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
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
Similar Books
