Brazilian author Machado de Assis creates a narrator who is pure air: Counselor José da Costa Marcondes Ayres, or Counselor Ayres, is a diplomat who spent his entire professional life of thirty years representing Brazil abroad before returning to Rio de Janeiro to pass his remaining days.¹ The name Ayres, meaning air, is symptomatic of transparency and absence: like Machado’s narrator Brás Cubas in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Ayres is another author who is dead yet returns to authorship in Machado’s last two novels, Esau and Jacob (1904) and Ayres’ diary-memoir, Counselor Ayres’ Memorial (1908).² In a clever dissimulation, Ayres is introduced in a “notice” to the 1904 novel, in which Machado de Assis revives the conceit of the found manuscript. In the unsigned “notice,” Machado disguises the identity of an editor, possibly himself, who has discovered seven bound notebooks left by the then deceased Counselor in his desk: the first six boxes contained the Counselor’s diary, from which the editor selected entries in order to compose the novel-memoir, and the seventh included a completed novel ready for publication. This complex game of authorship opens the space between writer and character, editor and text, narrator and reader, and language and meaning. In a note to the 1908 memoir signed “M. de A.,” Machado as the hidden author explains the uncompelling marginality both of Ayres and his writings: they were completed in unoccupied hours at work, the pages are filled with a unique inner way of thinking, some pages are dull or obscure, and their main readerly interest would be to kill some time on the boat to Petrópolis. The editor selects only two years of entries (1888-1889) from the notebooks for publication as a memoir, and these writings are stripped of circumstantial anecdotes, descriptions, and reflections leaving only what the editor thinks may constitute a possibly coherent narrative. His assertion that these selections are of small import is doubly strange, as it questions the value of his own work and elides the historical and human importance of those two years: abolition in the first and end of the empire and proclamation of the republic in the second. The note introduces an unexpected and seemingly gratuitous tone of pessimism as in the final dry observation that “the rest will appear some day, if some day comes.”³ Ayres’ voice returns from the insignificance of oblivion only within the editor’s selections, resulting in a doubly retrospective, selective memoir built around lost or abandoned writings.

Ayres is air because his edited memoir, just as his thoughts and outings in the city, appears to be random or fortuitous. His 172 diary entries are like air bubbles that rise individually, apparently disconnected from their many companions. On the surface, they are connected only by their chronological order. Since Ayres is no longer around to aid in editing, his manuscripts take on the quality of literary archaeology. Narrative comes in bits and pieces, and Ayres quotes from his own writings while he observes life in the city. His personal observations and confessions, often recounting visits to a select group of acquaintances, are elective, nonessential, and written to seem inconsequential. He frequently addresses, questions, and converses with the reader using the second person, so that the role of imagined reader-listener inside the text extends to the reader of the novel outside of it. The narrative’s profound themes of narrative and memory, slavery and manumission, home and exile, presence and absence, faithfulness and betrayal, time and eternity are embedded in the stream of bubbles. Ayres is further encased in a secondary bubble that is his glass cabinet, a microcosm of the geography of his diplomatic service where he keeps relics of his former life: ribbons, medals, old photos, pieces of classical ruins.

Ayres is air because he no longer exists at the time of reading; he is an ephemeral figure because he is mediated by the construction of the diary form of the novel, which for him is disorderly and fragmented. His wandering thoughts make him seem more air-like. His writings are self-conscious and self-referential: in the novel he refers to lines recorded in his diary, and in the memoirs he converses with the paper on which he writes. The reader is disarmed and misled by the implication of the insignificance and even disorder of the Counselor’s writings, as if the unnamed editor were questioning whether the contents were worth his time and dedication, much less the reader’s attention. The confusion this produces begs the question of whether an annotated life can be successfully forged into art by a novice editor. Mirroring Brás Cubas’ comment in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas about having only five readers,⁴ the editor here suggests that despite his struggles to piece together a connected narrative of minimal interest, the diary may be nothing more than another collection of retrospective and fragmentary memoirs by a dead author, of whom he says, “He did not play an important role in this world.”⁵ Yet the editor, in his dismissal of Ayres, seems not to grasp a meaning any deeper than curiosity or more than commonplace. The theme of death appears in the Counselor’s return to Rio de Janeiro at the age of sixty-two. Though retired, the always observant and supercilious Counselor haunts the city as if he were an airy absence, floating above the streets and people.

