Captains of the Sands

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

CAPTAINS OF THE SANDS

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.

COLM TÓIBÍN’
s novels include
The Master
and
Brooklyn
. Tóibín worked as a journalist in Latin America in the 1980s. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University.

Introduction by
COLM TÓIBÍN

CAPTAINS OF THE SANDS

Letters to the Editor

Child Thieves

In The Moonlight in an Old Abandoned Warehouse

The Warehouse

Night with The “Captains of The Sands”

The Pitangueiras Stop

The Lights of the Carrousel

Docks

The Ogun Adventure

God Grins Like A Little Black Boy

Family

Picture-Book Morning

Milk Pox

Destiny

The Night of Great Peace, The Great Peace in Your Eyes

Daughter of the Smallpox Man

Dora, Mother

Dora, Sister and Sweetheart

Reformatory

Orphanage

Night of Great Peace

Dora, Wife

Like A Star with Blond Hair

Song of Bahia, Song of Freedom

Vocations

The Spinster’s Love Song

Hitching A Ride on A Train

Like A Circus Trapeze Artist

News Items

Comrades

The Drums Resound Like Trumpets of War

…A Homeland and a Family

Postface: The Bahian Novels

In his book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, written in 1879, Henry James offered a list of what New England could not offer a novelist: “No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentleman, no palaces, no castles, nor manor, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot.” But James understood, at least some of the time, that such a lack could, in a strange way, be as much a gift as a problem for a novelist. “The American knows,” he wrote, “that a good deal remains.” Seven years earlier, in a letter to an American friend, he had suggested that the richness of Europe was something perhaps the American novelist did not need: “It’s a complex fate being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.”

In his efforts to root his fiction in a world of settled manners, however, James understood that he would have to possess the old world rather than embrace the new one. Since he believed in structure and form in the novel, and in the orderly
and stately architecture of fiction, he lived merely with the shadow of what “the American knows” and feasted instead on the substance of what England, France, and Italy offered him. He relished in his fiction a thousand years of slow progress, a sense of order and continuity.

In listing what was absent from the world that Hawthorne inherited, James was suggesting a kind of wilderness, a place where nothing orderly, including an orderly novel, could easily grow. He did not wish to write disorderly novels.

As James was working, however, literacy and literary culture began to spread in places where civility was merely a rumor, or a sour joke. In such countries as Ireland and Brazil, for example, as poverty and social disruption reigned, and respect for form and continuity was sorely missing, the novel took on a new and strange shape.

This caused unease, to say the least. It took more than eight years, for example, for
Dubliners
, James Joyce’s first collection of stories, to find a publisher willing to take the risk of bringing out a book with stark and relentless images of the sexual and social underside of a city. So, too, it took more than a decade for Joyce’s
Ulysses
, after its initial publication in Paris in 1922, to become freely available in the English-speaking world. The enemies were not only the censors but also snobbish elements in the literary community itself, including Professor Mahaffy of Trinity College Dublin, who said: “James Joyce is a living argument in defence of my contention that it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of this island—for the corner boys who spit in the Liffey.” Or Virginia Woolf, who noted in her diary that she found
Ulysses
“an illiterate, underbred book…the book of a self-taught working man.” Or Henry James’s friend Edmund Gosse, who wrote of Joyce: “He is of course not entirely without talent, but he is a literary charlatan of the extremest order.”

The year after Henry James published his book on Hawthorne, the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839–1908), a close contemporary of James’s—Elizabeth Bishop, in her book on Brazil, ranked him and James as the two greatest novelists of their age in the Americas—began his novel
Epitaph of a Small Winner
with a chapter called “The Death of the Author.” The novel begins: “I hesitated some time, not knowing whether to open these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, i.e., whether to start with my birth or with my death. Granted, the usual practice is to begin with one’s birth, but two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that properly speaking, I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but of one who has died and is now writing, a writer for whom the grave was really a new cradle; the second is that the book would thus gain in merriment and novelty.”

This tone seems a century away from James, being close to the tone of certain, and indeed uncertain, playful texts produced in both the eighteenth century and the twentieth century by such figures as Laurence Sterne (whom Machado de Assis had read) and Flann O’Brien or Jorge Luis Borges. What
Epitaph of a Small Winner
lacks, of course, is what Machado de Assis did not have as his hinterland—a world of manners and morals that had developed enough to give characters choices and chances, or a sense of time itself as something that brought easy progress and gradual change, or a sense of a structured and ordered society in which a character could grow and develop and in which a narrative could grow too to satisfy a large and leisured readership.

Machado de Assis and other such Brazilian novelists as João Guimerães Rosa (1908–1968), Jorge Amado (1912–2001), and Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) came to play with language and tone and structure rather than offer representation for the same reason that such writers as Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett in Ireland set out to destroy the line in narrative and replace it with the circle or the jagged form. Fiction for them was broken glass, a cracked mirror, a way of reflecting and engendering distortion rather than offering a window on the world or creating a mirror in which the readers could see their own world in the world of the characters. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, language in Ireland “is weapon, dissemblance, seduction, apologia—anything, in fact, but representational.” The same is true also in Brazil, where the language of fiction
has been a high-wire performance rather than a way of stabilizing the world below.