The Slum (Library of Latin America) Read online

  THE SLUM

  LIBRARY OF LATIN AMERICA

  General Editor

  Jean Franco

  Series Editor for Brazil

  Richard Graham, with the assistance of Alfredo Bosi

  Editorial Board

  Tulio Halperin Donghi

  Iván Jaksi

  Naomi Lindstrom

  Eduardo Lozano

  Francine Masiello

  THE SLUM

  A Novel by

  ALUÍSIO AZEVEDO

  Translated from the Portuguese by

  DAVID H. ROSENTHAL

  WITH A FOREWORD BY DAVID H. ROSENTHAL

  AND AN AFTERWORD BY AFFONSO ROMANO DE SANT’ANNA

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  Copyright © 2000 by Oxford University Press

  Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Azevedo, Aluísio, 1857-1913.

  [Cortiço. English]

  The slum : a novel / by Aluísio Azevedo ; translated from the

  Portuguese by David H. Rosenthal ; with a foreword by David H.

  Rosenthal and an afterword by Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna.

  p. cm.—(Library of Latin America)

  Includes bibliographical references (p.).

  ISBN 0-19-512186-4 (cloth)

  ISBN 0-19-512187-2 (paper)

  I. Rosenthal, David, 1945-1995. II. Title. III. Series.

  PQ9697.A93C613 1999

  869.3—dc21 98-48748

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  Contents

  Series Editors’ Introduction

  Foreword

  DAVID H. ROSENTHAL

  THE SLUM

  ALUÍSIO AZEVEDO

  Afterword

  AFFONSO ROMANO DE SANT’ANNA

  Chronology

  Bibliography

  Series Editors’ General Introduction

  The Library of Latin America series makes available in translation major nineteenth-century authors whose work has been neglected in the English-speaking world. The titles for the translations from the Spanish and Portuguese were suggested by an editorial committee that included Jean Franco (general editor responsible for works in Spanish), Richard Graham (series editor responsible for works in Portuguese), Tulio Halperín Donghi (at the University of California, Berkeley), Iván Jaksi (at the University of Notre Dame), Naomi Lindstrom (at the University of Texas at Austin), Francine Masiello (at the University of California, Berkeley), and Eduardo Lozano of the Library at the University of Pittsburgh. The late Antonio Cornejo Polar of the University of California, Berkeley, was also one of the founding members of the committee. The translations have been funded thanks to the generosity of the Lampadia Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  During the period of national formation between 1810 and into the early years of the twentieth century, the new nations of Latin America fashioned their identities, drew up constitutions, engaged in bitter struggles over territory, and debated questions of education, government, ethnicity, and culture. This was a unique period unlike the process of nation formation in Europe and one which should be more familiar than it is to students of comparative politics, history, and literature.

  The image of the nation, was envisioned by the lettered classes—a minority in countries in which indigenous, mestizo, black, or mulatto peasants and slaves predominated—although there were also alternative nationalisms at the grassroots level. The cultural elite were well educated in European thought and letters, but as statesmen, journalists, poets, and academics, they confronted the problem of the racial and linguistic heterogeneity of the continent and the difficulties of integrating the population into a modern nation-state. Some of the writers whose works will be translated in the Library of Latin America series played leading roles in politics. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, a friar who translated Rousseau’s The Social Contract and was one of the most colorful characters of the independence period, was faced with imprisonment and expulsion from Mexico for his heterodox beliefs; on his return, after independence, he was elected to the congress. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, exiled from his native Argentina under the presidency of Rosas, wrote Facundo: Civilizatión y barbarie, a stinging denunciation of that government. He returned after Rosas’ overthrow and was elected president in 1868. Andrés Bello was born in Venezuela, lived in London where he published poetry during the independence period, settled in Chile where he founded the University, wrote his grammar of the Spanish language, and drew up the country’s legal code.

  These post-independence intelligentsia were not simply dreaming castles in the air, but vitally contributed to the founding of nations and the shaping of culture. The advantage of hindsight may make us aware of problems they themselves did not foresee, but this should not affect our assessment of their truly astonishing energies and achievements. It is still surprising that the writing of Andrés Bello, who contributed fundamental works to so many different fields, has never been translated into English. Although there is a recent translation of Sarmiento’s celebrated Facundo, there is no translation of his memoirs, Recuerdos de provincia (Provincial Recollections). The predominance of memoirs in the Library of Latin America Series is no accident—many of these offer entertaining insights into a vast and complex continent.

  Nor have we neglected the novel. The Series includes new translations of the outstanding Brazilian writer Machado de Assis’ work, including Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. There is no reason why other novels and writers who are not so well known outside Latin America—the Peruvian novelist Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido, Nataniel Aguirre’s Juan de la Rosa, José de Alencar’s Iracema, Juana Manuela Gorriti’s short stories—should not be read with as much interest as the political novels of Anthony Trollope.

