INTRODUCTION

Monteiro Lobato represents the most recent phase of the Brazilian reaction against Gallic literary influence. Though not pretending primarily to be a writer, he yet has inaugurated what amounts not “to” almost to a new period of the national letters. At the bottom of his nationalism, however, is the one valid foundation of art: sincerity. If occasionally he overdoes his protest against the French, he may well be forgiven because of its sound basis; it is part of his own personality to see things in the primary colors, to play the national zealot not in any chauvinistic sense; he is no blind follower of the administrative powers, no nationalist in the ugly sense of cheap partisan drum-beating, but in the sense that true nationalism is the logical development of the fatherland’s potentialities. A personally independent fellow, then, who would achieve for his nation that same independence.

The beginning of the World War found Monteiro Lobato established upon a fazenda, far from the thoughts and centers of literature. It was by accident that he discovered his gifts as a writer. The story is told that one day, rendered indignant by the custom of clearing stubble fields by fire, and thus endangering the bordering inhabitants, he sent a letter of protest to a large daily in São Paulo. It seems that the letter was too important, too well-written,[Pg 6] too plainly indicative of natural literary talent, to be relegated to the corner where readers’ jeremiads usually wail, and that, instead, it was “featured” upon the first page. From that day the die was cast. The episode, in my opinion, is far more important than it appears. For, whatever form in which the man’s later writings are published, they are in a more important degree just what this initial venture was: a protest, a means of civic betterment, a national contribution.

It was with the collection named “Urupês” (Fungi) that Lobato definitely established himself. Upon the success of that book he has built a powerful publishing house, a splendid magazine (“Revista do Brasil”—The Brazilian Review), a veritable literary movement. He excels in stinging comment upon current affairs; he writes books for the primary schools; he is a practical nature bent upon visibly altering the national course. As a writer, he is “anti-literary,” scorning the finer graces. Together with a similar group in Buenos Aires he underestimates the aesthetic element in art, confusing it, perhaps, with the snobbish, aloof, vapory spirits who have a habit of infesting all movements with their neurotic lucubrations. Yet such a view may do him, as it does Manuel Gálvez in Argentina, or Upton Sinclair in the United States, injustice. His style, his attitude, his product, are directly conditioned by the ambient in which he works and the problems he has set out to solve. Less unjust, surely is the criticism that may be made against him when—as is characteristic[Pg 7]

of such natures—his earnestness degenerates into special pleading, when his intense feeling tapers off into sentimentality, and when what was meant to be humor falls away to caricature.

Lobato’s work in every phase is first of all an act of nationalism. To this caustic spirit, the real Brazil—the Brazil that must set to work stamping its impress upon the arts of the near future—lies in the interior of the country, away from the cosmopolitanism of the littoral. Yet his practise largely belies this implied regionalism.

That he is gifted with the rare faculty of self-criticism may be seen from a letter I received from him some time after I had introduced him to North American readers in a newspaper article.

“I was born,” he wrote, “on the 18th of April, 1883, in Tabauté, State of São Paulo, the son of parents who owned a coffee plantation. I began my studies in the city, proceeding later to São Paulo, where I matriculated as a law student, being graduated, like everybody else, as a Bachelor of Laws. Fond of literature, I read a great deal in my youth: my favorite authors were Kipling, Maupassant, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, Balzac, Wells, Dickens, Camillo Castello Branco, Eça de Queiroz and Machado de Assis ... but I never allowed myself to be dominated by any one.” (Let me interrupt the letter long enough to quote Lobato on literary influences. In his stimulating collection of critiques entitled “Idéas de Jéca Tatu” he has said: “Let us agree that imitation is, in fact, the greatest of creative forces. He imitates who assimilates[Pg 8] processes. Who copies, does not imitate; he steals. Who plagiarizes does not imitate; he apes.” And let us recall that Lobato presents this book as “a war-cry in favor of personality).” To continue with the letter:

“I like to see with my own eyes, smell with my own nose. All my work reveals this personal impression, almost always cruel, for, in my opinion, we are the remnant of a race approaching annihilation. Brazil will be something in the future, but the man of today, the Luso-Africano-Indian will pass out of existence, absorbed and assimilated by other, stronger races ... just as the primitive aborigine passed. Even as the Portuguese caused the disappearance of the Indian, so will the new races cause the disappearance of the hybrid Portuguese, whose rôle in Brazilian civilization is already fulfilled, having consisted in the vast labor of clearing the land by the destruction of the forests. The language will remain, gradually more and modified by the influence of the new milieu, so different from the Lusitanian milieu.

