By SALETE DE ALMEIDA CARA*
Considerations on Chico Buarque's book of short stories
1.
Em years of lead, by Chico Buarque, the set of eight stories does not spare the reader from discomfort.[I] The reading of three of them aims to show how the authorial strategy demands critical reflection from the reader through the mediation of narrative voices. That is the challenge. However, as can be seen in the stories in the volume, it is precisely this reflection that is increasingly under threat.
The global system, plunged into geopolitical, economic, environmental and social crises, seems to emerge stronger from the blatant evidence of the contradictions and ambiguities of its purposes, which are not hidden but made explicit. How can literature deal with the subject matter of a time that shamelessly exposes the violence of arbitrary actions and the interests of profit and military power? In these stories, narrators and characters do not escape their part in the process from the perspective of Brazilian life.[ii]
The stories challenge the inattentive reader (let's say) to modernization with failed social integration which, as such, was normalized with violence by the civil and military coup of 1964, to the delight of those who still celebrate it today, apart from the relief of many at the end of the Dictatorship mixed, however, with the chorus of neoliberal financial consensus from the 1970s-1980s onwards.
A process that advanced in the 1990s by including, as “progressive”, the promise of opportunities guaranteed by the agenda of capital and the market, with a view to controlling populations, social movements and managing poverty. As is known, productive disorganization combined with the shake-up of the national development project resulted in social disintegration, with reduced prospects for work and survival linked to the sovereignty of the market, through which strongly organized illegalities take place.[iii]
In the stories analyzed here, the objective conditions of the impasses of narrators and characters, intertwining present and past time, concern the relations between a social and economic reality justified in its most disastrous and perverse dimensions and the experiences narrated. The elaboration of the narrators and characters, in a situation, asks the reader to make a judgment about the stage of contemporary life, which also concerns him, by swallowing diverse subjects in diverse ways as functional pieces in the historical course of the world and national life.
It is worth highlighting a question asked by Antonio Candido when discussing Brazilian short stories from the 1960s and 1970s, in an essay written in the 1970s. As an innovative response to a “fiercely repressive” time unleashed in 1968, with “urban violence at all levels of behavior”, he highlights in the choice of themes and the first-person narrative technique the “aspiration for a prose that adheres to all levels of reality”.
In other words, “the brutality of the situation is conveyed by the brutality of its agent (character), to whom the narrative voice identifies, thus ruling out any interruption or critical contrast between narrator and narrated material.” A “fierce realism” that “attacks the reader at the same time as it involves him.” And he asks whether the first-person identification with “themes, situations and ways of speaking of the marginalized, the prostitute, the uneducated urbanite, which for the middle-class reader has the appeal of any other picturesque person,” could not result in “a new exoticism of a special kind, which will become more evident to future readers.”[iv]
By pointing out the risk of stereotyping form and content, the critic leads us to think not only about the function of the narrative point of view as a formal element involved in the challenges posed by the material and the time, but also about its relationship with the reader. Chico Buarque's short stories, published in 2021, respond to these challenges.
2.
“My uncle”, as we will see, reveals the horror of the situation through the construction of the first-person narrative, a girl subjected to constant sexual abuse by an uncle (certainly a militiaman) with the connivance of her father and mother; “The passport” shows how the narrator’s own movement in the third person composes the precariousness of subjects swallowed up by a historical-social reality frozen as unquestionable evidence, as he runs after a point of view that accounts for what happens when a popular “great artist” embarks for Paris; years of lead installs the narrator's voice in the first person in a narrative present constructed, in his own way, by memories and perhaps fantasies of his own formative experience, in the 1970s, as a boy physically limited by polio in a military family environment.[v]
In “My Uncle”, the way in which the girl recounts the terrible experience to which she is subjected, as a victim, reveals the extent of the social and psychological violence of a process that she does not understand and that, in fact, destroys her. And which is represented by her relationships with an uncle, her father and her mother, the latter mentioned, not by chance, at the beginning and end of the story. The first-person voice reveals the destructive and barbaric nature of the world in which she is given to live.
