Inventing a Lusotropical Father, or, the Neurotic Legacy in Germano Almeida's "O Testamento

do Senhor Napumoceno"
Author(s): Phillip Rothwell
Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 38, No. 1, Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian
Literatures (Spring, 2007), pp. 95-105
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4618356
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Inventing a Lusotropical Father, or, The
Neurotic Legacy in Germano Almeida's
0 Testamento
do SenhorNapumoceno
PHILLIP ROTHWELL
Rutgers University

usophone genealogies always trace back, either confrontationally or in

acquiescence, to the discourse of the lusotropical. When turning our focus
to the relationship between Cape Verde and Portugal, the controversial
theories of the Brazilian sociologist, and their even more controversial and impe-
rially haunted application, stumbles across troubled ground. The archipelago
nation should have been the perfect graft, endorsing Gilberto Freyre's lusotropical
apologetics. However, the sociologist saw fit to deny Cape Verde the same mythical
status as his edenic Brazilian cultural melting pot, precisely because of a lapse in
his Boasian training that allowed him to confuse race and culture, and effectively
to lament the lack of whiteness on the islands.' Nowhere in the Portuguese empire
was Gilberto Freyre's theory of the lusotropical more heartily revered than within
the cadres of Cape Verde's Claridoso generation.2 Yet those same Claridosos would
express regret at Freyre's failure to see that the society they imagined Cape Verde
to be was the natural and obvious embodiment of a theory he had initiated in
Brazil of the 1930s as a means of valorizing mulattos treated with contempt by
society at large.
By the time Freyre visited Cape Verde in the 1950s, he was already compro-
mised by the Salazar regime that appropriated a theory it initially disliked. The
basic premises of lusotropicalism were that the Portuguese colonized in a manner
distinct from other imperial practice because they had the historical consciousness
and phylogenetics of mixed blood due to the Moorish occupation of the Iberian
Peninsula. As a result, their adventures overseas where ones of discovery and love,
a special kind of love whereby the Portuguese male fell for the woman of color and
together they procreated a new strand of humanity: the race of the future.
Cliudia Castelo has documented the extent to which the Portuguese New
State's appropriation of lusotropicalism omitted aspects that did not serve its
imperial apologetics in its diplomatic buttress against growing international
pressure to decolonize following the Second World War.3Miguel Vale de Almeida,
for his part, has demonstrated clearly both the rupture in dominant political and
academic discourse that the adoption of lusotropical superficialities for expedi-
ency represented-the Portuguese semantic correlation between monstrosity and

X RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring2007).? 2007 •

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96 RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

