Counselor Ayres' Memorial

By Joaquim M. Machado de Assis

"A small masterwork, freshly translated , by one of the great novelists of the 19th century. A retired Brazilian diplomat (Ayres) recounts the love affair of a young widow who would rather be faithful to her dead Romeo. How she rejoins the world of the living, rekindling Ayres' spirit as well, is told with muted allusions to Brazil's plantation life and its emancipation of the slaves." --Chicago Tribune   "This novel first appeared in 1908 , the year of Machado de Assi s' death . . It is a mild story, mildly told with a muted form of irony . . it is without self-pity, an elegiac book . . . unmistakably the work of a masterful writer." --Kirkus Reviews   "Packed with wit, with compassion, with valiant self-knowledge. It is an experience I urge you to undertake." --Cleveland Plain Dealer   "A novel as ironic as any of Machado's earlier fiction, but with a new sense of ripeness and tender regard for those whom life tries and tests. It is a last fitting monument to the art of Machado de Assis." --Nation

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.
"A small masterwork, freshly translated , by one of the great novelists of the 19th century. A retired Brazilian diplomat (Ayres) recounts the love affair of a young widow who would rather be faithful to her dead Romeo. How she rejoins the world of the li

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520341326

Joaquim M. Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (21 June 1839 – 29 September 1908), was a Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer. Helen Caldwell is a scholar and Brazilianist from California. Her work focuses on the 19th century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis.

Book preview

COUNSELOR AYRES’ MEMORIAL

COUNSELOR

AYRES’ MEMORIAL

BY MACHADO DE ASSIS

TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY

HELEN CALDWELL

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1972 by The Regents of the University of California

First Paperback Printing 1982

ISBN 0-520-04775-3

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-187876

Designed by Dave Pauly

Printed in the United States of America

Note: The translation is based on an undated Garnier edition (Imprimerie P. Mouillot) with corrections in accordance with the manuscript belonging to the Academia Brasileira de Letras.

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Translator’s Introduction

Memorial de Ayres, which means both Ayres’ memorial (of and to himself) and Ayres’ notebook or diary, was Machado de Assis’ last novel, published a few months before his death in 1908.

In this work Machado de Assis not only allows the old charmer Ayres to display his own amusing psyche and the equally amusing psyches of friends and acquaintances but also to spin out a lighthearted love story for a charming widow. It is all limpid prose tissued of gentle wit and humor. And yet this novel involves two mysteries: one has often been commented upon; the other, I believe, has never been noticed.

The first mystery concerns the novel’s final manuscript—the one sent to the printer—which is written entirely in Machado de Assis’ hand. The strange thing about it is that the two main female characters, Carmo and Fidelia, were frequently written one for the other, then crossed out and corrected. No less than ninety-eight times Fidelia was first written, then crossed and Carmo written above or below the line. Conversely, Carmo was crossed eighty-eight times and Fidelia written in its stead. The mystery is increased by the fact that the character Carmo is, as Machado de Assis himself admitted, a portrait of his dead wife, Carolina. What relation, one asks, is Fidelia to Carmo? what relation to the real Carolina?

Carmo, the loving old wife, with her devoted husband Aguiar (presumably Machado de Assis), serves as a guiding star to the retired diplomat Ayres in his search for his identity, his wholeness. The ‘memorial" commemorates this venture. As he jots down the happenings around him in Rio de Janeiro, Ayres reveals his own regeneration as a human being—his heart’s progress toward love, not of any one person but of all persons. Retirement, he writes, has restored him to himself. And his emancipation from the petty deceits and cynicism of his diplomatic career is reflected in Brazil’s actual emancipation of the slaves (proclaimed during the course of the novel, 13 May 1888). Slavery and abolition keep appearing in Ayres’ diary as brief prose poems, passages that for perfection of form, dramatic shifts in emotion, and the placing of great opposites in small compass, remind one of lyrics by Catullus.

