Captains of the Sands (2 page)

In a 1932 essay called “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges attempted to formulate what this disruptive tone in fiction did, or where it came from. The South American writer, he wrote, by virtue of being both close to and distant from the center of Western culture, had more “rights” to Western culture than anyone in any Western nation. He compared this enriching sense of proximity and distance to the position of Jewish and Irish writers. “It was enough,” he wrote, “the fact of feeling Irish, different, to become innovators within English culture. I believe that Argentine writers, and South American writers in general, are in an analogous situation; we can handle all the European themes, handle them without superstition, but with an irreverence that can have, and does have, fortunate consequences.”

Thus Jorge Amado inherited the full tradition of European literature and felt free to do as he pleased with it. His social vision and his membership in the Communist Party meant he had no interest in dramatizing or inventing the lives of the fragile middle classes in Brazil. In his novel
Captains of the Sands
, he took what he needed from Charles Dickens and used also the form of the folktale, the picaresque novel, and the documentary novel. Like many novelists from the eighteenth century, and like his predecessor Machado de Assis, he did not bother too much with character development or a seamless structure. He wrote as a storyteller might speak. He used episodes rather than chapters. He merged a tone that was almost naive with a social vision that was challenging with a form that took its bearings from collage as much as from the orderly house of fiction.

Amado also set out to take the glamour away from Salvador de Bahia. Bahia was the first capital of Brazil, the place to which slaves were brought from Africa as early as 1535. It was around Bahia that the plantation system first grew. As Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote: “The world, gorged with gold, began to hunger after sugar; and sugar took a lot of slaves.” Many of the slaves had skills, and some were literate, and much of the culture they brought from Africa survived in hybrid form into
the twentieth century. The beautiful old colonial city, with its waterfront life and its magnificent baroque architecture and many churches, survived too. The capital was transferred to Rio in 1763, and slowly, as São Paulo became the coffee capital, there was no more reason to build in Bahia. Thus its architecture was preserved, and so, too, its folk art, its quasi-religious folk traditions—
candomblé
,
macumba
,
capoeira
—and its exotic feel.

Part of the drama in
Captains of the Sands
arises from Amado’s refusal to romanticize, to evoke the city of Bahia in all its exquisite beauty. The novel is not written for tourists; it is written to give substance to shadows, to re-create the under-life of the city, to offer the dispossessed and reviled an inner life. There is a lovely, hard materialist vision at the heart of the novel; it veers between sociology and mythmaking. There is a battle going on within it between Amado’s mission and his art; at times the mission wins a skirmish as his characters emerge golden and good; at other times the poverty of their lives diminishes any real possibility of choice or chance or development for them. Yet at other times their individuality emerges with artistry and sympathy.

Amado was writing to save his country’s soul. His characters are the poor, the abandoned who live from stealing. The novel’s hero, Pedro Bala, who is the leader of the group of youths at the heart of the book, is given a powerful sense of who he is and what he has inherited from the father he never met, who died leading a strike. But he is one of the few in the novel who is given a personal history. The rest of the Captains of the Sands inhabit the present tense, but with a sense always of the story of slavery and past cruelty as an essential, if mixed-up, part of their lives. Their motives are often grubby, their instincts mean, but there are also moments when their mission in the world is exalted, as when they set about rescuing Ogun the icon from the hands of the police. They believe in magic and in an older justice, one that came from Africa with the slaves. They also have talent, a talent for loyalty and love, as much as for robbing and deceiving. One of them, the Professor, even has talent as an artist.

The form that Amado chose for the book is close to fable, or to unstructured storytelling. The gravity of the book arises from his use of elemental forces, not only good and evil, wealth and poverty, the body and the spirit, but also the wind and the sea, the stars and the night, and indeed God or a force beyond and above the dull, repressive forces that seem to control the streets of Bahia during the day. There are passages where Amado draws what happens to his waifs in broad outline, but in other sections he manages a sort of razor-sharp realism. The scene where Pedro Bala is condemned to solitary confinement and begins to suffer from thirst is one of the most memorable and best-rendered accounts of being in prison we have in any literature. So, too, the scenes where smallpox and fever take their toll have a genuine edge of pain. Also, the scenes where the Captains of the Sands manage to fool the rich of the city and get away with it would have made Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens proud.

It is interesting that in his postface, written in Mexico in 1937, Amado writes, “I tried to set down the total life of my State,” echoing Joyce, who wrote of his alter ego Stephen in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” In both cases the writer came from a world that lacked the richness and the textures Henry James outlined in his book on Hawthorne. Both writers had to invent their textures and the forms that would display them best to the world. They used age-old systems of storytelling, replacing heroes with figures who were down on their luck; they used the shabby underside of a once-great city as though it were the very center of the universe; they both, in creating new and hybrid forms for the novel, offered the novel a new energy. They set about making the periphery the center of the known world while remaining true to its darker and stranger contours.