Ayres is air because he has been away from Rio de Janeiro for thirty years. He turns his late and final return into a ghostly posthumous revisiting by diary, sparkled with his usual witty and wry reflections, now coming from beyond. The distinguished diplomat is Machado’s ultimate inside-outsider, an analyst of the familiar who from long absence speaks on his definitive return to Rio in 1887 as if he were a voyeur anonymously observing the city. Rio de Janeiro is the bubble that envelops him when he returns as a native from abroad. Illustrating the dichotomy of presence and absence, he decides to live as a recluse, communicating only with the physical city: “I will not live with anybody. I will live with Catete, the Largo do Machado, Botafogo beach and Flamengo. I speak not of the people who live there but of the streets, the houses, the fountains, and the shops.”⁶ The material city is the bubble that brings Ayres back to familiar environs. It is within the city’s unchanged spaces that he wishes to commune in his final years; thus the city’s geography forms an unchangeable and protective bubble as Ayres’ outer soul. Thematic keys to his reading of the city are found in a substantial number of literary quotes, allusions, and references; a gesture of the old couple Aguiar and Carmo reminds Ayres of a line from Madame de Sevigné.⁷ When he makes a bet with his sister, Ayres consciously shapes his words while thinking of a phrase of Goethe.⁸ He describes the situation of the widow Norohna by altering the opening lines of a pastoral novel by Bernardim Ribeiro, Menina e Moça (1554).⁹

Ayres occupies two worlds: the first is the exterior world of Rio de Janeiro and the second is his personal, private territory, limited to his manuscript and memoirs. Perhaps because of his training in diplomacy, Ayres has emptied his mind of any preconceptions or opinions in his interaction with society: “Ayres thought nothing.”¹⁰ His professional agreeability is a calculated position taken against life’s irresolvable duality and conflict: it is a dissimulation, a purposeful misreading, a diplomatic posturing. In the public world where Ayres is a diplomat, he chooses to appear empty of substance, thus airy, while in his personal memoirs he expresses more substantive opinions. Yet in his view, his compromise is a wise and beneficial synthesis as well as a modus vivendi. At the same time, we learn that Ayres held opinions that he reserved only for his manuscript: “When he did not manage to have the same opinion, and it was worthwhile to write his down, he wrote it. He was also in the habit of keeping notes on his discoveries, observations, reflections, criticisms, and anecdotes, keeping for this purpose a collection of notebooks which he gave the name Memoirs.”¹¹ In all these notations, Ayres remains polite, sincere, and skeptical. He always confirms his position as a discreet diplomat, never contradicting or giving opinions. Ayres is also a widower but cuts the figure of a bachelor who has outlived or overcome his passions. He can therefore observe and judge the world of the Brazilian empire and republic with an aged, wise, and wry déjà vu. He is aware of his “usual drop of gall” sometimes expressed with “wicked mirth.”¹²

Ayres is air because of the impermanence or tenuousness of his return to Rio de Janeiro. While definitive, the return seems fated and futile because of the variability and decreasing number of his remaining days. His awareness of time gives him a marked philosophical turn, revealed in his reading of Horace and in his allusions to Faust, for example. Even with his title and charm, Ayres is keenly aware that his life has been wasted on the courtesies and falsities of the diplomatic profession: “My nature and my life have given me a taste for and the habit of conversing. Diplomacy taught me to endure with patience an infinity of intolerable individuals which this world nourishes for its secret purposes.”¹³ Yet his learned aplomb and neutrality on all questions for all appearances supports a position of wisdom, ostensible proof of his education in the ways of the world. To get to sleep he recites Horace, Cervantes, and Erasmus. Ayres distances himself from the present moment by being aloof, ironical, skeptical, measured, and diplomatically agreeable to all. Machado’s translator and interpreter, the American classicist Helen Caldwell, finds a parallel in Xenophon, who Machado read and quotes, since the Greek was also an adviser, retired from public life, and an observer of the surrounding society with detachment who spoke of himself in the third person in his Anabasis.¹⁴ Ayres’ story is shaped by the hidden editor who casts it as a dramatic allegory that, like Machado’s earlier novels, encompasses a variety of genres and arts, from the diary and novel to mythology, theater, and opera.¹⁵

