According to Jorge Amado, a book sometimes is born from an event, from a sentence, from a person, like what happened with Mrs. Flor and her two husbands in 1966. The novel is the result of a
real story which happened in the 30's in Bahia with a lady which, when young, married a bohemian, gambler and woman chaser, killed right after the marriage. The young widow marries again with the honest Portuguese merchant Teodoro, but after a while starts dreaming with Vadinho, the
dead husband, who appears demanding love. Honest and with a
moral above any desviation, Mrs. Flor starts
living a dreadful
drama without knowing how to solve it. In real live, the widow made her drama eternal by telling it to a friend of Jorge Amado who works himself a way to solve it. The characters surprise a very much. If it's living, reacts, doesn't obey, explains the author to state that in the romance Mrs. Flor's character surprises Jorge Amado by falling to her dead husband's charm which, after fulfilled, goes away while she delivers herself to her real husband thinking that if one's good, two's great. The writer thought that due to her untouchable moral Mrs. Flor wouldn't accept her dead husband's charm, and that was the ending he wrote before sleeping and dreaming about another ending in which she, after all, redeems to temptation. For the author, the moral of the romance is that love conquers death.
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