Counselor Ayres’ Memorial     by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Translated by Helen Caldwell Original title: Memorial de Ayres Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK List Price: $9.95, £6.50 Not available for ordering Published by California U.P. Pub. Date: 1973 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback List Price: $9.95 Not available for ordering Published by California U.P. Pub. Date: 1973 Pub. Place: USA Format: Hardcover List Price: $32.50 Not available for ordering

The last of Machado de Assis’s novels, published in 1908, the year of his death, Counselor Ayres’ Memorial has been regarded as his swan-song and, given its melancholic tone, his ‘reconciliation with life’. In fact it is much more interesting than that. Its central character is Counselor Ayres, a Brazilian diplomat who has retired to Rio de Janeiro after many years abroad. The novel purports to be his diary for the period between January 1888 and August 1889: in fact, it soon becomes plain to the reader that it also tells a story, centred on an old married, and childless couple, Aguiar and Dona Carmo, and two young people, now in their twenties, the widow Fidélia and Tristão, in whom they have taken an intense interest. Fidélia’s marriage was happy, but brief: she also braved the anger of her father, the plantation owner Baron of Santa Pia, to marry the son of a traditional enemy of his. Her husband died in Lisbon, and she has gone into permanent mourning, swearing never to marry again; in the two years since his death, she has visited his grave daily. Tristão is the son of friends of Aguiar and Dona Carmo, and was virtually adopted by them as a child; later, rather than go into his father’s business, he decides to get a lawyer’s degree and finally to go to Europe with his parents.

The plot has three centres of interest: the first is the wooing and eventual winning of the widow by Tristão, and their emigration to Portugal; the second the story of Ayres’s observation of these events; and third, the important political events of 1888 and 1889, principally the end of slavery on 13 May 1888, and the collapse of the coffee economy of the valley of the Paraíba do Sul as a consequence, or as part of this process. In the end, all three of these strands are interwoven, and the novel only takes on its full meaning when that is understood. We should also suspect that not all is what it seems to be: readers of his other novels will be aware that political events are more than just convenient dates for Machado, and that narrators are often unreliable, not only in that they put their own interpretation on events, but because they fail to see hidden truths.

Fidelia arrives from Paraiba 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. 82