The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma

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The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma first appeared in installments, published in the Jornal do Commercio in 1911, and became a book, revised by the author himself, in 1915. It is a satire about naive nationalism, bureaucracy, and the politics of the period known as the Republic of the Sword, told in a tone that mixes irony, humor, and tragedy.

The story is divided into three parts, each with a different dream of the protagonist: language, land, and armed politics. All three end in failure, and that pattern is where the novel's title comes from.

Lima Barreto writes from inside the suburbs and government offices of Rio de Janeiro, a portrait very different from the elegant city that showed up in the novels of the time. It is precisely because he knows this behind-the-scenes Brazil, that of the civil servant and the poor neighborhood, that the satire hits its target so well.

Policarpo Quaresma is a civil servant at Rio de Janeiro's War Arsenal, a middle-aged bachelor who lives in a simple house with his sister Adelaide and raises his goddaughter Olga with a father's affection.

What sets Quaresma apart from every other character in the book is his sincerity: he loves Brazil in a literal way, without any irony, and believes that dedication and good will are enough to prove, in practice, everything good that school textbooks say about the country.

This unfiltered sincerity, which would sound beautiful in any other context, becomes a running joke among the people around him, because no one else takes patriotism as seriously as he does.

He reads everything he can find about Brazilian history, geography, and culture, keeps maps and statistics memorized, and treats every dinner-table conversation as a chance to defend the country with facts in hand. It is this same excess of study, with no sense of when to stop, that keeps pushing Quaresma toward each of the novel's three tragedies.

One of the first proofs of Quaresma's patriotism is musical: he starts studying the viola and the modinha, Brazil's popular songbook, at a time when Rio's elite respected only what was copied from France and European opera.

It is in this world of the modinha that he gets close to Ricardo Coração dos Outros, a bohemian guitar player and composer, a central figure of Rio's popular nightlife and, at the same time, a suitor of Olga.

For Quaresma, liking the viola is not an amateur's whim, it is a statement that Brazilian popular culture is worth just as much as anything imported. To his more refined circle of friends, such as General Albernaz's family, this only confirms that he is an eccentric.

It is a small detail of the book that still makes sense today: liking what is made close to home, whether music, food, or crafts, often demands a justification that nobody asks of people who prefer only what comes from abroad.