hybridity was recodified as the Portuguese gift to the future-and the postcolo-
nial inheritance of a propaganda that so penetrated the Portuguese psyche that
traits of it continue to surface in the thinking explaining sociological patterns in
contemporary Portugal.4
Like many before me, not least, or rather the least of whom was the Salazar
regime, I intend to appropriate Freyre in this article, or his terminology, to ana-
lyze the role and inheritance (both as recipient and donor) of what I will term the
lusotropical father, particularly as he manifests himself in the Cape Verdean writer,
Germano Almeida's 1989 novel, O Testamentodo Sr Napumoceno.5The lusotropi-
cal father is a phenomenon that arises in certain nineteenth-century Portuguese
literature, particularly by Romantics like Camilo and Gomes de Amorim, who
show the obverse of what Freyre saw as Portugal's gift to a new universal world
culture. Those potential fathers who sailed away on voyages of discovery had the
unfortunate effect of evacuating the imperial center, in a maneuver which in the
nineteenth century always echoed the displacement of the imperial court to the
Brazilian periphery. The lusotropical father gives children to other nations, and
is felt as an absence in the land of his birth. If he returns to Portugal, it is a Portu-
gal he no longer knows, and that has celebrated him as an absence. He becomes
part of a spectral and bogus justification, whose aim is to conceal an accelerating
decadence in a has-been center.
In Germano Almeida's novel, the specter of an absent father who returns
to make his presence felt as a recreation of his posthumously acknowledged
daughter, haunts what David Brookshaw has signaled as one of Cape Verde's
first postmodern texts (Brookshaw 189). Several critics have made the comparison
between Brazil's Machado de Assis and Germano Almeida (e.g., Moser; Gandara).
Both authors' subtle game with a voice from beyond the grave that accentuates
the metaphor of writing as an attempted means of defeating mortality, parallel
to paternity, marked new metafictional territory in the narratives of their nations.
Almeida, born in 1945 on the Boa Vista Island in the archipelago, served in the
Portuguese colonial army in Angola in the 1960s before studying in Lisbon and
returning to practice law in his newly independent homeland. He helped to found
the journal Ponto e Virgula, which while not defining itself as an opposition to the
one-party state, encouraged diverse opinions and became an important cultural
bridge between the monolithic adherence to the unifying cause of independence
from Portugal and the attainment of a pluralistic political system in an indepen-
dent Cape Verde.6The idea of the book, which he claims to have written in a week,
came to him when he was called to read a rather idiosyncratic will, in which a
father used the medium to complain about his life and family (Lopes Guerreiro 41).
The subsequent film, directed by Francisco Manso and starring a host of Brazilian
actors, is described by Russell Hamilton as panlusophonic because of the diverse
lusophone provenance of those involved with its production (Hamilton 316). It
made several profound alterations to the narrative, the most obvious of which
was the replacement of tape recordings for the exercise books which are one of the
sources of Graqa'sinformation about her newly discovered and recently deceased
father.7 The effect is to reduce the potency of the written. In the original text, the
written had the ability to exhaust the spoken voice, as we witness in the opening
chapter, when the reading aloud of Napumoceno's will, one of its stipulations
despite its tome-size length, has to be shared out among three people.

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 PHILLIP ROTHWELL 97

Writing exerts a primacy throughout the discoveries made by Graqa, Napu-

moceno's daughter, in regard to her father. From the will itself, to her father's
notebooks, to the piece of paper discovered by Napumoceno's housekeeper Dona
Eduarda with the name Addlia written and then punctured as if in a desperate act
of scriptural expiation, the written word is allied with the creation of this Cape
Verdean father's identity. Paternity and writing become fused, and this particular
paternal script, initiated at the moment of Napumoceno's self-declared effected
death in 1974, a whole ten years prior to his physical demise, is haunted by a Por-
tugal of old. In other words, the moment Napumoceno chooses to retire from the
world, and to begin the process of writing that will trigger his posthumous recre-
ation and the prolongation of his being, is a deliberately placed moment at the junc-
ture of a revolution that will end the dream of lusophone empire if not the practice
of dreaming a lusophone empire. For Cape Verde, this moment marks the rise of
the PAIGC, the unstable and paternalistic monolith that claimed independence for
Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and which Germano Almeida opposed, leading
to Napumoceno's ironic comment about the same faces that had cried in favor of
Salazar's National Union one day, shouting in favor of its nationalist opponent
and inheritor of a paternalistic brand of one-party statehood the next.8
Like many former colonies, Cape Verde inherited not only traits of the politi-
cal praxis of its former metropolis, but also an enormous cultural legacy. Inflected
in Germano Almeida's tale are both Camaes and Almeida Garrett. Behind Napu-
moceno's imagination of Adelia, and his productive liaison with Graqa'smother, is
the paradox of Cam6es's Barbara and the amorous alchemy of Os Lusfadas,which
always attempts to overwrite a discourse of empire within Platonic parameters
of self-realization through the sublimative desire for another. So it is no accident
that the archetype woman that Napumoceno recalls from his youth is the witch,
Barbara, murdered by the mob for supposedly eating the flesh of Cape Verdean
children, as ugly and toothless as the Adilia Graga later discovers who may or may
not be the woman Napumoceno created in his notebooks.
Napumoceno fuses the two key aspects of the lusophone imperial experi-
ence: he is both a man with trade and exchange in his genes-a gift he transfers
to Graa--capable of reducing everything to the quantifiable yet valueless flow
of a market, and a man who aspires to the ideal of a love so perfect that it has no
face. Indeed, Napumoceno can never remember what Adelia looks like, and does
not recognize her in photographs.
So many of the things we learn about Napumoceno point to the archetypal
mindset of a one-dimensional trader, who wants to reduce everything to exchange
value as a "comerciante de importadio e exportaqdo" (15) / "import and export
merchant" (5).The minutiae of his will that quantifies his every possession testifies
to the reduction of everything in his life to an object he owns and defines through
exchange with no value in itself, only in its ability to be bought cheaply and sold
on at a profit. That was the brutal reality behind the impetus to empire and the
propulsion behind the sea routes to India: a logic that spiraled from a wish to attain
spice for less into the reduction of human flesh into a marketable and quantifi-
able object of exchange. However, and the Napumoceno of the notebooks points
strongly to this other aspect, there was a desire, in the culture and then political
dimension of the imperial process, or at least in many of its academic interpreta-
tions, for that exchange to be one of knowledge and self-realization. That special

