Hamlet’s Lament - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 379

A military tribunal absolved Dilermando de Assis for killing Euclides da Cunha II on
grounds of self-defense.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
There was another victim, an ancillary player who was unfortunately situated in the
drama. Euclides da Cunha had not just wounded Dilermando, remember, but also hit
Dinorah in the neck. Dinorah de Assis, athletic and quite sweet in disposition, was an
accomplished footballer who played for one of Rio's most important teams, Botafogo.
Fans used to the modern professionalism of Brazilian soccer may be surprised to hear of
a cadet rising to such heights, but he was apparently extremely talented, a football star
of the first rank, and very well known in Brazilian soccer and sport circles. Alongside
his companion Pullen, Dinorah played both fullback and defensive midfielder for this
esteemed team.
With the championship against the team's traditional rival, Fluminense, coming up,
Botafogo was in despair because Dinorah had sustained injuries in the first da Cunha
shootoutandwouldnotbeabletoplay.TherivalrybetweenRio'shometeamsisintense,
as anyone who has spent any time in a Rio bar will know, and this competition between
teamsstretchesbackmorethanacentury.ButaweekafterthePiedadeshootings,against
all imaginable odds, Dinorah was once again on the field, a fact that caused no little
commentary even among the trial lawyers. Although Botafogo lost, the game was close.
The next year, once again, Dinorah with his teammate Pullen helped the team win the
championship of Rio.
But the following year Dinorah was gone. The bullet in his neck had migrated (prob-
ably not helped by the professional level of soccer that he played), and he became par-
tially paralyzed. He was not even twenty when both his military and his sports careers
were definitively over.
The journalist Acélio Dauat wrote of Dinorah in his “Forgotten Victim of Euclides
da Cunha.” 17 Dauat describes the profound resentment that Dinorah nurtured against a
destiny that had exiled him from his life without extinguishing it. He came to despise
“the simple and innocent pleasures of youth.” His afflictions separated him from more
“humble happiness,” leaving to him only the easy pleasures of inebriation and the rep-
robatehabitsofalifeinbrothels.Dauatnarrateshisspiralingdownfall:“Withhisorgan-
ism ruined by his orgiastic nights, compromised by alcohol toxicity, and finally ravaged
by syphilis, Dinorah very shortly fell into dementia. In his madness, Dinorah entered
into conflict with his brother and came to loathe the one person he had most loved, the
one person who suffered the bitterness of Dantesque contrition for being the inadvert-
ent cause of his brother's disability.” 18 Dinorah despised his brother and his dependence
on him. Even though the bullet was finally removed from his spine in 1913, the neural