“Whoever’s born in Tocaia Grande is jagunço:” Jorge Amado and the shadow of Canudos

Lost somewhere in the Brazilian hinterlands there is a thriving modern city called Irisópolis. It has businesses, institutions, culture. It’s a city like any other. But Irisópolis harbours a dark history written in blood. “In its commemorative texts, literates, politicians and journalists have almost always omitted the town’s primitive town; obvious reasons relegated it to oblivion. Before being Irisópolis, it was Tocaia Grande.” Jorge Amado’s novel Showdown narrates its birth, rise and destruction.

The first man to idealize Tocaia Grande is Captain Natário Fonseca, a fearsome jagunço who serves Coronel Boaventura in the territorial fights for control of the sertão and its fertile lands, where cacao plantation can build fortunes. Natário once killed a businessman in a whorehouse and became a fugitive of justice until he found political protection under the Coronel. Forever obliged, Natário serves in the coronels’ wars lead Boaventura to reward him with some lands. Taciturn but loyal and courageous, Natário is a man with Indian blood, an unrivalled sharpshooter and natural leader of the coronel’s jagunços. Natário achieves mythical status when he sets up an ambush that wipes out most of the forces of Coronel Elias Daltro, giving Boaventura an advantage in the war and bringing peace to the region. The same land where he organised the legendary ambush becomes his to build his home once he decides to settle down and become a cacao planter, making the first steps to build a town there. (Tocaia Grande, in Portuguese, means exactly big ambush.) Despite the place’s ugly history, Natário is attracted to it. “A prettier place, by day or night, with sun or rain, didn’t exist in those parts; better to live in, nowhere.” Natário is a complex man, and opinions about him vary. He’s a loving husband who nevertheless cheats his wife with prostitutes. Some people love him, others hate him, all respect him. Although Tocaia Grande starts humbly, he’s also the first to realize its potential and to promote its development, by encouraging people to settle down there.

Tocaia Grande at first is a storage centre where cacao from the surroundings is kept before being shipped away. Its first inhabitants are the workmen who toil in the fields, the man who sells drinks to them, and of course the prostitutes who work in a nearby whorehouse. Later an enterprising businessman, Fadul Abdala, an Arab from Lebanon (but everyone calls him Turk in the novel) sets up a shot to sell wares to the workmen. Fadul is a true Brazilian self-made man, an immigrant who succeeds thanks to his hard work and because he has a vision of Tocaia Grande as a future great city. Natário is pleased with the Arab opening a shop there and becomes his protector. One of the episodes that demonstrates Natário’s laconic, strict but honourable personality is how he deals with three jagunços who rob Fadul’s store. The three men find themselves unemployed after the war between Coronels Boaventura and Elias Daltro comes to an end. Roaming the countryside, they learn Fadul is away on business and so raid the store, hoping to find money stashed somewhere. No one in Tocaia Grande lifts a finger to stop them, and when Fadul returns he finds his store looted. Refusing to give up, the hard-working businessman reopens his store, although his former joviality has evaporated. A week passes before Natário visits him. Instead of bringing up the robbery, the Captain just makes small talk while sipping cachaça. “Surprised and disappointed by such indifference, Fadul barely contained himself not to transpire the disappointment, the sorrow caused by such an attitude from the Captain, of whose friendship he had bragged.” Only when he’s about to leave does he produce a pocketknife the jagunços stole from his store:

   “Isn’t this yours, friend Fadul?”

   He put the object on the counter’s wood, Fadul Abdala felt a thud in his chest:

   “It’s mine, yes, Captain. If there’s no harm asking, how did it get into your hands?”

   “And how else would it be, friend?”

   He walked to the side of the house, came back with the mule, put his foot on the stirrup, read the anxious question in Fadul’s eyes, mounted and answered:

   “As soon as I knew of the thing, I quickly found them. Three bad brutes, friend Fadul.”

   The Turk’s eyes gleamed, a smile appeared in his mouth, at the same time he felt like crying, nevertheless he wanted to confirm:

   “The three, Captain?”

   “The three, in the same grave. See you around, friend.”

Although Natário stops being a jagunço for Boavantura and becomes a farmer in his own right, he continues to watch over Tocaia Grande’s security as if he had never hung up the rifle. The success of Fadul’s shop is instrumental in grounding people to the settlement. Also, whenever he finds people on the road, Natário would direct them to Tocaia Grande as a good place to start a new life. This is how the first family arrives there, running away from a corrupt senator in another state.

In time, Tocaia Grande became the favourite stopping place of the workers who came from the huge area of the Cobras river that enclosed a great number of properties, amongst them some of the largest estates in the region. The news of the construction of a business shop raised by the Turk Fadul, a clever man, of vision, contributed to the quickness with which new abodes showed up: shacks, cabans, barracks, some of beaten clay, others of wood, the poorer ones of dry straw.

Families in search of a better life start migrating to Tocaia Grande. Other businesses open up: a black man, Tição Abduim, starts providing services as blacksmith and, occasionally, dentist. Slowly Tocaia Grande grows from a mere dormitory for plantation workers to settlement, then a town in its own right. Social rituals and traditions start forming. From Coronel Boaventura’s workers, who refused to move a finger to save Fadul’s shop from robbers, to the population mutually helping itself in the wake of a devastating flood, the inhabitants of Tocaia Grande become more and more imbued with a spirit of community. Questions of identity even become a matter of interest. How to name the citizens? Tocaios, tocaienses, tocaianos? Fuad Karan, friend of Fadul, simplifies the issue retorting that “Whoever’s born in Tocaia Grande is jagunço.” In the sertão, where social mobility is practically non-existent, this is a constant reminder that that Tocaia Grande is always at the mercy of the true masters of that region, the rich landowners.

Nothing seems to stop Tocaia Grande’s meteoric rise until Coronel Boaventura dies and his dissolute son, Venturinha, takes over his affairs. Given to authoritarianism, Venturinha feels slighted when Natário refuses to work for him, claiming that his bond was to the coronel only and that his former patron assured him he’d have the freedom to be his own man one day. Humiliated, Venturinha uses his political influence to make the military police expel the Tocaios from the land. Using a legal loophole, given that Boaventura verbally gave the land to Natário and no signed contract exists, he accuses the citizens of being land stealers and has the law on his side.

Showdown is a novel written in the shadow of Euclides da Cunha monumental book Os Sertões. It’s hard not to see Canudos’ fingerprints all over the tragic story of Tocaia Grande. The Tocaios are on the whole lower-class people, workers, freed slaves, prostitutes, like the heterogeneous followers António Conselheiro attracted to Canudos. Behind the justification of restoring order, a war is waged against the town, defend by its citizens to their dying breath. The novel takes place some twenty years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil (1889), so some ten years after Canudos was wiped out, making the case that violence, political corruption and authoritarianism are linked in the sertão and no lesson was learned.

