PRECOCIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
First written for the 1984 edition of Verdes Vales do Fim duo Mundo.
Substantially revised and added to for the 2002 edition.
Touching on my CV, I was born on a farm on the outskirts of Cantareira, São Paulo, 1939. When I was two years old my family moved to the interior. My childhood was happy so that I can speak of "the Eden of my early years" with my mouth full. Of the war that was happening on the other side of the world I don’t remember hearing aeroplanes or bombs, just some terrible images of concentration camps published in periodicals of the time.
Five children – three girls and two boys, myself the one in the middle. My father was a cultured man, a very good saxophone player, the manager of high culture in the piece. Mother, in addition to her domestic gifts, was a modern, practical and hardworking woman, guiding us in the best possible way.
In between diving in the rivers, the fruits of the orchards, the cane fields, the country trails and my companions, I was a relatively artistic boy, a normal child but at the same time sui generis, one of a kind. I loved magazines, books, music and cinema – 16mm film cinema, once a week, at the club. I must have been about nine years old when I saw my first movie, a war film, with an actor who played a soldier who had style even when he was wounded (with a bullet in the leg) and stuck in a muddy trench. The film was The Bataan Patrol and the actor, Lee Bowman. After that were productions by Republic, Metro, Tarzan, black and white films and, of course, Esther Williams in Technicolor, rumba and Xavier Cugat.
Then we moved to a big town, I grew up and life seemed to get smaller. But always with many attractions. During the day I worked as a delivery boy for a big warehouse, cycling round the town doing my deliveries, and at night I went to the gym; teaching was deficient and I, as a bad student, usually cut classes to go to the cinema. Visconti's Senso was the first film prohibited for minors that I watched. I was sixteen years old. I thought the film was great. It was a revelation.
As far as books went, I had barely learned to read and I was already subverted by Oscar Wilde's brilliant paradoxes. On the bookshelf at home there was Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Clarice Lispector, Dinah Silveira de Queirós, and Berta Ruck. A certain Captain Rodrigo by Erico Verissimo. Francoise Sagan and Chocolate for the morning were in fashion during my adolescence. I discovered Simone de Beauvoir, but I found Sartre much too much for my head. When I was eighteen I heard about Kerouac and the Beat Generation. On a portable record player I listened to Chuck Berry, rockabilly, Gerry Mulligan & Chet Baker, João Gilberto and Invitation to listen to Maysa. At that time I had a short phase of writing film reviews in a local newspaper.
When I was 21 I left Ribeirão Preto and went to Rio de Janeiro to study theatre; first at the Brazilian Theatre Foundation with the legendary Dulcina as a teacher, and then, until my graduation, at the National Theatre Conservatory. Rio was decisive in my training. Altogether I must have lived about twelve years in Ipanema. I lived in Barão da Torre, in front of Tom’s house, when he and Vinicius were doing ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ at Veloso, which was a bar nearby. One night, at a get-together of people from Bossa, Vinicius made me a chicken sandwich. I was dying of hunger and the poet knew that. Straight afterwards Elis arrived; she was the star of the festival that did so well with Arrastão. Elis took off her shoes and her clothes, in front of the window, breathing in the night air. She was a conqueror, mission accomplished. It was in Domingos de Moraes street, in Copacabana, Nelita’s apartment (she’s now married to Vinicius).
Earlier, in 1963, I had debuted as an actor in the role of Estragon, in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, in a university revue directed by Maurice Perpignan, who, despite my slowness in memorising the script, believed in my theatrical talent from the beginning. Fausto Wolff, at that time a critic for the journal Tribuna da Imprensa, pointed me out as one of the revelations of the year as an actor. The following year I was Lisandro, in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the bill produced by Maria Clara Machado, celebrating the fourth centenary of the Bard of Avon.
In 1967, in the midst of an international boom in psychedelic and pop art, my name became known overnight, amongst the glitterati of Rio, when I gave the title Simone de Beauvoir, stop smoking, follow Gildinha Saraiva’s example and start working to a theatrical happening written in partnership with Carlos Aquino. A note appeared in a social column in a Sunday newspaper, and on Tuesday chroniclers in all the newspapers in Rio commented with humour on the kilometer-long title. Huge expectations were created regarding the debut – the play would be a sympathetic critique of the so-called Paissandu Generation (young intellectuals and 'poseurs' who frequented Cinema Paissandu and were part of the ‘festive left’).
