Blues for a Lost Childhood: A novel of Brazil

By Antônio Torres

It's another hot, sleepless night in Rio, punctuated by the sounds of jazz, TV, and gunshots from the cafés and shanties. In the narrator's drink-bruised mind, a nightmare begins with a parade of child coffins and a cascade of memories.

One figure stand

• Language: English
• Publisher: Readers International
• Release date: Jul 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781887378307

Antônio Torres

ANTÔNIO TORRES was born in 1940 in Junco (today called Sátiro Dias), a small farming village in Brazil's notoriously poor Sertão (Backlands) in the north-eastern state of Bahia. Like his characters from Bahia in The Land and Blues for a Lost Childhood, he attended school in Alagoinhas, then in Salvador. From school Antônio Torres joined the Jornal da Bahia in Salvador as a cub reporter following crime stories; then he moved to São Paulo, where he worked as a sport and local reporter for Ultima Hora. From 1965, shortly after the coup d'état that brought the military to power in Brazil (1964-1985), he moved to Portugal for 3 years to 1968, when he returned to Brazil and left journalism for advertising and fiction writing, living and working in Rio. He is now one of the best known Brazilian authors, since 2013 chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

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blues for a lost childhood

Acclaim for

Blues for A Lost Childhood

A novel that must be read, an intellectually demanding political, social and literary creation, a novel of psychological depth, remarkable imagery and tragic, absurd beauty. Torres’ novel is a challenge; nonetheless it offers a wonderful opportunity to learn about a people, about a culture that knows so much more about us than we know about them.

Los Angeles Times

"Torres’ book mixes places and times, so that the narrator alternates between talking to the dead, quarreling with his wife, and dreaming of his mother. The style is musical and moralistic, spattered with tags of songs, proverbs . . . , and reminders that ‘to remember is to live’.

The New Statesman

The flight to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo symbolizes an important drama for Brazilians. To abandon drought, poverty, and repressive tradition for the hope that the adopted cities represent is to act a role in a contemporary play whose protagonists are a continuous stream of refugees. The deep cleft that separates the two parts of the country is much harder to cross than anyone imagines . . . Torres’ books, widely read in Brazil, reveal a compelling need to define the relationships between individuals and institutions and to understand the critical metaphorical and actual journeys they make. Brazil is a country of frontiers, its sophisticated modernity juxtaposed with vast wilderness and daunting challenges, a country truly on the cusp.

Hungry Mind Review

"The topic of craziness was a crucial one in the 1970s, not only because of individual life experiences but also because of the repression and censorship enforced by the military dictatorship, which lead many young intellectuals into political exile or psychiatric treatment. Blues for a Lost Childhood (1986) picks up earlier themes. The protagonist’s hallucination brings up Brazil’s political past, this time from a Spanish-American perspective."

Dictionary of Brazilian Literature

"By the time we join Calunga and his cousin in Blues for a Lost Childhood, the world has inexorably started turning. The dizziness is that of the military dictatorship and its Economic Miracle, a ‘Nobel Prize afternoon’ of ‘traffic jams, tunnels, overpasses, sirens, barracks, tortured and torturers, and the dog-shit on the sidewalks.’ The childhood language of prayer and ritual, lullabies, romantic poetry memorized at school, rural ballads reciting murder and myth, remains as both a haunting and comforting reminder of another universe, populated too by the precessions of blue ‘angels’— coffins, the tragedy of infant mortality. But it is rapidly submerging beneath a new language, that of journalism and advertising, television and popular song, state propaganda and revolutionary protest, where any perspective of depth and truth has disappeared . . . In the limbo between these two cultures, where there is no longer any centre to hold, and where there is no possible return, then perhaps suicide, alcoholism or madness are understandable options."

Babel Guide to Fiction from Portugal, Brazil & Africa in Translation

Torres develops a syncopated, stop-start style, effervescent, raked with satire and insight into ‘the outrageous things that are going on around us’ . . . Remarkable.

Morning Star

Also by Antônio Torres

and available in English

from Readers International:

The Land

Blues for a lost childhood, by Antonio Torres, translated by Margaret A. Neves

The title of this book in Portuguese is Balada da infância perdida, first published in 1986 by Editora Nova Fronteira S.A., Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro.

