Alessandra Dalevi
For death it was a rich crop of talented people. For Brazil, which became considerably poorer, it was one heavy loss after another, after another, after another. In a short span of a few weeks in January and February, the country lost its most respected economist, Mário Henrique Simonsen; one of its best novelists, Antônio Callado; its brightest polemist-journalist Paulo Francis; world-renowned anthropologist and senator Darcy Ribeiro; folkloric soccer team owner Vicente Matheus; hated union leader Joaquim Santos Andrade; and promising young talent, composer Chico Science.
With the exception of Chico, who died in a car accident in the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, at 30, all the others were over 60. Despite their age, however, the intellectuals in the list were still very active till very recently or even until the very day when they died as in the case of Paulo Francis and Darcy Ribeiro.
DARCY RIBEIRO
Loved by the Indians, with whom he lived, Darcy had Terena and Xavante Indians paying him homage during the wake in Congress. A group of children, women and men placed over his chest a miniature vase symbolizing plenty in the after-life. His last girlfriend, Irene Ferraz, 38, confirmed his fame as a womanizer: "He left thousands of widows," she exaggerated. "He was passion-inspiring. He wasn't a man for an only woman." President Fernando Henrique Cardoso who attended at the wake declared a national three-day mourning period.
The versatile PDT (Partido Democrático Trabalhista — Worker's Democratic Party) senator, who was also a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, died of prostate cancer at 74 in the Sarah Kubitschek hospital, in Brasília. He died on February 17. Only two weeks before he had been to the senate to cast his vote against the government as the senate chose its new president, which is also the president of Congress. His vote was for Íris Resende, who had no chance against political powerhouse Antônio Carlos Magalhães.
Darcy was an accomplished success under all the hats he wore: educator, novelist, anthropologist, and politician. His contributions to the Indian ethnology started with the publication in 1950 of Religião e Mitologia Kadiuéu (Kadiuéu Religion and Mythology). He loved Brazil with all its warts. "Switzerland is an almost perfect country. That's terrible. I prefer our country that is still being made." About himself, he declared, "I am really vain. I really have a tendency to despise modest people because I believe that modesty is an attitude of those who are mediocre and satisfied with themselves and the world. I am the only Brazilian theoretician and the only Latin-American theoretician to provoke international discussion. My studies about the anthropology of civilization have had 145 editions."
He also said, "I have failed everything I tried in life. I tried to alphabetize the Brazilian children, but I didn't succeed. I tried to save the Indians, but I didn't save them. I tried to build a serious university and I failed. I tried to make Brazil develop with autonomy and I didn't succeed. My failures, however, are my victories. I would hate to be in the shoes of those who won."
ANTÔNIO CALLADO
He was called "real life's only Englishman" by right-wing writer Nelson Rodrigues, who criticized, but also admired the integrity and finesse of left-leaning novelist, playwright and journalist Antônio Carlos Callado. He would have a place guaranteed in the Brazilian literature even if he hadn't published anything else besides Quarup, a novel that he himself wasn't that proud of.
Published in 1967, the work whose title refers to a death ceremony among the Brazilian Indians, is the story of Nando, a priest from the Northeast who, in search of the truth, leaves the convent and goes to live with the natives in Xingu. There, the missionary is converted himself and discovers sex and love. When he goes back to the Northeast he has become a guerrilla.
The author also wrote, among other novels, Bar Don Juan, a stinging critique on the so-called festive left and the uselessness of fighting the Brazilian military dictatorship, A Madona de Cedro (The Cedar Madonna), Reflexos do Baile (Reflexes of the Ball), and Sempreviva (Evergreen). During the Second World War, starting in 1941, he worked in London with the Brazilian section of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Aldenham house. Three years later he moved to Paris to work at the Radio-Diffusion Française. In 1947 he was back in Brazil. During the military dictatorship (1964-1983), the writer was imprisoned five times. It was during his first period in jail in 1965 that he concocted the plot for Quarup.
Profoundly in love with Brazil, Antônio Callado wrote in 1993: "Let the country live. Let poor Brazil breathe. Leave it in peace, so it will lose its tortured manner, as if it were a stutterer, a child always being bugged and, who for that very reason gets bad grades in his report card."
Callado died just a few days after his 80th birthday. "To be alive at 80 is something horrible," he declared a little before dying. He had been fighting prostate cancer for 12 years and had two operations in 1984 and 1989 to try to eliminate the tumor. In 1994 he was elected to occupy seat number 8 in the ABL (Academia Brasileira de Letras — Brazilian Academy of Letters). His bier was placed in the Academy, with the dead writer wearing the Academy's pompous uniform that he criticized for being inappropriate for Rio's hot climate.
