Lino de Albergaria - writer

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The Impossible Autograph

Rio de Janeiro, 1985
Texto publicado na Folha de S. Paulo (Caderno Ilustríssima)

LINO DE ALBERGARIA
Although I am a rooted mineiro, there were times in my thirty years of literary life I had to leave Belo Horizonte. The first time was to study publishing in Paris, where I lived between 1978 and 1981The other cities which housed me were São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro where I worked editing infantile and juvenile books, between 1980 and 1990.

These journeys away from home often made me homesick, however, they also rendered a few fortuitous and somehow unusual encounters with well-known writers. Nonetheless, they were not as influential in my life as the professional convergences these lands brought me which helped boost my knowledge and my experience in my field. Thus, they persist as isolated flashes in the disorganized deposit of my memories.

It was in Paris, while learning about the world and my profession, that I first read Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas, and had as bedside book the complete poetry and prose of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, from the José Aguilar Publisher, on thin paper and green leather-bound, with the author's signature in gold ink on the cover.

On one Sunday, around Saint- Germain Boulevard, I spotted someone playing, in a square, with a little boy who could be his grandson, but somehow seemed liked his son. It was Klaus Kinski. His pictures as Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu had been on subway billboards for that motion picture had just debuted in theaters. It disturbed me why the first celebrity who bumped into my life had to be associated with a striking vampire, although right there he seemed like a fairly prosaic creature.

In Sao Paulo, years later, there was this episode in which I was quite frightened by a fellow who sat next to me on a bus in broad daylight, near Consolação Cemetery. What caught my attention about his presence were his huge, curved and conspicuous nails, some of which were broken or cut. He was the actor and filmmaker Coffin Joe who reminded me of how intrigued and haunted I was by ghosts; certainly a legacy of the old tales heard in my childhood.



Later in Rio, having exhausted my share of vampire and ghosts empiricism, I underwent through another important meeting in a Copacabana post office where I had gone in order to send some letters to Belo Horizonte. Just the day before, I had been to my cousin’s house, Consuelo Albergar-ia, a scholar of the works of Guimarães Rosa and Cornelio Penna, and one of our subjects had been on mineiros writers who had moved to Rio de Janeiro. Drummond, of course, was one of them. And, sure enough, right there, before my eyes, in a line at a mail office, he was: Carlos Drummond De Andrade. Skinny and myopic as on the book photo, the same book that I then re-gretted not having on me. It would have been a great excuse to approach him although neither the circumstance nor the man's temper would favor such approach. He was holding a telegram form, which he immediately hid when realized my indiscreet look at what he had written.

They were just good wishes and regards to some married-to-be couple; something as trivial as Klaus Kinski playing with his son in a small square in Paris.

"Poet" - a man shouted from the beginning of the line. Drummond did not reply and seemed very upset at having been identified, what made all eyes turn to his timid figure. The man offered him his place in line, to what he painfully hesitated because he did not want to break the line. However, before getting even more noticed, he courageously accepted the offer and was served. Then, he hurried out of there through Copacabana Avenue.

And off he went, visually fading out of my life, the author of "The Ghost Girl of Belo Horizonte Song," who, according to the poet, for having no flesh under her dress, was not from this world.

Even though I do not have his handwritten autograph, I still have a reproduction of his signature on my old copy whose back cover is worn out and pages are turning yellow.

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