Human beings live for the future. From the hope that the future will shelter your deepest dreams. His wildest dreams, in the sense of impossible, as the Frenzies sang.
It is the idea of what will come, the infinite expectation that the future will be better, that lifts us out of bed, for another day.
The dawn is a sign that the construction of the ideal will begin.
On a sunny Friday, the lawyer, daughter of a mechanic and a traditional housewife, appeared all in red, a bright red dress, which combined energy and discretion.
Not so red, that it became showy, “I arrived”, nor the wine sobriety, that would come to contain the enthusiasm of a sunny day, after cold autumn days.
She is a lawyer, who left a simple middle-middle-class alley in Lapa, and moved to the aristocracy of Alto de Pinheiros, through her work and her initiative.
It was born when the Brazilian dream had already lasted almost a decade of golden years, between the 1950s and 1980s, when Brazil was one of the countries that grew the most in the world, and the Chinese arrived here to find out what was the secret of expansion and development, which lent life and a future to Brazil.
He was born during a government that instigated development, covering 50 years in 5. With an optimistic smile on his face.
Brazil had already conquered its worldwide visibility, its passport to get out of “viralatismo”, in 58, in Sweden, where the dawn of the fight for inequality allows for a hope, even if late.
I delved deeply into a past, where I believed in an overwhelming dawn.
Hours of conversation in a restaurant, reviewing the past, episode by episode, like the conversation that Mario Vargas Llosa had at the Cathedral, we traced the trajectory of two Brazilians, who have already walked together, fabulating the future. The dream of realization. We were telling each other what we had lived through.
Now, on this Friday, 40 years this morning, both of us, largely accomplished, enjoyed the joy of two people, who were able to have a future in the country of the Future, and I suffered the sadness of seeing that those young people, who were 40 years old, ago, sitting there in the restaurant, could not believe the same fate.
The question was: what to do to avoid getting tangled up in this trap?
Among the memories of the past tense, there was a thin agony of the trapdoor of being between two futures, which sound like an ambush: Lula and Bolsonaro.
One bears the acrid aftertaste of a dream that has melted, aged, without curing vices, the other the snare of the leaden years. Where Marias and Clarisses cried, on the soil of Brazil.
The clouds began to charge again.
The afternoon did not fall like an overpass, nor was there a drunk in mourning, it rose sunny, although it promised a winter twilight in autumn.
I realized that I wanted to, but I didn’t have the answer.
First, I took refuge in the University of São Paulo, where I try to drown my intellectual agonies.
I came across professors talking about research, but with no answers to the ongoing dilemma.
Then I took refuge in a historic house. That witnessed the birth of the candidacy for the Senate, of a future president of the Republic, and other meetings that created the rallies of Diretas, Já.
To Zé Gregori’s house.
I thought, he at the height of his 91 years, and having sailed from tenentismo to Real, facing the military regime, the construction of a dream that we walk together, to live its remote conquests and defeats.
There would be some answer.
I found him in the same room where so many plans were combined, the impulse of Montoro’s battles in search of democratization and decentralization, of respect for human dignity, which Montoro taught, however, sunk in the beige sofa, he asked me, in a certain challenge: Portella, how can we get out of this trap?
He didn’t want Bolsonaro or the PT. In the same path as the lawyer who had won on her merits.
I tried to keep the joy of meeting a great friend again, but I felt the same uncertainty, which plagues at least 40% of Brazilians.
Through the crack in the glass at the top of the wall, I could see that the light was fading and the wind had cooled a lot. The polar mass had arrived.
He asked me what to look for, the search for lost time, between the fire of growth of the golden years and the lost decades of the eighties, and now, worse from 2011 to 2020. When the country did not grow, that is, it decreased.
It was a complicated moment, where my soul wandered between the memory of Maria Helena, a great workmate, Zé Gregori’s wife who left, and that feverish atmosphere on the Diretas platform, which I was happy to share.
But a pain like this cannot go with impunity.
In the trajectory of the lawyer, who was made on her merits, in the smile of Gregori’s grandson, in the discussion of professors at USP about improving the quality of life, measured by research, when there are active public policies joining the lives of people, in Zé’s firmness, when he raised his voice against the loss of human rights, and in the figure of that Nisei who also had lunch with me, with squinted smiling eyes, as a symbol of the immigrants who propelled Brazil, arriving with the clothes on her back, as the Jewish father of a friend who was expelled from Egypt, I had a warm spark for sure.
Brazil can provide the way out of its own dystopia.
People are the asset. An asset, now depressed, due to the sadness of the scenario, but resilient like the northeast of Euclides da Cunha. First of all, we are strong. Maybe he’s touched only by a hope, maybe not.
When I got back to the car, I wasn’t feeling the cold anymore.
Nisei looked at the square where another Paulo, Paulinho, a Nisei who combines a Japanese father and a Piauí mother, a very Brazilian mixture of strength and courage, walks with the aristocrat Marcelo Borg, looking for solutions. Haven’t found them yet.
He had a tepid conviction that a tropical dawn could come.
I don’t know how, for now, but it will come.
People rushing in the streets, not knowing why, gave me such a sight.
Smile, even when your heart is hurting (Smile by Chaplin, John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons). Listen.
I just smile.
