GABRIELA
"CRAVO E CANELA"
DIED IN SALVADOR
The brazilian brunette Gabriela, a creation of the internationally famous writer Jorge Amado (1912-2001), was sensual and exciting. The character popularized in TV and movies translations of the masterpiece which taken her name and her myth in the brazilian folklore is based on the legendary image of the sexy, disposable, innocent and lover. This is a very old myth that made a worldwide fame of Salvador, since the times the capital of Bahia was also the capital of Brazil, between the 1549 (year of the Salvador's foundation) and 1763 years.
However, the myth of Gabriela is dead today. And had died before her author death. The brunette who seducted the men, with her languid smile, doesn't exist in the Salvador everyday. Well, it can hurt the emotive tourist feelings and, in the same way, the Salvador inhabitants emotions, but the true is that the Gabriela's stereotypes is really extinct in Salvador. There's so much sense to find her kind in Australia and Austria. The actress who got fame doing Gabriela on the TV and movie, the Curitiba's native Sônia Braga, lives in the USA. The Gabriela kind, in general aspects, should be hidden in a noble smalltown in Sidney.
Here we must to consider two things not very pleasant. First, the pretty women number in Salvador is very reduced, as isn't enough to exist few women than men in the capital of Bahia. Second, is pratically nule the number of the beautiful females who are disposable, and here, it must to remember, there's not possible to describe disposable teenager girls (or, in general, women before the 22 years-old) ready to love, because it exists in any other place, not with the frequence that is supposed, but with some regularity, even so in regions with population predominantly masculine, as the brazilian states of Roraima, Amapá e Rondônia. Disposable little girls don't indicate female hegemony in a place.
The women in Salvador generally got insensible emotions. The most of them turned to be engaged, several women is well married and have children. They're not so much emotive, but just gentle for education, Não são muito emotivas, são apenas gentis por etiqueta, winsome for social obligation, but very far from the "acessibility" that the tourism insists to affirm that it still exists.
Besides, the number of women considered ugly or not attractive in Salvador is bigger, doing that the general proportion of a woman to each two men, that really happens in the capital of Bahia, grows to the rigorous proportion of a beautiful woman to each half score of men.
The capitalism, in one side, and the social unsafeness, in the other side, made that the image of the "foxy lady" got to be over, once that the Jorge Amado's Gabriela myth is a stereotype proceeded from the Salvador's old times, before this city's urban revolution on the 1950s, although the book "Gabriela" was published in 1958, in full developing process to urbanize Salvador. Now the Salvador's beautiful women are reserved and suspicious and, how they are so rare, these females get living their lives with their valentines and husbands, while the writers of the tourism marketing campaigns, isolated in refrigerated four-wall offices, continue to dream to evocate the idealized Salvador that doesn't exist at last, the Salvador where "women bear like a cell". This fiction is dissolved in dust down the Itapuan atlantic sea.