Tieta, the Goat Girl by Jorge Amado

First published:Tiêta do Agreste, 1977 (English translation, 1979)

Type of plot: Comic melodrama

Time of work: 1965

Locale: The fictitious town of Sant’Ana do Agreste in the north of Bahia, Salvador, and São Paulo, Brazil

Principal Characters:

• Antonieta Esteves Cantarelli (Tieta), the heroine, a former prostitute, now the owner of a high-class São Paulo bordello
• Perpétua Esteves Batista, Tieta’s older sister, a pious and mean-spirited widow
• Elisa Esteves Simas, Tieta’s naïve and frustrated younger sister
• Astério Simas, Elisa’s unimaginative husband
• Ricardo (Cardo) Batista, and
• Peto Batista , Perpétua’s sons, aged seventeen and thirteen, respectively
• Ascânio Trindade, Agreste’s county clerk and the local cat’s-paw of an international industrial scheme
• Dr. Mirko Stefano (Mirko the Magnificent), an unscrupulous São Paulo industrialist and chief architect of the industrial scheme
• Skipper Dário Queluz, a retired seaman, perhaps even an officer, and local antipollution activist
• Leonora Cantarelli, a prostitute posing as Tieta’s step-daughter
• Dona Carmosina Sluizer da Consolação, the town postmistress and self-appointed arbiter of gossip

The Novel

The action of the novel (its full title is Tieta, the Goat Girl: Or, The Return of the Prodigal Daughter, Melodramatic Serial Novel in Five Sensational Episodes, with a Touching Epilogue, Thrills and Suspense!) takes place largely in the fictitious northern Bahian backwater of Sant’Ana do Agreste, a tiny and politically insignificant community whose backwardness is exemplified by its reliance on a none-too-reliable generator as its sole source of electric power. At the opening of the story, Tieta’s sisters Perpétua and Elisa, accompanied by the ubiquitous Dona Carmosina, are worried because the monthly allowance generously sent to them by their wealthy sibling has for the first time failed to arrive on time. They depend on this largess not only for a few small luxuries but also for subsistence, and anxiety over the absent check provokes a relapse of Astério’s chronic gastritis and a succession of prayers from the young seminarian Ricardo. Reluctantly concluding the worst, the family holds a funeral for their beloved sister and prepare to hire a lawyer to ensure the proper disposal of whatever inheritance might be forthcoming, whereupon they receive a letter informing them that Tieta has been in mourning for her husband and will soon make her first visit to Agreste in twenty-six years.

The town is electrified by the news of the visit of the benefactress, and practically paralyzed when the gorgeous widow shows up not in black but in a sexy blouse and sexier jeans and in the company of the irresistible Leonora. Perpétua contrives to persuade her wealthy sister to adopt one or both of her sons, but the heroine’s interest in her nephews is anything but auntly, and she soon seduces Ricardo, an event which so delights the priest-to-be that it brings about a crisis of faith. Meanwhile, the benighted town clerk Ascânio, already madly in love with Leonora, is attempting to electrify the town in the literal sense, by having lines brought into town from a government hydroelectric project. When his efforts fail, the well-connected Tieta dashes off a single telegram and gets the power company to reverse its decision.

Tieta is not really a widow but the former kept woman of a wealthy businessman, under whose tutelage she has become owner of the elegant bordello, whose clients are the good connections. In Agreste, however, she poses as the owner of a chic boutique and discourages visits to São Paulo on the basis of a rather different kind of propriety than the town imagines.

Another novelty for Agreste is the appearance of two creatures of such outlandish appearance that they are first thought to be Martians. These visitors turn out to be merely two more people from São Paulo, albeit on a somewhat more sinister mission than that of Tieta and her ward. Mirko Stefano, one of the “Martians,” is attempting to suborn selected government officials into allowing him and his company, Brastânio, to open a titanium dioxide plant in Brazil, and Agreste turns out to be one of the possible sites. He investigates the town’s power structure and concludes that if Ascânio becomes mayor, the lovely dunes of Mangue Seco could be expropriated for his purposes under the law of eminent domain. Only he and a few other insiders know that titanium dioxide is one of the most toxic industries in the world. The only initial opposition to the factory comes from Skipper Dário, who reluctantly becomes an opposition candidate for mayor. Mirko takes the impressionable Ascânio to the state capital, Salvador, and treats him to the pleasures of fine food, good wine, and pliant females, all of which help convince Ascânio of Mirko’s good intentions. The mayoral election heats up when Tieta convinces Ascânio’s patron to sit out the contest, and a legal battle starts brewing over title to the dunes of Mangue Seco.

Tieta tardily discovers that Ricardo has become an ardent practitioner of the arts of love which she thought he was studying only with her. As a result, she throws him into the street, nude, and when the ruckus awakens her astonished sister Perpétua, she pays, in cash, for having taken the seminarian’s virginity. The anticlimax of the Brastânio episode occurs when the company gets another, even better site approved. Demoralized by the whole process, Ascânio nevertheless proposes marriage to Leonora, who finally admits to her own and Tieta’s sordid past and then attempts suicide. His pride mortally wounded, Ascânio denounces the two women for what they are, and Tieta, Leonora, and the neophyte Maria Imaculada (one of Ricardo’s conquests) depart for São Paulo.

The paved street, originally named after an obscure congressman, is rebaptized by the townsfolk as “The Street of Tieta’s Light.”

