I really read, from beginning to end, I only read Grande Sertão: Veredas once and I don’t think I will read it again, not like this, from first page to last. Before achieving this feat, he had tried several times. I’ll go to page ten and leave it. After a while he tried again, and went to the thirteenth, without understanding anything, as if he were spelling the syllables in Sanskrit.
I must have been in my early twenties and I don’t remember exactly why I insisted on trying to get into the Grand Sertao, if he kept pushing me out the door. Perhaps, because I was straining my memory, I wanted to know if I could read very intelligent and complex works. My friends, whom I respect a lot, have probably already read it.
Until one day, when I realized, I had passed page twenty and was completely inside Rosa’s mythical world. I don’t know how or when this happened, I only know that I did not want to stop, fearing that when I returned, I would not know where to enter or that I would be expelled again from that cosmogony that was in Brazilian Portuguese but also in another language – strange and intimate.
I just remember that I got to the end without realizing that I had read the entire book, which was 560 to 700 and a few pages long, depending on the edition.
Calhamaço is a word that suggests tiring, exhausting, monotonous and difficult reading. It wasn’t like that at all, but I’d also be lying if I said it was long-lasting fun. It was something else, something that had never happened to me before or since. Just through.
I joined the Riobaldo bandwagon without knowing exactly where I was and what I was reading. I don’t remember anything I read, I swear. It was a profound psychological fascination, a literary epiphany. As if I were a branch of the twisted serrado waiting for Riobaldo to pass by. I was there, in the mythical world of the great Rosa Hinterland, and I left without knowing where I was or what I was doing there.
I just remember not stopping at any of the successive words I had never read before or their strange combinations. It was as if the narrator had mixed up the Brazilian, municipal and some other dictionaries, invented new terms and dumped everything on the pages. Nouns have become adjectives and vice versa. The camel stopped midway and calmly turned around. It was a world of phonetics of words, as if writing had not yet been invented. And I listened to it all as if it were a part of me, because I’m not even from Minas Gerais.
Today, the Grande Sertao is under the bedside table. As if it were the Bible. Before, I would open it myself and look for life lessons. In the absolute majority of cases, I find nothing, because that’s not how you get to a rosy cosmogony.
He had no signs and did not propose to obtain them. But Rosie remains there, dusty, closed, forgotten, close to me.
In this post-epiphany, I have learned to deal with it another way (like many readers, I imagine), by reading little volumes containing axioms, aphorisms, and well-known phrases that allow me, from within, to see a little of what Rosa saw and knew—perhaps even without knowing as much as she did—about the conflicting mysteries of the world and ourselves.
A few days ago, I found a gem in a virtual used book store, Rosiana, a collection of concepts, aphorisms and pamphlets by João Guimarães Rosa, with a selection and introduction by Paolo Ronai, a Russian of absolute pitch.
The Salamandra edition was published in 1983 to celebrate the 75th birthday of Rosa, who died at the age of 59.
Matt is the way to say it. An eternity is not enough to cover Rosa’s writings, or as Carlos Drummond de Andrade asked in a famous poem full of questions, written by the poet shortly after learning of his friend’s death. João: “Fantastic?”, “Wonderful?”, “Fable?” It ends like this: “We are left without knowing what Joao is, and whether Joao existed at all.”
I manage to quietly and calmly pick up the book from under the table, as if it were a pebble I had stolen from the Grand Serteau.
*This text represents the opinions and ideas of the author.