The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray (2 page)

The family tries to have a decent wake for Joaquim. They buy him some nice, but not too pricey, new clothes—and even some shoes, which they can barely afford. (They pass on buying him new underwear, since they feel it can respectfully be done without.) And they try to make sure no one will know he’s dead until it’s too late to visit the body, until the wake is over. But the family gets tired, keeping vigil with the body, and when Quincas’s friends come by to pay their respects—they hear about the wake because Bahia is a place where one hears about things—the family retires to rest. Quincas’s friends gossip. They drink. They tell stories of their friend. They even steal his shoes. They offer their dead friend something to drink as well, so that he can be included in the fun. And then their friend—or at least the story goes—comes back to life for one more good night on the town, one more visit to his mistress, and one final death, one of his own choosing: leaping into the sea and disappearing without a trace.

Quincas, who is more than once in the novel termed a champion of dying—he dies not once, not twice, but three times!—is in this way also a champion of being born, at least via story. As such, it is fitting that gossip prompts Quincas back to life, at least long enough to see to his own funeral. “Gossip,” if we allow ourselves to follow the word’s roots in English, derives from
gossib
, Middle English for a woman invited to be present at a birth. Invited women were meant to chatter idly, to amuse and distract the laboring
mother from pain and boredom. (At least “gossip” most likely derives from
gossib
—etymologies are rumors as well.)

Of Bahia, the region of Brazil where most of Amado’s work is set, the wider world heard rumor in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
Tristes Tropiques
. In the opening section, after Lévi-Strauss speaks dismissively of the whole genre of tales of travel, and shortly before he notes that he never, at the time, knew what he was searching out, he describes a brief port-of-call visit to Bahia, a little before the outbreak of World War II. He recalls going from church to church—“there are said to be 365 of them,” he notes, “one for each day of the year they say”—photographing architectural details. While doing so, a group of “half-naked” black boys are following him, begging him not for money but simply to also be photographed. He is charmed and eventually agrees. “I had barely gone two hundred yards further when a hand descended on my shoulder: two plain-clothes inspectors…informed me that I had just committed an unfriendly act towards Brazil: the photograph, if used in Europe, might possibly give credence to the legend that there were black-skinned Brazilians and that the urchins of Bahia went barefoot.”

Lévi-Strauss’s trip follows shortly after the release of Amado’s sixth novel,
Captains of the Sands
(1937), the story of a band of boys living in a shack near the sea and making their way through petty crimes in Bahia. Amado was not yet thirty at the time. His work had already been banned, he had been imprisoned for two months on charges of being involved in a communist conspiracy, and he was about to be imprisoned a second time. His 1935 novel,
Jubiabá
, follows the life of a poor black slum boy who eventually becomes a dockworker and labor organizer; his 1936 novel,
Sea of Death
, follows the life of Bahia sailors.
The Knight of Hope
, published in 1941, was about an abolitionist poet from
Bahia’s past; after that, Amado was in exile in Argentina and Uruguay for a couple years. He later served the Brazilian Communist Party as their representative in the National Constituent Assembly, then lived in France and Czechoslovakia for a number of years. In 1951 he accepted the Stalin Peace Prize; in 1955 he returned to Brazil; in 1956, after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, he left the Communist Party. He had decided to leave political life and devote himself exclusively to literature. He began writing more books from the point of view of women. He wrote more often, and very frankly, about sex. (Perhaps not coincidentally, his writing also became more humorous.) For a time, his work was considered so racy and such an offense to morals that he was not welcome in his own hometown of Ilhéus. Amado’s 1966 bedroom comic novel,
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
—a woman is haunted by the disapproving ghost of her dead husband when she takes up a new and less sexually interesting lover—became a best seller, and eventually a hit Brazilian film starring Sônia Braga, and then a sanitized American rom-com with Sally Field. Amado wrote more novels, wrote some children’s stories; many more films were made of his work—also TV series, cartoons, ballets, even Samba routines….

In Bahia today, Amado’s house stands as a museum and foundation; it is one of the main sites to which local luxury hotels demarcate their nearness. Which, one imagines, must feel funny to a man who consistently went to such pains to list the price of the garments purchased—and the underwear not purchased—for a corpse, and whose work was serially revered, reviled, revered again, reviled again, and on and on, most precisely for his interest in writing lovingly and in economic detail about the lives of the lower classes. More than one expert of sorts on Latin American literature described Amado to me as something akin to great but
somewhat dismissable as a sentimental Marxist.
The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray
recounts the stories told about a dead man; with some irony we note the biography of Jorge Amado today as just more stories about the dead man in the room with us. It seems time to restore some life to him by starting newer, more interesting, and perhaps more true rumors about this sui generis novelist.

RIVKA GALCHEN

Even today a certain confusion remains surrounding the death of Quincas Water-Bray. Doubts to be explained, absurd details, contradictions in the testimony of witnesses, diverse gaps. Nothing is clear as to time, place, and last words. The family, backed up by neighbors and friends, remains adamant with their version of a peaceful death in the morning, without witnesses, display, or last words, taking place almost twenty hours before that other demise, the one bandied about and commented upon as the night wanes and the moon disappears over the sea, when mysteries take place along the waterfront of Bahia. Spoken in the presence of competent witnesses, however, and talked about everywhere in hillside neighborhoods and hidden alleys, his last words are repeated from mouth to mouth and in the opinion of those people represent more than just a farewell to the world; they are a prophetic testimony, a message with deep meaning (as a young author of our own time would come to write).

