Barren Lives
THE TEXAS PAN-AMERICAN SERIES
Barren Lives
(VIDAS SÊCAS)
by GRACILIANO RAMOS
Translated with an Introduction by
Ralph Edward Dimmick
ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES UMLAUF
The Texas Pan American Series is published with the assistance
of a revolving publication fund established by the Pan American
Sulphur Company and other friends of Latin America in Texas.
Publication of this book was also assisted by a grant from the
Rockefeller Foundation through the Latin American Translation
program of the Association of American University Presses.
International Standard Book Number 0-292-70133-0
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-16468
Copyright © 1965 by Heloisa de Medeiros Ramos
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Ninth paperback printing, 1999
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work
should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box
7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819.
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ANSI Z39.48-1984.
INTRODUCTION
The governor of Alagoas—a small, back-water state on the bulge of Brazil—could hardly believe his eyes. There among the municipal reports for the year 1928, dismal bureaucratic documents in which the accomplishments of local administrators were exaggerated with bombast or their in-action disguised by a cloud of obfuscating clichés, was one the like of which had never crossed his desk before. Wrote the mayor of Palmeira dos Índios: “I do not know whether the municipal administration is good or bad. Perhaps it could be worse. . . . I must have made numerous foolish mistakes, all attributable to my limited intelligence.” The style, simple and direct, often wryly humorous, was as refreshing as the author’s modesty and candor. At times it took on the raciness of popular speech: the mayor could see no point to wasting money on a telegram of condolence just because a deputy in the assembly had “kicked the bucket.”
In Brazil there has never been that divorce between intellectuals and government which is so often deplored in the United States—as the mayor of Palmeira dos Índios was to write on a later occasion, “Artists as a rule escape from hunger by getting government jobs”—and his municipal report for 1928 was soon brought to the attention of literary circles throughout the country. Augusto Frederico Schmidt, an unlikely combination of romantic poet and successful businessman, who at the time had fused his interests in a publishing venture, sensed, as he said, that the mayor must have the manuscript of a novel hidden away in a drawer someplace, and offered his services to the writer. The guess proved correct, and the publisher’s offer was accepted, but not until 1933, owing to the economic and political disturbances of the intervening years, did the book appear: Caetés, by Graciliano Ramos.
In the galaxy of new writers whose emergence in the early 1930’s made those years one of the most exciting periods in the history of Brazilian letters, Graciliano Ramos was a relative oldster. He had been born in 1892 in the little town of Quebrângulo, in rural Alagoas, but while still an infant had been taken to his maternal grandfather’s ranch near Buique, in the neighboring state of Pernambuco. This is range country, too dry for crops, subject to periodic droughts which bring death to cattle and ruin to the owners. This was the region of Ramos’ earliest recollections, and this is the background of Barren Lives.
Ramos’ childhood is brilliantly evoked in a volume of memoirs entitled Infância. He presents his father, “a grave man with a broad forehead—one of the handsomest I ever saw—sound teeth, a firm-set jaw, and a frightening voice”; his mother, “a puny, aggressive, bad-tempered matron, always bustling about, with a knobby head ill covered by thin hair, an evil-looking mouth, and evil-looking eyes, which, in moments of wrath, gleamed with a flame of madness”; his two grandfathers, one a bankrupt plantation owner, from whom “perhaps I inherited my absurd vocation for useless things,” the other “a man of immense vitality, resistant to drought, first prosperous, then all but ruined, courageously rebuilding his fortune”; and a host of other figures, some of whom, such as the ranch hand José Baía, appear without so much as a change of name in Ramos’ novel Anguish.
As is perhaps suggested by the description of his parents, Ramos’ early years were not happy ones. His mother had little time for him: the chapter of Barren Lives concerned with the older boy is a reminiscence of the author’s childhood. His father, in the patriarchal tradition of Brazilian society, was the incarnation of authority, at times mercilessly blind. Graciliano’s first encounter with “justice” was a paternal whiplashing occasioned by the disappearance of a belt—a beating for which the father made no amends even when he discovered that the boy was in no way responsible. Viewing his father’s actions with half a century’s perspective, Ramos found his outbursts understandable. Unlike his indomitable father-in-law, the elder Ramos gave way before the ravages of drought, abandoning ranching for a series of ill-starred ventures as a shopkeeper, first in Buíque, later in Viçosa and Palmeira dos Índios, back in the state of Alagoas. Unsure of his position, forced to scrape before his creditors and the local political bosses, he vented his spleen on his debtors, his social inferiors, and his children.
He made at least one significant contribution to his son’s education, however. Ramos’ account of his early schooling is a depressing one: cruel discipline, rote learning, incompetent teachers, classroom material totally inappropriate to the juvenile mind. At the age of seven, a lad with no knowledge of Portuguese beyond the rudimentary vocabulary used by the inhabitants of the backlands was assigned to read the Lusiads! Small wonder that two years later he was still “all but illiterate.” Then one evening, counter to all custom, Graciliano’s father called him to fetch a book and read. The book was an adventure story, telling of a family lost in the woods on a winter’s night, pursued by wolves. Under his father’s questioning, and with his translations into “kitchen language” of the more high-flown literary expressions, Graciliano’s understanding unfolded and his curiosity was whetted. The father’s tutoring lasted only three nights, but the boy’s interest in books, once aroused, was to accompany him to the end of his life.
