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to tell you that we were in the midst of dispensing state governorships! . . . And I (at the time com-
pletely inthrall toAugusteComte) declared innocently thatIdreamed ofalawforrecent engineering
graduates:ayearofpracticalinternshipdevelopingtheCentralBrazilianRailway.Iwon'ttellyouthe
rest. . . . When we departed, in the inert eyes of my interlocutor it was clearly written: “worthless.”
AndyetIpreenedinaninexplicablesatisfactionwhiledescendingthestairsatItamaratí,thenhappily
crossing the foyer below, I left embellishing I don't know how many dreams of my glorious future
. . . a future I had just calamitously destroyed.
2
So rather than a governorship of, say, Mato Grosso or a senatorial sinecure, da Cunha
was shunted off to the Central Brazilian Railway—but not for long. The uprising of the
pro-Monarchist navy in 1893 had stimulated harsh repression of any dissidents. Journ-
alists, statesmen, any kind of sympathizers, including da Cunha's father-in-law, Solon
Ribeiro, were clapped into prison. The new Republic was in civil war and under martial
law. Rio was being regularly bombarded from the Bay of Guanabara by the rebel navy,
anddaCunhaasamilitaryengineerwaspressedintoservicebuildinginfrastructurefrom
sewers to sniper towers.
3
Solon Ribeiro, then a senator, had participated in oppositionist groups who resented
Peixoto's coup d'état and was scheduled to be shot along with about two hundred others
for his overt defiance of Peixoto's government. Da Cunha, deeply agitated when he got
wind of the impending execution of his father-in-law, raced to Itamaratí for another in-
terview with the Iron Marshal. He described it in this way:
The Marshal eyed me silently with that cold and tired look which we all now know by heart. Deep
in his eyes, however, I glimpsed a malign and dangerous glimmer. I thought I was doomed. In spite
of this, I rallied the last fragments of energy remaining to me: I told him I had raced across the en-
tire city, and then added that I considered it to be impossible for me to live one more hour with the
weight of such horror and dreaded suspicions. “Don't think, Maréchal,” I said, turning to him, “that
I came here as a banal supplicant for the life of my father-in-law. Let me be frank. So that you have
no illusions about me, let me declare candidly that I don't recognize you as a leader, I'm not of your
party, but I follow you because you safeguard the Republic that I also defend.” Floriano gazed at me
with a contracted yet still insolent expression. I thought I had erred in seeking him out. My anxiety
was so great that I thought if he found a revolver to hand, I was lost. Then, suddenly, a monosyllable.
I waited for the answer with a certain foreboding. His words would have been enigmatic for others,
but forme they were perfectly clear: “Before yourfather had even imagined you” (the phrase he used
was more pungent), “I was a friend of Solon's. You can leave.”
4
. . .
Da Cunha alternated between the life of a military engineer and that of a journalist in
a time of serious political tensions between federalists, republicans, Jacobins and mon-
archists, when newspaper offices were burned, publishers were shot to death on com-
muter trains, and sabotage was rife. As a journalist, da Cunha urged that the political
prisoners not be simply lynched or shot, as the rising passions of Peixoto's hardline Ja-
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