Nacib's Omnamorata

GABRIELA, CLOVE AND CINNAMON (425 pp.)--Jorge Amado--Knopf ($5.95).

Old hands in the little Brazilian cacao port of Ilheus complain that the place has become overcivilized, and with reason. Take the matter of government. In the past, a sane, orderly rule was established and maintained in Ilheus by the most efficient of means: gunfire. Now, in the 1920s, there are modernists who say that gunfire is outdated; the new method is the free election. Polls are rigged, of course, to ensure that power remains in the proper hands, but oldtimers see no merit in the innovation; the elections are cumbersome and not at all entertaining.

There is also the serious matter of morality. In the old days a proper Brazilian wife stayed home, speaking only to the servants and to God. Now the town fathers are mortified; a man cannot walk home from a quiet evening at the brothel without seeing married women and their spineless husbands shamelessly laughing at the door of the new cinema. It is all very disturbing.

With sly, leisurely humor, Novelist Amado records the stir made in Ilheus as the fitful--sometimes barely perceptible --winds of progress blow. There is nothing that is not affected by modernism. Everyone is full of admiration when Colonel Jesuino Mendonga, after discovering his wife and his dentist in conversation (he in the nude, she wearing only a pair of long black stockings), shoots both of them. The colonel's conduct was impeccable under the ancient code for settling marital differences, and even liberals in Ilheus are shocked when a court finds him guilty and sentences him to a jail term.

It does not take the reader long to realize that he is in the hands of a Brazilian Boccaccio (whose book is marred now and then by his translators' foolish fondness for gringo slang). It is no surprise, therefore, when Gabriela appears--the laughing, barefoot, round-rumped omnamorata who turns up in the bawdy literature of every language. Who is Gabriela's husband? Naturally he is fat Nacib, the saloonkeeper. Who crawls in Nacib's window when Nacib is tending bar? No one but oily Tonico, the seducer. Will Tonico succeed in getting back out when Nacib comes home unexpectedly? Ah, now there is a question to stir discussion in Ilheus, just as it has fascinated readers in its countless variants across the centuries.

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