For example: The young heroine Fidelia, daughter of the plantation owner Baron de Santa-Pia, is endowed with all the virtues, physical and spiritual. She has beauty, intelligence, artistic talent, kindness, affection, loyalty—everything; she is cultivated and elegant. But, as the canny old diplomat plainly perceives, the roots of this exquisite flower have been nourished by the sweat and ignorance of slaves. He further understands that she has the potentialities for running a plantation: will, a genius for order, the ability to command, and lastly her charm itself. After abolition she inherits her father’s plantation with its recently freed slaves, and decides to sell it. In the following poem, which sums up slavery and abolition, we find Ayres attracted by the lovely Fidelia and repelled by the slaves’ irrationality; at the same time, he is moved to pity for the ex-slaves and repelled by the slave-mistress.

Fidelia arrives from Parahyba do Sul on the 15th or 16th. It seems the freed slaves are going to be unhappy. When they learned that she was disposing of the plantation they asked her not to, not to sell it, or to take them all with her. There you are, that is what it is to be beautiful and to have the gift of enslaving! In this kind of enslavement there are no emancipation papers nor laws to free you; the bonds are eternal and divine. It would be funny to see her arrive at the Corte with her freedmen behind her … and for what? and how sustain them? It was hard for her to make the poor things understand that they will have to work for wages and here there would be no means of employing them right away. She promised not to forget them and, in case she did not come back to the country, to put in a good word for them with the new owner of the property.

This hinting at the effects of abolition is not dropped by Ayres; he recognizes the responsibilities but tries to shut them out of his mind. Later, when it is decided to give the plantation to the freed slaves, his reaction is that it is simple justice; still he adds, Will they be able to work in common …? That is another question, but I do not particularly care whether it is resolved or not; there is many another thing in this world far more interesting. When the property is transferred to them, he remarks, The freed slaves will probably receive it with dances and with tears; but it also may be that this new, or first, responsibility … (The ellipsis is Ayres’.) In other words, the old diplomat’s regeneration into a warm, kindly Brazilian is indicated in this book, but is not complete. He feels he should be interested in this social problem, perhaps ought to bring his professional skill to its solution, but old ways of thinking prevail.

The young hero Tristão has a quite different attitude; and here is where the second mystery enters. Bom in Brazil and sentimentally attached to his native land, Tristão has lived in Lisbon from his fourteenth year and is a naturalized citizen of Portugal. When he first visits Fidelia’s plantation—although abolition is less than six months old and the slaves are still on the property —he speaks of the plantation, its artifacts, and customs, as if he were speaking of the bones of a prehistoric animal; to him it is a historical document illustrating the customs of a bygone era.

As far as Ayres’ personal story is concerned then, the book ends satisfactorily. For the young couple Fidelia and Tristão, the plot’s resolution is baffling. Their story, it is true, actually ends in blissful marriage, as it should. But beyond this happy ending is projected a certain foreseeable future that promises confusion. Tristão has a great love for politics and during his absence in Brazil he has been elected to the Portuguese parliament. At the end of the novel he returns to Lisbon (August 1889) to take up political life as a member of the chamber of deputies. Ayres has more than once noted in his diary that Tristão is a good and idealistic young man who will not be able to engage in dirty politics. Why then is this fair-haired boy dismissed to Portugal and its political life in a most corrupt and foolish period of Portuguese history? This is the mystery.

Machado de Assis was fully aware of the state of things in Portugal, if for no other reason than that his brother-in-law Miguel de Novaes often wrote him from Lisbon during those years, exclaiming against the governmental chaos and excoriating the politicians as fools and scoundrels and the people as idiots. It is possible that there is a simple answer: perhaps Machado de Assis intended to write a sequel that would restore Tristão to his native land. Mário de Alencar wrote in the 1910 introduction to his edition of A Semana that at the time of his death Machado de Assis was planning to write another book. And in the preface to Memorial de Ayres we find an indication that this book was to consist of additional pages from the old diplomat’s notebook: The rest will appear some day, if some day comes.

