São Bernardo: A Novel by Graciliano Ramos
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By Marshall Shord
Paulo Honório is a murderer, a swindler, an abuser, a belittler, a usurer, and a skinflint. He is also, partly owing to these qualities, the owner of a flourishing estate, which gives its name to Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos’s 1934 novel, São Bernardo. Cunning, stubborn, and violent, Senhor Paulo is no different, just a bit more of each, than his neighbors and creditors in this wild corner of northeast Brazil, where a prolonged low-intensity property war seems but a feature of life for the landowner.
Senhor Paulo’s first words—“Before I started this book, I thought division of labor was the way to go”—are an ironic introduction to a man who, through an autocratic will, a vicious distrust of others, and an easy recourse to skulduggery, maneuvers himself into ownership of the estate upon which he once toiled as a field hand. Now, whiling aways his days on the grounds of São Bernardo, for no humbler reason than “the betterment of our national literature,” he decides to write a book. But he suspects that his lack of schooling might be an obstacle to such a project, and so enlists his circle of worldlier dependents to tackle the elements of composition. Each collaborator is soon dispatched, and by the end of the brief first chapter, he is left alone with the project, which has turned into a memoir (“I mean to tell my own story”).
What he produces, not unlike Augustine’s Confessions, is an attempt at contrition through self-excoriating divulgence, but each lovingly rendered and lingered-over detail of a life lived as a blackguard works to undermine his pious intention. Unlike the bishop, though, Senhor Paulo is not conducting a spiritual exercise. He does not seek or expect relief from above (“The truth is, I don’t worry much about the next world”), nor does he believe that anyone—particularly he himself—could learn from his experience: “What am I fooling myself for? If it were possible to start over, what would happen is exactly what happened. I haven’t managed to change, and this is what makes me feel the worst.” Rather, to put it in terms the miserly landowner would appreciate, his memoir is simply the settling of his accounts, putting it all back to zero.
There is another interesting irony that the creator of this unrepentant capitalist was imprisoned himself two years after the publication of this book for, it is rumored, his communist sympathies. With such knowledge, São Bernardo might be read as the dissection of a very specific enemy, the brutal landowning class in the state of Alagoas in the early decades of the twentieth century. In large part, that novel is there, and what a dissection it is. However, such a work would not warrant a new English translation almost ninety years after its publication. It could take its place in the annals of regional literature, and be forgotten. But the writing of a novel is a sustained act of empathy, and political affiliations aside, there is a reason why Ramos is still cited as one of the most important Brazilian writers of his time.
It all comes down to voice. Senhor Paulo’s is sui generis; earthy, profane, inscrutable, and articulate. It is a voice to match the hoary face and horny hands of this peasant who has used his wits and resolve to come up in the world. It is a voice, until the final chapters, gloriously free of guilt: “Since I always kept my goal in sight—owning São Bernardo—anything that got me there was right as far as I was concerned.” And when guilt does creep in and then overwhelm him, it is for good reason.
The argot of estate management animates the life of the master of São Bernardo. It is through his knowledge of agriculture, husbandry, and the village market that he assembles and sorts his world. After he properly introduces himself at the beginning of the third chapter, the next piece of information Senhor Paulo shares is his weight, as if he were one of his heifers up for auction. When he decides to return to his hometown after serving a prison term for stabbing a man, he “plants” himself there. He calls the men who work his farm “brutes” and “wretches.” He sums up life as “Eating and sleeping like a pig.” As for relationships: “Animals—those who’ve served me all my life are animals.” What he knows about marriage and reproduction, he says, comes from a domestication and breeding manual.
Value is the index by which all his relationships are measured. People are useful, or they are not. Sick employees are failing assets—better to discard them than to lose money trying to help (“They get sick and that’s it: advances on pay and on medicines, and there goes my profit”). When the beauty of the flora growing on his estate is praised, he says,
“I’m not cultivating all this for decoration. It’s to sell.”
“Even the flowers?” asked Azevedo Gondim.
“Everything. Flowers, vegetables, fruit . . .”
The ellipsis speaks loudly.
Marriage, from this viewpoint, is another act of acquisition; a “bargain,” an “agreement,” where love is incidental or even a hindrance to the arrangement. The woman Senhor Paulo settles on for his wife is a schoolteacher named Madalena, many years his junior. The best he can do in courting her is to wear her down with proposals, as if she were a merchant reluctant to make a deal. Upon hearing the news, her aunt and former guardian, Dona Glória, “started to cry.”
It does not get better from there. Senhor Paulo quickly recognizes that his new wife is superior to him in almost every way. And she is not content to be on display as some sort of angel of the Sertão. She refuses domestic tasks, advocates for the field hands, and, worst of all, seeks intellectual stimulation from the various hangers-on around the estate. It is this desire that Senhor Paulo cannot abide, which stokes a consuming jealousy in him. He feels acutely his inadequacy as her conversation partner. It is a clever play on the trope of the jealous husband that the primary field for infidelity here is intellectual, not so much sexual. In conjuring the possibility of something brewing between the feckless socialist Padilha and Madalena, Senhor Paulo’s first fear is not of physical consummation, but of their colluding to bring communism to the estate.
By this point in his life, Senhor Paulo has everything that he ever desired, and he can truthfully say that he has only himself to thank. But the frenzy that gripped his youth, as the years went by, never seems to have settled, and though his life on São Bernardo no longer resembles the one that required him to grasp with such ferocity, he finds he can never loosen his grip, soften his vigilance. They instead surface entwined as a possessive rage, directed full force upon his wife. Prolonged contact with her husband’s “rough soul” abrades Madalena’s spirit—leaving her near the end mute, listless, seeking solace in religion—and eventually turns her to dust.
Two years on, alone except for his servants and a son who is but a ghost in the narrative (his birth is revealed in an aside so tossed off it would be humorous were it not so callous), menaced vaguely by a distant revolution, Senhor Paulo closes his account of his life, puts down his heavy pen, and rests his head on the table. Darkness surrounds him. Until that moment no shadow had fallen upon the character of the master of São Bernardo.
Though there are elements of a social novel that creep around the margins of São Bernardo, this is a work composed for a single voice, a single way of seeing the world. Paulo Honório, irredeemable as he is, speaks for himself—unlike comparable American characters Jay Gatsby and Thomas Sutpen—and in so doing, puts the lie to the persistent twinned myths of the inherently civilizing effects of hard work and the noble character of the self-made man. Senhor Paulo is someone you would cross the street to avoid (lest he beat you with a bullwhip), but he is a mesmerizing guide to the museum of his folly.
Marshall Shord lives in Maryland. He is currently at work on a novel about the formation of the CIA.
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