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98 A RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

love the Portuguese man can feel for a woman of color in Freyre's economy of
desire is a way the male comes to know himself: a phylogenetic essence that, once
the Jewish Other was expelled from Portugal proper, required a voyage into the
unknown.
Napumoceno will take that voyage, at two key stages in the text. The first,
a la Garrett, is an island hop that lands him with nothing but ambition in Sao
Vicente after a childhood in Sao Nicolau. The second, a la inverse Cam6es, is an
east-to-west trajectory and back again, when he voyages to the rapidly rising new
imperial center of the epoch in which he lives and back to his periphery. His visit
to America changes his life: in the words of Carlos, his disinherited nephew "sem
dtivida houvera dois Napumocenos: um d'aquem-America e outro d'alem-America"
(77) / "without a doubt there were two Napumocenos: the one before America and
the one after" (71).
The Garrettian journey is one of idealism versus materialism. In it, the quix-
otic recreation of a hag into Dulcinea constantly interacts with the self-interest of
a Sancho who wants exchange value to be created with the least effort possible.
Through it, the profoundest form of self-discovery is available within the bound-
aries of your own homeland. Yet, what you may discover is that your imagined
ideal-in Napumoceno's case, his Adelia who could lift the baseness of his self-
interest to a higher plane-is little more than the constantly inflected ghost of
a faceless Barbara you once knew and transformed into a shifting template of
memory.
In Napumoceno's national journey, Almeida plays with the erased differences
of the archipelago. Sao Nicolau is most famous for its seminary, the only secondary
educational establishment on the islands prior to 1917. Sao Vicente, in the words
of the recently arrived Napumoceno, was to the mind of the seminary-influenced
Sao Nicolau, the Sodom and Gomorrah of Cape Verde: a land of temptation and
discovery. Napumoceno's departure from Sao Nicolau to the more cosmopolitan
and exchange-minded locale of Mindelo is a switch away from the quintessence
of rural religious Portugal in the Tropics to the more audacious, frontier and mind-
opening location that would become his "terra madrasta" (16) / "adopted land" (6),
a telluric maternity already to one degree removed.
There, Napumoceno dreams of exporting his products to the Portuguese
colonies of Africa, in a maneuver that would yet again dislocate the primacy of
the metropolis to a lusotropical paradise, where economic mediation is yielded
to the periphery and dooms the primacy of the center's self-interest, making the
underlying rationale for empire cease to make sense. Sao Vicente is, according
to Napumoceno's thesis, an "ilha de povoamento recente, feito com recurso aos
naturais das outras ilhas que a seca, a falta de trabalho e outras miserias forqaram
a migraqdo" (131) / "recently populated island, made up of the natives of other
islands whom drought, unemployment and other miseries have forced to emigrate"
(128). Its inhabitants "para sobreviver, sAo obrigadas a miscigenar diferentes cul-
turas regionais com o consequente prejufzo de nenhuma delas ser suficientemente
majoritairia para se impor" (131) / "in order to survive, they are obliged to mix
with different regional cultures and the result is that no one group has enough
of a majority to dominate" (128): a microcosm of the lusotropical world. In that
miscegenating order, Napumoceno will conceive a daughter he only posthumously

