Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant, which literary scholars usually do not call a major novel in a grand tradition, is an important literary and historical document in the development of Brazilian culture. Since its first appearance in weekly installments in the Correio Mercantil newspaper over a period of a year beginning in June 1852, later published in two volumes in 1854–55, literary taxonomists have puzzled over which category fits a work that in many ways is a literary anomaly—the one major product of a brief but varied career of an author who was barely past adolescence when the work first appeared in print. In chronological terms it fits in the period of romantic literature, yet Memoirs shares few characteristics with that genre. It exhibits some traits of naturalism, but predates the emergence of that genre. It also shares some features associated with the picaresque novel of the Golden Age of Spanish literature, and is sometimes called a novel of manners, a loosely connected series of vignettes held together by the adventures and misfortunes of the two main characters, father and son, both named Leonardo. It seems likely that Almeida himself was little concerned with how his modest efforts would fare in cultural history as he produced this work in weekly bits and pieces, maintaining a familiar dialogue with the reader and telling the story in everyday language with a minimum of stylistic artifice and literary pretension, but rich in detail of life on the streets of Brazil’s capital city. It further seems likely that at the time the installments began to appear Almeida had not thought through the plot line, much less pondered the moral and ethical and many other implications that later analysts would read into his character sketches, satirical fun-poking, and the escapades of characters seemingly always close to the brink of some personal crisis or social misstep, yet who manage to pull through by hook or by crook.1 In this regard, the novel shares some features of the serial films of the mid-twentieth century, or the television situation comedies and serial novelas of more recent times.
However students of literature might decide to place it among styles and genres, Memoirs provides the historian with a window on a world that is difficult to reconstitute through the sorts of archival and documentary records normally available. Two aspects of the historical setting deserve some mention here. One might be called the institutional matrix in which the characters of the story are enmeshed in various ways, particularly the judicial and police systems. Related to that institutional environment is the social landscape of the city, particularly with regard to the free lower classes from which most characters are drawn. The political chronology of Brazil in this era is, of course, well known,2 and much has been recovered regarding the slaves of Rio de Janeiro in the period, a social category which barely figures in Memoirs.3 But the experience of the free lower classes, existing on the margins of the power hierarchy and occupying interstices of the social structure, is difficult to recover. We must assume that Manuel Antonio de Almeida, perceptively circulating in that environment from the time his father died in 1840, when the boy was nine years old, through his student days and beginnings of a career in journalism, was able to learn much about life and customs in the city in his own and in earlier times, a familiarity which he drew upon for the Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant.
The best known phrase of the novel is probably the very first: “It was back in the time of the king,” the period bracketed by the arrival of the Portuguese royal court in 1808 and the return of King João VI to Portugal in 1821, an era still in the living memory of the older generation of readers in the early 1850s. At the time the royal entourage arrived, having fled Lisbon to escape the advancing armies of Napoleon, João was still Prince Regent, ruling in the name of his mentally incapacitated mother, Queen Maria I. Only upon Maria’s death in 1816 did her son ascend the throne as King João VI, so “the time of the king” might be further narrowed to the period 1816–21. (This of course reminds us that the novel is a work of fiction, and the time period something of a literary abstraction, because the period its plot encompasses, from the birth of the second Leonardo through his young adulthood, is considerably longer than the 13 years the royal entourage spent in Brazil.) Much had happened in the political history of Brazil between “the time of the king” and Almeida’s adolescence in the 1840s. Briefly, late in 1815 João VI elevated Brazil to the formal status of co-kingdom with Portugal, and upon his return to Europe João left his son Pedro as Regent of Brazil. When the Portuguese parliament demanded that Pedro also return to Europe, the latter refused that order, and then on September 7, 1822, declared Brazilian independence from Portugal and was subsequently crowned Emperor Pedro I. Pedro decreed a constitution for the Brazilian Empire in 1824, based on the liberal Portuguese constitution of 1821, but Pedro I himself was pressured to abdicate the throne and return to Portugal in April 1831. There followed an unsettled regency, which ended in 1840 when the parliament prematurely declared Pedro’s Brazilian-born son, also named Pedro, to be of age to assume the imperial throne, which he occupied as Emperor Pedro II from 1840 to 1889.
