I wonder now how I, an old historical materialist, Marxist-Leninist, over the last few hours on the Útil bus bound for Belo Horizonte, could have become so indolent and esoteric, to the point of dragging behind me so many electoral ghosts (and all of them gazing at each other, floating in the air, partial and attentive, close to the pastures, the mountains, above all restless, fickle, glancing at the bus window, with a certain innate ability to resist the challenge of the incarnate gaze). Disconnected from the ceiling of ideas, I perhaps searched for a reason strong enough to endure it, as the beers I bought on the road turned out to be less cold than I would have liked. In Ressaquinha, for example, while I was drinking one that tasted like piss, it was so hot, baggage handlers at the Bus Terminal recalled Dilma's routine of zero dialogue with Congress, after the president entrenched herself in her secret and recessive ministerial alcove, increasing the tension surrounding any "leak" ---
It was essential (I thought) not to leak the government's inflationary directive at that time (2014), because of the "ruralist friendships" that the ecocidal Workers' Party (PT) had at the time, when record levels of deforestation were recorded in the Amazon, and fires, invasions of indigenous lands, and the Guarani genocide in Mato Grosso do Sul, with the explicit support of the PT government and its physiological PMDB base. Perhaps the Jesuits were right: faced with politics, DEVOTION is indispensable --- the people need Jesuit devotion, the superiority of their methods of popular education; and also the schools they maintained for the upper class, in the past, here and in Europe, from which they humanistically purified the world's diplomatic missions, confronting their somber moral standards with a sensitive presence.
Teblet had certainly known for a long time (he still thought), and Ciro had also known, or imagined, that the musical culture surrounding sertanejo had been completely revamped by the pop industry since 2010; initially, perhaps, to distance itself from the horrific scenario of human misfortune that the Workers' Party's agricultural sector and its "country culture" of slush funded concerts had modeled after Barretos, and which Lava Jato ended. Soon, with a neo-Pentecostal tone, all this demand from the rural world would become essentially anti-Workers' Party, assuming an age of decency that endures to this day, including in both Mato Grosso do Sul states.
Yes! "Esoteric, almost baroque, the almost epicene objet d'art that" (to quote a rural American writer) "with childish voracity" the Workers' Party is trying to "include in the furniture and decoration" of its campaign in this second presidential round, without there being any sign of engagement between Teblet's voters and Lula's mythical-nostalgic dilettantism, other than the Senator's vague nod in the wrong direction, which she so repudiated during her campaign (and here it is evident that the moral standard has not yet been raised by the candidate's rhetorical and demagogic efforts in the first round, when she simulated modesty and socio-political sensitivity with perfection and serenity, gradually standing out from the psychic-chemical-physiological mass encrusted in the electoral process).
Faced with the PT's wobbly revengeful urge, the Senator's solitude was the solitude of contempt and distrust, of the NO to the abstract illusion that, from 2003 to 2008, allowed construction and logging companies to use Dilma to crush Marina Silva and put in her place Mangabeira Unger, who in 2005 referred to the Lula administration as "the most corrupt of all time" (of course, until he was bought with his appointment to the newly created Strategic Affairs portfolio, where he began to treat the Amazon as a mere "collection of trees" where indigenous people were "imprisoned like children in a green paradise").
You'll understand what a phony representation of peace and prosperity Teblet saw in Lula's stagnant waters, what a relief and escape from reality, what a frontier of rural political hibernation. No puritanical heritage here, for all intents and purposes, no proud electoral mysticism, no intelligent and ardent erudition --- just remnants of a blindness characteristic of the Houssef-Mantega "school." If she speaks publicly again in these elections, after such a flagrant display of self-serving and physiological support, the Senator will fall into a crude and tedious imitation of the Matron of Bath (Chaucer's character in The Canterbury Tales whose main characteristic is vulgarity).
No doubt. It's more about understanding how the Workers' Party (PT) appropriates the candidate's virgin ticket and reduces her to a provincial intellect with no will of her own, destined to direct votes like cattle to a milieu of tasteless demagogic futilities.