He was a leftist of principles. "I have never joined any party," he declared in one of his last interviews. "I remain true, absolutely true to what I was and I am: a man from the left who believes in socialism."
MÁRIO HENRIQUE SIMONSEN
He liked to be called professor, just professor, without anything added to it. He became famous and was hardly criticized for his role in conducting the Brazilian economy during the military administrations of generals Ernesto Geisel and João Baptista Figueiredo. He was the voice of reason in a military regime with grandiose nationalistic plans without concern for its cost. While the generals wanted miracles, Mário Henrique Simonsen preached moderation and belt-tightening.
Born in February 19, 1935, economist Simonsen became Geisel's Finance Minister in 1974. As Figueiredo's Economy Minister, he didn't last more than six months, presenting personally his letter of resignation, to a startled president, who still on his underwear. Said the general: "From what I gather, you are saying here that my government is shit."
Few people know or remember that Simonsen was the president of the ill-fated Mobral (Fundação Movimento Brasileiro de Alfabetização — Foundation Brazilian Movement of Alphabetization) from 1970 to 1974. With a college diploma in civil engineering and another in economy, he became the proverbial sage that every administration consulted in times of crisis.
From his post at Fundação Getúlio Vargas he became the most influential man in Brazil as far as economic policies were concerned, a guru everybody wanted to hear though not necessarily to heed. But he had also profound knowledge of music, mathematics and chess. In his book Ensaios Analíticos (Analytical Essays), he demonstrated how easy it was for him to move from quanta physics to music, from philosophy to mathematics and show the relationship and links among these disciplines.
It was at the end of 1993 that he discovered he had lung cancer caused by a life of chain-smoking. According to his own calculations (for him numbers could explain everything), smoking 2 or 3 packs a day for 40 years, he puffed on 800,000 cigarettes. "To have cancer, is no cause for shame," he said matter-of-factly. After chemotherapy left him bald he didn't prevent photographers from taking his pictures and he didn't stop smiling. For a time it seemed that the cancer was in remission. It was a mirage. In the last few months he had been unconscious most of the time.
He defended until the end a monetary system similar to the one adopted in Argentina in which the currency is linked to the dollar in a way that the government cannot irresponsibly print more money whenever it needs it. He dreamed with a country entirely bound by the constraints of a global economy. He was the brightest economist of all, but he had a hard time dealing with politics and the realities of daily life.
PAULO FRANCIS
"The function of a University is to create elites and not to give diplomas to down-and-outs." "I am in favor of closing the Congress or any other of those institutions that prevent the country's progress." "I cannot imagine even one enemy. Nobody interests me enough for me to hate him." These are some of the jewels left by Paulo Francis. Journalist Franz Paulo Trannin Heilborn, who always called himself Paulo Francis, died of a heart attack, in New York, at the age of 66. He loved to polemicize. Extremely bright, a confessed book worm who never finished university, the became famous practicing a journalism in which he accused first and then (if ever) tried to show proof.
Through his one-page column published Thursdays and Sundays in O Estado de São Paulo and O Globo and commentaries at Globo TV, he became the most famous, most feared and best-paid Brazilian journalist. From the 21st floor apartment at 47th St in Manhattan, where he lived, the staunchly conservative newspaperman was a machine gun always poised to fire. Not only with attacks, but also with praise, he sometimes would condense his thought in one-liners about anything his keen sense of observation and erudition saw fit, from a new Broadway show, to a book just released, from a Brazilian friend visiting New York to an old snippet of information he had seen three decades ago.
Born in Rio in a Jewish middle-class family he tried the stage (with little success) and also to be a theater reviewer before finding his vocation as a journalist. He started as a political columnist writing for Rio's daily Última Hora. His left leanings with a Trotskyite flavor made him a persona non-grata among the military dictatorship and didn't make him too many friends among the Stalin-worshipping left-wingers. In 1969 he helped to launch O Pasquim, an underground weekly paper that would enrage the military regime and introduce in the country a new form of journalism.
His articles at Pasquim would land him in jail four times before he decided to move to New York in 1971. He would never go back to live in Brazil and "from the top of the world" as he used to say, his Weltanschauung would little by little be drastically reformed. In his trajectory from left to right, he would also substitute his for the poor for the ridicule of blacks and poor people. Some of his old friends never forgave him for what they considered high treason.
For having denounced shady dealings at Petrobrás, the Brazilian state oil monopoly, he had been taken into court in New York by Joel Rennó, the company's president, who was suing Francis for damages of $100 million. "They want to bankrupt me," he commented, knowing the costs of the American justice. "If anybody asked me to point to one single cause only of Paulo Francis death," said Jesus Cheda, his private doctor, "I would say that it was the stress caused by the legal problems that he was facing."
