Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant

This summary tells the whole story of Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant, from Leonardo's birth to the wedding that closes the book, ending included. If you still want to read it without knowing the outcome, save this summary for later: the idea here is to understand what Manuel Antônio de Almeida shows about popular life in old Rio de Janeiro.

The book first appeared in installments in the newspaper Correio Mercantil, between 1852 and 1853, signed only as A Brazilian, a pseudonym that hid the author's name, and only later became a book, in 1854 and 1855. It is fiction: the characters and plot are literary invention, but the Rio de Janeiro of the days when Dom João VI and the Portuguese court lived in the city was a concrete reality.

The book is in the public domain, and this summary does not copy the author's sentences: it is our own analysis, telling the plot in our own words. The novel also deals with imprisonment and forced recruitment into the army, parts we won't skip or treat as an easy joke.

The story takes place in the early 19th century, when the Portuguese royal family fled Napoleon and landed in Rio de Janeiro, turning a small colonial town into the temporary seat of the Portuguese kingdom. The mood of the whole book comes from this Rio of the king's day, with Dom João VI still on the throne.

While the court brought European balls and etiquette to a handful of wealthy people, most of the city went on living another way: street parties, Mass, small-time trade, neighbors who knew everybody's business. It is in this popular Rio that Manuel Antônio de Almeida decides to tell his story.

The novel avoids the solemn tone of other books of the time, bound by the rules of Romanticism, full of idealized heroes and impossible love. It prefers to follow ordinary people, a bailiff, a midwife, a barber, a sexton, showing the real life of the city beneath its official life.

The protagonist is born in an almost accidental way. His parents, Leonardo-Pataca and Maria da Hortaliça, meet during the ship crossing from Portugal to Brazil, in a beginning free of romantic drama: a stomp on the foot and a pinch exchanged between the two, still on board, are enough to start everything.

There are no love letters and no solemn promises: the book describes the start of the hero's parents' relationship as something trivial, more like a street pickup line than an ordinary serial romance. It is a way of gently laughing at the very romantic genre that dominated the literature of the day.

Once on land, the boy Leonardo is born, who gives the book its name and carries the same first name as his father, which causes deliberate confusion throughout the story: when the book says Leonardo, you have to guess from context whether it means the father or the son.