By SUSANA SOUTO*

Macabéa is a character who dismantles what we know about others, about ourselves, about the world, about the invention of joy

“No, I don’t feel sorry for those who die of hunger. Anger is what takes me. And I think it’s right to steal to eat.”
(Clarice Lispector, the discovery of the world).

“Oh, Joshua, I have never seen such misfortune\ The more misery there is, the more vultures threaten”
(Chico Science).

It was up to me, ironically, to make the dessert for this banquet book [Eating with your eyes] on a not-so-sweet topic: hunger. Dealing with hunger when enjoying what you eat for pure luxury, or pleasure, is to go back to the beginning of the meal/reflection and say that no, we cannot be satiated, as we still have this very serious problem to face, which is part of a chain long series of actions necessary to guarantee the right to life, in this country, on this planet, as Clarice Lispector tells us in a chronicle from September 1967, in Newspapers in Brazil:

“Twenty-five years from now”

“They asked me once if I would know how to calculate Brazil in twenty-five years. Not even in twenty-five minutes, let alone twenty-five years. But the impression-desire is that in a not too remote future we may understand that the current chaotic movements were already the first steps in tuning and orchestrating themselves towards an economic situation more worthy of a man, a woman, a child . […] But if I don’t know how to predict, I can at least wish. I can intensely hope that the most urgent problem will be resolved: that of hunger. Much faster, however, than in twenty-five years, because there is no more time to wait: thousands of men, women and children are true walking dying people who technically should be admitted to hospitals for the malnourished. Such is the misery that a state of readiness would be justified, as in the face of a public calamity. But it's worse: hunger is our endemic, it is already an organic part of the body and soul. And, most of the time, when describing the physical, moral and mental characteristics of a Brazilian, it is not noticed that they are actually describing the physical, moral and mental symptoms of hunger. Leaders who have as their goal the economic solution to the food problem will be as blessed by us as, in comparison, the world will bless those who discover the cure for cancer” (LISPECTOR, 1999, p.33).

We are 56 years after the publication of this chronicle and unfortunately, as I write this text, there are 21 million people in Brazil suffering from hunger and 70 million in food insecurity.[I] Hunger is still central today in the lives of a huge portion of the Brazilian population and also in the configuration of Macabéa, created by Clarice Lispector and recreated by Suzana Amaral, one of the most disconcerting and memorable characters in our arts.

 Published in the year of its author's death, 1977, star time is a unique book in Clarice's work, and will be the motto, in 1985, for the first feature film directed by Suzana Amaral, in a very happy debut that brings together extraordinary actors, such as José Dummond, Fernanda Montenegro and Marcélia Cartaxo, an actress who is making her debut in the cinema, a 19-year-old woman from Paraíba at the time was the same age as Macabéa.

We have ends and beginnings tying themselves together here.

The great famine

The title chosen for this text was cut from the excerpt: “I forgot to say that sometimes the typist got sick of eating. This had been going on since she was little, when she found out that she had eaten fried cat. She was scared forever. She lost her appetite, she was just really hungry” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 55). The great famine here is understood not in the sense it has in history, in which there is a great famine in Europe, in the Middle Ages, but in the sense of a famine that affects millions of people, not just Macabéa, which would be another kind of metonymy , with regard to hunger, of a huge portion of the Brazilian population.

Throughout her career, Suzana Amaral will continue to intertwine cinema and literature: in 2001, she A life in secret, 2001, based on the book by Autran Dourado; in 2009, he translated for cinema Hotel Atlântico, by João Gilberto Noll, and in 2018, he offers the public his reading of The Morel case, by Rubem Fonseca. But these are ingredients for other dishes.

So let's get to this somewhat bitter dessert.

Suzana Amaral, reader of Rodrigo SM

In an interview,[ii] Suzana Amaral says that she was taking a film course in New York and her screenwriting teacher told the class to choose a novel, being very categorical about the book's length: short. She then went to a library and ran her finger along the spine of a row of Brazilian novels, stopping at the thinnest one. This finer one was Clarice Lispector's last book, from which she wrote the script, in partnership with Alfredo Oroz.

On the cover of the book, there is only star hour, but after the “Author's Dedication (Actually Clarice Lispector)”, twelve more titles appear: A culpa é meu or A Hora da Estrela or Ela que se arrange or O Direito ao Scream or As for the future or Lamento de um blue or She doesn't know how to scream or A feeling of loss or Whistling in the dark wind or I can't do anything or Record of antecedent facts or Lachrymogenic history of cordel or Discreet exit through the back door (LISPECTOR, 1995, p.10).

This profusion of titles indicates the existence of multiple narratives that fit into this book in which we have the fictionalization of the authorship in the character Rodrigo SM, belonging to the middle class, which is related to food, as he himself (a)notes, “I am a man who has more money than those who are hungry, which makes me in some way dishonest” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 33), who finds himself faced with the difficult task of writing about a subject so different from his own life : “The upper class regards me as a strange monster, the middle class is suspicious that I might unbalance them, the lower class never comes to me” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 33).

Or even, in another metanarrative passage so similar to Clarice's prose: “But why am I feeling guilty? And trying to relieve myself of the weight of having done nothing concrete for the girl’s benefit” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 38). Rodrigo faces the ethical dilemma that dealing with Brazilian poverty in his work, in some way, is also benefiting from the existence of poverty, as highlighted by Nádia Battella Gotlib, a central name in Clarice Lispector's critical fortune: “The novel focuses, then , ultimately, the power of the writer, or the intellectual, who “takes care” of the poor, translating their dreams, but not being able to make these dreams come true in practice. In other words, the novel questions and demystifies the power of the intellectual who, both out of humble piety and competent arrogance, feeds on his object of study, without managing to make it the subject of his story.” (1995, p.470).

But Suzana Amaral is not exactly a reader of Clarice's novel. When writing her script, she is, let's say, a reader of Rodrigo SM's book, which, by the way, is not in the film. She brings to the screen not the book “by Clarice” and its embedded stories, but rather the book “written” by Rodrigo, and invites us to follow a few months of the daily life of a miserable country girl from Alagoas, her “[…] weak adventures […] in a city completely made against it” (1995, p. 35), a large Brazilian urban center to which many northeasterners have migrated and continue to migrate in search of survival conditions.[iii]

This metropolis “made against itself” is changed, in the film, from Clarice Lispector’s Rio de Janeiro to Suzana Amaral’s São Paulo, but that doesn’t matter, because, as the Titãs song says: “misery is misery anywhere.” ”.

Perhaps, in search of a fine book for her first script, Suzana Amaral chose an even shorter one: the novel by Rodrigo SM, in which the narrative confronts hunger, a “scourge manufactured by men, against other men”, in the lapidary definition of Josué de Castro.[iv]

Tell me what you (don't) eat and I'll tell you who you are

In chronicles, novels and stories, Clarice talks a lot about food. In Family relationships is present in “Reverie and drunkenness of a girl”; “The smallest woman in the world”; “A chicken”; "Happy birthday"; “Dinner.” In the foreign legion, we have the anthology “The sharing of bread”. This is not about making an exhaustive list of foods in Clarice's work, but I want to remember that the discovery of the world, begins (even though the volume was not organized by the author) with the painful “Boring Children”: “I can’t. I cannot think about the scene that I visualized and that it is real. The son who is hungry at night and says to his mother: I'm hungry, mommy. She responds sweetly: sleep. He says: but I'm hungry. She insists: sleep. He says: I can't, I'm hungry. She repeats in exasperation: sleep. He insists. She screams in pain: sleep, you annoying! The two remain silent in the dark, motionless. Is he sleeping? – she thinks all awake. And he's too scared to complain. In the black night they are both awake. Until, out of pain and tiredness, they both doze off, in the nest of resignation. And I can't stand the resignation. Ah, how I devour revolt with hunger and pleasure.” (LISPECTOR, 1996, p. 20).

This revolt perhaps led the author to Close to the wild heart composing Macabéa, a kind of Severina, who leaves the backlands for the big city, first Maceió, then Rio de Janeiro.

Both in the book and the film star hour, food is an important resource for character composition. At the beginning of the book, access to food is used as a criterion for classifying the public, something quite unusual in Brazilian literature: “(If the reader has some wealth and a well-accommodated life, he will go out of his way to see what others are sometimes like. If you are poor, you will not be reading me because reading me is superfluous for those who have a slight permanent hunger […])” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 46).

And also at the beginning of the film, there is a very harsh sequence, in which misery is evoked. Macabéa, who shares a guesthouse room with other equally poor women named Maria, wakes up in the middle of the night, sits down on a urinal and, shortly afterwards, while still sitting, takes a chicken leg that is in an aluminum packaging and He eats it, while doing his basic needs, in this room very similar to a Brazilian prison cell, where there is also an improvised kitchen, with a two-burner stove.

Figure 1

Opposite poles meet. The low material and the mouth. While urinating, Macabéa also eats ugly, cold food, which was not stored in a suitable place, in a reinterpretation of a painful excerpt from the book: “Sometimes, before going to sleep, I would feel hungry and go half hallucinating thinking about cow legs. The remedy was to chew paper well and swallow it” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 47). Much could be said about this role that is chewed in the absence of food, even more so in a novel so marked by metanarrative reflection.

There is so much at stake here: nighttime hunger, cold and ugly food, the absence of a table, a chair, a conventional place to eat, creating a picture of the degradation of the lives of those who have nothing. But with Macabéa nothing is simple or obvious, and Suzana Amaral, a fine reader, understands this. In the same room where the camera composes this moment of pain and need, in another sequence, Maca, alone (it is almost always in solitude that Clarice Lispector's characters face anguish, ecstasy or clandestine happiness), On a day off, she dances with a sheet that sometimes acts as a kind of wedding veil, sometimes as a parangolé, reminding us of Hélio Oiticica:

Figure 2

In the book, the same beauty: “So, the next day, when the four tired Marias went to work, she had for the first time in her life the most precious thing: solitude. She had a room just for her. She couldn't believe she enjoyed the space. And not a word was heard. So she danced in an act of absolute courage, because her aunt wouldn't understand her. She danced and twirled because when she was alone she became: free! She enjoyed everything, the hard-earned solitude, the battery radio playing as loud as possible, the vastness of the room without the Marias” (LISPECTOR, 1995, pp. 57-58).

In contrast to Macabéa, thin, country girl, pale, with shriveled ovaries, eating only hot dogs, orphaned by father, mother and money, we have Glória, her stenographer colleague, whose father works in a “beautiful butcher shop” (1998, p. 40), “raised in the flesh”, as she herself says, bringing “a good Portuguese wine in her blood” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 76).

This character, whose future is already indicated by the name, seduces Olímpico. In the market of affections, Glória is seen based on what she eats and is treated as food: “Seeing her, he [Olímpico] quickly guessed that, despite being ugly, Glória was good quality food. […] Later, from research to research, he learned that Glória had a mother, father and hot food at the right time. This made it top quality material. Olímpico fell into ecstasy when he found out that her father worked in a butcher shop” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 77). Macabéa, who shares with Olímpico a backwoods past of poverty, also sees and sees herself in relation to Glória through access to food:

“Macabéa understood one thing: Glória was a fuss to exist. And it all must have been because Glória was fat. Fatness had always been Macabéa's secret ideal, as in Maceió she had heard a boy say to a fat woman passing by on the street: “your fatness is beauty!” From then on, she dreamed of having meat and that was when she made the only request of her life. She asked her aunt to buy her cod liver oil. (Even then she had a penchant for advertisements.) Her aunt asked her: do you think you are the daughter of a family wanting luxury? (LISPECTOR, 1995, p.52).

Glória is the one who “has the malice of every woman”, as Noel Rosa sings, the one who knows “the pain and delight of being what she is”, to take up Caetano Veloso's response to this song.[v] She is a female character composed based on the gender stereotype: fake blonde (following the model imposed by industrial cinema, which appears in the film in the posters pasted by Macabéa on the wall of her room), fat, a real Carioca, seductive.

Figure 3

(I believe it is important to open parentheses about this character, at a time when we are once again seriously discussing reproductive rights in Brazil. In the book, there is no mention of abortion, but in the film, in 85, the last year of the military dictatorship, Suzana Amaral inserts this theme at some moments: in Glória's dialogue with a lover, in Glória's conversation with Macabéa and in Glória's consultation with Madama Carlota This theme remains on the agenda of feminist struggles and is always very tense and delicate, in the conservative and conservative context. Brazilian religious.).

Madama Carlota, the fortune teller played masterfully by Fernanda Montenegro in the film, comes from a past of poverty and hunger, and is also shaped by food, in the book, not in the film. At the end of the narrative, in dialogue with Machado's short story “The Fortune Teller”, Clarice Lispector completes her gallery of female characters with this ex-prostitute who reads Macabéa's future, in letters and “[…] while speaking, she took from an open box one candy after another and filled his small mouth. He didn’t offer any to Macabéa” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 92). These sweets, inside which there is a “thick liquid” (a somewhat obvious metaphor), connect with their femininity (since sweets are eaten by women and children) and reinforce their hedonism, sweets are eaten for pleasure, not out of necessity.

Macabéa's long dialogue with Madama Carlota, who only offers her client cold coffee, is followed almost line by line by Suzana Amaral. This will, in fact, be a rare moment in which Macabéa will receive the delicate, yet professional, simulated treatment of the fortune teller and will have for the first time news of a future that made her “shake all over because of the painful side of excessive happiness” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 96).

We also have in the film the three Marias with whom Macabéa shares a room and eat as much as she does. There is an unusual prophecy of the horrors of Brazil here: these miserable women work in Lojas Americanas, in the novel. They appear cooking in a scene on the small stove, an improvised kitchen, and later hold Macabéa's head, in a moment of solidarity while the country woman vomits. In the movie, not in the book.

The right to vomit

Hunger seems glued to Macabéa, or as Clarice Lispector writes in the chronicle of “Daqui a twenty-five anos”: “[…] most of the time, when describing the physical, moral and mental characteristics of a Brazilian, one does not notice that the physical, moral and mental symptoms of hunger are actually being described” (data, p.).

This fragment, in fact, seems to echo an excerpt from the classic published in 1946, The geography of hunger, by Josué de Castro: “It is not only by acting on the bodies of the victims, gnawing their viscera and opening wounds and holes in their skin, that hunger annihilates the life of the countryman, but also by acting on their mental structure, on their social conduct. No calamity is capable of disrupting the human personality so deeply and in such a harmful way as hunger when it reaches the limits of true starvation. Chastened by hunger, buffeted by the imperative need to feed, primary instincts become exalted and man, like any other hungry animal, presents a behavior that may seem the most disconcerting.” (2022, p. 252)

Josué de Castro of whom this year we are commemorating, in the sense of commemorating together, the 50th anniversary of his death and who was a great thinker on hunger, and beyond, and one of the victims of the military dictatorship, having died in exile. And even though he is dead, when he returns to Brazil, the dictatorship prevents his wake and burial from being publicized, fearing a major political act. Which reminds us of a famous thesis on history by Walter Benjamin: “The gift of awakening sparks of hope in the past is the exclusive privilege of the historian convinced that the dead will not be safe if the enemy wins. And this enemy has not ceased to win” (1994, p. 224). Josué, who dedicates his book to Rachel de Queirós and José Américo de Almeida, calling them “hunger novelists”, would certainly have been moved by Macabéa, who perhaps would not have left the backlands if Brazil had carried out agrarian reform, necessary to solve the problem of hunger.

This 19-year-old country girl is so absurdly miserable that, in the book, she doesn't even have the right to vomit. Vomiting is denied to Macabéa, the one who “thank God never vomited”, as Olímpico says, in one of her disconcerting conversations. And, in a passage that always brings me to tears, she explains why. In the consultation he has with the incompetent and merciless doctor, excluded from the film, “… inattentive [who] thought poverty was an ugly thing” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 85), we have the following dialogue:

— Do you sometimes have a vomiting attack?

— Oh, never! — She exclaimed, very astonished, as she wasn't crazy about wasting food, as I said.

(LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 85)

She almost vomits, at the moment of her death: “At this exact moment, Macabéa feels a deep nausea in her stomach and almost vomited, she wanted to vomit what is not her body, to vomit something luminous. Star with a thousand points” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 104).

But in the film, Macabéa vomits, towards the end, after going to Glória's house, who invites her, very guilty for having stolen Olímpico de Jesus,[vi] with whom he had a “perhaps strange relationship but at least related to some love” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 77) and conversations about “[…] flour, sun-dried meat, dried meat, rapadura, molasses” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 63). At Glória's mother's birthday party, Macabéa is surprised by the abundance and eats excessively, vomiting when she returns to the boarding house, helped by Marias.