At the same time the novel portrays Tocaia Grande as an Eden, a promised land of happiness and justice where people could live freely and in peace. This being a Jorge Amado novel, the characters spend more time having sex than fighting, living in a state of innocent communism. It is perhaps telling that the prelude to the war is the arrival of two missionaries, the severe Father Zygmunt von Gotteshammer, and his younger helper, Father Theun, both foreigners. Appalled at the licentiousness of the land, they preach against the prostitutes and the loose customs of the people, and make efforts to replace the local pagan beliefs with Christian values. The transition is relatively painless, even though the whorehouse, an institution of the town, never disappears. The whiff of sexual repression, however, signals more important changes in the values of sertão. Although Tocaia Grande always existed by the grace of Coronel Boaventura, the idea of him breaking his word was unthinkable. Honour was too valuable a commodity in the world of Natário and Boaventura. In the new world of the Bohemian Venturinha, not at all.

Showdown has a lot of the western genre. It’s hard to miss the similarities, with gunfighters riding horses and killing outlaws. But more important to the idea of the novel as a Brazilian western is the theme of the frontier, the remote land still waiting for man to civilize it. Unlike the American western, however, which is invested with a simple mythology of good and evil, the Brazilian western inverts the roles. The outlaws are the good guys and the forces of law and order are corrupt and grubby. These themes we’ll find again in the novels of João Ubaldo Ribeiro.

"Canudos, the filthy antechamber of Paradise:" Euclides da Cunha and the sertão in Brazilian literature

In Brazil’s northeast territories there’s a semi-arid region, stretching across states like Bahia, Pernambuco, and Minas Gerais, where rain falls three to four months during the year, but droughts can also last from three to seven years. Its isolated populations are chronically afflicted with famine, poverty and unemployment. This inhospitable region is called the sertão, etymologically derived from the Portuguese word desertão, big desert, and in English it’s frequently translated as backlands. In Brazilian literature and imagination this place has achieve mythical qualities. I’m going to try to explain why.

There’s nothing sillier and more irresponsible than making sweeping generalizations about something one knows very little about. It happens, however, that I’ve read in a very short time a handful of Brazilian novels that, without my intention, seem to constitute a subgenre within Brazilian literature. To keep it simple, I’ve dubbed this subgenre the literature of the sertão. This subgenre is written by writers who hail from Bahia, Minas Gerais and the other states that contain the sprawling sertão. Its main features include gunfights and violence; the main setting is the sertão, although it can be metaphorically transplanted to other spaces; the main character is the jagunço, a word for the armed bandit who terrorizes the byways of the sertão, but also the bodyguard of the coronéis, the rich land-owners who use these tough, taciturn men of action as private armies in political conflicts. Main themes include loyalty, honour, bravery, for the jagunço is old-fashioned and romantic in his moral values, like most thugs and ruffians tend to be; but also themes like the clash of civilization and primitivism, city and countryside, law and anarchy, plus utopianism, modernization and political corruption.

I first started putting this notion together when I began comparing some novels written by Jorge Amado, João Ubaldo Ribeiro and João Guimarães Rosa and found recurrent themes in them. To the novels we could also add some poems by João Cabral de Melo Neto and Carlos Drummond, who have sung of the sertão’s flora and fauna and its inhabitant, the grave sertanejo. Now if my premise has any substance behind it, I think we can trace this subgenre’s foundation to a book by journalist Euclides da Cunha – Os Sertões: Campanha de Canudos. Ironically Euclides had been born far away from the sertão. In English this book is known as Rebellion in the Backlands and, in a more recent translation from Penguin, as Backlands: The Canudos Campaign.

Euclides’ book is mainly concerned with the War of Canudos, a civil war that occurred from 1896 to 1897 in a part of the sertão within the state of Bahia. This catastrophic event, we could argue, forms the basis of the literature of the sertão and reappears in it, transformed, under different guises. As a war correspondent for the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, in 1897 Euclides travelled into the sertão, to the front where thousands of soldiers had been holding a small town under siege for months, and he stayed there almost until the tragic conclusion. Returning to Rio de Janeiro, he laboured on his book for five years before it came out to extraordinary reviews, making him into one of Brazil’s most important men of letters overnight. But Os Sertões was more than reportage. It is a totalising book, one of those rare books that contains all the sciences and areas of human knowledge, a broad-ranging tome that discusses geography, geology, botany, politics, history, sociology, biology, anthropology, economics, war, theology, even mythopoeism. It’s also literature in the grand tradition of Homer and Tolstoy, narrating past history and heroic feats of war. It’s considered Brazil’s national epic and a treatise on Brazilian identity, for the attention Euclides gave to the sertanejo. It’s also a dark, apocalyptic narrative. Published in 1902, the same year Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness came out, I believe without hesitation that the Brazilian classic shows a more chilling descent into total horror, barbarism, carnage, and paints a more urgent warning against the dangers of idolatry.

Now before I try to argue for the influence of the Os Sertões on a subset of 20^th century Brazilian literature, some facts about the War of Canudos are in order. In the 1870s a preacher emerged in the sertão. Official documents of the time already knew him by the name history would remember him: António Conselheiro. The Counsellor had long hair and beard, wore a dark wool tunic, and was a gaunt, mummy-like figure who ate very little and always travelled accompanied by followers, praying with him in their wanderings. Although the sertão was no stranger to prophets, mystics, and seers, the Counsellor managed to exert a strange, powerful influence on the sertanejos: they gathered around him to hear him speak, and many abandoned their ordinary lives to follow him. The local clergy disliked him and was his first opponent. As early as 1882 the Archbishop of Bahia had taken notice of him and of his “excessively rigid moral,” and had made efforts to warn the authorities of this preacher’s danger to authority. António Conselheiro barely avoided being committed to a madhouse in Rio de Janeiro; lack of room dissuaded authorities from acting.

The Counsellor started his messianic career during a period of transition in Brazilian history. In 1822 Brazil had declared independence from Portugal but remained an empire until 1889, the year in which it finally became a republic, although the first governments were military dictatorships. António Conselheiro opposed the republic and hurled invectives at its new laws and on the matter of laicism and censuses. Since the end of the 1880s he had also been prophesying the end of the world, the republic being a sign that the end was nigh. The Counsellor’s strange brand of mysticism predicted the return of D. Sebastião, a Portuguese king who in 1578 disappeared in a Moroccan city called Ksar el Kebir, putting an end to his ill-fated crusade to convert North Africa to Christian faith. D. Sebastião’s death marked Portugal’s decline, leaving the country in a crisis of heirs – only 24 years old, and allegedly homosexual, he didn’t leave the Queen pregnant before sailing to Africa – and that resulted in the kingdom being ruled by the Spanish Philips (the Filipes from Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra). In popular culture, D. Sebastião became a mystical figure, ironically the saviour who would one day return to steer Portugal in the direction of glory once more. Centuries later the Counsellor latched onto this myth and told his followers that the ancient king would come back to lead them in the final war against the Antichrist, personified by the republic.