“Brazil is an ailing country.”

Let me interrupt once again, to say that in his pamphlet “Problema Vital,” Lobato studies this problem, indicating that man will be victorious over the tropical zone through the new arms of hygiene. The pamphlet caused a turmoil throughout Brazil, and sides were at once formed, the one considering Lobato a defamer of the nation, the other seeing in the work an act of sanative patriotism. As a result, a national program of sanitation was inaugurated.[Pg 9] This realism of approach, so characteristic of Lobato, made of his figure Jéca Tatu a symbol that has in many minds replaced the idealized image of Pery, from Alencar’s “Guarany.” Jéca thus stands for the most recent critical reaction against national romanticism.

“I recognize now,” continues Lobato in the letter, “that I was cruel, but it was the only way of stirring opinion in that huge whale of most rudimentary nervous system which is my poor Brazil. I am not properly a literary man. I take no pleasure in writing, nor do I attach the slightest importance to what is called literary glory and similar follies. I am a particle of extremely sensitive conscience that adopted the literary form,—fiction, the conte, satire,—as the only means of being heard and heeded. I achieved my aim and today I devote myself to the publishing business, where I find a solid means of sustaining the great idea that, in order to cure an ailing person he must first be convinced that he is, in fact, a sick man.”

Here, as elsewhere, Lobato’s theory is harsher than his practise. He is, of course, a literary man, and has achieved a distinctive style; but he knows, as his letter hints, that his social strength may prove his literary weakness. The truth would seem to be that Monteiro Lobato is not so much a teller of stories as he is a critic of men. The three tales by which he is represented in this booklet come from his “Urupês”; they exhibit him at his favorite pursuit of caricaturing his fellow men, of deriding their political foibles, their personal weakness, their social shortcomings. “Modern[Pg 10] Torture” would not have shamed Mark Twain. It is not so intimately Brazilian that it cannot apply, with little alteration, to wardheelers in the United States. “The Penitent Wag” is an experiment in the macabre that also serves as a piece of social criticism. “The Plantation Buyer” is just as comical in the United States of America as in the United States of Brazil.

As I write, Lobato’s São Paulo is seething with revolt. Revolution, in ideas and in action have been the history of that region. It is not the least of Lobato’s virtues that his intellectual revolt seeks practical outlet. He means his blue-prints to be, some day, inspiring temples. And he is one of the finest social architects of contemporary Brazil.[1]

ISAAC GOLDBERG

Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1924.

BRAZILIAN SHORT STORIES

[Pg 11]

MODERN TORTURE

All the barbarity practiced by the Holy Inquisition to subjugate heretics, the clever tortures of the medieval rack, Ottoman impalement, the torture of the thousand pieces, the red-hot molten lead, poured down the throat through a funnel—all the old science of martyrdom still exists to this day, cloaked under clever disguises. Humanity is ever the same cruel destroyer of itself, either in centuries before or after Christ. The form of things changes; but the substance remains the same.

As proof I here adduce the avatar of the ancient tortures: the postman’s job.

This torture is equal to the wheel, the bonfire, strangulation, the strappado, the bronze bull, impalement, the cat-o’-nine-tails, the pillory, the hydraulic whipping-post; the difference being that these machines killed with relative rapidity, while the postman’s job prolongs the agony of the victim for years.

A man goes into the service of postman in the following manner: the Government, at the hateful suggestion of some political “boss,”—the modern substitute of the “servant” of the inquisition,—appoints a citizen mail-carrier between two neighboring towns not served by a railroad.

The innocent man sees both honor and business[Pg 12] in the case: it is an honor to become one of the crowded phalanx of budget-devouring parasites who patiently digest the country; it is a good business to taste at the end of each month a fixed salary and to have, nicely prepared for the future, the soft bed of a pension.

