The year of the revolt of the destitute

The year of the revolt of the underprivileged

27/12/2024

Culture • Literature • Books

By HUGO ALMEIDA*

Commentary on the recently released book by Ronaldo Costa Fernandes

The year of the revolt of the underprivileged is the third historical novel by Ronaldo Costa Fernandes (1952), from Maranhão, who has lived in Brasília for decades, after having lived most of his life in Rio de Janeiro and nine years in Caracas, where he was director of the Center for Brazilian Studies at the Brazilian Embassy. He has published around 30 books, many of them novels, several of which have won awards, including The solidary dead (with the prize House of the Americas, in 1990). Also a poet and essayist, with a doctorate in literature from the University of Brasília (Unb), Ronaldo Costa Fernandes had released Scallop on the island of Maranhão (2019) and Balaiada (2021)

In his new historical novel, the writer achieves a leaner text (it is the shortest and densest of the three) and an even more refined language, poetry interspersed in the prose. In more than half of the 63 chapters, almost all of them two pages long, the story is narrated in the first person by the merchant José Quirino, who learned to write well thanks to the access he had to rich libraries in Aveiro, where he was a seminarian.

Quirino deals mainly with the troubled life in São Luís of a man abandoned by his wife, father of a girl with cognitive disabilities, Maria, who lives with him and the efficient maid Raimunda, like Dona Benedita, The widower (2005), another admirable novel by Ronaldo Costa Fernandes. Quirino's daughter falls in love with a young man (Abelardo) with the same problems as hers. Without her parents' support for the marriage, the two run away and disappear into the woods.

Quirino's anguish over Maria's disappearance provides a large portion of the novel's best pages. The doubt that haunts him: is she alive or dead? Macabre versions of the story emerge in the city, such as that the girl had regressed in the human evolutionary scale, was covered in hair, and could no longer walk or talk like a human being. His daughter's disappearance leads José Quirino to the deepest depression and also to thoughts of a metaphysical nature. He oscillates between despair and acceptance, the spherical character that he is.

As the novelist himself says in the essay book The narrator of the novel (Sette Letras, 1996, p. 141), “narration includes the notion of loss: the entire unfolding of a novel corresponds to a balance where conflict arises from an absence. […] The narrator becomes the administrator of a loss”.

However, the plot is not always the main thing in a novel. Its fascination lies more in the way of narration, in the structure, in the language, in the consistency of the characters, in their psychological density. The restlessness of the story of The year of revolt… is accompanied by the delight of the exquisite, serene, lyrical and analytical text, a modern classic.

Ronaldo Costa Fernandes moves with ease between History and private life, the social, in a way close to what João Alexandre Barbosa (1937-2006) wrote in “João Cabral, education through poetry” (The imaginary library, Ateliê Editorial, 1996), regarding the Friar's Play, by the poet from Pernambuco. The professor and critic says that the Cars “adds a fundamental element to João Cabral’s poetic language in the sense of a reading of reality: we move from the social to the historical, without there being a denial of the first, but rather its incorporation” (p. 245 and 246).

This procedure is endorsed by Vera Lúcia de Oliveira, poet, essayist and professor. In a substantial essay published on the internet about Costa Fernandes’ novel, she states: “There are, therefore, two movements in Ronaldo’s narrative: one, towards the world outside José Quirino’s house, which shows the conflict between the government and the rebels with the arrest of the hero [Manuel] Bequimão; and another, towards the interior of his house and, even more, towards himself, an anti-hero. This, subjective and subtle, transforms the event suggested in the title into almost a backdrop, a panel of the time in which the action unfolds”.

Despite fictionalizing historical episodes from the 13th century, the revolt of merchants against the stagnation, the similarities with facts from the country's recent history are clear. We read on page XNUMX of The year of the revolt of the underprivileged: “Rumors are a sick kind of violence that penetrates the soul, perverts the subject and when he realizes it, he is repeating the rumors as if he were the author of them. There is no doubt that whoever repeats the lie is also an author of the wrongdoing. He is also a conspirator, because there is no rumor that does not conspire.”

And as writer and literary critic Adelto Gonçalves points out in an insightful article about Costa Fernandes' novel, "although History considers this a popular revolt, it is clear that what was behind it, as is the case most of the time, was the interests of the ruling classes. And the poor and the well-off, once again, were used as pawns."

