In the midst of carnival, roguish Vadinho dos Guimaraes dies during a parade, leaving behind his long-suffering wife, Dona Flor, a cooking instructor. As a widow, Flor devotes herself to cooking school and an assortment of well-meaning friends who urge her to remarry. She finds herself attracted to Dr. Teodoro Madureria, a kind, considerate pharmacist, who is everything Vadinho was not. After her marriage, though content, Flor longs for her first husband's sensual pleasures. And her desirous longing is so powerful that it brings the ghost of Vadinho back from the grave--right into her bed.

Chapter One

Vadinho, Dona Flor's first husband, died one Sunday of Carnival, in the morning, when, dressed up like a Bahian woman, he was dancing the samba, with the greatest enthusiasm, in the Dois de Julho Square, not far from his house. He did not belong to the group--he had just joined it, in the company of four of his friends, all masquerading as bahianas, and they had come from a bar on Cabeça, where the whiskey flowed like water at the expense of one Moyses AlvÉs, a cacao planter, rich and open-handed.

The group was accompanied by a small, well-rehearsed orchestra of guitars and flutes; the four-string guitar was played by Carlinhos Mascarenhas, a tall, skinny character famous in the whorehouses--ah, a divine player. The men were got up as Gypsies and the girls as Hungarian or Romanian peasants; never, however, had a Hungarian or Romanian, or even a Bulgarian or Slovak, swung her hips the way they did, those brown girls in the flower of their youth and coquetry.

When Vadinho, the liveliest of the lot, saw the group come around the comer and heard the skeleton-like Mascarenhas strumming his sublime four-string guitar, he hurried forward, and chose as his partner a heavily rouged Romanian, a big one, as monumental as a church--the Church of St. Francis, for she was a mass of golden sequins--and announced:

"Here I come, my Russian from TororÓ."

The Gypsy Mascarenhas, who was also bedecked with glass beads and spangles and had gaudy earrings hanging from his ears, pulsed his four-string guitar still more sonorously, the flutes and Spanish guitars groaned, and Vadinho took his place in the samba with that exemplary enthusiasm he brought to everything he did except work. He whirled in the middle of the group, stomped in front of the mulatta, approached her in flourishes and belly-bumps, then suddenly gave a kind of hoarse moan, wobbled, listed to one side, and fell to the ground, a yellow slobber drooling from his mouth on which the grimace of death could not wholly extinguish the fatuous smile of the complete faker he had always been.

His friends were under the impression that it was the result of the load he had taken aboard: not the whiskeys the planter had treated them to--those four or five doses would have had little effect on the class of drinker Vadinho was--but all the rum imbibed from the evening before until noon when the Carnival was officially inaugurated at the Triumph Bar, in the Municipal Square--all of it hitting him at once and knocking him out. But the big mulatta was not fooled, a nurse by profession, she knew death when she saw it; it was a familiar sight to her in the hospital. Not, however, to the point of giving her belly-bumps, of winking its eye at her, of dancing the samba with her. She bent over Vadinho, laid her hand on his neck, and shuddered, a chill running through her stomach and up her spine: "Dear God, he's dead."

Others touched the body, too, felt his pulse, raised his head with its fair hair, listened to his heart. It was useless, a waste of time. Vadinho had taken leave of the Carnival of Bahia for good.

Chapter Two

There was a hubbub in the group of dancers and in the street, a rush through the neighborhood, a God-be-with-us sending a shiver through the merrymakers--and on top of everything Anete, a romantic and hysterically inclined young teacher, took advantage of the occasion to have an attack of nerves, with squeals and the threat of fainting. All that act for the benefit of the vain Carlinhos Mascarenhas, for whom that affected creature sighed, always on the verge of swooning, describing herself as hypersensitive, twitching like a cat having its hair rubbed the wrong way when he strummed the guitar. A guitar that was now mute, hanging uselessly from the hands of its player, as though Vadinho had carried off its final notes with him to the other world.

People came running from every direction; after the news had circulated through the environs, it reached SÃo Pedro, Avenida Sete, Campo Grande, rounding up the curious. A small crowd had gathered around the corpse, jogging one another, overflowing with comments. A doctor who lived in Sodre was commandeered; a traffic policeman took out his whistle and blew it uninterruptedly, as though informing the whole city, the entire Carnival, of Vadinho's end.

"Why, it's Vadinho, the poor thing!" remarked one of the disguised revelers, his mask slipping off, his gaiety gone. All recognized the dead man; he enjoyed great popularity, with his sparkling joyousness, his hairline mustache, his profligate's pride, especially well-liked in places where drinking, gambling, and carousing were the order of the day; and there, so near his home, everyone knew him.

Another masked man, this one dressed in burlap and wearing a bear's head, pushed his way through the tight group and managed to approach close enough to get a good look. He pulled off his mask revealing a doleful face, with drooping mustache and bald scalp, and murmured: "Vadinho, my brother, what have they done to you?"

"What happened to him, what did he die of?" people asked one another, and someone answered: "Rum." This was far too simple an explanation of such an untimely death. A stooped old woman gazed at him for a long time and remarked: "Still so young. Why did he have to die so early?"

There was a crossfire of questions and answers, while the doctor laid his ear on Vadinho's breast. His report was definitive and extinguished all hope.

"He was dancing the samba, having a wonderful time, and without a word to anyone he fell over completely dead . . . "

The foregoing is excerpted from Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado. All rights reserved. view abbreviated excerpt only...

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