For World Writers' Week
Ginny from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Urariano Mota
The UNESCO website has some good news for us:
“World Novel Week was proclaimed at the 41st session of the UNESCO General Conference in 2021 and takes place every year during the week of 13 October. It aims to encourage the appreciation of literature as an expression of human creativity, promote reading, and raise awareness of the important role of writers as key contributors to knowledge sharing and cultural diversity, in line with the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions and the 1980 Recommendation concerning the Status of the Artist.
For novelists, poets, screenwriters, playwrights, literary critics, publishers and many others, World Novel Week champions their contributions to interculturality, supports their rights and strengthens book industries around the world. On this occasion, UNESCO invites everyone to celebrate writers, and the creativity, diversity and access to culture and knowledge that they provide us”
So, for such a fitting week, from my hopeful corner I’m sharing these excerpts from my novel “Never-Ending Youth”, translated by Peter Lownds:
“Then the old girlfriend speaks up, as if for the first time. “He was celebrating the announcement of the publication of his book.”
“His book?”
“The book that was going to be published in Pernambuco.”
To me, writing a book is a reason to live. It may not be a lifeboat, if your life is a capsized ship. But, in my fathomless depths, I know it is a reason to live—and to die. At this moment, Citizen Luiz do Carmo lifts his head from the table, no longer the man with the ridiculous Mexican mustache. No, Senhor do Carmo is a man who believes in a destiny more elevated than dying solo at a barroom table. The no-longer-defunct Luiz is capable of manufacturing steely sentences that rival the epitaphs on tombstones: “He swallowed half the drink and lit the cigarette she handed him. They both smoked. The black filament of the kerosene lamp added to the smoke. If there was a clock on the wall, its hands had stopped keeping time.”
Next, a souvenir from 1970:
“Ula-Ula, what are you going to do with the Ella Fitzgerald record?”
“I’m going to listen to it when I get a record player.”
“Ula-Ula, let’s watch the sunrise in the port.”
Much later, when he is a man on the far side of never-ending youth, he says, “Júlio, have you read Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, the stories of Turgenev? He’s a world champion of literature.”
At that moment, more sudden than death, I have an epiphany, a flash of spirit! Luiz do Carmo needs to be interred together with the Party flag. He cannot leave this world without it. My epiphany demands that his coffin be wrapped in a red flag emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. It is useless to try to trace my mental leap from his death and the book to the Party flag. But my desire to have the flag play a part in the funeral is strong. As strong as the overwhelming alcohol odor of bagasse, the waste of the refineries, near Luiz’s birthplace, Goiana. Memory is aromatic. The smell of cachaça came from yet another table, one at which we both sat, on another day in another place. He told me that the Party was one of the things he valued most. Not a word about literature. But now I know it was his secret love, a clandestine, sinful, taboo affair that led to his death at a barroom table, toasting the announcement of his new book. But what consumed my mind at the moment in a jumble of joy, pain and anguish, was draping the Party flag on his sarcophagus. For atheists, or as Luiz used to call them, “historical, dialectical materialists under the sway of Marx, Engels and Lenin,” a life dedicated to the historic struggle of militancy makes up for the lack of God. Those on the outside do not understand. It is more than the perpetuation of a single character, like Superman or The Phantom in the comic books. Successive generations of fans wear their costumes and don their masks, their utter faith in the demiurge’s existence assuring his perpetuity. This is not the case with Brazilian militants. They disappear, they are tortured, they fall by the wayside, but those who survive return to the same place from which they departed. In this way, the Party continues to flourish on the historic path of partisan activity. I always regarded the need for this ceaseless self-sacrifice with skepticism. To be honest, after my vision of Luiz’s flag-draped bier, I realized that the occasion might call for grandiloquence. If asked to speak, I would veer away from anything extraordinary or resounding. I would want to speak my truth—as a tormented soul wandering in a vale of tears with others in torment, that red banner gave me reason to live. But my version of that reason is diverse. My search for Luiz do Carmo, the terrorist, began the night we visited the brothel on Vigario de Tenorio and Vesper shed her grace on us. The red fabric opened wider after that and we had been walking on it since 1969, without really acknowledging it. How am I going to listen to Ella Fitzgerald without a record player?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had an epiphany about the elongation of puberty that his amanuensis, Eckermann, recorded. For Goethe, such visions were common, on a gamut of subjects. Years later, in Eckermann’s presence, he touched on this subject again:
The belief in our immortality comes from the idea of activity, for if I keep myself uninterruptedly active until death, nature will feel obliged to supply me with a new form of existence as soon as my spirit can no longer support my current corporal form.
Seeing this as mere idealism would be unjust, since it does not make sense to impose linear reason on a poetic way of thinking. I prefer to celebrate the existence of a man who was loving and passionate well into his seventies, whose rebellion was fecund and practical. I think of an elegy Goethe wrote that described a phenomenon we have all experienced, even though he sang only of its fall from grace. I think about the universality of his heart, and the emotional torrent that assailed his old age, when he fell in love with a beautiful young girl. “What must I expect of this new encounter/Of the unopened bud of this day?” No sybarite would remove a ventricle from this elegy, it is beautiful, organic, unique. Friends and companions, the more I think about what the years confided to Luiz do Carmo, the more I relate them to Goethe’s notion of extended adolescence. Which is not to say that he fell for a Lolita or lived to a ripe old age. I believe that, as a generation, we failed to mature, from our actual youth in the late 1960s and early 1970s all the way to the present day. There are not many rightwing conservatives among those of us who have survived. From a behavioral point of view, we have failed, fallen behind, been rendered inadequate, simply because we never learned, or thought it necessary, to act our age”.
Urariano Mota is a Brazilian writer and journalist, born in Recife on September 29, 1950. He is the author of novels about the horrors of the Brazilian dictatorship, such as “Soledad no Recife” and “Never-Ending Youth”
Comments