BOCA DO INFERNO
Ana Miranda
Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
1989
Suppose we were to read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe not as an adventure story for children but as a historical novel. We might see that Crusoe's narrative has a fairly rigorous chronology, that the time Crusoe spends on his island in the Caribbean is, roughly, the time of the Restoration in England (1660-1680) and that the entire text (of Part I, the only one anybody reads) is a meditation on the "shipwreck" of the English (Whig) middle class under the Stuarts.
Thus the text is simultaneously realistic and allegorical, simultaneously an account of how a man might survive alone on a Caribbean island in the seventeenth century and a meditation on English political life in the latter part of the sane century. We might recall that Defoe, writing in Crusoe's voice, ironically defends himself (that is, Crusoe) from those who charge that his tale of shipwreck is a lie:
“I…do hereby declare their objection is an invention scandalous in design, and false in fact; and do affirm that the story, though allegorical, is also historical; that it is the beautiful representation of a life of unexampled misfortunes…intended for the common good of mankind….”
Crusoe's dream
Did it really happen or was it a fabrication? Or, assuming, for the sake of argument that there is some truth in the tale, does the retelling of any event inevitably turn that event into fiction, or, as Defoe calls it, allegory?
Recalling the facts in Crusoe's story, we might note that Crusoe lands in Bahia early in the 1650s ("We had a very good Voyage to the Brasils, and arriv'd in the Bay de todos los Santos, or All Saints Bay…") where he sets up as a sugar plantation owner. In 1659, on a slaving expedition, he experiences his famous shipwreck. If Crusoe had stayed in Bahia until 1683, he might have witnessed the action in Ana Miranda's brilliant new novel Boca do Inferno (Mouth of Hell), which, like Robison Crusoe, is both a historical novel and an allegory.
Boca do Inferno does not have as limited a cast of characters as Robinson Crusoe, and it is certainly not an allegory about the fortunes of a specific social class. Ana Miranda attempts here to define the historical reality of colonial Brazil in the seventeenth century, a period in history clouded by the mists of legend. She succeeds, but pays the price by making us wonder if seventeenth-century Bahia could actually have existed as she describes it or if it was nothing more that the dream of people like Defoe: Did it exist, or is it fiction?
What was Bahia in the seventeenth century? First, since 1549, it had been the capital of colonial Brazil and would remain so until 1763. Therefore, whatever culture there was in Brazil took place in Bahia. But there was precious little: there were no printing presses in Brazil until 1808, and the population of this so called capital would only reach seventy thousand inhabitants in 1800. In 1604, it was attacked by the Dutch, at war with Spain and eager to supplant the Portuguese, whose
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