Tatters of Reality

PHILOSOPHER OR DOG? (271 pp.)--Machado de Assis, translated from the Portuguese by Clotilde Wilson--Noonday Press ($3.50).

What is reality? The question has furrowed the higher brows from Sophocles and Heraclitus to Pirandello and John Dewey. To Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, who produced the best in 19th century Brazilian literature, the "problem of reality" was not just a metaphysical "What is it?" The problem was a practical "Can you take it?" In Philosopher or Dog?, the third of his novels to be published in English, Author Machado tells what happens to a man who can't take it.

In a sense Rubiao is killed with kindness. There he is, an average young fellow minding his own business in a little up-country town in Brazil, when all at once a silly old noodle of his acquaintance, a pseudo-philosopher named Quincas Borba, dies and leaves him an immense fortune on the sole condition that he look after a dog, also named Quincas Borba. Rubiao exuberantly grabs the money and the dog, goes flying down to Rio.

Stocks & Solitaires. What does he encounter on the way but a "pair of tender eyes which seemed to repeat the prophet's exhortation, 'Ho, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.' " The trouble is, Sophia is already married to Christiano, an amiable young businessman whose soul, alas, "is a patchwork quilt." Though he would kill the man who touched his wife, Christiano is flattered when men try. This suits Sophia, a flirt with "an intuitive appreciation of solitaires." It also suits Rubiao. To keep his welcome sweet at Christiano's, he lends the fellow money and even backs him in business. But when Rubiao asks Sophia for a return on his investment, he gets a haughty eyebrow.

Downcast, he takes consolation in politics under the tutelage of a wonderful figure of fun, an editorial bull-roarer called Camacho, from whose lips "anathemas were springing . . . as from the lips of Isaiah; the triumphal palms were turning green in his hands. Every gesture seemed a principle. When he opened his arms, striking the air, it was as though an entire program were unfolding." Rubiao, the gullible incomepoop, throws good money after bad journalism, and begins to dream of a seat in the Chamber of Deputies.

A Crown of Nothing. These hopes blasted too, Rubiao decides that he has had enough of reality. He takes to sulking at home and dining a crew of worthless pickthanks who steal his cigars and tell him what he wants to hear. After some months of "conversing with his buttons," he begins to get peculiar notions. One day he buys a bust of Napoleon and another of Louis Napoleon. Pretty soon he has his beard barbered like Louis Napoleon's. "Wait," he murmurs to Sophia, "I shall still make you Empress." His cronies become marshals, his hens pheasants. In the end, both reason and money are exhausted. Rubiao crowns himself Emperor: "He picked up nothing and encircled his head with it . . . 'Take care of my crown,' he murmured." Then he dies in squalor.

The irony goes deep--deeper sometimes than the author can smelt it. Machado was occasionally a careless workman: his characters often come tumbling into view piecemeal--so many arms, fears, eyes, legs, longings, that the reader must assemble them as he can. The symbolism of the dog with the same name as his late master is soggy, and gets worked for more than it is worth--Machado seems to be saying that along with the old man's money and dog, Rubiao inherited his fatuity. Still, as the author says at one point in the book, "It's quite an accomplishment, after all, just to put together the tatters of reality."

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