The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

THE DOUBLE DEATH OF QUINCAS WATER-BRAY

JORGE AMADO
(1912–2001), the son of a cocoa planter, was born in the Brazilian state of Bahia, which he would portray in more than thirty novels. His first novels, published when he was still a teenager, dramatize the class struggles of workers on Bahian cocoa plantations. Amado was later exiled for his leftist politics, but his novels would always have a strong political perspective. Not until Amado returned to Brazil in the 1950s did he write his acclaimed novels
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon
and
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
(the basis for the successful film and Broadway musical of the same name), which display a lighter, more comic approach than his overtly political novels. One of the most renowned writers of the Latin American boom of the 1960s, Amado has had his work translated into more than forty-five languages.

GREGORY RABASSA
is a National Book Award–winning translator whose English-language versions of works by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Amado have become classics in their own right. He was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1922, and in 2006 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He is Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature at Queens College, City University of New York.

RIVKA GALCHEN
is one of
The New Yorker
’s “20 Under 40” fiction writers and the author of the award-winning novel
Atmospheric Disturbances
. Her essays and stories have appeared in
Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, Bookforum,
and
The New York Times
.

JORGE AMADO

Translated by
GREGORY RABASSA

Introduction by
RIVKA GALCHEN

PENGUIN BOOKS

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Introduction by
RIVKA GALCHEN

THE DOUBLE DEATH OF QUINCAS WATER-BRAY

Though a best seller in Brazil, and translated into more languages than most Americans know exist, the twentieth-century Brazilian writer Jorge Amado (1912–2001) is little known in this country, even to the bookish, for whom the writing of Brazil is represented either by the two genius Europhilic stars, Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector—who, to be fair in the distribution of unfairness, are also relatively unknown in this country—or by the self-help-esque novelist/guru/lyricist Paulo Coelho, who is well known most everywhere, and who is not infrequently photographed with halo lighting effects, or barefoot in desert sand. So an American reader, educated in only these two extreme types, tends to feel at a loss even in building a misleading stereotype from which to begin misimagining what type of writer Amado might be. But maybe the Hydratic stereotype is a helpful beginning. Amado’s work is neither precisely for the mandarin nor precisely for the masses. Amado held the prestigious chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters for forty years, and he was especially beloved by his contemporary French intellectuals; at the same time, his novels sold so well, and there were so many of them (more than thirty), that these days—from our place and time—one might understandably entertain the incorrect suspicion that Amado had penned series with zombies, or with vampires, or both.

In fact, Amado wrote mostly about the lives of the people—most of them quite poor—from his native region of Bahia, Brazil. Yet, the varieties of the undead prove to be a not fruitless misassociation to bring to a first reading of this 1959 novella,
The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray
, published here in celebration of the centennial of Amado’s birth. A swift, funny, and occasionally even slapstick little book,
Double Death
is not uninterested in clouding a reader’s sense of in what ways and when its eponymic hero is and isn’t alive, and in what ways and when he was and wasn’t, at certain moments, dead. (Normally I might worry such a sentence would plot-spoil, but one of the unsettling comforts of reading a Latin American novel—the “Latin American novel” being the taxonomical juggernaut with which every book penned south of Brownsville, Texas, has to contend, even those penned in Portuguese—is that a character’s death rarely means that character then exits stage left forever; only in Shakespeare do the dead as frequently return.)

So who is this Quincas? In the novel’s opening, Quincas is already dead. The reader really hears only rumors of him, and for a spell we are not even sure Quincas is his “real” name. We are told that he was born Joaquim Soares da Cunha, “of good family; and exemplary employee of the State Bureau of Revenue, with a measured step, a closely shaved chin, a black alpaca jacket, and a briefcase under his arm; someone listened to with respect by his neighbors as he rendered his opinions on politics and the weather, never seen in any bar, with a modest drink of cachaça at home.” This seems to be the story his family tries to maintain and spread. “When a man dies he is reintegrated into his most authentic respectability, even having committed the maddest acts when he was alive…. This was the thesis put forth by the family and seconded by neighbors and friends.”
But there are other theses. Arguably the really important cast of characters in
Double Death
consists not of people but rather of gossip, rumor, hearsay, stories, and lies—how they are born, countered, stamped dubiously onto official papers, re-countered, wiped out, and reborn, and not just anywhere but very specifically in Quincas’s (and Amado’s) region of Bahia, Brazil.

Ten years before his death, Joaquim Soares unexpectedly called his wife and daughter “vipers” and then, “with the greatest of calm in the world, as if he were simply carrying through some exceedingly banal act, he left and never came back.” He then took to drinking, gambling, prankstering, socializing with the lower classes, and, possibly, became much happier. He also became much more talked about.

For the family of Joaquim Soares, the rumor and hearsay about Quincas—they can hardly acknowledge it is the same person—are experienced as a humiliation, even a sort of assault. “‘The king of the tramps of Bahia,’ the police news column in the newspapers had written about him, a street type mentioned in the chronicles by literary people…” Quincas’s son-in-law, Leonardo, recalls with particular shame and disgust a day when he found his father-in-law at a police station “in the basement of headquarters, barefoot and in his undershorts, gambling peacefully with thieves and swindlers.” The word on the street, or one of the words, was that Quincas Water-Bray—a nickname he earned, we hear, when after having taken a drink of water he had thought was cachaça, he then spat it out and shouted about as if he’d just swallowed poison—felt his respectable life was a living death; that in leaving it, he became his free and natural and joyful self.

When an image vendor—an image vendor! one “who had a shop on the Ladeira do Tabuão”—brings the news of
Quincas’s being found dead alone in his room, Quincas’s estranged daughter and son-in-law sigh in relief. No more humiliating rumors, they think. But of course there are more. “The rascals who told the story of Quincas’s final moments up and down the streets in the hillside neighborhoods, across from the market and in the stalls at Água dos Meninos (there was even a handbill with some doggerel composed by the improviser Cuíca de Santo Amaro that was widely sold), were therefore an affront to the memory of the deceased, according to his family.” The novel is a battle of spin. “These would be difficult moments for Leonardo, talking about the old man’s madness, trying to find some explanation for it. The worst of it would be the news spreading among his colleagues, whispered from desk to desk as faces took on wicked little smiles, uncouth tales were told, tasteless comments made.”

The presence of so many commentaries and columns draws extra attention to the question: Who or what, then, is the novella’s voice outside of quotes? The voice is not unrelated to the opening of
Pride and Prejudice
, not unrelated to the townspeak of
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
, not unrelated to what it might sound like if the speakers in
As I Lay Dying
were allowed out of the corrals of their separate chapters so they could shoulder up against one another within the same sentence. The voice is a fractious and fractionating family of voices figuring out something about how the stories we tell contribute to the construction of the lives we live and the deaths we die. The voice is also, if sides are to be taken, in alliance with Quincas’s friends more than Joaquim’s family—the name Quincas is used more often, and the telling itself is an act of solidarity.

For while gossip and rumor register like mortal wounds to the family, Quincas and his buddies are of the variety such that the only thing worse than being talked about is
not being talked about. Hence, Quincas’s family’s aggression is to not speak of him. “It had reached the point where his name was never mentioned or his deeds ever spoken about in the innocent presence of the children, for whom Grandfather Joaquim, of fond memory, had died a long time ago, decently enwrapped in everybody’s respect.” And his friends’ retaliation is to speak and speak.