The Memorial foregrounds its mixed genres: twice Ayres writes in his diary, “If this were a novel” and “If I were writing a novel.”¹⁶ The allusion to medieval romance and the allegory of love and death is confirmed by the epigraph from Joham Zorro’s Cantiga d’el-rei Dom Denis (late thirteenth century).¹⁷ The verses introduce the trope of the maiden who departs from her mother to see her friend, who desires a tryst with her. The Cantiga tells of preparations for traveling overseas to Brazil, but in this case Portugal is the point of origin and return, whereas for Ayres, Brazil is the point of origin and return. If left between Ayres and the editor, the Memorial would seem to be either a novel pretending to be a travel memoir or a memoir disguised as a novel, however there is another generic substratum.

Ayres comments that his writing and the contents of his diary form a counterpoint to the city with its politics and social life: “time is a knowing rat that diminishes or alters things by giving them another appearance.”¹⁸ His skeptical opinions of human motives underlie his method and reinforce his position as an outside observer, the diplomat who is always keeping notes. He wishes his diary to be mimetic and therefore a truthful copy of observed life, however he knows that writing, like the stream of air bubbles in his diary entries, should be tuned to imaginative spheres and hidden realms in constant change:

If I were writing a novel I would strike the pages of the 12th and 22nd of this month. A work of fiction would not permit such an equivalence of events. On both those days — which I should then call chapters — I met the widow Noronha on the street[.] … I would delete the two chapters, or make them quite different from each other. In either case I would lessen the exact truth, which seems to me more useful for my present purposes than it would in a work of imagination[.] … All this is repugnant to imaginary compositions, which demand variety, and even contradictions, in behavior. Life, on the other hand, is like that, a repetition of acts and gestures, as in receptions, meals, visits, and other amusements.¹⁹

Ayres converses with his own diary, as if it were a guiding and more perceptive virtual self than the one that would appear to a reader of his diary, yet he sees advantages in his cutting witticisms: “If someone did read us, he would think me evil, and nothing is lost by appearing to be evil; one gains almost as much by actually being so.²⁰

What politics contributes to the novel is perhaps a material surface that equals Ayres’ thumbnail definition of all of diplomacy as just “covering and uncovering.”²¹ In these notes he even acquires the habit of writing down a few random indiscreet, malicious, and even perverse thoughts — he admires the sharp-tongued Cesária — that he intimates to his sister Rita and confesses to the paper on which he writes. In this way, Ayres duplicates his personal conflicts and dualities, which he seeks to dispel diplomatically, suggesting that his solution is simply a strategy of fleeting benefit and soporific effect. Everything is material for a great baroque theater of the world, or for comic opera on the human condition, as if Machado were staging the aphorism from Resurrection: “Life is an opera buffa with intervals of serious music.”²² Ayres, however, is more than aware of the existence of a great abyss ready to consume all the formal structures of life, and his own life now coming to an end, whether coming from Dante’s Inferno, Croesus’ misreading of Pythia’s prophecy, Camões’ Cape of Storms, or his own heart: “since the heart is the abyss of abysses.”²³ In his final return to Rio de Janeiro, he is determined to maintain his equilibrium while waiting out an inexorable fate — whether classical, biblical, or tropical — that takes the measure of his world and of his philosophy. Ayres foreshadows another character who faces death, Ricardo Reis, whom Saramago brings back to Lisbon to meet his maker in his novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984).²⁴

