::
The Greatest
Prostitute
Amado
in Portuguese means loved one, beloved. Jorge Amado, Brazil's best-known
novelist, whose books have been translated in more than 30 languages,
has had his share of worldwide love and appreciation. Since 1984,
for example, he is a member of France's Legion of Honor. In this article,
Brazilian literature professor Janer Cristaldo looks at a less than
flattering side of the prolific author and accuses him of selling
his own soul for literary fame and petty personal gains.
The
word "bordel" (brothel), for those who don't know, was born
in Paris. During the time in which the "maisons closes"
were at the bank of the Seine, when someone went in search of women,
they would euphemistically say: "J'vais au bord'elle" (I
am going to its bank). It is a feminine word, la Seine. Therefore,
when someone said "au bord'elle" he meant "au bord
de la Seine". From there, bordel (brothel). It is not surprising
then that the capital that invented this word decided to pay homage
during the recent 18th Salon du Livre de Paris (Paris Book Fair) to
the greatest prostitute of contemporary literature.
Brazil
was honored in the Salon and had as honoring guest and representative
of our literature, Jorge Amado. Brazil's best selling author, Amado
began his career as a messenger of Nazism and continued as an agent
of Stalinism and today is Roberto Marinho's (TV Globo network all-powerful
owner) officious scriptwriter. Amado also received the title of Dr.
Honoris Causa by Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris
III. Nothing to be surprised about. The Parisians, long known for
their collaborationism and Stalinist tradition, wouldn't miss the
opportunity to honor, in this end of century, the colleague who since
his youth fought on the same side.
From
Nazism to Stalinism
Amado was born on a cocoa plantation farm on August 10, 1912 at the
then recently founded town named Itabuna, in Bahia. His father was
from the state of Sergipe and his mother had been born in Bahia of
indigenous descent. This author, who is the most divulged Brazilian
writer throughout the world and who has been translated in more than
40 languages, was also a collaborator of Nazi publications, a militant
of the Communist Party, constituent Congressman in 1946, Obá
Otum Arolu of Axé Opô Afonjá candomblé—a
dignitary on African-Brazilian religion—in Bahia and member
of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
He
was arrested in 1936 in Rio as a consequence of the '35 Intentona,
a failed coup ordered by the Kremlin and lead in Brazil by Luís
Carlos Prestes, the leader of the Brazilian Communist Party. In 1940,
during the non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia signed by
Stalin and Joachim von Ribbentrop, he became the editor of the cultural
page in the pro-nazi newspaper Meio-Dia. During a meeting
of the Communist Party, he was accused of being a "cheap spy
of Nazism" by writer Oswald de Andrade who urged him to move
out of São Paulo. When asked about the dirty work during this
period, Amado naively says: "I don't remember." But Oswald
de Andrade remembers. In an old interview, republished more recently
in Os Dentes do Dragão, he said:
"I
withdrew from the Party when I was confronted with so many mistakes
and mystifications. In a writer's committee meeting, in front of 15
people from the Party, I appealed to Mr. Jorge Amado to leave São
Paulo and I accused him of being a cheap spy for the Nazis, as former
eminent editor of Meio Dia. I told them—and Amado didn't
dare to defend himself—since everything is absolutely accurate—that
in 1940 Jorge invited me in Rio to have lunch at Brahma with a high-ranking
German man at the Embassy and in the Transocean agency, so that this
German could offer me to write a book defending Germany. Jorge informed
me later that this book would pay me $30 contos. I refused
and Jorge was surprised because he had accepted various orders from
this very same German."
In
1945, Amado was elected federal deputy by the Communist Party and
published Vida de Luís Carlos Prestes, o Cavaleiro da Esperança
(Life of Luís Carlos Prestes, the Horseman of Hope) an eulogy
of this southern communist leader and member of the Comintern. The
pamphlet, ordered by the Kremlin, was translated and published in
Occidental democracies and communist dictatorships as part of a campaign
to free Prestes from prison after his bloody attempt in 1935 to impose
in Brazil a tyranny in the best style of his guru, Iosif Vissarionovich
Dzhugashvili (1879-1953), better known as Stalin. For Amado, Prestes
is the "Hero, he who never sold himself, who never bent and upon
whom the mud, dirt, rottenness and repulsive drivel of calumny never
left a trace."
