By TARSUS GENUS*
Rio Grande do Sul is the symbol of the impasse portrayed in Goya's painting “Duelo a Garratozos”, as the climate tragedy puts the state in the same situation as the duelists
“April is the cruelest of months”, prefigures TS Elliot in his most luminous poem. But for us it will be – for a long time – May, the cruelest of months: we were “at the burial of the dead”, we saw the “lilacs of the dead land in the winter that sheltered us” and we anchored their “agonic roots”. They are pieces of verses from “Desolate Land”, reassembled to express other lands in other times. Others alive and others dead.
"Duel at Garrotazos” (Duel with sticks) is a painting by Goya, from the famous series of “Black Paintings” that decorated – between 1820 and 1823 – the walls of his residence in “Quinta del Sordo”, at the time the painter’s home on the outskirts of Madrid. In the field of economics, the picture simulates the struggle for life, in a society in which norms do not organize rules for everyone's dignified survival; at the level of law, it shows that the norm is not the “empire of the common will”, but rather laws that designate meaning as a relationship between opposing forces, which produce a hegemonic will.
In the Social State, norms can be “concerted” and wills can be organized in such a way that – at least at a given moment – they are universally accepted as the best possibility for everyone. Concertation, which can only take shape in a moment of chaos on the initiative of civil society, is the name of this process, whose negotiation only leaves out those who want to defeat what is best in liberal democracy: political negotiation to define the next steps of order, not the provisional size of chaos.
Its organizational form at this moment is a Federal Agency, which organizes a political and financial strategy for a new order in Rio Grande do Sul, above immediate partisan dissent and welcoming all entities of the Union.
This painting by Goya should decorate all civil society meetings in our state. At least those in which its protagonists – coming from outside the legitimate electoral disputes – wanted to design the strategic project of a new model of economic development, inclusive, of a socio-environmental nature, that would become exemplary for the country. A model based on humanitarian aid, the reconstruction of what was lost in the climate tragedy and the promotion of a new spirit of solidarity and social justice.
Goya's work is now part of the Prado Museum's collection and it contains – buried up to their knees – the duelists who can do nothing but march to the death of one or both of them. Slaughtered by the desperate strength of those who are prevented from moving in another direction, duelists cannot escape the brutal fate that separates them as human beings and unites them through unlimited violence.
Their bodies will then only be collected by those who in their historical representation are the same ones who today want to deny climate evidence, be they public debt speculators or futures favored by gentrification, a phenomenon that always follows disaster in any Desolate Land: rather by feudal elitism of the nobility, today made possible by the raging waters and by interests that want to compete with each other for the spoils of poverty.
At the time Goya painted this tragic and magnificent work, liberals and absolutists were facing each other in Spain, but the painting seems to prefigure the entire destiny of Spanish modernity, which led to a bloody Civil War that also marked the last century with blood. . Between 1936 and 1939, with the defeat of the Republic and the rise of fascism, the times of authentic liberal democracy were extirpated from the History of Spain and postponed until the transition from Francoism, to a still unfinished liberal democracy.
For the democratic enlightenment to function in the field of politics and for the Republic to establish itself as an institution, the duelists should have the option of letting go of the land and giving up their “garrotes”: the fight between the two Spains, the enlightened one and the one of the Barbarism could then be projected – through different means and cultural forms – until the Moncloa Pact, without the legacy of Francoism.
The emergence of right-wing extremism with Vox, in Spain – with significant support from various sectors of national and global business – is the return of barbarism in preparation for the immediate return of fascism. But be careful: here in Brazil, Vox is Bolsonarism and the Moncloa Pact is – in political and moral terms – what the 1988 Constitution means for us, the Charter that unifies the idea of nation with liberal democracy – republican and democratic – which is under permanent threat.
Our state, at this moment, is perhaps the best symbol of this impasse portrayed in Goya's painting, as the climate tragedy puts us – I'm talking about the democratic field in the broadest sense – in the same situation as the “garrotazo” duelists. From the possibility of freeing our feet trapped by the mud of the floods comes the possibility of a new democratic political cycle in the State, concerted around a development model that becomes an example for Brazil
If civil society in Rio Grande do Sul does not free itself from the mud of the catastrophe and keep the “garrotazos” away, the false impression of us resuming life as a new normal will dry up the source of the future. And so we will have a new radical depreciation of the State's public functions, the senescence of private initiative, plus the resumption of aggressions against nature, which will further blind us to climate tragedies and even make us involuntary accomplices to the new exclusions. Before the duelists kill themselves and the deniers come to remove their mutilated bodies, let us adjust the strings of a dignified future for everyone.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts). [https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I]
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