PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE DOUBLE DEATH OF QUINCAS WATER-BRAY
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.
RIVKA GALCHEN is one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” fiction writers and the author of the award-winning novel Atmospheric Disturbances. Her essays and stories have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and The New York Times.
JORGE AMADO
The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray
Translated by
GREGORY RABASSA
Introduction by
RIVKA GALCHEN
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This translation first published in Penguin Books 2012
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Copyright © Grapiuna Producoes Artisticas Ltda., 2008
Translation copyright © Gregory Rabassa, 2012
Introduction copyright © Rivka Galchen, 2012
All rights reserved
Published in Portuguese under the title A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro Dagua by Livraria Martins Editora, Sao Paulo, 1961.
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Amado, Jorge, 1912–2001.
[Morte e a morte de Quincas Berro Dágua. English]
The double death of Quincas Water-Bray / Jorge Amado ; translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa ; introduction by Rivka Galchen.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
ISBN: 978-1-101-60354-3
I. Rabassa, Gregory. II. Title.
PQ9697.A647M613 2012
869.3’41—dc23 2012022838
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Sabon
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PEARSON
Contents
Introduction by RIVKA GALCHEN
THE DOUBLE DEATH OF QUINCAS WATER-BRAY
Introduction
Though a best seller in Brazil, and translated into more languages than most Americans know exist, the twentieth-century Brazilian writer Jorge Amado (1912–2001) is little known in this country, even to the bookish, for whom the writing of Brazil is represented either by the two genius Europhilic stars, Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector—who, to be fair in the distribution of unfairness, are also relatively unknown in this country—or by the self-help-esque novelist/guru/lyricist Paulo Coelho, who is well known most everywhere, and who is not infrequently photographed with halo lighting effects, or barefoot in desert sand. So an American reader, educated in only these two extreme types, tends to feel at a loss even in building a misleading stereotype from which to begin misimagining what type of writer Amado might be. But maybe the Hydratic stereotype is a helpful beginning. Amado’s work is neither precisely for the mandarin nor precisely for the masses. Amado held the prestigious chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters for forty years, and he was especially beloved by his contemporary French intellectuals; at the same time, his novels sold so well, and there were so many of them (more than thirty), that these days—from our place and time—one might understandably entertain the incorrect suspicion that Amado had penned series with zombies, or with vampires, or both.
In fact, Amado wrote mostly about the lives of the people—most of them quite poor—from his native region of Bahia, Brazil. Yet, the varieties of the undead prove to be a not fruitless misassociation to bring to a first reading of this 1959 novella, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray, published here in celebration of the centennial of Amado’s birth. A swift, funny, and occasionally even slapstick little book, Double Death is not uninterested in clouding a reader’s sense of in what ways and when its eponymic hero is and isn’t alive, and in what ways and when he was and wasn’t, at certain moments, dead. (Normally I might worry such a sentence would plot-spoil, but one of the unsettling comforts of reading a Latin American novel—the “Latin American novel” being the taxonomical juggernaut with which every book penned south of Brownsville, Texas, has to contend, even those penned in Portuguese—is that a character’s death rarely means that character then exits stage left forever; only in Shakespeare do the dead as frequently return.)
So who is this Quincas? In the novel’s opening, Quincas is already dead. The reader really hears only rumors of him, and for a spell we are not even sure Quincas is his “real” name. We are told that he was born Joaquim Soares da Cunha, “of good family; and 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 a modest drink of cachaça at home.” This seems to be the story his family tries to maintain and spread. “When a man dies he is reintegrated into his most authentic respectability, even having committed the maddest acts when he was alive…. This was the thesis put forth by the family and seconded by neighbors and friends.” But there are other theses. Arguably the really important cast of characters in Double Death consists not of people but rather of gossip, rumor, hearsay, stories, and lies—how they are born, countered, stamped dubiously onto official papers, re-countered, wiped out, and reborn, and not just anywhere but very specifically in Quincas’s (and Amado’s) region of Bahia, Brazil.
Ten years before his death, Joaquim Soares unexpectedly called his wife and daughter “vipers” and then, “with the greatest of calm in the world, as if he were simply carrying through some exceedingly banal act, he left and never came back.” He then took to drinking, gambling, prankstering, socializing with the lower classes, and, possibly, became much happier. He also became much more talked about.
For the family of Joaquim Soares, the rumor and hearsay about Quincas—they can hardly acknowledge it is the same person—are experienced as a humiliation, even a sort of assault. “‘The king of the tramps of Bahia,’ the police news column in the newspapers had written about him, a street type mentioned in the chronicles by literary people…” Quincas’s son-in-law, Leonardo, recalls with particular shame and disgust a day when he found his father-in-law at a police station “in the basement of headquarters, barefoot and in his undershorts, gambling peacefully with thieves and swindlers.” The word on the street, or one of the words, was that Quincas Water-Bray—a nickname he earned, we hear, when after having taken a drink of water he had thought was cachaça, he then spat it out and shouted about as if he’d just swallowed poison—felt his respectable life was a living death; that in leaving it, he became his free and natural and joyful self.
When an image vendor—an image vendor! one “who had a shop on the Ladeira do Tabuão”—brings the news of Quincas’s being found dead alone in his room, Quincas’s estranged daughter and son-in-law sigh in relief. No more humiliating rumors, they think. But of course there are more. “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.” The novel is a battle of spin. “These would be difficult moments for Leonardo, talking about the old man’s madness, trying to find some explanation for it. The worst of it would be the news spreading among his colleagues, whispered from desk to desk as faces took on wicked little smiles, uncouth tales were told, tasteless comments made.”
The presence of so many commentaries and columns draws extra attention to the question: Who or what, then, is the novella’s voice outside of quotes? The voice is not unrelated to the opening of Pride and Prejudice, not unrelated to the townspeak of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, not unrelated to what it might sound like if the speakers in As I Lay Dying were allowed out of the corrals of their separate chapters so they could shoulder up against one another within the same sentence. The voice is a fractious and fractionating family of voices figuring out something about how the stories we tell contribute to the construction of the lives we live and the deaths we die. The voice is also, if sides are to be taken, in alliance with Quincas’s friends more than Joaquim’s family—the name Quincas is used more often, and the telling itself is an act of solidarity.
For while gossip and rumor register like mortal wounds to the family, Quincas and his buddies are of the variety such that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Hence, Quincas’s family’s aggression is to not speak of him. “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.” And his friends’ retaliation is to speak and speak.
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 p
oint 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
For Zélia, by the fish-skiff docks
For the memory of Carlos Pena Filho,
Master of poetry and life, A little Water-Bray
The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray Page 1