In 1968 – and what more appropriate year? – I debuted for real, now as a playwright, in Cordélia Brasil, with Norma Bengell who, in the title role, moved the whole audience with emotion. In this same year Fauzi Arap directed, in São Paulo, my second play, with Maria Della Costa. With this play, Open the window and allow to come in the pure air and the morning sunshine, I won the prize for best playwright of the year, the Moliere award, and the prize was a trip to Europe donated by Air France. Amidst the crossfire that was the military dictatorship, tightening more and more the Federal Censorship's force and sadism, exile was necessary. And I, thank God, had already been so chosen. A great escape: a year away that resulted in Verdes Vales do fim do mundo, which was published thirteen years later.
When I think of all the decades, without doubt the most distressing to get through was the seventies, from 1973 onwards. The ‘New Drama’, which I was a part of (with Leilah, Zé Vicente, Consuelo de Castro, Isabel Camara – and a little earlier, Plinio Marcos, and a little later Mario Prata) and which, like all other movements before and since, transformed the theatrical scene with its originality, had suddenly gone out of fashion. It was the time of ‘divine decadence’ with great euphoria. In Brazil, the seventies started a little late, in 1973, with the androgynous outbreak of Secos & Molhados in popular music, and Dzi Croquettes in theater. Two years later, the young and talented troupe with Asdrubal brought the Trombone.
Extremely sensitive to the zeitgeist, I suffered a premonition of the change, in my second year of exile in Europe in 1972. During this time – Glam Rock, The Last Tango, Cabaret, and Clockwork Orange – I wrote ‘side B’ of Verdes Vales, which was Longe daqui aqui mesmo (I used as the title of the book the same as for the play I had written in the Chelsea Hotel in NY, 1970). The book was published in 1995 by the Editora Best Seller/Circulo do Livro.
Another change in 1973. For the first time I read Virginia Woolf, The Waves. I became so identified with her style that I couldn't think of any other writer. Twenty years later synchronicity would have me accepted – and the only Latin American! – amongst 21 academics and amateur enthusiasts in the summer school of 1993, at Charleston Farmhouse, in Sussex, one of the country resorts of the Bloomsbury Group since 1916 when it was discovered by Virginia on one of her walks. My first meeting with Quentin Bell, in his nearby residence, was friendship at first sight. Quentin, the first biographer of his aunt VW, historian of Bloomsbury, sculptor, art professor, was 83 years old, but until his death in December 1996 we had several meetings and a happy friendship by letter. After his death I received a card from his widow, Anne Olivier Bell (she was the thorough and perfectionist editor of five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries). She wrote to me: “Your enthusiastic friendship was always a source of great pleasure for him – and for me, and I thank you for that”. My friendship with Olivier continued. Whenever I could I came back to Charleston Farm for the summer school or for the annual festival. The one in 2001 was very promising: in the programme, from Harold Pinter to Merlin Holland (nephew of Oscar Wilde). Olivier wrote to invite me to stay at her house – Quentin’s ceramics workshop had been transformed into a guest suite, with bed, bath, kitchen. “But you would have to do your own catering and transport!” she explained. I wrote five volumes of diaries about my experiences at Charleston Farmhouse and my studies of literature and art there. One day I want to publish them. [They were published as Bivar in the Court of Bloomsbury in 1995].
But, getting back to the seventies … I did wish for one thing (this was a thing of literature), but also it instigated me as a talented artist (though without much vocation) to experiment with other media.
In 1973, when my other year in Europe arrived, Maria Bethania invited me to direct (with Isabel Camara) her show Drama – there are even two short scripts of mine on the live LP of this show; months later, I directed Rita Lee in her first show (with her I would work again, sporadically, in other decades – in 1986, on radio in '89, and in 1991 on MTV, for example). Delicious and memorable experiences.
Samuel Wainer always invited me to write in the journals that he edited, and in the seventies, with him, I wrote in Ultima Hora and others. I wrote also in Vogue-Homem, I was editor in chief of Interview, I had a column in Pop and, for one season, a weekly column in the Folha de São Paulo.
During this decade I did what I could, in theatre. Even a come-back as an actor (in the role of Riff Raff) in the Rocky Horror Show, playing the rival of Paulo Villaca (great figure and already legendary like The bandit of the red light in the film of Sganzerla).
The following year I got the biggest scare when I was invited by Ziembinski to write a play with which the master would celebrate his 50 years in theatre. He wanted a play with a warholiana atmosphere; advised by him, I wrote Quarteto. It was a catastrophic experience. Federal censorship stopped the debut, expectations increased, and when the play did debut Emilinha Borba was in the front row to dissect the work of her eternal rival, Marlene, who was on stage and quickly made 'counter-timing' with Ziembinski, also legendary after 50 years of long pauses and sepulchral silences in his shows. In the plot, Louise Cardoso (from the cast of Asdrubal), very beautiful at 18 years old, debuted as the stage lover of Ziembinski, then 68. Amongst other scenes, the master had me write one in which Roberto Pirilo, in the flower of youth, appeared naked for some ten minutes. Zimba explained to me that the point was this: the old man observes the physical perfection of the young, not with envy but as inspiration, to continue acting. The critics did not swallow it and the massacre was unanimous. In 1976 the critics were in a high-handed bad mood, just wanting things that would denounce the regime, and did not understand that this great Polish man, who had given so much to the modernisation of Brazilian theatre since he’d arrived in Rio after fleeing from Poland at the outbreak of the second world war, now wanted to play, relax, in the show that he had conceptualised, directed and acted in, celebrating his golden wedding of the stage. Quarteto was the last show of the master, who died two years later at the age of 70.
As the 70s turned into the 80s I was depressed, but once again Providence saved me: with a theatrical script, Suddenly in a Burst, I received a prize at the first (and I believe, the only) Feira de Humor do Paraná [Paraná Festival of Humour] and I went to spend another year in England. It was a year of training at the most modern school that life offered at that time, and I felt 20 years younger. I was staying in the countryside for a few days, at Andrew Lovelock’s house, when letters from home told me of my father's death at the age of 81. His last message to me, on the back of one of the envelopes, was "Enjoy yourself". I made a journey of pilgrimage in honour of my dear father, for whom life had led to so much conflict and which he had left without me being nearby. These were years of feeling many losses – relatives, friends, but the biggest of all was my mother, in 2000, nineteen years after my father – and this time I was close, with two sisters, and I was the one who saw that Guilhermina was no longer breathing. Her magnanimous heart had stopped for good. Lucid, at 92 years of an exemplary life, and who had always taken care of me whenever I turned up in a state. The sweetest of creatures, the greatest love of my life, and to whom I gave so much of my thoughts. It was the greatest loss. Two years have passed, the grief does not want to go away and I struggle to put myself back together. But I am at peace because, now more mature and aware, I had given her some peace myself. In 1994, when she was 86 years old, really well, working, sewing, cooking like no other, I had the great idea of talking to my brothers and sisters and my nephews, and we published a private edition of the memories that she, living alone, had written in notebooks at night. When I arrived with the books and opened a package to give her a copy, her reaction was shock, as if it was a violation. Memories she had written for her children and grandchildren, there, printed in 500 copies! Fine, she didn't speak to us for two days. But then she loved it, when letters of admiration – and not just from family members – kept arriving. I have to admit that Dona Guilhermina (née Battistetti) Lima, with Lembrancas, received more such letters than her son with all his books. The daily trips to the mailbox and coming back with letters in hand were reasons for us to be joyful.
But, getting back to 1981, that was an exceptional year and I immersed myself in the new art that was erupting. England was, for a long time, the best place to get involved with new ideas. The new generation that sailed on the crest of the wave now had short hair and brilliant ideas. And I, the eternal apprentice, attended this new school as the most assiduous student. England was once more preparing another cultural invasion and I was there in the right place at the right time so that, on my return to São Paulo, I was able to survive another season thanks to the new ideas that I had acquired. I launched myself as ‘Style Editor’ for a magazine that created new opinions (Gallery Around), where I stayed for ten years. In the mean time, I did not neglect my other work.
The eighties were the post-modern decade par excellence. Everything came up redone and remodeled. Even the architecture became more Greco-Roman. The spirit of Punk, that had burst onto the scene in 1977, was understood and it liberated a multitude of aspects with youthful appeal in the applied arts. In this decade – and now I am talking about Brazil – with the end of the military dictatorship, a host of different trends found the space to manifest. ‘Beat’ literature, for example: with [publishers] Brasiliense and L&PM, launched for the first time translations of Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso and others, authors until now unpublished in our editorial world; they were a success and from then on the books passed from hand to hand. In letters, it was also time for the emergence of new authors, with Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Caio Fernando Abreu, Ana Cristina César, Paulo Leminski, Reinaldo Moraes, Eduardo Bueno, and the rediscovery of Roberto Piva, Claudio Willer, Wally Salomão, Jorge Mautner, myself and others – this list is just a sample.
In November 1982 my first book came out, O que é Punk [What is Punk?], launched during the Punk festival The start of the end of the world, that I dreamed up and helped to organise with Callegari (from The Innocents). The festival made a strong impression in the media, reported even in The Washington Post and in newspapers in Japan. And my contact with punk culture hasn’t stopped since. In 1998 I was summoned by Motim Punk and by the Municipality of Santo André to be the playwright for the first Punk Opera that was reported on the planet. Does anyone exist who’s more punk than me? was the title. And in 2001, commemorating 25 years of punk, I helped to organise another festival, One step to the end of the world. Two days, 52 bands, it was an emotional celebration.
But getting back again to the first half of the eighties, it was a time when I had a guilty conscience on account of my absolute ignorance of Brazilian history. And it was a time when my friend, the poet Celso Luiz Paulini (1929-1992), wanted us to write with our four hands a play for the theatre. One night in 1983 I thought the time had arrived, and I proposed that we should write the history of Brazil for the theatre. It took eight years to write a trilogy. We won the Vitae scholarship and the third of the plays, The Café Foxes, was performed by the Tapa group in 1990, celebrating the centenary of Oswald de Andrade’s birth. The play, with brightness and humour, also followed the history of Modernism, and with it we won almost all the awards for best play script of the year incliuding, once again, the Moliere award. In the second half of the nineties, two plays of this trilogy were staged with emotion, intelligence and clarity for the third year students at the Rudolf Steiner college. Watching them in 1997 and '98, I was moved to tears. A friend who watched it with me in the beautiful anthroposophical theatre in the college, said: “Bivar, these historical plays have everything needed to become classics of the high school repertoire”.
At 50 years of age, I learned to drive and soon bought the Brasilia from my nephew Rafael, who was changing cars. What a delight, I was finally going to do the 'on the road' that I had always dreamed of. It was a phase of total reunion with nature, the discovery of clean and solitary rivers, swimming, breathing, going deep in with my friends. A car is essential. In the decade of the nineties I had two, and I really enjoyed them. And how chic, I got to give Danuza Leão a ride in my Brasilia! I even wrote a story about it, in the State of São Paulo.
It was a decade just as good as the others, the last of the past millennium – and the only one provided for in its own right. Because it is so recent, it sometimes gives me blanks and I find myself asking, "what did I do?" Well, I had my years of Bloomsbury experience (including direct access to Virginia Woolf's childhood manuscripts in the British Museum, thanks to my friend Jenny Thompson, who spared no effort so that I could get in direct contact with the originals).
In truth the eighties and nineties were decades of many travels. I had my time as a tourism journalist writing for various publications. I cruised the Caribbean as far as Jamaica, trips to St Louis (blues) on the Missouri, New York, I went on a cruise up the Brazilian coast as far as the Amazon Pororoca, the tidal bore … and the Island of the Devil, Tobago; Viña del Mar, in Chile (‘The Garden City’, where a whole new enchantment has sprung up for all of Latin America); Lower California in Mexico, various trips to the Pantanal wetlands, and so on. And one turn to the Isle of Wight, in 1998. Travelling is not only necessary, it is always great. Our planet is everything and deserves to be seen by all the earthlings. And I continue, whenever possible, to visit friends from every period, many from Verdes Vales.
In 1999 I reached 60 years of age. I don’t remember feeling any great difference. I had accepted the idea that a ‘third age’ is good. I have always got along well with the elderly and, if the body over time pulls you down (from a cataract or a painful arthritis), it is good to learn to live with such ailments, because the head, if it’s open, always rises above them. Ideas, projects, dreams? Always. But I don’t need to talk about them. For a poor man of God, to dream is natural. Dreams never cease.
Five children – three girls and two boys, myself the one in the middle. My father was a cultured man, a very good saxophone player, the manager of high culture in the piece. Mother, in addition to her domestic gifts, was a modern, practical and hardworking woman, guiding us in the best possible way.
In between diving in the rivers, the fruits of the orchards, the cane fields, the country trails and my companions, I was a relatively artistic boy, a normal child but at the same time sui generis, one of a kind. I loved magazines, books, music and cinema – 16mm film cinema, once a week, at the club. I must have been about nine years old when I saw my first movie, a war film, with an actor who played a soldier who had style even when he was wounded (with a bullet in the leg) and stuck in a muddy trench. The film was The Bataan Patrol and the actor, Lee Bowman. After that were productions by Republic, Metro, Tarzan, black and white films and, of course, Esther Williams in Technicolor, rumba and Xavier Cugat.
Then we moved to a big town, I grew up and life seemed to get smaller. But always with many attractions. During the day I worked as a delivery boy for a big warehouse, cycling round the town doing my deliveries, and at night I went to the gym; teaching was deficient and I, as a bad student, usually cut classes to go to the cinema. Visconti's Senso was the first film prohibited for minors that I watched. I was sixteen years old. I thought the film was great. It was a revelation.
As far as books went, I had barely learned to read and I was already subverted by Oscar Wilde's brilliant paradoxes. On the bookshelf at home there was Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Clarice Lispector, Dinah Silveira de Queirós, and Berta Ruck. A certain Captain Rodrigo by Erico Verissimo. Francoise Sagan and Chocolate for the morning were in fashion during my adolescence. I discovered Simone de Beauvoir, but I found Sartre much too much for my head. When I was eighteen I heard about Kerouac and the Beat Generation. On a portable record player I listened to Chuck Berry, rockabilly, Gerry Mulligan & Chet Baker, João Gilberto and Invitation to listen to Maysa. At that time I had a short phase of writing film reviews in a local newspaper.
When I was 21 I left Ribeirão Preto and went to Rio de Janeiro to study theatre; first at the Brazilian Theatre Foundation with the legendary Dulcina as a teacher, and then, until my graduation, at the National Theatre Conservatory. Rio was decisive in my training. Altogether I must have lived about twelve years in Ipanema. I lived in Barão da Torre, in front of Tom’s house, when he and Vinicius were doing ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ at Veloso, which was a bar nearby. One night, at a get-together of people from Bossa, Vinicius made me a chicken sandwich. I was dying of hunger and the poet knew that. Straight afterwards Elis arrived; she was the star of the festival that did so well with Arrastão. Elis took off her shoes and her clothes, in front of the window, breathing in the night air. She was a conqueror, mission accomplished. It was in Domingos de Moraes street, in Copacabana, Nelita’s apartment (she’s now married to Vinicius).
Earlier, in 1963, I had debuted as an actor in the role of Estragon, in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, in a university revue directed by Maurice Perpignan, who, despite my slowness in memorising the script, believed in my theatrical talent from the beginning. Fausto Wolff, at that time a critic for the journal Tribuna da Imprensa, pointed me out as one of the revelations of the year as an actor. The following year I was Lisandro, in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the bill produced by Maria Clara Machado, celebrating the fourth centenary of the Bard of Avon.
In 1967, in the midst of an international boom in psychedelic and pop art, my name became known overnight, amongst the glitterati of Rio, when I gave the title Simone de Beauvoir, stop smoking, follow Gildinha Saraiva’s example and start working to a theatrical happening written in partnership with Carlos Aquino. A note appeared in a social column in a Sunday newspaper, and on Tuesday chroniclers in all the newspapers in Rio commented with humour on the kilometer-long title. Huge expectations were created regarding the debut – the play would be a sympathetic critique of the so-called Paissandu Generation (young intellectuals and 'poseurs' who frequented Cinema Paissandu and were part of the ‘festive left’).
