Guillotine and slavery
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a aria de Abel, os córos da guilhotina e da escravidão.
the aria of Abel, the choruses of the guillotine and of slavery.
The program runs from Genesis to the Terror to the slave-ship.
The program continues: Abel's aria, then the choruses of the guillotine and of slavery. Machado runs the opera from Genesis to the Terror to the slave-ship, human history as a sequence of numbers, and the juxtaposition — an aria for the first murder, a chorus for the auction block — is coolly savage.
The 1899 reader felt the last item closely; abolition was eleven years old. By placing 'escravidão' in the same casual list as Eden and Abel, the narrator both universalizes atrocity and disarms it into entertainment. It is Machado's method exactly: the gravest matters delivered in the lightest tone, so the horror arrives only once you have stopped laughing.
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