Here we see the difference between the ominous medieval times and the super-excellency of the democracy of the present day.

Absolutism brutally seized the victims and without warning or “habeas-corpus,” murdered them; democracy works with the cunning of a hypocrite, sets traps, sticks a slice of orange inside and treacherously waits for the famished bird to fall into the noose, of his own free will. It wants chance victims and does not choose. This is called art, artfully done....

The man having been appointed, at first does not perceive his misfortune. Only at the end of a month or two he begins to have his doubts; doubts that gradually become a certainty, a horrible certainty that he has been impaled on the hard back of the worst plug in the neighborhood, with five, six, seven leagues of torture before him to consume per day, with the mail-bag behind him on the horse’s back. These leagues are the pricks of the instrument of torture. For ordinary mortals a league is a league; the measure of a distance beginning here and ending there. The traveler, having covered the distance, arrives and is satisfied. The leagues of the postman, hardly are they over, return again “da capo” as in music. Having gone over six (suppose the route to be one of six leagues), he sees[Pg 13] them rise up again in front of him on his return. He must do them and undo them. Penelope’s web, rock of Sisyphus, and between the going and coming, the bad digestion of a warmed-up dinner and a bad night; and thus it continues for a

month, a year, two, three, five, as long as he still has buttocks and his horse has loins.

When he meets a traveler on his way he becomes green with envy: that one will soon “arrive,” whereas, for the postman, this verb is an ironical derision. He dismounts with difficulty, worn out, his flesh on fire at the end of the thirty-six thousand metres of the weary way. He eats a plate of badly cooked beans, and takes a wretched little nap. The dawn of the next day stretches out before him and by way of good-morning, the same accursed thirty-six thousand meters of the evening before, now lengthened out the other way....

Soon the sore animal weakens and gives out. Now the rider must climb the hills on foot. He has no means with which to buy another nag. His salary is spent for corn and a closely cropped pasture for the horse, and brine for the baths and other remedies for the bruises of both rider and ridden. There is nothing left for clothes.

The State awards—the same State that maintains fat bureaucratic caterpillars at a conto and Congressional parrots at a hundred mil réis per day,—awards him, this generous and wealthy State ... one hundred mil réis per month. That is, one real for every nine yards of torment. Twenty réis they pay him for[Pg 14] three hundred and thirty meters of torture. That is, one kilometer of martyrdom for sixty réis. Cheaper pain would be impossible....

The post-made-man begins to shrink from fatigue and hunger. He gets thin, his cheeks sink in, his legs become brackets within which dwells the belly of the wretched horse.

Besides the physiological, economical and social calamities, he is also showered with meteorological woes. The inclement weather does not spare him. In summer the sun roasts him pitilessly, as nuts are roasted in an oven; if it rains, he misses not a drop; by the end of May, when the cold weather begins, benumbed like a subject of the Czar in Siberia, he devours the infernal leagues. On Saint Bartholomew’s day,[2] as he hangs like grim death to the mane of the lean mare, it is a miracle that the devilish wind does not tumble them both over a precipice.

His patrons, the Government, take it for granted that he is made of iron and his buttocks of chromate of steel; that the roads are asphalted streets lined with plush; that the weather is a permanent blue sky with balmy breezes bent upon blowing the sweet perfume of flowering balsam over the travelers.

It still takes it for granted that the hundred mil réis[3] of salary is a regal remuneration, to make one smack one’s lips. And, in these angelical suppositions, when financial crises come and economy must be considered, it cuts[Pg 15] down five or ten mil réis from his meagre salary so that there may be some margin by which some brother-in-law, graduated in medicine, can go to Europe on a commission to study the “zygomatic influence of the solar perihelion on the Zarathustrian system of Latin democracies.”

And thus the army of postmen, more and more emaciated every day, head over heels in debt, covered with bruises, at the mercy of the December sun or the benumbing June drizzles, trots, trots, unceasingly, up hill and down dale, through mud-holes and sand-banks, whirlpools and slippery slopes, shaken up by the miserable mount that from so much suffering, poor thing, has lost all semblance of a horse. Its loins are but an open wound; the ribs a lathwork. This sorry caricature of the noble Equus, finally one day falls exhausted and famished in the midst of the journey.