As an allegorical drama framed by philosophy, Ayres’ novel is air because it has the open form of an intermezzo, or “Entr’acte. The intermezzo is a figurative space removed from the main act, which was a common performance practice in Italian baroque operas. Ayres thinks of his diary as an exterior space between acts of life, as if it could occupy a space apart, truthful and free of tearful artifice: “I will not set down those tears in this place, or the promises made, the reminders given, the pictures exchanged, between godson and godparents.”²⁵ The elaborate staging has been pared down to resemble unadorned truth: “I will not set down the separate events or unrelated anecdotes, and I even exclude the adjectives, which held more interest in his mouth than my pen could give them — only those needed for understanding things and persons will appear here.”²⁶ He lives in the fashion of a tragicomic “Entr’acte,” interviewing the theatergoers and waiting for the inevitable dénouement. He expects to find pure truth in his diary, whose writings will add up to more than the sum of their contents, with their concentration of sly observations and witty truths, yet there are moments when he seems aware of his own diary as performance: “Ayres dear, confess that when you heard young Tristão’s grief at not being loved, you felt a glow of pleasure, which, however, did not last long, nor did it come back.”²⁷

Like Machado’s other character-narrators, Ayres overestimates the narrative truth of his memoir. Is his narration not also part of the theater? Ayres as narrator would dismiss the play in the world theater to go directly to its underlying theme or message as described in his banal, prosaic, and agreeable review, as if it were immune from representation. He is aware of the power of the theater, however, and in one scene “he confessed that he had killed more than one rival. That if he remembered correctly he must be carrying seven corpses on his back, done in with various weapons. The ladies laughed.”²⁸ In his “Entr’acte” Ayres posits that there are deeper truths in the intervals between action which are vulnerable to our moments of meditation and solitude; yet in the end these truths cannot pass beyond another form of entertainment in his world theater: “hyperbole is the way of this world[.] … [O]nly by force of a lot of rhetoric can one fill [peoples’ ears] with a breath of truth.”²⁹

In a moment of quiet and solitude, when meeting his sister Rita in the cemetery to lay a wreath at their family monument, she points out the young widow nearby at the tomb of her husband, who had died suddenly during a visit to Lisbon after only several years of marriage.³⁰ The widow Noronha’s depth of emotion and devotion is symbolized by her having returned his body to Rio de Janeiro, contrary to Ayres, who had left his wife buried in Vienna. Ayres is offered a Faustian bargain by his sister: the challenge to marry the young and attractive widow Fidélia in the face of Rita’s determined opinion that she will remain faithful to the deceased husband and never remarry: “she cited the wager between God and the Devil over Faust, which I had read to her, here at my house, in Goethe’s own words.”³¹ Ayres makes light of the challenge, even as he is weighed down by his own imminent preparations for death. His morbid philosophizing serves as a vaguely disguised excuse for suppressing and abandoning the pursuit of Fidélia to his surrogate, Tristão. The clock on his wall strikes the hours mournfully and seems to be speaking to him with the message that he is a gravedigger. Because of his age, Ayres considers himself to be part of the dead and dying and is determined to act out a role he believes to be assigned by destiny rather than try to pursue Fidélia. He nevertheless feels attracted by a primitive instinct for freedom and Eros, which is outweighed and denied by what he calls life’s imprescriptible laws.

The reader would have learned from Esau and Jacob that Ayres did not care for marriage, although he recognized its advantages for his profession. The editor reports that he had proposed to the first eligible woman, yet because of their differences it was as if he lived alone, and when she died “He did not suffer with the loss.”³² Ayres may thus take up Rita’s challenge lightly, although one may have doubts about his commitment to winning it. To emphasize what amounts to an alliance with death, Ayres writes, “Life, especially for the old, is a tiresome burden.”³³ None of the city’s sounds — carriages, mules, people, bells and whistles — can overcome his determined march toward death: “I have a wife under the sod in Vienna, and none of my children ever left the cradle of nothingness. I am alone, completely alone.”³⁴ As in other of Machado’s narrators, his bleak statement hides a more precise and honest truth.

