By JULIO TUDE D'AVILA*
Commentary on Chico Buarque's recently released book
"hindrance It is a brilliant book, written with ingenuity and a light hand.” Roberto Schwarz's characterization of Chico Buarque's first novel still serves to describe the composer's fiction. Bambino in Rome It is an exquisite, fun and subtle book that can be read in a few hours. The lightness, however, does not diminish the strength of the narrative, which shows us – as is often the case with Chico Buarque's books – that reality is not as simple as it seems.
In the first part of the book, the narrator goes through memories of his childhood in Rome, in the 1950s. Moving between the school for foreigners, gala parties and goal-to-goal matches with Amadeo, his poor friend, the narrator describes this period of his life full of nostalgia, with a soft and sensitive look, delighting in the memory of the rides he took around the city on his nickel-plated bicycle, the unrequited love of a colleague and the time he danced with Alida Valli, the biggest star in the world. Italian cinema at the time.
The scenario he builds is beautiful, and the streets he ventures into appear in the reader's mind with a particular familiarity, as if he shared that experience with the narrator. With the same tone, he tells how his teacher put his hand down his shorts and squeezed his butt and, when he thinks about reporting him, he decides that he would not be taken seriously because he is Brazilian, that is, a native of a liberal country that Who knows, maybe one day the teacher could visit, to handpick boys on the beach and harass them at will.
We also learn that the narrator spied on his sister when she was changing, that unrequited love gave him his first lesson in cuckolding, and that he narrowly escaped kidnapping or abuse. The mildness of the story is crossed by these moments that insinuate a fragility in the picture we see, indicating that it is supported by a twisted or incomplete perspective, even though, with humor, the prose seeks to disarm these elements.
Furthermore, the narrator constantly questions the veracity of what he explains: “[…] my wallpaper was an imitation of a brick wall. Due to the humidity, the paper was coming loose at the seams, revealing a real brick wall underneath. My dream book of memories could be just that, a wallpaper reproducing what it hides at the same time”, in an exemplary excerpt from the author’s crystal clear writing.
Metalanguage and self-reference occur sometimes, but they do not tire or take the reader out of the story as is common in novels that attempt the same. In Bambino in Rome it reinforces the ambiguous character of fiction. In this first part, then, we are left with a nostalgic image, although pierced by less innocent reminiscences.
In the second part, the narrator returns to Rome after he grows old, and the fracture of the story is fully revealed: without the imaginative resources of memory, the narrator has to confront what is in front of him, the immediate, the real. Walking through the streets he knows, he sees a boy close to the age he was when he first came to Rome.
The boy, however, seems to suspect that the narrator is going to abuse him, pay for something sexual, and makes a scene in front of the hotel where he is staying. When he returns to the apartment where he lived, he discovers an almost empty building, and when he tries to recover the history of that building, he is rejected by the Senegalese employee who takes care of cleaning the place and fears that she will be fired if she helps him.
He finally manages to speak to the resident of another apartment in the building, whose help he tries to win over when he learns that she, like him, spends all day reading. When talking about literature, however, he learns that she reads legal documents and is rarely distracted by literary whims.
The woman finally gives in when she thinks she can receive a commission for mediating contact between the narrator and the current owners: a group of Russian mobsters who use the place for sex parties with prostitutes from different countries (we can assume that they work in drug trafficking). of women, among other things), and do real estate speculation with the place.
The narrator clarifies that he does not want to buy the property, he only wants to visit it once, to remember his childhood. He gets the opportunity, but doesn't make it past the entrance. He suddenly walks backwards, as if his mother's spirit is pulling him by the collar. The dreamlike idea of the apartment is preserved.
It is clear, then, that he does not want to get rid of the illusion that sustains his image of that place, that time, those people and who he is. The romanticized past is something that the narrator constructs, an invention that hides the brutality of today's world, hides the fissures of reality in our collective fabulation about what we live in and supports the story he tells himself about who he is.
The trip to Rome is an escape, in a literal sense too: the narrator leaves Brazil and leaves his family behind, but he suspects they don't miss him. But it is an escape into a past that is not quite the way we remember it, not quite the way we would like to be able to remember it.
To be tolerable, it needs a dose of self-deception and a dash of mystification. It's an image that gives us a refuge from the fractured and violent world we live in now. Facing this fact would force the narrator to review what he invented, get rid of these illusions and evaluate, without deceit or childish eyes, what was this reality in which he was formed and how we got here.
The last chapter masterfully closes the story and puts a bitter and ironic smile on anyone who, rightly, has ever been sent to the “bridge that left”, putting it in terms familiar to the composer. Some people can create realities for themselves, others cannot.
Bambino in Rome is another splendid book by Chico Buarque.
*Julio Tude d'Avila Graduated in Social Sciences from USP.
Reference
Chico Buarque. Bambino in Rome. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2024, 168 pages. [https://amzn.to/3M4G8sU]
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