The Characters

The characters of Tieta, the Goat Girl are, if not predictable, at least vaguely familiar to loyal Amadophiles. Since the publication of Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958; Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, 1962), Amado has been producing novels peopled by a motley array of protagonists, including drunks, bums, womanizers, charlatans, whores, and assorted ne’er-do-wells, all of whom seem to share a single salient characteristic of indifference or even outright hostility to society’s norms. Tieta is part of the long literary tradition of whores-with-a-heart-of-gold, but she is also representative of protagonists in a very Amadian canon. Her sexual awareness comes at an early age, when, as a goatherd, she witnesses the billy goat Inácio introducing the initially reluctant nanny goats into adulthood. At the age of thirteen, she is chased across the dunes by a randy itinerant vendor and caught rather too easily after which she is sexually insatiable. Her father beats her and runs her out of the house because of this proclivity, but she continues to be sexually active and is delighted to learn the “sauces and spices” of the operation with one of her early lovers. She goes from full-time prostitution to a rather more sedate but nevertheless illicit relationship with Felipe, whose death precipitates her visit to Agreste. Through it all, she has sent her family money, and she never mentions to her father the source of her large income. Tieta’s seduction of Ricardo is typical Amado as well: She is at the moment without a man, and even if Ricardo is a nephew and a seminarian as well, he is a man and he wants her, although it takes him a while to realize it.

The characterization of Ricardo is also consistent with the usual Amadian style. He is tormented by sexual feelings even before the arrival of his comely aunt, and his torment becomes an agony when he sees her in a bathing suit, especially when his perverse little brother Peto notes that he can see pubic hair peeping out of her skimpy bikini bottom. The seduction itself is an epiphany for him, though he is unable to resolve the dilemma of sex and religion until he talks to his confessor, Frei Thimóteo. The genial friar, relentlessly beatific, understands the ways of the world and is thus able not only to provide justification for the pleasures of the flesh but also to point out the evils of industrial pollution.

The other side of the coin is provided by characters as apparently diverse as Perpétua and Mirko Stefano. Perpétua’s delight at her sister’s visit is rooted fundamentally in greed, and her moral outrage on discovering that her son has been deflowered by her own sister is a kind of knee-jerk reaction of the perpetually unimaginative, the product of a forlorn and threadbare petit bourgeois mentality. Mirko’s badness is much more clearly a matter of turpitude than of small-mindedness, but he is nevertheless similar to her. The difference is that he is intelligent and has the wherewithal to be a capitalist—it is likely that if she were smarter and richer she would be like him. Mirko bribes politicians, large and small, and does anything else which seems to be necessary to produce the desired result: to make money.

The dichotomy is one familiar to Amado’s readers. The basic character conflict in all of his later novels is between the crassness and triviality of bourgeois values and the healthy sensuality and irrepressible vitality of the common folk’s worldview. It does not matter to his characters, nor apparently to his readers, that much of what goes on in such a scenario, even if it is good, dirty fun, is not exactly the kind of thing on which parent-teacher organizations look fondly.

Critical Context

Amado published his first novel in 1931; Tieta, the Goat Girl was his nineteenth. He became a best-selling author in the first decade of his career, but not until the 1960’s was he generally recognized as a writer at the peak of his form, master of an inimitable style. Critics have chided him for being too facile or too ideological, and some have even called him racist or sexist, but such criticism seems irrelevant to novels in which the reading experience is something akin to listening to a witty and engaging blabbermouth recount a convoluted yarn about a town in which he might once have lived. Much of the negative criticism of his works is based on the fact that he was for many years a member of the Communist Party and that some of his early novels make that affiliation transparent. Yet he has never been an ideologue, and even if his novels consistently belittle the Brazilian bourgeoisie for its flaws, his faithful readers are not deterred, though most are members of that class.

There are no competitors to his commercial success in Brazil, and his works have been translated into more than forty languages, enjoying sometimes spectacular sales abroad. Since he has won practically every literary prize worth winning in Brazil, his massive and enthusiastic public has made him a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, and every new novel is a best-seller within days of release.

Part of Jorge Amado’s popularity stems from his ability to portray Brazilians as they would like to think they are—at once lusty, courageous, charming, and, above all, unfettered. Some of the appeal of the works in translation may lie in this same exotic appeal of tropical eroticism and adventure. What really makes a novel such as Tieta, the Goat Girl work is its perverse narrator, with his leisurely and digressive story, genuinely amusing, concerning people who are either what the reader suspects his next-door neighbor may truly be or people who are just sufficiently larger than life to charm and beguile.

Bibliography

Chamberlain, Bobby J. Jorge Amado. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Useful, informative, and readable, this critical analysis of Amado’s work covers all periods of the novelist’s output while focusing on a few of the author’s most important works. A biographical chapter is included, as well as an extensive bibliography.

Hinchberger, Bill. “Jorge Amado Writes from Heart, Home.” Variety 366 (March 31, 1997): 56. Hinchberger explores the inspirations that shape Amado’s work, the filming of Amado’s novels, and Amado’s reaction to the critical acclaim he has received. Offers interesting insight into the influences that shaped Amado’s work.

Robitaille, L. B. “These Men of Letters Speak for the Powerless.” World Press Review 38 (December, 1991): 26-27. An intriguing profile of Amado, covering his political activity, his life in Paris, and his feelings for his native Brazil. Presents background that sheds considerable light on his writings.