sent five videos. Two of them were front facing, Guy talking into the camera saying shit akin to: “What a wonderful night! WOW! Cindy’s lips. All I’m thinking of are Cindy’s lips!” Smoochyfacing the camera. He’s 76 years old, and the front facing video message is a youngster’s medium, so the whole scene had a geriatric uncanniness. 

The other three videos were much worse. They were of Guy getting his dick sucked by the aforementioned Cindy (of the luscious lips), then penetrating her vaginally, and finally, penetrating her anally. 

Now this Cindy was a friend of Debby’s. From what we know about the timeline of the affair, Debby was in the hospital recovering from heart surgery (she chainsmoked most of her life), and Cindy—who owns a convenient store—came over to her house to drop off some food. Guy was there. They started banging. 

Now, Guy was, by all indications, a horrorshow husband. But one thing Debby firmly believed in was his fidelity. In the narrative she’d fashioned of their relationship the one thing she couldn’t tolerate was his cheating and she was willing to ignore any hearsay that’d undermine her story. But the visual proof was too much to ignore. 

Can you imagine the feeling of betrayal? You’re with somebody for 60 years putting up with shit piled on shit for their sake and for the sake of your children, and you find out this motherfucker was waking up at 4:30 in the morning under the guise of heading to work early but instead driving over to the convenient store to go into the storage room and fuck your supposed friend in the ass with a dick (if reports can be trusted) that’s not even fully hard and then doting on this woman and sending her large amounts of cash (50-100 thousand) when both of you know you can’t afford it cause you’re in the hole with the IRS cause his stupid ass can’t stop gambling and buying Corvettes. 

Debby left him. At least she had that last push of agency. He begged her to come back and she refused. But she started smoking hard again when she wasn’t supposed to. And she ended up dying about a year later. She wanted to tell me the whole story of her life, especially everything about her whole life with Guy without skimping on a detail. I was too slow to get it, though. I thought she would last longer. 

At her funeral, his phone rang twice. His ringtone was “Bad to the Bone.”

You can see Guy driving his brand new red Corvette around Steubenville right now; a Corvette he bought, it can reasonably be deduced, with the life insurance money paid on Debby’s death. 

Why did I tell you this story?

After all, Javier Marías opens up his magnificent three volume novel Your Face Tomorrow with the admonishment, “One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories…Keep quiet, and save yourself.” 

As a self-flagellating incontinent sieve myself, I picked up this book cause of this warning. I have gotten myself in trouble many times by passing on information I shouldn’t have passed on. Because I’m obsessed with the luridity of gossip. Or for some self-captivated yearning to have my narrative recognized when all I’m doing is spreading poison.

Your Face Tomorrow is about the spread of poison. Jacques Deza is an innocent language professor that gets involved with a British intelligence agency and over the course of 1200 pages everything he says and sees and hears slowly poisons him and by the end of the book he has direct and indirect blood on his hands.

Of all the many things Your Face Tomorrow is about: storytelling, interpretation, betrayal; there’s one theme that’s always lurking in the background. Judgment.

My mom blames Guy for killing her best friend. She also blames Cindy’s husband for sending those videos. For exposing Debby to the poison. For a while there was a billboard Guy put up, right before you turn on Route 7 to go to Wheeling. It said, “smoking kills” with some weird tasteless image of somebody on fire and Debby’s initials. My mom would get so irate driving by it she would cry. I always tell her that being Guy is its own punishment. 

I’m not sure that’s true. And I wish I could console her by appealing to the Final Judgment. 

Because Debby might not get justice in this, 

stubborn, unequal world, not in its unchanging order which I cannot alter and which causes me such harm, not in the skewed harmony that governs it and that is already digging my grave in order to drive me out early; but in the other world I will, when time comes to an end and we are all gathered together, all invited, without exception, to the great dance of suffering and contentment, and I will be told that I was right and will be rewarded by that Judge to whom one cannot lie because he knows already what went wrong…

I think that’s the most delicious consolation of Christianity: true Judgment. Not this bullshit earthly excuse for justice, verdicted by foiblefilled fuckers. It would be worth any amount of time and suffering to get to the end and have someone indisputable tell you if you were right or wrong. To truly take you to task for your sins and your virtues. 

