Approaching his 70th birthday, Caetano says he's still a teenager.

247 - In August, Caetano Veloso will turn 70. But he feels like a teenager, with the soul of someone who is 14. Read his article below about time, where he talks about his new discoveries and his fears.

Ages - CAETANO VELOSO

O GLOBO - 24/06

I suppose I didn't like my childhood. I remember a lot of impatience and an almost permanent, suppressed irritation. There were joys—like drawing railroad tracks with charcoal on the immense cement of the backyard (interspersed with flowerbeds with shrubs, sometimes flowering, in one a guava tree, in the larger central one a gigantic mango tree)—along which we made trains travel, made of rectangular iron rods that, with their orderly protrusions for fitting together, remained in the storeroom waiting their turn to be nailed to telegraph poles along the real railroad. There was indeed happiness in the hours spent in the high branches of the mangaba tree (which is what we called the araçá tree), finding araçás that were not yet ripe, their skins showing the slow swelling of maturation, a supposedly imperceptible movement but clearly perceived by my overly attentive eyes, too pleased in their anticipation of the resistance that the fruit's pulp would offer to my teeth before displaying its bittersweet taste, its tang, and its very fresh information of vegetality.
And also in living with the large family group, many women and no open fights, my mother distant but attentive to the slightest announcement of physical injury, my father, besides her, but in charge of everything. All my siblings. Happiness, yes. In all of them, a certain amused admiration for what seemed to be my special gifts of memory, learning ability, lucidity. I have nothing objective to complain about. I just grew up impatient and saw that those who were 7 years old despised the condition of those who were 4, and those who were 12, that of those who were 7. That was Santo Amaro.

The terrifying, delightful marks of adolescence assaulted me in Rio. I stopped being a child the year I spent in Guadalupe. To this day, no matter how much I read about the anxieties of adolescence and the infinite happiness of childhood, I notice more the joy that all the people I've known show when they stop being children. Children cry several times a day, eat, go to bed, and bathe when adults tell them to. Not having autonomy isn't felt as something that brings contentment. I don't want to deny the conflicts that must exist—and do exist—during this transition period. But, for me, teenagers are happier than children. I think I've always thought that. Since I was a child. Also when I was a teenager. I realized that adulthood brings even greater firmness to this enjoyment of autonomy, but the blossoming of this happiness has forever remained linked, in my imagination, to puberty. So I can say that I've always been a teenager. Fifteen is my age. Perhaps 14. The rest are external milestones that don't concern me, like that number 70 that the record label and my production office pasted onto my name on the website that's on the internet. For me, even these external milestones are subject to the strict dating of the turning point: I'm 69 years old until August 7th, a period, incidentally, in which Chico Buarque, who turned 68, is only one year younger than me. More modern, someone from Santo Amaro would say (or that newspaper from Cachoeira whose news became a chronicle by Machado de Assis studied by Roberto Schwarz, the latter seeming to understand even less than Machado that "modern" in the Recôncavo Baiano region means "young").

The development of the mind has a kind of peak at 50. It's not a rule, but I felt it in myself. I thought it would continue the same at 65. But I soon realized that my memory wasn't the same. I had suffered a lot when, in my forties, I had to wear glasses to read. I had always had excellent vision; I couldn't bear having to use that contraption or worry about losing it. I also had to get used to hearing people say "the glasses" instead of "the glasses." The lack of agreement in number in verbs and related adjectives also bothered me. I like grammar, the rules of language; I think the tendency to disregard these things denotes social unhealthiness. I write in a somewhat baroque way, but I don't think Brazilians should be inattentive to rules of clarity, coherence, and cohesion. It also doesn't make me happy to read, so frequently, things like "So-and-so didn't deliver the DVD to So-and-so." This acute accent indicating crasis where it doesn't exist (something a linguist once declared should already be the rule) saddens me. Old man's stubbornness? No: when I was a boy, I was purer in my passions and grammatical vanities.

I say I'm 14 years old. I could say 30, the age I was when my first child was born, amidst the unspeakable joy of returning to Brazil. But even then I felt like a teenager. The meticulous description of childhood impressions might lead one to believe that I idealize it like everyone else. It's just that I won't describe the corresponding experiences of adolescence here.

One of the clearest signs that I'm getting old was reading Francisco Bosco saying he didn't understand what we found so funny about Francis. It was a delight to read a fragmented Bosco (so fragmented, if viewed from our Sunday perspective). I've matured enough to say that I don't believe concepts like "class struggle" explain everything. I don't even know if that "everything" refers to anything obvious. As a teenager, I savor the taste of discovery, I'm afraid, I have immense joy, I'm beginning to dare to speak to strangers, not just to Mom and Dad. I think Cristiano Ronaldo and his worldwide dissemination of Teló's music are wonderful.