COLM TÓIBÍN

THE SINISTER ADVENTURES OF THE “CAPTAINS OF THE SANDS”—CITY INFESTED BY CHILDREN WHO LIVE BY STEALING—ACTIONS URGED ON THE PART OF THE JUVENILE JUDGE AND CHIEF OF POLICE—ANOTHER ATTACK YESTERDAY

Several times now this newspaper, which is without a doubt the organ of the most legitimate aspirations of the Bahian people, has carried news of the criminal activities of the “Captains of the Sands,” the name by which a group of assaulting and thieving children who infest our city is known. These children who have dedicated themselves to a frightful career of crime at such an early age have no set abode or, at least, their abode has not been located. As has not been located either, the place where they hide the product of their attacks, which have become daily, calling for immediate action on the part of the juvenile judge or the chief of police.

This gang that lives off crime is made up, as far as is known, of more than 100 children of the most varied ages, from 8 to 16. Children whose parents neglect giving them even a few Christian feelings in their upbringing, are naturally given over to a life of crime in their young years. They are called the “Captains of the Sands” because the waterfront is their headquarters. And as a commander they have an urchin of 14 who is the worst of the lot, not only a thief but the perpetrator of an attack that resulted in serious injury yesterday
afternoon. Unfortunately the identity of this leader is unknown.

What has become necessary is immediate action by the police and the juvenile court so that this gang may be eliminated and the police can pick up these precocious criminals who have not let the city sleep in peace or have the rest it so well deserves, and put them into reform school or prison. Let us go on now to the story of yesterday’s attack, the victim of which was a respected businessman of our town whose residence was robbed of more than a thousand and his servant wounded by the heartless leader of that gang of young bandits.

AT THE RESIDENCE OF COMMANDER JOSÉ FERREIRA

On the Corredor da Vitória, in the heart of the most fashionable district of the city, stands the beautiful dwelling of Commander José Ferreira, one of the wealthiest and most distinguished businessmen of this city, with a dry goods establishment on the Rua Portugal. It is a pleasure to see the commander’s small palace, surrounded by gardens, with its colonial architecture. Only yesterday this cove of peace and honest toil suffered an hour of indescribable agitation and fright with the invasion it underwent by the “Captains of the Sands.”

The clocks were striking three in the afternoon and the city was smothering with heat when the gardener noticed some children dressed in rags loitering about the commander’s residence. The gardener tried to drive those unwelcome visitors away. And since they went on their way down the street, Ramiro, the gardener, went about his business in the garden at the rear of the villa. Minutes later, however, came the

ATTACK

Five minutes had not gone by when Ramiro the gardener heard frightened screams coming from inside the residence. They were the cries of people who were truly terrified. Arming himself with a sickle, the gardener went into the house and barely had time to see several urchins who, like a pack of demons (in Ramiro’s curious expression), fled, leaping out the windows, loaded down with valuable objects from the dining room. The maid who had screamed was taking care of the commander’s wife, who suffered a slight swoon because of the shock she had been through. The gardener hurried out to the garden where he got into the

FIGHT

It so happened that in the garden the charming child named Raul Ferreira, 11 years old, grandson of the
commander, who was visiting his grandparents, was talking to the leader of the “Captains of the Sands,” who can be recognized by a scar he has on his face. In his innocence, Raul was laughing with the thug, who doubtless intended to rob him. The gardener then threw himself onto the thief. He did not expect, however, the reaction of the urchin, who showed himself to be a master of fights of that nature. The result was that when he thought he had a good grip on the head of the gang, the gardener received a stab in the shoulder and immediately thereafter another on the arm, obliging him to free the criminal, who fled.

The police have investigated the event, but up till the writing of this report no trace of the “Captains of the Sands” has been found. Commander José Ferreira, interviewed by our reporters, estimates his loss at more than a thousand
reis
, since a small watch belonging to his wife was worth 900 alone and it was stolen.

MEASURES URGED

The inhabitants of the aristocratic neighborhood are alarmed and fearful that the attacks will be repeated, for this was not the first one carried out by the “Captains of the Sands.” They urge measures to bring proper punishment to such scoundrels and calm to our most distinguished families. We hope that his honor the Chief of Police and the no less honorable Juvenile Judge will take the proper measures against these criminals who are so young and so daring.

THE OPINION OF INNOCENCE

Our reporters also heard from little Raul, who, as we said, is 11 years old and is already one of the brightest students at the Antônio Vieira School. Raul showed great courage and told us about his conversation with the terrible chief of the “Captains of the Sands.”

“He said that I was a fool and didn’t know what playing was. I answered that I had a bicycle and lots of playthings. He laughed and said he had the street and the waterfront. I liked him because he was like one of those movie children who run away from home to have adventures.”

Then we began to think about that other delicate problem of childhood, the movies, which give children so many erroneous ideas of life. Another problem deserving of the attention of the Juvenile Judge. We shall return to it.

(Account published in the
Jornal da Tarde
, on the “Police News” page along with a picture of the commander’s house and one of him at the time he received a decoration.)

LETTER FROM THE SECRETARY OF THE CHIEF OF POLICE TO THE EDITOR OF THE
JORNAL DA TARDE