Excerpted by Katharine F. Baker from her paper in the Fall 2022 Gávea-Brown journal
São Miguel-born scholar and author Adelaide Freitas (1949–2018) wrote her novel Sorriso por dentro da Noite (2004) [Smiling in the Darkness (2020)] as an Azorean saga recast in homage to Moby-Dick (Baker, 2020). She incorporated into her narrative calamities that befell her protagonists — one, the deadly 1949 plane crash into a mountain near the island’s remote northeastern village where the book is primarily set.
At its root, Smiling in the Darkness, like many a roman à clef, constitutes the preservation of family, community, or other history disguised (perhaps thinly) as fiction. Another motive for fictionalizing real life might be a lack of sufficient connective factual details to create a coherent account. For example, French writer Adrien Bosc cast his account of the crash as a novel, despite exhaustive documentation. Alternatively, an author’s goal might be to simplify the plot by telescoping multiple real people into fewer characters (or even to invent a convenient new one), or a wish to redistribute portions of one real-life person’s traits and experiences across a number of characters — whether for any of the above reasons or out of artistic license, or for clarifying the underlying verity of the story’s message by pruning extraneous details. As novelist Anthony Barcellos (1951-2024) observed, “Anything can be true in fiction” (Dotar).
Sorriso por dentro da Noite was one means for Adelaide Freitas to capture a way of Azorean village and rural life that, by the time of her childhood in the 1950s, was rapidly vanishing, yet still survived in oral tradition handed down by elders. While Freitas likely gathered decades’ worth of local vignettes from a wide range of sources, in Smiling in the Darkness she attributes some to a lone elderly neighbor who said he had shared them with the novel’s fictitious youngest daughter Xana over the years:
“I know that your little girl goes to school, and when the mood strikes me I haul out a tale for her perhaps to tell others someday, or to write about everything that God has sent our way. These are scarcely tilled clods in this midocean of ours, so tiny that almost no one’s heard of them. And to what small extent they have, it’s that sometimes they crumble, other times they tremble with all the fury of hell” (Freitas, 2020, p. 215).
Although Xana, the central protagonist of Smiling in the Darkness, was born barely six months after the novelist, Freitas chose another character to narrate. In homage to Moby-Dick, the storyteller is not Ishmael but Isabel — note the similar names — one of Xana’s sisters (Baker, 2020). All six girls and their brother were born and raised in fictional São Bento, which stands in for villages along the north coast of the concelho [county] of Nordeste, especially Freitas’s hometown of Achadinha.
As if seismological, volcanic, meteorological and other natural catastrophes that sporadically struck the area were hard enough for Azoreans to bear, tragedies caused by human error could also intrude unexpectedly upon their lives. Among the novel’s leitmotifs is the nearby airplane crash into the slope of Monte Redondo, a shoulder of São Miguel’s tallest mountain, Pico da Vara, that killed all 48 people aboard in the early morning darkness of October 28, 1949. In Smiling in the Darkness, this accident occurred just days before Xana’s premature birth following her mother’s long, hard labor — which a few villagers speculated was somehow connected to the crash. Early in the novel, Freitas hinted at how deeply the trauma affected local residents:
It was November. I am backtracking a few years to the moment when my sister was born under the fateful sign of the plane crash on Pico da Vara, which days earlier had intruded upon the serenity of hamlets around here as the trees were dropping their last leaves (Freitas, 2020, p. 32).
“How do you explain the birth of our little girl occurring so unexpectedly far ahead of time? And why today, and why now, at midnight? Could the roar of that ill-fated plane have contributed to hastening our little girl’s birth?” (Ibid., p. 36).
[…] At first they resembled fireworks; some thought it must be another plane crashing on Pico da Vara (Ibid., p. 84).
Freitas cast her most extended and vivid evocation of the crash as a flashback, with villagers living interror of a bogeyman nicknamed Arregalado (due to his bug-eyed appearance) — who, if he even existed, was allegedly brutalizing and robbing some of their populace:
Autumn was at the door.