Suzana Amaral grants Macabéa the right to vomit, so common in Sganzerla's films, as Patrícia Mourão reminds us, in her moving talk about No That, Spider[vii]. In the book, Clarice Lispector deals with this in a much harsher way. Food is something so rare in Macabéa's life that she doesn't even have the right to waste it by vomiting, which is reinforced in several passages, such as the following: “The next day, Monday, I don't know if because of the liver hit by chocolate or because of the nervousness of drinking something rich, he felt sick. But she stubbornly did not vomit so as not to waste the luxury of chocolate” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 84).

Chocolate, in the book, and the hearty lunch for Glória's mother's birthday in the suburbs, in the film, are therefore luxuries for Macabéa. In the film she can “waste food”. Vomiting, she experiences excess, which is denied to her in the book. Or, we can also think that the vomiting in the film is part of the fictionalization of Macabéa's extreme misery: she eats so poorly and little that, when she eats well, she vomits. She never has the right to food. She doesn't vomit so as not to waste it, and when she eats too much of it, she can't keep it down. She is condemned to a diet based on garbage from the food industry controlled by the American empire: hot dogs and coke[viii], and sometimes coffee.

In several passages of the film, Suzana Amaral shows the coca-cola next to the radio, an important vehicle of mass communication even today in Brazil. The collusion between hegemonic media and large corporations, even today, sustains and prolongs misery.

This drink, common on Brazilian tables and central to the country's economy at a certain period, has an interesting place in the book and film. An index of hospitality, coffee is offered to Macabéa, thin, cold and without sugar, by the owner of the guesthouse where she lives, when she goes to look for a room. And, at the end of the book, it appears again, now offered by Madama Carlota, cold and without sugar. With milk and sugar, it is also offered by Olímpico to Maca, who is amazed by the rare generosity of this “boyfriend”, seen by her as “her guava paste with cheese”. In this sequence, Macabéa almost gets sick from so much sugar, the center of many of our ills, linked to large estates, monoculture and slave labor, which she puts in her small cup:

– […]Well, look, I’ll buy you a coffee at the bar. He wants?

– Can it be dripped with milk?

– Yes, it's the same price, if it's more, you pay the rest.

Macabéa did not pay Olympic any expenses. Only this time when she bought him a leaky coffee that she filled with sugar almost to the point of vomiting but controlled herself so as not to embarrass herself. She put a lot of sugar to use. (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 50)

If Glória is “raised in the flesh”, the one with plenty of meat, Macabéa is the one who eats almost nothing and who does not awaken anyone’s appetite. When he abandons her, Olímpico tells her:

–You, Macabéa, are a hair in the ointment. Don't feel like eating. I'm sorry if I offended you, but I'm sincere. Are you offended?

– No, no, no! Oh, please, I want to leave! Please tell me goodbye soon” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 78).

Suzana Amaral, so attentive to the use of food as an element of character composition, does not incorporate into her film a scene in which Olímpico chews chilli pepper, during the first meeting with Glória, to immediately show who is boss. It would be good to have seen this relationship between food and gender, but in the film Olímpico it is not the male goat who chews pepper and overcomes poverty, becoming, as indicated in a narrative summary in the novel, a deputy and dismantling the irony inscribed in his name. , in which the reference to Olympus contrasts with “Jesus”, the surname of those who do not have their father's name in the registry.

Suzana Amaral reserves a different destiny for Olímpico, or rather, a more predictable destiny, which ignores the complexity and diversity of destinations of poor northeastern migrants in the big city, whose most extraordinary achievement is that of President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, who leaves from the interior of Pernambuco to São Paulo in pau-de-arara, and was elected three times to govern this unjust country.

The closest that Olímpico comes to this unlikely but possible future is in a scene, a kind of homage to Glauber Rocha de God and the devil in the land of the sun e also from Terra em trance, in which he makes an impassioned speech in an almost empty square, attended only by Macabéa and a beggar woman, who applauds him, promising to solve Brazil's problems, from Cajazeiras (land of Marcélia Cartaxo) to Brasília. But the heroism of Olímpico de Jesus ends there. In the end, he remains lost and alone, “in a whole city made against [him]”.