The postman throws the harness and the mail-bag over his shoulders and finishes the journey on foot. However, as on that day he arrives late, the post-office agent reports to headquarters regarding his “non-compliance with the rules.” Headquarters get moving; a paper circulates about several rooms, where, comfortably sprawled out in expensive armchairs, the stout bureaucracy converses about German spies. After a long voyage the documents reach an office where a well filled-out fellow, with good color, is seated at a mahogany desk smoking a confiscated cigar.

This one earns eight hundred mil réis per month, is son of someone, brother-in-law, father-in-law[Pg 16] or son-in-law of someone else, begins work at eleven in the morning and leaves at three with an interval in between to take a cup of chocolate at the café on the corner. The fatted pig glances over the paper with lazy, listless eyes and grunts:

“These postmen! What vagabonds they are!”

And signs the dismissal of the culprit for the good of the public service.

The poor tortured man, turned out, without health, without a horse, without flesh, full of debts, his insides dislocated by the shaking up on horseback, finds himself surrounded by creditors, hungry as vultures around a slaughterhouse. As he is completely cleaned out, he is unable to pay any of them and, therefore, becomes known as a swindler.

“He seemed an honest man and nevertheless robbed me of five measures of corn,” says the grocer, a fat man from Calabria, who became rich circulating bogus money.

“He borrowed one hundred mil réis from me for a horse, at a small friendly interest (three per cent per month) five years ago, and all he could pay me was the little premium and the harness as part payment. What a thief!” said the money-lender, partner of the other in the circulation of bogus money.

The dry-goods shop lamented the loss of a pair of cotton trousers sold on credit to the postman some time ago. The drug store bewailed two pounds of adulterated Epsom salts. And the martyr, steeped in insults, only sees one way out of it: to take to his feet and run[Pg 17] ... run to any country where he is unknown and can die in peace.

Thus the modern torture of the post service, besides drying up the flesh of a human creature free from crime, gives him a beautiful moral death.

And all this so that no news will be lacking to the learned people of the little towns, unserved by railroads; for they must get the daily paper and learn about the knifings between Spread-foot and Black Shirt, the cheese stolen by Little Bahiano from Manoel of the grocery-store, the novel translated from Georges Ohnet, the country’s rescue from national thieving, the spouting of Leagues for this and that, the discovery of spies where there is nothing to spy, polyculture, zebu oxen, illiteracy, the falsehoods of the International News Agency and all the nonsense that sprouts from the soil of this wonderful country.

Colonel Evandro’s policy in Itaóca fell through when, at a certain election, the rival candidate Fidencio, also Colonel, hoisted the quotation of votes of those who wore neck-ties, to five hundred mil réis and of those who went bare-foot to two suits of clothes and a hat besides. The first act of the winner was to turn out everyone turnoutable connected with public employment. Among those dismissed were the post-office employes, including the postman, who was replaced at the suggestion of the Government, by Izé Biriba.

Said Biriba was a human snail, slow in movement and obtuse in ideas, with two tremendous[Pg 18] preoccupations in life: politics and his forelock. The forelock was a stubborn tangled lock of hair always falling over his forehead, and so obstinate that he spent half the day raising his left hand to his forehead in an automatic movement to push back the rebellious lock. It is needless to say what the politics consisted of.

Forelock and politics, both combined, took up all of his time so that Biriba found no spare moment in which to work his farm, which finally, gnawed by the mortgage-bug, fell into the hands of a wily Italian.

Then he started a bar that failed. While he pushed back his forelock, the customers stole the tips from him; and during the political talks, the men of his party drank cooling drinks and ate fish-cakes in celebration of the future victory while they spouted sarcastic remarks against those in power.

Besides brushing back his forelock, Biriba had the habit of saying, “Yes, Sir,” used as a comma, semicolon, colon and period in reply to all the nonsensical remarks of his companions; and sometimes, through habit, when the customer ceased talking and began to eat, Biriba would utter a series of “Yes, Sirs,” in accompaniment to the chewing of the stolen cake.