Despite his desperate efforts to adapt to life in Rio de Janeiro and his consequent madness, Rubião’s ultimate loyalty is to the real Brazil of the interior. Machado, however, chose Barbacena for specific and important reasons. In Chapter LXXXII, Rubião’s wedding dreams lead him to fantasies of titled nobility, and he selects a title for himself: the Marquis of Barbacena. However, another nobleman associated with Barbacena already existed in Brazilian history—the Viscount of Barbacena, colonial governor of the Province of Minas Gerais who, in 1789, smashed the potential conspiracy against Portuguese rule that is known as the “Inconndencia Mineira.” The accused leader of the conspiracy, the shadowy figure known as Tiradentes, was hanged and quartered in Rio in 1792. The official historiography of the Empire attributed Brazilian independence in 1822 entirely to the Portuguese royal family, but a popular mythology developed around the Inconfidencia and around Tiradentes. When Rubião returns to Barbacena, he wanders endlessly up and down Tiradentes Street, symbolically searching both for his own past and for the nation’s true history. Machado suggests, finally, that the crown of imperial Brazil, like the crown Rubião so carefully and lovingly places on his head at the end of the novel, is not real; it is not even a literary allusion (in this case, tcr the barber’s basin Don Quixote fantasizes as Mambrino’s helmet). Rather, the essence of the Empire—the world in which Machado spent most of his life—is its absolute, irreducible nothingness.

The bitter intensity of this symbolic negation of the Empire leads us back to Araripe Junior’s other perception about Quincas Borba: his description of Rubião as “the stalking-horse for the rage of a philosopher hiding in the bushes.” Rage is, clearly, not too strong a term for Machado’s attitude toward the Empire. It is more difficult to ascertain the source of this virulent hostility. After all, Machado’s is one of the real success stories of imperial Brazil; his books sold well, a high-ranking government job provided financial security, and the Emperor rewarded him with membership in the elite Order of the Rose. Nonetheless, one very plausible explanation of the novelist’s rage can be found in Chapters XLIII through XLVIII, one of the defining moments of Quincas Borba.

Rubião has just left a party at the Palhas’ house after quite violently declaring his love for Sofia, the wife of his host; this declaration is, in fact, the only forceful and fully conscious action Rubião ever takes. Other guests, Major Siqueira and his spinster daughter, Dona Tonica, do not witness the declaration, but they clearly understand what has taken place. Tonica goes home, bitter that one more potential suitor has fallen in love with another woman, and fantasizes about attacking Sofia—strangling her, ripping out her heart. Tonica represses this violence and turns to tears, but the narrator tells us that, just for an instant,“a tiny thread of Caligula,” the monstrous Roman emperor, ran through her soul.

At the same time, Rubião walks down the hill to the center of town, debating what to do next: Should he be loyal to his friend Palha, or should he continue to pursue Sofia? Several horse-drawn cabs are waiting for passengers, and Rubião finds it hard to choose among them—an indecision that reflects his internal debate about his relationship with the Palhas. As the drivers call out to Rubião, Chapter XLVI restates one of Machado’s convictions: powers greater than ourselves, if they in fact exist, care nothing about our existence and our actions and can provide neither help nor guidance.

As Chapter XLVII begins, Rubião does not consciously choose a cab; he simply gets into the closest one. As he tries to avoid thinking about the choice he must make regarding Sofia, he suddenly remembers an incident from his youth. During a previous visit to Rio de Janeiro many years before, he came across a mob watching the execution of a black slave. While such scenes were commonplace in Rio in the nineteenth century, this is virtually the only description of a slave execution in Brazilian literature of the period; it is shocking today, but must have absolutely appalled Machado’s readers in its unexpected revelation of the darkest side of the nation’s life.

Rubião had been alternately attracted and repulsed by the spectacle of the slave execution; he tried to leave, but his feet could not decide in which direction to move. The narrator overtly links Rubião’s past indecision to his uncertainty about which cab to pick and which path to choose with Sofia, and compares Rubião—the friend and disciple of Quincas Borba, a mad philosopher who declared himself the reincarnation of Saint Augustine—to Saint Alypius, Augustine’s closest friend and disciple; Alypius’s weakness, as Augustine describes it in the Confessions, was his love of bloody spectacles.5 Rubião stayed to watch the execution, but then fainted; he appears to lose consciousness in the present as well, suddenly awakened from his memories by the cab driver, who loudly praises his horse and insists that horses—and dogs—are almost human. This observation leads Rubião to embrace the possibility of the transmigration of souls: the soul of the philosopher Quincas Borba may now reside in the body of Quincas Borba the dog. Rubião is so obsessed with this possibility that he forgets to tell the cab driver where he lives.

These chapters reveal a great deal about Machado’s view of the world in which he lived; that view, inevitably, was conditioned by the rage he must have felt, as a descendent of African slaves on his father’s side, at the continuation and omnipresence of slavery in Brazil. The impulse to violence, first, exists in even the meekest and gentlest humans; moral societies restrain that violence and channel it into acceptable outlets. Imperial Brazil, however, like Caligula’s Roman Empire of bloodthirsty circus entertainments, is founded upon the violence of slavery and depends upon that violence for its very existence. The fundamental immorality of Brazilian society, moreover, forces even its most decent citizens to confront painful and morally destructive choices. Educated Brazilians found themselves secretly embarrassed and offended by slavery but unprepared to accept the social and economic consequences of its abolition.

The political system of the Empire that Machado describes and satirizes throughout this novel could not offer a solution, primarily because Pedro II was unable to resolve the dilemma in his own mind, at least until the late 188os. Pedro II, whose illustrious foreign friends implored him to abolish slavery, declared that he was personally opposed to the institution; at the same time, however, he was afraid that to end it would destroy both Brazil’s economy and his family’s rule. The first small step towards abolition, the timid and tentative “Law of the Free Womb,” freeing newborn slaves once they reached the age of twenty-one, was enacted in 1871—the year in which much of the action of Quincas Borba takes place. As he wrote the novel in the 188os, Machado was very much aware that the 1871 law had failed to accomplish even its minimal, temporizing aims.6 The nation’s inability to confront and resolve the issue had ensured the survival of the institution for another seventeen years and had revealed fundamental flaws in the Empire itself. The bifurcation and consequent inertia Rubião experienced at the slave execution parallel his inability, in the novel’s present, to choose between morality and his desire for Sofia; this bifurcation will slowly deepen into schizophrenia and lead inevitably to Rubião’s destruction. In the same way, the fall of the Empire—its glory reduced to the nothingness of a nonexistent crown—can be traced back to the divisive and destructive issue of slavery, an issue that made painfully clear the abyss between image and reality that was, for Machado, the essence of imperial Brazil.

Araripe Júnior’s reading of Quincas Borba not only perceived Machado’s rage, but also described the novelist as “a philosopher hiding in the bushes,” that is, a philosopher who is not prepared to express his ideas openly and whose text is at least potentially a trap for the unwary.