It’s infernal to be stuck here in the subjectivity of my narrative. I think I am living right, speaking right, doing right. And I am likely sorely mistaken. But there won’t ever be any true confirmation of that. Like with Guy. There’s no force on earth that will convince him that he was an evil dude because, 

what merely happens to us barely affects us, or at least, no more than what does not happen, but it is the story (the story of what does not happen, too), which however imprecise, treacherous, approximate and downright useless, is nevertheless the only thing that counts, is the decisive factor, it is what troubles our soul and diverts and poisons our footsteps, it is doubtless also what keeps the weak lazy wheel of the world turning.

The story. Everything is a story and you can never fucking escape that. That’s why Marías thinks silence is the truth. After the squabbly chittery chattery scoresettling last day of time all that will remain will be silence. Truth. 

Alongside Marías, I’ve been rereading the great master of exploring the subtleties of the self-narrative: Machado de Assis. 

Machado is Brasil’s most canonical writer and its second best (behind João Guimarães Rosa). Him and Marías both got the same translator, the epic Margaret Jull Costa, and they’re both obsessed with Tristram Shandy (Marías actually translated it into Spanish when he was 25) which means they’re both digressive and funny (Machado much more so than Marías who is funny in a British and aristocratic way). 

Here’s the opening sentence of Tristram Shandy which gives you an idea of the tone:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;——Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,——I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

Tristram Shandy is funny I swear but it takes a lot of fucking work to figure that out. Less so with Machado. We get that right from the dedication of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas:

To the first worm to gnaw the cold flesh of my corpse I tenderly dedicate these posthumous memoirs.

Just to tell you the grip Machado has on Brasil, earlier this year reading that dedication in various brasilian accents went viral on TikTok. 

He’s a pretty stunning 19th century figure. He was born in Rio de Janeiro, the grandson of freed slaves. His dad was a painter and his mom was a washerwoman. After his mom died, his dad remarried and his stepmom made candles for a girl’s only school and they let Machado take classes there. He did not have much serious formal education. Poor and sickly (epileptic), he grinded for his knowledge wherever he could find it. He ended up learning to read in Latin, French, German, English, and Greek. He published his most famous book in 1881. He was the grandson of slaves and the most popular writer in a country while slavery was still legal. 

The protagonists of his best work: the trilogy of Brás Cubas, Quincas Borba, and Dom Casmurro are not scroungy low-crust hustlers. They are people to whom everything has been given, and they proceed to ruin their lives because of the narrative they self-fashion. 

Early on in Brás Cubas, Brás’s father warns him,

I didn’t invest all that money, time, and effort in order for you not to shine as you should and as befits both you and us. You must carry on the family name and add still more luster… Fear obscurity Brás, and flee the second-rate! There are many different ways to make your mark, but the surest of these is by gaining the favor of your fellow man. Don’t underestimate the advantage of your social position, your financial resources…

Sure Brás might fear obscurity and the second rate, but he don’t do nothing about it. He twiddles his thumbs and totters and dawdles. 

The central experience of his life is an affair he carries on with his childhood love Virgilia who is married to a friend of his Lobo Neves (another example of the cultural  prominence of Machado in Brasil: if someone tells you something you been knowing, you could say “valeu Neves but you’re the last to know” cause Neves was the last to know of the affair). 

It takes literal death for Brás Cubas to finally be productive; he writes this memoir from beyond the grave. 

There’s an implacable saudade in Machado. Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro give outsized space in both the stories to childhood. Childhood is an expansive wonderland and adulthood and age creep in to ruin it and accelerate rapidly to the destitute wasteland of middle age. The reason childhood is so important is because it’s all potential. And all these guys have is potential. They’re coddled with their options. And they squander everything by being their own worst enemies. 

Like, young Cubas is crazy about this neighbor girl Eugenia. Until he finds out that she has a limp. And he conceives of himself as somebody perfect, somebody that would never be with somebody lame. When he gets the news of her death later on (cause everybody dies in a Machado novel) he says, 

You dear Eugenia… walked down the path of life, lame in one leg and lame in love, as sad as a pauper’s funeral, solitary, silent, slow, until you too crossed over to this other shore… What I don’t know is this: Was your existence really necessary to the century? Who knows? Perhaps the human tragedy would have proved a complete flop had it not included your walk on part.

Brás Cubas questions her necessity because he takes his own necessity for granted; the human tragedy he mentions is his life. She has a walk-on part in his life, and that’s the only reason she matters, however so slightly. He don’t realize that this shortsightedness—this lameness of soul—is his doom. 

There’s a dark pessimism sprouting beneath the humor and playfulness of Machado’s great novels. Like check the ending of Brás Cubas:

For on reaching the far side of live’s mystery, I found myself with a small positive balance, which is the final negative in this chapter of negatives: I did not have children, and thus did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our misery.