Prestes
in prison, according to the writer, meant the own people oppressed:
"Like him are the people, arrested and persecuted, outraged and
wounded. But like him people will stand up, one, two, one thousand
times and one day the chains will be broken and freedom will come
out stronger through the prison bars. 'Dawn comes after every night,'
said the people's Poet. Even during the most somber nights, a star
shines announcing dawn, like a friend guiding men to the morning light.
In the same way, this black Brazilian night has its star shining over
men—that is Luís Carlos Prestes. One day, we will see
him in the morning of freedom and when the moment comes to build in
this free and beautiful day, we will see that he was the star that
is the sun: light in the night, hope; warmth in the day, certainty."
In
1946, as a constituent, Amado signs the 4th Brazilian Constitution.
Two years later, his mandate is revoked due to cancellation of the
Communist Party's registration. In that same year, 1948, he moves
to Paris where he meets Sartre, Aragon and Picasso, among others.
In 1950, he moves to the Castle of the Writer's Union in Dobris, in
the former Czechoslovakia where he writes O Mundo e a Paz
(The World and Peace) an ode to Lenin, Stalin and to the Albanian
dictator Enver Hoxha. The following year, when the book is published
he receives the Stalin International Peace Prize in Moscow, for the
totality of his work, a detail often omitted from his biographies.
This decade is marked by long trips, among others, to Continental
China, Mongolia, Western and Central Europe, to the former Soviet
Union and to the Far East.
"You
all know, friends, the hatred that the men of money, the owners of
life, the people's oppressors, the exploiters of human work have against
Stalin. This name makes them shiver, it disturbs them, fills their
nights with ghosts, prevent them from sleeping and transforms their
dreams in nightmares. Upon this name laid the most vile calumnies,
the greatest infamies, the most sordid lies. The 'Red Tzar,' I read
on the headline of a newspaper. And I smile because I think that in
the Kremlin he works incessantly for the soviet people and for all
of us, for the whole mankind, for the happiness of all people. Master,
father and guide, the greatest scientist of today's world, the greatest
state man, the greatest general, the best of all that humanity has
produced. There are those who calumniate, insult and grate their teeth.
But to Stalin elevates the love of millions, of tens and hundreds
of millions of human beings. It hasn't been long since he turned 70.
It was a worldwide Party, his name was saluted in China and Lebanon,
in Rumania and Ecuador, in Nicaragua and South Africa. In this day
of December, the eyes and hopes of hundreds of millions of people
turned to the East. And the Brazilian workers wrote on the mountain
his luminous name."
Because
of his militancy in the Communist Party, in the beginning of his career
he was translated in China, Korea, Vietnam and former Soviet Union.
Only later he is drawn to the Western Countries taken by the hand
of his German translator. In Munich, in 1978, I interviewed Curt Meyer-Clason,
who was responsible for the introduction of Amado in Western Europe.
The Bahian invaded with his literature the free world so calumniated
by him, through the now dead German Democratic Republic. "Because
of the Communist Party protection, the GDR took the responsibility
for the publication of all his books as early as the '50s," said
Meyer-Clason. "Afterwards, because of me, he passed directly
to the Federal Republic of Germany." Not merely by chance, Meyer
Clason has just been charged by German magazine Der Spiegel
as a spy of the Third Reich in Brazil.
