Captains of the Sands (38 page)

Pedro Bala comes into the warehouse. Night had covered the city. The black man’s voice is singing at sea. Dora’s star is shining almost as brightly as the moon in the most beautiful sky in the world. Pedro Bala comes in, looks at the children. Outrigger comes along next to him, the little black boy is 15 years old now.

Pedro Bala looks. They’re lying down, some already asleep, others are talking, smoking cigarettes, laughing the great guffaw of the Captains of the Sands. Bullet brings them all together, has Outrigger come over:

“People, I’m going away now, I’m going to leave you. I’m going away, Outrigger is leader now. Alberto will still come to see you, do what he says. And everybody listen: Outrigger is leader now.”

The black boy Outrigger speaks:

“People, Pedro Bala is going away. Three cheers for Pedro Bala…”

The fists of the Captains of the Sands are raised.

“Bullet, Bullet,” they shout as a farewell.

The shouts fill the night, drown out the voice of the black man singing on the sea, the sky trembles, as does Pedro Bala’s heart. Clenched fists of children who stand up. Mouths that shout a farewell to their leader: “Bullet, Bullet.”

Outrigger stands before them all. He’s leader now. Pedro Bala seems to see Dry Gulch, Legless, Cat, Professor, Lollipop, Good-Life, Big João, and Dora, all at the same time among them. Now their destiny has changed. The voice of the black man on the sea is singing Good-Life’s samba:

Comrades, let’s go into the fight…

With their fists raised, the children salute Pedro Bala, who is leaving to change the destiny of other children. Outrigger shouts in front of them all, he’s the new leader now.

From far off Pedro Bala can still see the Captains of the Sands. In the moonlight, in an old abandoned warehouse, they’re raising their arms. They’re on their feet, their destiny has changed.

In the mysterious night of the
macumbas
the drums resound like trumpets of war.

Years later, good newspapers, little newspapers, several of which existed illegally and were printed on clandestine presses, newspapers that circulated in factories, passed from hand to hand, and which were read by the light of a match, kept publishing news about a militant proletarian, Comrade Pedro Bala, who was sought by the police of five States as an organizer of strikes, as the director of illegal parties, as the dangerous enemy of the established order.

In the year that all mouths were prevented from speaking, in the year that was one whole night of terror, those newspapers (the only mouths still speaking) demanded the freedom of Pedro Bala, the leader of his class, who was imprisoned in a penal colony.

And the day he escaped, in numberless homes at the hour of their poor meal, faces lighted up when they heard the news. And in spite of the fact that the terror was out there, any one of those homes was a home that would be open for Pedro Bala, a fugitive from the police. Because the revolution is a homeland and a family.

THE END

In the house haunted by Doninha Quaresma (jugs and Doninha’s soul were buried there), now the Captain’s, in the peace of Estância, Sergipe, March 1937.

On board the
Rakuyo Maru
, going up the coast of South America en route to Mexico, June 1937.

With the publication of
Captains of the Sands
, I bring to a close the cycle of works that I call “The Bahian Novels.” They are six books in which I have tried to set down the life, the customs, the language of my State. In
Carnival Country
it is the restlessness of intellectual youth that seeks its way at a moment of definition. Various critics who have written about my work, unfamiliar, naturally, with that first novel of mine, are accustomed to see it as a satirical book about Brazilian intellectuals who live as an offshoot of European literature, especially that of France. There is, however, not the slightest intent at satire in that novel. There does exist a desire to bring into focus a moment lived by the more or less intellectual or intellectualized youth of Brazil, a moment in which social and political currents were beginning to show and be defined.
Cacao
tried to give a glimpse of the life of workers on plantations in the south of Bahia, its richest region.
Sweat
exposes the most failed aspect of the State, creatures who have already lost everything and expect nothing more from life. I had the action of that novel take place in one of those strange tenements on the Ladeira do Pelourinho, and I did it with an aim: not only because I had met most of the characters in one of those tenements (where I lived), but as much because it seems to me that only in that environment could the novel and
characters of the novel take on a tone of revolt in the face of their anguish and misery, and in that way, with some healthy pamphleteering, save the novel from the futility of reactionary pessimism or false mysticism.
Jubiabá
is the life of the black race in Brazil, a life of adventure and poetry.
Sea of Death
is a new vision of the life of the sailors of small sailing vessels on the waterfront of the state capital and the bay. And this book,
Captains of the Sands
, is the existence of abandoned children on the streets of the capital city who go off to the most diverse destinies, children who tomorrow will be the men who will possibly direct the fortunes of Bahia.

