Ilhéus

Jorge Amado’s 1958 novel Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon depicted the sexual customs of cocoa-rich Ilhéus with such scandalous honesty that the writer couldn’t enter his own hometown for years due to threats over his alleged offense to local morality. Legend has it the same cocoa barons who dropped their wives at the cathedral for mass, telling them they had business at Bar Vesúvio, actually slipped through a secret tunnel connecting the church to the Bataclan cabaret, where European call girls waited, timing their return to the church bells. The same men were suddenly very concerned about their reputations in print.

The math never quite worked in the barons’ favor. A man who builds a tunnel to sin without his wife noticing has already accepted that the sin is happening, he’s only trying to manage the paperwork. Amado wrote down what everyone in Ilhéus already knew and called it fiction, and the town’s response was to treat the fiction as slander. Today, the tunnel is unverifiable, the cathedral still stands across the square from the bar, and the Bataclan serves dinner in the same room the coronéis paid to be looked at, forgiven, and lied to for.