For Almeida himself, born in 1831 and not yet 21 years of age when publication of Memoirs began, the time of João VI’s residence in Rio must have seemed remote. Despite continuity in the physical environment of Rio that Almeida’s readers would have found familiar, the institutional context and its operation had changed considerably in the intervening generation. In the process of independence and state formation from 1821 to 1840, most of the administrative structures of the colonial regime, including those installed by João VI in “the time of the king,” were replaced in Rio de Janeiro by new institutions based on liberal precepts and modern notions of bureaucratic efficiency. Thus by the time Almeida was approaching maturity, the office of meirinho (bailiff), so important in positioning Leonardo-Pataca in the social and political hierarchy of Rio, had been eliminated, as was the Guarda Real de Polícia, the informally styled “militia” in which the historical Major Vidigal, principal representative of the authority of the state in the streets of the city, had served from its founding in 1809 until his retirement in 1824. At this remove, in order to frame the institutional setting and the authority hierarchy in which the novel’s characters operate, it is appropriate to lay out the main features of the legal and police structures of “the time of the king.”
One of the institutions transferred from Portugal along with the royal family was the Intendancy of Police, instituted in Rio by royal de cree on 10 May 1808.4 This police intendancy was based on the French model of enlightened despotism, introduced into Portugal in 1760, with responsibility for a variety of urban services, in addition to personal and collective security. These responsibilities included public order, surveillance of the population, the investigation of crimes, and apprehension of criminals. In the tradition of royal absolutism, the intendant as the king’s agent had the power to decide what behavior was to be declared criminal, establish the punishment he thought appropriate, and then to arrest, prosecute, pass judgment, and supervise the sentence of individual perpetrators. In Brazil the intendant became part of a local judicial system that had been built up through the colonial era by the accumulation of edicts and decrees, and which in the colonial capital was supervised by the judges of the High Court of Appeals (the Relação), which in turn supervised a variety of lesser judges and judicial officers.5
One of the latter positions was that of meirinho (bailiff), the post held by Leonardo-Pataca, the satirical description of which opens the novel and frames subsequent action and relationships. The title, one of many linguistic traces of Moslem rule of medieval Iberia, derives from the same word as the Arabic emir (governor or commander), with the addition of the Portuguese diminutive -inho denoting the petty nature of the position. Another legacy of the old regime is that the meirinho of the time in which Memoirs is set was not a public employee in the modern, bureaucratic sense. Although he was formally an officer of the law, the meirinho was a private individual who had obtained, probably through personal connections or in return for some favor or in response to a petition, an appointment authorizing him to exercise the profession in question. Like most state officials in the late colonial and early independence era, he received no salary. In return for a fee for services rendered, meirinhos were called upon by magistrates or by private individuals or their agents to serve writs and citations and deliver legal papers, including orders of arrest in certain circumstances. Such bailiffs hung out on the street corner where the novel opens, to be available when called upon by lawyers or higher judicial authorities. Upon completing an assignment, they would be paid the fee that gave Leonardo-Pataca his nickname. They were not expected to have any legal training, and had no authority or responsibilities independent of the commissions they took on. In practice, despite the pretensions to status and authority to which Almeida alludes in opening the novel, the bailiffs of “the time of the king” were little more than officially sanctioned errand runners.
In one of many ironies and satirical thrusts of the novel, Leonardo-Pataca was professionally connected to the same judicial system in which served Major Vidigal, the ominous and omnipresent representative of state authority and nemesis of both Leonardo-Pataca and his son, who in the last pages of the novel enters the ranks of the corps commanded by the same Vidigal. Informal usage still referred to that body as the “Militia,” a popular holdover from the terminology of colonial times—the militia of the novel’s title. But by making Vidigal a principal character Almeida was fixing in the mind of the reading public and successive generations the popular image of a historical figure well known in “the time of the king,” whose career is well documented. The historical Vidigal was still remembered in the Rio de Janeiro in which Almeida grew up, and his legacy was ideal material for the tensions the author sets up between state authority and repression on the one hand, and the spontaneous exercise of popular will on the other. Since the publication of Memoirs, in fact, the historical Vidigal and the fictional character based explicitly on him have become intertwined. In view of the central role in the novel of the fictional major and the corps in which he served, a brief exploration of the historical Vidigal and the Guarda Real de Polícia helps flesh out the context with which Almeida and his readers were familiar.
