Barren Lives Read online

  Although not only this approach to the novel but also a number of Ramos’ other characteristics—the spareness and precision of his vocabulary, the brevity of his periods, his disillusioned view of life, his wry humor—are to be found in Caetés, that book by no means prepares the reader for the novels that were to follow, all of which show a mastery of style and technique that assign Graciliano Ramos a place apart in Brazilian letters. They are remarkably different one from another, and each has found critics to support it as the author’s masterpiece.

  “Stark” is perhaps the adjective which best befits São Bernardo, by reason of the obduracy of the protagonist, the harshness of the book’s atmosphere, the bareness of the narrative, and the strength of the work as a literary creation.

  If in Caetés Ramos described the society surrounding him in Palmeira dos Índios, for São Bernardo he went back to an earlier period in his existence, situating the action in the district of Viçosa. This was a region of both farmers and stock raisers, whose mutually repellent interests led to what at one time was said to be the highest homicide rate in any municipality in Brazil. Small property owners, particularly crop raisers, were systematically eliminated—with a rifle or through economic and political pressure—by the larger proprietors, usually cattlemen. Only the strongest and most ruthless survived.

  The story Ramos tells is well suited to so harsh a background. The protagonist-narrator, Paulo Honório, is a self-made man. A foundling, he has forged ahead in life by hook, by crook, by indomitable will, and by endless energy. At the age of forty-five he has achieved the goal of his existence: he is the owner of the property which gives the book its name, a rural estate on which he had once been a field laborer; the ne’er-do-well son of the former proprietor is now in his employ. With a view to begetting an heir, he takes a wife, Madalena, a woman of great goodness and compassion for all. Her charity and sensitivity are totally incompatible with Paulo Honório’s brutal, possessive nature. He cannot conceive of Madalena as other than an item of his property, and she, weary of an unending struggle against cruelty, misunderstanding, and jealousy, commits suicide. Paulo Honório realizes at last that he had, in his own way, truly loved his wife, that everything else has no real meaning for him. To fill the empty hours, to unburden the soul he had been unable to reveal even to Madalena, he undertakes to set their story down on paper.

  Unlike the protagonist of Caetés, Paulo Honório is not a function of his environment; on the contrary the environment is entirely subordinated to his own compelling personality. Paulo Honório embodies the instinct of ownership. It is not a question of avarice; for Paulo Honório all humanity is divided into two classes—men of property and those who work for them. All his efforts have been bent to achieving entrance into the former class. The consequences of his single-mindedness he recognizes in a final summing up:

  I do not think I was always selfish and brutal. My calling made me so. . . . This way of life destroyed me. I am a cripple. I must have a very small heart, blank spots in my brain, nerves different from those of other men.

  Hypertrophied though he may be, he is not, however, all of a piece. He still possesses human feelings, and it is the inner conflict to which they give rise that makes of him a dramatic personality, that leaves him in the end not one of life’s victors but one of life’s vanquished.

  It would be difficult to imagine a work more thoroughly reduced to essentials than São Bernardo. Paulo Honório’s early career is related in a dozen short, but extraordinarily vivid, paragraphs. There is not a single description for its own sake. The phrases that evoke the property of São Bernardo are of the briefest and are always introduced to further in some way the development of events. Here, for example, is the opening of the scene in which Paulo Honório proposes to take over the estate from Luis Padilha, the ne’er-do-well into whose hands it has fallen by inheritance:

  I rode toward the plantation house, which looked even older and in worse need of repair under the pouring rain. The spiderflowers had not been cut. I jumped off the horse and walked in, stamping my feet, my spurs clinking. Luis Padilha was asleep in the main room, stretched out in a filthy hammock, oblivious to the rain that beat at the windows and the leaks from the roof which were flooding the floor.

  Everything needed to explain Padilha’s subsequent acquiescence is here suggested to the reader—his indolence, the neglect into which he has let his property fall, the domineering manner in which Paulo Honório approaches him, stamping, and entering without so much as a by-your-leave.

  While the conversations are fully as natural as those of Caetés, Ramos has limited them, like all else, to the significant. The sharpness of the interchanges gives them often an air of verbal duels between the characters.

  Ramos, speaking through his protagonist-narrator, describes the reduction to essentials quite simply: “The process I have adopted is this: I extract a few elements from an event, and reject the rest as waste.”

  Stylistically, São Bernardo is a tour de force. The short, abrupt sentences, with their energetic vocabulary, are thoroughly expressive of the personality of the narrator. The writing has the ease and naturalness of popular speech, without recourse to dialect, looseness of construction, imprecision in choice of words, or syntactical error.

  It would be hard to conceive of a work more different in overall effect from São Bernardo than the novel which followed, Angústia (translated as Anguish by L. C. Kaplan, New York, 1946). Once again the story is told in retrospect by the protagonist, but whereas Paulo Honório is a man strong of body and purpose, who has battled his way from field laborer to landed proprietor, the Luis da Silva of Anguish is the abulic final offshoot of a decadent family of plantation owners, reduced to a meager existence as a petty clerk in a government office. While São Bernardo has an out-of-doors atmosphere of space and light, the drama of Anguish unfolds in the dark, tortuous recesses of the protagonist’s mind. Dialog, so brilliantly handled in the preceding novels, is abandoned for an all-but-uninterrupted inner monolog. Straightforward narrative is replaced by a fragmented confession, in which events are presented in a complex interplay of objective reality, memory, and speculation. The view of persons and events is not merely one-sided; it is deformed by the distorted vision of the protagonist.