At sunset that afternoon the north wind brought an unusual wave of heat to São Bento. One could feel a crumbling that was not from an earthquake, houses, or even land. The entire populace perked up its ears like rabbits, trying to detect any sound, to understand what was strange about it.
All at once the locals noticed that the evergreen trees were curling up their leaves, to the naked eye withered-looking, and then they fell shriveled to the ground. No one knew whether it was a plague that would wipe out the flora or, worse than that, a heat that would scorch everyone, human and animal alike.
Pico da Vara soon turned the color of fire. The sun became a half watermelon. Then, toward the southern region, a sudden flash traversed the skies leaving a vast swath of red that rendered the mountain blood colored. A beautiful spectacle, a horrific panorama engulfed in a coagulated hemorrhage. People were thinking that hell had arrived, then deduced it was something else. […] To the most skeptical, it might have been another plane crashing, burning like a fireball, rolling and devouring the heavens, seven years after the first one, in more or less the same place but at a different hour.
Arregalado leapt back into the center of the controversy — he who this time had stolen some watches and rings, taken at the cost of severed fingers. The thief had never come so close tosuch great fortune. Drunkenness, however, led him to squander in short order what had never belonged to him in the first place.
[…] A group of the wisest men were still arguing the possibility that an accident had occurred, while others were inclined to different speculations. They realized, however, that they could not sit idly by and that they had to do something, regardless of what had or had not transpired. So they hurried, in hopes of saving some lives and, if there were none to save, at least to stand guard over the bodies until the responsible parties arrived.
They determined a course of action and set off with sickles slung over their backs, and not another word. They carried axes, pruning hooks, whatever else was at hand, ready to clear brush in search of bodies. The youngest held lanterns. When they reached Pico Redondo they surrendered to the purple silence of night. There was not a single star in the sky. Everyone huddled together, frightened. They waited patiently for the new day. And when dawn arrived, only the birds could be heard.
Traces? Not a one!
[…] But in the long run it turned out to be nothing they had thought. It was not a plane, nor the sun. For those who believed in superstitions it was another sign, along with the falling of the curled leaves and the twigs from fig trees, that Judgment Day was imminent (Freitas, 2020, pp. 124–125).
Even this extended passage, however, cannot capture the full magnitude of the horror of deadly plane crashes. A doctoral research study that included 1994 USAir #427 crash recovery workers found that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was diagnosed in some of the witnesses to such gruesome spectacles and even by some of the mental health professionals who counseled them (Rizzo, 2003, pp. 20–21, 92–93). Of course, in 1949 no such treatments for PTSD yet existed for locals who had viewed the Pico da Vara crash site, or even heard vivid tales of its gore. São Bento’s authoritarian parish priest was of no comfort to his flock in times of distress, either. In Freitas’s account of the village’s All Souls’ Day church service several years later, her narrator compared the priest’s resemblance to a terrifying blackbird:
The initial whispering of the faithful before the start of the mass gave way bit by bit to an unaccustomed shouting that cracked open and crumbled the church walls like cornbread. And when the blackbird fell silent for a brief moment, in search of a stone with which to pelt a sinner once again, what we heard was a rollcall of laments and sighs, hollow coughs and blowing of noses, with which there converged a cascade of tears of guilt.
“Forgive us. Do not forsake us, O Lord our God,” they all said in unison.
Like so many gray reptiles they kept shedding tears, and whispering endless Hail Marys. And the [priest’s] stones did not stop coming. They were leveled with such violence that they seemed to come out of the belly of a volcano that from time to time would go dormant, only to resume with redoubled bursts in an overwhelming explosion. At first they resembled fireworks; some thought it must be another plane crashing onto Pico da Vara. And with each fury and screech from the blackbird, the sun hid behind clouds, shivering.
* * *
A translator must understand not only a writing’s source language but also the work’s background and nuances. Such responsibility entails more than just mechanically decoding words from one language to another without sufficient knowledge of their context; this is especially true for literary translating, where computer translation is often inadequate (American Translators Association).
