His Own Man Read Free

quickly integrated — essentially consisted of Max’s girlfriend, Ana, a young actress I had already seen onstage in Rio de Janeiro more than once; Moira, an artist who lived in Santa Teresa (inundated with debt and cats, according to Max); Olavo, a millionaire who owned a silver-gray Lancia in which he would cruise around Rio late at night, and whose appeal owed a lot to the jazz albums he would bring back from his trips to New York; Efraim, a poet whose genius was celebrated by Max alone, since no one else had access to his verses; and, finally, Flávio Eduardo, a film critic who would later getcaught up in political militancy, go underground, and die a few months later in a bank robbery.
    Each of us unwittingly played a role in Max’s master plan. Mine was having lived in countries he knew only through literature and speaking (without an accent) two or three languages Max had taken great pains to learn at his boarding school. Ana’s consisted of shining onstage and being courted by theater and film bigwigs, who envied our friend because once the night came to a close, it was his bed the beauty would seek. Olavo’s could be summed up as flying his fiery meteor along the city’s deserted streets, awaiting the tree that would eventually kill him. The young poet Efraim’s was pondering verses with the implicit condition that he would remain unknown. I never understood what Moira was doing in our midst, which in a way also confirmed the group’s unorthodox profile. Flávio’s role would be unveiled only after his disappearance: dying for a lost cause. And even this extreme case would leave the impression of having to do with some whim of our friend and host.
    But all of these hidden clues would become clear to me only as time went by. The afternoon of my initiation, finding the street-level door open, I’d gone up to the building’s third and top floor, from which voices and music were drifting down. Max seemed to have forgotten that he’d invited me. He looked surprised at first but quickly recovered: placing a hand on my shoulder, he asked everyone to quiet down and lowered the stereo, relegating John Coltrane to the background — utter sacrilege. He then formally announced, “This guy has read everything. Even more than I have.” He made the statement as though bestowing a title of honor on me — yet the brilliance was all owed to him. Ana, to whom I hadn’t yet been introduced, confirmed my perception with an amused wink, which I caught by mere chance:
Max
was the benchmark to which the achievements of others were compared.
    Without further ado, Max turned the stereo up, bringing John Coltrane back to the scene, and I was thrown into a rarefied atmosphere, as if I’d suddenly been given access to a greenhouse filled with exotic plant species.
    We were young, we drank a lot, and the country was imploding at our feet — without our realizing what exactly was taking place. What was censored was more telling than what was revealed in the media, giving rise to a host of rumors. And these only grew.
Dead
,
missing
,
tortured
 … The imagined horror magnified the actual, since it had no defined shape or limits. What could we do? Take up arms? Jazz symbolized freedom. The louder and more abstract, the better. Drinking, fueled by anxiety and chaos, took care of the rest. The word of Flávio’s death, however, eventually brought a particular depth to our silence, which went far beyond pain and confusion: our safe haven had been violated.
    In spite of it all, during those early days, I never stopped seeing Max through admiring eyes. He in turn gradually adopted me as a younger brother: an honor, true, but one that reflected a distinct hierarchy — assigning the role of mentor to himself. After my having built Max’s pedestal with such enthusiasm, it took me years to dismantle it, in a tormenting, drawn-out process.
    Looking back now, and considering everything that transpired in Brazil after the military coup