This interest was of prime importance for his educational development. While at the age of twelve he was sent to secondary school in the state capital, Maceió, he never completed the course, and such culture as he acquired resulted almost entirely from his own independent readings. The Ramos household seems to have numbered few books among its possessions, but the notary of Viçosa had a library, and from him Graciliano borrowed his first work of literary value, O Guarani (“The Guarani Indian”), by José de Alencar, the Brazilian counterpart of James Fenimore Cooper. The postmaster was another source of supply. A man of literary pretensions himself, he encouraged Graciliano to write for a small sheet he had founded, and the resulting products appeared there, much embellished by the boy’s mentor. Local stocks proving insufficient for his appetite, however, Graciliano took to filching coins from the cash drawer in his father’s shop, so that he might order the works that so tempted him in publishers’ catalogs received from Rio. “These crimes caused me no remorse,” he declared, saying that he managed to convince himself of his father’s tacit approval of his conduct. And indeed the elder Ramos must have had some idea of the origin of the volumes that accumulated on his son’s bookshelf.
One is not surprised to lear
n that the adolescent reader’s taste ran to the novels of Zola and his Portuguese contemporary Eça de Queiroz, then at the apogee of their fame, and the appeal offered by Balzac is understandable. One is surprised, however, to discover that translations of Dostoevsky and Gorki had made their way to the backlands of Brazil in the first decade of our century, and that they were avidly devoured by the young Graciliano.
The years of Ramos’ early manhood are a somewhat obscure period in his life. In 1914 he went to Rio to try his hand at journalism. Unprepossessing in appearance, without influential friends, he failed to make his way there, and 1915 found him back in Palmeira dos Índios, where he married. To support himself and his family, he turned, like his father, to shopkeeping. His literary urgings were satisfied by occasional contributions to short-lived local periodicals and, beginning in 1926, by work upon a novel. The novel was not finished till 1928, the year of his election as mayor. By this time he was married for the second time, his first wife having died after but five years of wedded life.
The literary consequence of his venture into politics has already been noted. Once launched as a writer, with the publication of Caetés in 1933, he brought out three other novels in rather rapid succession: São Bernardo, in 1934; Anguish, in 1936; and Barren Lives, in 1938.
Meanwhile his material existence had undergone radical changes. The reports of his two years as mayor of Palmeira dos Índios so impressed the governor of Alagoas that, early in 1930, he invited Ramos to Maceió to assume the direction of the state press. He remained in this position until the end of 1931, having strangely survived the Vargas revolution, which toppled his patron along with other governors. A return to Palmeira dos Índios, where he briefly established a school, and a long sojourn in the hospital marked 1932. In 1933 the man who had never completed secondary school was appointed state director of public instruction. With the same practical objectivity and single-minded adherence to conviction that had characterized him as a municipal administrator, he undertook the reform of teaching in Alagoas. It was not surprising that his innovations won him enemies, both overt and covert, among those whose interests were unfavorably affected.
Whether or not those enemies were responsible for his dismissal and imprisonment in 1936 is, however, open to question. The frustrated revolt of the National Liberal Alliance at the end of 1935 led to wholesale arrests and deportations. Ramos, with countless others from all walks of life, was crammed into the hold of a coastal vessel and shipped to Rio, where he was first sent to a penitentiary, then to a prison camp on an island off the coast, and finally back again to the penitentiary. His health, precarious since his hospital experience of 1932, was definitely ruined by the hardships to which he was thus exposed, and his last two months of incarceration were spent in the prison infirmary.
No formal charges were ever brought against him: he was released with no more explanation than had been given for his arrest. This Kafka-like experience is related at length and in searing detail in a work with which Ramos was occupied at the time of his death, Memórias do Cárcere (“Prison Memoirs”). A curious air of resignation pervades the book: there are no outcries at injustice or official barbarity, no attacks on the political order, no attempts at self-justification. Although he admits that his offspring had gone about painting leftist slogans in public places, he himself did not officially adhere to the Communist Party until 1945. Even then his act seems to have been one of protest against the established order rather than a statement of Marxist conviction.
In any case, whatever the grounds for his imprisonment may have been, it was only a little more than a year after his release that he was offered and accepted appointment as a federal inspector of education in Vargas’ fascistic New State. With the salary from this post and the income from his books and periodical articles, Ramos eked out an existence until his death in 1953. He did not return to Alagoas, but instead took up residence in Rio, where he enjoyed great respect in literary circles. Elected president of the Brazilian Writers’ Union, he made a trip in this capacity to Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union in 1952 to attend a literary congress in Moscow.
