Killing Dr. da Cunha - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 357

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Killing Dr. da Cunha
Alltragediesendwiththestagestrewnwithcorpses,wailingwomen,sorrowfulcomrades
yearning for a different ending—perhaps the bourgeois one with its accommodation to
circumstances—the wish that the protagonist had perhaps not been so attached to his
own nature, so melded by conditions. Most of what we know about Euclides da Cunha's
end days, besides the rancorous explanations offered up in revisionist histories by the da
Cunha and de Assis factions, is derived from the testimony and depositions from the trial
of twenty-two-year-old Dilermando de Assis, 1 along with de Assis's memoir of events, A
trágedia de Piedade (The tragedy at Piedade), and description of the domestic situation
published as part of his formal argument in another Euclides da Cunha murder trial, that
of da Cunha's son. 2 There are also the hindsight accounts of various people who saw da
Cunhaandtheothervictims inthedaysbeforehetookthestreetcar fromhishouseonthe
beach at Copacabana on a drizzly morning to the modest working-class neighborhood of
Piedade, to the house at 240 Rua Sta. Cruz, home of Dilermando and Dinorah de Assis. 3
. . .
After four years of insecurity, intrigue, and the stresses of cartographic production and
political writing for the Baron Rio Branco, da Cunha sought a sinecure, a chair in logic
at the Pedro II Gymnasium, the equivalent today of a Brazilian national university. With
it he would no longer have to suffer through the formalisms and increasingly dandified
atmosphereofdiplomaticsalonsandtheendlessannoyanceofseeingthoseheconsidered
dishonest mediocrities vaulted into higher, more secure positions through the interces-
sions of their cronies. 4 He generally stuck to his maps and his studies whenever he could.
The impact of his topics meant that foreign visitors often liked to see him, and da Cunha,
though very prim, was often sloppily attired and if irritated, not particularly polite. Rio
Branco, reared in a diplomatic household and having spent considerable time in France,
was reflexively courteous and needed da Cunha to be soigné and charming to interna-
tional visitors, given the delicate politics surrounding Brazil at the time with the Peru-
Bolivia adjudication in Argentina and the Peru-Brazil boundary negotiations. Itamaratí
was switching gears into a different international diplomacy of trade, treaty connections,
and international legations. The kind of international arbitration in which da Cunha had
been engaged was on its way out: his efforts were the “last sigh” of this type of chan-
cellery politics, with its maps and historical arguments.