Then I tell him stories of men-only things
And he smiles because everything is amazing.
Laughs at kings and those who are not kings (…).
– Fernando Pessoa
It’s Tuesday and my neck hurts. With difficulty and cursing in languages I’ve never even heard, I get up to pick up my cell phone, which is vibrating insistently – and rather hysterically, I would add. It’s a friend and he’s disgusted. With me! Apologizing in advance for the hyperbole, I will say that screaming he complains about the chronicle with time travel. “How childish, man! Why don’t you write a serious text, from a journalist, about the elections?”, he insults and then asks his friend.
I immediately imagine an article, no!, a essay with many quotes and maybe even a little Latin to decorate. The title has to be something very pompous and subtle, with a touch of humor and lyricism. “But without mesoclisis, right?”, I ask. On the other side of the video call, the friend makes an ugly face (the only one he has), but concedes: no mesoclisis. “Order given is a long order,” I say, and walk out of the office, stumbling over my spelling. The autocorrect error is actually a harbinger.
Because, after spending two days thinking about the task that fatigue forces me to resort to the cliché and call it Herculean, I give up on the job. To my good friend and other readers who yearn for serious, thoughtful words, all of them in tails, with more than four syllables and lined up in the sentence, I apologize. One day maybe, but not today. Because today, ah, today I want this space of Gazeta do Povo to be a reasonably safe haven for troubled spirits. A place where readers can find the hope that is today a little white thread lost in the great black fabric of national politics.
“My tired and human”
If I were to write a serious article, I would be forced to talk, for example, about the suspicions that hover over the elections. To be more precise: on the counting of votes. You may have already received one of the many videos that show the strange symmetry of the graphics and other signs that, in a very different context, that is, in a context of democracy and open freedom, would go unnoticed, but that draw attention because of the technocratic arrogance by Alexandre de Moraes, Barroso, Cármen Lúcia et caterva.
But what good would arguments skillfully stitched into successive paragraphs serve? until the climax of the improbable aphorism ? for nothing. Readers would be even more nervous. And fearful. After all, if there’s anything that unites us these days, it’s this fear that comes from the feeling of powerlessness. We fight against a powerful enemy, who arrives on the battlefield in a litter made with the dead consciences of the STF and supported on the shoulders of envy, resentment, arrogance and dishonesty.
I could. Oh, if it could. But I won’t. I’m not going to complain about the 57 millions of voters who, out of ignorance, blind faith, stubbornness or Machiavellian calculation, supposedly voted for Lula in the first round. I will regret, yes, the fact that you have not read any of the texts that make up my humble Trilogy of Optimism – “It doesn’t look like it, but eligible Lula is good news” (from 2021 )), “What will you do if Lula (knock, knock, knock) wins the elections?” (57) and the very recent “What will become of us if Lula wins the elections?”. But I won’t shed tears poetically compared to the pearls that pigs absently consume along with washing.
Likewise, and although I have a lot to write about on all these serious subjects, that do not admit metaphors, much less references to the naive world and something ridiculous of children, I refuse to talk about the null vote. Of the spoiled citizen who, between the Liberdade ice cream and the Communismo ice cream they offer him, prefers to throw himself on the floor of the Great Mall of Democracy, kicking and screaming “Vanilla!!! I want vanilla ice cream!!!!!”.
Instead, I prefer to quote a poem (calm down, Ewandro!). Perhaps titled “Poem of the Baby Jesus”. Maybe from Ferdinand. Yes, the Person. Maybe that poem from above, the epigraph that you didn’t read or read without paying attention or what is the epigraph? The poem has little or nothing to do with national politics (although in its worst moments it makes reference to a typically Marxist anti-clericalism). But it ends with a call to dream which, on second thought, might be too sentimental. I’m sorry again. It’s just that today I’m bitter.
When I die, little son,
Be the child, the most little one.
Take me in your arms
And take me inside your house.
Undress my tired and human being
And lay me on your bed.
And count tell me stories, in case I wake up,
So I can go back to sleep.
And give me dreams of yours to play with
