OLÍVIA, Juiz de Fora-Cataguases, January 2010
It was around 2009 that I received a phone call from him (K), saying that my name had been recommended by his own father, Uccello, a former politics teacher of mine whom I liked a lot. The project was called Escola de Cidadania (Citizenship School) and involved an agreement with the City Hall and the Municipal Chamber of Cataguases, a cultural foundation in that same city, and the UFJF. According to K, that was currently the last and only remaining version of the project that had given rise to the NGO he and Agnelo, the man who headed up the entire above-mentioned project. My role was basically to teach politics to a very diverse audience, served by the cultural foundation, in addition to other people who had signed up and/or were invited to participate. Although he had no degree in absolutely anything, K also taught classes. When I asked him, he said:
“I practically invented this project all by myself. If not on paper, then at least in practice. I reinvented it when I realized how ineffective it was to insist on the “class” model. Once, after fifteen days traveling through the districts of Lima Duarte, “giving lectures” or, better yet, “stirring up” small associations of residents and rural producers, I managed to fill the City Council to such an extent that almost the entire police force in the city had to patrol the block, because of so many people mobilized outside, demanding the vote on a popular initiative bill that I myself had written. Modesty aside, I felt like a genius that afternoon, because only God knows how difficult it is to politically mobilize the rural area.”
Then he said that he didn’t exactly teach politics, but that he started by explaining the legislative process based on constitutional law books and, throughout the packed meeting, he would insert newspaper articles so that the audience could understand how things worked or not; he said that he talked a lot about elections, corruption and disputes over funds, in addition to comparing constitutions and the functioning of political institutions during the various regimes in Brazil’s history; and that when there was some space, he would talk about the country’s socioeconomic formation. Personally, I preferred to stick to the traditional politics class, like the ones I had had at university, especially because I had no experience as an “agitator” (something that seemed suspicious to me, recommended by K like that); but right on the first weekend of work I understood why the people who left the auditorium where K was speaking seemed so much more agitated and involved than those who left the room where I myself was speaking. He realized that I might be having trouble engaging the audience (I heard several people whispering insults in each other’s ears during the break; they were finding my “class” boring). So, the following weekend, he decided to do something ethically questionable, but which reassured me a lot: he invited his own father, Uccello, to join the project as a volunteer, speaking with me in the same room.
’He’s the best, and he loves you!’’ K said, ‘’Not only because he’s a great professor of politics, but because he’s been involved in politics his whole life, from the base of the PT to the CUT. He knows how to communicate with the people like no one else. I’ve even imitated him since the beginning, which is why I acquired this easy magnetism. People need to be provoked to feel like political animals. Often, there’s a desire within people to grunt, roar and moo politically, but they don’t know how. You have to stir up their grievances inside them, inflame them. My father will help a lot!’’
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ResponderExcluirWell, that was the objective part of that work. As for the relationship between us, I must say the following: it was love at first sight! From him, K, to me, and not the other way around. I had recently married a chemical engineer from White Martins, and I ‘still’ did not completely agree with what Rubem Fonseca says at the beginning of Diary of a Fescenino: ‘’Living with a woman is the quickest way to end desire, love, even friendship. But in general, women want to get married, have a home and, within the home, a kind man who will give them one or more children, and who will go to work every morning and come back at night. They don’t want this man to love and fuck – obviously they feel calmer when the man fucks them, even when they are not very willing – they want company, provision, security. A friend of mine, a writer, a pretty, middle-aged widow who lives alone, said she wanted to get married again to have a man ‘’to take the trash out’’. No, I ‘’not yet’’.
ResponderExcluirHowever, I was not able to inflict the disdain recommended for a committed woman on the boy's advances. I liked being in his company, and I found him quite cute, despite the demagogic excesses of his behavior, sometimes, when my feminine intuition identified behind that facade of self-taught militancy a bunch of errant whims, crazy eccentricities and totally schizophrenic personality displays, depending on his "mood of the day." K's behavior towards me never acquired a defined form, as if every time I turned him down, he instantly invented a new personality and tried again, attacking the center of my being from other angles, like an obstinate desirous potentiality of varying degrees. At first, he acted paternalistically, surrounding me with attention and encouragement when he said that my class was boring. The perfect way to take control of the fear inside another person.