In 1968 – and what more appropriate year? – I debuted for real, now as a playwright, in Cordélia Brasil, with Norma Bengell who, in the title role, moved the whole audience with emotion. In this same year Fauzi Arap directed, in São Paulo, my second play, with Maria Della Costa. With this play, Open the window and allow to come in the pure air and the morning sunshine, I won the prize for best playwright of the year, the Moliere award, and the prize was a trip to Europe donated by Air France. Amidst the crossfire that was the military dictatorship, tightening more and more the Federal Censorship's force and sadism, exile was necessary. And I, thank God, had already been so chosen. A great escape: a year away that resulted in Verdes Vales do fim do mundo, which was published thirteen years later.
When I think of all the decades, without doubt the most distressing to get through was the seventies, from 1973 onwards. The ‘New Drama’, which I was a part of (with Leilah, Zé Vicente, Consuelo de Castro, Isabel Camara – and a little earlier, Plinio Marcos, and a little later Mario Prata) and which, like all other movements before and since, transformed the theatrical scene with its originality, had suddenly gone out of fashion. It was the time of ‘divine decadence’ with great euphoria. In Brazil, the seventies started a little late, in 1973, with the androgynous outbreak of Secos & Molhados in popular music, and Dzi Croquettes in theater. Two years later, the young and talented troupe with Asdrubal brought the Trombone.
Extremely sensitive to the zeitgeist, I suffered a premonition of the change, in my second year of exile in Europe in 1972. During this time – Glam Rock, The Last Tango, Cabaret, and Clockwork Orange – I wrote ‘side B’ of Verdes Vales, which was Longe daqui aqui mesmo (I used as the title of the book the same as for the play I had written in the Chelsea Hotel in NY, 1970). The book was published in 1995 by the Editora Best Seller/Circulo do Livro.
Another change in 1973. For the first time I read Virginia Woolf, The Waves. I became so identified with her style that I couldn't think of any other writer. Twenty years later synchronicity would have me accepted – and the only Latin American! – amongst 21 academics and amateur enthusiasts in the summer school of 1993, at Charleston Farmhouse, in Sussex, one of the country resorts of the Bloomsbury Group since 1916 when it was discovered by Virginia on one of her walks. My first meeting with Quentin Bell, in his nearby residence, was friendship at first sight. Quentin, the first biographer of his aunt VW, historian of Bloomsbury, sculptor, art professor, was 83 years old, but until his death in December 1996 we had several meetings and a happy friendship by letter. After his death I received a card from his widow, Anne Olivier Bell (she was the thorough and perfectionist editor of five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries). She wrote to me: “Your enthusiastic friendship was always a source of great pleasure for him – and for me, and I thank you for that”. My friendship with Olivier continued. Whenever I could I came back to Charleston Farm for the summer school or for the annual festival. The one in 2001 was very promising: in the programme, from Harold Pinter to Merlin Holland (nephew of Oscar Wilde). Olivier wrote to invite me to stay at her house – Quentin’s ceramics workshop had been transformed into a guest suite, with bed, bath, kitchen. “But you would have to do your own catering and transport!” she explained. I wrote five volumes of diaries about my experiences at Charleston Farmhouse and my studies of literature and art there. One day I want to publish them. [They were published as Bivar in the Court of Bloomsbury in 1995].
But, getting back to the seventies … I did wish for one thing (this was a thing of literature), but also it instigated me as a talented artist (though without much vocation) to experiment with other media.
In 1973, when my other year in Europe arrived, Maria Bethania invited me to direct (with Isabel Camara) her show Drama – there are even two short scripts of mine on the live LP of this show; months later, I directed Rita Lee in her first show (with her I would work again, sporadically, in other decades – in 1986, on radio in '89, and in 1991 on MTV, for example). Delicious and memorable experiences.
Samuel Wainer always invited me to write in the journals that he edited, and in the seventies, with him, I wrote in Ultima Hora and others. I wrote also in Vogue-Homem, I was editor in chief of Interview, I had a column in Pop and, for one season, a weekly column in the Folha de São Paulo.
During this decade I did what I could, in theatre. Even a come-back as an actor (in the role of Riff Raff) in the Rocky Horror Show, playing the rival of Paulo Villaca (great figure and already legendary like The bandit of the red light in the film of Sganzerla).
