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"A Youth Already Old." When Quadros says, "I am no plutocrat," he means it. He was born and raised a Roman Catholic in the tiny Mato Grosso town of Campo Grande on what was then the woolly fringe of Brazil's wild western frontier. His home was a rented room over a barbershop, where his mother, Leonor da Silva Quadros, the daughter of a small-time immigrant Argentine cattleman, tried to keep house, and where his pharmacist father, Gabriel, made life miserable for them both. Gabriel, says one of Quadros' close friends, "was abnormal—a real villain with a mania for women, displaying constant aggressiveness toward his son and wife." Pursued by bill collectors, the family flitted from town to town, until at 16 Jânio was finally allowed to settle in São Paulo. He took a year's course in education, started teaching part time (for 12¢ per hour), and enrolled in São Paulo's highly respected School of Law.
The law-school years were marked by neither great distinction nor great popularity, but by an accident. While whooping it up at a pre-Lenten carnival parade, Quadros was nearly blinded by an exploding bottle of colored ether that Brazilians happily spray around as part of the fun. When the bandage came off, his left eye was canted out about 20°. He brooded for months, turning out tortured poetry about love, Brazil's destiny, himself:
Don't speak to me of suffering!
I feel it in my breast.
When the sun sinks away
I murmur in brokenhearted silence.
I am a youth already old.
Quadros graduated into total obscurity. He took half of a 12-ft. by 15-ft. downtown office, read his way through the life of Abraham Lincoln between the occasional shopkeepers and petty crooks who sought his services. He began sharing his dreams of someday becoming somebody with pretty Eloá do Valle, the daughter of one of his father's druggist friends, married her in 1941 after two years of courtship. "He was," she reports, "the ugliest man I ever met."
The courtroom did not hold much future for a scrawny fellow with a funny eye. In 1945, when Dictator Getúlio Vargas fell, another way presented itself: politics, where offbeat appearance can sometimes be an advantage. "When he first got the idea, I was very dubious," Eloá says. In his first race, in 1947, he fetched up 47th on the list of candidates for 45 São Paulo city council seats. Only when the Communist Party was outlawed and 14 of the winners were eliminated did Quadros get a seat.
"Let Them Watch." All at once his pent-up rages and frustrations seemed to burst out. Like a banty rooster, Quadros flew at the graft-feathered machine of São Paulo's Governor Adhemar de Barros. Quadros raced around the city listening to citizens' protests and holding rallies, a rumpled, stubble-chinned reformer who sucked oranges on the platform and waved a caged rat.