The Counsellor and his sectarians started making preparations to gain entrance in paradise. In 1893 they settled in Canudos, a muddy, desolate valley next to a river deep in the hinterlands. There they started building houses and a church. The settlement grew quickly in size. The Counsellor’s words attracted people from every corner of sertão. The republic had finally abolished slavery in Brazil and the sertão’s byways and roads were teeming with freed slaves and unemployed workers. To them the preacher’s messages offered guidance and comfort. Families sold their houses and belongings and travelled in droves to join this new community. There they lived under a form of communism, without private property and sharing everything, and also practised free love. Canudos also attracted many jagunços, who became the Counsellor’s personal guard and the enforcers of authority. These jagunços also directed raids on local farms and towns, which made the surrounding authorities wary of Canudos.

The final cause that provoked the war, however, was absurd in its smallness. Around October 1896, the Counsellor had ordered a quantity of timber from the town of Juazeiro for repairing the church. But the business was conducted with a local judge who had past grievances to settle with António Conselheiro: once he had been scared out of a town by his followers. So to get even he withheld the shipment of timber to Canudos, and then started spreading rumours that the jagunços were going to attack Juazeiro to reclaim it by force. The government replied to his appeals by sending soldiers to disband the settlement. Overly confident but badly equipped to travel 200 kilometres through the sertão, the military expedition was attacked halfway through by Canudos men, who had been warned in advanced of their coming. Instead of disbanding in terror, these fanatics, their heads filled with stories about the end of the world and the final war between Good and Evil, marched into battle like crusaders in a holy war, singing, praying and shouting the name of Jesus Christ. The soldiers were not ready for the fierce resistance they put up, and were violently repelled. Although only ten men died on the regiment’s side, against some 150 casualties on Canudos’, the officer in charge called the retreat. And when they returned to Juazeiro four days later, covered in blood, wearing rags, maimed and famished, “the telegraph lines transmitted to the whole country the prelude of the war in the backlands…”

At the time many Brazilian believed Canudos was part of a royalist conspiracy to overthrow the young republic and restore the monarchy. According to popular belief, Canudos was preparing a rebellion with the help of foreign powers. Perhaps these fanciful rumours were just orchestrated to justify the existence of the military dictatorship. Maybe these concerns were heartfelt. Be as it may, the threat Canudos represented was greatly exaggerated in the press and the popular imagination, resulting in national hysteria and panic.

For the young republic, Canudos posed a challenge that threatened to revert its social progress. In fact most failed to understand what motivated the Counsellor and his acolytes. They tried to find modern reasons for the rebellion, but, as Euclides defended, Canudos was a break with the modern world, and its mentality unintelligible to the politicians who feared a monarchist plot. Thinking they were dealing with ordinary rebels or criminals, and not religious fanatics, they never realized the spiritual value Canudos had to these people – for them it was holy ground, New Jerusalem. Threatened, instead of running away, the acolytes entrenched themselves and literally fought to the last man, prolonging the war for more than a year and nearly bankrupting Brazil, which had to finance and organize three more expeditionary forces before Canudos was completely exterminated in October 1897. On the final day of the war, the fanatics were reduced to four men, firing away with rudimentary muskets at five thousand soldiers equipped with the most advanced firearms and artillery at the time.

The War of Canudos was a calamity that claimed some 30,000 lives. What it did to the Brazilian psyche can never be fully ascertained, but it can’t be denied that it left an indelible mark on the imagination of the Baianos. From then on the sertão would remain a place of violence and thwarted utopian aspirations, ideas that literature has appropriated ever since. Novels in line with this tendency include Jorge Amado’s Showdown (1984) and João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s O Feitiço da Ilha do Pavão (The Peacock Island Spell, 1997). Amado’s novel narrates the birth and destruction of a town called Tocaia Grande. Tocaia Grande begins as a settlement founded by a jagunço called Natário Fonseca, on lands he receives as reward for his loyalty to a local coronel (in Brazilian Portuguese, the word coronel means both the military rank and owner of large farming estates) during a war for control of the sertão. Tocaia Grande begins as a stop for plantation workers and prostitutes. But in time it attracts businessmen, respectable families, artisans, until it becomes a real community based on cooperation and freedom, a corner of peace and civilization inside the violent sertão. Then a jealous coronel accuses the people of Tocaia Grande of trespassing private property and uses his political influence to get the army to expel them, resulting in a final massacre. The similarities with the fate of Canudos are more than obvious.

Peacock Island is no less utopian than Tocaia Grande. The novel does not take place in the sertão, but on a magical island off the coast of Bahia (a key state), a remote, secluded place where prostitutes, Indians, freed slaves, Europeans and Brazilians work together to create a new society that does not have the vices of Europe and the rest of Brazil in terms of slavery, class difference and authoritarianism. Like Canudos and Tocaia Grande, Peacock Island is in danger from the forces of authoritarianism and conservatism. Peacock Island also reserves for itself a sense of exceptionalism, more progressive, more open-minded, than the rest of Brazil behind the high cliffs that hide the island from the world. Another theme in these novels is the wide gap between the rich and the poor, especially of the sertão’s poor forever being at the mercy of the powerful.

The irony of Tocaia Grande and Peacock Island is that Canudos was not a utopia at all. A missionary who stayed in the settlement in 1895 counted eight to nine deaths every day, from famine, sickness, and poor living conditions. People lived in abject poverty. Although the acolytes lived in freedom in some matters – free love was permitted there – and in communion of goods, law-breakers were punished with the death penalty by jagunços who enforced the Counsellor’s authoritarian regime. In hindsight, Canudos may sound like a history of underdogs, a romantic undercurrent feeding the novels of Amado and Ribeiro, but the Counsellor himself had more to do with Reverend Jim Jones, and Canudos was but a precursor of the Waco siege. “Canudos, filthy antechamber of Paradise,” that’s how Euclides described it. At best the Counsellor was a benevolent tyrant. However none of this matters in the hour of forging myths. Like Canudos, Tocaia Grande becomes famous for its licentiousness, and Peacock Island becomes a haven for freed slaves and the birthplace of a modern, democratic conscience. If not themes, then whole episodes are transplanted from history to fiction. The Capuchin priest who stayed in Canudos in 1895, trying to establish a mission, often reappears in the novels of the sertão. This religious man was alarmed at the state the people there lived in, lawless, like animals, amidst filth. He gained an audience with António Conselheiro, and was surprised to see him protected by armed men. “It is for my safety that I have these armed men, because Your Excellency will know that the police attacked me and wanted to kill me in the place called Massete, where there were deaths on one and the other side. In the time of the monarchy I let myself be arrested because I recognized the government, nowadays no, because I don’t recognise the Republic.” The Capuchin priest received permission to formalise marriages, conduct funerals and baptisms, and to preach in the new church. But in his sermons he exhorted the people to abandon Canudos. At the same time the Counsellor started a disinformation campaign against him, scaring his followers with tell-tales that the priest was going to bring the army to Canudos, arrest António Conselheiro and kill everyone else. In no time the missionary was expelled. Dissidence was not tolerated there. What this shows, along with the Archbishop of Bahia’s attempt in 1882 to have the Counsellor committed, is that the church was his first enemy. The priest who opposes utopia in the sertão and is synonymous with law and order, instead of natural innocence, goes by different names in the novels: Father Zygmunt von Gotteshammer, Father Theun and Father Tertuliano, who tries to reinstate the Inquisition in Peacock Island. Even Grande Sertão: Veredas (1955), a novel that doesn’t wear the myth of Canudos so plainly, has an episode narrating how a missionary berates a prostitute during a mass, echoing the uneasy relationship between the pious populace and the clergymen of the other novels.