The following year I got the biggest scare when I was invited by Ziembinski to write a play with which the master would celebrate his 50 years in theatre. He wanted a play with a warholiana atmosphere; advised by him, I wrote Quarteto. It was a catastrophic experience. Federal censorship stopped the debut, expectations increased, and when the play did debut Emilinha Borba was in the front row to dissect the work of her eternal rival, Marlene, who was on stage and quickly made 'counter-timing' with Ziembinski, also legendary after 50 years of long pauses and sepulchral silences in his shows. In the plot, Louise Cardoso (from the cast of Asdrubal), very beautiful at 18 years old, debuted as the stage lover of Ziembinski, then 68. Amongst other scenes, the master had me write one in which Roberto Pirilo, in the flower of youth, appeared naked for some ten minutes. Zimba explained to me that the point was this: the old man observes the physical perfection of the young, not with envy but as inspiration, to continue acting. The critics did not swallow it and the massacre was unanimous. In 1976 the critics were in a high-handed bad mood, just wanting things that would denounce the regime, and did not understand that this great Polish man, who had given so much to the modernisation of Brazilian theatre since he’d arrived in Rio after fleeing from Poland at the outbreak of the second world war, now wanted to play, relax, in the show that he had conceptualised, directed and acted in, celebrating his golden wedding of the stage. Quarteto was the last show of the master, who died two years later at the age of 70.
As the 70s turned into the 80s I was depressed, but once again Providence saved me: with a theatrical script, Suddenly in a Burst, I received a prize at the first (and I believe, the only) Feira de Humor do Paraná [Paraná Festival of Humour] and I went to spend another year in England. It was a year of training at the most modern school that life offered at that time, and I felt 20 years younger. I was staying in the countryside for a few days, at Andrew Lovelock’s house, when letters from home told me of my father's death at the age of 81. His last message to me, on the back of one of the envelopes, was "Enjoy yourself". I made a journey of pilgrimage in honour of my dear father, for whom life had led to so much conflict and which he had left without me being nearby. These were years of feeling many losses – relatives, friends, but the biggest of all was my mother, in 2000, nineteen years after my father – and this time I was close, with two sisters, and I was the one who saw that Guilhermina was no longer breathing. Her magnanimous heart had stopped for good. Lucid, at 92 years of an exemplary life, and who had always taken care of me whenever I turned up in a state. The sweetest of creatures, the greatest love of my life, and to whom I gave so much of my thoughts. It was the greatest loss. Two years have passed, the grief does not want to go away and I struggle to put myself back together. But I am at peace because, now more mature and aware, I had given her some peace myself. In 1994, when she was 86 years old, really well, working, sewing, cooking like no other, I had the great idea of talking to my brothers and sisters and my nephews, and we published a private edition of the memories that she, living alone, had written in notebooks at night. When I arrived with the books and opened a package to give her a copy, her reaction was shock, as if it was a violation. Memories she had written for her children and grandchildren, there, printed in 500 copies! Fine, she didn't speak to us for two days. But then she loved it, when letters of admiration – and not just from family members – kept arriving. I have to admit that Dona Guilhermina (née Battistetti) Lima, with Lembrancas, received more such letters than her son with all his books. The daily trips to the mailbox and coming back with letters in hand were reasons for us to be joyful.
But, getting back to 1981, that was an exceptional year and I immersed myself in the new art that was erupting. England was, for a long time, the best place to get involved with new ideas. The new generation that sailed on the crest of the wave now had short hair and brilliant ideas. And I, the eternal apprentice, attended this new school as the most assiduous student. England was once more preparing another cultural invasion and I was there in the right place at the right time so that, on my return to São Paulo, I was able to survive another season thanks to the new ideas that I had acquired. I launched myself as ‘Style Editor’ for a magazine that created new opinions (Gallery Around), where I stayed for ten years. In the mean time, I did not neglect my other work.
