Barren Lives (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963).
Before I reread it late this past winter, my clearest memory of Graciliano Ramos’s 1938 novel Vidas Secas (Barren Lives), a classic of Brazilian modernism, was of the dog, Baleia. I’d first read the novel in high school, and my teacher, Ivan, had an illustration of Baleia tattooed on his arm. Barren Lives was a favorite even among those pupils who, unlike me, didn’t obsessively read every book assigned. We all adored Baleia; though she is a dog, she has as much of a consciousness and a perspective as any of the human characters in the book. Her tragic death left us all equally moved and indignant.
In Brazil, literature is singular and filmmaking is mostly ignored. I saw online that a movie theater in São Paulo not far from where I grew up was playing a rare print of the film adaptation of Barren Lives (1963), directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos—one of the prominent members of the neorealist-inspired Brazilian Cinema Novo. I felt a small pang in my chest at the thought of life happening at home, far away from me, indifferent to my departure. I’d made a resolution at the beginning of the year to reacquaint myself with the culture of my country, whose riches I’d been neglecting in my quest to Americanize. I thought I’d start with Barren Lives.
Unlike some other Brazilian classics, like Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas and pretty much all of Clarice Lispector’s body of work, Vidas Secas hasn’t been reprinted in English since the mid-’60s. Santos’s film is likewise hard to come by in the United States. He got a retrospective at New York’s Metrograph theater in 2019, and Barren Lives played at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015, but the film is unavailable for streaming save an unsubtitled, grainy YouTube video, uploaded in a touching act of preservation. Latin American literature has enjoyed a place of relative renown in the English-speaking world at least since the break-out success of A Hundred Years of Solitude in the late ’60s, when magical realism captured the imagination of the global market. Thanks to Katrina Dodson’s phenomenal 2015 translation of her Complete Stories, interest in Clarice Lispector’s writing has done much to catapult Brazilian literature to recognition alongside its more famous South American neighbors. Translators and small presses in particular have worked tirelessly to make these works available to an anglophone audience. But the steep uphill battle for visibility on the world stage is still being fought by the Latin American cinema. In 2022’s Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll, the highest-ranked Latin American movie was Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga, in 136th place.
I asked my mom to mail me the copy of Barren Lives we had at home, along with a DVD whose region code, I realized too late, was not compatible with my American player. When the book arrived, yellowing and flimsy, densely set in a thick, bold-face type, I was surprised to see that the first page was inscribed with my teacher Ivan’s name and marked “São Paulo, 2004”—almost a decade before I would’ve read it in school. It was funny to see that handwriting, all these years later, the same penmanship I remembered from diagrammed sentences and detailed timelines on the whiteboard. I don’t remember by what circumstance I ended up with one of his copies, but it felt like some sort of sign, like my reeducation was being guided by my former teachers, my former selves.
Barren Lives (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963).
Barren Lives takes place over a particularly dry year; the date goes unspecified in the novel, but Santos uses a title card to indicate that the film takes place in 1940. The setting is the Northeastern sertão, which is something like the Brazilian badlands, a semiarid, desert-y stretch of land tucked far inland. A comparison to the American Wild West is not perfect, but it’s apt: these are landscapes usually depicted as vast, unknowable, and potentially hostile; they are places to be braved. If we associate the Wild West with macho silent types and settler colonialism, we in Brazil might associate the sertão with hardship and injustice. It is located in the poorest region of a poor country, where more than twelve million people live in abject poverty and more than five million are illiterate.
Both the book and the movie open with a family of four, Fabiano and Sinhá Vitória and their two young boys, plus Baleia and a parrot, walking through the sertão, with no set destination. They’ve had to flee their employer’s farm because of the drought: the crops and the cattle all died of thirst. The farm’s owner, Mr. Thomas, left too. Though he was a cultured and compassionate man, his literacy couldn’t save him any more than it could the illiterate family in his employ.
Eventually, the family finds an abandoned farmhouse where they take shelter, waiting for the weather to let up and a miracle to strike. There’s a song called “País Tropical,” by Jorge Ben Jor, something of an unofficial national anthem, that goes: “I live in a tropical country / blessed by God / and beautiful by nature.” It typifies a strong national sentiment that Brazil, while eternally plagued by the mistakes and misjudgments of man, is a country touched by a nature-conscious God, where every seed yields a harvest. In this context, the incontestability of the drought and its attendant misery take on nearly metaphysical proportions, as if they were divine punishment. How else to interpret barrenness in a country otherwise so bountiful?
Barren Lives (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963).
Mercifully, it rains. At this point in the movie—which follows more or less the sequence of events in the book—Santos films the family sitting on the floor of the abandoned farmhouse, a fire burning tenaciously behind them. So far, they’ve said little; they’ve hoped to God that the rain would come, and Sinhá Vitória has justified killing, roasting, and eating the parrot by pointing out that he couldn’t even talk. Now, their spirits lifted by the rain, Sinhá Vitória and Fabiano speak all at once, making conversation impossible. Talking is like drinking a cup of water, the fulfillment of an existential urge. Santos’s camera cuts between Fabiano and Sinhá Vitória—and, here and there, Baleia, who lays at Sinhá Vitória’s feet looking content—as they talk about Mr. Thomas, whose leather bed was so soft and smelled so good.