Another innovation following the transfer of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil was the creation of a full-time police force, organized along military lines and given broad authority to maintain order and pursue criminals. This was the Guarda Real de Polícia, established in May 1809. Like the Intendancy of Police, to which it was subordinate, the Guarda Real replicated in Rio de Janeiro an institution already existing in Lisbon. Members of the Guarda Real became notorious as the ruthless agents of the Intendant of Police. Miguel Nunes Vidigal was the most famous among them, celebrated or reviled by contemporaries and later historians on both sides of these issues. Vidigal transferred to the new unit from the colonial militia, which he had entered as a cadet in 1770, and subsequently became the terror of the vagrants and idlers who might meet him coming around a corner or see him suddenly appear at a late-night social gathering. Without so much as pro forma deference to legal procedures, Vidigal and his soldiers, handpicked for their size and strength, proceeded to beat any participant, miscreant, or vagrant they could capture. These brutal attacks became known in the folklore of the city as “shrimp dinners” (ceias de camarão) recalling the flaying necessary to get at the pink flesh of those crustaceans. Instead of the usual military sword, the normal equipment of Vidigal and his grenadiers was a whip with a long heavy shaft tipped by rawhide strips, used as both club and lash. Following the beating viciously and indiscriminately administered at the time of arrest, slaves were returned to their owner’s custody or submitted to the intendant or his assistants, the criminal magistrates, for judgment of their offense. Nonslave detainees were kept in the short-term lock-up, the casa de guarda on the Palace square (now Praça XV de Novembro), from where some went to a longer term in the city jail, and others among the able-bodied were selected as conscripts for the army or navy. Some of the latter, as is eventually the situation of the title character of the novel, might find themselves serving in the corps under Vidigal’s command. Thus what to later readers might seem like an unlikely plot development, in view of the recurring antagonism between Vidigal and the other characters and Leonardo in particular, was in fact well within the realm of historical possibility.
The real Vidigal retired with honors in 1824, lived to a ripe old age, and died in Rio in 1843.6 By placing a figure based closely on the historical Vidigal in close relation to purely fictitious characters, Almeida provided readers with a sense of verisimilitude—because his fictional Vidigal was so much like the memory of the real one, the other characters seemed more realistic. At the same time, Almeida avoided any direct connection with existing people and institutions. Like the office of meirinho, the militia of the book’s title, the Guarda Real de Polícia, no longer existed at the time the novel began to appear in serial form. In 1831 the troops of the Guarda Real had mutinied and the corps was subsequently disbanded, replaced by a new uniformed police force called the Corpo Municipal de Permanentes. Thus Almeida’s satirical jabs at the judicial and police systems mentioned only offices and institutions no longer in official existence, even though popular memory of them persisted. Similarly, the identity of the author himself was left formally anonymous, not only in the first appearance as weekly installments but also in the subsequent publication in book form, when its author was designated as only “A Brazilian.” Not until the edition of 1863, two years after the untimely death of the author, at age 30 (in the shipwreck of a coastal steamer near Rio), was his name placed on the title page.
The Vidigal of history was delegated authority by the king, through the intendant, and personified the powerful presence of the legally constituted authority of the state. But as portrayed by Almeida, the notorious major Vidigal of the novel also operates in what might be termed the relational social universe central to Brazilian culture, in which individual members of society are in personal, hierarchical, dyadic relationships with every other member with whom they interact.7 The novelistic Vidigal exercises his considerable authority in personalistic and arbitrary ways, depending on the circumstances and individuals involved. Each person in the relational system brings to the arena of social contact their individual qualities, but also brings relative status based on economic and social standing, professional activity, gender, kinship both biological and fictive, age, race and ethnicity, nationality, and legal condition.