I said above that I tried to set down the total life of my State. This was really an intention and I say so, even if it might be too ambitious for a young man less than 25 years of age to attempt what thus far no Brazilian writer has tried. Those writers never undertook an honest attempt to set down in novels the life, the picturesque qualities, the strange humanity of Bahia. Bahia is something mysterious and big, like India, or certain regions of Africa, or islands of the South Seas. That always escaped the few novelists who tried to write fiction with my State as the scene and its people as the characters. They stood before that fertile and strange humanity in a position of the most absolute lack of understanding. In their pockets they carried a standardized type of the hero of a novel (either an elegant and mannerly young man or an illiterate and oratorical backlands hero) and they never really tried to approach the people, never learned their customs except from some vague bits of information. There is no greater difference anywhere than between the Bahian figures in novels that have been written about my State and the real humanity of Bahia. In order to put these novels of mine (which may have many defects, but which have one quality: the absolute honesty of the author) together, I tried to seek out the people, I went to live with them, ever since my childhood on cacao plantations, my adolescence in cafés in the capital, my trips all through the State, crossing it in all manner of conveyances, listening to and seeing the most beautiful and strangest parts of Bahia’s humanity.

I have always spoken of collected material and many of the
bosses of the Brazilian novel have criticized those words harshly. But in this series of mine of novels of Bahia, I have only given myself the freedom to invent, to imagine plots. I have refused to imagine either the customs of my State, or the feelings of its men, or the way in which they react to determined facts. All this, this going out to see how Bahians really live, I call “collecting material.” I am certain that I was not doing the work of a reporter, but that of a novelist, just as I am certain that, even if my novels relate facts, feelings, and landscapes of Bahia, they have a broad universal and human meaning precisely due to the social character they possess, a universal and human meaning, doubtless many times greater than those of novels written in reaction to new Brazilian novelists and which are distinguished by their not accepting any local or social character in their pages, novels that basically do not go beyond intellectual masturbation, a sort of continuation of the physical masturbation that their authors practice every day.

Therefore, I will not admit any kind of comparison between my novels and others that have been written about Bahia already. It is not a question of literary pride. It is only the certainty that no one until today has dared look face to face with so much love at Bahian humanity and its problems. No one knows better than I, who wrote them, what the weaknesses and defects of my novels are. But, by the same token, no one can measure the sacrifice they cost me, the honesty that went into their making, the disinterest and pure love that made the novelist return to his people.

I know full well that this series of novels has nothing of genius or the miraculous about it. The work of a young man, it could not help but be full of defects. I do know, however, that there exists in it a feeling that has almost always been forgotten in Brazilian works of art: an absolute solidarity with and a great love for the humanity that lives in these books.

The novelist who set out to start this work at the age of 18 and who today, at the age of 24, sees it concluded, wishes to make it quite clear here that he wrote it with the greatest satisfaction. He knows quite well that writing in Brazil is still a sacrifice, that making literature in this country, with few sales, is
heroic. But this novelist has had support from the public that few Brazilian writers have had, and he knows that there are many people in the country who have understood him and look upon him with sympathy and love. Free of any and all links of friendship with literary groups and forces in the country, this novelist went out to seek support from the public, who came to understand that they had a friend in him, someone who wished to speak with a frank and loyal voice. Furthermore, this novelist is happy to know that he made the suffering and life of the Bahian people known to millions of people in Brazil and abroad, making many hearts beat in solidarity with the drama of their brethren in Bahia.

This series of six novels of Bahia is only based on the love a young man felt for the suffering, the joy, the life of the people of his land. They were books written, if not with talent and literary capacity, at least with a desire for absolute understanding.

I dedicate these “Novels of Bahia” to João Amado de Faria, my father, as a token of love and great recognition. He was one of those men from Sergipe who came as boys to build a country in Bahia, a clearer of backlands, builder of roads, raiser of towns, and to him for his 40 years of daily work on the land of Bahia, for the strength of heroism and poetry in his life, to him, builder of the country of Bahia, this remembrance from his Bahian son.

JORGE AMADO

Mexico City, June
1937