In
the same way he denies his Nazi involvement, Amado makes no comment
about his Stalinist past. On his last book, Navegação
de Cabotagem, he declares :
"During
my journey as a writer and citizen I got to know facts, causes and
consequences that I promised to keep secret. I knew of them because
I was a militant for a political party that proposed to change society's
face, acting in illegality and developing subversive actions. Many
years after I left the militancy of the Communist Party, even today
when the Marxist-Leninist ideology that determined the activity of
the Communist Party is getting empty and dying out, when the socialist
universe arrives at a dead end, even today I don't feel totally free
of the commitment I assumed. Even if the disloyalty does not have
any importance and does not bring any consequences now, even in that
case, I don't feel I have the right to spread out what was revealed
to me in confidence. If I remember them sometimes, I didn't keep notes
of such memories. They will die with me."
Socialist
Realism
In
1954, maybe thinking his defense of Stalinism in O Cavaleiro da
Esperança and O Mundo da Paz (The World of Peace)
was insufficient, Amado publishes the three volumes of Subterrâneos
da Liberdade (The Undergrounds of Freedom) where he narrates
the saga of the Communist Party in Brazil. Only in 1958, with the
publication of Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (Gabriela, Clove
and Cinnamon) he leaves aside his political militancy and begins the
practice of a literature rich of Bahian folklore that later would
become the theme of national movies and soap operas of TV Globo network.
The Bahian novelist introduced the socialist realism in Brazilian
literature, also known as Zdanovism, formula of literary confection
to preach the communist ideal, conceived by the Russian writers Maksim
Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeyev, and
systematized by the General Colonel Andrei Zdanov. In the countries
where he was translated, Amado is seen as a writer who does Brazilian
literature, but in reality he was obeying an awkward formula, more
propagandistic than aesthetic, produced by theorists from Moscow.
In A História da Inteligência Brasileira (History
of the Brazilian Intelligence) Wilson Martins clearly translates the
characteristics of the new genre:
"…on
one side the good, or those who can be included in the mystical 'key'
of the 'worker,' the 'laborer'; on the other, the bad, or all others,
but the 'police' and the 'proprietor' in particular, the two manichaeistic
entities of this singular universe. The first are honest, generous,
unselfish, friends of instruction and progress, patriots, good fathers,
sober, delicate artisans, conscientious technicians, efficient employees
(even if rebellious), imaginative and untiring, subjects of a powerful
personal magnetism, filled with an innate sense of leadership and
at the same time of the most irreprehensible sense of discipline,
courageous, sentimental, instinctive poets, characters of violent
passions (only in the good sense), models of group solidarity, invincible
debaters, full of a nobility that shines like a halo. The 'worker'
is a hero typical of the chivalry novels: fearless and faultless.
He is just as realistic as Amadís de Gaula.
On
the other hand, the "proprietor" is loathsome and nasty,
subject of all vices, rude, barbaric, corrupt, implacable when collecting
his interests, lascivious when in presence of young widows and a ferocious
persecutor of old ladies, fat, always smoking huge cigars, belching
with no shame, man of many lovers and probably also of unconfessable
diseases, member of the secret association called 'capitalism', where,
as everyone knows, is invulnerable to the existent solidarity among
its members; individual that favors all types of mockeries, including
from his own children; coward, dishonest, selfish, ignorant, sold
to the American dollar, lecherous, brutal husband and mean father,
annoying and obnoxious, a man of routine, cold as ice, incapable of
sincerity, who has no better argument that brutal force, true contemporary
incarnation of demoniacal figures that were used by the Medieval society
to scare itself."
Wilson
Martins continues in detail a listing of other stereotypes used in
this kind of novel, among them the police, the notary public, the
leaseholder, the governor, the plantation owner, the peasant. It would
be too tedious to continue the description of this polarized universe,
as it would make little sense to follow the repetition—ad nauseam—of
a primitive formula of book fabrication. Let's then put our hands
further down this garbage.
The
book Os Subterrrâneos was also written in Dobris, in
the same Castle of the Union of Czechoslovakian Writers where Amado
had produced O Mundo da Paz, from March 1952 to November
1953, in the period immediately following his obtaining the Stalin
Prize. In its historical background there is of course the 1917 revolution.
Other dates and posterior facts will powerfully determine the construction
of characters.