"The tendency of the intellectual is to be from the right," he wrote recently. "By definition, he is an elitist." Those who kept his friendship were always talking about his generosity, but Francis could be mean and was almost invariably arrogant. While interviewing American economist John Kenneth Galbraith for TV, the journalist started to give some lessons. Galbraith interrupted him with a "I would like to remind you that I am the professor here." Francis wrote a dozen books, but he didn't have the time or the guts to put on paper the great novel he dreamed of.
CHICO SCIENCE
Nobody had heard about the mangue beat four years ago. The rhythm — a mix of Northeastern styles like ciranda, coco, and maracatu with rock, funk and rap — was created by Francisco de Assis França, a former employee of a computer company, who then adopted the name of Chico (a common nickname for Francisco) Science. He called himself a "crab with a brain" and a "mangueboy", since it was in the mangues (swamps), favelas (shantytowns) and cheap bordéis (whorehouses) that he found his inspiration. Among the new generation of Northeastern composers, which includes Carlinhos Brown and Raimundos, Chico Science was the most articulate one
Influenced by his interest in computers — he made part of a videoclip for his firs album on his Mac — the composer baptized his new sound as "mangue bit" to show the computer connection. But a journalist misspelled the name and mangue beat it became. He and his band Chico Science & Nação Zumbi had time to release only two albums: Da Lama ao Caos (From Mud to Chaos) in 1994 and Afrociberdelia in 1996. His international career got an impulse two years ago when his group opened the show for singer-composer Gilberto Gil at the Central Park in New York.
Chico Science's life ended on the fast lane with his speeding car hitting a pole on the road that links Recife do Olinda, in Pernambuco state. It is not clear whether the accident was caused by another vehicle. What is clear is that Brazil lost a very promising musical talent. Composer Arnaldo Antunes, who had invited Chico to be part of his next album, Silêncio (Silence) eulogized the friend: "My admiration for his work is total. I identify myself with him. He was able to go much farther. His death has aborted a very generous slice of the MPB's (Música Popular Brasileira — Brazilian Popular Music) future.
JOAQUIM DOS SANTOS ANDRADE
He was a bohemian, a unrepentant womanizer, a powerful though hated union leader, but at the end, Joaquim dos Santos Andrade, better known as Joaquinzão was taken by his family to a public clinic for old people and left there to die. At his wake, three of his four children were present, but neither his official wife nor his extra-official mistress bothered to go. He was 70 when he died on February 5, of a stroke and pneumonia. In the obituaries his name came always linked to the word "pelego" (bosses's worthy), a supreme insult, describing him as a sychophant and a government's informer during the military dictatorship.
He became the symbol of peleguismo. For 22 years, starting in 1964, backed by the military regime, he was the president of the biggest Latin American Union, the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos de São Paulo (São Paulo's Metalworkers Union). Even when the political opening started and other leaders were encouraged to take his place, the Christian conservative was able to keep his position first by rigging elections and then making an unholy alliance with the PCB (Partido Comunista Brasileiro — Brazilian Communist Party).
In 1986, he created the CGT (Central Geral dos Trabalhadores _ General Confederation of Workers) that he presided until 1989. "At beginning he was tainted by his connection with the military regime, but later he became one of the leaders of the democratic transition," said Luiz Antonio de Medeiros, president of Força Sindical, one of the three Brazilian workers' federations. Just before dying, Joaquinzão declared: "I wasn't a good husband or a good father. I wasted my life with unionism and women." The rumors that he received big money to avoid strikes, however, seem unfounded. He died poor, leaving to his family not more than a modest house and a little ranch.
VICENTE MATHEUS
As NY Yankees catcher Yogi Bera, Vicente Matheus had a knack to twist sentences and mangle grammar in a peculiar and memorable way. Among his most famous utterings are: "Whoever goes out in the rain gets burned", "Sócrates (a soccer player) is unsalable, unnegotiable, and useless," and "I thank Antarctica for the braminhas it sent us." Antarctica and Brahma are the two biggest breweries in Brazil. Braminha means a little beer. The sentence is the equivalent to saying, "I thank Pepsi for sending us some cokes."
Starting in 1959, on and off, Matheus, the legendary and folkloric character, was ten times president of São Paulo's Sport Club Corinthians, the most popular soccer team in the country next to Rio's Flamengo. But at his funeral on February 10 the only player present was Neto. The present board of directors seem to have forgotten the popular leader. It was under his helm that the team ended a fast of 23 years for a title and became São Paulo's champion in 1977. It was again during his presidency that Corinthians won in 1990 its only nationwide championship ever. Matheus, 88, he died of pneumonia at the Instituto do Coração (Heart Institute) in São Paulo.