Ayres occupies an undefined dramatic space between life and death instincts. Counselor Ayres’ Memorial conveys the presence of absence and approaching death: “All my days are told: there is no way of recovering a shadow of what is gone.”³⁵ Ayres is convinced that his return to Rio de Janeiro is a scenario for the final act of his diplomatic life: “I am a gravedigger,”³⁶ he writes in his diary on September 30. Death has taken away the companions of his generation, “If I were to total the sum of friends I have lost throughout this world, it would come to a number of dozens.”³⁷ He also makes reference to his own mortality when observing the young couple Tristão and Fidélia: “I saw them with these eyes that the cold earth will one day devour.”³⁸ The insistent resurgence of instinct appears in his unexpected attraction to the “widow Noronha,” disguised in their mutual condition of permanent widowhood. The widow and widower have an eternal fidelity to the dead, which is set against the omnipresence and persistence of an underlying desire for each other. Ayres, the diplomat, is, as usual, on both sides at once: he is already dead for the reader and at the time of writing he is assumed to have filled his own personal quota of romance that life allows. Thus he maintains diplomatic propriety, agreeing with everyone on every topic, convinced that the fatality of destiny and the transmuting of love into death is simply a matter of patience and observation, a “drama performed every day.”³⁹

Ayres floats through Rio de Janeiro as might the deceased Brás Cubas, who feigned to turn the absence of an heir into an insincere final advantage in his life.⁴⁰ Rita’s bet with Ayres implies the possibility, however remote, of calling Ayres’ potential heirs from nothingness. To counterbalance Rita’s challenge, Ayres quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley. As in other novels based on quotations — Resurrection on Shakespeare and Esau and Jacob on Dante — in the Memorial Ayres frequently quotes a line from Shelley’s 1822 poem to Jane Williams, “One Word is Too Often Profaned,” which ends with the phrase “I cannot give what men call love.”⁴¹ Ayres misunderstands, or purposely misstates, the meaning of Shelley’s line: the English poet cannot give love because his feelings for Jane are more intense than what can be communicated by a word so commonly profaned; Ayres quotes the line to mean that he has passed beyond the will or ability to love.⁴² Ayres is actively involved, whether consciously or unconsciously, in the repression or denial of Eros — whether his own or those of other characters — and his literary justification comes through as a false memory. Ayres battles false feelings throughout his encounters with Fidélia. He has condemned his possible heirs to remain in nothingness. His quote from Shelley marks the inherent falsity and fragility of memory by reversing the English poet’s pretended denial of love. Throughout the Memorial, Ayres assumes the role of conspirator in death’s power over an equally eternal erotic impulse. He marks his return to Rio de Janeiro with an inverted Caesarean adage: “Here I am, here I live, here I shall die.”⁴³ The phrase is Ayres’ “veni, vidi, mori.”

Ayres embodies the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, the essential forces he seeks to reconcile by pretending to assume an external point of view of the eternal.⁴⁴ The struggle takes place in the memoirs on multiple planes of action, comparable to an opera libretto, beginning with the archetypal references to Tristan’s love-death theme and to heroic Fidelio-Leonor’s freeing of her captive husband; these plots are adjusted to a Brazilian setting, where Fidélia continues to honor her deceased husband and Tristão arrives from Lisbon as a disguised challenger and “brother.” A second plane of action lies within the Counselor’s desires; he is motivated by Rita’s challenge and by Tristão’s growing interest in Fidélia, and Ayres struggles to deny his own attraction to the widow. The old Aguiar couple provide another setting for the love-death motif: the sentimental D. Carmo has devoted her adult life to raising Tristão as a son and caring for Fidélia as a daughter, two substitutes for the children she never had. The love motif, supported by the renewed presence of the youths with the Aguiar couple, is bound up at the same time with its deadly consequences: the end of their world, brought about by the permanent departure of the new young couple to Lisbon; the symbolic death of the parenthood of the Aguiar couple; and the closure of Ayres’ erotic reawakening. After the young couple departs for Lisbon, Ayres sees the old couple from afar, sitting silently, staring into space, overcome by their own melancholy.