“My uncle came to pick me up in his new car” and while “daddy pretended to be sleeping in the room”, “mommy welcomed my uncle with two kisses, offered coffee, water, cheese bread”. The girl is hurriedly taken out of the apartment by her “restless” uncle (“my uncle looked smaller without his sunglasses”), who reinforces the promise of taking them “to a better apartment, in a better neighborhood”. “My father would never refuse a upgrade, according to my uncle, and I would be the luckiest to live near the beach.”
The girl accurately describes her uncle’s car (“a 4x4 Pajero SUV”) and the procession through the narrow streets crammed with “old cars and carcasses”. She recalls that her uncle “always said that envy is a bitch”. And she notes that, with maximum speed and honking, “it was inside the tunnel that my uncle made up for lost time”. In Lagoa, he pays for gas in cash, “hundred-real bills”. The car’s sound system has an “impressive volume” and “each beat of the funk was like his heart pumping hard”. In Barra da Tijuca, always impatient, her uncle advances among “street vendors”, “grown men”, “windshield wipers” and “jugglers”, knocking over the cages of a “parakeet seller”.
At a beach shack, she eats oysters (“He had taught me to like oysters”), and enters the sea at her uncle’s command, while he waits dressed, saying at one point “that he felt like eating my ass”. When they leave the beach, there are the men that the girl had seen from afar, complaining about the illegally parked Pajero, without daring to confront her uncle. “Envy is a bitch,” she must have thought when she saw the blocked drivers, who waited with their heads down and sullen faces. Entering a slum, the neighborhood has on one side a “residential street” and on the other “more of a slum”, she observes. Her uncle is treated with deference and makes large distributions (“wads of money”) to workers on a construction site (illegal, the reader will surely think).
Already on the avenue, the dispute between her uncle and a motorcyclist brings the girl a sudden and brief glimpse of a desire for autonomy. “At one point I had the impression that he was watching me, but insufilm on the side window blocked his view of the inside of the car. (…) and now, if he wanted, he could see my legs through the transparency of the front window. Through the helmet visor, I could also see that he had light green eyes.”
The motorcyclist damages the Pajero with an iron bar, is thrown from behind into a flowerbed and rolls over several times with the powerful motorcycle, “hugging it”, as the girl sees it. “Luckily, just ahead was the Mitsubishi dealership.” There the uncle demands and gets the car exchanged for another one on display in the store, and when he buys Viagra for him at the pharmacy, there is still a possibility. “They must have thought that only a very suburban girl would go shopping in a bikini.”
The enumerative and almost protocolary rhythm of the girl's narrative, when telling the tremendous story, is repeated in the scene at the motel where her uncle puts on a porn film. "Without taking off his sunglasses, he ate my little ass and bit my head. Then he lay down on his side and spent a long time stroking my straight hair, just like my mother's." The brief affective memory is naturally connected to and equivalent to her uncle's secret promise that she would be the first to travel on the plane he was going to buy, to his yelling at her for not waking him up, to paying the motel bill "in several hundred dollar bills," to the reverse gear that scrapes "the front fender against the wall," to the "extra money" she gets from her uncle to take a taxi ("he said he would have problems at home"), since he lived right there in Barra da Tijuca.
Back home, the girl's narrative merely reproduces her mother's reaction, who complains about the unused condom in her purse and the risk of pregnancy and miscarriage. "My father assured me that no one would force me to have an abortion, not even my uncle with all the power he has." The final sentences of the story are dedicated to the father and mother's considerations (so to speak) about the situation. "Mom said she didn't raise me to give her a grandson who is also a nephew. Not to mention that blood relatives sometimes produce degenerate children. My father said that it's not quite like that."
In this way, the process of degradation experienced and accepted by the girl, incapable of understanding, closes in on her and imprisons her in a fatal and merciless way. A violence to which the reader would add if he observed the horror of others only through moral or psychological clichés – submission and subservience, interest, admiration, naivety, among other generalities. In the narrative of the girl thrown to the beasts, the historical and social tragedy sets its paws.
3.
In the second story, “The Passport”, the third-person narrator tells the story of a “great artist” crossing Tom Jobim Airport towards Paris, “with hand luggage and nothing to check in” (certainly with a guaranteed landing, the reader might think, keeping an eye on the author himself who lives in that city). [vi] The “great artist” wants to get to the front row of business class straight away, without “drawing attention” or “stopping for anything or anyone”, take an anxiolytic, cover his face and sleep until he arrives in Paris. However, this wish will be put on hold due to the disappearance of his passport, with consequences that will come after he barely manages to board the plane.
How does the narrator configure the low tone of his story? By moving between proximity and distance as an organizing voice of the narrated facts, he seeks a point of view capable of giving meaning to the story and to the subject he is willing to address, in whose scope he is immersed as part of the material. The authorial strategy does not lose sight of the impasses of this search. By occasionally hinting to the reader, the broad scope of the experience that overwhelms the narrator is suggested, and which becomes clear at the end of the story, as if there were nothing left to do but throw in the towel. A way of giving up or embracing?
The end-of-the-line atmosphere is already established when the “great artist” arrives at the airport. The narrator describes the atmosphere without sympathy, which does not correspond to the measure of prestige and “glamour” that is usually conferred upon him by the expectation of flying out of the country. In the “meanders of a free shop“With little movement, the lighting in the almost empty stores is redundant.”
The “great artist,” a regular traveler, is disoriented in the stores and “for the first time” notices the “mirrored floor with arrows and arrows in different directions,” finding a bathroom “with difficulty.” In a hurry, he tries to beat the speed of the conveyor belt and even becomes emotional with a couple in love, giving rise to a suggestion from the narrator that seems to pique, in ambiguous complicity, the reader’s curiosity. “Perhaps there was also someone in Paris waiting for the great artist.”
Upon realizing that his passport was missing, “he could not have guessed that at that moment a curious person was opening an abandoned passport along with his boarding pass on the bathroom counter.” Anticipating the “great artist,” who “could not have guessed,” the narrator shares with the reader the scene and his judgment of the “individual” who “could hardly believe it when he saw on the document the name and face of the artist he hated the most.”
Unable to bear “the idea that the celebrity would take champagne in Paris, traveling on the same plane as him”, and “sensing that the scoundrel would return to the bathroom at any moment”, the guy “didn’t refrain from spitting on the corncob”. It turns out that the term “scoundrel” will soon be an insult shared between the “great artist” and the so-called “individual”, his real opponent. The narrator’s proximity to both will allow no more than a moral judgment on individual dispositions of hatred and resentment, common to both.
For now, the “great artist’s” first trip to the bathroom to get his passport will not yield good results. He comes face to face with a young man with “playboy looks” (“who looked at him with that hostile expression he had been getting used to lately”), with a “fat guy in a sweatshirt” (the narrator insists more than once on qualifying the “fat guy”), and praises his own luck when he comes across a wheelchair user. And in the first of two snapshots of himself, directed at a mirror, he becomes aware of his own aging (“the great artist looked at himself in the mirror just as he was getting older”).
Back on the treadmill, he didn't quite "realize that he had a girl in front of him with half a dozen shopping bags free shop”. But the narrator advances his own disdain for the couple, which brings back the playboy from the bathroom door, while ridiculing the girl's pleas of “Love, Love” and the response of “Love impassive looking into infinity”. In this way, he plants clues to his narrative script. Until then, when he quickens his pace on the treadmill, the “great artist” only recognizes the “handsome guy” and observes the phlegm of the couple “for whom perhaps the doors would never close”. The narrator makes use of the proximity that free indirectness grants him without ceasing to try to preserve his control over the narrated matter.
When he goes to the bathroom once again to get his passport, he is recognized by the driver of the electric cart, gets a ride, and sees the playboy and his wife again. The narrator assumes that “from that journey he might only remember the young wife of the handsome man, who nudged her husband and held back her laughter when she saw the artist displayed in an open car traveling down the empty aisle in the wrong direction.” In front of the trash can, the narrator tells us that “the great artist” is “aware of how much he was hated in certain circles and it was no surprise that some scoundrel would go so far as to throw his belongings in the trash.”
From there he deduces “that the scoundrel would not leave the passport so easily within reach, he would sink it deeper and deeper to where only a scoundrel like him could reach”. And he begins to enjoy rummaging through that rubbish, even without wanting to give in to “the one” who, for sure, would imagine him capable of such a feat “even in the absence of spectators”.
Once again a mirror reveals what the “great artist” did not yet know: in addition to his old age, the possibility of his villainy (“Stunned, the great artist looked at himself in the mirror at the very moment he was transforming himself into a villain”), however nuanced by the effort of a gesture: “he still tried to recover some trace of sympathy, or vestige of good feelings, to apologize to the cleaning lady who…”
In this way, the “great artist” is not spared by the narrator from his ambivalences and ambiguities. Aware that “the world seemed to conspire against the great artist”, the fact that “he was a detestable artist on the outside made him feel cleaner on the inside”, and he even “sometimes” suspected “that allowing himself to be loved by strangers is a form of passive corruption”. A critical disposition that would be well suited to a belligerent disposition. Even though he is exhausted when he boards, and despite the “negative buzz” and the “slanted glances”, which make him feel like “an intruder, as if his heavy breathing contaminated the atmosphere of business class”, he indignantly demands his right to the seat already reserved by the window and occupied by another passenger.
It is in business class that he believes he has identified the person responsible for the disappearance of his document, in a mistake of judgment that is beyond doubt, calculating spiteful and violent revenge (in the terms of upper-class international travelers). The clues set up so far by the narrator somehow prepare the deception: it is precisely that “handsome playboy”, the “impassible Love” who accompanied the easy-going woman in the “stiletto boots”.
A “mustard-colored rage” leads “the great artist” to the couple’s armchair, “where the handsome man snored with a placid expression, almost a smile on his lips.” The narrator dwells on the “great artist’s” imagination. “One would say that he was dreaming of adventures in Paris with his pretty wife, who slept in the armchair next to him facing the window, a piece of her smooth thighs showing through the blanket. Looking more closely, however, there was no lewdness in his smile. The smile was only with the left corner of his mouth, the typical smile of a scoundrel.” Faced with the “satisfied hatred” of that “authentic scoundrel,” being himself only a “scumbag apprentice,” he is still able to restrain the urge to “knock the handsome man’s teeth out” – “a stupid outburst,” the narrator and the character agree – but not “his desire for revenge.”
He immediately recognizes the suede jacket, among others hanging up by the flight attendant, as well as the woman's coat with the same pattern as his boots. The “great artist” then “stole the scoundrel's passport” and with “the eagerness of a teenager on the verge of masturbation,” the narrator emphasizes, he destroys the document in meticulous fashion until he throws it in the toilet and flushes it, especially when he learns of “the scoundrel's identity with his compound name, his four surnames” and the stamps of multiple and varied international trips around the world.
His urge to see “an entire past of the past” is uncontrollable. playboy globe trotter thrown in the trash can”. Once the destruction is complete, and now “without anger or hatred”, he just wants to “sleep soundly”. And in the morning, when he sees the coats returned to the passengers and “his good nature restored”, he will have a brief moment of pity for the playboy, soon replaced by the “scoundrel spirit” of the desire to meet the girl “by chance, bored and alone, sightseeing in the streets of Paris”.
Upon landing, however, the suspect and the woman will declare themselves his fans, while the passenger “who had usurped his seat” will identify himself as the guilty party. The false duel between a near scoundrel and a supposed scoundrel haunts the farcical spectacle. What is the deeper meaning of this farce, carried out by a narrator looking for a point of view and revealing the impasses of the representation of a situation that, since it cannot be justified, results in the subject’s impotence in the willingness to face the dynamics of supposed evidence?
In the dry ending (“Upon leaving, the great artist wished his traveling companion a pleasant stay, who replied with a lighter in his hand: next time I’ll set it on fire”), the threat of violence is unexpected and at the same time present throughout the plot, and may leave the reader somewhat astonished or half-smiling, conniving and even somewhat critical of the direction the world is taking. Could this ending also be a final wink to the reader, keeping an eye on the complicity with a point of view that, after all, as has already been said, throws in the towel? The authorial strategy is worth warning: the reader should include in his reflection the difficult path of the narrator himself, who, as we have seen, is part of the subject. [vii]
4.
In the short story “Years of Lead,” the first-person narrator recalls his childhood and experiences from 1970 to 1973 in a family with a military father who was directly involved in the tortures of the military dictatorship of those years. In this narrative of memories of the past, the experience gathered through the boy’s own voice is filtered and conducted by the adult narrator in a specious way, which is worth noting. The memories are stitched together by the boy’s games with lead soldiers (and later tin soldiers), heroically acting out old military operations around the world. This is the main focus of his interest in those years and in that military environment.
In the first paragraph, the reader may find it at least curious, certainly instigated by the author's strategy, that the dating of the years of these games may already suggest the narrator's disposition in relation to what he is narrating, taking into account his lack of interest in the historical content of the wars and massacres staged. Hence, considering the way in which the boy's life is remembered in the present, the attentive reader will be interested in the relationship between the narrated time and the time of the narrative, which, at the end of the story, the prose will emphasize as a problem shared with him from the beginning. An ambiguous thread sews together the times and the configuration of the childish and mature voices.
Opening the story, “on May 9, 1971, the cavalry of the Confederate army crossed the Tennessee River under the command of General James Stuart, who immediately pointed his cannons at Fort Anderson” (this is the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865, to verify the veracity of the references to the general who had participated in the massacre in Kansas and the capture of the abolitionist John Brown).
At that moment, his friend Luiz Haroldo rarely appears to play with the narrator, showing himself to be impatient, because “lately all he wanted to know about was football”. Therefore, in the staging of the invasion of Belgium in 1914, “I had to speed up the advance of the German troops” and the “infantry charge” lasted “less than 15 minutes”. The reader may assume that even if the movement of the troops had lasted more than fifteen minutes, it would not have been appropriate to massacre the civilian population of a neutral country, which played an important role in the First World War.
His friend Luiz Haroldo is the son of a decorated major who was promoted to the top of the army, a colleague “from the academy and the barracks” and his father’s superior. He “brought his Armed Forces” to play with and used to keep the pieces in the case, after “smelling and cleaning with a flannel” the ones “that I had handled”. At a certain point, having stolen some of them, the narrator receives a tremendous beating from his father, which leaves a scar. His father’s reaction is somewhat justified: “my father boasted that, in thirty years of military service, he had never enriched himself, nor had he ever stolen a cigarette from a subordinate. That’s why he dragged me out of bed and called me a crook and a thief”.
The violent beating is not compensated by the box containing six “very mean” Brazilian Army soldiers that the father gives the boy the next day. “Shortly after this incident, Luiz Haroldo’s visits became less frequent,” despite the insistence of the boy on crutches, with limited mobility. Without his only friend and his lead army, he uses matchsticks as soldiers.
In 1970, however, he received a gift from the major on one of his “special mission” trips abroad: a huge set of tin soldiers, a material that made the pieces “more modern and realistic than lead ones”. “My mother felt a little sorry for me, and one day at the club she told Luiz Haroldo’s father about my passion for lead soldiers, hoping that he would lend me the collection that his son had abandoned at the back of the closet”. On July 21, 1970, “at the foot of the pyramids, Napoleon’s troops routed the Mameluke army, knocking down all their horses and advancing towards Cairo” (this was the battle of 1798).
The boy lives in a house with “armored doors, bars on the windows like those of a prison and an electrified wall like the one in Berlin.” And “the happiest period of my childhood” had been when he had polio, surrounded in bed by nurses, doctors, Luiz Haroldo and his tin soldiers, as well as the assiduous presence of the major and his wife who, on weekends, would also come over for a whiskey and a game of canasta.
Limited by crutches, by his mother's care and the target of nicknames, he even misses Luis Haroldo's mother, "who stopped visiting us, although her husband would not turn his nose up at whiskey with my father," in a relationship governed by circumstances of command and cordial subservience. Hence, he assumes "some quarrel" between his father and the major for his privileged promotion, while "marking his career by doing dirty work in the basements" of the dictatorship, which could justify his constant tension and domestic violence. It would be "possible that such gossip reached the major's ears."
The major also stops coming for whiskey, but shows up weekly to visit his mother “even on the nights my father was on duty at the barracks.” The boy takes part in “dinners and wines at good restaurants” until his mother sends him to bed (“Luiz Haroldo must have warned his father against eating at home”). On these occasions, the major talks about his father’s “special missions” and the many “complimentary mentions that should make us, my mother and me, proud.” And the boy hears about the “hard and dangerous task” that the major entrusts to his father. “From what I could gather, my father dealt with prisoners of war, criminals who had real blood on their hands.”
One morning in 1972, he inadvertently overhears through the door of his parents' bedroom, the major explaining to his mother about his father's "prestige" ("his sense of duty, discipline, respect for hierarchy, patriotism, and impeccable honesty"). And giving details about his activities ("these delinquents, both men and women, would spend hours hanging from an iron bar, more or less like chickens on a spit. Then my father would teach his team how to properly insert objects into those creatures. He would insert objects into the prisoners' anuses and vaginas, and I didn't know those words, but I could guess, if not their meaning, by their sound: the word vagina couldn't be more feminine, while anus sounded like something more somber"). Then he hears whispers and moans amidst the unknown words.
In this episode, the adult narrator sarcastically emphasizes, through the terms he gives to the memory, the naivety of the boy who does not realize what was going on between his mother and the major, even when he hears “my mother’s moaning voice saying anus, vagina, anus, vagina” to his lover. “I went back to my room, because I was already over the cramps, but I felt that I would not sleep again that night. On August 5, 1972, in Namibia, German general Lothar Von Trotha decimated the Herero blacks in the Battle of Waterberg.” Surely, the reader may think again, the dimension of the horror carried out by the general during and after the battle of August 1904, in German-occupied Southwest Africa, the first genocide of the XNUMXth century, could not be captured in the joke.
By the end of the afternoon, he will recognize “the bones of the trade of a true commander like my father”, unlike his own lack of patience “to take care of the wounded, let alone the dead scattered under my bed”. That same day, his father, exasperated, tells his mother out loud (instead of beating her) about the betrayal “of his best friend”, repeating the major’s arguments. As if he felt “given to espionage”, the boy in turn retells what he heard from his father.
The major had proposed to the Air Force High Command, aiming at a “drastic reduction in expenses” (“since I didn’t feed my soldiers, I never stopped to think to what extent my father’s efforts were a burden on the state budget”), measures that would reduce his father’s work to interrogations. And if “the Air Force closed the deal, those creatures would be thrown out of planes into the high seas, and I’m not sure I understood that part correctly”. Given what the boy thinks: “they were all old acquaintances of my father, who had become fond of their suffering”.
The ironic record that captures the boy's naive observation is followed by the somewhat cynical record of his mother's speech (“My mother sighed and tried to console her husband”), which reproduces the terms of the major's praise for his father (“sense of duty, discipline, respect for hierarchy, patriotism, honesty beyond reproach”). Almost a year later, on April 30, 1973, “General Custer's expedition stormed the Sioux village,” invading the boy's room with a “formidable effect” of fire in the Indian huts, which he built with paper (in June 1876, the reader may recall, the general was unable to destroy another Indian camp, was defeated by the Sioux, and would later be acclaimed as an American hero, played in the film by Ronald Reagan Santa Fe trail, of 1940, and by Errol Flynn in The intrepid General Custer, 1941, directed by Raoul Walsh).
The fire spreads to the room (“it’s a good thing my parents were asleep, otherwise I would have definitely gotten beaten up”), the boy runs out and locks the door (“I ran through the living room”, “I don’t know what I was thinking when I locked the door from the outside”). He thinks about going to his old friend’s house, but decides to go to the ice cream shop, without crossing the street, and after walking around the block with a lemon popsicle, he sees the house on fire (“I think I saw the silhouettes of my parents clinging to the bars of the windows”) and hears the siren of the fire department that “arrived too late.” The boy runs despite his crutches, wants to go to his friend’s house who has already moved away, shows doubts and recognizes possible mistakes in his own judgments when he remembers (or fantasizes like a mature narrator) the death of his parents in which he would have casually participated.
The naivety that marked the memories of his childhood in different tones takes on a dimension of significant ambiguity. It could be said that the authorial strategy leads the reader to think, based on the narrator's formative staging, about the way in which, by depicting the past, it is situated in the experience of the present. Thus, it challenges the reader to return to the story, with an eye on the relationship between narrated time and narrative time, searching for the meaning that is stolen from him and at the same time demanded by the formal elaboration and construction of the narrator. What is it about, after all?
The ambiguity that constitutes the narrator's irony is based on a mixture of moral resentment and political connivance, the former punctuating (and in a certain way disguising), in the framing of the story, the adult's suspicion (or certainty) regarding the affair between the mother and the major. If this is the case, the vengeful intention would be delegated to a supposed and involuntary crime committed by the boy in the past (even counting on some desolation due to the delay of the firemen).
In turn, the narrator's conservatism in the present narrative is evidenced by the prudent and concealed treatment of the violence of those years of lead (the father, after all, could even be called a good man). The violence exposed through the naive filter of a boy withdrawn into the family and military environment is somehow minimized by the casual tone given by the narrator to the dates of the games with lead or tin soldiers.
It is worth remembering that both the “two hundred pieces” that the boy receives from the major, brought back from one of “his international trips” and, as the boy assesses, “more modern and realistic than the lead ones”, and the prisoners of the military dictatorship who were to be thrown into the sea are made of tin. The economic justification for the murders is accepted by the boy naturally. “Now, from what I understand, the major advocated a drastic reduction in the expenses with food, clothing and medical treatment for the prisoners. (…) There was no reason to waste time and resources on inflexible prisoners, as if made of tin, nor on those who had already given what they had to give, those who went crazy, those who turned into zombies”. Could the apparently fortuitous displacement of the material, the tin, somehow intersect the realism and modernity of the little soldiers with the shamelessness of the economic argument that justifies the violence? Or would it be imputing an excessive intention to the narrative strategy?
By reviewing its formation, mixing up moral content and violence from the dictatorial years, without effective reflection on the objective and subjective unfoldings and results of a life experience, the prose empties these contents into the ambiguity of the narrator's position and, at the same time, covers and duplicates, masks and reveals the functioning of the narrative material, leaving it up to the reader to unravel it. Irony is constitutive of the impasses of a problematic relationship, as such normalized, between subject and experience, between narrator and material.
The years of dictatorial lead, filled with a supposed fable of remembrance, reveal (through the art of authorial strategy) the strength of the contemporary process that relies, as part of the very engine that justifies and also preserves it, on the conjunction between the disposition of the subjects and the objective functioning of the past and the present, including their historical barbarities. In this way, and not by chance, the story closes the volume.
The reader is once again put in check, as always in these stories, going against the grain and with no room for a distant or merely picturesque reception, in terms of Antonio Candido's distrust regarding the possible developments of those stories examined in the 1970s.[viii] Anyway, things?
*Salete de Almeida Cara is a senior professor in the area of Comparative Studies of Literatures in the Portuguese Language (FFLCH-USP). She is the author, among other books, of Marx, Zola and Realist Prose (Editorial Studio).
Originally published in the magazine Literature and society.
Reference
Chico Buarque Years of Lead and Other Tales. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2021, 168 pages. [https://amzn.to/3VrZNbi]
Notes
[I] On the historical-social and formal challenges faced by the writer's prose since the 1990s, see the essay by Ivone Daré Rabello, “Mundo opaco: os contos de Chico Buarque”, published on the website the earth is round, January 1, 2022.
[ii] To highlight the long tradition of our impasses, it is worth remembering that, as early as 1943, responding to Mário Neme (“Platform of the new generation”), Antonio Candido confessed his historical disappointment and called upon the creative and critical imagination capable of grasping “the meaning of the moment”: “But now is the time of restlessness and melancholy; of nervous enthusiasms that are wasted for nothing; of sudden despairs that destroy a life. And you want to know what we think of all this! Frankly, I would prefer you to read some of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poems; especially some unpublished ones. Carlos Drummond de Andrade is a man from “another generation”, the one you want us to judge. However, there is no young man who possesses and realizes the meaning of the moment like he does.” Cf. intervention texts, selection, presentations and notes by Vinicius Dantas. São Paulo, Duas Cidades/ Editora 34, 2002, p. 238.
[iii] In “Ajuste intelectual” [Intellectual Adjustment], from the mid-1990s, dealing with “national oddities”, the “Brazilian path to modern capitalism” and retracing the historical path of “intellectuals against, but in favor”, Paulo Eduardo Arantes proposes that it would be “the case of imagining a line of reasoning”, namely: “in fact, there is no longer any politics that is not merely decorative and no one will reach the top of the State who does not invest in the fetishistic aspiration that permeates all social classes without exception, because no one can live with the unimaginable idea that a totally monetary economy is in fact unfeasible in practice; not only the State, but also private enterprises of all kinds stake their future on fictitious profits; now, without a future, there is no politics, unless we continue to call the art of entertaining through the media the monetary illusion of those who have no money, but vote every four years, by the old name of politics”. Cf. the thread. Rio de Janeiro, Peace and Land, 1996, pp. 326-327.
[iv] Cf. Antonio Candido, “The New Narrative”, in Education at Night. Rio de Janeiro, Ouro sobre Azul, 5th edition revised by the author, 2006, pp. 254–260.
[v] About the novel hindrance (1991), in a text from the same year of its publication, Roberto Schwarz pointed out that “hallucinations and reality receive equal literary treatment, and have the same degree of evidence. As the motivating force of the former is greater, the climate becomes dreamlike and fatalistic: the future may turn out even more wrong. The interpenetration of reality and imagination, which requires good technique, makes the facts porous. (…) The dry and factual account of what is there, as well as of what is not, or of absence in presence, operates the transformation of consumer fiction into demanding literature (that which seeks to live up to the complexity of life).” Cf. “Um romance de Chico Buarque”, in Brazilian Sequences. New York, New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 219-220.
[vi] This short narrative can make you think from the inside out, despite or precisely because of the fictional character that makes it unique, in the current media success of auto-fictions, which are rarely capable of interpreting the subjective experience under the scrutiny of the contradictions of their time without self-indulgence.
[vii] It is worth remembering another authorial strategy, perhaps remote but curious, that aims to make the reader a decisive part of understanding what is being narrated. Different ways of constructing the narrator are based on the specificities of historical experiences, but which can dialogue regarding the centrality of formal mediation. In the short story “Singular Occurrence,” from 1883, Machado de Assis’ narrator, steeped in ideas of the time and his social class, gets stuck in evaluating the supposed betrayal of a popular girl to her married lover, and stuck in his adherence to the theme of betrayal. However, the formal elaboration asks the reader (which he does not always succeed in doing) to, while distrusting the narrator’s arguments and twists and turns, also distrust his own adherence to the relevance given to the subject and to the enjoyment of the distance he shares with the narrator, both of whom are settled, with moral superiority, in an agreement with the current social order. Hence, the reader can wisely agree with the narrator’s assertion, without questioning it. “Anyway, things.”
[viii] Short texts with “innovative techniques” in an “era of hurried reading”, dealing with the demands of the publishing market, consumption and a “provisional literature”, plus the “difficult tension of violence, the unusual or the dazzling vision” would have Impact and “shock on the reader” as reception measures. And they could result in “watered-down clichés”, “new exoticism of a special kind” or “attractiveness of any other picturesque” for the “middle-class reader”. (Antonio Candido, “A nova narrativa”, in ob, cit, pp. 258-259). Reading today Years of Lead, Perhaps it is not too much to ask who writes Chico Buarque, a successful popular composer.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