I got off in downtown Belo Horizonte at 5:40 p.m., perhaps because what I subconsciously wanted was to lose my peace, perpetually drowning myself in beer accompanied by cachaça and liver with onions and okra. --- Downtown Belo Horizonte at dusk, leaving the bus station, is a mix of adventurous commercial scams (from China, Paraguay, and São Paulo) and cheap hotels beneath crowded bars with dirty glasses; a gloomy Minas Gerais psychology, discreetly arrogant and blasphemous in a low voice, conspiratorial in a superstitious silence (apud Tira-Dentes), which brings together people with a sharp sense of humor, given to hasty mockery, just for the pleasure of provoking and bragging ("cartar marra," as they say). Gluttonous, Belo Horizonte residents also drink a lot, which makes them heavy-handed and unimaginative --- among the friends at the bar, Raul (back on the "Island of Parrots"). Despite everything, there are essential drowsinesses here for my Memories.
"What time is it, Raul?"
"Almost seven."
"Ah, a long, empty night, devoid of feminine beauty, huh?"
"The sensual impulse of the women here is in fact completely lacking in social piety; all, without exception, pessimistic and sarcastic with pseudo-intellectual bohemian romanticism. At the top of the pyramid, they easily combine sex with religion, as long as the marriage is negotiated in, let's say, a "business" environment; without those "class mixtures" that give them a slightly repulsive flavor. They are spicy in their exclusivity," Raul said.
"Very quick now, Raul. Direct! I feel knocked out. However, I still feel like a gambler sensing a final trump card, despite the excess of cause and effect of fate. Back when I wanted to transform your older sister into a consort for my harem, I was given over to the vile game of passions, to the continued psychic stimulation of my endocrine glands. Today, in my life, besides this long, lost war of politics, I am left with the attempt to reach the mountains of Minas Gerais with words. Through disuse, however, the need for speech within me has been atrophying my capacity for poetic self-affirmation. Whenever I search for the Logos-poem, I immediately find myself at the center of a dirty dispute with the facts, enraged and aphasic, stuttering at best. When the passions of my life are at stake, I lack any and all theological justification. My ego begins to provide all my memories to that obvious dimension in which everything that was lost without explanation is just part of the trail of a long and dangerous downfall, eloquently interrupted by rentier old age.
"What it lacks, in truth, is a subliminal engine anchored in triumphant rhetoric. The intrinsic irrationality of this power stems from something beyond mere ego, that "semi-cataplectic stupor in which most human beings live," according to Huxley. Oversimplification always makes fool's gold shine, as in Lula's presidential campaign this time. With cartoonish rhetoric, the Workers' Party (PT) has once again leveraged its unconfessed Dilma-Mantega policy and its precarious socioeconomic understanding through the game of sympathizer agglutination, which has even bowed down the economists of the Plano Real to the current redundant tautology---when loyalty to the organization to regain power turns all the unforgivable vices of past administrations into a pleasant mental blur; the entire historical wing of the old PSDB is now resigned to an infra-intellectual subsistence in a sub-PT limbo, halfway between where their brains and their blabbering public image are and where their theoretical, practical and moral preparation would like to be in fact'' said Raul
Raul and I had long forgotten what it was like to be young, and the entire bar around us reflected the same harshness and dryness, that progressive darkening of the soul under alcohol---old men, the stench of piss, lupin beans, moldy salami wrappers, olive jars, and platters of hard-boiled eggs, unbreathable farts, and the worthless bacon someone had vomited into the bathroom. The next day (Saturday), Raul and I had arranged to meet in Santa Tereza, where he would introduce me to his eldest daughter, Helô, a former fling of K's. Perhaps when she was still living in Belo Horizonte, under twenty, and striving to distance herself from that group of chatterbox women in her family, she had quickly developed that urban gesture of vain gallantry, aimed at every girl who crossed his path---which, deep down, was nothing more than a boy's eccentric arrogance. However, Raul himself still remembered him --- in fact, it was the only thing that actually made us laugh, before we left that bar on Paraná Street.
