Dom Casmurro 2.70 · 2.70

He turns and answers the busts aloud, in a mock-heroic apostrophe: 'Sim, Nero, Augusto, Massinissa, e tu, grande César, que me incitas a fazer os meus commentarios' — Yes, Nero, Augustus, Massinissa, and you, great Caesar, who urge me to make my commentaries. The playfulness is delightful — the old man conversing with the painted Roman heads, granting Caesar the intimate 'tu' as chief instigator. But the learned joke has a barb. Julius Caesar wrote the 'Commentarii', the most famous first-person military memoir in the world, the very model of terse, lucid, self-authored history — and famous, too, among those who read it closely, as brilliant propaganda: an interested party's account of his own deeds, shaped throughout to Caesar's advantage, narrated in a cool third person that counterfeits objectivity. When Bento, urged by Caesar's bust, styles his own book 'os meus commentarios', my commentaries, he is aligning his memoir with the archetype of the self-serving self-account. He means it as a flourish of grandeur. It reads, to anyone who knows what Caesar's Commentaries are, as an unwitting confession: here comes another interested party's version of his own life, another commentary shaped to its author's advantage. And the company keeps its dark hint — that quartet of emperors and a matricide and a turncoat, presiding still.

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