This political issue would be enough to make The year of the revolt of the underprivileged a great novel. However, it is almost a backdrop to the narrative, but always in a refined, confident, fluent, beautiful text. The poetic content stands out throughout the book, whether in the historical and political accounts or, above all, in the daily chronicle. There are countless examples. One of them: “Mary does not know what it is to be modest and once her beautiful, firm and perfect breast jumped out of her little body and, in the middle of the procession, she went like a Virgin breastfeeding the open-mouthed Christians around her…” (p.15).

As in his books of poetry, the writer also masterfully works in the novel with the anthropomorphization of nature, animals and objects and with the reification of human beings. Let us look at some examples. “The storm does not interest me,/ I already have enough lava inside me”, poem “Volcano”, by Memory of pigs, P. 32. The year of revolt of the helpless, p. 24: “I think [Quirino] that there must be a downpour inside me, which are the cloudy, murky, ungrateful thoughts. So I also have my own storms”. Poem “A Dog’s Life”, by Memory of pigs, p. 55: “My dog has nightmares;/ in which he must dream that he is human.” From Eternal passenger, “October”, p. 71: “I want to be static and wandering,/ learn from the discipline of rivers/ that move without leaving their place”, and “Invention”, p. 113: “From that scaffolding that is there/ I could build myself/ provisionally, a skeleton of pipes, without viscera or blood”. Poem “The rubber tree”, by Earthquake, p. 75: “The rubber tree bleeds,/ cut at the wrist/ the white blood of the latex”. And “The banana trees”, from the same book, p. 57: “At night the banana trees howl/ when the wind/ – violin bow – / passes through the strings of the trees”, and in The year of revolt…, p. 17: “The houses are also covered in fear: the windows are closed, the façade peeling as if a seasonal fever had left them scabbed…”, and on p. 31: “There is nothing sadder than a soulless land”.

From the poem “What do I want your legs for”, by Wanderer, p. 37: “My legs are hands without a clock./ My legs walk on the high heels of falling.//[…] My legs have an anguished life/ like a cat meowing behind the door”. From “The Nature of Things”, by The machine of hands, p. 46: “Between one bush and another,/ there is a Morse code of smells/ that I cannot decipher”. From The year of revolt…, p. 66: “José Quirino, with the drink, feels powerful and fearless: he is a universe in himself, a fearless caravel, an oven of desires”. On p. 103, José Quirino calls himself an “eternal wanderer”, an expression that unites the titles of two books of poems by Costa Fernandes.

It is not only with his own work that the writer dialogues. In the novel there are slight, subtle allusions to texts by other authors, exponents of Brazilian literature. The reference, albeit inverted, at the end of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, by Machado de Assis, in the last sentence of the penultimate paragraph (p. 106) of chapter 49. It is not difficult to also perceive echoes of the poem “Infância”, by some poetry, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in the second paragraph of chapter 34 (p. 73). Costa Fernandes also pays homage to Guimarães Rosa, in the subtle but noticeable allusion to the short story “A terceira margem do rio”, by first stories, in chapter 54 (p. 115), also in the second paragraph. These intelligent intertextual passages ennoble Ronaldo Costa Fernandes' fiction.

There is humor in the novel, a bit sad, but humor, as in the dialogue between Abelardo and Maria heard by Quirino (p. 22). The girl says: “There are times of the year when I think that if I jump, I could go to the moon.” The boy says: “I’m afraid of the Indians.” Maria’s father intervenes when she says that Indians have no soul: “Indians have souls.” In The year of the revolt of the underprivileged, there is no “gap between gesture and living” (verse from “The poem”, by Wanderer, P. 11).

One of Costa Fernandes' merits in his new novel is “the complexity, subtlety and unexpectedness of his solutions”, attributes highlighted by Osman Lins in Life and death of MJ Gonzaga de Sá (Lima Barreto and the Romanesque space, São Paulo: Ática, 1976, p. 125). No one will fail to notice the points of contact between the episodes of XNUMXth-century São Luís and the recent ones in Brasília, although in different situations. Nor the similarity between the cruel scene at the end of the book, José Quirino's nightmare, with what almost happened in Brazil today.

*Hugo Almeida, journalist and writer, he holds a PhD in Brazilian literature from USP. Author, among other books, of The voice of the bells (Seal).

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