(As I approached K indirectly again, this time through Helô, I imagined the next trip I would have to make, to Altamira, in Pará, where K had been mining before the transposition of the Volta Grande do Xingú, and where now indigenous people and riverside dwellers, deprived of navigation and irrigation, were crammed into the city's favelas, starving because of the Workers' Party's work --- 100 km of dead Xingú, 270 species of endemic fish suddenly extinct, and all the associated deforestation and loss of the water table; as if that weren't enough, the proliferation of mosquitoes and diseases like malaria and dengue. No, at that moment, walking among leaflets thrown in the street and stickers stuck to lampposts, I wasn't screaming at anyone, not even at something indefinite, I was just imagining a Munchian scream inside me, piercing the force field of that immobile antagonism that retained within me the scar of an outraged political conscience, that surplus accumulation of despair.)
The next morning, in Santa Tereza, there was no barrier of Minas Gerais modesty, nor was there any need for a flowery, platonic introductory detour to convince Raul and Helô that I was merely gathering evidence of the young man's journey through life, intending to explain the current global derision. Despite being over fifty, Helô had the slender, delicate arms of a girl, firm, round breasts, and the smooth, slender neck of a teenager --- and sitting on that bench in Duque de Caxias Square, with a draft beer from Choperia Santa Tereza in hand, next to my father, Raul, I returned to that place after almost a decade, thinking about the pasta at Bolão and an old record from Clube da Esquina, which featured a song that suggested Bahia was much better than Minas Gerais. Rereading some of K's books, the tourist wouldn't think twice about swapping Santa Tereza for Rio Vermelho --- in terms of gastronomy alone, it was a "massacre":
At least ten Italian and Mediterranean restaurants with the best pasta in the world; plus Japanese, Arab, Iranian, Mexican, Indian, Portuguese, vegetarian, and Carioca restaurants, and, of course, those serving regional cuisine, much richer than Minas Gerais cuisine. And better nightclubs, with more beautiful and lively people. And the beaches are paradisiacal. As for Helô's reaction (after I warned her I was looking for her because of K)—a bold Belo Horizonte coquetry turned into an unexpected panic—I attributed it to traces of Lula's entrepreneurial past and tried to reassure her, explaining that I wasn't an undercover federal police officer.
"The truth is that Lulaism's magic formula—growing the pie without proportional or significant redistribution, tied to and dependent on the external economic cycle—quickly ran out of steam," Helô said. "The dispersion of propaganda and the volatility of 'PT justifications,' under the pressure of June 2013, bordered on nonsense. In less than a week, the entire PT facade gave way, including to the looming inflation, and the star was replaced by the (price of) tomatoes. Soon, party politics was reduced to a risky, twilight, and lethargic abode, at the center of which lay that internal cancer, CORRUPTION, and the inexhaustible anxiety it generated amid the struggle to restore the Lulista peace in the country."
"Indeed," I agreed with her. "It's ridiculous to hear candidate Lula talking about 'pacifying the country,' when it was during the Workers' Party government that the greatest popular uprising in decades erupted: the poor quality of public services, corruption, unemployment, inflation, spending on massive projects, and police repression in the streets—all the work of the Workers' Party in power. Already in 2013, the cycle of consumption stimulated by the Workers' Party through credit lines was taking a heavy toll on the population. Subsidies and grants were unsustainable, and the popular protests had undeniable and visible participation from the poor, at every level of their being, from the muscular and sensory to the moral and intellectual—proving that every tendency generates its opposite."
"He he he," Raul interjected. "When we look at something red, the visual induction immediately intensifies our perception of green, right? A green halo immediately surrounds the red object.
"There's no doubt that the preferred targets of the street riots were the bank branches that the Workers' Party government had helped enrich, while also forcing the names of nearly 70 million people onto the SPC," I said.