The jagunço is another mainstay of the literature of the sertão. He’s in Showdown and Grande Sertão: Veredas, and although he’s not in O Feitiço da Ilha Pavão, he shows up in another Ribeiro novel, Sergeant Getúlio (1971). The jagunço was already part of the sertão before Canudos, but Euclides da Cunha’s book was the first great narrative to put him under the spotlight. João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas is the definitive book of the jagunço, a novel fully narrated by a former jagunço, Riobaldo, now an old man talking to a nameless listener of his life as an armed man roaming the byways with other bandits. Throughout the novel Riobaldo fulfils many roles that show the tension between order and lawlessness in the sertão. First he rides with a posse working for the government, fighting other jagunços in order to bring stability to the region. Then he joins a group of bandits; and finally he heads a group that chases a traitor that killed their beloved leader. The jagunço is the repository of romantic ideals like loyalty and courage, and the sertão is a backward corner that needs to be civilized by force. These concepts, already elaborated in Euclides’ book, reappear in the novels. In Showdown the justification to wipe out Tocaia Grande is that bandits have occupied the lands of a coronel. Peacock Island is also the setting of a small-scale civil war when a reactionary party asks outside help to quell a rebellion of Indians. Then we have Sergeant Getúlio, a novel that is all about the violence of the sertão and its dynamic politics. In the novel, Getúlio, a violent military police sergeant, is tasked with escorting a political prisoner across Bahia. During the journey, Getúlio has to defend himself from his followers. Halfway through, political circumstances change and Getúlio is ordered to release the prisoner. But the violent jagunço ignores and marches on. Getúlio only obeys orders from Acrísio Nunes, the politician he owes everything to. Since he does not receive the orders from Nunes himself, Getúlio carries on, eventually having to defend himself from the police and Nunes’ own jagunços. If Tocaia Grande influenced Peacock Island, it could be said that Getúlio influenced Natário Fonseca.

Os Sertões and later Grande Sertão: Veredas established the sertão as a sort of Brazilian Wild West, in need of law and order and in a slow process of modernization through armed violence by men riding horses who come into town to kill criminals. They’re very much like cowboy movies. At the same time the books have something of the frontier, the virgin territory where free men can start a new life. Frequently these two views of the sertão clash. There is also a considerable difference from the American Wild West. In the American myth the community is terrorised by an outlaw and needs an honourable hero, a sheriff, to deliver it from tyranny. In the more sceptical Brazilian literature, authority is corrupt and modernization is just a sham to intrude upon people’s freedom. The Counsellor, let us remember, originally railed against the republic when it started taking censuses of the sertanejos. A curious exception in American literature is a short-story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Maypole of Merry Mount," exactly a tale about a happy community in the early days of American history overtaken by a gloomy, oppressive posse of Puritans led by John Endecott.

I will discuss all these books more in depth in the coming days. What I hope to have made clear is that Euclides da Cunha’s book has been an unavoidable influence on Brazilian literature. Its sphere of influence extends even beyond Brazil. For me Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World is probably the best achievement of this subgenre I made up, perfectly integrating all the themes I list above in one single epic novel. Even so, nothing substitutes reading the one and only Os Sertões: Campanha de Canudos, an inexhaustible narrative of war, death, faith and madness.

Ferreira Gullar, Architect

Portugal and Brazil share the same language, but the scarcity of Brazilian books in our bookstores make the two seem like strangers to each other. I don’t have the ability to assess the popularity of Portuguese writers on the other side of the Atlantic, but I hope it doesn’t mirror what happens here. Putting aside the classical Machado de Assis, the perennially popular Jorge Amado, and the mediocre self-help guru Paulo Coelho, Brazilian literature has trouble finding room in our market. As it tends to happen, prestigious awards, namely the Camões Prize, can make the difference between a writer being discovered or remaining in obscurity. Even though this award tendentiously goes mainly to Portugal and Brazil, as if no other country wrote Portuguese-language literature, thanks to it the books of João Ubaldo Ribeiro and Rubem Fonseca are in our bookstores. Thanks to it I managed to read a book by Ferreira Gullar.

Ferreira Gullar (b. 1930) is a poet, essayist, playwright, and short-story writer. Some will argue he’s the greatest living Brazilian poet, in competition with Manoel de Barros (b. 1916). In 2010 Gullar received the Camões Prize. Since then his work has gained wider visibility in Portugal, with recent releases including Em Alguma Parte Alguma (2010), his latest poetry book, Rabo de foguete - Os anos de exílio (1998), his memoirs of the years in exile, during Brazil’s military dictatorship, and Poema Sujo (1976), his most important poem, exactly written during this exile. Gullar is a poet, then, but today I’m writing about his short-story collection, Cidades Inventadas.

A rare incursion into prose and narrative, Cidades Inventadas (Invented Cities) collects stories about fabulous cities that never existed; Gullar wrote the first story in 1955 and continued to add more stories, each named after a different city, for more than forty years until the book came out in 1997. Similar to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, these stories lack the unifying frame narrative but they’re every bit as fascinating and wondrous.

If there’s something holding the stories together, we could say it’s a theme: the apocalypse of cities, as centres of life and culture. As a whole, the book is an imaginative exercise and a satire about modernity but also the strange predictability of human history. The book’s main thesis is that, no matter how we organize ourselves, we’re fated to disappear. A civilization, it matters not the geographical location, the history, the technological feats, is always at the mercy of Nature, of human barbarism, and of progress which contains in itself, many times, its own destruction. The stories have a cold, analytical tone, of someone narrating distant events. Only one of the stories is narrated in the first person.

The first story, “Odon,” establishes this theme; here we see a city brought low by Nature. “Odon is a collection of old houses in the middle of a desert – the Uz desert. A primary school reading book, adopted some fifty years ago in city’s schools, described it thus: ‘Odon, our progressive city, is on the fertile valley of Uz, on the margin of Gôni.’ In truth this description hadn’t corresponded to reality in, maybe, two, three centuries. The reading manuals today speak differently: ‘Odon, our beloved city, is in the desert of Uz, where once upon a time there was a fertile valley’”

Odon subsisted on its agriculture, and worshipped the tobacco god, Igork, a very profitable crop. But with time the cult of Igork dwindled. Then there was a cataclysm that turned the valley into a desert; some interpreted the catastrophe as Igork’s punishment. Be as it may, the fact is that Nature, in the past the city’s main source of income, turned against it unexpectedly, overnight, leaving it a decrepit city, never to flourish again. This is the power of Nature and the fragility of all human endeavours.