For this reason, the first step in translating Freitas’s references to the plane crash in the novel was to ascertain whether such an event actually occurred, and if so, the facts surrounding it. An internet search revealed that Air France #009 — departing from Orly Airport in Paris on the evening of October 27, 1949, headed for New York City’s Idlewild (now JFK) Airport — was scheduled to make a technical (maintenance) stop at the Azores’ Santa Maria airport just before 3:00 a.m. Instead, the aircraft plowed into Pico da Vara, some sixty miles off course.
English-language news accounts of the accident provided details as well as the proper vocabulary that translators would need to recount the event in both Smiling in the Darkness and Urbano Bettencourt’s review of the book Constellation. Additional corroboration regarding the crash was supplied by long-time California immigrant José do Couto Rodrigues (1944-2024), who was living in his native village a few miles west of Freitas’s hometown at the time. His recollection of the aftermath included gory tales of the crash site that he heard as local gossip:
I still remember seeing the large truck with many caskets stopped in front of my house in Lomba da Maia. They were on the way from Pico da Vara to Ponta Delgada, and Lomba da Maia was en route. Why they stopped, although briefly, I don’t know. But I remember seeing it vividly.
There was a lot of controversy because some locals in Pico da Vara got to the site way before the authorities and helped themselves to lots of stuff, including a box of watches. My mother bought one of them for herself from a street vendor [vendilhão] . We heard that the box of watches was cargo on the way from Switzerland to the U.S. None of the watches I saw were brand names. They were sold by people from that area who got to the plane early.
It was also rumored at the time that some people cut the fingers off some of the dead in order to get their jewelry and watches. But I don’t know if it happened or was just local gossip. All I heard is that people around Pico da Vara made some money and got a bad reputation. Not a pretty story for the Azores. (Rodrigues, personal correspondence)
Among commentaries found online about the crash of Air France #009 was a 2008 crónica by São Miguel writer and educator Daniel de Sá (1944–2013), a native of the adjacent concelho of Ribeira Grande. In it he highlighted the Stradivarius violin entrusted to the dazzling young French virtuoso Ginette Neveu — and the presence on board of French-Algerian boxer Marcel Cerdan, en route to see his paramour, international singing star Édith Piaf, as well as to arrange a rematch for the world middleweight boxing championship he had lost on June 16. Although de Sá speculated that Neveu and Cerdan had never met, widely published internet images show them and Ginette’s brother Jean-Paul (her piano accompanist) posing together at Orly prior to boarding the flight.
In 2015 Urbano Bettencourt reviewed French author Adrien Bosc’s historical novel Constellation, which delves into the Air France crash in detail. Bettencourt also cited earlier literary treatment of the disaster by Freitas’s fellow Achadinha native João de Melo in his novel O Meu Mundo Não é Deste Reino (My World Is Not of This Kingdom), from the perspective of the local populace: “[A]n apocalyptic tale of the people of Rosário, who faced signs of end times and ventured onto Pico da Vara’s roads and trails to witness the extent of the death and its face throughout the shock and awe — which did not, however, impede their pillaging and looting of the victims.”
The plane crash was covered exhaustively by newspapers from nearby Ponta Delgada to Lisbon, from Paris (where the flight originated) to New York City (its destination), and from places where victims resided to worldwide wire service accounts. Articles also reported speculation as to whether foul weather, pilot error, or radio equipment failure caused the plane, scheduled for a routine technical stop on neighboring Santa Maria island, to veer instead more than 60 miles off course to São Miguel (Le Monde, 1949).
However, based on Freitas’s later description in the novel of delayed access by São Bento residents of that era to newspapers published in São Miguel’s main city of Ponta Delgada, it seems unlikely that locals would have read journalistic accounts of the crash until considerably later. Even then, both grandmothers in Smiling in the Darkness — like a number of real-life villagers, especially older ones — were illiterate, and thus reliant upon word of mouth, radio reports, or being read aloud to by others for outside news.
