Why do I like Nelson Rodrigues so much? That's a question I asked myself for a long time. Like any question concerning preferences, it's difficult to answer. But, a few decades after my first encounter with his chronicles, I believe I have a plausible answer.
I have always been an avid reader. Perhaps my childhood without siblings and without many toys, except for a ball, partially explains my interest in reading. I remember my mother commenting that God had written a letter to humanity. So, at the age of 10, I went to read the Bible. How could I not read a text written by God himself? It wasn't easy. The erudite and sometimes obscure passages of the Holy Scriptures forced me to carry my dictionary with me [1] . Obviously, I understood almost nothing, but my inner universe expanded proportionally to the increase in my vocabulary [2] . From then on, I was not intimidated by the Greek philosophers, the Church Fathers, the Russian writers, the French and, no less important, the English, whose influence on me is immense.
Involuntarily, or rather, inadvertently, I ended up forming a reasonable literary repertoire. At 17 or 18 years old, due to preparing for the university entrance exam, I interrupted a daily reading practice [3] and began to dedicate myself more to mathematics, chemistry, physics, in short, to the subjects required by the exams. As I am from Manaus, I took the entrance exam for the federal university there, which was then called UA, Universidade do Amazonas [4] . I didn't pass. I got a zero on the essay exam, which was eliminatory. One day, I will tell this story in detail.
But I digress. I'll return to the topic. Now living in Campinas, studying Applied and Computational Mathematics at Unicamp, I resumed my old reading habit. I read columnists in newspapers and magazines. But something had changed. I would finish certain texts and not know what I had read. For a long time, I believed it was mental fatigue, because doing mathematics requires an effort that one doesn't confess in public without seeming pretentious.
Time passed. The internet emerged, facilitating access to writings, including foreign ones. I graduated, earned a master's degree, got married, had children, and completed my doctorate. In short, another decade went by. And the same uneasy feeling persisted when I read certain articles I came across: what were they even about? However, with two aggravating factors: their number had increased considerably, and they weren't limited to Portuguese. I wasn't mentally exhausted. There had to be some other explanation.
That's when Nelson Rodrigues' memoir, *The Girl Without a Star *, fell into my hands. Right from the first pages, I felt a punch in the gut:
" This light isn't turning green? It's turned green. Here I go, rushing through. But the Avenue, from Praça Mauá to the obelisk, is resounding with the immortal cry:"
The new Prostitution in BrazilThe new Prostitution in Brazil!
A tourist passing by would surely write in their notebook: 'Brazil has just enacted its new Prostitution.' For me, it was an unprecedented experience: for the first time, I saw prostitution promoted like soap, Coca-Cola, or Grapete.. "(The girl without a star, Nelson Rodrigues)
To enact the new prostitution? Indeed. In the course of the chronicle, Nelson reveals the auditory misunderstanding: "New Constitution".
Further on, he concludes:
" Drinking my milk, I engage in my dairy-style reflections. Unintentionally, and due to an acoustic mishap, I discovered the following, colon: what we lack is what I would call 'political astonishment.' Here, astonishing things have ceased to astonish. If a street vendor were to spring from a hallucination, invade real life, and shout about the 'new Prostitution of Brazil'—no one would fall wounded by astonishment."
Let's consider another scenario. If a decree were issued ordering us to walk on all fours—what would our reaction be? None. Exactly: none. And nobody would even think to ask, simply ask: —'Why walk on all fours?' Quite the opposite. Each of us would try to perk up our ears, lengthen our tails, and tighten our shoes.. "
(The girl without a star, Nelson Rodrigues)
He writes from the past, but who in their right mind would dare say that this second passage has lost its relevance? He speaks of himself. He speaks of all of us. The text is shocking. You may agree or disagree with it, but you cannot emerge unscathed.
And that's when I suddenly identified the problem with the other texts. There's a pattern. We've been living, for some time now, under the yoke of increasing dissociation [5] and fear, to such an extent that many authors self-censor: they dilute the content of their articles until (almost) nothing remains. The sentence no longer affirms; it insinuates. The opinion no longer presents itself; it appears, as Nelson Rodrigues would say, anesthetized, with gloves and an advance apology. I call these texts "homeopathic".
No one is immune to the Zeitgeist . As I write, I feel its specter looming over me.
How much we miss Nelson Rodrigues!
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
References
[1] At that time, thank God, there was no “Pastoral” edition.
[2] I will write again about the intimate relationship between vocabulary and the inner universe.
[3] I mean: reading Literature.
[4] Today, UFAM, Federal University of Amazonas.
[5] I hesitated a great deal when choosing this word. Originally, I thought of “emptying,” since words are being deprived of their meanings. But the cause seems to me deeper: the divorce between the Word and Reality. A kind of dissociation, an ontological rupture. The corruption of language always precedes the decadence of a civilization.
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