for Lúcio Cardoso, one of our greatest playwrights.
The inevitable hangover soon arrived. “Despite this great success, even ‘d’estime’ (in relation to the earlier plays), it was still a complete professional failure. It vanished without a trace.”
But it was typical of Lúcio to infect a group of Brazil’s most talented artists, an astonishing number of whom participated in this production alone, with his extravagant dreams. “Ipanema ought to be called ‘Lúcio Cardoso,’” one friend said. “I am not a writer,” he himself said, “I am an atmosphere.” His sister Maria Helena captured the power of his irrepressible enthusiasm:
I remember Nonô [her pet name for him] so joyful, his head full of fantasies, especially when thinking of traveling, and still young, with several books published and many still to be written, deciding to be a rancher someday. Infected by his enthusiasm, by the power of his faith and of his imagination, I seriously believed in all his whims, even the most impossible things. For me, it was all feasible, nothing was impossible for him, whom I admired above all else: novels, poems, beautiful plantations conjured out of nothing. His slightest dreams were realities for me, such was the force of his imagination.
Yet his failures, too, were typical. Despite his volcanic creativity and the admiration he inspired from the leading artists of his generation, Lúcio would never enjoy the fame to which his talent seemed to entitle him. His theatrical ventures had come to nothing, and his writing was met with incomprehension. In 1959 he published his masterpiece, Chronicle of the Murdered House, a long novel set in his native Minas Gerais, an attack on “Minas, in its flesh and spirit,” a meditation on good and evil and God.
Its setting, the decaying mansion of the once-grand Meneses family, and its themes, including the ways that one generation’s sins are visited upon its descendants, are redolent of Faulkner; but its charm resides in the ways Lúcio marries those themes to what can only be called camp: as if Bette Davis had wandered, bewigged and in full makeup, into Yoknapatawpha. The figure of Timóteo, the semi-deranged cross-dressing scion of the decadent dynasty, has no precedents in Brazilian literature, and, almost certainly, no descendants: a not-quite-caricature of a man trapped between his own nature and the expectations of family and society, and who, unable to escape, wavers between alcoholism and hysteria. The character of Timóteo may be seen as representing all those gay people, in Brazil or anywhere else, for whom an adequate language had not been found, and who desperately sought some means of expression.
There had always been certain limited places for gay people in Brazil: they had taken a leading role in making Rio’s Carnival the most opulent in the world; and a leading role, too, in religion: in Catholicism and, even more notably, as priests, soothsayers, and palm readers in the African-descended religions. Shut out of so many areas, they became gatekeepers of their own domains: organizers and collectors, tastemakers and decorators. One area they were shut out of was literature: they had turned up occasionally in Brazilian books, notably in Adolfo Caminha’s short Bom-Crioulo of 1895. But even gay writers (Caminha seems not to have been gay) wrapped a cordon sanitaire around gay lives: Mário de Andrade’s story “Frederico Paciência,” for example, was only published posthumously, and though it was ahead of its time—it was begun in the twenties and appeared in 1947—its hesitations and implied condemnation of homosexual love leave it far behind ours.
Appearing in this context of no context, Lúcio Cardoso’s Chronicle predictably scandalized the more predictably scandalizable critics. In words that hint at Lúcio’s affinity with Clarice Lispector, his champion Otávio de Faria answered those critics: “Are we going to leave off on our attempts to reconstruct the world, this tremendous responsibility, on which our salvation may depend, in order to obey a half-dozen prejudices?”
•
On December 7, 1962, a lifetime of heavy drinking and drug abuse finally caught up with Lúcio Cardoso. To what extent did these addictions have to do with his sexuality? Even in our far freer times, and as evidenced in numerous studies and articles, substance abuse is notoriously higher among gay people, a toll largely attributable to homophobic discrimination and bullying.
Earlier that year, in May, he had had a warning. Arriving at his home in Ipanema, his sister Maria Helena “saw the muscles in his face ceaselessly trembling, while he, in the greatest affliction, tried to calm them with his hand.” The crisis passed, but the doctor was clear. “Look, Lúcio, what you had was just a spasm, leaving your mouth a bit crooked and that drawling way of speaking. Thank God, because it could have been much worse. With time, if you keep doing your exercises in front of the mirror, everything will return to normal. But from now on don’t overdo it, don’t drink, don’t wear yourself out partying, try to lead a calmer life, since if you go on like before something worse can happen.” Despite his sister’s desperate attempts to help him, he refused to heed the doctor’s warning. “I’m not a child for you to be taking care of me,” he told Maria Helena. “Don’t touch those bottles! If I want to drink, neither you nor anybody else is going to stop me.” Later, Maria Helena would write:
I’ll never forget that date: December 7, 1962. It was a calm day, completely normal, until the afternoon. Between six- thirty and seven the phone rang.
“Lelena, I’m at Lazzarini’s house, helping out with a dinner for his friends.”
I recognized the voice of Nonô, whom I hadn’t seen in more than two days. He sometimes vanished like that for a week, which worried me after his spasm.
“Be careful, don’t drink, don’t take any pills.”
“Relax, I’m being a saint.”
Later that night, not having heard from him, she went to his apartment, directly behind hers. She found the door unlocked, which she thought was strange. She went in and discovered her brother gravely ill. Terrified, she called an ambulance; that night he fell into a coma. He emerged from the coma, but a massive stroke had left him permanently paralyzed. He would never again be able to speak normally. His writing career was over.
Maria Helena cared for him for years, always hoping that their attempts at rehabilitation would allow him to resume his career. It was a painful struggle, days of hope punctuated by weeks and months of despair. In a moment of frustration, trying to get him to do his exercises, Maria Helena told him:
“You’re very stubborn, that’s why so much has happened to you. Remember when you had your first sickness, just a spasm? I begged you, but you kept on drinking and popping pills. Did it work, your stubbornness?”
He got even more irritated and to my surprise said:
“It did. I died.”
Nursed by Maria Helena, Lúcio eventually become a talented painter, using only his left hand. The little watercolor on my shelf eventually grew into full-fledged scenes, and before his death he would show these paintings in four different exhibitions. In the eloquent memoir Maria Helena published at Clarice’s suggestion, she records his painful, fitful, exhausting progress—until, miraculously, he finally managed to start writing again.
“Can be 100 years—I have in the spirit young—life, happiness, everything!” he scrawled. “I, writer by fate.” “I looked at him with great affection and admiration. God had tried him in the cruelest way yet he had more happiness and love in his heart than sadness and bitterness. The dark days passed quickly, followed by light, much light.” After saying it for years in order to keep up his spirits, Maria Helena could finally exclaim, this time with conviction, “Darling, the day is not far off when you will be able to write novels again.”
The end soon followed, on September 22, 1968. When he was already in a