"Between us," Helô continued, "at that time, I was up to my neck in the PT's contractor capitalism, through my law firm which, fulfilling contracts with various ministries, helped the Brazilian judicial system to execute what seemed until then to be its greatest talent: formulating the technical jargon with which a victorious partisan gang was telling its story to the masses. The militancy paid with public money helped to spread the 'Message' (even the name of one of the wings of the PT), but it was the Courts that gave the technical approval for the robbery --- that they later came to judge and condemn these same people, is only irony of fate (they danced to the music --- and that they came to absolve them not long ago of the same convictions, only to try to return to power, is also irony, but nostalgic --- return to the old velvety unity of the silent womb of corruption, from where most of their nominations for the Supreme Court came: the old politics, the 'jeitinho' (its anonymous marriage without excessive faces this time, a mere reflection in the secret and foolish gaze of the supreme magistrates)
The reverie continued, incorporating ever more detailed details. The end of the night in the bars, in that neighborhood of Italian immigrants in the eastern region of Belo Horizonte, drew attention to the listed architecture, surrounded by the Ribeirão Arrudas and the railway line. There, with Helô and Raul, the verbal tremors passed imperceptibly, as if in a trial, and the concern on Helô's face contributed to her expression of a whipped dog, awaiting my interrogation. Raul shook his head a little when he perceived some perverse insinuation of mine—in those moments, I would pat him on the back, joke irreverently, and say: "A repentant sinner is worth more than a thousand faithful."
From that jumble of inconsistencies that was the mentality of the contractor-PT national-developmentalism, I now wondered only what K really had to do with Helô. She herself answered me, towards the end of the night:
"Nothing. I mean, I met him by chance at Café Com Letras, on a night with a jazz trio and free consumption of white wine. He was still very young, but he no longer lived in the city—he was just 'hanging out' that time. He told some girls at the table with him that he was president of a non-profit organization (OSCIP) in Juiz de Fora and that he knew everything about environmental compensation projects that facilitated licensing and improved companies' market image. And can you believe it? I FELL FOR IT! At that time, the legal dangers of what he was doing leading that institution linked to the Workers' Party (PT) and the Communist Party (PCdoB) hadn't yet turned him into a Draco Mitigatus (Taming of the Shrew), and his name and image easily emerged with a false glow in any social circle he infiltrated, with charisma and smooth talk. It was only after we had gone to bed a few times, here and in Governador Valadares, that I realized he was transforming himself into a polygamous apostle of Toltec androgynous love, as he himself once said: ‘the best of all is real life, the dreamy lucidity of the flesh’.
Then I thought to myself: "My God, billions were effectively embezzled from the public treasury, not just from Petrobras, both to individuals in the form of bribes and to legal entities in the form of inflated contracts, subsidized loans, grants, or illegal or paralegal contributions to PT, PSDB, and PMDB campaigns. The scale of the theft is still staggering! Arrests, searches and seizures, preventive arrests, and criminal executions."
Helô was the quiet and enigmatic type, capable of suppressing strong emotions and revealing only what was necessary, perhaps omitting crucial information to broaden the case's perception, even giving it a different cover than the CHANCE she had blamed for her encounter with K.
Another world! In the nearby nightclub, hundreds of young people were dancing. They didn't see me, they didn't see us—we, the Garibaldi natives of the reserve, with over fifty years under our belts; in my case, much more. While we discussed the passage of June 2013 for Dilma's impeachment, they had grown silently into the night, like an extraterrestrial army whose presidential vote is completely unpredictable. Unexpected and mysterious, they ignored us. I wondered if K himself, a little younger than Helô and me, wasn't somewhere similar, in the middle of Rio Vermelho at night, in Salvador, perfectly identified with this kind of crowd. I let myself be carried away by the ruminant emptiness of my thoughts, there in Santê—a vague mortifying sensation, feeling forever archived in that false and happy atmosphere of Atlantean bohemia.
And to draw on any existing social sentiments that might serve our conversation, I note Santê's nighttime gourmet markets, open all night with their cans of luxury preserves, ready-made Milanese risottos with saffron, and their bottled sauces, mustards, extra virgin olive oils, imported wines, cheeses and pepperonis, Parma ham and smoked salmon, slivers of a thousand snacks, and their merciless competition with the Bolão at dinnertime. The end of the walk was hot, restless, gagged by Helô, between two dark areas of the neighborhood, which reminded me of the assassination of Mayor Celso Daniel in Santo André. So I finally hailed a taxi and headed to the airport, completely drunk, where I slept on a bench until dawn)
ResponderExcluirI wonder now how I, an old historical materialist, Marxist-Leninist, over the last few hours on the Útil bus bound for Belo Horizonte, could have become so indolent and esoteric, to the point of dragging behind me so many electoral ghosts (and all of them gazing at each other, floating in the air, partial and attentive, close to the pastures, the mountains, above all restless, fickle, glancing at the bus window, with a certain innate ability to resist the challenge of the incarnate gaze). Disconnected from the ceiling of ideas, I perhaps searched for a reason strong enough to endure it, as the beers I bought on the road turned out to be less cold than I would have liked. In Ressaquinha, for example, while I was drinking one that tasted like piss, it was so hot, baggage handlers at the Bus Terminal recalled Dilma's routine of zero dialogue with Congress, after the president entrenched herself in her secret and recessive ministerial alcove, increasing the tension surrounding any "leak" ---
It was essential (I thought) not to leak the government's inflationary directive at that time (2014), because of the "ruralist friendships" that the ecocidal Workers' Party (PT) had at the time, when record levels of deforestation were recorded in the Amazon, and fires, invasions of indigenous lands, and the Guarani genocide in Mato Grosso do Sul, with the explicit support of the PT government and its physiological PMDB base. Perhaps the Jesuits were right: faced with politics, DEVOTION is indispensable --- the people need Jesuit devotion, the superiority of their methods of popular education; and also the schools they maintained for the upper class, in the past, here and in Europe, from which they humanistically purified the world's diplomatic missions, confronting their somber moral standards with a sensitive presence.
ResponderExcluirTeblet had certainly known for a long time (he still thought), and Ciro had also known, or imagined, that the musical culture surrounding sertanejo had been completely revamped by the pop industry since 2010; initially, perhaps, to distance itself from the horrific scenario of human misfortune that the Workers' Party's agricultural sector and its "country culture" of slush funded concerts had modeled after Barretos, and which Lava Jato ended. Soon, with a neo-Pentecostal tone, all this demand from the rural world would become essentially anti-Workers' Party, assuming an age of decency that endures to this day, including in both Mato Grosso do Sul states.
ResponderExcluirYes! "Esoteric, almost baroque, the almost epicene objet d'art that" (to quote a rural American writer) "with childish voracity" the Workers' Party is trying to "include in the furniture and decoration" of its campaign in this second presidential round, without there being any sign of engagement between Teblet's voters and Lula's mythical-nostalgic dilettantism, other than the Senator's vague nod in the wrong direction, which she so repudiated during her campaign (and here it is evident that the moral standard has not yet been raised by the candidate's rhetorical and demagogic efforts in the first round, when she simulated modesty and socio-political sensitivity with perfection and serenity, gradually standing out from the psychic-chemical-physiological mass encrusted in the electoral process).
ResponderExcluirFaced with the PT's wobbly revengeful urge, the Senator's solitude was the solitude of contempt and distrust, of the NO to the abstract illusion that, from 2003 to 2008, allowed construction and logging companies to use Dilma to crush Marina Silva and put in her place Mangabeira Unger, who in 2005 referred to the Lula administration as "the most corrupt of all time" (of course, until he was bought with his appointment to the newly created Strategic Affairs portfolio, where he began to treat the Amazon as a mere "collection of trees" where indigenous people were "imprisoned like children in a green paradise").
ResponderExcluirYou'll understand what a phony representation of peace and prosperity Teblet saw in Lula's stagnant waters, what a relief and escape from reality, what a frontier of rural political hibernation. No puritanical heritage here, for all intents and purposes, no proud electoral mysticism, no intelligent and ardent erudition --- just remnants of a blindness characteristic of the Houssef-Mantega "school." If she speaks publicly again in these elections, after such a flagrant display of self-serving and physiological support, the Senator will fall into a crude and tedious imitation of the Matron of Bath (Chaucer's character in The Canterbury Tales whose main characteristic is vulgarity).
ResponderExcluirNo doubt. It's more about understanding how the Workers' Party (PT) appropriates the candidate's virgin ticket and reduces her to a provincial intellect with no will of her own, destined to direct votes like cattle to a milieu of tasteless demagogic futilities.
