Sugar and Spice

DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS by Jorge Amado. 553 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

I never needed ginger and almonds. It was the hand, the tongue, the word, his profile, his charm, it was he who stripped me of the sheet and my modesty for the wild astronomy of his kisses.

Food and sex. Sex and food. Chicken in coconut milk--vatapa--then a white night under the stars. These constitute life in the Brazilian state of Bahia, according to its most celebrated writer, Jorge Amado. They are also the fixed points in the remarkable history of his latest heroine, Dona Flor.

As proprietress of the Cooking School of Savor and Art, pretty, plump Dona Flor is a well-loved member of the community. She is also pitied because of her impulsive marriage to Vadinho, one of the great gamblers and womanizers in all Brazil. The novel begins at carnival time with Vadinho's sudden death while dancing the samba in drag, "with that exemplary enthusiasm he brought to everything he did except work."

Dona Flor's friends can scarcely contain their vicarious relief. But Dona Flor is wretched. Her Vadinho was a tender, tireless, imaginative lover.

Fortunately, her desolate widowhood proves brief. Her second husband is Dr. Teodoro, a hard-working druggist and part-time bassoonist. A man moderate in everything, he makes love to his wife on Wednesdays and Saturdays--with an optional encore on Wednesday. She thinks she is content, until she enters her bedroom and finds Vadinho stretched out naked. The next morning he parades unclad about her cooking class--invisible except to Dona Flor but capable of exerting physical pressure on the breasts of an astonished student. Mostly he can be found in her bed, stating with humorous logic his legitimate posthumous rights as a husband.

Of course, Vadinho could not make his way back from the blue except in a land as saturated with voodoo and ghostly candomble rituals as Bahia. "God is fat," he confides to Dona Flor. He came back, he adds, because, despite her love for Dr. Teodoro, she called him. She cannot deny it, nor can she bring herself to send him packing back to his corpulent deity.

Dona Flor is rich and leisurely, as much verbal aphrodisiac as novel. Flor is a close cousin to Amado's most celebrated heroine. Gabriela (in Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon), another lady capable of cooking up a storm in the kitchen or in bed. In lavishing details of color, touch and taste, Amado so ignores the canons of construction that at times he seems embarked on little more than an engaging shaggy-dog story.

One reason for his expansive mood is that he is really writing a love letter to Bahia. Formerly an earnest Communist, he turned out several stark novels (sample title: Sweat). Gabriela marked an abrupt mellowing in Amado's outlook. Now he romanticizes his Bahians into virile lovers, darkly sensual morenas, whores and neighbors, all larger than life. According to rumor, Dona Flor's friends are not the Bahian poor, but Amado's own circle of artists and intellectuals, whom he has costumed as peasants for a literary romp `a cle. To that degree, Dona Flor is a long, savory inside joke. It is not, however, malicious, Amado too plainly believes that he lives in God's country. He may even be trying to provide some benevolent fat deity with a narrative blueprint for his own future return.

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