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 PHILLIPROTHWELL 99

avows, in a rape constantly grounded in commercial transaction (quite literally so

as the table on which Graga is conceived is Napumoceno's office desk), and then
rewritten as a union that provoked desire and led to self-discovery.
Napumoceno's youth is filled with a search for exchange value. As he ages,
he seeks an ideal, and the written record he leaves for his daughter conceived on
top of that office desk is the trigger attempting to elevate the perception of his
self-interest of constant flows into a record of a man's search for an Other who
could fill his life with meaning and self-knowledge. The written records redefin-
ing Napumoceno thus inflect the cultural and cleansing mechanism of a sullied,
self-interested colonialism.
The manner in which Napumoceno becomes a father and exercises his dis-
tanced fatherhood is worthy of consideration for it reveals the ambiguity between
ideal and materialism that haunts back to one of the primary flaws in lusotropical
apologetics. We learn at various points in the novel of Napumoceno's decision
to acquire a family, as if a wife and children were chattel, to be possessed. Yet
he will never have a family precisely because possessions get in the way. He
views his adopted son and nephew in purely transactional terms as someone in
whom he has invested money and from whom he expects a return. He can only
be disappointed. Business and material commitments repeatedly get in the way
of continued realizations of love affairs that may develop into something more
permanent. Indeed, his letter to J6ia explaining his feelings for her transforms into
a request for her to vote for him in the forthcoming election, and in his quest for a
family somehow "outras tarefas o ocupavam" (90) / "he was occupied with other
matters" (84). Against this backdrop, lusotropical paternity provides the perfect
outlet-combining a materialism and idealism cloaked through an absence.
The rape characterizing Graqa's conception with the series of markers that
point back to possession and Portugal is subsequently rewritten in terms of
mutual desire, before being reduced to a simple question of financial transactions
between a used employee and her former boss. As we learn, "a grande fraqueza
de toda a vida do sr. Napumoceno tinha sido o Sporting Club de Portugal e por
arrastamento qualquer outra equipe que usasse a cor verde" (63-64) / "the great
weakness of Sr. Napumoceno's life had been Portugal's Sporting Club soccer team,
and by extension any other club that wore the color green" (56). His weakness
transforms into a fetish for Mari Chica's green skirt, which points to a club that
points back to the metropolis. Napumoceno's desire is aroused not for the tropical
beauty who cleans his office. Rather, the color of her clothing stimulates him, as
he hauls her onto his office table "o finico exemplar do estilo Lufs XV existente
em Sdo Vicente" (65) / "the only example of Louis XV furniture in S. Vicente"
(58), rapes her and then begs for her forgiveness. In this lusotropical union, it is
not the color of the skin but the color of the skirt that triggers the male's desire.
Chica is moved by his tears, and feels pity for the impotence of the man against
whom she has struggled. He, for his part, associates Sporting's victory, the week-
end following the rape, with her skirt and his desire, quickly seeking to reduce
the whole episode to a financial transaction by offering Chica 500 escudos "para
festejar a vit6ria de Sporting" (72) / "to celebrate Sporting's victory" (65), an offer
she refuses on the grounds that she is not a prostitute. The initial rape is then fol-
lowed by a series of sex acts that always take place on the office table-the empty