Furthermore, Machado de Assis’ last five novels are thematically connected and he had a way of sometimes preparing in one for a work to follow. For example, toward the end of Memorias Posthumas de Braz Cubas (Epitaph of a Small Winner), Quincas Borba made a trip to Rio de Janeiro in order to die there and consequently delay the opening of his will—thus setting in motion the plot of the next novel, Çuincas Borba (Philosopher or Dog?). Not only does Esau and Jacob’s preface herald the appearance of Counselor Ayres⁹ Memorial but also, toward the end of that novel, Ayres made a trip to Europe for which he would give no very good reason. He said it was for his health; his sister and their friend Natividade, however, appeared to doubt this and sought other reasons but received no other answer from Ayres. That is, sometime within the years 1893-1894 Counselor Ayres spent eleven months in Europe. Did that trip concern Tristão, and was Machado de Assis preparing in Esau and Jacob for his tenth novel, which he was never to write?

It might be remarked that conditions in Portugal grew worse. In Brazil, meanwhile, although the young republic was troubled at its beginning, the nineties emerged into the longest period of comparative peace and undisturbed material development that the republic has perhaps ever known. Did Ayres, on his trip to Europe, use his influence to restore Tristão to Brazil and its problems of reconstruction—and in so doing further his own, still incomplete, reconstruction, just as he had furthered it with the Aguiars’ oneness and Fidelia’s two loves?

In Esau and Jacob Counselor Ayres was the genius of the society that gave birth to modern Brazil—especially to its problems. In the Memorial he is still a courtly gentleman in the court city of the Braganças—but undergoing a transformation. The protagonists of Assis’ last five, so-called great novels, all sought a wholeness of personality. The first three were unsuccessful: Braz Cubas admitted failure; Rubião plunged into the abyss of madness that lay between mind and heart; Dorn Casmurro tried to tie together the two ends of his life but could not. In Esau and Jacob Flora’s attempt to unite the twins had an ephemeral success but in the long run the whole society failed to fulfill its destiny. Memorial de Ayres has often been termed a work of optimism. There is about it an aura of happy success; the Aguiar couple, Rita, Fidelia, and Ayres all achieve a degree of wholeness; and—Ayres leaves us in no doubt—its core is love. The baron, on the contrary, with his undying hatreds, is unmercifully felled by a stroke of apoplexy—Machado de Assis’ ultimate weapon in these kinds of cases.

COUNSELOR AYRES’ MEMORIAL

Em Lixboa, sobre lo mar, Barcas novas mandey lavrar…

Cantiga de Joham Zorro.

Para veer meu amigo Que talhou preyto comigo, Alá vou, madre.

Para veer meu amado Que mig’a preyto talhado, Alá vou, madre.

Cantiga d’el-rei Dom Denis.

In Lisbon by the sea, I ordered new ships built…

To see my friend (lover), who promised me a tryst, I am off, mother. To see my beloved, who keeps tryst with me, I am off, mother.

Foreword

Whoever has read my Esau and Jacob will perhaps recognize these words from its preface: "In the leisure moments of his career he wrote his Memorial, which, if the dull and obscure pages were cut, would scarcely serve to while away the time (and perhaps will) of the Petropolis boat trip."

I was referring to Counselor Ayres. In considering publication of the Memorial, it was found that the part relating to the two years 1888-1889, if pruned of certain incidents, descriptions, and reflections, could present a connected narrative that might hold some interest in spite of the diary form in which it is written. There was no unwillingness on my part to recast it in the manner of the other work—no unwillingness and no ability either.

It comes out as it was, but trimmed and spare, keeping only what ties together a single theme. The rest will appear some day, if some day comes.

M. de A.

1888

1888

January 9

Well, today marks a year since I returned from Europe for good. What reminded me of the date was that as I sat drinking my coffee I heard a broom peddler crying his wares in the street: Brooms for sale! Dusters! Come buy dusters! I have heard the cry other mornings but this time it brought to mind the day my ship touched port, and I, pensioned off, came home to my own land, my own Rua do Cattete, my own language. Yes, it was the same cry I heard a year ago, in 1887; perhaps it was the same throat.

During my thirty-odd years of diplomatic service, I occasionally came to Brazil on leave. Most of the time, I lived abroad, in various lands, and it was no small stint. I thought perhaps I would not succeed in accustoming myself once more to the life here. Well, I did. True, I still remember faraway things and persons, amusements, landscapes, foreign ways, but I do not die of longing for any of it. Here I am, here I live, here I shall die.

