What is fatherland anyway?
“What was fatherland anyway?” Seventy years before the Irish scholar Benedict Anderson developed the concept of the nation as an imagined community, Major Policarpo Quaresma posed this question. Was the Brazil he imagined a fantasy created by his hyperbolic patriotism? Who was “imagining” the Brazil that actually existed? What was the role of borders in defining the fatherland? These melancholic reflections sound familiar, but they were published by Lima Barreto more than a century ago, in 1911. Still topical in many respects, the satirical “The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma” tells the quixotic story of a man who loves his country above everything else. His attempts to improve it, however, invariably fail — mostly due to lack of understanding on the part of his own imagined community.
The civil servant Policarpo Quaresma, who arrives home every day “with the regularity of the appearance of a planet or an eclipse”, is described as an introverted man devoid of ambition for money or fame. In his life, there is only room for one passion: his homeland. Generally incorruptible, he would even resort to “amputating a few kilometers from the Nile” to guarantee the pre-eminence of the Amazon River and, in doing so, convince his peers of the superiority of Brazil. Funny and sarcastic throughout, Barreto tells the tale of a single-minded and well-intentioned man who passes his days “half at the office, where he was not understood, and half at home, where he was not understood either”.
I first read the book in Portuguese, as a teenager who was starting to discover the richness of Brazilian culture and the bleakness of our social problems. Policarpo’s naive enthusiasm for our homeland, however, didn’t seem so ridiculous to me — I shared with him the idealism for change and the need to oppose the discourse that uncritically repeated that we should be more “civilized” like Europe. A century lies between Quaresma’s Rio de Janeiro and mine. Within the novel, violence is not present in everyday life, apart from during the war, and the characters have enviable freedom of movement. Yet, a disconcerting social inequality and the roots of structural corruption are there, even if described with a satirical tone. The channel I chose to unload my patriotic frustrations was quite an obvious one: I became a journalist. The Major, on the other hand, took less mainstream routes.
The tale of Policarpo Quaresma is divided into three parts: each of them covers a new enterprise and its respective “sad end”. In order to enhance his beloved country, the Major first sends a petition to Congress to make the indigenous language Tupi-Guaraní the country’s official one, an idea that is met with mockery and seen as “a betrayal of the mediocrity” of bureaucrats. Then he decides to dedicate his life to agriculture and explore the land’s fertility, but is defeated by “tiny pirates” — an army of fearless ants. Lastly, he goes to war. Needless to say, he soon finds out that his reason for fighting is not echoed by his fellow countrymen.
Before each new endeavor, Policarpo buys a range of books on the subject, raising his neighbors’ suspicions: “What for, if he had no degree? The pretension!” Famous for his walks around every nook and cranny of Rio, Barreto was a talented observer of the different strata of Brazilian society and an even more skilled chronicler of its contradictions: despite the “semi-divine” aura that men acquired when they had a degree, Doctor Armando Borges is rapidly unmasked by his wife as an intellectual fraud; the helpful politician Doctor Campos ceases to be nice the moment Quaresma refuses to join his corruption schemes; and General Albernaz exalts in his title but “hadn’t seen a single battle”. The military is one of Barreto’s main targets, especially the president Marshall Floriano Peixoto — a man with “no intellectual qualities at all” and a soft spot for violence. Depressingly, little seems to have changed.
Apart from death, the author acknowledges that there is another social leveler: madness. The subject recurs throughout the book — when Quaresma is taken to an asylum because of his petition and when Ismênia, convinced that getting married is the aim of her existence, is left by her fiance and gives up on life. In both cases, though, it is questionable where the insanity actually lies: with the individual or with society. Ismênia is not the only female character that has a role in Barreto’s critiques of society. Olga, Quarema’s goddaughter, is even more important, insofar as she is the one who voices sobering reflections on poverty and the surprisingly hopeful message of the book.
Born in 1881, the journalist and writer Lima Barreto could easily have been a character from a novel himself. The son of a freed slave, he lost his mother when he was six, then had to drop out of his Engineering course when his father had a mental collapse. Like Quaresma, he became a civil servant and a nonconformist. In the book introduction, his biographer Lilia Moritz Schwarcz explains that the author chose to become a “counter-cultural figure” — he identified himself as a black writer, was averse to the formalities of literature and was extremely critical of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Barreto was interned twice for alcoholism at the same asylum as his character; this beautiful neoclassical building later became the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where I studied Journalism. One of Brazilian most renowned authors, Lima Barreto died very young, at 41.
More than a decade after I read “The Sad End…” for the first time, I got hold of Mike Carlyon’s brilliant translation into English. Published in 2014, the Penguin Classics edition has an old black and white photo of Rio in the cover — an almost unrecognizable empty Copacabana beach, bordered by few low-rise buildings. Living in a divided country on the verge of Brexit, I engaged with the Major’s intense patriotism more cautiously. This time, the character’s doubts touched me more than his certainties. “What was fatherland anyway?”, I asked myself, oscillating between an intense pessimism for Brazil’s gloomy future and a dash of guilt for having started a new life in another country. Are the people who share your values really the ones confined within the same borders? Is patriotism a tool for improvement, as Quaresma originally thought, or is it a justification for (even more) violence and tyranny?
Despite my momentary lack of hope, “The Sad End…” was the first present I bought for my husband — the beginning of my own personal venture of introducing him to as many Brazilian books as I could find translated into English. Our bookshelves are now filled with volumes by Milton Hatoum, Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Chico Buarque, Graciliano Ramos, Tatiana Salem Levy, Raduan Nassar, Jorge Amado and many others — unsurprisingly, he nicknamed me Maricarpo.