  The new manner is suggested by this passage from the beginning of the novel:

  If I could, I would give up everything and resume my travels. This monotonous existence, chained to a desk from nine to twelve and from two to five, is stupefying. I might as well be a clam. Stupefying. When they close the office, I drag myself over to the clock tower and take the first streetcar to Land’s End.

  What can Marina be doing? I try to get her out of my mind. I could take a trip, get drunk, commit suicide.

  I can see my dead body, thin as a rail, my teeth showing in a grin, my eyes like a pair of peeled grapes, my hands with their tobacco-stained fingers crossed on my hollow chest....

  I shake off these depressing thoughts. They come and go shamelessly, and with them the recollection of Julião Tavares. Unbearable. I try to get my mind off these things. I’m not a rat, I don’t want to be a rat. I seek distraction looking at the street

  Fifteen years ago it was different. You couldn’t hear the church bell for the noise of the streetcars. My room, on the second floor, was as hot as hell. So at the hour the other boarders were leaving for medical school, I would go over to the public park and read the crime reports in the shade of the trees. Of course the boardinghouse has been closed and Miss Aurora, who was old even then, has died.

  If Paulo Honório personifies the instinct of ownership, Luis da Silva is the embodiment of frustration. The thought of his family reminds him how far he has come down in the world; his bureaucratic routine gives him no sense of purpose in life; an overdeveloped critical faculty makes him keenly aware not only of the lack of merit of those more favored by fortune but also of his own shortcomings. He had once written a collection of poems; unable to pay for their publica
tion under his own name, he has sold them one by one to others who wished to figure as possessors of literary talents.

  Timid in his personal relations, particularly with women (“sex for me was always something painful, complicated, and incomplete”), he is ensnared into an engagement by Marina, the idle daughter of a neighbor family. She spends on a trousseau what he has saved and borrowed for household goods. At this point a man appears who is the exact opposite of Luis de Silva. Julião Tavares, the son of a merchant, has money, social position, women, self-confidence, and an untroubled conscience. Taking a passing fancy to Marina, he seduces and abandons her. All of Luís’ pent-up frustration finds its object in his triumphant rival. So obsessed with him does he become that at last he is led to action. One night, as Julião returns from a visit to his latest conquest, Luis strangles him. He tells his story upon recovery from the extended period of nervous prostration that ensued.

  Though attention centers on the personality of Luis da Silva, the novel offers a varied gallery of vivid portraits. Particularly striking is the servant woman Vitória, who buries her savings in the back yard only to dig them up for constant recounting, and who is deeply perturbed when, without her knowledge, Luis borrows from the hoard and makes restitution in coins of different denomination.

  Despite the nightmare air of the book, many of the characters are drawn from life. Luís da Silva’s grandfather, for example, is patterned on Ramos’ own; the latter’s henchman José Baía appears under his own name. The original of Moisés, the Jewish revolutionary, was a source of concern to Ramos at the time of his incarceration.

  It is curious that this somber story, with its prison-like atmosphere, should have appeared precisely at that darkest period in the author’s life—curious because no relation of cause and effect exists between the two facts. The book had been finished prior to Ramos’ arrest; one of his many worries in jail was how it might fare in the hands of the publisher. Persecution of the author did, however, contribute to the success with which the novel met on its appearance. It was greeted as a masterpiece; the author was hailed as a Brazilian Dostoevsky. Somewhat more reserved views are expressed today. Antônio Cândido, while paying due tribute to Anguish as a tour de force, finds it “overdone.” The work is still, however, the one regarded by a majority of critics as Ramos’ best.

  The genesis of his next and final novel, Barren Lives, Graciliano Ramos describes thus:

  In 1937 I wrote some lines on the death of a dog, an animal that turned out overly intelligent to my way of thinking, and for this reason somewhat different from my bipeds. Afterwards I did a few pages on the dog’s owners. These pieces were sold, one by one, to newspapers and magazines. When [the publisher] José Olímpio asked me for a book at the beginning of last year, I invented a few more narratives which could just as easily be short stories as chapters of a novel. Thus there came into being Fabiano, his wife, their two boys, and the dog, the last creatures I have put in circulation.

  It is interesting to note that all of Ramos’ novels, by his own account, began as short stories. São Bernardo and Anguish were sketched in embryonic form before he took up the theme of Caetés; in this last case “the short story grew all too long and deteriorated into a novel.” Caetés having been accepted for publication, Ramos returned to his earlier sketches, developing them too into novels.

  Barren Lives is a compromise between genres. The book possesses unity: it presents a cycle in the life of a herdsman and his family, from their arrival at a ranch as refugees from one drought to their departure in flight from another. Yet the individual chapters are relatively independent entities; their order could be altered in various ways without detriment to the whole. Not only were the first parts written for separate publication as short stories, but Ramos himself included three chapters (“Jail,” “Feast Day,” “The Dog”) with other selected short narratives in a volume he published in 1946 under the title of Histórias Incompietas (“Incompletas Stories”).