ResponderExcluirAs he had really calmed me down, which allowed me to improve my performance a lot in the next class, my insecurity disappeared very quickly, and he could no longer count on any kind of plea from me, neither by phone nor by e-mail; so he started recording music CDs for me, which I loved (I'm a conservatory flutist): each record he recorded for me, I reciprocated with a spark of open praise for his musical knowledge, which established a continuum of reciprocal sympathy over which, I believe, he masturbated a lot thinking about me. On the third or fourth weekend of work, however, I told him that my husband had really liked the records too, and he never gave me any again as a gift. Then, many of those angles of harassment darkened inside him, you know? Instead of the drooling and helpful dog of the beginning, which lovingly marked the archetype of intelligent friendship, he began to show the paranoid and inflamed traits of a brutal, vengeful critic, you know?, of almost everything we did or discussed, especially when his father started traveling with us to Cataguases.
ResponderExcluirIt was precisely during this phase that I gave him the first truly physical ‘affection’, on a trip back to Juiz de Fora, at night, in the back seat of the car that took us back and forth with that crazy driver from Santos Dumont at the wheel, talking non-stop.
ResponderExcluirI noticed that K was quite sullen, in the corner of the car, after responding to something his father had said about the FHC government, about controlling inflation; he had his arms crossed, a frown on his face, looking out the window, looking deep into the night behind the mountains, like a spoiled child. I seriously suspected that his ‘sullenness’ had nothing to do with the friction with his father a little while ago. So I said, running my hand through his hair:
‘’What’s that face, boy? Put a smile on that little face. Today is Saturday.
Então, num susto, sem falar nada, ele chegou junto de mim, no carro, me segurando pela mão, e beijou meu pescoço. Depois, segurou meu rosto com a mão e tentou me beijar na boca. Desviei a tempo, e fiquei rindo. Olhei pra ele e ele estava rindo também. Fiquei imaginando se ele não estava o tempo todo representando algum tipo de papel, de teatro, do começo do dia até aquele momento, só para produzir exatamente a situação que tinha acabado de acontecer. Nem seu pai nem o motorista, que conversavam animadamente na frente, perceberam nada. K veio colado no meu corpo o resto da viagem inteira, até o carro me deixar na porta de casa. No fim, ele me perguntou:
ResponderExcluir‘’Não vai sair hoje à noite?’’
E eu disse:
‘’Hoje não’’, e vi ele fechar a porta do carro, com uma expressão elétrica de satisfação no rosto.
In the middle of the following week, I had to go to the headquarters of the institution where he worked, across from the City Hall of JF, to finalize the details for the weekend with him. He was quite embarrassed because I went without warning and surprised him in his office next to a muscular blonde girl, sitting next to him, very intimate, discussing college matters. It was a quick and formal conversation, and I almost limited myself to giving him the schedule of activities in Cataguases and leaving, without further ado. The blonde girl wasn't that pretty, but she had such a sculpted body that I was left "imagining things." "Things" that I won't talk about here, to avoid fluctuations in my evidence dispenser.
ResponderExcluirWell, on Saturday we set sail again for Cataguases, early in the morning (at this point our audience was already waiting for us as if they were expecting a big event, full of controversy and heated arguments). In the middle of the trip, K and Uccello had, perhaps because of this, a heated argument, as if they were – now that the audience had been won over – disputing which way the “votes” would go. After Uccello mentioned the name of the dean of UFJF, an old PT member from Juiz de Fora, who had promised to attend the ceremony to hand out certificates to the public of our “political training course” at the end of the year, something happened in K’s mind, it, I don’t know, suddenly exploded, without explanation, and now seemed to be overflowing with accumulated hatred, which gave him a disturbed aura in the face of which the trembling jelly with which Uccello tried to calm the mood was soon reduced to a fragile center of contraction in the PT’s arrangement of his evasion.
