“S. Sebastião has never been like this”

Representations of a smallpox epidemics in the short story “A peste” (1910), by João do Rio

Abstract

The present paper aims at analyzing the representations of the smallpox epidemics which plagued the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1908, leaving a final balance of over 6,400 deaths, in the short story “A peste”, by João do Rio. Exemplary of what Paes (1985) categorizes as grimace-literature of the art nouveau aesthetics, the short story originally published in Gazeta de Notícias and later collected in the volume Dentro da noite (1910), has as its main narrator the snob Luciano Torres, who reports the tragic outcome of his beloved Francisco´s contamination by the smallpox to an unnamed interlocutor. Starting from the premise that João do Rio observes the condition of epidemiological breakthrough (McNEILL, 1998) in his own time, the real pestilence is transfigured into a meaningful literary motif, inasmuch as, by means of the representations of the pest presented in the story, the writer articulates the disease and its processes – dissemination, contagion, isolation, deformity, death – with a critical view of the city, reaching beyond the euphoric perspective of the belle époque modernization; a dysphoric view (GOMES, 1994) which perceives its evils under the veil of the ideology of progress. In this sense, “A peste” reveals the paralyzing condition of a flâneur facing the empty city (MARTINS, 2021), contaminated by the “bladder disease”: a Saint Sebastian mortal wound, ruled by the Obaluaiê haunting sign and analogous to the catastrophic experience of the battlefield.