Ramos’ reputation rests upon his last three novels and the two autobiographical works which have been mentioned. Besides these his other writings are of relatively little interest, save for the light they occasionally throw on aspects of his character or literary processes. Thus Viagem (“Journey”), unfinished at his death, in which his European experiences are related in routine fashion, reveals an attitude of little more than open-minded neutrality toward life behind the Iron Curtain. One might have expected more enthusiasm from a declared—even if nominal— Communist. Linhas Tortas (“Crooked Lines”) and Viventes das Alagoas (“People of Alagoas”), posthumous collections of his contributions to periodicals, contain views of the author on writing, writers, and the Brazilian temperament. Ramos thrice tried his hand at children’s literature: with a collection of tall tales, Histórias de Alexandre (“Stories Told by Alexander”); with an insipid short narrative, which nonetheless won a prize from the Ministry of Education, A Terra dos Meninos Pelados (“The Land of Hairless Children”); and with a Pequena História da Republica (“Short History of the Repúblic”). The last-mentioned was Ramos’ entry in a contest for school textbooks. It is difficult to conceive how he could have expected any regime, least of all one of the type prevailing in 1942, to accept so irreverent a treatment of the nation’s history, or how he could have supposed juvenile readers would appreciate the irony which makes his account of public figures and events wryly diverting to adults. Finally, he wrote a collection of short stories, published first as Dois Dedos (“Two Fingers”), and later, in augmented form, as Insônia (“Insomnia”). Of these something will be said in connection with Barren Lives.
Ramos seems to have regretted the publication of Caetés. One day during his imprisonment he observed, “with a shudder of revulsion,” that one of his fellow inmates was engaged in reading the novel and begged, “For heaven’s sake, don’t read that! It’s trash.”
Ramos’ judgment is overly harsh. While not worthy to stand beside his later novels, Caetés is nevertheless a very respectable example of the masterwork of an apprentice—the proof that he has absorbed the lesson of his elders and is ready to strike out on his own. It falls clearly within the current of post-Naturalism, showing great concern with the establishment of a milieu in all its details, dwelling on events of the most ordinary nature, presenting a slice of life in small-town northeastern Brazil. The chief influence to be noted is that of Eça de Queiroz, whose use of a similar device in his A Ilustre Casa de Ramires (“The Illustrious House of Ramires”) may have inspired Ramos to assign the writing of a historical novel as a pastime for his protagonist-narrator, Joào Valério. This undertaking, concerned with the Caeté Indians who once inhabited Alagoas—and whose chief recorded exploit seems to have been the cannibalizing of the first bishop of Brazil—not only provides the title of the novel but also gives rise to passages in which Ramos reveals something of his approach to the literary process. Here João Valério has been trying to describe the shipwreck which caused the ill-starred bishop to fall into the hands—and stomachs—of the savages:
With a hesitant pen I meditated a long while on the floating wreckage. I had counted on that shipwreck; I had imagined an impressive description full of vivid adjectives. And there I had only a colorless, insignificant account of a second-rate disaster. It was short too: written in a large hand, and with some words crossed out, it ran to only eighteen lines. Putting a sinking ship in my book—what foolishness! When had I ever seen a galleon? Besides it may have been a caravel. Or a barkentine.
Like João Valério, Ramos, from the beginning, found himself incapable not only of high-flown language but of drawing episodes out beyond the essential. He was also incapable, or felt himself to be so, of describing that with which he did not have firsthand experience.
The plot of Caetés is a simple one. João Valério, a store clerk, nourishes an adulte
rous desire for Luisa, his employer’s wife. She yields to him during an absence of her husband. The latter, informed of her infidelity, commits suicide. Though now free to marry, João Valério and Luisa go their separate ways, their passion dead.
About these central figures revolves a host of minor ones—politicians, boardinghouse keepers, clergy, merchants—occupied with the petty intrigues and gossip of small-town existence. They are singularly lifelike. A number of Ramos’ acquaintances claimed to recognize their portraits and accused him of writing a roman à clef, a charge that greatly annoyed him. He himself says, regarding the genesis of his characters, “One thing surprised me: my personages began to talk. Previously my wretched, abandoned, incomplete creatures had been all but mute, perhaps because they had tried to express themselves in an overly correct Portuguese, altogether impossible in Brazil. My book turned out to be full of dialog; it reads like a play.”
Indeed, it is largely through dialog that the characters reveal themselves, bit by bit. The resulting psychological portraits are doubtless superficial, for people are not wont to bare their souls in casual dinner-table conversations. The abundant dialog also offers another advantage: by its liveliness it causes the reader to all but overlook the paucity of narrative element.
In Caetés, as in his later novels, Ramos is concerned much less with telling a story than with studying an individual in a particular situation. The critic Antônio Cândido penetratingly observes: “Without recourse to introspection, inner life is described through the situation of a character within a context of actions and events. A double perspective results, for, if the character is revealed by the events, these present themselves in the light of the problems affecting him.” Ramos’ preoccupation with the case of the individual, with his particular view of ambient reality, is emphasized by the fact that each of his first three novels is related by the protagonist, an arrangement which of necessity results in subordinating all events and characters to his private angle of vision. (Indeed, save for the short stories and Barren Lives, virtually the whole of Ramos’ writing is in the first person, the author speaking either directly for himself, as in the case of the autobiographical works, or through the mouth of a fictional creation.)
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