The matter of whether Dom Casumurro’s narrator Bentinho bequeathed our legacy of misery onto any creature is the central problem of that book. 

Bentinho thinks his childhood love, Capitu, fathered a child with his best friend, Escobar. What Bentinho cannot handle is Capitu’s “sly and oblique eyes”, the life she’s living away from his control, in her mind. The same thing was Adam and God’s frustration with Eve and Othello’s with Desdemona. The possibility that something is happening that you’re not privy to. And Bentinho spins himself a reckless yarn. 

As a kid all he wanted was to be Capitu’s husband, which he got. As a man all he wanted was a child, which he got. But he convinces himself that the child is not his and that his wife is not really his. He has everything he wants but he convinces himself it’s all an illusion. 

I think the kid is Bentinho’s. But it don’t really matter. Bentinho could’ve chosen to be happy. But instead he writes this whole novel convincing himself of Capitu’s guilt. The whole world becomes Iago, whispering poison into his ear. And he becomes the grim-moody-stubborn, the casmurro of the title, trapped in the amber of saudade. 

Dom Casmurro also ends on the matter of sums:

One thing remains and that is the sum of sums, or the residue of residues which is that my first love and my closest friend, both of them so loving and also so beloved by me, were destined to come together and deceive me.

What Brás and Bentinho and Rubião (the protagonist of Quincas Borba) don’t understand is that the world dropped unlimited potential and possibility onto their lap, and they squandered it not because of bad luck or exterior circumstances, but because they fell in love with the wrong narrative, they could never look at themselves clearly in a truthful mirror and it was their doom; which is why I think Machado’s ostensible melancholy pessimism is actually an excoriating class critique and a form of optimism; he makes us look at these people who ruined their own lives (and makes us look at them with supreme empathy and tenderness, wrong as they are) thru their own free choice. To believe in freedom to that extent is invigorating. You can fashion your narrative in a way that’s a boon to yourself and the people around you. 

But there is a problem, also, in evaluating ourselves too clearly, too stringently; maybe it’s good that there is no inarguable judge cause we might not be able to handle his verdict. At the end of Your Face Tomorrow Jacques Deza goes to see his old friend, a 90 year old British professor, Peter Wheeler, who got him the job in the Intelligence organization. Jacques is feeling bad cause he just beat up his ex-wife’s new boyfriend and he found out information he gave out probably got an innocent someone killed. 

And that’s when this Peter Wheeler finally tells Jacques the story of how his wife, Valerie, died. When she was a kid, she spent her summers in Germany with a family there that she became very close to. WW2 breaks out and she starts working as a spy cause her German is so crisp. So she’s best friends with this girl Isle. Her and Isle maintain contact. Isle is married to an SS officer and she tells Valerie that this man has a Jewish grandparent and that he forged documents to cover that up. Valerie, reports this information. Himmler is incensed of course and makes an example out of him. The officer, Isle, and their two daughters are sent to a concentration camp. Their son survives because he wasn’t home that day. 

Valerie doesn’t know any of this. After the war, Isle’s sister sends her a letter saying that she needs money for the orphaned boy and that her sister is probably dead and she says, “I just don’t know what happened”. Valerie knows what happened. They’re dead because of her, and she can’t live with herself. She’s having nightmares and insomnia. One night she tells her husband to go sleep in another room, cause then he’ll be able to rest. And he thinks it’s a nice gesture, but he gets up in the middle of the night feeling eerie and he goes out into the hallway where he witnesses Valerie’s suicide. 

Basically, Peter tells Jacques this story to say: you don’t have these kind of stringent compunctions, you’ll be able to live with what you did. So maybe it is better that there won’t be a final judgment, that we are our own judges. 

I think both Marías and Machado have the appropriate cosmic view of how we matter. This is how Machado ends Quincas Borba:

Enough! If you have tears, then weep for the two most recent dead. If you have only laughter, then laugh! It comes to the same thing. The Southern Cross on which the lovely Sofia refused to gaze, as Rubião asked her to, is high enough above us to notice neither the laughter nor the tears of we humans.

We are not being watched by an all-seeing all-honest judge. We are our own judges. It is far from meaningless. Take it very seriously. Be careful with the stories you tell about yourself and others. And sometimes don’t say shit. 

Guy might never get his due comeuppance, but fuck him, that ain’t our business.