  A series on nineteenth-century Latin America cannot, however, be limited to literary genres such as the novel, the poem, and the short story. The literature of independent Latin America was eclectic and strongly influenced by the periodical press newly liberated from scrutiny by colonial authorities and the Inquisition. Newspapers were miscellanies of fiction, essays, poems, and translations from all manner of European writing. The novels written on the eve of Mexican Independence by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, included disquisitions on secular education and law, and denunciations of the evils of gaming and idleness. Other works, such as a well-known poem by Andrés Bello, “Ode to Tropical Agriculture,” and novels such as Amalia by José Mórmol and the Bolivian Nataniel Aguirre’s Juan de la Rosa, were openly partisan. By the end of the century, sophisticated scholars were beginning to address the history of their countries, as did João Capistrano de Abreu in his Capítulos de história colonial.

  It is often in memoirs such as those by Fray Servando Teresa d
e Mier or Sarmiento that we find the descriptions of everyday life that in Europe were incorporated into the realist novel. Latin American literature at this time was seen largely as a pedagogical tool, a “light” alternative to speeches, sermons, and philosophical tracts—though, in fact, especially in the early part of the century, even the readership for novels was quite small because of the high rate of illiteracy. Nevertheless the vigorous orally transmitted culture of the gaucho and the urban underclasses became the linguistic repertoire of some of the most interesting nineteenth-century writers—most notably José Hernández, author of the “gauchesque” poem “Martin Fierrio,” which enjoyed an unparalleled popularity. But for many writers the task was not to appropriate popular language but to civilize, and their literary works were strongly influenced by the high style of political oratory.

  The editorial committee has not attempted to limit its selection to the better-known writers such as Machado de Assis; it has also selected many works that have never appeared in translation or writers whose works have not been translated recently. The Series now makes these works available to the English-speaking public.

  Because of the preferences of funding organizations, the series initially focuses on writing from Brazil, the Southern Cone, the Andean region, and Mexico. Each of our editions will have an introduction that places the work in its appropriate context and includes explanatory notes.

  We owe special thanks to Robert Glynn of the Lampadia Foundation, whose initiative gave the project a jump-start, and to Richard Ekman of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which also generously supported the project. We also thank the Rockefeller Foundation for funding the 1996 symposium, “Culture and Nation in Iberoamerica,” organized by the editorial board of the Library of Latin America. The support of Edward Barry of Oxford University Press has been crucial, as has the advice and help of Ellen Chodosh of Oxford University Press. The first volumes of the series were published after the untimely death, on July 3, 1997, of Maria C. Bulle who, as an associate of the Lampadia Foundation, supported the idea from its beginning. We received substantial institutional support and personal encouragement from the Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of Texas at Austin.

  —Jean Franco

  —Richard Graham

  Foreword

  The turn of the last century witnessed a remarkable outpouring of first-rate prose in Brazil. Some high points of the era were Adolfo Caminha’s homosexual classic Bom-Crioulo (The black man and the cabin boy); Raul Pompéia’s The Atheneum, the story of a sensitive adolescent in a brutal, elite boarding school; Machado de Assis’s desolately elegant Epitaph for a Small Winner, and Aluísio Azevedo’s The Slum—not to mention Euclides da Cunha’s brilliant analysis of his nation’s clashing races and cultures in Rebellion in the Backlands. Among nineteenth-century Brazilian novelists, only Machado has received much recognition in the United States. Azevedo’s The Slum, however, surely deserves a place among the outstanding books of its era—as well as among the world’s elemental tales of passion and greed. Azevedo had a genius for timing, a dazzlingly pictorial imagination, and an instinct for complex plot choreography, for counterpoint among characters and incidents.

  Azevedo (1857–1913) was born in São Luís do Maranhão, in Brazil’s tropical north. Because his mother had left her husband and divorce was illegal, his parents were unable to marry until the first husband’s death. At the age of thirteen, Aluísio went to work in a store owned by one of his father’s friends, and at the same time began to study art. At nineteen, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he earned his living by doing illustrations and caricatures for magazines. Two years later, upon his father’s death, he returned to São Luís. He stayed there for three years, writing humorous pieces, stories, journalistic attacks on the Church and slavery (which aroused considerable animosity and provoked a lawsuit brought by a local priest), and two novels. The first of these (A Woman’s Tear, 1880) was a fairly run-of-the-mill Romantic work, but the second (The Mulatto, 1881) showed his gift for sharp description and a wide-angle, synthetic view of society. For São Luís’s provincial citizens, whose narrow-mindedness and racism The Mulatto had attacked, the book put the finishing touches on Azevedo’s disgrace. Soon after its publication, he again moved to Rio, where his work had been well received and where he hoped to make a living as a writer.

  Between 1882 and 1895, Azevedo published ten novels and collaborated on several plays with his older brother Arturo. Brazil’s reading public was small, the novels were published in installments, and the strain of his constant struggle to meet deadlines is evident in much of Azevedo’s work. In 1895, burnt out, he joined the diplomatic corps, serving in Spain, Japan, Argentina, and Italy and writing nothing for the last eighteen years of his life. In a letter to a friend, he explained some of the reasons that led him to switch professions: “What’s the use of writing? For whom? We have no readers. A printing of two thousand copies takes years to sell out . . . I’ve had it up to here with literature!”