I got off in downtown Belo Horizonte at 5:40 p.m., perhaps because what I subconsciously wanted was to lose my peace, perpetually drowning myself in beer accompanied by cachaça and liver with onions and okra. --- Downtown Belo Horizonte at dusk, leaving the bus station, is a mix of adventurous commercial scams (from China, Paraguay, and São Paulo) and cheap hotels beneath crowded bars with dirty glasses; a gloomy Minas Gerais psychology, discreetly arrogant and blasphemous in a low voice, conspiratorial in a superstitious silence (apud Tira-Dentes), which brings together people with a sharp sense of humor, given to hasty mockery, just for the pleasure of provoking and bragging ("cartar marra," as they say). Gluttonous, Belo Horizonte residents also drink a lot, which makes them heavy-handed and unimaginative --- among the friends at the bar, Raul (back on the "Island of Parrots"). Despite everything, there are essential drowsinesses here for my Memories.
ResponderExcluir"What time is it, Raul?"
"Almost seven."
"Ah, a long, empty night, devoid of feminine beauty, huh?"
ResponderExcluir"The sensual impulse of the women here is in fact completely lacking in social piety; all, without exception, pessimistic and sarcastic with pseudo-intellectual bohemian romanticism. At the top of the pyramid, they easily combine sex with religion, as long as the marriage is negotiated in, let's say, a "business" environment; without those "class mixtures" that give them a slightly repulsive flavor. They are spicy in their exclusivity," Raul said.
ResponderExcluir"Very quick now, Raul. Direct! I feel knocked out. However, I still feel like a gambler sensing a final trump card, despite the excess of cause and effect of fate. Back when I wanted to transform your older sister into a consort for my harem, I was given over to the vile game of passions, to the continued psychic stimulation of my endocrine glands. Today, in my life, besides this long, lost war of politics, I am left with the attempt to reach the mountains of Minas Gerais with words. Through disuse, however, the need for speech within me has been atrophying my capacity for poetic self-affirmation. Whenever I search for the Logos-poem, I immediately find myself at the center of a dirty dispute with the facts, enraged and aphasic, stuttering at best. When the passions of my life are at stake, I lack any and all theological justification. My ego begins to provide all my memories to that obvious dimension in which everything that was lost without explanation is just part of the trail of a long and dangerous downfall, eloquently interrupted by rentier old age.
"What it lacks, in truth, is a subliminal engine anchored in triumphant rhetoric. The intrinsic irrationality of this power stems from something beyond mere ego, that "semi-cataplectic stupor in which most human beings live," according to Huxley. Oversimplification always makes fool's gold shine, as in Lula's presidential campaign this time. With cartoonish rhetoric, the Workers' Party (PT) has once again leveraged its unconfessed Dilma-Mantega policy and its precarious socioeconomic understanding through the game of sympathizer agglutination, which has even bowed down the economists of the Plano Real to the current redundant tautology---when loyalty to the organization to regain power turns all the unforgivable vices of past administrations into a pleasant mental blur; the entire historical wing of the old PSDB is now resigned to an infra-intellectual subsistence in a sub-PT limbo, halfway between where their brains and their blabbering public image are and where their theoretical, practical and moral preparation would like to be in fact'' said Raul
ResponderExcluirRaul and I had long forgotten what it was like to be young, and the entire bar around us reflected the same harshness and dryness, that progressive darkening of the soul under alcohol---old men, the stench of piss, lupin beans, moldy salami wrappers, olive jars, and platters of hard-boiled eggs, unbreathable farts, and the worthless bacon someone had vomited into the bathroom. The next day (Saturday), Raul and I had arranged to meet in Santa Tereza, where he would introduce me to his eldest daughter, Helô, a former fling of K's. Perhaps when she was still living in Belo Horizonte, under twenty, and striving to distance herself from that group of chatterbox women in her family, she had quickly developed that urban gesture of vain gallantry, aimed at every girl who crossed his path---which, deep down, was nothing more than a boy's eccentric arrogance. However, Raul himself still remembered him --- in fact, it was the only thing that actually made us laugh, before we left that bar on Paraná Street.
