MIDNIGHT MASS (A missa do galo)
by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 1899

"Midnight Mass" ("A missa do galo") is a classic Brazilian short story. Not only is it obligatory reading for any educated person in Brazil, but it also is one of the most anthologized stories since it was first collected in 1899 in Páginas recolhidas. It is a supreme example of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's crafts-manship. The simple plot has intrigued generations, and people sometimes debate whether there was adultery or whether the narrator knew what the woman's intentions toward him were.

One proof of the text's ambiguity is the fact that six celebrated Brazilian writers—Antonio Callado, Autran Dourado, Julieta de Godoy Ladeira, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Nélida Piñon, and Osman Lins—published Missa do galo; variacões sobre o mesmo tema (Midnight Mass: Variations on the Same Theme) in 1977. In this book each writer takes up a different point of view and tells the story again. Still, Machado de Assis's original version remains with all its force.

"Midnight Mass" is narrated by Nogueira, who remembers a Christmas Eve spent in Rio around 1861 or 1862. On this occasion, as is customary, the Catholic Church has a special mass at midnight. The young Nogueira, a student from the provinces then boarding at the notary Menezes's house, stays up late to go to the mass. While he is waiting for a friend to pick him up, the notary's wife, Conceição, keeps him company. Their dialogue never exceeds the confines of what is appropriate. They talk about novels, the characteristics of masses in the provinces and in the big city, and the two engravings she has on the wall.

As any reader of Machado de Assis's fiction knows, however, even as simple an occasion as a seemingly banal conversation between a younger man and an older woman gives rise to all sorts of play between what is said and what is implied. One important thing to consider in the story is its original title, "A missa do galo" (The Rooster's Mass). The Christmas Eve mass is referred to by this name in Portuguese, for a rooster is said to have crowed at midnight, the time Jesus is supposed to have been born. The symbol of the sexually mature rooster as the usher of a new day for Christendom can, of course, be understood in this context as the sign for the birth of the man Nogueira out of the conversation he has with the lonely Conceição, whose husband, it is made clear, has a lover whom he visits constantly.

Because the narrator of the story is a mature Nogueira looking back on that crucial moment of his life, when he was just 17 years old, he can muse about perceptions and understandings that were probably not available to him when the conversation took place. At the time the young Nogueira, however, can feel only the ambiguous vibrations of Conceição's words and his feelings. The older Nogueira can only remark how he never quite understood the conversation: too much time has passed, too many things have changed, and he might misrepresent what happened.

Indeed, representation, misrepresentation, and insinuation are at the center of the story. When Conceição first speaks to Nogueira, he is holding a copy of The Three Musketeers, a favorite with young boys. As the subject wanders to novels, a classic of young women's sentimental fiction, Macedo's The Little Sweetheart, is mentioned. It seems clear that Conceição is inviting Nogueira to grow from adventure stories to love stories, with all this might imply. As Nogueira pretends to resume his reading, Conceição's "chaste disarray" allows him to see parts of her forearms, and when she paces between a window and the door of her husband's study, he notices the rhythm of her body.

The subject then falls on the appropriateness of the engravings on the wall. For Conceição these two pictures, one representing Cleopatra and the other several feminine figures, would be better in a barbershop. She has never been to a barbershop, of course, but she believes that such pictures belong in places like these or in bachelors' quarters. What she would have instead, she says, are pictures of saints. She refers to a statue of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception that stands in her little oratory.

The contrast between what her house displays—two inappropriate pictures of secular women—and the religious icon she has hidden in her room signals the ambiguous nature of the representation of Conceição. In the eyes of the young Nogueira there can be only the Conceição in the flesh, unavoidably associated with the engravings he sees on the wall. Even as she calls his attention to these pictures, however, Conceição assures him of the existence of another, hidden, immaculate conception.

The two do not even touch. Nogueira's friend knocks at the window at the appointed hour, and they go to the midnight mass, the mass of the rooster. After he returns to his parents' house, Nogueira's life continues without incident. The news that the notary Menezes has died and that Conceição has married her husband's apprentice is given in the last lines of the story. Nogueira does not comment on this news, and he also abstains from analyzing the nature of the feelings the news produces in him. Desire, in the form both of the young Nogueira's nascent sexuality and of the mature Nogueira's longing for a magical moment in his youth, cannot be represented as such. What the reader is left with is the representation of its impossibility, personified on a night shortly before the rooster crowed.

—Eva Paulino Bueno