© Antônio Torres 1986

First published in English by Readers International Inc, Columbia, Louisiana and Readers International, London. Editorial inquiries to the London office at 8 Strathray Gardens, London NW3 4NY, England. US/Canadian inquiries to the N. American Book Service, P.O. Box 909, Columbia LA 71418-0909 USA

Translation © Readers International Inc. 1989, 2020

All rights reserved

Readers International acknowledges with thanks the co-operation of the Google Book Project in the production of this digital edition.

Cover art: Untitled 1986 by Brazilian artist Hildebrando de Castro.

Digital and ebook design by BNGO Books.

Catalog records for this book are available from the Library of Congress and the British Library.

ISBN 9780930523688

EBOOK ISBN 9781887378307

Contents

Acclaim for Blues for A Lost Childhood

Introduction by John Parker

1

2

São Paulo, 31st March 1964

3

4

5

First hypothesis: MAMA

Second hypothesis: AUNT MADALENA (Calunga’s Mother)

Third hypothesis: GUESS WHO?

Ernesto Che Guevara. (The One in The Photo.)

Urgent: Dispatch This Coffin To Moscow

The Show Must Go On

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

ABOUT READERS INTERNATIONAL

Antônio Torres:

Protesting Underdevelopment

Introduction

by John Parker

And suddenly I realised I was a writer, and that I was not alone. We were a whole generation in the seventies, up and down the country, writing and discussing our literature; and a new awareness grew of our national and regional strengths.

— Antônio Torres

Born in a small town in the dusty interior of the state of Bahia, the author of Blues for a Lost Childhood made the trek to the industrial south, like so many northeasterners before and since. He didn’t, it is true, have to suffer the 1500-mile journey clinging to the shafts of a rickety truck known as a pau-de-arara (parrot’s perch). He was literate and articulate; he had been a journalist in the state capital, Salvador; he went on to work on newspapers in São Paulo and Rio, before moving into the heady, precarious world of advertising evoked in this novel. However, unlike the book’s nameless narrator, to whom he has clearly given some of his own situational traits, Torres’ concern with his native Northeast does not stop at nostalgia for its alcoholic pleasures. Rather, he can be seen as a spokesman for those poor migrants, symbolic of Brazil’s under­development, of the cleavage between the ‘two Brazils’, north and south, and in the north itself between the handful of urban centres and the vast hinterland controlled by landowners recalcitrant to all attempts at agrarian reform.

This had been the subject matter of the so-called ‘novel of the Northeast’, in the 1930s, when writers such as Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos and Rachel de Queiroz attacked the social evils of the areas to which they belonged. Their writing used descriptive realism to depict the lives of poor estate workers, debt labourers, sharecroppers, cowboys and their families, beset by the crushing problems of an unjust social system, frequently made worse by hostile climatic conditions, for which there was no solution other than migration to the growing cities of the south. Antônio Torres sees his generation as heir to the ethical position of Amado, Ramos and others, in facing and questioning Brazil’s most pressing national problems, bridging the gap with the thirties after a lengthy period during which the majority of writers had turned their attention to the psychological concerns of the individual and to experimenting with the aesthetic claims of fictional form. Os subterrâneos da liberdade (Freedom Underground), Jorge Amado’s socialist-realist fresco of communist party activity during the early years of the Estado Novo, was the last major work in the socio-political line followed by the Northeastern novelists. However, appearing in 1954, the year of President Getúlio Vargas’ suicide, it was soon overtaken by Guimarães Rosa’s masterpieces, Grande sertão: Veredas (translated to English as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) and Corpo de Baile (Corps de Ballet), both published in 1956, the year which many Brazilian critics have come to consider a watershed which established the ‘new fiction’. The political and economic climate was favourable to the aesthetic changes: democratisation was followed by the industrial development programme of Juscelino Kubitschek, which encouraged hope in a better future, symbolized by the founding of the new capital, Brasilia (1960).

Brazil moved into the era of bossa nova and the world football championship, both sources of international recog­nition, while in the Northeast things began to move, with the formation of the Peasant Leagues and, when the great drought of 1958 claimed Kubitschek’s attention, the creation of Sudene, a government agency to plan and finance development in the region. Fiction, for the most part, responded more to industrial development in the south, rejecting the perceived threat of massification, in the name of the individual identity and of creating a literature in form and content accessible only to an educated elite.

