The 100th anniversary of Braga, the master of the chronicle.

Milton Ribeiro, from South21

Without a doubt, the chronicle is not a genre recommended for those who aspire to posterity. After all, chroniclers usually write for the next day, and their products, like modern palimpsests*, are replaced the following day. Certainly, chronicles last a little longer when published in magazines, and their absolute glory is appearing in a book. Today, with the internet and blogs, chronicles are published instantly and are perhaps even more volatile. The exposure time of chronicles on website homepages is variable, and their most lasting glory is continuing to appear in Google searches or, and here we return to the common point, in a book.

We have and have had excellent columnists in our country. We had, for example, Nelson Rodrigues and Stanislaw Ponte Preta, Paulo Mendes Campos and Fernando Sabino, Millôr Fernandes and the survivor – thankfully! – Luís Fernando Verissimo. But we had a solitary columnist who was proud to have been born in Cachoeiro do Itapemirim and who was the greatest of them all: Rubem Braga. 

Most of Rubem Braga's chronicles fulfilled their palimpsest-like destiny. After all, he wrote more than 15 chronicles for newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV, and no more than a thousand were selected by the author for publication in book form. He published more than 20 books of chronicles, the first at age 22. The strange thing is that Rubem Braga—a journalist who for years wrote news in newsrooms—had his best performances when dealing with non-news. As Manuel Bandeira wrote, Rubem Braga's true material is the scarcity of subject matter. When he spoke of an absolutely simple and everyday theme, he skillfully squeezed it to extract drops of poetry that were uniquely his.

Rubem Braga was born 100 years ago, on January 12, 1913, in Cachoeiro do Itapemirim (ES) and died in Rio de Janeiro in December 1990. In 1929, he enrolled in law school in Rio, later transferring to Belo Horizonte. In 1932, the year he graduated, he began working at the Diário da Tarde newspaper in Belo Horizonte. Soon, in addition to articles, he began writing his chronicles. In the same year, he covered the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932 for Diários Associados, from the front lines. He worked as a correspondent or contractor in various cities across the country, such as São Paulo, Recife, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, and Rio de Janeiro.

He also accompanied the Brazilian Expeditionary Force in the 1944-45 campaign in Europe, when he was a correspondent for the Diário Carioca newspaper. He always traveled extensively, writing for Brazilian newspapers about the countries he visited. He spent long periods in Paris and Santiago, Chile. He traveled from Paraguay to India, from Greece to Mozambique. In 1955, he headed the Brazilian Commercial Office in Santiago during the government of Café Filho, but he didn't stay in the position for a year. He sent a telegram resigning. In 1961, with his friends Jânio Quadros as President and Affonso Arinos at Itamaraty (the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), he became Brazil's Ambassador to Morocco. But he never strayed far from journalism.

We said that Rubem Braga worked in Porto Alegre. Yes, he only spent a few months in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, in 1939, at the age of 27, working for the Correio do Povo newspaper. At the time, he was suffering political persecution from the government of Getúlio Vargas and was even arrested for a few hours when he disembarked. 

His first book of chronicles, *O Conde e o Passarinho* (The Count and the Little Bird), was published in 1936 by José Olympio. The chronicle that gives the volume its title is written: "My life has always been guided by the fact that I do not intend to be a count." In fact, he never was a count; he always worked hard, despite his reputation as a hermit with an introspective temperament, but he earned a noble nickname: he was called "The Prince of the Chronicle." His themes were always the streets of the cities where he lived, their trees, their birds – he loved to describe them – women, childhood, the sea, friends, longing, and death. He also wrote many political chronicles, but he did not select them for his books. He was a man of the left who became increasingly skeptical about political discourse. He never took the usual path to the right and harshly criticized the 64 coup, even without being particularly fond of João Goulart. He died writing as a skeptical humanist: Nothing disgusts me more than the primitiveness of anti-communists who see everything from Russia as the work of devils, or the tone long adopted by the "Popular Press" seeing corruption, imperialism, bestiality, and ignorance in everything American. Such independence would earn him much criticism and misunderstanding, both from the military and from the "Ideological Patrol" of the 70s and 80s.

