Machado teases his readers, but he also relies on them to be his accomplices; and sometimes he makes our complicity distinctly uncomfortable. In the last story in this volume, “The Tale of the Cabriolet” (1906), a slave arrives at the church of São José in Rio de Janeiro and asks the priest to perform the last rites at a nearby house. The man seems “quite distraught” about the news he is carrying, and the narrator comments:

Anyone reading this with a darkly skeptical soul will inevitably ask if the slave was genuinely upset, or if he simply wanted to pique the curiosity of the priest and the sacristan. I’m of the view that anything is possible in this world and the next. I believe he was genuinely upset, but then again I don’t not believe that he was also eager to tell some terrible tale.

The sacristan in fact spends the rest of the story sniffing out the tale for himself, not because he is a gossip or a meddler but because he loves tales. “With him it was a case of art for art’s sake.” And with us? With Machado himself? Aren’t we looking for tales, terrible or not? How far are we from being upset?

The wit and grace of Machado’s writing never diminish in these stories, and the scene is almost always the same. We are watching the bourgeoisie of Rio Janeiro at play, and occasionally trying to be serious. They misunderstand each other, they get married, they worry about dying, there is the occasional violent murder. Money and the business of keeping up appearances are large questions. The characters read Hugo and Feydeau, Dumas père and Dumas fils, and indeed the general tone is that of nineteenth-century Paris as reconstructed in so many Latin American locations of that time. Machado is gently mocking this class that believes only in borrowed culture, or in what the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz calls “misplaced ideas,” but he is not advocating any kind of nativism.

When the chief character of “The Alienist,” refusing distinguished positions offered to him by the king of Portugal, refers to the Brazilian city of Itaguaí as “my universe,” we laugh because he seems to have made his world so small. But then we may also feel that his grandiose claim for his hometown and the exclusive fascination of others with the culture of Europe are simply rival forms of provincialism. There is a third way. We can take all culture, local and international, as our own, and this is the practice suggested by Machado’s own allusions, as it is by those of Jorge Luis Borges, writing a little later in a neighboring Latin American country. “We cannot confine ourselves to what is Argentine in order to be Argentine,” Borges says, and Machado might add that we don’t have to believe that Paris is the capital of the world in order to read French literature.