The latter characteristic refers to slave status versus free, and an aspect of Memoirs that touches modern sensibilities is that slaves and slavery are not so much ignored, as simply taken for granted. Despite the fact that more than 40 percent of the population of Rio de Janeiro was enslaved (both in the era of João VI and still at midcentury), and a large but indeterminate proportion of the free population were of some degree of African descent, neither slaves nor free people of color occupy significant positions in the cast of characters of this story of life on the city’s streets. The Afro-Brazilian presence in the novel can be summed up quickly: Unnamed house slaves are called upon to report gossip; Leonardo’s barber/godfather talks his way into a berth as a ship’s doctor on a slave ship to Africa; Bahianas, the street vendors so-called because of their association with the city of Salvador, Bahia, appear in a procession; and the street tough Chico-Juca, apparently a free man of color, is commissioned to start a fight at a social gathering. Even when Leonardo-Pataca seeks out a necromancer to win the affections of a Gypsy girl, the sorcerer is an aging caboclo (native Indian or mixed Indian/Portuguese), rather than a practitioner of Afro-Brazilian ritual. Although there are occasional hints at distinctions between native Brazilians and recent arrivals from Portugal, all other characters are apparently of Portuguese or Euro-Brazilian racial and ethnic stock. Gypsies, in fact, play a more central role than do Africans or Afro-Brazilians of whatever legal status. Despite their virtual absence in the novel, the role of slaves in Rio de Janeiro created a situation for the free lower classes that is significant for the social environment in which the plot develops. Most centrally, no one in the book works. Some characters hold positions of professional status such as policeman or bailiff, and others exercise such trades as barbering and midwifery, but no one engages in physical labor, much less productive activity.
Turning to the social types and relationships that are in the novel rather than what is absent, the action is focused on the ways the central characters make it through life by cultivating connections in the relational social universe, taking advantage where possible and making the best of the situation when no advantage is to be gained or a loss must be sustained. One develops a sense of the individual characters behaving like social atoms bouncing against one another, or that the characters play the game of life as if it were a game of cards, depending on an uncertain combination of the luck of the draw and the strategies of the play, doing the best one can with the hand one is dealt. Some of the players are stronger and some are weaker, based on professional status and derived authority, or on such personal qualities as bluster or reticence. Some have properties specific to females and others those of males. Some are young and naive, and others have the wisdom of experience and deference given to age. Some are simply more crafty and calculating than others. Their actions and interactions are based on perceived self-interest, however misinformed or miscalculated, or doomed to failure in the face of forces arrayed in opposition to them.
Moral and ethical considerations, concern for whose interests might be hurt even as others benefit, pangs of conscience, or issues of a deeper or higher nature are largely absent here. Points are scored in this game, in fact, for successfully damaging the interests of others, whether as revenge for real or perceived injury (as when Leonardo-Pataca seeks vengeance on the Gypsy girl and her new beau, who is also a priest), or as a way to demonstrate relative power (as when Vidigal doggedly pursues the young Leonardo until the latter becomes a protected subordinate in the militia under Vidigal’s own command). Even affairs of the heart are conducted in an atmosphere of self-interested calculation (as in the machinations of matchmaking older ladies, or Leonardo’s movement between Vidinha and Luisinha). As a final example, one of the more sympathetic actions in the novel is the barber’s kind persistence in providing a home and upbringing for his ungrateful and unregenerate godson. The same barber got his start in life when he took the wages of a physician by signing up on the crew of slave ship under false pretenses. And when the ship’s captain died under his care, the barber made a deathbed promise to deliver an inheritance to the captain’s daughter, but kept it for himself instead—who would be the wiser?
One of the best known of modern critical assessments of Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant is that of Antonio Cândido, one of Brazil’s renowned intellectual figures of the recent era, in a 1970 essay entitled “Dialética da malandragem,” or The Dialectic of Roguery.8 Cândido’s analysis is organized around the oppositional play between the forces of order and disorder, as displayed by the relative positions of the characters in the novel as the action develops. It is worthwhile in introducing the present edition to convey to the English-language audience some of Cândido’s general conclusions, as the insights of a perceptive Brazilian student of both society and literature. The character Vidigal is a prime representative of the world of order, yet his actions bring problems and pain to inhabitants of the world of disorder for little apparent reason and less permanent result. Leonardo the ne’er-do-well spends most of his young life in the world of disorder, even though his pranks and transgressions seem fairly harmless, and he ends up as the eponymous sergeant in Vidigal’s own militia, representing order. As Cândido explains such apparent flip-flops, “the special feature of the book is the absence of moral judgment, and in the acceptance of human nature ‘as is,’ a mixture of cynicism and bonhomie that shows the reader a certain equivalence between the universes of order and disorder, or what might more conventionally be called good and evil.” The world of Leonardo and Vidigal is “a universe without blame or guilt, and even without internally produced restraint on behavior, other than the exterior repression that is constantly present in the figure of Vidigal—who himself appears stripped of the authority symbolized by his uniform and rank when people visit his house and find him clad in pajamas.”9