For example, four months after the 64 coup, he wrote a column saying that it was the result of the frenetic adventurism of the João Goulart government. However, in the same text, he made the useless warning that he did not approve of "nonsense such as the revocation of the political rights of Jânio Quadros, or of men like Celso Furtado and Anísio Teixeira." Two months later, his stance was much more decisive:

There have always been those in Brazil who advocated for a strong government, a military government. Only then could we have order and respect. A soldier to enforce the law. The military virtues of hierarchy, discipline, and obedience – to end the classic Brazilian chaos.

Well, that's not what we see. In Recife, there's a Colonel Ibiapina who respects neither the Superior Military Court, nor the Supreme Federal Court, nor generals, nor marshals: he's the one in charge, he's the one who arrests and releases.

(...)

Besides the violent, the arbitrary, the loudmouthed, there are the worst, those who torture political prisoners. Where is the order, the discipline, where is the respect?

No, putting a band-aid on the mess is not a solution. We've had more than one civilian president who wouldn't tolerate even a minute of these displays of insubordination.

Fame and the status of a lyrical writer should not be confused with political indifference. Rubem Braga founded *A Folha do Povo* in Recife, a communist newspaper that was shut down, and its editors were imprisoned and beaten. He himself, Rubem Braga, was imprisoned in Recife before being imprisoned in Porto Alegre. So what happened for him to be insistently identified as apolitical? Well, after his 60s, during the Médici government and in full force of the AI-5 (Institutional Act No. 5), there was indeed a retreat by the columnist towards skepticism, but not only that: what happened was an aesthetic choice, a substitution of social and factual chronicle for the timeless and indirect, characteristics, incidentally, adopted by authors such as Saramago and García Márquez in their books, just to mention two authors whose political opinions were never confused.

For example, in *Woe to You, Copacabana*, there is a short, famous, and delicate chronicle called "The Baker" (full text at the end of this article). In it, Braga describes a bread delivery man who went from floor to floor and shouted, immediately after ringing each doorbell, "It's nobody, it's the baker!" Superficially, the chronicle can be read as a joke about the man who said he was nobody, but the chronicle also allows for the reading of the story of the worker who delivered bread to the rich of Copacabana, warning them—and perhaps thinking—that he was nobody, that it wasn't worth the trouble of opening the door to greet him with a good morning. The criticism leveled at Rubem Braga by some on the left ignored the human dimension of his stories, which dispensed with speeches, adopting grace, lightness, and transcendence. But those were different times.

And it is precisely these chronicles—the combative ones, the indirect ones, the poetic ones—that Braga chose for the many books available today. They are lyrical chronicles with a decidedly unpleasant undertone. They are related to Drummond's *A Rosa do Povo* and are far from salon literature, despite their beloved birds and trees. And they are also sad, very sad, like the story of the lonely man who never met Nunes's First Wife (full text at the end of the article), of whom everyone spoke wonders and with whom the narrator was already in love. But one thing or another prevented him from meeting her.

Paradoxically, the solitary Braga changed in the presence of women. A womanizer, he loved one of the most beautiful Brazilian actresses of the 40s and 50s: Tônia Carrero. He met her in Paris. Rubem praised her beauty, made jokes — "I really like your left knee" — and, little by little, won her over. Her husband forbade them from seeing each other. Tônia cried a lot, but later, lonely and sad, she began to go out even more with Braga. Determined to leave her husband, Tônia met with Rubem at a small hotel. One day the concierge gave him advice: "Never lose this woman. She is too beautiful." But Tônia decided to break up, and the writer threatened to kill himself under the wheels of cars in Paris. Nothing. Both back in Brazil, he insisted, but Tônia ignored him: "Then I'll throw myself into the sea!", Rubem shouted.