The Memorial is founded as an allegory both of life and death, symbolized for the Counselor by the figure of the young widow Fidélia at her husband’s grave, and is on every level a symbolic narrative rather than a realistic memoir. Its entire contents are described by Ayres as “All imaginings of mine.”⁴⁵ The allegory is presented as an operatic performance between Eros and Thanatos: the common identification of Fidélia with Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera premiered in 1805, is hypothesized in the Memorial: “But Fidélia[?] …Could it have been given to the baron’s daughter as a feminine form of Fidelio in homage to Beethoven?”⁴⁶ In the opera, Fidelio is actually Leonore in disguise, whose purpose is to rescue her husband Florestan from the prison of the dictator Pizarro where he is being starved to death. Fidelio is “Fidélia,” the ever loyal and courageous wife who pays homage to the tomb of her deceased husband, a devotion that introduces the love-death theme and the struggle between Eros and Thanatos. The second operatic theme introduced by Fidélia’s “brother” Tristão — both have been adopted by the Aguiar couple under different circumstances — invokes Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1865), which recreates a romance of the Middle Ages, perhaps dating from the twelfth century.⁴⁷ Tristan, who has killed Isolde’s fiancé Morold (Fidélia’s husband in the novel) is conveying Isolde to be married to King Marke (Counselor Ayres in the novel). Meeting in the King’s castle, the couple drinks a potion meant to be a poison with which Isolde will obtain her revenge against Tristan; however, Bragane, Isolde’s companion, has changed the potion from poison to a love potion. In the ensuing duet between Tristan and Isolde, Tristan sings that only in the eternity of death can they be fully united. The couple performs the drama of timeless love, an eternally repeated spectacle that according to Ayres symbolizes renewal:

There is nothing like the passion of love to make original what is commonplace, and new what is dying of old age. That is the way it is with the engaged couple, whom I never tire of listening to, for they are always interesting. That drama of love, which appears to have been born of the serpent’s guile and of man’s disobedience, has never yet failed to play to full houses in this world. Now and again some poet lends it his tongue, amid the tears of the spectators, only that. The drama is performed every day, in every form, new as the sun, which is also old.⁴⁸

Taking the position of King Marke, Ayres annotates the operatic allegories and romances that recur in the scenario and with characters of his city, in which he is both spectator and confidant, scarcely daring to hope that the drama of love will redeem and renew him as an actor as well as author. Yet in his ambivalence, and to dissimulate, he encourages Tristão’s enchantment with Fidélia by serving as confidant.

In the diary’s final entries — after seeing off Fidélia and Tristão, now married, on the ship that will take the young couple to Lisbon on what seems certain to be their definitive return voyage to Portugal, where Tristão has been named a deputy of parliament — Ayres returns home to find a surprise visitor. There is an airy vision waiting on his sofa, and they stare at each other. Fidélia, in the flesh, confesses her desire for the aplomb diplomat: “just now there appeared before me the figure of Fidélia, exactly as I left her on board ship, but without the tears. She sat on the sofa and we looked at each other… [S]he dissolved in charm, I giving the lie to Shelley with all the sexagenarian strength left in me.”⁴⁹ Only now that she has sailed away can Ayres admit his deep feelings by returning to Shelley’s line that he still has not understood. Yet even when there is no longer any hope, Eros conjures up his desired companion out of thin air.

Is everything to be air and illusion, after all? Or do there exist myriad subtle ways of fulfilling and compensating one’s desires? Although he returns fatally to the city of his birth, which is the sphere or world that he has served as a dedicated diplomat, Ayres keeps intellectual distance; his witty observations and mental faculties are apart from both material and political society and even from the acquaintances in his circle. In his diary Counselor Ayres observes the ways of the world — his profession and practice as diplomat — as if he were an outsider, observing with ironic distance, displeased to find himself equally subject to them, while ever diplomatically accepting the inevitability and ambiguity of the human condition.