Five o’clock in the evening

I have just received a note from Mana Rita, which is pasted below:

January 9

Mano,

It occurred to me only just now that today marks a year since you came back from Europe to retire. It is now too late to go to São João Baptista Cemetery to visit our family tomb and give thanks for your return. I will go in the morning and beg you to be ready and go with me.

Love from

Your old sister,

Rita

I do not see any necessity for it, but I sent word that I would go.

January 10

We went to the cemetery. Rita, in spite of the joyful motive, could not hold back a few of her usual tears of longing and remembrance for the husband who lies there in our tomb alongside my father and mother. She still loves him, as on the day she lost him, so many years ago—when she placed in his coffin long strands of her hair, then black, to be watched over by the dead while her remaining locks grew silvery white out here in the world of the living.

Our tomb monument is not unpleasing; it could scarcely be more simple—the inscription and a cross—but what there is is well done. I found it too new, that I did. Rita has it washed every month and this keeps it from aging. Well, I believe that an old tomb gives a better impression of its function if it bears the gloomy smudges of time, which consumes all things. The opposite always seems a thing of the day before.

Rita prayed before it a few minutes, while I glanced around at the graves nearby. On almost all of them there was the same ancient supplication as on ours: Pray for him! Pray for her! Rita told me later, as we walked along, that it is her custom to answer the request on the other graves as well, uttering a prayer for all who lie there. Perhaps it is the only one they get. Mana is a good soul, no less than a cheerful one.

The impression given me by the cemetery as a whole was the same one that cemeteries always give me: everything there stood still. The gestures of the figures, angels and others, were many and various, but motionless. Only some little birds gave sign of life, as they sought out one another, lighting on branches, chirping, and trilling. The bushes hved, but silently, in their green freshness and in their flowers.

As we drew near the great entrance gate on our way out, I spoke to Mana Rita of a lady I had seen (while she was praying) at the foot of another grave to the left of the great cross. She was young, dressed in black, and she too appeared to be praying, with clasped hands pointing downward. Her face was not unfamiliar, although I could not place it. She was handsome and most genteel—gentilissima, as I have heard said of other ladies, in Rome.

Where is she?

I told her where she was. She wanted to see who it was. Rita, besides being a good woman, is curious, without, however, attaining Roman superlativeness. I answered that we could wait for her there at the gate.

No! she may not come right away. Let’s try to get a peek at her from a distance. Is she really handsome?

I thought so.

We began to wend our way among the graves as if by chance. At some distance Rita stopped.

You know her. You saw her there at home, at my house, a few days ago.

Who is she?

It’s the widow Noronha. Come, let’s go before she sees us.

Now I recalled, though vaguely, a lady who had appeared in Andarahy, to whom Rita presented me, and with whom I spoke several minutes.

Widow of a doctor, isn’t she?

Yes. Daughter of a plantation owner in Parahyba do Sul, Baron de Santa-Pia.

At that moment the widow unclasped her hands and appeared about to leave. First she glanced around as if to see if she was alone. Perhaps she wanted to kiss the gravestone, her husband’s name most likely, but there were people about, not to mention two gravediggers with watering pot and spade who kept talking about a burial of that morning. They spoke very loud and one was making fun of the other in a rough voice.

Could you carry one of those fellows to the mound?

Four of ’em your size.

They were talking about a heavy coffin of course, but I quickly turned my attention to the widow, who was moving slowly away without looking back. Though hiding behind a nearby mausoleum, I could not see any more of her, or any better than at first. She went on down to the great gate, a streetcar came along, she got on and went away. We followed and caught the next one.

Rita then told me some of the young lady’s history and of her great happiness with the husband who has been buried there for more than two years. They had lived together only a short time. I do not know what fiendish inspiration made me retort, That doesn’t mean she won’t marry again.

SZie will not marry.

Who says she won’t?

She won’t marry. It is enough to know the circumstances of her marriage, the life they had together, and her grief when she was widowed.

"That doesn’t mean anything. She’ll marry. In