In
1935, there is the Communist Intentona in Brazil. In 1936, Prestes
is arrested and his wife, Olga Benário, a German Jew, who was
an official of the Red Army is deported to Hitler's Germany. Getúlio
Vargas manages to persuade Congress to create a National Security
Tribunal to punish the insurgents. Still in the same year, the Civil
War erupts in Spain. That confrontation involved all the European
nations and constituted a sort of general rehearsal for the Second
World War, detonated in 1939, a circumstance extensively exploited
by Amado.
In
1937, the "integralistas" (Brazilian-style fascists) launched
Plínio Salgado as a candidate to the presidential elections
of January of the coming year, but they were aborted in November 10
by the coup that consolidated the Estado Novo (New State) of Getúlio
Vargas in Brazil. To develop his history, Amado will concentrate in
one of the most turbulent periods of this century that up to this
day continues to generate extensive bibliographies. The action of
Os Subterrâneos is situated precisely between October
of 1937 (right before the Estado Novo and during the Spanish Civil
War) and it finishes November 7 of 1939, on the 23rd anniversary of
the proclamation of the Soviet regime in Russia.
Amado,
writer and militant, was responsible for various missions. The first
consisted of defending the ideals of 1917, incarnated in the figures
of Lenin and Stalin, powers invoked many times in the course of the
three volumes. Secondly, defending the Messiah that would save Brazil,
Luís Carlos Prestes. Not by chance, the trilogy ended with
his trial. They were secondary missions, but not less vital: denouncing
the Yankee imperialism, condemning the Trotskyist dissidence and portraying
Franco as a demon, and fustigating Vargas for having crushed the communist
activity since 1935.
His
characters are implausible puppets who lack self will, soaked in alcohol
if they are bourgeois or filled with absolute truth and mineral water
if they are workers or militants, always obedient to the orders emitted
from the banks of the Volga river.
The
book, composed of three volumes—Os Ásperos Tempos
(The Rough Times), Agonia da Noite (Night Agony) and
A Luz no Túnel (The Tunnel Light)—constituted
only the first part of a more vast trilogy with pretensions of being
the Brazilian War and Peace. They were published in May of 1954, a
year after Stalin's death and two years before the 20th Congress of
the Soviet Communist Party, which forced the author to interrupt his
work. For the second time, in Amado's literary journey his fiction
will be determined not by an analysis of the Brazilian reality but
by decisions taken in Moscow.
Omnipresence
of the New God
The
quintessential character of the novel is the Communist Party, ubiquitous
as the old Christian God and incarnated in the figure of Stalin. The
struggle of the Communist Party is the struggle—in the author's
view—of the Brazilian people against the tyranny of Vargas.
The external enemies are the United States, Germany, Franco and Salazar.
Without mentioning, of course, the IV International and the Trotskyists.
The Communist Party is infiltrated in the dominant class, dispersed
in the middle class, and massively present among the workers. It invades
the cities and the backcountry, the pampas and the forest, the bourgeois
parties, the factories and ports, hearts and minds.
"How
many others, from Amazonas to Rio Grande do Sul," reflects militant
Gonçalo, "didn't find themselves in the same situation
as him, facing difficult problems, having to solve them without being
able to discuss with the leaders and unable to discuss it with the
comrades? Gonçalo knows that the Party leadership is not that
big, one thousand or so all over the country, a few thousand militants
to attend to an incommensurable multitude of problems, to keep the
struggle in the four corners of the nation—separated by colossal
distances—to win endless obstacles, persecuted and chased as
beasts by the specialized police, tortured, arrested, murdered. A
handful of men, his Communist Party, but this few men were the nation's
own heart, its source of vital force, its powerful brain, its powerful
arm."
This
omnipresence extrapolates the country and it is manifested wherever
the characters might be, in Uruguay, France, Spain, all over the planet.
