Midnight Mass
About this story
On a sleepless Christmas Eve, a seventeen-year-old boy waiting to leave for midnight mass falls into a long, murmured conversation with Conceição, his host's thirty-year-old wife. Nothing happens — and everything trembles beneath the surface. In this masterclass of ambiguity, Machado de Assis, the greatest of Brazilian writers and founding president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, turns a single midnight exchange into an inexhaustible study of desire, innocence, and the unsaid. One of the most anthologized stories in the Portuguese language, 'Missa do Galo' proves why its author ranks among the supreme ironists of world literature. Read it once for the story; read it again for everything it refuses to tell you.
By the numbers
About the author
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely regarded as the greatest Brazilian writer and the founder and first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. A self-taught son of a poor mixed-race family in Rio de Janeiro, he transformed Brazilian fiction with a mordant irony and psychological subtlety that anticipated literary modernism. His major novels — Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), Quincas Borba (1891) and Dom Casmurro (1899) — sit alongside a body of short stories, including 'O Alienista' and 'A Cartomante', that are pillars of the language. 'Missa do Galo', collected in Páginas Recolhidas (1899), is among his most celebrated and endlessly anthologized tales, a masterclass in ambiguity and the unsaid.
Recognition
It is one of the best stories Machado ever wrote; the analysis of desire is carried out with a delicate acuity that is rarely seen.
A supreme example of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's craftsmanship... a classic Brazilian short story, obligatory reading for any educated person in Brazil, and one of the most anthologized stories since it was first collected in 1899.
We are struck by the discursive density of Machado de Assis, who in this story reveals himself (once again) a profound connoisseur of the secrets of the human soul.
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