  The Slum (1890), a work at once archetypal and so realistic that it remains one of our best portraits of Brazilian society, is universally recognized as Azevedo’s masterpiece. Its deft, intricate interplay of stories, its keen observation of telling detail, and its accurate use of everyday speech are magnetic and authoritative. Though many strands are woven together in the book, there are two dominant narrative lines. One is the rise of João Romão from a penny-pinching shopkeeper and landlord to a rich capitalist. The other is the love affair between two tenants in João’s sprawling warren: brawny, sweet-natured Jerônimo and the vivacious mulatta Rita Bahiana. Both Portuguese, João and Jerônimo embody two alternative immigrant responses to Brazil. Jerônimo is transformed by Rita from a thrifty, prudent European into a sensual Brazilian. Her initial entrance, abruptly galvanizing a lazy Sunday afternoon, both telegraphs her importance in the book and reflects Azevedo’s scene-setting skills:

  She wasn’t dressed for church; she was wearing a white blouse and a skirt that showed her stockingless feet in fine leather sandals adorned with brightly colored straps. In her thick, frizzy hair, gathered in a glossy bun, there was a sprig of basil and a vanilla flower held in place by a pin. Everything about her breathed the cleanliness of Brazilian women and the sensual perfume of clover and aromatic herbs. Restlessly wiggling her firm, brazen Bahian hips, she answered questions right and left, flashing rows of brilliant white teeth that added luster to her beauty.

  Discarding Piedade, his sensible spouse from the old country, Jerônimo falls in love with Rita, finally killing her mulatto lover Firmo and taking her as his common-law wife. Crushed by this rejection, Piedade degenerates into a drunken slut, while Senhorina, Jerônimo’s daughter, is clearly doomed to a life of prostitution. In the murder scene, Azevedo again shows his knack for vivid evocation, making a thunderstorm one of the protagonists in Firmo’s death:

  The rain fell harder. Beneath that relentless downpour he seemed frailer, as though he were melting away. He looked like a mouse being beaten to death with a stick. A slight convulsive trembling was all that showed he was still alive. The other three kept silent, panting and striking him again and again, overcome by an irresistable thirst for blood, a wish to mangle and destroy that hunk of flesh that groaned at their feet. Finally, exhausted, they dragged him to the edge of the water and threw him in. Gasping for breath, they fled helter-skelter across the beach, heading back toward the city.

  João Romão chooses a path different from Jerônimo’s. João is dazzled not by the light and sexual heat of the tropics but by the glitter of gold. Like Jerônimo, however, as he changes he jettisons one woman, the black slave Bertoleza, and becomes engaged to another, the rich, refined, and sheltered Zulmira. Bertoleza’s desperate response to her betrayal provides the book with its stunning climax. As in The Mulatto, race plays a central role in The Slum. Although Azevedo’s language occasionally reveals the all-but-unconscious racist preconceptions of virtually all whites during his time, his book is
nevertheless a powerful cry of outrage against bigotry, comparable only to Huckleberry Finn in North America.

  As Brazilian critics have often noted, one of Azevedo’s great talents is his ability to bring a crowd to life. São Romão, the slum in Botafogo where most of the action takes place, is presented as a collective entity, suffocatingly dense with passions and swarming with both life and the threat of sudden death. Here its inhabitants are described on a typical Monday morning:

  The noise grew louder and denser. One could no longer make out individual voices amid the compact buzzing that filled the courtyard. Women began buying things at the store, new quarrels broke out, one heard guffaws and curses. People shouted instead of talking. Like a vine hungrily plunging its roots into life’s black and nourishing mire, São Romão seethed with the animal joy of existence, the triumphant pleasure of simply breathing.

  “Seethe” is a verb Azevedo often employs in The Slum. Some crisis, some tragedy is always erupting, with scarcely a moment’s rest between them. Often dramas are piled on top of each other, as when a fight between Piedade and Rita leads to a brawl between mobs of Portuguese and Brazilians, interrupted by an invasion by a gang from another slum. This attack, in turn, is aborted by a fire set by a tenant, a half-insane Indian woman trying to avenge the eviction of her friend Marciana. The constant shocks of contact between ethnic groups—Portuguese, Italians, Amerindians, blacks, half-breeds of all descriptions—at once lend The Slum its cultural density and make it a quintessentially American book. Indeed, it comes about as close as anything to being “the Great American Novel.” Though clearly a piece of naturalist fiction and influenced both by Emile Zola and the great nineteenth-century Portuguese novelist José Maria Eça de Queirós, The Slum is blessedly free of social Darwinist cant. Its pace is swift, and it is rich in subplots like the story of gentle Pombinha, whom the French lesbian prostitute Léonie transforms from a precociously wise adolescent into a cynical call girl. In another of the book’s poetic high points, Pombinha, after her sexual initiation by Léonie, dreams she is a rose wooed by an enamored butterfly. The dream, in turn, leads to her first menstrual period: