#1937Club: Captains of the Sands

I always love joining in with Simon and Karen’s ‘focus on a particular year in literature’, which is 1937 this month. Or rather, it will be on the 15th of April for one week, but I can’t wait that long. And my reading time is greatly reduced by all those International Booker titles. So instead, I’ll be reading and reviewing titles from 1937 all month long. And our first book takes us to one of my favourite places in Brazil, namely Salvador de Bahia.

Jorge Amado: Captains of the Sands, transl. Gregory Rabassa.

I’ve always been a fan of Bahia native Jorge Amado’s work, although I was more familiar with his later novels, such as Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, or Gabriela, Clove and Cinammon, or The War of the Saints, which could be accused a little of pandering to the stereotypes of Brazilian sexiness and sensuality, celebrating the beauty of women, teeming with the smells and sounds of the street, full of energy and optimism against all odds, often with a fantastical element thrown in for comic effect.

His earlier work from the 1930s and 40s couldn’t be more different. He was a Communist at the time, occasionally imprisoned for his activism, and eventually forced into exile. His novels of this period are of the social realist school, each one covering a different part of society: workers on the cocoa plantations, tenement dwellers in Bahia, port workers and prostitutes etc. This book, Captains of the Sands, shows the life of street children – orphans and runaways who have grouped together as a gang in an old abandoned warehouse near the port, calling themselves Captains of the Sands, led by a fifteen year old leader called Pedro Bala (Bullet). Although they are viewed as juvenile delinquents by ‘respectable’ society, they actually have their own moral code, a strong sense of fairness, each contributing as best they can and then sharing out the spoils.

Each chapter highlights one or two of the members of the gang, known by their nicknames.

The Professor steals books, which he reads ‘with an anxiety that was almost a fever’. He is also a master storyteller ‘he would weave a great and mysterious magic spell that transported them to many different worlds and made the eyes of the Captains of the Sands shine as only the stars in the Bahia night could shine’.

Legless is lame, and, outwardly at least, the mean clown who always mocks the others. He inveigles his way into rich people’s homes, making them feel sorry for him and give him food and a bed for the night, while he cases out the place for his mates to rob them.

Legless felt they were taking him in out of remorse. Because Legless thought that they were all to blame for the situation of all poor children. And he hated them all, with a deep hatred. His great and almost only joy was to calculate the despair of the family after the robbery, thinking that the hungry boy they had fed had been the one who had staked out the house for other hungry children to find its valuables. But this time it was becoming different. This time they hadn’t left him in the kitchen in his rags, they hadn’t sent him out to sleep in the shed. They’d given him clothing, a room, fed him in the dining room. He was like a guest, like a beloved guest… and suddenly he has the fear that they’ll be good to him in this house.

Good-Life is the most chilled of them all, who likes to let ‘life run on without worrying too much’, gets on well with everyone, and really just wants to stroll at leisure along the streets of the city, or lie on the sands.

He’s the one who brings Father Jose Pedro into the Captains’ lives – a humble worker turned idealistic priest who might not be able to penetrate all the mysteries of philosophy, theology and Latin, but who is very kind-hearted and understanding and wants to help the abandoned children. At first they don’t quite trust him and he misguidedly tries to find homes for them, not realising that they treasure their freedom above any material comforts. But he treats them as friends and gradually wins them over. His advocacy for these children horrifies his superiors:

‘Compromising with robbery, with the crimes of those hoodlums…’

‘Whose fault is it of theirs? Who takes care of them? Who teaches them? Who helps them? What love do they get?… They steal in order to eat because all these rich people who’ve got enough to throw away, to give to churches, forget that hungry children exist…’

‘Anyone who heard you would think it was a communist speaking… an enemy of the Church… You’ve dishonored the priestly vestment you wear.’

Yet, although the books shows the vulnerability and suffering of the boys, as well as their spirit of solidarity, it does not idealise them. It is also remarkably frank about their sexual adventures (with both men and women), especially for a book written in 1937. There are some unpalatable scenes, such as Pedro Bala forcing himself upon a young girl on the beach, although technically maintaining her virginity.

Amado was very young when he wrote what he called his ‘Bahian novels’ and he admits that they are full of flaws. On occasion, he overexplains what his protagonists are thinking or feeling, and his style is more direct and political, with far less emphasis on local colour than his later novels. But his intentions were to capture the real voices of the real inhabitants of the state of Bahia, collecting material by living among those people and talking to them. He is careful to add that he is not doing the work of a reporter, but that although his novels relate the facts, feelings and landscapes of Bahia, they have a broader universal meaning.

The book was made into a film in 2012 (the year of Amado’s centennial anniversary) by his granddaughter Cecilia Amado (see a still from the film below).