It’s rare, but sometimes getting a death certificate, even though it has important lakes, can be a fun thing, and a great victory to celebrate. Anyone seen I’m still hereWhich awarded Brazil the first Oscar in its history, recalls the scene. Eunice Paiva, widow of Rep. Rubens Paiva, when the dictatorship is gone forever, stands proudly, smiling with the document she has just received in the civil registry. It’s 1996. At that time, Senora Paiva had spent 25 years struggling to find out where her husband was.
“The death certificate reached the press, as if it were a trophy. In that moment it told me: there was the true heroine of the family,” wrote his son, writer and playwright Marcelo Rubens Paiva, in the autobiography of the same name that inspired the award-winning film by director Walter Salles.
Like the film, the work, just published by Shackleton Books in Spanish and translated by Sofia Netzert Torres, tells the story of Eunice Paiva, but from a different perspective, so that they complement each other. The book, published in Brazil a decade ago, has been highlighted as a pulse against amnesia. To confront the memory loss suffered by Eunice, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and the difficulties her homeland faces in confronting the legacy of the last dictatorship.
Writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva was an 11-year-old child when his father disappeared. The dictatorship police confiscated the family chalet in Rio de Janeiro; As well as his mother and one of his sisters. They returned within days. Hey, never. Until that day in the summer of 1971, Marcelo’s childhood was one of pure happiness. He lived with his four sisters and parents in front of Ipanema Beach, in a villa full of joy, music and constant travel with friends, among them the teenager Walter Salles. The film director said that it was only over the years that he understood the historical significance of Paiva’s drama.
They never returned to see the patriarch, a politically engaged civil engineer who had been kidnapped by the military regime a year earlier. The author says that he understood that his priest would never return, and that he was dead, though he never uttered it, when a few months later his mother replaced the marriage bed with a single bed (see here Single bed).
Paiva Hijo describes with great sensitivity his mother, Eunice, who supported her five children during the search for her missing husband and reinvented herself as a lawyer for international organizations and artists (the World Bank, Gilberto Gil, Sting…) until she became one of the first specialists in indigenous rights in Brazil, and gradually became one of them. Memory deficiency. To the point of not knowing something seems as trivial as this year. A typical question from neurologists and lawyers when evaluating patients. “We were humiliated by brain connections (…) We seemed to be being pulled by the current in the emptiness of the ocean, we were awake, we were forgotten.”
The author decided to give written testimony about the family drama when the truth commission began to uncover hidden atrocities in history through a wide-ranging amnesty law. His mother was lost in this fog-filled world dominated by the Forgotten, a world where all the knowledge Atsuru once had was just gibberish, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, when she incorporated a new phrase into her limited repertoire:I’m still here“(Aún estoy aquí).
La Señora Paiva taught her children not to seek revenge – “Fighting to restore democracy was the most effective revenge” – and encouraged them to smile in the face of adversity and in pictures. Most importantly, they must realize that they are not that special. The author narrates that “the Rubens-Paiva family is not a victim of the dictatorship, but the country is a victim of it. The crime was against humanity, not against Rubens-Paiva. We had to be sensible and nailed in order to counterattack.”
His story is not gray at all, it is full of bright or shining moments. It evokes the tenderness and carelessness from colleague to colleague, from judge to veteran lawyer, with which the clerk explains to Leonis, 77, that this document he will sign before his children renders her powerless. The author, Marcello, the only man in the house, became like this the momFor the practical and legal implications of his mother. (A role she has played mostly since the accident that left him a quadriplegic for 20 years, and the raw material for her first book, happy old year, 1982).
He recounts with humor that his priest, who grew up in a wealthy family and entered politics to help workers and the poor, used to study alongside his comrades, where he would turn to him in case of need. The newly opened Eligieron la de Yugoslavia, the best ever, has a swimming pool. Alas, the politician ended up leaving after a movie with a plane and a Volkswagen Scarabago.
The amazing success of the film in Brazil gave a second life to the book, which jumped to the bestseller list. Paiva’s history was distinguished from others by the fact that this time the victims of the dictatorship were from a bourgeois family, and not just guerrillas or soldiers. It has facilitated empathy, multiplied its scope.
This is an opportune moment to deal with the book or film, dictated last September by the historic sentence that convicted for the first time some generals and the former president, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, on charges of planning a coup. The past few years have called us to think about the military system. Brazil remains reeling in the aftermath of an attack by Bolsonarista mobs against the heart of democracy in Brasilia, in 2023. America’s second-most populous democracy has just proven that the courts are capable of punishing those who attack democracy from within.
El Globo de Oro is the protagonist of the novel I’m still here, Fernanda Torres, whose version of Eunice was the Oscar waiting room. Her mother, the legendary Fernanda Montenegro, makes a fleeting appearance as an elderly mother, even with Alzheimer’s. (Yes, this is a country of family clans, whether in art or politics…).
Without remaining brave in the battles fought, Paiva’s son truthfully portrays his lost priest – a macho master, who wanted his wife at home waiting for him with whiskey with ice, while working outside the house – and his mother.
“She was practical, educated, slim, sensible, a workaholic. Everything she didn’t want in a mother,” she begins before going into detail: “My mother will kiss me four times in my life, and sometimes I go to the movies and watch the movies she wanted to see: Doctor Zhivago y Lawrence of Arabia. (…) ¿Bacius? “With my parents, my aunts and my friends’ mothers.” This account is without resentment, with a smile and endless affection. Hasya is the heroine of the family.
The Oscar fallout brings Paiva another victory in the battle he has been fighting for half a century. New death certificate for victims of dictatorship. revision. No lakes. “Cause of death of Rubens Berrot Paiva: unnatural, violent, caused by the Brazilian state.”
I’m still here
Marcelo Rubens Paiva
Shackleton Books, 2025
304 pages, €22.90
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