ResponderExcluirUCCELLO: “I admit to you here that, despite being a university professor, having a master’s degree, a doctorate, a post-doctorate, and a high salary and stability, I was trained in the political struggle, from the union in the 1980s to the PT campaigns, until today, I dedicated all my efforts to ‘doing politics’, to indoctrinating students and voters according to the Marxist principles of the class struggle; and today I see that it was worth it: I see the forces of transformation of society unified under Lula’s government, I see the renewal of the country’s social and productive structures. That is why I am not embarrassed to speak openly to any audience, whether students or the common people, in my opinion, it is necessary to direct efforts towards the constitution of this new political subject that was born after the defeat of neoliberalism in Latin America.”
ResponderExcluirK: “The defeat of neoliberalism was so great that the first thing Lula did in government was to put Palocci in the Ministry of Finance. Until the other day, he was more loved by the financial market than FHC himself. The policy of monetary stability is strictly the same, with high interest rates to contain inflation. And the banks have never profited so much. Not even the industrialists of São Paulo were satisfied with FHC. The only difference I see is in the policy of rigging the State, which the PT is fiercely resuming in the face of the displeasure caused by the “strategic submission of FHC”: the entire national technocracy, the military, the church, sectors of the state bureaucracy, technicians, engineers and scientists, could no longer stand the “austere swellings” of the PSDB’s Minimal State, and began to demand the return of the Strong National State (in other words, a trinket of reliable jobs spewing public money in all directions) and the illusion of development based on a national basis. The crisis, in fact, continues, despite the official propaganda of Petrobras and the bravado surrounding the ‘little wave’, which will explode soon’’.
ResponderExcluirUCCELLO: ‘’The KM has been becoming more right-wing lately. It no longer recognizes the reforms that the PT implemented in the country. The fabric of political action, the eradication of poverty, and class relations, in the context of global interdependence, has changed a lot under Lula. The poorest part of the population has become an active subject and has integrated possible political action. The people’s capacity for expression, during the PT government, has generated forms of social governance’’
ResponderExcluirK: “By God! Lula didn’t implement any reforms, he pushed them all onto his successor, in whose hands all this fiscal madness will probably explode sooner or later. The PT’s policies only managed to overdetermine a social crisis that is still dragging on, disguised under all sorts of stupid excitement. They were lucky with the current economic situation in the world, which exacerbated Brazil’s position as an exporter of raw materials. What remains, at best, is a failed industrialization process as a PT legacy, NULL! That is not developmentalism! All the economic and social nodes of national development have remained intact since 2003, all of its elements of physiological conservation of private interests and political parasitism. Just because the poor now buy refrigerators on credit and study at Estácio de Sá (what the PT calls a ‘passport to prosperity’, lol) does not allow us to identify any new social capacity of the type ‘’revolution from above’’. Not to mention all this corruption that has been appearing since the beginning!’’
ResponderExcluirUCCELLO: ‘’You are being unfair, saying things this way. If it weren’t for the Lula government, you, from the PC do B, would never have been able to raise funds to get your NGO off the ground. You are part of the social governance created by the PT.’’
ResponderExcluirK: ‘’LOL! I’m not from the PC do B! Furthermore, with this, you yourself acknowledge that the PT’s so-called ‘social governance’ is just a nice name to designate a corrupt state apparatus based on the exchange of favors between ‘friends.’ You yourself, last weekend when we were here, spent a good part of the dinner that the people from the foundation here offered us promising that you would immediately contact your ‘brother minister’ in Brasília to unblock the project that they had sent to the Ministry of Culture, in the order of almost five million. Do you think I’m an idiot?’’
UCCELLO: ‘’Look, forget all this. I don’t want to talk anymore!’’
K: ‘’But I do! Hahahahahah!’’
(...) then, like two travelers who, having reached the limit of civility, feel that they may have to replace words with punches and kicks, they fell silent, leaving in the car only a vain mist coming from their burnt throats, which in no way promised to reestablish mutual understanding. A drooling nausea took hold of my mind as I realized that Uccello had been ruined in his quest for pacifying persuasion. Then I looked at K, next to me in the back seat, and I noticed that he was cold, calm, even though his nerves were resting on the crest of an electric arc that could tense violently again at any moment. Without a doubt: the vibration on the boy's face was not in the least like a signal for retreat.
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