Um conto de duas cidades

Last Tuesday morning found me standing at a bus stop on Rua Jardim Botânico, bleary-eyed and rumpled, but bound for São Paulo. All because I’ve been trying to be more impulsive lately. The Friday before, I was checking my email at PUC and saw that a dear professor of mine was giving two talks at USP the next week. And Antonio Candido was giving the opening talk at the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda conference! I did a bit of agonizing and deliberating and asking to be let out of classes and trying to find plane tickets for less than R$500 (complete failure on that front), but by the next day I had bus tickets to the Drizzly City. I yanked myself out of bed at 5 a.m. on Tuesday, the day of the conference, and made my way to Rodoviária Novo Rio. By midafternoon I was in another world.

As soon as I stepped out of the Metro in São Paulo, things felt eerily familiar. I can’t say if it was one thing in particular – the sidewalks were broad, the cars drove slower, there were more trees – but the city felt profoundly, profoundly American to me. I don’t say that as a value judgment, either for good or for bad: it just felt incredibly familiar. Walking around Santa Cecília and Higienópolis, I kept having little shocks of surprise whenever I heard people speaking Portuguese; I half expected to hear New York accents. When it doesn’t look like Mumbai, São Paulo could easily be a stunt double for Brooklyn. (Fittingly enough, because the city even has a neighborhood called Brooklin.) Rio has always felt exhilaratingly different, in all its azulejo-strewn colonial decadence; at least for me, São Paulo felt like nothing new.

Antonio Candido’s talk was precisely about that difference. Um conto de duas cidades, he announced at the opening – A Tale of Two Cities. (Sidebar: I found an ancient Portuguese translation of A Tale of Two Cities in the Laranjeiras public library which was titled Morrer por ela: a queda da Bastilha. I have to say that I am very, very glad that didn’t become the canonical title.) The two cities were, of course, Rio and São Paulo, but the tale was more about Sérgio Buarque de Holanda himself, the paulista who grew up in Rio and came back to São Paulo only to establish himself as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century in Brazil.

The reception at the talk was incredible. The opening was in a tiny makeshift auditorium, and by the time I got there it was jammed to the rafters. When Antonio Candido himself showed up, there was such palpable adoration in the air that I half-expected the crowd to snip pieces from his suit jacket or try and grab locks of his hair. And justifiably so, because the talk itself was marvelous. The central enigma was as follows: why, in the history of Brazilian modernism, did the most daring, the most revolutionary, the most avant-garde works come out of São Paulo and not Rio? Rio had a centuries-long literary tradition; São Paulo was practically a factory town.

“Estereótipo é coisa odiosa,” Candido said, and, with a wink, proceeded to launch into a list of carioca and paulista stereotypes (at the time that Sérgio was living in Rio, that is). Rio was the sunny city of samba, populated by disorganized cariocas who never responded to letters and managed their money badly; the inhabitants of São Paulo were hard-working, responded to letters on time, and laughed maybe once a year. And yet Rio’s modernism was more comportado, well-behaved and sensible, especially in comparison with the paulicéia desvairada just to the west of it.

Candido hypothesized that Rio’s longstanding literary establishment was precisely what held it back from riskier artistic ventures. Rio already had its own literature, had its own traditions, but São Paulo, the upstart, had nothing to lose. Sérgio, meanwhile, being the anti-cafajeste, brought to Rio the radicalism of paulistano modernism and made it reverberate throughout the carioca intellectual elite by virtue of his personal connections (with Prudente de Moraes, neto, among others). In the end, Candido’s story was considerably different from Dickens’: the tale of an advanced city with timid modernists and a backwards city which became the vanguard, and of the man who lived between them. Not exactly A queda da Bastilha, but well worth the trip. Even if the bus did blow out a tire on the way back.

Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

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