A Wild West Show From Brazil’s Northeast : SHOWDOWN <i> by Jorge Amado; translated by Gregory Rabassa (Bantam Books: $18.95; 352 pp.) </i>

Recently, a California anthropologist working in South America complained about a group of foreign students he accompanied on a trip to the interior. Their bus broke down, forcing them to arrive at their destination a day late on a truck laden with peasants, chickens and grain.

The students moaned endlessly about the discomforts of the journey and treated the peasants with disdain. At one point, the anthropologist turned to his fellow travelers and said, “Hey, cool it. If you expected four-lane highways here you’re missing the point. This is a frontier society.”

The incident came to mind as I read “Showdown,” by the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado. The book is precisely about frontier life a century ago in the backlands of Brazil’s northeast Bahia region where the author grew up on a cacao plantation.

The setting is the town of Tocaia Grande, named for a “big ambush” that took place during a territorial dispute between two landowners before the town was settled.

Amado, 76, Brazil’s most widely translated storyteller, is best known for his novel, “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands,” a passionate, steamy story about life in the barrios of San Salvador de Bahia. In “Showdown,” Amado masterfully describes his characters--cowboys, gunslingers, migrant laborers, hard drinking merchants and itinerant prostitutes--through a series of violent incidents.

The unifying thread is the town itself, which grows from a few shacks to a small settlement, taking shape finally with the arrival of migrant families driven off lands deeper inland by unscrupulous landlords.

“Showdown” brings to mind our own cowboy fiction, with its bands of marauders, bloody shootouts, and dance-hall girls. Tocaia Grande, though, is more primitive than Dodge City, Kan., or Pecos, Tex. The Brazilian backwater settlement lacks basic institutions such as a church, a courthouse, a sheriff, or even a dance hall.

The law doesn’t show up until the end, not to protect the little guy, but to enforce the will of a powerful land baron. Today, wire service cables still report massacres of peasants and Indians by hired gunmen in the Brazilian outback. Things haven’t changed much. Perhaps that’s Amado’s point.

“My literature and my life have one characteristic trait in common: never to depart from the life and concerns of my Brazilian people,” he wrote in a brief autobiography.

Brazilian authorities imprisoned Amado in 1935 and exiled him twice for his leftist political views. He made use of the time traveling through Europe and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, in his words, to involve himself in “movements for peace, fighting for freedom and in defense of culture.”

Amado’s earliest novels of the 1930s (“The Land of the Carnival,” “Cacao” and “Jubiaba” were strongly political. Later, he admits, his style lightened up, becoming more humorous and picaresque, as evidenced in “The Violent Land” (1943).

“Showdown,” a sequel to “The Violent Land,” reflects Amado’s youth on his father’s cacao farm where the young writer witnessed outbreaks of criminal and political violence, followed by floods and malaria epidemics. The novel carries forward Amado’s reputation as a literary craftsman, and picaresque storyteller. His character descriptions run from the amusing to the hilarious. He compares one of Tocaia Grande’s ladies of the evening to a small vessel, “her small behind like the stern of a sloop, she was sailing along at high tide.”

Amado’s description of two itinerant missionaries is unforgettable. He employs Chaucerian impishness in his portrayal of the German Frei Zygmunt Gotteshammer (God’s hammer) and the Dutch Frei Thun of the Holy Eucharist.

The men of Tocaia Grande, not known for their churchgoing ways, are impressed by the tall and bony German’s fire and brimstone sermons. But the prostitutes favor the mild-mannered and cherubic Dutchman, exchanging scandalous gossip about what they would do if they could “hold the chubby friar with the crybaby face in their arms.”

Amado’s sketch of the arrival of migrant workers to Tocaia Grande evokes the tenderness of John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.” When a bone-thin mother carrying an emaciated child catches sight of the village, she feels the caress of her man’s callous, loving hand, and thinks that “maybe in those virgin lands she could go back to tilling the soil, raising animals, feeling her body warm, even becoming pregnant again.”

Amado’s prose is pungent, bawdy, and naughty, and he’s fun to read. Who else could bring to life a ribald and loquacious macaw with an obscenity for a name thanks to her constant insults to passers-by? Only her owner could pet her. Anyone else the papagayo would peck and send to the devil with a string of dirty epithets.

In “Showdown,” Amado lets the reader smell tropical plants and commune with its mysterious landscape where clouds “run across the sky” and “light and shadow mingle in an atmosphere of treason, ambush, and the announcement of danger.”

“One hardly knows what to admire most,” wrote Harriet de Onis, one of Amado’s principal translators, “the dexterity with which Amado can keep half a dozen plots spinning; the gossamer texture of his writing; or his humor, tenderness and humanity.”

Gregory Rabassa has done an excellent job in translating “Showdown,” but one wonders why he uses the word drover for cowboy. When was the last time anyone went to a “drover’s bar,” or put on “drover’s boots”?

That, though, is a minor flaw. After putting down “Showdown,” this reader harbors a modest hope--that at age 76, he could be nearly half as compassionate and half as good a storyteller as Jorge Amado.

Half as naughty, too.