Around the time of its publication in 1910, The Patriot (the Portuguese title translates as The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma) remained, like its author, pretty much marginalised from the literary mainstream. This is perhaps not surprising, as it is a devastating satire, not only on exagerrated patriotism, but also on the crushing bureaucratic conservatism of the Republican state and its official ideology, Positivism. The novel follows the downfall of a self-educated patriot, from his first, eccentric ventures into public service on behalf of his nation, to his eventual execution for treason.

At first sight it is all too easy to attribute this tragic end to the blinkered, chauvinistic nationalism of which Policarpo is certainly guilty, and which often blinds him to the social and political realities surrounding him. His first patriotic endeavour, based on thirty years of library-bound academic studies, is the highly romantic promotion of indigenous and folkloric traditions as the basis for a new cultural nationalism. After some comic incidents involving a suffocating tribal mask and a disappointing encounter with a black woman who turns out to have forgotten the songs of slavery, this culminates in the humiliating public exposure of his proposal to transform Tupi-Guarani into the official language, and he retreats into the disturbing other-world of a mental asylum.

However, as becomes increasingly apparent, there is another, far more dangerous madness at work in the outside world, the madness of social conformism, of a kind of mental, as well as political, totalitarianism. For it is not so much the impracticality of Policarpo’s ideas that earns him ridicule and rebuke (indeed in many respects they reflect an ultra-orthodox point of view, epitomised in a contemporary manifesto of eulogistic jingoism, Afonso Celso’s Why I Boast of my Country), as the fact that his sincerity and public-mindedness, his reformist zeal and initiative constitute a provocation to the inertia and passivity of the bourgeois establishment, and to the hypocritical interests of a reactionary status quo. When, for example, he decides to prove the country’s agricultural potential by flouting social decorum and literally getting his hands dirty, yes, his ignorance of farming technology and pest control frustrates his efforts. But far more sinister and threatening is the intimidation and obstruction he meets from the local land barons and administrators for his innocent failure to comply with the rules of petty politics and bureaucracy.

In the third and final part of the novel, Policarpo discovers the true meaning of the Positivist slogan of the Republic: ‘Order and Progress’ (still found on the Brazilian national flag). Having pledged his support as a loyal citizen-soldier for the military President Floriano Peixoto (a real historical figure known as the ‘Iron Marshall’) in his suppression of the 1893 Naval Revolt, he is horrified as he becomes both witness and instrument of the regime’s barbaric treatment of its own subjects. Arrested and condemned for his legitimate, humane protest, in a terrible, Quixotic moment of revelation he is painfully disabused of all the misconceptions that have guided his life until now; above all, the chimera of the Brazilian ‘Terrestrial Paradise’, under the benevolent guardianship of an enlightened and civilised State.

From the age of eighteen patriotism had been the moving force of his life; for its sake he had committed the folly of studying trivialities. What did rivers matter to him? If they were long what difference did it make? How much happier did it make him to have known the names of his country’s heroes? Not a whit. The important thing is that he should have been happy. Had he been? No. He called to mind his Tupí, his folklore and his attempts at farming... Had they left in him any trace of satisfaction? None at all. None at all.

His Tupí had been greeted with general incredulity, laughter, mockery and scorn; it had been the cause of his madness. This was his first disillusionment. And agriculture? Again nothing. The soil was not fertile or easy to cultivate as the books said. A second disillusionment. And when his patriotism turned him into a soldier what did he find? More disillusionment. Where was the meekness of our people? Hadn’t he seen them fighting like animals? Hadn’t he seen them slaughtering countless prisoners? Yet more disllusionment. His life had been one long disillusionment, or rather a series, a whole chain of disillusionments.

His native country as he wished it to be was a myth, a phantasy conjured up in the silence of his study. In the sense that he had imagined it it simply did not exist, neither physically, morally, intellectually nor politically...206