Inevitable are their references to the hammer and sickle and to Stalin,
naturally, guide, master and father. The litany directed towards the
great murderer has sometimes the characteristics of black humor:
"The
more we are," says militant Mariana "more work the leaders
will have. Think about Stalin. Who in the world works more than he
does? He is responsible for the life of tens of millions of men. Just
the other day I read a poem about him: the poet said that when all
sleep late at night, a window is still lit in the Kremlin, its Stalin's.
The destiny of his nation and of his own people always worries him.
It was more or less what the poet said, but in prettier words, of
course..."
The
poet is Pablo Neruda, already mentioned in O Mundo da Paz: "The
light in his cabinet is turned off late. The world and his nation
do not allow him to rest." It is part of an ode to Stalin, taken
from the Complete Works from the Chilean poet, where one
can still find and "Ode to Lenin." Today we know what Stalin
was planning late at night in his office.
When
Apolinário Rodrigues, for example (character inspired by Apolônio
de Carvalho, Brazilian official exiled who had participated in the
1935 Intentona) arrives in Madrid, he feels at home because wherever
he looks, there is the Party. The only local color of the Spanish
capital seems to be the fight for Prestes liberation:
"When
he arrives in Spain from Montevideo he lives days of intense emotion
when he sees all around in a country that is at war, on the bombarded
streets of cities and villages, on the walls of the indomitable Madrid,
the inscriptions asking for Prestes's liberation. He was surrounded
by the color of an intense solidarity developed by the Spanish workers
and combatants towards the arrested Brazilian antifascists and Prestes
in particular. (...) It was a single fight all over the world, Apolinário
thought in face of those inscriptions. The Spanish knew that, and
among its hard tasks and multiple sufferings, they extended their
solidary hand to the Brazilian people."
The
coincidence of the establishment of Estado Novo with the explosion
of the Spanish Civil War makes an unique opportunity for Amado to
insert his characters in the international conflict that would lead
to World War II, exposing at the same time the Party's orientation.
So unique is this opportunity and the author wishes to use it so much
that he even moves the 1946 Santos (a port city in São Paulo)
longshoremen's strike to 1938, though lighting a debate. Was he really
being loyal to the method that "demands from the artist a concrete
and truthful representation of the reality in its revolutionary development?"
as the Soviet Writers' Union statutes proclaimed? To him that did
not matter too much. By dislocating the strike to 1938, he can create
a German ship that comes to Brazil to pick up coffee for Spain. Amado
is able to fustigate Hitler, Getúlio and Franco, all at the
same time:
"In
few words (the old Gregório) told the reason why the union's
leadership had planned that session: the government had offered General
Franco, commandant of the Spanish rebels (" a traitor" yelled
a voice in the room), a great amount of coffee. There was a German
ship at the port ("Nazi" yelled a voice in the room) to
take the coffee."
In
the Spanish Civil War, according to Amado, there are only "Nazi
Germans and Fascist Italians." So prodigal in his praise of Stalin
and of the Soviet Union, he silences in his trilogy the Russian presence
in Spain, constituted by war pilots, military technicians, sailors,
interpreters and police. The first foreign presence in Spain was the
Soviet, that sent war material and highly qualified military personnel
in exchange for three-fourths—7800 boxes, each weighing 65 kg
(143 lbs.) of the gold reserves available at the Spanish bank, paid
in advance. Amado silences: the truthful concrete representation of
reality in his revolutionary development can wait a little longer.
The
Party's presence will permeate the trilogy from the first pages of
Os Ásperos Tempos to the last ones of A Luz no
Túnel. The militant Mariana, before she is arrested, watches
Prestes trial. The communist leader's voice is the "victorious
voice of the Party against terror and reaction:"
"I
want to use this moment that they offer me to speak to the Brazilian
people and pay homage today to one of the greatest dates of all history,
to the 23 anniversary of the great Russian Revolution that freed a
nation from tyranny..."
It
would be redundant and monotonous to follow this ubiquity of the Party
in Amado's trilogy. In this universe reigns the absolute good and
evil. The good, obviously is represented by the new God, the proletariat.