Gullar explains, in the introduction, that the first story was about the past and he decided to write a second one about the future. That is “Ufu,” also the name of a marvellous city, a masterpiece of science and technology, “the vastest city ever built by man, and it continues to grow.” But this miracle of progress contains a threat as dangerous as Nature: oblivion.

Ufu has a history, even if its citizens don’t remember it, being so absorbed in their current life. In some point in the city there’s a building where the Museum of Ufu functions. It’s true that, given the city’s growth, the museum’s services are almost fully devoted to the impossible task of recording its frantic present: electronic devices work tirelessly photographing new documents, computing data and searching for an order capable of keeping the material vestiges of History, which flies feverishly towards forgetfulness. But, in some corner of the museum, one may find a picture of Ufu, when it was a city with just one million inhabitants, fifty years ago – which in Ufu is the same as a very remote time. Some older documents will reveal that the city isn’t even two centuries old and that, underneath the first house, there was just material ground, without myth and memory.

Ufo grows at such a breakneck pace it no longer has history, and its limits expand, without an end in sight. “The closest cities were absorbed by Ufu, they became its suburbs.” Cultivation fields were turned into roads. Distant cities were “murdered by Ufu, which turned them into gigantic farms for the production of cereals, oxen and sheep, eggs and fowl, which it consumed voraciously.” This development is only sustained thanks to the “extermination of the country’s other cities, whose inhabitants flee to Ufu.” This manic growth is a threat that endangers mankind itself, a city that seems to have developed an internal logic of its own, self-aware, following an order its citizens no longer understand or control.  Ufu consumes the resources of other cities and then transforms them into objects the inhabitants “didn’t even think existed or let alone thought they needed.” So it marches on, Ufu, absorbing the world around it, replacing everything, like a consumerist version of Jorge Luis Borges’ Tlön. This is the main axis of the book – Nature and technology/barbarism – and the stories follow one after another with several variations. For instance, the city of Alminta is defeated by “wild grass, rats and bats” after a slave revolt leaves the city ransacked. In “Iscúmbria” (similar to escombros, or debris), a whole city is destroyed as an act of punishment.

The story “Texclx” is a metaphor of the Inca people, or of pre-Columbian civilizations, also decimated by conquerors who “crossed the unknown ocean.” Texclx, like the aforementioned Ufu, is a city that swallows other cities, conquering people, sacrificing them to its gods, until the Europeans arrive and obliterate it. Power is a relative thing in the relationships between peoples and civilizations. A more stringent metaphor about South America’s history is “Fraternópolis,” a satire of USA. Fraternópolis (the city of fraternity?) is an “economic power that, backed by internal development, turned the neighbouring cities into markets for its goods and, at the same time, suppliers of raw matter for its industries. They sold it, at a low price, iron ore, copper, bauxite and oil, and bought from it manufactured goods, at high prices. That way Fraternópolis grew richer while its neighbours grew poorer.” This is basically the history of USA/Latin American relationships, only leaving out the coups and dictators orchestrated and supported by the United States over the decades. It’s worth mentioning once more that Gullar himself had to run into exile from the military dictatorship that counted with the USA’s support. Fraternópolis even has a governor, whose motto is that inequality is the engine of economy, named Rigã, a name whose likeness to a former American president’s requires, I think, no explanations. Many of the cities are victims of the ‘miracle of progress’ which, like destiny, is flexible. Progress can be a blessing or bring new difficulties and challenges a society is not prepared to respond to.

Besides the dangers of progress and technology, another constant threat to cities is Nature and geography, like in the case of Aldrova, home to blacksmiths. “In the glassy and metallic soil, where bushes grew like wires, and flowers had dust for pollen, in the shadow of the dark mountain range, iron through and through, raised up to the clouds like a wall, and down there, in a vast crater, they placed the city, whipped by rays during the storms.” This city also ends up destroyed ands people are made nomads, to wander the desert. Another city ruined by Nature, that scourge, is Minofagasta, which subsists for centuries on whale fishing, until this huge mammal suddenly disappears from its waters. Later, a plague of pelicans, who cover everything in shit, becomes an opportunity to grow rich again when the citizens discover they can extract sodium nitrate from the droppings, a valuable substance they start exporting. But after science discovers a cheaper process to synthesise it, the city enters in economic collapse again.

From reading these stories ones gets the frightening impression that cities exist, are created, to dominate, that that is their only purpose and destiny. Building cities, laying down roots, conquering the fertile soil, and then the neighbours, or to destroyed by nature, external enemies, or its own hubris. Perhaps, we could say, the city exists exactly to be destroyed, that violence is inescapable. One city, Bela (a pun, bela means beautiful in Portuguese but also sounds like the Latin bellum, war), is famous for worshipping war and violence, like ancient Sparta. Ironically, Wen-Fen, besieged by Genghis Khan himself, of all conquerors, is one of the book’s few surviving cities.

Another danger to cities, after nature and technology, is the utopian ideals of its rulers. One of my favourite stories is “Adrixerlinus,” whose government tries to create a city according to the principles of “objectivity, rationality and pragmatism.” Poets, homeless and bachelors are expelled from inside its walls to go live in nearby camps. Similar to Plato’s idealized city, Adrixerlinus becomes an unbearable place to live in and the citizens risk their lives trying to flee it to the join the merrier, more interesting camps with the poets. “Perhaps the mistake,” concludes the narrator, “is in projecting cities instead of letting them be born spontaneously,” and I think we can see here a criticism to urban planners like Le Corbusier, father or modern architecture, inventor of suburbs and chiefly responsible for so many of our modern urban problems, as well as his acolytes, like Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, who planned and built from scratch Brazil’s capital, Brasília, a city reputedly unliveable. Maybe the problem is that these urban centres, instead of growing along the lines of rituals, traditions and the normal necessities of their inhabitants, are planned by architects and urban planners who see only theory, thereby uprooting people from invisible orders that ground their existence in a place they call home.

Other stories are less critical of modern problems. I love for instance “Rti,” the tale of an underground miniature city discovered by an Englishman in India, in 1630. This explorer, one Georges Sams, finds a city whose inhabitants would be four centimeters tall, but were obliterated by some war. However subsequent expeditions fail to find traces of Rti, leading some to believe that Sams’ Rti and the underground civilization is an elaborate hoax, which, nevertheless, inspired future writers like “Swift, Jorge Gorbes, Dub Sert, Wells and Llagur, amongst others.” Gorbes is Borges, of course, and Llagur is Gullar. I’m still trying to identify Dub Sert, it has to be someone!

