Literature and theater protected me during this hectic week. Conflicts between powers reached the level of fear for the stability of buildings. A cyclone-like wind swept across São Paulo, heralding the arrival of extreme weather conditions. On Sunday I read “Heart Without Fear” by Itamar Vieira Junior and, from the beginning, I was enchanted by this sentence: “The waters, the waters of this moment, flow forever and without destination.”
During the week, Congress repeatedly gave us reasons for disbelief. On Tuesday, the scenes of physical altercation at the MP’s seat as Speaker of the House were unspeakable. The early morning bad votes showed that Brazil’s parliament is waiting for voters to sleep to surreptitiously carry out its plans. Thursday dawned with our astonishment because the Chamber had exceeded all limits, attacking one of the founding foundations of the rule of law: respect for judicial orders.
“Send it to the archives,” said House Speaker Hugo Motta, referring to the Federal Court’s order to dismiss MP Carla Zambelli. In the plenary session of the House, the deputies jumped. They celebrated an unconstitutional decision. Zambelli was convicted, in a definitive and final action, for having invaded, with the help of a hacker, the system of the National Council of Justice. Its revocation is an automatic consequence of the conviction, and the STF order is not archived. The Supreme Court declared the House decision null and void.
Democracy was a difficult construct that consumed us for years. The arts were the rope to cross the cliff. On Thursday, actor Othon Bastos took the stage at the Academia Brasileira de Letras in the magnificent show “Don’t give me back, não!” », by Flávio Marinho. Now 92 years old, he travels the stage and history of Brazil talking about his own career. Othon recalled a quote from Mário Quintana: “Don’t make a mess of your life. You may not have time to clean it up” – speaking of the painful 1970s. “If there was a phase of my life that I would not clean up, it would be the 70s, despite all the repression and censorship. And if I were forced to choose a specific year of the decade, I would choose 1973.”
During the decade, he and his wife, Martha Overbeck, founded a theater company that produced notable works on stages across the country. In 1973, he toured Brazil with “Un cri immobile dans l’air”. That year, Brazil felt what is described in the title of the work. The theaters were full, sometimes with three performances a day. “Not per week, not per day,” he stressed.
The Senate approved the PEC Marco Temporal in two rounds, without taking into account the obligatory interval of five sessions. This removes indigenous land rights. It is the eternal struggle for land in Brazil. The Supreme Court has already declared this theory unconstitutional. Congress wants to impose it by force.
Everyone challenges the Supreme Court, including the Supreme Court. No, Minister Dias Toffoli could not have traveled to attend the match in Lima on a business plane, with on board the lawyer of one of the people investigated in the Master affair. And being present on this flight, I could not have kept the Banco Master affair confidential. Even less did he stop the investigations into the bank which had committed fraud while flattering politicians. The search for facts continues. That cry is still in the air, on this plane.
Itamar Vieira Junior, in his trilogy, talks about the struggle for territory, in the countryside or in the city. I interviewed him on Wednesday on my GloboNews show. “Heart without fear is that of those who have been absolutely torn from the earth. Rita Preta leaves her homeland when, at the age of 12, she goes to work in the city as a domestic servant, something we have seen countless times in Brazil over the last decades,” he said of the main character of his new novel who, like so many women from the periphery, faced the disappearance of her son during a violent police action in the favela.
I asked Itamar what kind of Brazilian he was, who suffers from the country’s pain or who has hope? He said it was both. “We can’t change what’s already happened, and that’s what these stories highlight. But we can find hope.” On the ABL stage, Othon Bastos arrives at the end of the monologue by quoting Federico García Lorca: “Theater is poetry that emerges from the book and becomes human.” On Saturday, I went to see Fernanda Montenegro reading Simone de Beauvoir. This is how I protected myself during a week of tornadoes in the Three Powers.
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