Evil is the bourgeoisie that holds capital. Chameleon-like beings,
also known as "class traitors" or Party traitors, eventually
transit from one universe to the other.
Dividing
the universe in two folds, one good and the other bad, doesn't mean
anything new and original. This principle comes from the third century,
through the Persian doctrine of Mani (also known as Manes). The scary
part is that it is still in practice today, 20th century, and more:
imposing tastes, behavior and even party affiliation to the characters
of a novel. Those who represent the good side are able to love. Those
who represent the bad have mistresses. The good ones drink mineral
water. The bad ones drink rum or whiskey. The good are thin and idealists.
The bad ones are fat and greedy. The good ones have healthy teeth,
the bad have rotten ones. The good have no possessions. The bad ones
are proprietors.
The
good are poor, the bad rich. The good belong to the Party or collaborate
with it. The others are bad. The good, by the way, are imprisoned
in an ideological straitjacket where they can't even be allowed to
appreciate a surrealist or naïve painting.
Up
until 1954, Amado translated in his literature the determinations
of the Russian Communist Party. In an interview with Isto É
(November 18, 1981), Amado admits to his Stalinism:
"I
don't know if the term "socialist realism" is applicable
to all my books from that period. They faced socialist realism but
the truth is that Jubiabá, Mar Morto and
Capitães de Areia from the period you have referred
could only be published in Russian after Stalin's death. I believe
this classification is right for Terras do Sem Fim, Seara
Vermelha and Subterrâneos da Liberdade. If there
is a book I wrote that is completely influenced by the Stalinism that
is Subterrâneos da Liberdade that reflects a manichaeistic
position."
After
Khrushchev denounces the crimes of the Stalin regime in 1956, Amado
wets his little finger on his tongue and raises it up, to see the
direction the wind is now blowing: the direction of History was then
one of a more popular tone, to the style of Rede Globo network. He
then starts producing a literature of evasion around Bahian motifs,
but not before doing a timid and discreet mea culpa, published on
October 10 of the same year by the Imprensa Popular:
"We
are approaching, my dear, the nine months left to the 20th Congress
of the Soviet Union Communist Party, the time of a gestation. This
pregnancy of silence is too long and all are asking what could it
be hiding or if the mountain isn't giving birth to a mouse".
"I
believe that we must discuss, freely and deeply, all that moves
and agitates the democratic and communist international movement,
but that above all we have to discuss the huge reflexes of the personality
cult among us, our huge mistakes, the absurds of all sizes, the
dehumanization that, like the most detrimental and poisonous tree,
flourished in the manure of this cult elevated to its lowest and rudest
forms, and are now suffocating our thoughts and actions. (...) I feel
the mud and the blood all around me, but above them I see the light
of the new humanism that we want to keep lit, but that was almost
drowned by the wave of crimes and mistakes."
As
if the simple fact he could feel the mud and the blood around himself
could redeem him of his past complicities. But the denunciation of
the crimes of the Stalin regime did not generate any Nuremberg tribunal
and Jorge Amado felt as someone naïve, deceived by the winds
of the century. However, he did not allow the reissuing of O Mundo
da Paz. As for his fiction based on the socialist realism continues
to be reedited and translated. But the Bahian agitprop feels obliged
to change his course and publishes in 1958, Gabriela, Cravo e
Canela. In 1961, he releases Os Velhos Marinheiros (The
Old Sailors, published as Home Is the Sailor in 1964 in the
U.S.), considered as one of his best moments in literature. In this
same year he is elected a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters,
an institution he had stoned and insulted during his youth. In his
inauguration speech, with the same naiveté of an urchin recalling
past tricks, he reiterates his opposition to the House that receives
him:
"I
get to your illustrious companionship with the quiet satisfaction
of having been an intransigent adversary of this institution during
that period in one's life when one must necessarily be against what
is settled and definite. Woe is that young man, that young writer's
apprentice, who at the start of his career does not come, sincere
and quixotic, assailing the walls and the glory of this House. For
me, fortunately, I cast many stones on your windows, many rude adjectives
I wasted against your indifference, too much I booed against your
composure, many battles I fought against your strength."