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100 AN RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

center of his universe-and are triggered by Chica's use of the green skirt, until
she becomes pregnant and leaves the Araiijo firm, but receives an allowance from
her boss-come-rapist-come-lover-come-keeper.
The importance of the initial rape episode to the narrative is that it is essential
to the creation of Graqa. Napumoceno and Chica come from two different worlds.
Napumoceno is born to poverty, but like the empire's center he mimics within his
Cape Verdean reality, he will achieve a hollow greatness by facilitating transaction.
Chica occupies a position of subalternity, rigorously enforced by her boss who
insists that she address him as Sr Araijo. His desire for her is a displaced desire
that focuses on something that leads him back to his own heritage and metropolis.
By forcing himself on her, he reminds us of the violence of the lusotropical dream.
It is not one of transformative love but of concealed rape that may lead to some-
thing beautiful but can never fully erase, however much the sophistry of alchemic
love is deployed, the initial violence that reveals, as it does in Napumoceno, an
abject impotence and inability to be a father within the nation.
Napumoceno's Garrettian trip across to another island, the Sodom and
Gomorrah he will attempt to distill into his "Ilha de Amor" (Island of Love), is not
enough to gain the self-knowledge and ideal the maturing Napumoceno so craves.
His voyage must thus take him further into the unknown, and so he reroutes
Cam6es's epic from Sao Vicente to America, the India of his day, where innovation
and an interaction with the unknown will, he hopes, bring a self-knowledge to
fill the void that his world of transactions necessarily produces in him. America,
homeland of his hero Lincoln, promises values that will give him meaning. Like
Brazil's relation to Portugal in the nineteenth century, America of the twentieth
century served to evacuate Cape Verde's best, driven to emigrate through poverty
and climate and the promise of a better life in the New World. Indeed, Napu-
moceno laments the loss of Cape Verde's mothers and future wives to the New
World: "NAo deixo porem de pensar ser uma pena que a distante America teime
em roubar-nos excelentes esposas e futuras mAes" (62) / "I cannot stop thinking
what a pity it is that faraway America insists on robbing us of excellent wives and
future mothers" (54). His comments are a spatial- and gender-refracted echo of the
nineteenth-century lament of metropolitan women left behind by future husbands
and fathers drawn to better prospects in Brazil. Napumoceno loses J6ia to America,
a woman he did not know he wanted until he safely knew he could not have her.
America changes Napumoceno. It imbues him with neuroses, and then leads
him to a reflection over the nature of the world's materialism. His notion of time
and space is profoundly altered by his voyage to the New World, which repre-
sents the sublimation of the Garrettian voyage he began when he turned up in
Sao Vicente "de pe descalho" and with "uma enorme mala americana, mas quase
vazia" (84) / "a barefoot boy" and with "a huge, almost empty suitcase" (77) into
an anti-Camoenian epic. The emptiness of that suitcase is subsequently replaced
by the consumer goods he brings back to Cape Verde from America as a testament
to his status and his ability to consume. His summary of the disposable nature
of American products-"um carro na America tem uma vida 6itil de dois anos e
conservi-lo mais tempo e deitar dinheiro fora" (77-78) / "in America a car has a
shelf life of two years and to keep it longer is to throw money away" (71)-and
the transient nature of the nation's use for things-"na America, pafs maravilhoso
onde nada 6eterno, o que nio serve 6logo substituido por outra coisa mais vMlida"