There is yet another sequence that I like to think of as a tribute to inventive cinema. It is a moment in which Macabéa and Olímpico are in a deserted, unattractive place, on a day out, under a viaduct, and suddenly he lifts her up and simulates an airplane flight. The sounds of laughter mix with the noise of the train and Macabéa flies. I see in this very beautiful moment a dialogue with Sganzerla, in Copacabana, my love. Unsubmissive bodies in freedom, just like in Maca's dance with the parangolé sheet, in the bedroom.

Guava paste with cheese

Before finishing this bitter dessert, I want to leave some images of sweetness, difficult, but still sweet, that Clarice and Suzana invite us to savor and that linger in my memory, after going through this “punch in the stomach” story about characters who feel a “slight permanent hunger”.

At the end of the film, Macabéa wears a steamy blue dress, similar to a wedding dress (happy ending in industrial cinema) and runs into the arms of the man (stereotypical good guy) who runs over her. Even if in imagination, or in a final delirium of death, she lives the end of the movie she watched, when she had some money. This ending seems to remake, in some way, the circularity staged in the book, whose beginning is “Everything in the world began with a yes” and whose end is the word “Yes”.

Figure 4

Macabéa is one of the most disconcerting characters I know. It dismantles what we know about others, about ourselves, about the world, about the invention of joy. She, “thin grass”, knows how to invent a world to live in: listening to a borrowed radio, singing, going to the cinema, being enchanted by words, and, in a moving celebration of freedom and leisure, waking up early on Sunday: “to spend more time doing nothing” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 20).

Maca, who loved guava with cheese, “the only passion in his life” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 20), seems to be telling us that we should also imagine ways to make Brazil leave the hunger map forever and have more days of hunger. guava with cheese for everyone. Happier days: “Happiness? I have never seen a crazier word, invented by northeastern women who are out there in droves” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 25).

*Susana Souto is a professor at the Faculty of Arts at the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL).

Originally published in the book SEDLMAYER, Sabrina, CLIMENT-ESPINO, Rafael and ANDRADE, Luiz Eduardo (eds.). Eating with your eyes: food culture cinema. Authentica, 2023.

References

The hour of the star. Directed by Suzana Amaral and Alfredo Oroz. São Paulo. Rais Fil-Producer

month. Embrafilm. 1985. Full film available at: https://www.you-tube.com/watch?v=MBxAMJvSip0

BENJAMIN, Walter. About the concept of History. In: BENJAMIN, Walter. Magic and technique, art and politics: essays on literature and cultural history. Translated by Sergio Paulo Rouanet. 3rd ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987. p. 222-234.

CASTRO, Joshua. Geography of hunger. The Brazilian dilemma: bread or steel. São Paulo: However, 2022.

GOTLIB, Nádia Battella. Clarice: a life that counts. Sao Paulo: Attica, 1995.

LISPECTOR, Clarice. The discovery of the world. Rio de Janeiro: New Frontier, 1996.

LISPECTOR, Clarice. The hour of the star. 23. Ed. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1977.

Notes

[I] “The 2023 edition of the report [The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI), published today jointly by five specialized agencies of the United Nations] reveals that between 691 and 783 million people went hungry in 2022, with an average of 735 million. This represents an increase of 122 million people compared to 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.” Available at https://www.fao.org/brasil/noticias/detail-events/en/c/1644602/.

[ii] Available in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykPcZqaq2U0.

[iii] The topic of migration has already been widely analyzed. See Northeastern migrants in Brazilian literature, by Adriana de Fátima Barbosa Araújo. Curitiba: Appris, 2019.

[iv] Hunger is understood here not as a momentary discomfort that will be satisfied, but as a social problem, derived from the deep Brazilian inequality, a framework in which, in the case of this narrative, the characters Macabéa, Olímpico de Jesus and the Marias are also inserted.

[v] Noel Rosa’s song is called “Why lie?” and Caetano Veloso’s “Gift of Illusion”.

[vi] Olímpico refers to the Greek world, indicating strength, but his severe condition is reinforced by his surname, Jesus: “– Olímpico de Jesus Moreira Chaves — he lied because his surname was only that of Jesus, the surname of those who do not have a father.” (LISPECTOR, 1995, p. 60).

[vii]At Cine Sal, whose text is part of this volume.

[viii] Drink that has already been discussed at Cine Sal with a lot of humor by Sabrina Sedlmayer, based on the thought-provoking film How Fernando Pessoa saved Portugal, by Eugêne Green (2018).

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