Another made-up book that relates the existence of a city, Vat Phan, is Storia di cittatti immaginari, written in the 3^rd century but published only in 1702. Its author, the Italian Giuseppe Spudorato, may be a nod to Calvino himself. If these fictional books make the reader automatically think of Borges, I should add most stories are accompanied by end notes that refer to more fictional books, historical dates and cultural information about the cities. Even Peruvian poet César Vallejo is credited with having written Canciones y leyendas del pueblo Siian, a work of reference about Vat Phan. “Aldrova” also has another possible nod to Calvino, when a legend is related about an armour and helmet forged in Aldrova that could move by themselves, without a man inside it, much like the armour in The Non-Existing Knight. Cidades Inventadas would certainly not be out of place in the library of lovers of Borges and Calvino.

This is a small book full of big ideas, very well written, that speaks about modernity and its most pressing questions – dehumanization, globalization, war, barbarism, scientism, the cost of progress itself. Furthermore it’s a remarkable compendium of all the possible ways of destroying a city. One gets the impression the whole of human history is contained in its 130 pages. Not even the atomic bomb fails to make an appearance, as shown in “Mori,” a reflection of Hiroshima. Strangely enough this is one of the most upbeat stories, with due irony, because of the city’s magnificent rise from the ashes. After a fantastic description of the explosion, the narrator says:

But Mori didn’t die. The survivors returned, later, to the city to rebuild it and make it into a centre of peace and culture. Mori today is a tourist attraction centre, where people go to scare themselves with the products of man’s new destructive power: stones that grew wrinkles, steel sheets than turned into lace, bones melted like wax, human skin that strangely unglued itself from the body. In the city’s suburbs, tourists can also admire some specimen of fishes that turned into birds and that now live perched on trees.

I wrote above that forgetfulness was as much a danger as war and nature. This story shows why: from peace centre to tourist attraction, tragedy turned into grotesque entertainment, what do people learn and retain?

Some Carlos Drummond

Things were different with Carlos Drummond. I’ve read him in three big volumes, collecting most of his poetry from Brejo das Almas (1934) to Farewell (1996). Carlos Drummond de Andrade was born in 1902 and died in 1987. Like João Cabral de Melo Neto he is considered one of the greatest and most influential Brazilian poets of the 20^th centry. An important Modernist, if he had written in English he would be as worldwide famous as TS Eliot, Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats or Wallace Stevens.

It’s important to stress that I didn’t care about a lot of the poems comprising the 1360 or so pages of the collection. I particularly liked his earlier poems but think he became more predictable, and too repetitive, with the passing years. Some poets produce poem after poem that leaves me dazzled – Fernando Pessoa, Wislawa Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski, to name just a few. Then there are a few where I have to work hard to squeeze an interesting handful from the vastness of their work. Some, perhaps most, poets just have a few very good poems in them – everything else is a variation of previous successes.

I don’t want to write at length about Drummond’s poetry because a) I don’t presume to know enough about it and b) because I prefer to let his poetry speak for itself. The way I understand it, Drummond was the poet of the bittersweet feeling, of self-deprecation; his tone is melancholy and ironic. His frequent topics include love, friendship, Brazil, loneliness, existentialism.

JOSÉ

What now, José?
The party’s over,
the light’s out,
the people are gone,
the night’s cooler,
what now, José?
what now, You?

you without a name,

mocking others,

you making verses,

loving, protesting?

what now, José?

You’re womanless,

you’re speechless,

you’re tenderless,

you can no longer drink

you can no longer smoke,

spit you no longer can,

the night’s cooler,

the bus didn’t show up,

laughter didn’t show up,

utopia didn’t show up

and everything ended

and everything fled

and everything withered,

what now, José?

What now, José?

your sweet Word,

your moment of fever,

your gluttony and fast,

your library,

your golden harvest,

your glass suit,

your incoherence,

your hatred, - what now?

With key in hand

you want to open the door,

there is no door;

want to die in the sea,

but the sea has dried;

want to go to Minas,

Minas no longer exists.

José, what now?

If you screamed,

if you moaned,

if you touched,

the Vienna waltz,

if you slept,

if you married,

if you died…

But you won’t die,

you’re tough, José!

Alone in the dark

like a wild thing,

no theogony,

no naked wall

to lean against,

no black horse

to flee the trotting,

you march, José!

José, where to?

This was one of the earliest poems (1942) I speak of that immediately carved its own space in my memory. There’s a mixture of sadness but also humour about this poet’s moment of reflection, this evaluating of where his life stands, that reminds me of the similar poems one of my favourite Portuguese poets, Alexandre O’Neill, would write during the ‘50s and ‘60s. The imagined José, perhaps the poet’s alter ego, suffers so much misery it veers on the absurd. I like how his generic problems – no women, no friends, no bus – are interspersed with more ambitious problems, the failed utopia, his inability to make verses; the lack of a theogony is especially delightful, the uprooting is total. Is there a poem more pathetic, in the strict meaning of the word?

LOVE BALLAD THROUGH THE AGES

I love you, you love me

Since times immemorial.

I was Greek, you Trojan,

Trojan but not Helen.

I left the wooden horse

To kill your brother.

I killed, we fought, died.

I turned Roman soldier,

Persecutor of Christians,

In the catacomb’s cave,

I found you again.

But when I saw you naked

Lying in the circus’ sand

And the lion coming,

I jumped desperately

And the lion ate us both.

Then I was a Moorish pirate,

The scourge of Tripoli.

I torched the frigate

Where you hid

From the fury of my vessel.

But when I was going to grab

And make you my slave,

You made the sign of the cross

And slashed your chest with the dagger…

I killed myself too.

Then (more pleasant times)

I was a Versailles courtesan,

Witty and debauched.

You had to be a nun…

I jumped the convent wall

But political complications

Took us to the guillotine.

Today I’m a modern boy,

I row, jump, dance, box,

I have money in the bank.

You’re a notable blonde,

You box, dance, jump, row.

But your dad doesn’t like it,

But after a thousand travails,

I, Paramount hero,

Hug and kiss you and we marry.

Drummond is a storyteller. His poems have a story, a narrative. Unlike João Cabral de Melo Neto, who develops an abstract concept, Drummond tells a situation involving characters, José, the timeless lovers here. Melo Neto is philosophical, concerned with the external world – architecture, time, etc – Drummond, with the interior; the I shows up a lot more in his poems. Also, the humour is a main part of his style: tragic love turns into film love, from Homer to Hollywood in a poem’s span.

LITTLE SONNET OF THE FAKE FERNANDO PESSOA

Where I was born, I died.

Where I died, I exist.

And of the skins I wear

many exist I never saw.

Without me as without you

I can last. I give up

everything mixed up

and that I hated or felt.

Neither Faust nor Mephisto,

to the goddess laughing

at our chatting,

here’s me saying: I live

beyond, nothing, here,

but I’m not me, nor this.