In
response to those who condemned him, he said: "All in life obeys
formalities, and if I am a socialist that doesn't mean that I ignore
the formal world that surrounds me." From Moscow he receives
the support of Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg: "We love Jorge
Amado and we trust him. I just saw him in a photograph a little fatter,
wearing an academic's gown. I looked at it and smiled. They give a
luxurious gown to Brazilian academics. Besides, they use the swords
like the French. There is nothing wrong in a simple man of yesterday
appearing once a year in an immortal's costume."
An
Affair With the Yankee Imperialism
With
the transposition of his novels to TV soap operas, this retired revolutionary
becomes a sort of scriptwriter for Rede Globo network. Up to this
day he prides himself of his past as a man of the left. But he was
the first Brazilian author to personally congratulate Fernando Collor
de Mello for his victory. Of course he didn't offer his support when
he was being impeached.
With
this new turn, his books begin to be published in the U.S.. In a 1985
interview with the French translator Alice Raillard in his Bahia mansion
we see that from an unconditional enemy of capitalism he becomes a
member: "Yes, this house... This house, I always say that it
was the American capitalism that allowed me to build it! It was an
old dream to have a house in Bahia. (…) To build one? I wished
but I didn't have the money. It was then that I sold the rights for
Metro Goldwin Mayer to make a movie based on Gabriela."
In
an interview with the newspaper Folha de São Paulo
in December of 1994 he shows the reporter the mansion bought with
the MGM's dollars: "This is the master's bedroom. I spent my
life calling Americans all sort of names, but all we have is thanks
to the imperialist Yankees' money. We bought this house in 1963 with
the money we got from selling the rights of Gabriela, filmed
only 21 years later. I didn't charge them too much, only $100,000."
The
partnership with the capitalist enemy turned out to be a lucrative
one and allowed Amado to realize the dream of living in the same Paris
he had insulted so much when a Marxist: "In 1986, the Americans
paid me a big sum in advance for the rights of translation of Tocaia
Grande, $250,000. We put our savings together, Zélia and
I, and we bought our little place in Marais, Paris."
This
gentleman, who held up with enthusiasm the worst and most murderous
flags of the century and who at the end of his life confesses without
any modesty his venality is who represented Brazil in the Book Fair
of Paris. But there is nothing to be surprised about. Amado sells
to Europe an image Europe accepts as being Brazilian. Once again according
to Wilson Martins:
"The
truth is that our literature has always been seen as something exotic,
tropical. That's why Amado is extremely popular in other countries.
He offers this stereotype of violence, of conquest of the land, of
class struggle and of racial oppression. This exotic idea, this sort
of island of the south seas where everyone wears a tanga (loincloth)
on the streets, holds a bow and arrow and chases jaguars on Rio Branco
avenue (in downtown Rio). When a white Brazilian appears showing a
great international culture, he causes an extraordinary surprise.
We feed this prejudice with all our might. We want to pass this image
of tropicalistas, that this is a tropical country, that we
are a mixed race, that whites here don't have a chance. The ones who
defend this are these group of 'Bahians' and 'new Bahians', the people
of the trios elétricos (wired-for-sound trucks used
in the Northeast during Carnaval); it is even a prejudice against
the culture, in the ecumenical sense of the word."
When
recently asked how he would like to be remembered in an Encyclopedia
50 years from now, Amado answered with the naïveté of
the innocent: "As a sensual and romantic Bahian man. I am like
my characters—sometimes even the female ones." And maybe
it is one of his female characters that better represents the ambivalence
of the "sensual and romantic Bahian:" Dona Flor, the one
who calmly managed two husbands. By paying homage to Amado, Paris
was in reality distinguishing with a medal a venal writer, who rendered
the worst disservice to Brazil when fighting to transform it in one
more little Soviet republic, all for a rapid literary ascension and
personal gain.
Translated
by Rosemary Gund