The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray by Jorge Amado Page B

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 ofQuincas’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 isnot 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