It’s a rite of passage in Portuguese-language poetry, a poet has to write a poem about Fernando Pessoa sooner or later. Perhaps one day I should post all the ones I know. It’s a futile exercise, I mean the poets writing about him not my hypothetical post; Pessoa was the best poet about Pessoa. The fun about the others is seeing from what angle they pick up Pessoa, and how much you’re aware of the in-jokes. For instance, here my attention is taken up by the verse about Faust and Mephisto. Frustrated Pessoa was writing against many geniuses, Luís de Camões, William Shakespeare, and Goethe. So much so that he tried to write his own Faust. This is just Drummond flaunting his knowledge of the poet’s life, and now I’m doing the same. I like the minimalist feeling of the first verse, shades of Alberto Caeiro, a heteronym short on biographical details. The goddess reference may be just a shout-out to Ricardo Reis’ paganism, although the last verses are the opposite of his stoic philosophy; he’d say he lives here and nothing beyond. Perhaps it’s no longer about Reis but Pessoa’s own obscurity in life and posthumous discovery. Everything is symbol. Thinking about it, I think Fernando Pessoa is just the poet Carlos Drummond would like: ironic, self-deprecating, pessimistic, confessional. So far I’ve written about two very different poets, Drummond and Melo Neto. Next time we’ll continue with a poet too, but we’ll try his short-stories instead: Ferreira Gullar.

A needle instant with João Cabral de Melo Neto

I know next to nothing about Brazilian poetry. To date I’ve only read the poems of Carlos Drummond and João Cabral de Melo Neto. Today I’m writing about the latter.

João Cabral de Melo Neto was born in 1920 and in 1990 received the Camões Prize, the highest literary honour in the Portuguese language. By the time he died in 1999 he was considered one of the greatest and most influential Brazilian poets, but since I don’t know anything about Brazilian poetry, that’s meaningless to me. The only book I’ve read is A Educação Pela Pedra (which gives the name to the English-language anthology Education by Stone, translated by Richard Zenith). Although I don’t think it’s a strong book, it contains a handful of poems that I find very well constructed:

Weaving the morning:

A rooster alone doesn’t weave a morning:

he’ll always need other roosters.

Of a rooster to catch that scream he

and throw it to another; of another rooster

that catches the scream a rooster before

and throws it at another one; and other roosters

that with many other roosters cross

the sun strands from their rooster screams,

so that the morning, from a weak web,

weaves itself, between all roosters.

2

And gaining a body, amongst all,

rising as a tent, where all fit,

amusing itself for all, in the awning

(the morning) that soars free of frames.

The morning, awning of so ethereal a fabric

that, woven, lifts itself up: balloon light.

This is a poem that, purely from an architectural sense, is impressive. The first part is built on the repetition of the word rooster, its own form of weaving the verses together. The first part also treats morning like a physical object, and the second one just runs with this metaphor, before returning to its lightlessness in the final image: balloon light is a startling and amusing mental image, the idea that light just goes up like a balloon.

I also like the way he omits two verbs in verses three and five, because the reader can guess what they’d be anyway. This poem’s translation caused some difficulties because it’s extremely alliterative. Rooster and scream, or galo and grito, are highly unlikely to maintain unless with distant substitutes (roar, perhaps?, although a roaring rooster is even more bizarre than a screaming one.) I fared better with the two last verses of the first section. Originally I wrote tenuous web (from teia tênue), but then realized I could keep alliteration with web and weaving using a near synonym. In the second part, the t sound is dominant but I had more difficulties there, particularly because all (todos), awning (toldo), fabric (tecido), and woven (also tecido) don’t have the adequate replacements in English. Especially lost is the wordplay between tecido, in the sense of fabric, and the past participle of the verb tecer, to weave.

I think, however, that the translation maintains the strong images that make it so poignant. Here’s another poem that shows an ordinary concept from a new perspective:

Fable of an architect

Architecture as building doors,

for opening; or as building the open;

building, not as isolating and holding,

nor building as closing secrets;

building open doors, in doors;

house exclusively doors and ceiling.

The architect: the one who opens for man

(everything would heal with open houses)

doors through-where, never doors-against:

through where, free: air light true reason.

2

Until, so many free ones scaring him,

he abdicated to living in the clear and open.

Wherever openings, he started walling up

closing opaques; wherever glass, concrete;

until reclosing man: in the uterus chapel,

with matrix comforts, again foetus.

Clearly Melo Neto loves repetition. Here he keeps repeating door and open, and then he contrasts the first part’s sense of openness with the claustrophobic second one. It’s more basic than in the first poem, but I love how instead of expanding the theme he makes a 180 degree turn. This poem doesn’t make use of alliteration like the other one, but also has unusual images for the mind to take in. I particularly love house exclusively doors and ceiling. Like a penrose triangle or an Escher painting, it’s something hard to imagine in physical terms. I also like the general idea of turning architecture on its head, making it about ‘building the open’ instead of building walls, architecture as freedom and not enclosing. Also, uterus chapel, what are the chances of anyone actually using this in a normal conversation?

Inhabiting time

So as not to kill time, he imagined:

Living it while it happens, live;

In the very fine instant it happens in,

On the needle’s tip and thus accessible;

Living his time: to go living

In a literal desert, or of porches;

In nowheres, so as not to distract from living

The needle of a single instant, fully.

Fully: living it from inside it;

Inhabiting it, in the needle of each instant,

In each needle instant: and inhabiting in it

Everything inhabiting gives in to the inhabitant.

2

And coming back from inhabiting his time:

He runs empty, that live time;

And since beyond empty, transparent,

The instant to inhabit flows invisible.

Therefore: in order not to kill it, to kill it;

To kill time, filling it with things;

Instead of the desert, living in the streets

Where people fill him and kill him;

For as time passes transparent

And only gains body and colour with its inside

(what didn’t pass from what passed it),

To inhabit it: only in the past, dead.

Melo Neto’s poems are labyrinthine and his arguments torturous. His poems are really traps to ensnare the reader. And the way he puts words together: needle instant, who would have thought of that? But poetically it’s so just. It’s curious, I was going to write a single post on Melo Neto and Drummond. It was going to be about how I dislike Melo Neto and loved Drummond. But after re-reading some of the book’s poems I realised they were better and stronger than I imagined them. Perhaps I should continue to read him.

Carlos Drummond is coming next.

De Luca Versus Italian History

The history of Italian detective fiction is no doubt very interesting, and different than the traditional conventions and outcomes of the genre. I think it has to do with the country’s turbulent history in the 20^th century. The uncovering of the Mafia, the Fascist era, the post-war purges, the recrudescence of neo-fascism and its infiltration in national institutions, the explosive period known as the years of lead, the infamous Operation Gladio – NATO’s secret plan to halt communism in Europe – the connections between organised crime and government. Italy is a corrupt, secretive society with wounds still open dating back to many generations, but at the same a society that forgets quickly. Italian detective fiction therefore acts not is not just escapist fiction but often as a form of memory, a repository of the country’s seediest episodes.

Although I wish this were the introduction to my latest review of a Leonardo Sciascia novel, today I’m writing about Carlo Lucarelli and his Commissioner De Luca trilogy. Published between 1990 and 1996, the trilogy follows the travails of an honest, diligent, objective policeman from the final years of World War II to the landmark general elections of 1948.

