Boundless love and death in Bahia.

• Author: Wyels, Joyce Gregory

BULLETINS FROM THE WORLD'S PRESS LAST YEAR CHRONICLED JORGE AMADO'S deteriorating health, his admittance to Alianca Hospital in Salvador, and his subsequent release last July. Plans were under way for Amado's eighty-ninth birthday celebration on August 10 when the news came: E morto lo scrittore Jorge Amado--Jorge Amado esta morto--Brazilian Author Jorge Amado Dead at 88. On August 6, 2001, the author whose own works often blurred the line between the physical and the spiritual, the living and the deceased, slipped away from those who loved him.

Loved--amado--the Brazilian icon himself could hardly have invented a more inspired name for a writer whose admirers spanned the globe and erected shrines in his honor long before his death. In Salvador da Bahia, thousands of usually exuberant Bahians filed past his coffin, subdued, in white mourning clothes, showing their respect for a dignitary of the Candomble religion and an author whose novels have touched the hearts of people in more than fifty countries."

"When he died, everything came to a stop," says Rosa Lobo Resnick, an artist and native of Salvador. "Everyone loved him. He was not only a great writer, but a great man."

Public adulation for Brazil's most renowned writer has long welled up from the ordinary folk, the marginalized masses, even from those Bahians who may never have leafed through one of his books. "Strange and original land," marveled Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, visiting Bahia on the occasion of Amado's seventieth birthday, "where writers are as famous as football players."

Throughout his and productive life, Amado reciprocated the great affection shown him by the people of Bahia. In one of his early works, Captains of the Sands, he writes in an afterword, "In order to put these novels of mine together, I tried to seek out the people, I went to live with them, ever since my childhood on cacao plantations, my adolescence in cafes in the capital, my trips all through the State, crossing it in all manner of conveyances, listening to and seeing the most beautiful and strangest parts of Bahia's humanity--no one until today has dared look face to face with so much love at Bahian humanity and its problems."

My own journey to the land of Jorge Amado began inauspiciously enough, over casual conversation in a Rio de Janeiro restaurant transplanted from Bahia and named after the African deity Yemanja. When I learned that Salvador da Bahia was a favorite vacation spot for Rio's fun-loving cariocas, I resolved to one day visit the state of Bahia and its principal city, Salvador (sometimes, confusingly, also called Bahia). And I began to read Amado. Eagerly I plunged into his circuitous plots, tracked his numerous characters, absorbed his personal asides to the reader--or, as Amado slyly put it toward the end of War of the Saints, "undertook the penance of following the plot, the tribulations of the characters--not to mention those of the author, as a matter of fact, suffering the atrocious pains of lumbago just now."

Finally, my chance came to travel through a slice of the sprawling northeastern state--the teeming two-tiered capital, Salvador; the fertile region known as the Reconcavo, which hugs the Baia de Todos os Santos; the bay itself, with its lyrically named islands; and rural towns as far south as Ilheus, Amado's boyhood home. If reading the novels had proved a good prelude to traveling in Bahia, the reverse is also true: the landscape, littered as it is with bars, beaches, and buildings frequented by Amado's characters, offers the perfect prologue to the writer's works.

Everywhere in this sunny tropical expanse can be found the very characters who jostle for attention in the pages of Amado's books--if not those exact individuals, certainly their successors--a smiling, strutting, thumbs-up crowd who greet you with enthusiasm and charm you with their unabashed sensuality, flaunting their physical beauty and reveling in their African-infused culture. It's as though the Bahian Carnival of 1997 never really ended. That was the year that Amado's creation, "Tieta," reigned over the extravaganza, Caetano Veloso provided the musical beat, and a multitude of prancing, posturing Vadinhos, Dona Flors, Gabrielas, Pedro Arcanjos, and...