Roberto Schwarz calls the story “How to Be a Bigwig,” first published in 1881, “the key to [Machado’s] mature satirical style.” This story has no apparent darkness, and the reader’s role is essential. The work is pure dialogue, so we don’t even have Machado’s narrator as an unreliable playmate or misinformant. A father decides to have a chat with his son, who has just turned twenty-one. The boy has “a private income and a college degree,” he could do almost anything. “[P]olitics, the law, journalism, farming, industry, commerce, literature, or the arts” all await him if he wants them. Whichever he chooses, the father says, he will need a very particular second career, “just in case the others fail entirely, or do not quite meet [your] ambitions.” This career is that of a bigwig. The boy doesn’t understand, and the father explains. The bigwig is a man of “measure and reason,” who fits the role so perfectly because he has nothing in his mind that might compete with the steady, empty gravity of his comportment. There are people who have ideas and conceal them, but it is far better, the father says, to have no ideas at all, and he finds in his son “the perfect degree of mental vacuity required by such a noble profession.” It is important to waste a lot of time in the company of others, because “solitude is the workshop of ideas.” A good habit is to go into bookstores to chat, rather than to read or buy anything, and a proper mastery of clichés is invaluable. “Publicity” is to be wooed, the young man’s future speeches are to be packed with ready-made phrases, and above all, the father says, “whatever you do, never go beyond the boundaries of enviable triteness.” He adds, “I forbid you to arrive at any conclusions that have not already been reached by others.” The son thinks this is all going to be quite difficult, and the father agrees. The father, very pleased with himself, compares the advice he has just given to his son with Machiavelli’s instructions in The Prince.