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 PHILLIP ROTHWELL 101

(136) / "in America, a marvelous land where nothing is eternal, where what's no
good is immediately replaced with something better" (133)-is a perfect synopsis
of an economy that replaces completely use value with exchange value. Despite
his admiration for that ideological perfection of what he has made his profession,
according to his disgruntled nephew Carlos, Napumoceno "nunca deixou de ser
um pobre homem de Sdo Nicolau" (78) / "never stopped being a poor boy from
S. Nicolau" (71). There is always a trace of his humble beginnings and a question
mark over what he really made of his life.
The greatest symbol of neurosis he acquires from America is the answer-
phone: it becomes the shallow focus of his existence. If we define a neurosis as
looking for meaning where there is none, the answer-phone, for the short period
of its primacy in Western societies prior to the introduction and proliferation of
the mobile phone, embodied the alienating paradigm of late capitalism precisely
because it triggered the search for meaning where there was none. It made its
owner want to be there and not there. It enslaved its owner in a false need that
skewed both time and space. On returning home or to the office in which it was
installed, the answer-phone created an expectation and desire in the owner, to
know if he or she had been contacted in absence. Then, there were a series of trivial
dilemmas related to decisions about what to do with the yet-to-be-answered calls
or, worse still, an intense sense of loneliness and disappointment when no one
had called during the owner's absence. The answer-phone added another layer of
distancing and alienation between its owner and the rest of humanity. At the same
time, it acquired a sacred status in every household in which it resided, with the
ability to determine moods or trigger fretting: incomplete messages or bad con-
nections created a series of empty searches for meaning, as did the anticipation of
finding out why someone called to leave a message.
This last neurosis is the one that becomes most salient in Napumoceno's
interaction with his answer-phone. It is his answer-phone that leads him to dis-
inherit Carlos because of the abusive message his closest acknowledged relative
(prior to his death) leaves for him one day. Napumoceno had arrived in his office
and, as his first action of the day, "ligou o gravador a saber de eventuais men-
sagens que pudessem ter-lhe deixado" (118) / "turned the answering machine
on to see what messages might have been left him" (113). It is a habitual action
that on this particular day leads to him listening to a message that reduces him
to a "ze-ninguem" (118) / "nobody" (114). That status as a nobody is not the self-
anointed realization of Garrett's "Ninguem"-one of the most infamous theatrical
characters from the nineteenth-century play Frei Luis de Sousa-but it points to the
same vacuousness in a "want-to-be" imperial center. The answer-phone message
interrupts Napumoceno's imagination of his own biography-as a "self-made man"
who created a trading empire capable of liberating "o homem da escuriddo e da
miseria" (118) / "man from darkness and misery" (114). It reveals the tyrannical
side of an impotence felt by both those whom he oppresses (the nephew who does
not have the courage to say what everyone thinks of Napumoceno to his face) and
Napumoceno himself, whose reaction is one of passive acquiescence to the search
for empty meaning embodied in the answer-phone. Despite the offensive tone of
the message, the answer-phone exercises its power over Napumoceno. It forces
him to listen to the whole message "do principio ao fim, muito mais por nio sentir
com forgas para desligar o gravador do que por vontade de o ouvir" (119) [from

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102 A RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

