The Violent Land

On the forty-second page of “The Violent Land” (originally published as Terras do Sem Fim in Portuguese in 1943) author Jorge Amado wrote—as translated into English by Samuel Putnam (emphasis added):

making of it, of the cacao groves, and of the wood one single entity bound by the dusk that was equal to night itself. The trees would assume gigantic shapes, growing in stature with the mysterious spreading of the shadows. Dolorous sounds would be heard, the cry of unknown birds and of animals, coming from—where? She did not know. And the hissing of the reptiles, the rustling of dried leaves where they crawled. Ester always had the feeling that one day the snakes would end by coming up on the veranda and making their way into the house, some stormy night, until they reached her own and her child's throat, which they would encircle like a necklace. She herself could never have told the horror of those moments, which lasted from the fall oftwilight until the storm broke. And then, when at last it descended in all its fury and Nature appeared bent upon destroying everything, she would seek out those places where the light of the kerosene lamps was brightest. Even then the shadows cast by the light made her afraid and set her imagination to work, leading her to believe the most superstitious of the stories that the Negroes told.

There was one thing that she always remembered on these nights, and that was the cradle lullabies her grandmother had sung to her to calm her fears when she was a child, so many years before. And so now, beside her own child's cradle, she tearfully sang them over again, one after another, in a low voice, once more convinced of their magic efficacy. She sang them to her son as he looked up at her with his hard brown eyes. Horacio's eyes; but she sang them for herself as well, for she too was a frightened child. She sang in a low voice, lulling herself iwth the melody as the tears streamed down her face. She forgot the darkness of the veranda, those terrible shadows outside, the ominous hoot of the owls in the trees, the melancholy of the night, and the forest and its mystery. She sang the songs of long ago, simple melodies, efficacious against spells. It was as though her grandmother's protecting shade were hovering over her, lovingly and understandingly.

And then of a sudden the cry of a frog in the pool, killed by a snake, would come through the forest, through the cacao groves, and would enter the house; it was louder than the owls' hoot or the rustling of leaves, louder than the whistling wind itself, as it came to die away in the lamp-lit room where Ester sat, her body all a-tremble. She sang no more. Closing her eyes, she could see—in every slightest detail—the slimy, repulsive reptile slithering along over the ground and among the fallen leaves,

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