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(not to mention psychic) damage had been done and was irreversible. Dinorah rejected
allcharityfromDilermandoand,increasinglyhomelessanddestitute,refusingallfamily
help,cametobegonthestreets.Finallyby1921hehadhadenoughand,findinghimself
on a quay in Porto Alegre, threw himself into the sea.
The gods were done playing. The carnage was over.
. . .
Dilermando de Assis rose to the rank of general but always had to live up to, or live
down, da Cunha. De Assis wasn't a bad writer, and in addition to his volumes that ar-
guedhisdefense(
Um conselho de guerra: A morte de aspirante da Marinha Euclides da
Cunha Filho
[Tothemilitarytribunal:ThestoryofthedeathofcadetEuclidesdaCunha
II] and
A tragédia da Piedade
[The tragedy of Piedade]), he produced an autobiography
(
Um nome, uma vida, uma obra
[A name, a life, a labor]), a war history, and a saga of
unrelenting tedium on transport engineering in Sao Paulo.
19
He left Ana in 1926.
The events of de Assis's mature life were eclipsed by the early Euclidean times, but
he did have a role in other historical events. By kinship, training, and political alliance,
he was part of a powerful military coterie from Rio Grande de Sul that would become
the incubator for the ideologues and army men who would shape the Brazilian military
state that would rule the country for much of the twentieth century. De Assis was the
commanderofthecrucialSãoPaulogarrisonthatsupportedtheVargascoupin1930and
vanquisheditsoppositionby1932.Thiscritical victoryentrenched themilitary coalition
in governing the country. De Assis thus helped usher in Brazil's period of Authoritarian
Modernism, which lasted on and off for the next fifty years.
These military modernists and their “March to the West” and “National Integration”
programstransformedtheBrazilianeconomy,andtheysettheirsightsontheAmazonas
a central national project. Dilermando died in 1950, just as Generals Golbery de Couto
e Silva, Emilio Garrastazu Medici, and Humberto Castelo-Branco would look at their
mapsandseeaverydifferentAmazonia fromthatofEuclides, aplace usefully“empty,”
ripe for a new geopolitics and a different kind of nation building, a place for a modern-
izing nation to make its mark, to “flood the land with civilization.” By 1964, they ruled.
They turned their sights to the north and the Amazon and unleashed an apocalypse.
20
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