beginning to end, as much from the feeling he didn't have the strength to unplug
the machine as from wanting to hear it (114)].The message renders Napumoceno
speechless. It also creates a mystery as to who had left the message and, in keeping
with the temporally deferring nature of the answer-phone itself, it takes Napumo-
ceno several minutes to work out the obvious. Only Carlos knows of the existence
of the answer-phone, and only Carlos ever leaves messages on it. Add to this, the
mispronunciation of Sao Nicolau characteristic of both Carlos and the message
left for Napumoceno, and Carlos's strange behavior on the day of the message,
and the resultant mystery, which is only a mystery because of the answer-phone's
intervention on the concept of time and space, delaying Napumoceno's realiza-
tion of the obvious, is solved. Napumoceno's reaction is answer-phone-like, and
structures Almeida's novel. For one of the primary narrative threads in the book
is the search to discover why Carlos was disinherited by his uncle. Napumoceno's
delay in punishing his nephew until after his death parallels the delay in the
reader's realization as to why Carlos has been punished. They compliment the
book's postmodern strategy of deferring meaning.
The other narrative thread based on mystery and deferred answers is the
search for Adelia: another possible lose end that embodies Napumoceno's search
for meaning where there is none. Napumoceno's legacy to Adelia is a copy of
Ant6nio Nobre's book of poems, S6. Nobre was born in the north of Portugal
in 1867 and was noted for the autobiographical bent with which he infused his
poetry. His family had a wealth created by the archetype lusotropical father, Jose
Pereira Nobre, who had made his fortune over twenty years in the New World.
Ant6nio Nobre would later dedicate the first poem in S6 to his father. The book
was first published in Paris, where Nobre resided, and where he secluded himself
for the better part of a year writing the poems that would become the collection.
According to Maria Ema Tarracha Ferreira, "a aspiraqdo ao casamento e a ser pai,
apesar de tio insistentemente referida na correspondencia, parece nio ir alum de
um desejo ut6pico" 'the aspiration to marry and be a father, despite its repeated
occurrence in his correspondence, does not seem to go beyond a utopian desire'
(Tarracha Ferreira 23). Nobre's utopian dream of fatherhood parallels a recurring
theme of death in his poetry. Like Napumoceno, the only way to achieve perpetu-
ity for the poet seems to be to write. Yet, also like Napumoceno, the writing process
is less one of solace and more one of solitude for the imagination cannot overcome
a self-imposed isolation and societal alienation. By leaving Adelia a text, once
described as "o livro mais triste que haiem Portugal" 'the saddest book there is in
Portugal' (Tarracha Ferreira 72, and including a poem entitled "Viagens na minha
terra" (Travels in My Homeland), Napumoceno points to the lonely conclusion of
his own Garrettian journey across the archipelago and almost into oblivion. Only
the literary creations he leaves behind for his daughter to enact keep him alive
beyond the grave.
In that enactment by a daughter in search of a father she never needed but
comes to desire as her own act of creation, Camoenian shadows of a Barbara
become refracted in Adelia, who in turn becomes the embodiment of all women on
whom Napumoceno lays his eyes. His "medo pavoroso de se ver impotente diante
de uma mulher" (98) / "morbid fear of being impotent with a woman" (93)-his
reluctance to touch Addlia-transforms the woman of his fantastic desire into a
woman he can control by creating her through a text in a manner that replicates

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 PHILLIP ROTHWELL 103

Cam6es's textual control over his slave Barbara. The toothlessness of the Barbara
from Napumoceno's youth resonates in the ugliness of "uma moqa que nem sequer
era bonita" (144) / "a girl who wasn't even pretty" (141),and becomes the sublime
Adelia of his dreams, including the last dream of his life. Like the function of the
carnalized beauty fashioned in Cam6es's poetry to permit an attempted recon-
ciliation of opposites, Addlia embodies the attempted reconciliation of the two
divergent aspects of the Portuguese colonial legacy. For Napumoceno thinks he
owns Adelia after sleeping with her-"jai sentia dono e senhor daquele corpo, pro-
prietario daquela carne" (99) / "he already felt like lord and master of her body, the
proprietor of the flesh (93)"-that she becomes another one of his transactionable
items. At the same time, she represents a union capable of lifting his moral value,
the Platonic means through which his worth is sublimated. She is both material
and ideal, yet she may not even exist at all.
Adelia holds the key to Graqa's understanding of her father: "era a pessoa
indicada para a esclarecer sobre quem realmente fora o homem que a fizera sobre
uma mesa de trabalho" (109-10) / "Adelia was the person who could shed light
on just who that man really was who had sired her on an office desk" (105). This
fascinating conclusion reached by Graqa dislocates the lusotropical reality of her
raped mother onto the lusotropical fantasy created in and through Adelia. Her
mother was on the same table where she was conceived; yet knowledge of her
father will be through his literary creation and sanitized beauty, Adelia. Even her
own knowledge of the man she mistook for a pervert because of his harassment
of her outside her school on her birthday is suppressed in favor of his literary
idealization of himself. Her conclusion that Napumoceno was a "velho desonesto
que pensa que pode comprar toda a gente com dinheiro" (130) / "dishonest man
who thinks he can buy everyone with his money" (127), a "velho porco" (130) /
"dirty old man "(127)],cedes to assisting in the creation of a more idealized image
of her father by resituating the times his notebooks were written "com o exclu-
sivo objectivo de justificar o pai, pensar que ter ele escrito o que sonhara e nao o
que acontecera na realidade" (109) / "with the sole aim of justifying her father, of
believing that he had written what he'd dreamed, not what had really happened"
(104). The cruelty of his apparent treatment of Adelia must, in Graqa's reading
of her father, be restricted to the realm of fantasy. She only wants to inherit the
lusotropical ideal: the man who knows how to love a woman in the Tropics; not
the man that throws the real Addlia he has away for fear of an inflected Barbara
and because he, like the reality of the imperialism he mimics, has reduced her to
a mere possession.