ResponderExcluir(As I approached K indirectly again, this time through Helô, I imagined the next trip I would have to make, to Altamira, in Pará, where K had been mining before the transposition of the Volta Grande do Xingú, and where now indigenous people and riverside dwellers, deprived of navigation and irrigation, were crammed into the city's favelas, starving because of the Workers' Party's work --- 100 km of dead Xingú, 270 species of endemic fish suddenly extinct, and all the associated deforestation and loss of the water table; as if that weren't enough, the proliferation of mosquitoes and diseases like malaria and dengue. No, at that moment, walking among leaflets thrown in the street and stickers stuck to lampposts, I wasn't screaming at anyone, not even at something indefinite, I was just imagining a Munchian scream inside me, piercing the force field of that immobile antagonism that retained within me the scar of an outraged political conscience, that surplus accumulation of despair.)
ResponderExcluirThe next morning, in Santa Tereza, there was no barrier of Minas Gerais modesty, nor was there any need for a flowery, platonic introductory detour to convince Raul and Helô that I was merely gathering evidence of the young man's journey through life, intending to explain the current global derision. Despite being over fifty, Helô had the slender, delicate arms of a girl, firm, round breasts, and the smooth, slender neck of a teenager --- and sitting on that bench in Duque de Caxias Square, with a draft beer from Choperia Santa Tereza in hand, next to my father, Raul, I returned to that place after almost a decade, thinking about the pasta at Bolão and an old record from Clube da Esquina, which featured a song that suggested Bahia was much better than Minas Gerais. Rereading some of K's books, the tourist wouldn't think twice about swapping Santa Tereza for Rio Vermelho --- in terms of gastronomy alone, it was a "massacre":
ResponderExcluirAt least ten Italian and Mediterranean restaurants with the best pasta in the world; plus Japanese, Arab, Iranian, Mexican, Indian, Portuguese, vegetarian, and Carioca restaurants, and, of course, those serving regional cuisine, much richer than Minas Gerais cuisine. And better nightclubs, with more beautiful and lively people. And the beaches are paradisiacal. As for Helô's reaction (after I warned her I was looking for her because of K)—a bold Belo Horizonte coquetry turned into an unexpected panic—I attributed it to traces of Lula's entrepreneurial past and tried to reassure her, explaining that I wasn't an undercover federal police officer.
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluir"The truth is that Lulaism's magic formula—growing the pie without proportional or significant redistribution, tied to and dependent on the external economic cycle—quickly ran out of steam," Helô said. "The dispersion of propaganda and the volatility of 'PT justifications,' under the pressure of June 2013, bordered on nonsense. In less than a week, the entire PT facade gave way, including to the looming inflation, and the star was replaced by the (price of) tomatoes. Soon, party politics was reduced to a risky, twilight, and lethargic abode, at the center of which lay that internal cancer, CORRUPTION, and the inexhaustible anxiety it generated amid the struggle to restore the Lulista peace in the country."
ResponderExcluir"Indeed," I agreed with her. "It's ridiculous to hear candidate Lula talking about 'pacifying the country,' when it was during the Workers' Party government that the greatest popular uprising in decades erupted: the poor quality of public services, corruption, unemployment, inflation, spending on massive projects, and police repression in the streets—all the work of the Workers' Party in power. Already in 2013, the cycle of consumption stimulated by the Workers' Party through credit lines was taking a heavy toll on the population. Subsidies and grants were unsustainable, and the popular protests had undeniable and visible participation from the poor, at every level of their being, from the muscular and sensory to the moral and intellectual—proving that every tendency generates its opposite."
"He he he," Raul interjected. "When we look at something red, the visual induction immediately intensifies our perception of green, right? A green halo immediately surrounds the red object.
"There's no doubt that the preferred targets of the street riots were the bank branches that the Workers' Party government had helped enrich, while also forcing the names of nearly 70 million people onto the SPC," I said.