Rubem Braga was very popular; his writing was accessible, and he wrote for the biggest newspapers and magazines of his time. As can be seen in the photos, he was a reserved man who only opened up to his friends. He justified his simplicity by explaining that one of Camões' most beautiful verses—"The great pain of things that have passed"—was written using only common words of the language. Simple and perfect was also his death. Two days before, he gathered his friends at his penthouse in Ipanema, in what everyone understood as a farewell. He knew the seriousness of his illness, laryngeal cancer, and asked them to leave him alone afterward. According to his doctor and friend, the neurologist Sérgio Carneiro, he refused all kinds of treatment and died alone, as he had requested.

* Palimpsest: parchment made of leather used by monks in the Middle Ages to record texts and engravings. From time to time they were washed in order to remove the ink and record new manuscripts that were then superimposed on the previous ones.

To make sure that readers ofSouth21 Whether you remember or are familiar with Rubem Braga, we leave here the two chronicles mentioned:

The Baker

I get up early, perform my ablutions, put the kettle on to make coffee, and open the apartment door – but I don't find the usual bread. At that same instant, I remember reading something in the previous day's newspapers about the "stale bread strike." Actually, it's not really a strike, it's a lockout, a strike by the bosses, who have suspended night work; they think that by forcing people to have their breakfast with stale bread they will achieve something, I don't know what, from the government.

Okay. I'll have my coffee with stale bread, which isn't so bad. And while I drink my coffee, I'm reminded of a modest man I used to know. When he came to deliver bread to the apartment door, he would ring the doorbell, but, so as not to disturb the residents, he would announce it by shouting:

It's nobody, it's the baker!

I asked him once: how did he come up with the idea of ​​shouting that?

"So you're nobody?"

He smiled broadly. He explained that he had learned it by ear. Many times he had rung the doorbell of a house and been answered by a maid or some other person, and heard a voice coming from inside asking who it was; and heard the person who answered say inside: “It’s nobody, ma’am, it’s the baker.” That’s how he had learned that it was nobody…

He told me this without any bitterness, and said goodbye still smiling. I didn't want to stop him to explain that he was talking to a colleague, albeit a less important one. At that time, I too, like the bakers, worked the night shift. It was in the early hours of the morning that I left the newspaper office, almost always after a visit to the printing press – and often I would leave carrying one of the first printed copies, the newspaper still warm from the machine, like bread fresh from the oven.

Ah, I was a young man, I was a young man back then! And sometimes I thought myself important because in the newspaper I took home, besides reports or notes I had written without signing, there was a column or article with my name. The newspaper and the bread would be at the door of every home very early in the morning; and in my heart I received the lesson of humility from that man, useful to all and cheerful to all: "He's nobody, he's the baker!"

And he whistled down the stairs.

Nunes' First Wife

Today, around midday, I went to get a taxi at that stand in Praça Serzedelo Correia, in Copacabana. As I approached the stand, I noticed a lady sitting on a bench, facing the garden; at either end of the bench sat two chauffeurs, but facing the opposite direction, towards the restaurant on the corner. As I walked towards a car, I glanced at the lady. She was pretty and had a foreign air about her; she was dressed very simply, but her dress was of good linen and her flesh-colored sandals seemed elegant. From a distance, she might have seemed a friend of one of the drivers; up close, despite the simplicity of her dress, one could sense that she had nothing in common with either of them. The mere fact that she was sitting on that bench seemed to indicate that she was a foreigner, and I don't know why the idea occurred to me that she was a lady who had never lived in Rio, perhaps it was her first day in Rio de Janeiro, engrossed in watching the trees, the activity in the square, the children playing, the nannies pushing strollers. It may seem an exaggeration that I felt all this at a glance, but the impression I got was that she had very well-groomed skin and hair, even though she wasn't a wealthy lady or at least of a certain social standing; she gave me the impression of taking a certain pleasure in being there, in that popular environment, looking at people with a friendly and vaguely amused air; that's what it seemed to me in the brief instant when our eyes met.

