She was a friendly-faced lady, on a wooden bench on Russell Street, and as soon as we started to approach her and the friends she was talking to in the middle of the sidewalk, she smiled in our direction. Even seated, she rested her arms on the two canes, as if the movement helped her to better project her voice, and, unable to resist her curiosity, after having unarchived all the Wikipedia files she had in her memory, she asked my walking companion:
– You’re an actress, aren’t you?
Modern life is made up of thousands of faces. The backup memory takes away those of ordinary people, those of dreams, of the past, of communication media, and they accumulate in disorder in our heads, in an album often without subtitles. It’s too much visual information. From time to time, readers mix up the columns and greet me in the street with “Graaande Ancelmo Gois!!! “. I usually smile back, greeting with a “What’s up sir, how are you?” » Many others, I come back with a “Magina! I would have liked to have been given such an honor!”
At the turn of the century, I was at a Flip when a girl came up to the restaurant table. He handed a book by Drauzio Varela to my lunch companion, Zuenir Ventura, and asked him to autograph the copy. The girl ignored the journalist’s denials that he was not the doctor, she insisted, perhaps assuming that “Drauzio Varela” did not want to sign an autograph during lunch – and that it was only up to Zuenir to scribble his friend’s name so as not to give him a bad reputation in Paraty.
– I’m a singer – my walking companion kindly replied. I accompanied her to the parking lot to say goodbye, after doing an interview on the 30th anniversary of the release of her extraordinary and still relevant LP, “Da lata,” a true-colored eulogy – without the “wonderful city” – of the purgatory of beauty and chaos in which we live. It was the singer Fernanda Abreu.
For this Christmas, I don’t believe in it, but for the next one, I ask that Santa Claus fulfills a dream not only mine, but that of all humanity, and places AI-equipped glasses under the tree. May they, among other advances, have the ability to caption in milliseconds the person we met only once in our lives, decades ago, and who now approaches with a hug full of intimacy, saying that we miss them, sure that they have become unforgettable since then. Who is it? – you keep wondering as she remembers what was long since erased.
It happens. I, a journalist, during a soap opera launch cocktail, approached Carol Castro as if she were Juliana Paes. Who ever? It happened to Carlos Heitor Cony, he told me himself. When boarding the Santos Dumont, he was mistaken for Antônio Maria. Since the girl was pretty, she didn’t complain and they ended up in bed in São Paulo, as she later explained to him.
– And there? – asked Maria.
– Oh, Maria, you made a mistake – said Cony laughing.
After leaving Fernanda Abreu in the car, I returned to Rua do Russell and found the lady. I was delighted. He says he discovered, in a hidden corner of his memory, the file with the face of the woman he assumed to be an “actress”:
– It’s Marina Lima, the singer of “carioca girl swing sang”, right?
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