The 1964 military coup accentuated this tendency, particularly from 1968, when the regime, under Medici, entered its most violently repressive phase and literary reference, when it exists, became oblique, opaquely allegori­cal, its meaning to be teased out by inference. José J. Veiga uses Orwellian fable (A hora dos ruminantes, 1966, translated into English as The Three Trials of Manirema, 1970) and fantastic realism (A máquina extraviada, 1968, translated into English as The Misplaced Machine and other stories, 1970) to convey a threatening atmosphere of oppression; in Sombras de reis barbudos, 1972 (Shadows of Bearded Kings), the oppression is openly aggressive and all-embracing, but the writing continues to be dominated by the fantastic. The regime’s censors could hardly identify the source of oppression with the military government, without admitting precisely what Brazilian official propaganda was doing its best to deny to its supporters in the western democracies!

For Antônio Torres and most of the writers he recognises as belonging to his generation, such was the type of national fiction they read and discussed in their late teens and early twenties, as they too began to appear in print: a fiction that was (ostensibly) apolitical, individualistic or universalizing, metaphysical, mythopoeic, divorced from immediate or identifiable reality, concerned with formal innovation (disruption of linear narrative, use of stream of consciousness, multiple narrators, etc.), all part of a general move away from the traditions of bourgeois realism. The short story, too, had begun to acquire more importance, in the hands of Rosa, Clarice Lispector, Dourado, Veiga and others, who experimented with new techniques, creating strange atmospheres, using children or abnormal characters to produce ‘defamiliarzation’ effects. The younger gener­ation followed their example, and in the late sixties and early seventies we find them forming groups and founding magazines to serve as outlets for their work and to attract the attention of their contemporaries. Their fiction is seldom overtly political, but if a word to the wise is sufficient one can be sure that the Brazilian context would promote certain interpretations, particularly among the student body, which never ceased its hostility to the regime. Seen in this light, the attitude of the jury member (Luiz Vilela, Júri, 1967) who, revolted by the attitudes of everyone in court, decides he will vote against the sentence, regardless of the accused’s guilt, acquires a clear political dimension. Another story by Vilela, O buraco (The hole), in which the narrator starts digging a hole as a child and ends up isolating himself inside it, transformed into an armadillo, can be seen as an allegory of man’s alienation in modern industrial societies, but going underground suggests another meaning in what was rapidly becoming a police state.

Vilela’s novel Os novos (1971, The Young Ones) skates sufficiently close to subversion to give credence to such interpretations. Subversion is present, too, in Oswaldo Franca Júnior’s first novel, O viúvo (1965, The Widower), in the upbringing the bereaved narrator gives to his children, intended to instill in them a sturdy independence and self-reliance, against all the attempts at interference by traditional family authority. In Um dia no Rio (1969, One Day in Rio), Franca’s central character, accidentally caught up in a running battle between students and riot police in central Rio, pronounces no judgment, but his eyes and ears serve as the filter for the expression of popular anger. We shall, however, look in vain for further direct reference to political events in the work of this author until 1984, when he eventually confronted his own forced retirement from the air force, twenty years previously, in a novel (O passo-­bandeira, roughly translated as pass the flag or get the brush-off) which points to the paranoid authoritarianism of the regime, but seems not to question its legitimacy and avoids addressing its cruel repression of elementary human rights.

The most overtly political novelist of the period must be Antônio Callado, an already established writer and journal­ist, whose books in this phase revolve around urban guerrilla activity (Bar Don Juan, 1971; Reflexos do baile, 1976, Reflections of the Dance). That they were allowed to circulate may be explained by the lyrical incapacity of the would-be guerrillas portrayed (in the first) and the hopelessness of their task (in the second), crushed by a merciless machine: perhaps the censors weighed this indication of the regime’s invincibi­lity favourably against the crude detailing of torture in the second novel, which went through four printings within months of publication. Torture features also in one section of Sergio Sant’Anna’s Confissôes de Ralfo (1975, Ralph’s Confessions), a satirical carnavalesque parody of contempor­ary bourgeois civilisation subtitled ‘An imaginary autobio­graphy’, which proclaims its literariness sufficiently often to divert suspicion.

Yet all this fiction