This moment of proto-Altman overlapping dialogue, which occurs only twenty or so minutes into a mostly quiet film, is a revealing aspect of Santos’s project of adaptation. In the book, which follows in the third person the alternating perspectives of the family members, articulation is a huge problem, particularly for Fabiano. By turns aggrieved and acquiescent, he keeps telling himself he’s an animal. “Yes sir,” he thinks, “an animal, capable of overcoming difficulties. He’d arrived in that fearful situation—and here he was, strong, fat even.” (These and all following translations are my own.) But his pride doesn’t last long; as if reproaching himself, the same train of thought veers quickly into shame. Being strong like an animal has its advantages in farm life, but the urban world might see this likeness as undignified. This confusion at the center of Fabiano’s sense of self is reflected in his language: “He spoke a sing-song language, monosyllabic and guttural.… In truth, he spoke little. He admired the long and difficult words of people from the city, tried in vain to reproduce some of them, but knew that they were useless and maybe dangerous.” His inability to speak is both a burden and a solace: a way to hide inside himself and an impediment to an ampler life lived in connection with others. By making Sinhá Vitória and Fabiano literally unable to understand one another when speech returns to them, Santos signals at the outset that he sees an issue of articulation at the core of the story. The question he lifts from the book and brings to the fore is how the indignities of abject poverty might interfere with a person’s ability to know and understand others.
Eventually, the rancher who owns the farm comes back and hires Fabiano as a farmhand, allowing his family to stay in the farmhouse. From that moment on, every time he is able to make himself clear and to contend with the injustices of the world around him, Fabiano is punished. In the book, he is now and again called to venture into the remote rural village that borders the farm; in the film, Santos collapses these visits so that they follow one another in an extended sequence, almost as if going into the village were, like speaking, a necessity that must be dispensed with all at once. On the first visit, Fabiano collects his paycheck—scrupulously calculated by Sinhá Vitória using beans—from the rancher. He tells his employer that according to his wife’s calculations, the money is short. The rancher shrugs him off, telling him the difference is collected interest. “This isn’t right,” Fabiano says, knowing that his illiteracy is being taken advantage of. The rancher tells him he’s welcome to find a job elsewhere. Fabiano apologizes, blames his wife, and leaves. Later, when the family leaves the farm to attend mass and a village-wide festival, Fabiano plays cards with a soldier who had earlier given him trouble for selling meat without a permit. Seeing that he is about to lose precious money, Fabiano quietly forfeits the game. The soldier demands an explanation. “You don’t have the right to provoke those of us who are quiet,” Fabiano risks. When the soldier steps on his conspicuously bare foot—since completing the long journey through the sertão barefoot, the family has come to find shoes oppressive—Fabiano lets out a curse. The soldier books him into jail, where he is whipped for insulting a man in uniform.
Barren Lives (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963).
Fabiano finds it impossible to speak up, to assert his existence. His attempts at clarity are met with hostility or outright physical violence. It’s no surprise, then, that as they try to protect their children, Fabiano and Sinhá Vitória discourage curiosity or even the most preliminary of explorations into understanding. A healer, a pruned old lady whose praying Santos juxtaposes with Sinhá Vitória’s smoldering cauldron, is the picture of a witch, whom the eldest kid watches with rapture. Chanting, she mutters the word “hell.” The kid wants to know, from Sinhá Vitória, what the word means. “It’s a really bad place,” she replies, but he wants to know more. Bad how? He poses the same question to Fabiano, who doesn’t reply. “It’s a place for the condemned,” Sinhá Vitória explains after being asked a second time. “Have you ever been there?” the kid insists. She flings hot water on his head, and holding it, he absconds to the shade of a tree, where he cuddles with Baleia. “Bad place,” he says to himself, over and over again. With every repetition, Santos cuts to another static scene of the hot, arid landscape, the twigs and brittle branches twisted on themselves. But the kid’s perception of his desolate surroundings is punctuated by his affection for Baleia, and by the affection she shows him. Santos alternates the static landscape shots with images of her attentive little ears perked up as the kid moves her, drags her body close to his, places her legs just so, scratches her head.
It’s not just because she’s an impossibly cute dog that Baleia gets so much attention—she is crucial to the book’s ideas about articulation. Who are we when we live mostly in silence, isolated from others? Baleia is the family’s only solace: one of the few constants in a precarious life. Because their ability to express themselves is so limited and repressed, their only open demonstrations of affection are directed toward the little dog; these gestures, Ramos suggests, anchor the family. They provide the kind of stability that a sense of place can’t, seeing as their home is constantly vulnerable to the climate. Toward the end of the novel, Baleia gets sick with what Fabiano assumes is rabies. Santos moves this event closer to the family’s imminent departure from the ranch, gently linking Baleia’s illness to the curse of the drought that drives the family back into the sertão, in search of a miracle. Wanting to spare Baleia’s suffering, Fabiano resolves to shoot her.
