In “Father Against Mother,” first published in 1905, near the end of Machado’s life, the stage belongs not to the bourgeoisie but to a lower social sector, that of a man who has been a clerk in a store, a bookkeeper to a notary, an office boy, and a postman, and is now a slave catcher. This was “one of the trades of the time,” the narrator says, and of course “not . . . a very noble profession.” This understatement has considerable force because the story has already informed us in some detail about “certain . . . implements” of slavery:

There was the neck iron, the leg iron, and the iron muzzle. The muzzle covered the mouth as a way of putting a stop to the vice of drunkenness among slaves. It had only three holes, two to see through and one to breathe through, and was fastened at the back of the head with a padlock.

Nothing very noble here, just ingenious mechanical cruelty. The idea of putting a stop to vice must be rank hypocrisy, but Machado continues to imitate the voice of moral piety:

[T]he muzzle also did away with the temptation to steal, because slaves tended to steal their master’s money in order to slake their thirst, and thus two grave sins were abolished, and sobriety and honesty saved. The muzzle was a grotesque thing, but then human and social order cannot always be achieved without the grotesque, or, indeed, without occasional acts of cruelty.

The same tone is present when the narrator remarks that slave catchers are “helping the forces who defend the law and private property,” and that their trade therefore may be said to have “a different sort of nobility, the kind implicit in retrieving what is lost.”

Slavery was finally abolished in Brazil in 1888, by which time Machado had published four of his seven volumes of stories. The slave trade itself had ended in 1850. Slaves are everywhere in these works, a fact of life, and not often commented on. We can be sure Machado has little sympathy for the woman who complains of her “feckless slaves,” or the man who alternately smashes plates over his slaves’ heads and calls them by “the sweetest, most endearing names.” There is a slave who is “more brother than slave as regards devotion and affection.” But generally the slaves are just slaves, part of a subjugated work force taken for granted. Is Machado endorsing the institution of slavery? No, he is evoking a world and leaving the judgment of that world to the reader’s conscience. And in “Father Against Mother” he is slyly hoping we will not share the opinions offered.