My edition, an Italian collection of the three volumes, is barely longer than 300 pages. It can safely be said that the first two books – Carte Blanche and The Damned Season – are but novellas, Via delle Oche being the only one long enough to constitute a novel, barely. None of these books does a disservice to the genre. They’re gripping reads, even if pared down to the point one thinks they could have been better developed. This wasn’t the first time I had read Lucarelli. A few years ago I read his Almost Blue, another detective novel, about a woman detective and a young blind man searching for a serial killer in Bologna. I barely understood it so it’s meaningless to say I didn’t enjoy it, I was just learning Italian. What I have retained from it is the conviction that, had it been written in the ‘70s, filmmaker extraordinaire Dario Argento could have made a great giallo out of it. But anyway, a few years later my Italian is much better, and it was much easier to appreciate this trilogy.

Like most detectives, Commissioner De Luca is a bit bland. There are certain things he can’t help being: curious, upright, a workaholic, lacking a social life. These are the conventions, we accept them without passing judgement. Then there are the details that distinguish him from other detectives. De Luca was a venttotista, that is a man who enlisted in the force in 1928, when candidates needn’t have a degree, only pass the exams, which he did with excellent marks. In 1929 he solved the case of Filippo Matera, the Monster of Orvieto. (I googled him to know if he existed, but he appears to be an invention of Lucarelli) Mussolini himself sent him a note of commendation. De Luca was also the youngest agent to become a commissioner. Ironically the fact that he’s not a dottore is something that’s constantly being rubbed in his face in the third volume. In Carte Blanche, chronicling his final days as a cop in the Fascist regime, his colleagues show no class prejudice about his lacking a college degree. De Luca’s having joined the force during the ventennio, that is, the 20 years of the Fascist regime, is a matter that keeps coming back to haunt him. It’s not just that he was a cop during the regime, he was also a member of the Ettore Muti Brigade, a special unit of the Political Police, composed of black shirts and named after a World War I aviator and Fascist hero. This unit was responsible for torturing and killing political opponents, although De Luca vehemently repeats throughout the trilogy that he only did investigative work for there. As Carte Blanche starts, he’s been transferred back to Homicides.

It’s April 1945, De Luca is in Milan, the Northern redoubt of the Fascist regime after the Allied invasion. With his assistant, Pugliese, he investigates the murder of Rehinard Vittorio, a rich citizen and member of the Fascist Republican Party since 1944. He’s found castrated in his apartment. Preliminary investigations show that he had many connections to many influential people, for instance Sonia Tedesco, daughter of Count Tedesco, member of the Diplomatic Corps. Understandably cautious, De Luca is assured by his superiors that he will have no impediments to his investigation, since it must be shown that the law is respected in Fascist Italy.

Of course it’s not that simple. Witnesses disappear only to show up dead in SS headquarters, the Allies are bombing the city, and De Luca discovers that his name is on the list of the National Liberation Committee to be captured and tried for his complicity in Fascist crimes. On top of that, the ruling power, which promised De Luca not to interfere, is really using the investigation to get rid of some political opponents in a power struggle between factions within the party. The mystery, a bit dull and simplistic, is nowhere near as intriguing and exciting as the circumstances surrounding De Luca. Every action he makes serves only to show that he navigates in an environment hostile to the truth. The twist at the end, with its bittersweet irony, more than redeems the book’s weakest parts, and prepares the ground for part two.

In The Damned Season, De Luca is travelling in the Romagna countryside under a false alias. The Fascists have been taken down, but law and order haven’t reached all parts of Italy yet, there are still many pockets of partisans who’ve appointed themselves as the local authority and treat their villages as their own fiefdoms, free to do whatever they want, provided they don’t upset the Allies, the only power they fear. Because of his Fascist ties, De Luca is a wanted man. When a partisan confiscates his papers on the road, he thinks he’s done for. But instead the partisan, called Leonardo, takes him to the site of a mass murder, where a whole family was butchered. De Luca tries to feign indifference and amazement, but instinctively his old curiosity drives him to start asking questions, and he unmasks himself. Leonardo had recognised from the days when he had studied to join the Carabinieri. The partisan policeman is still anxious to be a real policeman one day, so he wants De Luca to help him solve the murder. Unfortunately their investigation leads them into other partisans, war heroes, local bosses, and secrets the partisans want to hide from the Allies.

The murder, again, is not very interesting: someone killed a whole family. At first they think it was to steal something, but later De Luca thinks it was to kill a specific person who had witnessed something dangerous, and he’s sure it has something to do with the execution of a local Count who cavorted with the Fascists. What makes the book interesting is the way the post-war is contrasted with the final days of the regime. And the differences aren’t many, which is what is so provocative. Although De Luca is determined to see the case through, Leonardo starts feeling conflicted when the blame starts pointing in the direction of his fellow partisans and particularly a local war hero called Carnera. The partisans are shown as an unruly and corrupted group, interested only in settling old scores and profiting from dead Fascists. People are already starting to forget the recent past and going back to post-war normalcy, rebuilding their lives and taking advantage of new opportunities. The new era already seems as corrupt as the Fascist one, and if De Luca could at least trust his colleagues in the force, he’s totally alone here.

In the final volume, Via delle Oche, it’s April 1948 and De Luca is back on the police force, seemingly rehabilitated of his past, having survived the Fascists purges. But instead of Homicide he’s put on Vice. Reunited with Pugliese, he investigates the death of a communist homosexual in a brothel that everyone wants to consider was suicide but that De Luca believes was a murder. Shortly after a photographer with communist ties shows up murdered, and De Luca tries to prove the two deaths are connected.

De Luca’s problem is that he’s perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time. Italy is having general elections in a few days, crucial elections which will decide Italy’s role in the new Cold War world. Either is turns socialist or goes conservative. The Christian Democrats and the Communists are vying for power in post-war Italy, mounting extensive propaganda campaigns and using terrorism even. A revolution is imminent. The Americans are watching, ready to intervene should Italy go red. So when De Luca discovers a sexual scandal involving a famous conservative and a prostitute, he’s ordered to back away. “This country is in need of rebuilding and not destroying,” De Luca’s superior explains to him. But since he didn’t back away for the fascists and the partisans, he’s not going to back away for democratic Italy either. No doubt to make a contrast with the power struggle of the first novel, here De Luca is caught between a power struggle between right and left, one side wanting to hush the scandal, the other wanting to use it to discredit its political opponents in the elections.

Once again the novel ends with an ironic twist for De Luca, who continues to pay a heavy price for being the only person with convictions in the whole of Italy. Or perhaps it’s his lack of conventions that makes him so dangerous. De Luca doesn’t follow any ideology that makes him sympathetic to a specific group, which is a current theme in the trilogy. He’s concerned only with the truth. In this he’s very similar to Inspector Amerigo Rogas, from Leonardo Sciascia’s Equal Danger. I don’t think Lucarelli is as good as Sciascia, but their indignation obviously stems from the same sources that make Italian detective fiction so fascinating.