Cândido characterizes the more general role of a work like Memoirs in the following terms:
One of the greatest endeavors of societies, through their organizational structures and the ideologies that serve to legitimize them, is to assume the objective existence and the real value of antithetical pairs, between which people must choose. These pairs include behavior that is permitted and forbidden, what is true and the false, moral and immoral, just and unjust, political left and right, and so forth. The more rigid a society is, the more clearly defined is each choice, and more narrow the options. In this situation there develop parallel accommodations of a causistic nature, which make hypocrisy a pillar of civilization. One of the great functions of satirical literature, of demystifying candor, and of psychological analysis is that they show, each in its own way, that the pairs are reversible, not fixed, and that beyond the realm of ideological rationalization the contradictions coexist in a curious twilight.10
Cândido thus takes issue with those who read this novel as a sort of documentary record of what life was like in Rio de Janeiro in “the time of the king.” He suggests instead that the work of Antonio de Almeida, despite the author’s modestly expressed intent and his relative youth and inexperience at the time the story was published, and beyond the problems of continuity, chronological possibility, and unlikely twists of plot, is “perhaps unique in Brazilian literature of the nineteenth century for not taking the point of view nor expressing the vision of the sociopolitical elite.” He suggests that “In the transparent clarity of this society without culpability, we can perceive the contours of a land without definitive and unresolvable problems, governed by an enchanting moral neutrality. In this land no one works, no one is needy, everything is taken care of.”11
Rather than realistically depicting life as it was, Manuel Antonio de Almeida put together a cast of characters who, by their narrow and superficial approach to their interaction with others, made a subtle and incisive comment on Brazilian society and culture of the nineteenth century. With its demystifying candor, Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant rightfully occupies an important position in the satirical literature of Brazil and the world.
—Thomas H. Holloway
1. The first installment, published on 27 June 1852, included a few lines of introduction suggesting that the story would be a little long, because it begins in the time of the king, and goes to the present day. At its conclusion the historical moment has been, in effect, suspended still in the time of the king, and the same major Vidigal (of whom more below) who roamed the streets in the opening chapter still occupies the same position of authority.
2. For detailed accounts see Neill Macaulay, Dom Pedro: The Struggle for Liberty in Brazil and Portugal, 1798–1834 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986); and Roderick Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798–1852 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988).
3. See especially Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).
4. For more on these institutions, their legal bases, and ideological origins, see Thomas H. Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a Nineteenth-Century City (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 28–38 and passim.
5. For an overview of Brazil’s judicial system on the eve of independence, see Thomas Flory, Judge and Jury in Imperial Brazil, 1808–1871 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 31–43.
6. José Viera Fazenda, “Vidigal,” in Antiqualhas e memorias do Rio de Janeiro, 5 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Nacional, 1923–28), 4:87–90; J.C. Fernandes Pinheiro, “Paulo Fernandes e a polícia de seu tempo,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 39 (1876), pp. 65–76; and Mello Barreto Filho and Hermeto Lima, História da Polícia do Rio de Janeiro, 3 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: A Noite, 1939–43), 1:202–208.
7. Roberto da Matta treats this theme in “The Quest for Citizenship in a Relational Universe” in John Wirth, Edson de Oliveira Nunes, and Thomas Bogenschild, eds., State and Society in Brazil (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 307–335; and in Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1991), especially in the essay ‘Do You Know Who You’re Talking To?’ The Distinction between Individual and Person in Brazil,” pp. 137–197.
8. Antonio Cândido, “Dialética da malandragem” in Cecilia Lara, ed., Memórias de um sargento de milícias: Edição crítica (Rio de Janeiro: Livros Técnicos e Científicos, 1978). Cândido’s influential essay was originally published in Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, 8 (1970), pp. 67–89. In turn, it has led to further examinations of the theme, including Roberto Schwarz, “Pressupostos, salvo engano, de ‘Dialética da malandragem,’ “ in Celso Lafer, ed., Esboço de figura (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1979), reprinted in Roberto Schwarz, Que horassão? (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987), pp. 129–155; and Roberto Goto, Malandragem revisitada: Uma leitura ideológica de “Dialética da malandragem” (Campinas: Pontes, 1988).
9. Cândido, “Dialética,” pp. 322, 337.
10. Ibid., p. 338
11. Ibid., pp. 341, 342.