After Gabriela, Dona Flor was the author’s second striking female character. Written in Salvador in the second half of 1965, the book was released the following year to great acclaim. In addition to this material from memory, the plot is also interspersed with literary cameos by real-life figures such as Dorival Cayammi, Pierre Verger, master Didi, Sílvio Caldas and Carybé. As a model for Vadinho, the author recalled a friend from his youth who spent his life “losing money and accumulating women”. Jorge Amado used to say that in writing Dona Flor and her Two Husbands he had based himself on a story he heard some years earlier about a widow who remarries but can’t stop dreaming about her deceased first husband.
This story paints an inventive and good-humoured portrait of the ambiguities that characterize Brazil, a nation caught between commitment and pleasure, joy and serenity, work and roguery. Divided between the faithful and sensible Teodoro and the extravagant and voluptuous Vadinho, she opts for the best of both worlds. One of the author’s best-known female characters, Dona Flor embodies some very Brazilian contradictions. In the best style of the comedy of manners, Dona Flor and her Two Husbands describes the night-life of Salvador, with its casinos and cabarets, the typical food of Bahia, the voodoo rites of candomblé and the mingling between politicians, doctors, poets, prostitutes and scoundrels. The scoundrel’s ghost moves in with the couple. One night, a year into her marriage, Dona Flor is stunned to find Vadinho lying naked on the bed, smirking and beckoning to her. Flor is happy with him, but there is an emptiness she cannot define. Teodoro lives only for pharmacy and his bassoon rehearsals. Ceremonious and balanced, the second husband is the very opposite of the first, as Dr. After courtship and chaste engagement, they finally marry. The chemist Teodoro Madureira emerges as a suitor. A year after Vadinho’s death, however, the body’s desires burn through the soul’s reclusion. Widowed, Florípedes Guimarães devotes herself to cooking classes at the school of Flavour and Art. For seven years of marriage she had suffered Vadinho’s shenanigans, but loved him nonetheless. Dona Flor, dressed in the garb of the traditional Baiana, cradled her husband’s corpse and sobbed. A bohemian life had reached its end: rum, gambling and nightly binges had ruined the young rogue. One Carnival Sunday, Vadinho stopped sambaing and dropped down dead.
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