The crash of Air France flight #009 on Pico da Vara has had a profound and long-lasting impact on the residents of the region and on those who study plane accidents, even to this day. One measure of the intensity of the emotional trauma is the prominence Adelaide Freitas accorded the tragedy as a leitmotif in her novel, where it continued to haunt the characters for many years, as it has people in real life.
Author’s Note
Prior to translating Sorriso por dentro da Noite, I had no memory of having heard of the crash of Air France #009. So I was startled when, during background research, the name of victim Ginette Neveu seemed familiar. As I read of her brief but ascendant career, I realized that while I was a music major in college in the 1960s, some of her recordings were included on class syllabi as recommended listening for foundational works we studied in repertoire and analysis courses. Nowadays her recordings are available online for listening or purchase, so like Daniel de Sá, I could hear her performances of the Brahms (1949) and Sibelius (1945) concertos while I worked.
Although boxer Marcel Cerdan was arguably the most famous of the accident victims, his name rang no bells with me (not being a boxing fan). But in childhood I had become familiar with the singing of his surviving paramour Édith Piaf (an international star since her hit “La Vie en Rose”) through recordings played on a local radio program — and from her live performances on CBS’s popular Sunday night television variety show hosted by sports columnist Ed Sullivan (who, as a boxing aficionado, likely had known Cerdan).
Ironically, not long before Cerdan’s death, Piaf and her frequent collaborator Marguerite Monnot had composed “Hymne à l’Amour” in tribute to him. On September 14, 1949, Piaf performed it at the Cabaret Versailles in New York City, but she did not record it until more than six months after Cerdan’s death. Only after learning this information did I realize that as a child I had seen Piaf’s 1955 performance of the song on Ed Sullivan’s show, preceded by an introduction referring to its significance, which I had been too young to grasp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYgVDXUIAuo.
Piaf sang the song’s English lyrics during one of her eight television appearances on the show (between 1952 and 1959): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhLvhM6XDCE.
The most memorable recent live performance of “Hymne à l’Amour” may well be Celine Dion’s return to performing on 26 July 2024, when she sang it from the Eiffel Tower as part of the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremonies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wQ-GYnKPYM.
References
American Translators Association (n.d.). “Machine Translation: Can’t a computer do all this?”
www.atanet.org/client-assistance/machine-translation
Baker, K.F. (2020). “Translator’s Note.” In Freitas (2020), 223–226. Republished on the Azores’ Comunidades blog, 1 Apr 2020.
Baker, K.F. (2022). “The Role of the Crash of Air France Flight #009 in Adelaide Freitas’s Novel Smiling in the Darkness.” Providence, RI.: Gávea-Brown — A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies, vol. 46, Fall 2022, pp. 1-28. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:fzhxtt7u
Bettencourt, U. (2015, Feb 16). “O último voo do Constellation F-BAZN.”
https://urbanobettencourt.wordpress.com/tag/acidente-aereo-pico-da-vara
de Sá, D. (2008, Jan 21). “Um Stradivarius no Pico da Vara.”
Dotar, T. (2012, Jul 16). “Tractors should be red.” Sacramento Press.
Freitas, A. (2004). Sorriso por Dentro da Noite. Editora Ausência.
Freitas, A. (2020). Smiling in the Darkness. (K.F. Baker, B. J. Chamberlain, R. F. Silva, & E. Melo, trans.). Tagus Press.
Le Monde. (1949, Oct 29). “L’accident du Paris-New-York est-il dû à une panne de radio?”
Rizzo, W.C. (2003). “Mental health services provided in the aftermath of aviation disasters” [Doctoral dissertation, Widener University].
https://www.planesafe.org/planesafe_archive/pdfs/Dissertation_AfterAirCrashDisRizzo.pdf
Rodrigues, J. (2013, Aug 3). “José do Couto Rodrigues: An Oral History.” Conducted by Don Warrin. University of California Bancroft Library, Regional Oral History Office.
https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/rodrigues_jose_2013.pdf