The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray Read Free

something akin to great butsomewhat dismissable as a sentimental Marxist.
The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray
recounts the stories told about a dead man; with some irony we note the biography of Jorge Amado today as just more stories about the dead man in the room with us. It seems time to restore some life to him by starting newer, more interesting, and perhaps more true rumors about this sui generis novelist.
    RIVKA GALCHEN

For Zélia, by the fish-skiff docks
    For the memory of Carlos Pena Filho,
Master of poetry and life, A little Water-Bray
at a tavern table, thin and pale-faced lord of
the poker game, sailing today on an unknown sea
with his angel wings, This tale here that I told
him once I’d tell.
    For Laís and Rui Antunes, in whose fraternal
Pernambuco house with warmth of friendship Quincas
and his people came to be.

Let everyone see to his own funeral; nothing is impossible.
    —The last words of Quincas Water-Bray,
according to Quitéria, who was at his side

The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray

1
    Even today a certain confusion remains surrounding the death of Quincas Water-Bray. Doubts to be explained, absurd details, contradictions in the testimony of witnesses, diverse gaps. Nothing is clear as to time, place, and last words. The family, backed up by neighbors and friends, remains adamant with their version of a peaceful death in the morning, without witnesses, display, or last words, taking place almost twenty hours before that other demise, the one bandied about and commented upon as the night wanes and the moon disappears over the sea, when mysteries take place along the waterfront of Bahia. Spoken in the presence of competent witnesses, however, and talked about everywhere in hillside neighborhoods and hidden alleys, his last words are repeated from mouth to mouth and in the opinion of those people represent more than just a farewell to the world; they are a prophetic testimony, a message with deep meaning (as a young author of our own time would come to write).
    All those competent witnesses, among them Master Manuel and Quitéria Goggle-Eye, a woman of her word, and yet, in spite of it all, there are those who deny all and any authenticity, not to those admired words alone but also to all the events of that memorable night when at a doubtful time and under disputable circumstances QuincasWater-Bray plunged into the seas of Bahia and set off on an endless journey, never to return. That’s what the world’s like, hitched, like oxen to a yoke, to law and order, customary procedures, and sealed documents. They triumphantly display the death certificate, signed by the doctor just before noon, and on the strength of that simple sheet of paper—just because it has printed letters and some stamps on it—they try to snuff out all those hours lived so intensely by Quincas Water-Bray up until his departure, of his own free and spontaneous will, as he declared in a loud, clear voice to his friends and all present.
    The dead man’s family—his respectable daughter and his proper son-in-law, a civil servant with a promising career; Aunt Marocas; and his younger brother, a merchant with modest credit in the bank—says that the whole tale is nothing but a gross bit of counterfeit goods, the inventions of inveterate drunkards and lowlifes on the margin of society and the law, rogues whose surroundings ought to be the bars of a jail cell and not the freedom of the streets, the waterfront of Bahia, its white sand beaches and its immense night. Committing an injustice, it is to these friends of Quincas that they attribute all the responsibility for the ill-fated existence he had been living these last few years, when he became a bother and a shame for his family. It had reached the point where his name was never mentioned or his deeds ever spoken about in the innocent presence of the children, for whom Grandfather Joaquim, of fond memory, had died a long time ago, decently enwrapped in everybody’s respect.