Brazilian Tequila

Augustus Young

Description

Experienced author and journalist Augustus Young used his travel diaries to produce a semi-fictional story about the people and culture of Brazil in Brazilian Tequila. Gus, a middle-aged Irishman, finds that his life in London has gone cold. An epidemiologist without an epidemic, a poet who cannot write poems, he decides to transmigrate to a warmer climate, namely Brazil, where he hopes to winter himself back to spring. He flies around Brazil, learning things that challenge his preconceptions. Pandemic corruption seeps into everything and nobody seems bothered, including his friend, Pedrinho. Even the first democratic elections for decades are being conspicuously rigged. Throughout his travels, Gus meets the real victims, particularly the poor and the young, and their cheerful passivity take him aback. However, his European side begins to revolt against what he sees as a 'moral no-man's-land.' Torn between his love of being there and his concept of justice, his engagement becomes disturbingly personal. When Gus travels with Pedrinho to his hometown (which is suffering a ten-year drought), it leads to a confrontation and a moral twist that throws his cherished certitudes into confusion. His affections threaten to take over from his principles. How will Gus cope? Will he see Brazil in the same eyes ever again?Inspired by Theodore Roosevelt'sThrough the Brazilian Wilderness, Brazilian Tequilawill appeal to those who enjoy travel stories and are interested in Brazil.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• Brazil

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 11 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785897368
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2017 Augustus Young

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Acknowledgements to Ronald King of Circle Press for Brazilian Minatures by Axl Leskoschek and Paulo Setūbal for his cartoon of Ubaldo Ribeiro

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ISBN 978 1785897 368

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd


To m.








‘Happy is the man who like Ulysses returns after a fine journey overflowing with thoughts and experience’

Du Bellay

‘No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port’

Michel de Montaigne

‘A dice throw never will annul chance’

Mallarmĕ

‘I laughed a wooden laugh that I could fear a door’

Emily Dickinson



Contents
Prologue O Altitudo

Part 1

My Voyage of the Imagination
There
Towards the Oasis
On Not Meeting Ubaldo Ribeiro
Break Down
Pink Bikes
The Turning of the Worm
Brazilian Tequila
Interim Stop
The Red Scorpion
A Perfect Desert Flower
‘An Evening Meal in the Widower’s Heaven’
On Not Meeting Ubaldo Ribeiro (Again)
A Letter to Senhor Joậo Ubaldo Ribeiro

Part 2

I’ll Go With You
The Homecoming
The Last Colonel
The Visits
What Pinto Thinks
Old Friends
The Girls
Edifying Discourses
Pedrinho’s Farewell Party
If the Heart is Big Enough
Epilogue

Lexicon of Brazilian words
Itinerary (Key places)
Music in the Text
Note and Poem
A Journey into the Interior
Brief Biography of the Author

Photographs by Alice and Gilbert
Cartoon by Paulo Setúbal
Brazilian Miniatures by Axi Leskoschek (Circle Press 1974)



Prologue
O Altitudo
I first see Dr Pedrinho Diaz in the lobby of the Cumberland Hotel, holding a large parcel wrapped in brown paper: a shambling panda of a man, clothes crumpled from the tour group treadmill. He looks lost, and older than fifty-five. His wife, Suzanna, sleek and watchful as a fox, catches my wave. And Pedrinho lumbers over. Could this imploded figure be the author of ten years of letters, ornate in feelings, eloquent in ideas?
It’s the end of the 1980s. The correspondence began a decade before with an Oxfam project in Brazil – colleagues working together for the good of humanity. It went well enough: a few showpiece projects. The dispatches diversified. I procured offprints for his doctoral thesis in Public Health. Pedrinho responded with chocolate box photos of his two daughters, one married. His style grew flowery. Opening with ‘Revėred colleague,’ closing with ‘warm embraces’: in between Virgil, Unamuno, Emily Bronte and matters of life and love. ‘All things are possible if the heart is big enough.’
The O Altitudo thrilled me. Not quite ‘Hallo clouds, hallo sun,’ but sometimes close. I introduced him to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and lines like ‘another Athens will arise’ became a touchstone. His passionate espousal of Shelley’s ideas on freedom and ‘the common good’ touched me as a lapsed anarchist. ‘Governments lock us up in institutions to save us from ourselves. Society, on the other hand, if left alone, brings out the best in people. Only by eliminating guilt can the mutual trust necessary to support an equitable community be possible. We release ourselves to promote happiness.’ A far cry from the creeping paralysis of cynicism that was overtaking my London friends. As the pendulum of the sixties began to swing the other way, Madame de Stael’s contention that ‘happiness is a concept that’s alien to Europeans’ had come home to roost.
It’s a stuffy July evening and my flat is like a humidor. Pipe smoke lingering in the air evaporates. Over steak and kidney pie the talk is not of higher things. Apart from his lunar notion that the Common Market should have an Emperor, the conversation is a bit of a comedown. ‘Tipico’ English dishes, cost of living comparisons, ways around inflation and the dustbin strike in West Hampstead. He speaks sadly of the struggle Brazilian professionals have to keep in the middle-class. It is not the Pedrinho of the letters, until I open the French window and the wild life drones in. He dispatches a dragonfly and, at home at last, unwraps the parcel.