  The title, as Antônio Cândido shrewdly notes, is perhaps more significant than Ramos intended, for it well indicates the deficiency that marks his work as a short story writer. None of his compositions in this genre forms a satisfying narrative unit. Each seems but a sketch for, or fragment of, a larger work. In Barren Lives, however, the recurrence of the same figures in varying situations gradually produces that sense of wholeness requisite to the self-sufficiency of a work of art.

  Of all his output, Barren Lives is the work in which Ramos is most concerned with narration, with telling a story, tenuous though it may be. As in the case of his short stories, he here abandons the use of the first person for the third. This technique does not result in any sense of detachment, however, for he still writes at all times from the viewpoint of one of the characters. Five of the chapters in fact are named for the personage whose vision of events colors their presentation. In four more Fabiano reappears as the dominant figure. In the remaining chapters the viewpoint shifts from character to character. Only in the closing sentence of the books does Ramos, perhaps regrettably, speak from a standpoint foreign to his characters.

  One can hardly speak of psychological analysis in the case of Fabiano and his family; they are not so much simple as elementary. Their actions are guided by instinct rather than thought; Fabiano’s attempt to understand how he comes to be in jail, for instance, suggests that ratiocination is beyond his capabilities. Ramos can therefore treat the dog on very much the same level as her masters, as a member of the family.

  Dialog, of which Ramos had made such skillful use in earlier works, is here almost totally missing. Having a minimum of ideas to convey to one another, the members of the family are generally silent, to such an extent that the parrot they once owned never learned to talk. A gesture or an interjection serves for a large part of the communication among them.

  The personages of Barren Lives are admirably studied in regard to their surroundings. This is, in fact, of all Ramos’ works the one in which the relation between man and his milieu is most clearly developed. In Caetés the characters are distinctly small-town products, but the town might have been any one of countless others in Brazil rather than Palmeira dos Índios. The action of São Bernardo is set in the district of Viçosa and that of Anguish presumably in Maceió, but the locale is of little importance to the development of personalities and events.

  Barren Lives, however, could take place nowhere save in the drought-ridden interior of northeastern Brazil. (The literal meaning of the Portuguese title, Vidas Sêcas, “Dry Lives,” reflets both the parched atmosphere of the region and the desiccating effect it has on the existence of its inhabitants.) It is the work which identifies Ramos with the so-called novel of the Northeast, one of the most fertile veins in Brazilian literature since 1930. Its practitioners have dealt with varying aspects of the region—José Lins do Rêgo with the sugar plantations of coastal Pernambuco and Paraiba, Jorge Amado with the street urchins of Salvador and the cacao wars of southern Bahia, for example. No aspect of the area has attracted greater attention, doubtless by reason of the dramatic effects it offers, than the terrible droughts that periodically visit the backlands. Only a hardy breed could survive such trials, especially when prospects of reward are so few.

  Fabiano and his family own little more than the clothes on their backs. Their few belongings are easily contained in a tin trunk which Vitória balances on her head when they set off on one of their forced treks. Their pleasures are small ones—an occasional swig of rum for Fabiano, a pair of high-heeled shoes for Vitória, a trip to town for all at the time of the Christmas festivities. Fabiano is a good herdsman, and the ranch propers under his management as long as the rains come. He gets no thanks from the proprietor, however, whose conversation with his employee usually takes the form of a dressing-down. By a skillful system of advances of money and overcharges for interest, the proprietor sees, moreover, that little or nothing in the form of wages comes into Fabiano’s hands at the end of the year. Tradesmen cheat the ranch
hand, townspeople scorn him as a bumpkin, a policeman avenges his ill luck at cards by throwing him into jail. Yet Fabiano accepts all this abuse as his natural lot; so was his father used before him, and he has only vague illusions that his sons may know a better life. The height of his wife’s ambition is ownership of a single piece of furniture, a comfortable bed.

  It is to be remarked that Ramos has no recourse to the more dramatic aspects of life in the backlands—banditry and religious fanaticism—which crop up frequently in other novels of the region. His very descriptions of the drought are sober; he suggests by details, such as the vultures circling in to peck out the eyes of moribund animals, in preference to painting a large-scale picture of natural catastrophe. One might recall in this regard João Valério, whose attempt at a grandiose depiction of shipwreck resuited in a “colorless, insignificant account of a second-rate disaster.” Unlike João Valério, who had never seen a galleon, Graciliano Ramos had experienced drought from his earliest years. The restraint of his treatment reflects his austere temperament rather than any insufficiency of knowledge.

  It is difficult to say why Ramos to all intents and purposes turned his back on fiction after the publication of Barren Lives. Perhaps he felt he had exhausted the varieties of approach open to a writer of his particular abilities and preferred to avoid any air of repeating himself. Again it may have been a desire to comment still more directly upon the world of his experience that led him to abandon fictional mouthpieces and to devote the major literary efforts of his last years to autobiography.