As the first driver in line claimed he preferred a passenger going downtown because it was his lunch break, and the next two cars had no apparent drivers, I walked a little to get the fourth one. I had the impression that the lady had turned to look at me. When I got in the car and was facing her again, and while I was murmuring my destination to the driver – Ipanema – I noticed she was looking away; the car had only moved a few meters and, seized by a premonition, I told the driver to stop for a moment. He obeyed. I looked at the lady, but she had completely turned her head away. I told her to start again, but as the old taxi rolled along the beach, I was possessed by the sudden and insistent certainty that I had just seen Nunes's first wife.

***

"You need to meet Nunes' first wife," a friend once told me.

- You need to meet Nunes' first wife – me again, another friend.

This happened a few years ago in São Paulo, during the few years I worked with Nunes. I had met his second wife, a pretty, gentle, quiet brunette – he had invited me to dinner at his house twice. He never spoke to me about his first wife, nor about his first marriage. Nunes was a person of some prominence in his profession and, after all, a pleasant man, though not brilliant; I noticed, however, that whenever someone spoke to me about him, a reference to his first wife was inevitable.

A couple of friends of mine, who used to spend weekends on a farm, once invited me to go with them and a small group. I accepted, but on Saturday I had to call to say I couldn't go. On Monday, the friend who had invited me told me:

- It's a shame you couldn't go. We had great weather and the group was fun. Marissa was the one who asked about you a lot.

- Who?

- Nunes' first wife.

But I don't know...

I know, but I told her you were coming. She was very interested in meeting you.

By this point I already knew several things about Nunes's first girlfriend; that she was beautiful, intelligent, very interesting, a little strange, Italian Jewish, rich, had light brown hair and green eyes and wonderful skin – "it always looks fresh, like she's just had a bath," according to the description I had heard.

When I came to my senses, I was, in a more naive, more foolish, more vehement way, in love with Nunes' first wife. I must say that at that time I was emerging from a devastating sentimental affair – a situation that more than once bordered on drama and tragedy, and I myself, probably more than once, crossed the line into the ridiculous. I was living through a bleak, empty period, filled with boredom and remorse; the memory of the past story hurt me a little and embittered me greatly. Besides, my situation wasn't good; friends thought – and one had the frankness to tell me this when drunk – that I was declining in my profession. Others said I was drinking too much. In short, bad times, low morale, and on top of that, little money and mortifying small debts. Naturally, I distracted myself with one or two love stories, but I emerged from each one even more bored. The image of Nunes' first wife began to appear to me as the last hope, the only star shining before me. This feeling was more or less unconscious, but I became acutely aware of it when I learned that she had won a splendid scholarship to spend six months in the United States. I felt robbed, betrayed by the American government. But the news came in the form of an invitation – to the farewell dinner for Nunes' first wife.

***

This happened four or five years ago. I moved from São Paulo, took some trips, and decided to settle down in Rio – and naturally, things happened to me. I never saw Nunes again. In fact, in recent times, our relationship had changed; I had distanced myself from him out of an absurd embarrassment, a childish modesty about what he might think the day he found out that there was something between me and his first wife… In reality, there was never anything between us; we never even met. A simple flu prevented me from going to the farewell dinner; then I learned that his scholarship had been extended, then I heard someone say they had seen her in Paris – in short, Nunes's first wife remained a myth, a star lost forever in distant horizons, and whom I never even got to see.

Perhaps it was indeed her who was lodging today, around noon, in Serzedelo Correia Square, simple, beautiful, and tranquil. That was the image I had of her; and I had the impression that her quick, vaguely cordial and vaguely ironic glance was trying to tell me something, perhaps containing a startling and cruel message: “I know who you are; I am Marissa, Nunes' first wife; but our destiny is never to meet…”