Showdown     by Jorge Amado, Translated by Gregory Rabassa Original title: Tocaia Grande Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub (Trd Pap) Pub. Date: January 1989 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 432 pages Dimensions: 1.11 x 9.04 x 6.06 in. ISBN: 0553346660 List Price: $23.00, £12.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £14.62 Buy online from Amazon.com for $23.00

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Showdown was described as giving ‘the underside of (Brazilian) history’ by B.J.Chamberlain in his 1990 book on Jorge Amado. It’s certainly the underside in the sense of being the totally non-respectable version of the founding of a cocoa town in Southern Bahia. Rather than some cleaned-up, long after the fact, official municipal history that skips the brutal realities of first settlement and cuts to heroic ‘founding families’, and mayors and state officials with suitably long Portuguese-sounding names, it’s the story of the mestizo gunmen, peddlers, rapacious land-grabbers, starveling prostitutes and black hired hands who really cut the first turfs...

Showdown proceeds in a classic racy, populist style that is hard to resist; Amado’s storytelling simply washes over your objections — yet another gorgeous fifteen-year-old prostitute in town for the delectation of the cocoa ‘baronetcy’? Another fine figure of a half-breed hero ‘the Captain’, loyal and brave servant of his master ‘the Colonel’, a landowner who has carved out his cocoa land and fortune with the indispensable help of hired guns (and lawyers). It’s the Bahian South as Wild West with less shooting, more whoring and no preacher man, honest sheriff or US Cavalry to spoil the fun. This is Brazil not the Protestant frontier of Hollywood Westerns. Although of course, rather curiously, today a kind of rigid frontier Protestantism — originally a U.S. export — is a major force amongst Brazil’s poor, tending to replace both the laissez-faire (and upper-class led) Catholicism and the Afro-Brazilian religion so celebrated by this author.

One of the things that made Amado a Brazilian national treasure in his day was his loving attention to the detail of life in Bahia. An example is the figure of Fadul, peddler and subsequently shopkeeper, the founder of commerce in the town of ‘Tocaia Grande’ or ‘Showdown’ (thus named because an important gunfight occurred there). Fadul is a larger-than-life Maronite Christian from the Lebanon, and poignantly described here are the contents of his peddler’s pack:

‘He dropped the heavy pack, heavier every day, the folding ruler he used as a rattle to announce to rich and poor the presence of commerce and fashion in those boondocks. In the pack he carried silks and calicos, cottons, ladies’ boots, buskins, thread, needles, and thimbles, ribbons and lace, soap, mirrors, perfumes, tisanes, coloured prints of saints, and scapulars against fevers.’

If that is a tribute to that long-existing race of men, the despised peddlers, who have lived by carrying the little comforts of the town into the most rural of places, the book in itself is a tribute to the New World experience of settlement and the wider one of homecoming and home-making; ‘A citizen’s homeland is the place where he sweats, weeps and laughs, where he toils to earn a living and build a place of business and residence.’ Fadul is Amado’s tribute to the immigrant, to the man who struggles to build something in the wilderness.

Amado loves to unravel the long march of historical and economic progress; a progress he always sees as faulty, corrupt, as in his view of the landowner’s son who trains to be a lawyer. The young lawyer’s graduation is celebrated by a High Mass with the Bishop, a grand ceremony with the State Governor, a ball at the Club and a late-night session at the best nearby brothel. The hypocrisy of this ensemble is underlined by the words of the new lawyer’s proud father; ‘Lawyers were nothing but a bunch of hornswagglers, good at putting on airs, useful... precisely in order to legitimise violations of law and justice.’ In particular Amado has in mind battles over land-title, falsification of wills and rigging of elections, all ‘celebrated’ in his various books about the cocoa lands.

Nevertheless he puts on display an element of joyful sensuality, of celebration of the body and of sexuality that he finds especially in Afro-Brazilian culture and that he contrasts with European, Catholic influence. Amidst its floods, fevers and fights, Showdown provides a thought-provoking human picture of a frontier town.

Initially, in order to know the date of the month and the day of the week, one had to consult the only calendar in Tocaia Grande, hanging beside the door of the dry cacao storehouse. At first glance, a print that was a delight to see: a European winter landscape, mountains white with snow and a big hairy dog with a small cask hanging from his neck, a thing to be admired. Pasted underneath the print hung a small thick pad made of printed pages that told the day and date — the calendar, properly speaking — a New Year’s present from Colonel Robustiano de Araújo to old Gerino, a loyal fellow.

The proud owner of such a precious item, Gerino would show off the painting to whores and drovers, repeating information he had heard from the colonel: ‘In foreign parts it’s cold enough to bust your gut and that barrel is chockfull of cachaça to help anybody who might be in need of it.’ You couldn’t want a prettier or more educational calendar, even if it was unfaithful and uncertain, because old Gerino would let days and days go by without pulling a leaf off the pad, and when he remembered to do it, following the colonel’s recommendation, he would take them off haphazardly: one, two, never more than three, economizing on those letters and numbers that were incomprehensible to nearly all residents and strangers. Life went on permanently behind time, and nobody could guarantee exactly whether it was the end of March or the beginning of April, or if it was Wednesday or Saturday... 143-4