Súditos do Rei

É sua primeira vez no blog? Leia antes o post “Uma Introdução” (em português).*

If you’ll recall, apparently I have to understand Roberto Carlos to understand Brazil. And to understand Roberto Carlos, of course, I’ve got to listen to his music.  The best of his music, that is.  So I went to the fans for help.  No more than ten songs, I distinctly remember saying. Okay? But when you get the Carlosians started, there’s no stopping them. That’s how I ended up with 23 Roberto Carlos songs to listen to.

How does one sit down and listen to 23 Roberto Carlos songs? Drunk, was my instinctive reaction. Very, very drunk. But that sounds like a depressing Friday night, doesn’t it? I also know myself well enough to know that if someone sits me down and makes me watch their favorite movie/listen to their favorite song/read their favorite book, the odds are very good that I will dislike it with all the passion of a contrarian knee-jerk reaction.  This goes for everything from the Pokémon movies to Neutral Milk Hotel (I will maintain to this day that Jeff Mangum is actually a goat they keep tied up in the recording studio). So I couldn’t just sit there at my laptop and press play 23 times; that wouldn’t end well. I had to let the songs catch me off-guard. Less of a confrontation and more of an encounter. Oh, hey, Roberto Carlos, how’s it going?

I decided to kill two birds with one stone. The other thing I’d been meaning to do for ages was bake. Unlike Roberto Carlos, I know that I unreservedly love baking; and I’ve missed it so much in Brazil. During the busiest time in the year in Princeton, a final exam period when most people stop sleeping, I decided to make it a tradition: I’d be in the college kitchen turning out huge fragrant chocolate chip cookies, and a bleary-eyed crowd would gather to eat them hot out of the oven.  Inducing happiness and diabetes since 2009.

This time around, I knew exactly what I wanted to make – a relatively simple recipe, but one that’s become almost legendary among my colleagues. Dorie Greenspan’s infamous Katharine Hepburn brownies. They have been compared to heroin (albeit by non-heroin users, so take that one with a large grain of salt).  Anyway, having gone two and a half months without baking anything, I was ready to jump back into the game. And now I had the perfect soundtrack.

I cued up the playlist and started buttering and flouring. I think my strategy mainly worked; I was sufficiently distracted to listen to the music without concentrating too hard, but for about an hour and a half it was just me and Roberto. (And the housekeeper singing along from the other room.)

Four well-adjusted, intelligent people who are also Carlosians sent me their “indispensable” Roberto lists.  And it was uncanny: in every list there were both shockingly good and utterly unbearable songs.

My tentative conclusion is that Roberto Carlos is a sort of musical Aleph. In Borges, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. That, in a nutshell, is the Rei. He blows hot and cold, pastel and pretentious, Barry Manilow and Paul McCartney, snarky 60s guitars and horrifically unironic string sections. You can’t pick away at one song, or one album, even though the spoken-word sections in “120, 150, 190 km por hora” would have made me flee the kitchen if I hadn’t had to keep the butter from burning. He’s too damn prolific, he’s been around too long.  Asking if you like Roberto Carlos is kind of like asking if you like music. You’ve got to have some sort of a screw loose to just say “no.”

To return to Borges, here’s how the narrator of the story describes the experience of seeing infinity in the Aleph, with all of the Roberto Carlos songs I listened to embedded in the text:

In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I’ll try to recollect what I can.

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

[translation: Norman Thomas Di Giovanni in collaboration with JLB]

Let’s be clear.  My heart still belongs to Noel Rosa. But infinite wonder and infinite pity: that about sums it up.

The brownies, incidentally, came out kind of burned – less Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen and more Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year.  I’m going to blame “Despedida.”

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É escritora, tradutora, brasilianista e diretora de pesquisa na Rádio Novelo