All those competent witnesses, among them Master Manuel and Quitéria Goggle-Eye, a woman of her word, and yet, in spite of it all, there are those who deny all and any authenticity, not to those admired words alone but also to all the events of that memorable night when at a doubtful time and under disputable circumstances Quincas
Water-Bray plunged into the seas of Bahia and set off on an endless journey, never to return. That’s what the world’s like, hitched, like oxen to a yoke, to law and order, customary procedures, and sealed documents. They triumphantly display the death certificate, signed by the doctor just before noon, and on the strength of that simple sheet of paper—just because it has printed letters and some stamps on it—they try to snuff out all those hours lived so intensely by Quincas Water-Bray up until his departure, of his own free and spontaneous will, as he declared in a loud, clear voice to his friends and all present.

The dead man’s family—his respectable daughter and his proper son-in-law, a civil servant with a promising career; Aunt Marocas; and his younger brother, a merchant with modest credit in the bank—says that the whole tale is nothing but a gross bit of counterfeit goods, the inventions of inveterate drunkards and lowlifes on the margin of society and the law, rogues whose surroundings ought to be the bars of a jail cell and not the freedom of the streets, the waterfront of Bahia, its white sand beaches and its immense night. Committing an injustice, it is to these friends of Quincas that they attribute all the responsibility for the ill-fated existence he had been living these last few years, when he became a bother and a shame for his family. 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. Which leads one to attest that there had indeed been a first death, if not physical, a moral one at least, dating back some years earlier, which brings the total to three, making Quincas some kind of record holder in matters of death, a champion at dying, and gives us the right to think that posterior events—beginning with the
death certificate right up to his plunge into the sea—were a farce he put together in order to molest his relatives’ lives once more, to bring some annoyance into their existence, lowering them into the shameful gossip of the street. He wasn’t a man for respect and convention, in spite of the respect he was paid by his card-playing partners as a gambler of outsized luck or as a drinker of storied amounts of cachaça.

I don’t know if this mystery of the death (of the successive deaths) of Quincas Water-Bray will ever be completely deciphered, but I shall make an attempt, as he himself advised, because the important thing is to try, even with the impossible.

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. And the memory of the dead, as is well known, is a sacred thing, not meant for the unclean mouths of cachaça-swillers, gamblers, and marijuana smugglers. Nor to serve as the basis for the vulgar poetry of the singers of popular songs by the entrance to the Lacerda Elevator, which so many proper people pass through, including the colleagues of Leonardo Barreto, Quincas’s humiliated son-in-law. When a man dies he is reintegrated into his most authentic respectability, even having committed the maddest acts when he was alive. Death, with its unseen hand, erases the stains of the past and leaves the dead man’s memory gleaming like a new-cut diamond. This was the thesis put forth by the family and seconded by neighbors and friends. According to them, Quincas Water-Bray, upon dying, went back to being that once respectable Joaquim Soares da Cunha, of good family; an 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 only a modest drink of cachaça at home. In reality, in an effort worthy of applause, the family had managed to arrange for Quincas’s memory to gleam forth without a flaw only a few years after having publicly declared him to be dead. They spoke of him in the past tense when circumstances obliged them to make mention of him. Unfortunately, however, every so often some neighbor, some colleague of Leonardo’s, a talkative friend of Vanda’s (his shamed daughter) would run into Quincas or hear something about him from some third party. It was as if a dead man had risen from his tomb to cast a stain on his own memory: lying drunk in the sun at the height of morning near the Rampa do Mercado, or, filthy and ragged, leaning against some greasy cart by the steps of the church of Pilar, or even singing in a hoarse voice on the arms of black and mulatto streetwalkers along the Ladeira de São Miguel. A horror!

When finally on that morning a vendor of holy images who had a shop on the Ladeira do Tabuão arrived in great affliction at the small but well-kept home of the Barreto family and brought the daughter, Vanda, and the son-in-law, Leonardo, the news that Quincas had indeed kicked the bucket, found dead in his miserable hovel, a sigh of relief arose in unison from the breasts of the couple. From now on it would no longer be the memory of the retired employee of the State Bureau of Revenue overturned and dragged through the mud by the contradictory acts of the tramp he had been transformed into toward the end of his life. The time for a bit of deserved rest had arrived. Now they could speak freely of Joaquim Soares da Cunha; praise his conduct as a civil servant, a husband and father, a citizen; point out his virtues as an example for the children; teach them to
love the memory of their grandfather without fear of any upset.

The image vendor, a skinny old man with close-curled white hair, went into details: A black woman who sold
mingau
,
acarajé
,
abará
, and other culinary delights had had some important business to transact with Quincas that morning. He had promised to get her some herbs that were hard to find but that were indispensable for the obligations of
candomblé
rites. The black woman had come for the herbs. It was urgent that she get them because it was the holy season for festivities in honor of Xangô. As usual, the door to the room at the top of the filthy stairway was open—Quincas had lost the great and ancient key a long time ago. It was said that he’d sold it to some tourists on a day that was lean from his bad luck in gambling, as he coupled it to a tale, with dates and all, that elevated it to the status of a holy key to a church. The woman called out but got no answer. She thought he was asleep and pushed open the unlocked door. Quincas was there smiling as he lay on his cot—the sheet was black with filth, and a ragged blanket covered his legs—but it was his usual smile of welcome, so she thought nothing of it. She asked him for the herbs he’d promised her, but he smiled without answering. The great toe of his right foot stuck out through a hole in the sock, and his beat-up shoes were on the floor. The black woman, a close friend and quite accustomed to Quincas’s monkeyshines, sat down on the bed and told him to get a move on. She was surprised he hadn’t reached out a libertine hand, addicted as he was to pats and pinches. She stared again at the great toe of his right foot, found it strange. She touched Quincas’s body and jumped up in alarm, dropping the cold hand. She ran down the stairs and spread the news.