The Afterlife of Revolution - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 36

cobins would have had it, but be tried under the “serenity of laws.” Once again he had
annoyed the authorities, and once again the army exiled him, this time to the mountains
of Minas Gerais to work on building barracks far from convenient journalistic venues.
Always ambivalent about army life, da Cunha began to doubt whether he could recon-
cile his “independent spirit with the discipline of the barracks and the caprices of the
Republic.” 5 Although he remained in the ranks for another year, he resolved to move to
São Paulo for good, away from his wife's family, with whom he was in bitter conflict
due to political differences. 6 Given his short temper and scholarly inclinations, it is hard
to imagine him happily ensconced in the hearth of the bourgeois career military family,
devoted to gossip and intrigues. Solon's periodic incarcerations and problems with the
ruling military coterie didn't help. Surely his in-laws must have viewed him on some
level as a collaborator with the more questionable elements of Peixoto's Republic.
Solon was later exiled to Brazil's various “Siberias”—outposts in Mato Grosso where
there was an interesting probability that he might die from malaria, snakebite, or some
other Amazonian affliction, taking him off the political stage once and for all. Later he
would be reassigned to the garrison in Bahia, where he would preside, unsuccessfully
over the second Canudos attack. Later he was sent to Belém, at the mouth of the
Amazon.
Da Cunha was not embraced by the firebrands of the young Republic either, and his
disillusionment with the new Jacobins of Peixoto was great. As he wrote to Ribeiro:
“Here, I understand (and haven't even yet tried) that I'll get little or nothing from this
political world basking in the bloody aura of Jacobins that view me with frank displeas-
ure.” 7 He wanted to have a direct role in the politics of the regime, but means of doing
so through his military connections were increasingly closed to him. He would always
remain a compliant dissident to the state, but in a way that constantly nourished his frus-
tration, since he could never really rely on rewards or accolades to translate into any
concrete security.
Ribeiro's household probably had plenty of commentary to make on his and Ana's
conjugal life, and the political divergences certainly didn't help. Eventually, in a hurt
fury, da Cunha broke off relations with the in-laws, asking for but one big favor: “that
you no longer mention my name in the visitors' parlor.” 8 Perhaps Republican politics
had become too incendiary for what little domestic bliss he and Ana were to share.
Da Cunha decamped to his father's coffee farm, and although he was relieved for a
while by physical labor, his own inclinations led him to a post with the superintendency
for public works of the state of São Paulo. In his life as a functionary, he had ample time
to read his Carlyle, the British historian Henry Thomas Buckle, Auguste Comte, Vict-
or Hugo, Hippolyte Taine, and the epics of Walter Scott as he rode on horseback from
work site to work site. Although he regularly romanticized rural life, especially when