Macho Days on the Cacao Frontier SHOWDOWN

By Stefan Kanfer

At the beginning of this Brazilian pageant, a colonel surprises his rivals in a violent encounter known thereafter as tocaia grande, the big ambush. It is an overriding metaphor, not only for events in Jorge Amado's novel but also for those outside it. There the ambushees are bookstores, critics and the public. The firepower comes from an arsenal of hype.

Bantam, Amado's new publisher, seems uncomfortably aware that its author is not a brand name. His 21 previous novels (among them Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) have been translated into 46 languages in 60 countries, but in North America he has never been able to break from the shadows of such Latin American celebrities as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Moreover, the portly mestre is 75 and unlikely to produce many more epics. The Amado boom has to be detonated now or not at all.

Accordingly, Bantam, which paid the unusually high price of $250,000 for the English-language rights to Showdown, has engineered an elaborate promotional campaign. It commissioned the "big-book look": a dust jacket with an original painting, featuring the author's name in print nearly as big as the title. Last month Amado and his wife were flown to New York City for interviews, receptions, book signings. Now a national advertising campaign is under way, complete with a mailing of 8,000 postcards to bookstore owners. Inscribed on each one is an encomium from Vargas Llosa: "Not only is Jorge Amado one of the greatest writers alive, he's also one of the most entertaining."

The merchandise Bantam is pushing is a romantic evocation of Brazil's cacao region circa 1900, when it was a lawless frontier powerfully reminiscent of the American West. The land surrounding the settlement of Tocaia Grande, as it becomes known, is peopled with archetypes: gunslingers and half-breeds, fortune hunters and wanderers, gypsies and whores. They are placed under the % authority of Captain Natario da Fonseca, a macho gunman with grand appetites for sex and violence. But then nearly everyone in the cast has a grand appetite for sex and violence. Surrounding Natario are men like Fadul Abdala, a gigantic Turk who talks to God in Arabic "since he wasn't sure that the Almighty knew Portuguese," and the black Castor, a former serf turned free spirit. Their loosely plotted exploits are augmented by a series of women identified principally by their breasts and buttocks. In the beginning, all is fornication, feasts and braggadocio. But the blessed time grows short, and soon the arena is visited by catastrophe. Flood and plague are followed by lurid murders; imperialism prevails, and the notion of honor is buried with the men who upheld it. In its ultimate tragedy, the city of Tocaia Grande is ambushed by history. "What happened afterward," says Amado with bitter irony, "progress, emancipation . . . the church, the bungalows, the villas, the vicar, the prosecutor, and the judge . . . isn't worth mentioning, holds no interest."

Throughout his picaresque, Amado displays an acute sense of place and a profound social conscience. These attributes have characterized his work since its beginnings in the early '30s, when the author, the son of a prosperous cacao plantation owner, broke from his family traditions and became a radical. But if his humane ideals are unchanged, so, alas, is his approach to fiction. Between the soft-core interludes and the bloody skirmishes, men grunt portentous lines ("Anything can be done this side of death") and women entice them with dialogue right out of a Dolores Del Rio movie: "If I lose my head, what will become of me later? Poor me, even in love I have to control myself."

The cacao people may be new to U.S. readers, but the language that describes them is not. Showdown's translator, Gregory Rabassa, who is also the premier translator of Latin American literature, has remarked that to convey Amado's original intent he had to find as many as a dozen synonyms for sexual organs. He was unable to enliven the rest of the author's narrative. Fadul finds that a prostitute "cost him a pretty penny"; a woman, "body and heart well- hardened . . . had the ways of a child, full of laughter and fantasy." It may be that these bromides exert the hoped-for appeal; after all, Westerns are not famous for fresh rhetoric. But it seems fair for consumers to receive accuracy in advertising. The awestruck promotion implies that Showdown is the work of a potential Nobel laureate. The book itself suggests Louis L'Amour with a Portuguese accent.