NOTES
1. Miguel Vale de Almeida describes the disappointment and recrimination from
the Claridosos following Freyre's all-expenses-paid visit to the islands which was
sponsored by the Salazar regime in his Outros Destinos 266-68.
2. The Claridosos were a Cape Verdean intellectual circle involved in the produc-
tion of the journal Claridade.According to Ellen Sapega, "the review's founders were
among the first to investigate the specificity of Cape Verdean experience" (159).Interest-
ingly, one of the criticisms of the Claridosos was that they placed too much emphasis
on the "European origins of the Creole culture and language that they wished to pro-
mote" (160).Sapega highlights the influence Freyre's theory had on them in the 1930s

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104 RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

(167).It is easy to imagine their disappointment when the originator of a theory they
deemed to be most applicable to their archipelago dismissed their claims to emulate
the lusotropical experience of Brazil, among other reasons for lack of "stocks europeus"
on the islands (see Silvestre 87).
3. In particular, Castelo carefully demonstrates how, while a simplified version of
lusotropicalism infected a variety of levels of Portuguese academic life and political
discourse, key aspects of Freyre's thesis, especially "os seus aspectos 'desnacionaliza-
dores,"' were deliberately elided by Salazar and his propaganda machine, (139).
4. See particularly Miguel Vale de Almeida's third, fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters
in his groundbreaking Um Mar Corda Terra.
5. Maria Manuela Lopes Guerreiro dates the first publication a year earlier, in
1988. Its title was the longer O Testamentodo Sr Napomucenoda SilvaAraijjo.Subsequent
publications copyright the work in 1989.The first edition was by Editora Ilheu, in part
owned by Germano Almeida (Lopes Guerreiro36). Lisbon-based Caminho republished
the work in 1991 and Sdo Paulo's Campanhia das Letras published a Brazilian edition
in 1996, shortening the title to the one used in this article, which reflects a shortening
in the title for the film version of the book. References in this article are taken from
the 1996 Brazilian edition. A translation by Sheila Faria Glaser entitled The Last Will
and Testamentof Senhorda SilvaAraujowas published by New Directions Books in 2004.
Translations of quotations in this article appear in square brackets and are taken from
Faria Glaser's edition.
6. For more on the formation and effects of Pontoe Virgulasee Laban 609-691.
7. One of the most interesting changes made in the film is the racial codification
of the relationship between Graqa'smother and Napumoceno. He becomes decidedly
white and she decidedly black. Also, Napumoceno is given mannerisms that mimic
those of Salazar, particularly when delivering political speeches.
8. Almeida became a member of parliament for the MpD (Movimento pela Democ-
racia).In a shock election result, given the relative stability that had characterized the
PAIGC/PAICVhold on power (the latter initials replaced the former when the two
former colonies of Portugal-Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau-separated in 1980), the
MpD was swept to power with a landslide in 1991 (see Silva Andrade 270).

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