Barren Lives (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963).
Though we’ve dipped in and out of Baleia’s thoughts before, in this chapter Ramos switches fully into her perspective. As she loses consciousness, she thinks about her duties. Her vision darkens, and she becomes confused about “the goats’ bells jingling beyond the river.” The sound frightens her: “What were those animals doing loose at night? Her duty was to get up, take them to the waterhole. She furrowed her nostrils, trying to make out the boys. She thought their absence strange.” She has a vague sense of being angry with Fabiano, wanting to bite him, but it comes and goes in waves: “Her little heart was tightened by affliction.” Finally, she gets sleepy. When she wakes up, she thinks, it would be “in a world full of guinea pigs. And she’d lick Fabiano’s hands, an enormous Fabiano. The kids would roll around with her on a huge patio and pigsty. The world would all be filled with huge, fat guinea pigs.”
With Baleia’s drifting consciousness, perhaps what Ramos is getting at is a validation of Fabiano’s notion that the differences between his family’s way of life and an animal’s are negligible, the fault of a cruel and indifferent system that sees certain parts of the population as subhuman. But with Baleia’s ability to register memory—and therefore, to suffer—he’s also suggesting that their communion is no less humane for being mostly nonverbal, unarticulated. Their connection is based on the grace and the faith the family and Baleia are able to grant each other, whether or not they can speak. But still, reading Baleia’s thoughts makes me wonder what kind of effect she could have on the family if only she could put any of this into words: to humanize them with her own affection. By the same token, I find the notion that Baleia couldn’t possibly understand the extent of the family’s lament, particularly the boys’, who saw her like a sister, almost unbearable. Their final, wordless encounter is a peculiar form of starcrossed tragedy. It makes me forget we’re even talking about humans and dogs.
Barren Lives (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963).
How might Santos give this crucial moment its due, translating Baleia’s innermost thoughts to the visual language? The story of Barren Lives is an internal one; it’s a story of feeling. The novel’s third-person omniscient narration gives it an observational quality that aligns nicely with Santos’s neorealist-inspired style, which ambles across the vast landscape. Another filmmaker might have expressed Baleia’s thoughts in voice-over, a tool often used in adaptation to conjure the sense of intimacy between reader and character that is literature’s magical exchange: it’s not hard to imagine a version of Barren Lives that gets weird with the dog’s perspective.
Santos’s approach is much subtler. As Baleia dies, the camera is placed low on the ground, and we take in the environment as if from her vantage point. We see the little Brazilian guinea pigs and the farmhouse, look around at the trees and into the brightness of the sun. At first, Baleia is wincing in pain, but slowly, under the axle of a wooden wagon, she regains her calm. She looks as though she’s falling slowly asleep. Even without verbal insight into Baleia’s perspective, it’s a moment as moving in the film as it is in the book. Santos uses silence to evoke the questions that animate Ramos’s novel. Whether by necessity or circumstance, Ramos’s characters are introspective; their stories unravel inside their minds. Santos honors this quality by allowing the characters and his viewers the same privacy. Looking at Baleia looking at the world, a person’s own ideas about grace, faith or death might emerge, charging the scene with meaning.
In the booklet accompanying my DVD, which was issued by Instituto Moreira Salles, Luiz Carlos Barreto, the film’s cinematographer, explains that he used a “naked lens, with no filter,” to create the sense that the images had been “invaded by light.” This blown-out brightness evokes the dryness and relentlessness of the sertão and literally tints the family’s worldview, coloring the farmhouse and the cracks in the beaten red ground. When the sun is up, it is at its peak, and when storms come, Santos cuts to jarring bolts of lightning. There is no reprieve from the climate or the landscape. In frequent wide shots that place the family within the farm, Santos emphasizes their isolated but courageous endurance. Relying on each other and on their animals, it’s all they can do to survive another hour, another sun-up.
Barren Lives (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1963).
The drought comes again, and the family must leave the farm once more for an unknown destination, this time without their loyal canine companion. In Ramos’s novel, setting off on their interminable journey, memories of Baleia and the dying horses bring Fabiano close to tears: the thought of the little dog is “intolerable.” Assailed by a similar misery, Sinhá Vitória starts to speak to her husband. She needs “support, someone who would give her courage.” They start sketching out the dream of a life in which the boys would go to school and they could stay put: “The world is big,” they assure each other. Conversation makes the miles go by easier, and by the book’s closing pages, Fabiano and Sinhá Vitória have become convinced of their imminent good fortune: “They walked south, absorbed in the dream.”
In the beginning of his film, Santos mingled Fabiano and Sinhá Vitória’s voices, foreclosing the possibility of understanding. Here he honors Ramos’s touching optimism by having them not only hear each other, but truly listen. They engage not just in talk, but in conversation. Looking at each other tenderly, they smile at Sinhá Vitória’s speculations: “A nice ranch, with lots of corn, lots of beans. Abundance and heftto raise the boys.” Articulation, so long a source of punishment, becomes the family’s only source of hope, the indispensable well of energy that allows them to keep going. Speaking finally, and freely, they are able to imagine something better than this.