The eighties were the post-modern decade par excellence. Everything came up redone and remodeled. Even the architecture became more Greco-Roman. The spirit of Punk, that had burst onto the scene in 1977, was understood and it liberated a multitude of aspects with youthful appeal in the applied arts. In this decade – and now I am talking about Brazil – with the end of the military dictatorship, a host of different trends found the space to manifest. ‘Beat’ literature, for example: with [publishers] Brasiliense and L&PM, launched for the first time translations of Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso and others, authors until now unpublished in our editorial world; they were a success and from then on the books passed from hand to hand. In letters, it was also time for the emergence of new authors, with Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Caio Fernando Abreu, Ana Cristina César, Paulo Leminski, Reinaldo Moraes, Eduardo Bueno, and the rediscovery of Roberto Piva, Claudio Willer, Wally Salomão, Jorge Mautner, myself and others – this list is just a sample.
In November 1982 my first book came out, O que é Punk [What is Punk?], launched during the Punk festival The start of the end of the world, that I dreamed up and helped to organise with Callegari (from The Innocents). The festival made a strong impression in the media, reported even in The Washington Post and in newspapers in Japan. And my contact with punk culture hasn’t stopped since. In 1998 I was summoned by Motim Punk and by the Municipality of Santo André to be the playwright for the first Punk Opera that was reported on the planet. Does anyone exist who’s more punk than me? was the title. And in 2001, commemorating 25 years of punk, I helped to organise another festival, One step to the end of the world. Two days, 52 bands, it was an emotional celebration.
But getting back again to the first half of the eighties, it was a time when I had a guilty conscience on account of my absolute ignorance of Brazilian history. And it was a time when my friend, the poet Celso Luiz Paulini (1929-1992), wanted us to write with our four hands a play for the theatre. One night in 1983 I thought the time had arrived, and I proposed that we should write the history of Brazil for the theatre. It took eight years to write a trilogy. We won the Vitae scholarship and the third of the plays, The Café Foxes, was performed by the Tapa group in 1990, celebrating the centenary of Oswald de Andrade’s birth. The play, with brightness and humour, also followed the history of Modernism, and with it we won almost all the awards for best play script of the year incliuding, once again, the Moliere award. In the second half of the nineties, two plays of this trilogy were staged with emotion, intelligence and clarity for the third year students at the Rudolf Steiner college. Watching them in 1997 and '98, I was moved to tears. A friend who watched it with me in the beautiful anthroposophical theatre in the college, said: “Bivar, these historical plays have everything needed to become classics of the high school repertoire”.
At 50 years of age, I learned to drive and soon bought the Brasilia from my nephew Rafael, who was changing cars. What a delight, I was finally going to do the 'on the road' that I had always dreamed of. It was a phase of total reunion with nature, the discovery of clean and solitary rivers, swimming, breathing, going deep in with my friends. A car is essential. In the decade of the nineties I had two, and I really enjoyed them. And how chic, I got to give Danuza Leão a ride in my Brasilia! I even wrote a story about it, in the State of São Paulo.
It was a decade just as good as the others, the last of the past millennium – and the only one provided for in its own right. Because it is so recent, it sometimes gives me blanks and I find myself asking, "what did I do?" Well, I had my years of Bloomsbury experience (including direct access to Virginia Woolf's childhood manuscripts in the British Museum, thanks to my friend Jenny Thompson, who spared no effort so that I could get in direct contact with the originals).
In truth the eighties and nineties were decades of many travels. I had my time as a tourism journalist writing for various publications. I cruised the Caribbean as far as Jamaica, trips to St Louis (blues) on the Missouri, New York, I went on a cruise up the Brazilian coast as far as the Amazon Pororoca, the tidal bore … and the Island of the Devil, Tobago; Viña del Mar, in Chile (‘The Garden City’, where a whole new enchantment has sprung up for all of Latin America); Lower California in Mexico, various trips to the Pantanal wetlands, and so on. And one turn to the Isle of Wight, in 1998. Travelling is not only necessary, it is always great. Our planet is everything and deserves to be seen by all the earthlings. And I continue, whenever possible, to visit friends from every period, many from Verdes Vales.
In 1999 I reached 60 years of age. I don’t remember feeling any great difference. I had accepted the idea that a ‘third age’ is good. I have always got along well with the elderly and, if the body over time pulls you down (from a cataract or a painful arthritis), it is good to learn to live with such ailments, because the head, if it’s open, always rises above them. Ideas, projects, dreams? Always. But I don’t need to talk about them. For a poor man of God, to dream is natural. Dreams never cease.