"Between us," Helô continued, "at that time, I was up to my neck in the PT's contractor capitalism, through my law firm which, fulfilling contracts with various ministries, helped the Brazilian judicial system to execute what seemed until then to be its greatest talent: formulating the technical jargon with which a victorious partisan gang was telling its story to the masses. The militancy paid with public money helped to spread the 'Message' (even the name of one of the wings of the PT), but it was the Courts that gave the technical approval for the robbery --- that they later came to judge and condemn these same people, is only irony of fate (they danced to the music --- and that they came to absolve them not long ago of the same convictions, only to try to return to power, is also irony, but nostalgic --- return to the old velvety unity of the silent womb of corruption, from where most of their nominations for the Supreme Court came: the old politics, the 'jeitinho' (its anonymous marriage without excessive faces this time, a mere reflection in the secret and foolish gaze of the supreme magistrates)
ResponderExcluirThe reverie continued, incorporating ever more detailed details. The end of the night in the bars, in that neighborhood of Italian immigrants in the eastern region of Belo Horizonte, drew attention to the listed architecture, surrounded by the Ribeirão Arrudas and the railway line. There, with Helô and Raul, the verbal tremors passed imperceptibly, as if in a trial, and the concern on Helô's face contributed to her expression of a whipped dog, awaiting my interrogation. Raul shook his head a little when he perceived some perverse insinuation of mine—in those moments, I would pat him on the back, joke irreverently, and say: "A repentant sinner is worth more than a thousand faithful."
ResponderExcluirFrom that jumble of inconsistencies that was the mentality of the contractor-PT national-developmentalism, I now wondered only what K really had to do with Helô. She herself answered me, towards the end of the night:
"Nothing. I mean, I met him by chance at Café Com Letras, on a night with a jazz trio and free consumption of white wine. He was still very young, but he no longer lived in the city—he was just 'hanging out' that time. He told some girls at the table with him that he was president of a non-profit organization (OSCIP) in Juiz de Fora and that he knew everything about environmental compensation projects that facilitated licensing and improved companies' market image. And can you believe it? I FELL FOR IT! At that time, the legal dangers of what he was doing leading that institution linked to the Workers' Party (PT) and the Communist Party (PCdoB) hadn't yet turned him into a Draco Mitigatus (Taming of the Shrew), and his name and image easily emerged with a false glow in any social circle he infiltrated, with charisma and smooth talk. It was only after we had gone to bed a few times, here and in Governador Valadares, that I realized he was transforming himself into a polygamous apostle of Toltec androgynous love, as he himself once said: ‘the best of all is real life, the dreamy lucidity of the flesh’.
ResponderExcluirThen I thought to myself: "My God, billions were effectively embezzled from the public treasury, not just from Petrobras, both to individuals in the form of bribes and to legal entities in the form of inflated contracts, subsidized loans, grants, or illegal or paralegal contributions to PT, PSDB, and PMDB campaigns. The scale of the theft is still staggering! Arrests, searches and seizures, preventive arrests, and criminal executions."
ResponderExcluirHelô was the quiet and enigmatic type, capable of suppressing strong emotions and revealing only what was necessary, perhaps omitting crucial information to broaden the case's perception, even giving it a different cover than the CHANCE she had blamed for her encounter with K.
Another world! In the nearby nightclub, hundreds of young people were dancing. They didn't see me, they didn't see us—we, the Garibaldi natives of the reserve, with over fifty years under our belts; in my case, much more. While we discussed the passage of June 2013 for Dilma's impeachment, they had grown silently into the night, like an extraterrestrial army whose presidential vote is completely unpredictable. Unexpected and mysterious, they ignored us. I wondered if K himself, a little younger than Helô and me, wasn't somewhere similar, in the middle of Rio Vermelho at night, in Salvador, perfectly identified with this kind of crowd. I let myself be carried away by the ruminant emptiness of my thoughts, there in Santê—a vague mortifying sensation, feeling forever archived in that false and happy atmosphere of Atlantean bohemia.
ResponderExcluirAnd to draw on any existing social sentiments that might serve our conversation, I note Santê's nighttime gourmet markets, open all night with their cans of luxury preserves, ready-made Milanese risottos with saffron, and their bottled sauces, mustards, extra virgin olive oils, imported wines, cheeses and pepperonis, Parma ham and smoked salmon, slivers of a thousand snacks, and their merciless competition with the Bolão at dinnertime. The end of the walk was hot, restless, gagged by Helô, between two dark areas of the neighborhood, which reminded me of the assassination of Mayor Celso Daniel in Santo André. So I finally hailed a taxi and headed to the airport, completely drunk, where I slept on a bench until dawn)
ResponderExcluirEnd MAVECCHIO here!
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