‘A carranca.’ He places the head of a devil-man carved in wood on the window ledge. ‘Back to the light, front to the living. Otherwise it brings bad luck. You’re now protected from the evil eye.’
Pointy ears, voracious teeth, and eyes squinting at a flat nose, the fetish takes me aback. ‘What eye could be more evil than that?’
‘Your own.’ Pedrinho laughs, but he is serious.
‘So it is protecting me from myself.’
‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’
Suzanne changes the subject, and we’re back to where we began.
* * *
After Pedrinho’s trip to Europe, Shelley’s anarchist ideal is no longer mentioned. Before he balanced the rarefied with the earthy. Now the dark side of his lunar notions are leavened with ‘the terrible bite of necessity’ (Montaigne). He is not shy to confide the fiscal chicaneries needed to keep in the middle-class: for instance, how to offset the ravages of inflation by opportunist buying and selling of motorcars. Some of the ruses are so ingenious that he can’t contain his delight in them. I meet halfway his justification – ‘small corruptions are the enemy of greater ones’ – as it echoes my maverick hero Bertolt Brecht.
Brazil is moving towards democracy, and Pedrinho is sceptical. ‘It has been tried periodically and failed.’ He blames it for the untimely death of Getulio Dorneles Vargas. ‘Vargas ruled for sixteen years as a benign dictator, and brought Brazil into the modern world. But three years as the democratically elected President drove him to suicide.’ However, he welcomes democracy. ‘We Brazilians live in hope. But it needs a Head of State, like the Queen of England, to give it ballast. Reinstating the House of Braganza is the answer. Under Emperor Pedro II the country prospered.’
In London when he spoke of the struggle to stay in the middle class, I thought he was talking about his unmarried daughter. I had just gathered from Suzanna that she failed to get a professional qualification, and was unreasonably shy for a pretty girl of thirty. Her only boyfriend was an unemployed dentist. And so I am relieved to receive her wedding photograph. She has married a lawyer who plans to practice in Portugal.
* * *
I commemorate my fiftieth birthday, toasting the sands of time with a bottle of Brazilian tequila. I need an oasis on the horizon. Not that life is a desert, but the grass is growing less green every year. As an epidemiologist in London I found myself working on Aids, a disease without a treatment. Since finding solutions to problems is what I make my living from, I’m frustrated. I ought to take a break from population research, and get back to writing poetry. But poems cannot be forced. They only come when you stop trying.
In his last letter, Pedrinho told me he dreamt of taking me to see his friend Ubaldo Ribeiro, and the legendary Lilian, in the island of Itaparica. It is a dream I can share. I’ve just finished Ubaldo’s novel, Viva O Brasil, and his concept of vara intrigues me: if a problem doesn’t have a solution, then it isn’t a problem.
His counterbalance to vara is the Literature of the Cordel. This popular street poetry of the Northeast takes up controversial subjects and run with them, not to solve the problems of the world, but to keep them in the public eye, so they don’t disappear into desuetude. Pedrinho often encloses a cordel with his letters. I’m the proud possessor of numerous hand-press booklets with woodcuts on the covers. Maybe an on-the-spot study of verse- with-a-purpose would help me to make the muse of my poems less self-referral. My last effort got stuck after two stanzas:

A turban on my head
the pipe I smoke is not
for other men to puff,
unless they serve to swat
the flies, and breathe my breath,
and give me right of love.

I stand for my portrait
beside myself with pride
against a canvass of blue;
the artists I’ve tried
sketch my image with hate
and with wonder too…

Embarrassed, I want to tear it up, but don’t. It’s conclusion will be a nice come-uppance.
I toast Pedrinho and Ubaldo, and, while thumbing through my album of cordels – witty, pious, sexy, angry, sad – I hear myself humming, ‘I’m going to Brazil,’ a current hit. I had not considered before that you could just go there, other than in a voyage of the imagination. It is simply a matter of buying a plane ticket. I could be there next week and stay as long as I like (I work freelance). Above all, Brazil would be an escape from Nietzsche’s ‘sombre reflection in which the self becomes its own object of relentless scrutiny and self-punishment’ ( The