Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
2
The Unlikely Protagonist
Euclides da Cunha, the mestizo grandchild of a Portuguese slaver and a Kararí Indian,
was born in Bahia to Manuel and Eudóxia da Cunha in 1866. He was a feeble child,
“stunned by the unpleasant surprise of being born.” 1 His mother died when he was three,
and thereafter he was raised mostly by fussy and distracted female relatives who were al-
ternately doting and indifferent. He was shunted from household to household according
to the fortunes of Manuel da Cunha, a minor coffee grower. Although not entirely un-
concerned about his children, da Cunha had domestic arrangements that were as shaky as
hiscommercial interests, andthatmeantthesicklychildremained quasi-orphaned among
his handsome cousins in the comfortable homes of his extended family. Young Euclides
moved among villas and boarding schools, introverted and shy.
He was neurasthenic and frail in his youth, in part because he was tubercular, and in-
deed, that disease had carried off his mother. His later adventures however, revealed ex-
traordinary physical capacities, since he was able to survive military campaigns in the
desert bush of the Northeast (an enterprise that killed thousands) and a grueling Amazon
foray. He was frequently ill as both child and adult with lung hemorrhages and the peri-
odic fevers of malaria, and was exhausted by insomnia. What few photographs we have
ofhimshowapale,intensechild,andlateraslenderman,slicklymustachioedinthedan-
dyish style of the day, with the lambent eyes of a nocturnal animal.
Figure 2.1. Euclides da Cunha at age ten.
Da Cunha's father, inhabiting the treacherous and tenuous realms of the Brazilian
middle class, was highly sensitive to the precarious forms of ascension and patronage
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