Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado

Author:Jorge Amado [Amado, Jorge]
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Brazil, Editing -in progress, Fiction, Fiction-Latin American, Latin American, Portuguese
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

OF THE OLD WAYS

Mundinho Falcão finally kept his promise and went on a visit to Colonel Altino’s plantation. Not the Saturday previously agreed on, but a month later and at the insistence of the Captain. If Altino was won over, the Captain maintained, it would be easy to get the support of several other planters who had been on the fence since the engineering studies of the sandbar began.

Undoubtedly the arrival of the engineer—a defeat for the state government—weighed heavily in Mundinho’s favor. Hence the violent reaction of the Bastoses that resulted in the burning of an edition of the Ilhéus Daily. In the days that followed, a number of colonels called at the exporter’s office to join with Mundinho and to pledge him their votes. The Captain jotted down figures and kept a record of the number of votes they could count on. In view of the political practices of the time, he knew that a close victory would do them no good. Without a large majority of the votes, the men they elected as mayor, councilmen, and state and federal legislators would not be officially recognized. Even with such a majority, recognition might be difficult to obtain; in this contingency the Captain relied on Mundinho’s friendships in Rio and on the prestige of the Mendes Falcão family. But they would have to win by a wide margin, otherwise nothing would be gained.

Certain groups in Ilhéus were going over more and more to Mundinho’s side. People were alarmed by the burning of the newspaper. As long as the Bastoses remained in control, they said, there would always be rule by force and intimidation. But the Captain knew that these merchants, these young men in stores and warehouses, these dock workers, could not swing an election. The important men for this purpose were the colonels, especially the owners of the very large plantations. They were known and respected by everyone; they had, indeed, godfathered the children of half the citizens. They completely controlled the votes and the electoral machinery in their respective districts.

Colonel Altino Brandão’s house in Rio do Braço stood near the railroad station. It had a veranda on every side, vines climbing up its walls, a flower garden in front, and fruit trees in the back yard. Mundinho looked at the house with great interest: perhaps the Captain was right in characterizing the colonel as a rare type in Ilhéus—an open-minded man. The tradition of the great manor house, developed in the old days when sugar was king, had not carried over into the era of cacao. The houses of the cacao colonels often lacked the most rudimentary comforts. Some of them were built on stilts, with the pigs sleeping underneath, and those that were on the ground had the pigsty nearby as protection against the large number of deadly poisonous snakes. The pigs, shielded against the poison by their layers of fat, would kill the snakes. The days of violence had left behind a certain austere mode of living.

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