Ulisses Razzante Vaccari*

Commentary on the most recent book by Reinaldo Moraes

Although a bit unusual, it is fair to use a phrase from Kant to define Reinaldo Moraes' novel: it is a work of the spirit, which enlivens the reader's mind. I thought about this when I read its pages, because, in fact, at the end of some of them, my mind seemed like a blender of ideas, lights, and the most bizarre neural connections, whose existence I had never suspected existed in my head. A profusion of thoughts, feelings, memories, comparisons, and all of this – this is the strangest thing – provided by a book that does not have a story, a plot, a myth, as Aristotle demanded of every tragedy, with a beginning, middle, and end.

The book, rather, is composed of thoughts thought up in the solitude of a scatterbrained mind, with literary pretensions, embedded in the body of a middle-aged man who walks up to Teodoro Sampaio, speaking into a tape recorder the ideas that occur to him randomly, in free association, searching for a brilliant first sentence for his next novel. Everything happens there, inside his head. But these thoughts do not get lost, as could well happen with every narcissistic soliloquy, because they are supported by the street, which here plays the role of a concrete poetics.

The character's dangerous delusions do not consume themselves, because they collide and narrow in on the signs of the shops, the shop windows, the tangled wires of the light poles, the smells of the restaurants, bars and pizzerias, or the nauseating smell that overflows from the corpses of the IML. But, mainly, these thoughts collide with the passersby, the most diverse possible, from the richest fauna ever explored by a literary man in search of a character and a story. Most of them are beggars, women of the most varied sort, motorcyclists, upper-class ladies embalmed in their plastic surgeries and in their armored cars, bus drivers who cross the path of the eternal traveler.

The most subjective discourse, thus more personal and more delirious, does not lose its meaning in a solipsistic and uninteresting epiphany. Without a home or a place, the thoughts of this solitary character find their place and place in the stone of the street, in the dirty curb of the dirty sidewalk that stretches out before the feet of the solitary São Paulo flâneur, as if the rhythm of his apparently disconnected thoughts, hummed on his analog recorder, were set by the frenetic pitch of the intersections he slowly passes by.

And just as the streets, with their contingent characters, are left behind and disappear into the immensity of the auto-devouring city, thoughts, as good as they are, also disappear to the same extent that they are propagated into nothingness. Like the mind of a loner, the city is also a cloud of pollution and luminous gases in eternal transformation. In both, nothing remains or remains, like a micro chaos that expresses the macro chaos of the urban universe. Or is it vice versa? In any case.

The chaos that springs from his thoughts follows a common thread, the same one that orders the chaos of the streets of São Paulo, transposed at a snail's pace by the talkative, effusive, obsessive, neurotic, compulsive character, the archetype, in short, of the average São Paulo resident, although literary and with pretensions. beatniks. The intersections he passes through are not just streets and disconnected ideas, but also works and literary references, often implicit, always filled with irony, a lot of irony, as if the reader were reading a satirical history of literature, albeit without the pedantry characteristic of academic tomes, good sure, following the guidelines of a good bar conversation. A story of literature told at the bar table.

For the writer knows for whom he is writing. And for his reader, who also cultivates a literary pride deep down, it becomes impossible not to remember a certain Chillies, Turkeys and Bacanaço, making of bigger than the world a direct offspring of that purest breed of São Paulo writers, with their unmistakably urban verve, born from the chaos and asshole of the metropolis, smoked in its malevolent odors, tuned in the blaring horns and reflected in the blinding light of the advertising signs clouding consciences in the twilight of downtown São Paulo.

It once occurred to me that Chillies, Turkeys and Bacanaço perhaps constituted the epic of São Paulo, its Iliad skewed, and now I see that this upside-down epic poem also sprouted a Aenida, but one Aenida from the lower Augusta, filled, as it could not be otherwise, with failed anti-heroes, motorcycle drivers, taxi drivers and ordinary people, many addicted to cell phones, and also a few nostalgic whores, since modernity has taken away from Augusta those fallen archangels of yesteryear. And so, by taking the reader on a tour of the city of São Paulo through the thoughts of its narrator, the book also brings to the table Roberto Piva, another literary character from the most psychedelic and paranoid of São Paulo.

I can even see his angels of Sodom hidden behind the pillars of the buildings on Augusta, as the character walks down this legendary street. In today's Augusta, Piva's angels look timidly at the modernity outside, as if ashamed of themselves, pushed into the unconscious of the metropolis, our collective Tietê. Only darker. And so, even though one can see Reinaldo's book as an heir to the João Antônios, the Pivas and the Plínios Marcos, and even though he shares the same environment as them, one can see through it that time has passed in this same city, and transformed its streets, resized its spaces and narrowed the thoughts of its newest old passersby.

That is why his language is at once old and new, because his inhospitable environment is at once old and new. A language that expresses, after all, the vision of a middle-aged man who, born in the 60s, balances his verve between the safety of the sidewalk and the wild dangers of the street, between ideas and concepts from the 80s and the youngest manifestations of the generation of the second decade of the XNUMXst century. In doing so, his language achieves a feat. The critic would say that, at the same time that it unites the eras in an unbearable tension, it synthesizes the incest, typical of Brazilianness, of the highest literary culture with the most sordid world of the sewers of São Paulo.

Through his habitual loquacity, his colloquial and unpretentious verbosity, our character, while belching Flaubert and the Bard, finds himself in the position of having to negotiate batteries for his analog recorder with a Chinese street vendor. And so it is, between a São Paulo of yesteryear, populated by the angels of Sodom, and a São Paulo of today, squeezed between the blackout blocks and the demonstrations at the front of Masp, which our character sneaks around, with his look at the same time stupid and in tune, idiotic and critical, naive and mocking. And all this without a kid in your pocket and a hard-on, as every aspiring writer in our beloved homeland called Brazil often does.

*Ulisses Razzante Vaccari Professor of Philosophy at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC).