Nélida Piñón has been reborn to writing at 82. "I read little, I write with difficulty, I hardly distinguish anyone from afar", you can read in this bundle of fragments that have just been published with the title of A furtive tear (Alfaguara). "There is nothing that can be done, according to reputed ophthalmologists. From Paris, Oviedo, Barcelona, ​​Rio and Belo Horizonte," he adds. Last Wednesday, in a hotel in Madrid, the writer says that she has hired a person to read it. "I've gotten worse," he says smiling. But for two months he writes on a keyboard of two gigantic computers that extend the letter. "I have to write without stopping, without looking at the screens. I am delighted because that way I can see some of the new novel I am writing." He started it in Lisbon, where he spent a year, by hand ("I had no courage to face the computer") but when he passed it his secretary to the computer found that the structure "was ready. Now I am cleaning it." It will be something like "an evocation of the greatness of 19th century Portugal through a character that is not of the elite. I don't want to deal with the elite, I want the people."

Nélida Piñón is pure enthusiasm. It is enough to say a word and she develops it, comes and goes with an idea and with others that intertwines without stopping. "This diary ...". "It is not a newspaper, they are fragments," he says. He has been scoring them for seven years. "I love to think, everything comes from thinking, thinking fictionalizes reality. As a child I developed a capacity to express my thinking about any circumstance at any time." Perhaps, as he says in the book, it comes from when his mother told him that he was intelligent but could not speak. "If you do not reach the viscera of language you cannot develop a thought. I do not speak of language but of language. I try to synchronize with short sentences, subordinate phrases to sharpen my thinking. The art of thinking sustains and encourages literature."

"God free us from passion," said his mother. "She was afraid of it because she lived it. Passion is very dangerous, it is insidious. It is a wonder while it is beneficial but, in general, that peak period lasts very little. There are many betrayals, there are many infidelities. We spend our lives looking for new passions to justify the failure of the above, "he says from behind narrowed eyes.

The book is a tray where you can peck everything, from Epicurus to Innocent X de Velázquez, from Pablo de Tarso to Wagner, from his family to Carlos V. And the two years he spent in Galicia when he was 10: "They were the most happy of my life, I already had a substrate of joy from Brazil, but everything was new there, I became an archaic girl who invaded every time, my father gave me the key to independence: he gave me a knife (today I'm still going to all the places with a razor) and a leather belt with a bag with rye bread, ham, sausage and an apple, and so I climbed the mountain with my grandmother's animals, I was alone for hours and hours. His name was Pé da Múa [in Pontevedra]. For me he was like Annapurna, Shangri-La, although I later discovered that he was tiny, I loved the north wind and the howl of the wolves. I was not afraid, I had a dazzling unconsciousness I knew all the lands, I still remember who they belonged to, that's why I could write The Republic of Dreams . When I returned home, when it began to get dark, I diverted the threads of water, which were like a musical phrase, to the lands of my grandmother. "

And he speaks without being asked of his paternal grandfather, Daniel, who arrived from Pontevedra with 12 or 13 years, the same as years later, being a carpenter, he did not want to go to the doctor when he lost a finger: "Leave him, he left" . The finger was on the floor. "He was very impatient with someone else's incompetence. He took me to the restaurants and told me as a child: 'choose the table, choose the food. I want you to learn this: if you don't like something, return it; wine, food, whatever "And I dipped the cigar in coffee and brandy. It's as if my grandfather had given me an education to be a great courtesan."

Nélida Piñón studied at a German school, there in Rio de Janeiro, and that's where the discipline to write comes from. "And from my mother. I conjugate education and impetuosity. Art is born of chaos, of insubordination. I don't have to worry about rules, but rather to store the imagination that will later become literary fiction. I don't think of the reader when I write and that gives me fantastic freedom. I am not afraid. If I thought about the reader I would risk writing for an elitist reader. Language is the climax of the creation of the human being. When I write, I pay tribute to the simplest people. Someone would ask me who I would like him to read to me, I would say that the Ribeirinhos , the children who live on the shores of the Amazon. I was in Manaus and cried. "

This woman has also been to the Bayreuth Festival, where every summer Wagner music was heard. Everywhere he seems to enjoy. "That was what my friend Carmen Balcells said. Yes, I have an insatiable curiosity. Life is a scroll that I have to read, an incunable that, in some way, has been written for me, for the future reader that I am."

"Anger and nonconformity continue to accompany me," he says in the book. "I mean not to the unworthy anger, but to the wrath of who is alive. If you cut my arm, I have to react with anger. Anger somehow governs my thinking. I have anger when I find out that they have I had relations with children, so I am ashamed of my kind. Every day I am more sensitive to the pain of others. It is a good sign of civilization to react to the pain of others. "

When asked why he does not have dual citizenship, he doubts; He says he is entitled to her by his grandfather, but that on the other hand he could betray him, because he gave her "the majesty of the Portuguese language". And there it stays. And the prizes he has come up, the Princess of Asturias de las Letras, Juan Rulfo, Rosalía de Castro, Gabriela Mistral from Chile ... And they don't condition him when he starts writing? "You have to believe in me: yesterday I was with young people for three hours sharing my passion for literature. All the pompous side, that if I was the president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters ... What I like is talking to a boy with a box that sells on the street, see what it sells, teach him to sell it. What I like is to communicate with people, to forget who I am. I want to be my mother's daughter. "

Nélida Piñón (Rio de Janeiro, 1937) was the first woman to lead the Brazilian Academy of Letters. "Yes, for a year. I had the right to follow another one but I didn't want to, I'm a walking woman, I wanted to do something else, go to my house to file my soul, be alone again." And Catalonia emerges. "I have great friends there and I never ask them what their position is, each one has his version of the story, right? But I am very sorry about what is happening. It is not the Catalonia I met. I lived there. Carmen Balcells was my friend of the soul. I know its culture, its food, the writers. I was there in 1970. I know a lot because I don't tell it. Carmen was a storm, a brave temperament, and at the same time prodigal. "

He says in the book: "I am mestizo and I like it (...) I am a woman, Brazilian, writer, cosmopolitan, villager, a being from everywhere, from all ports ... I am diverse, I am many." "Yes, I am a woman of fantasy, of reality, I am the woman of the past who stayed behind, I am the woman I am going to meet tomorrow. A woman in permanent metamorphosis. We are all multiple. Life takes changes, changes , alternatives. Intelligence promotes change, the same reading of a newspaper. "

His mother (Carmen) was born in Rio, was the daughter of Amada and Daniel. They were from Carballedo. His father (Lino), from Burela. "And according to Torrente Ballester, we are relatives of my father. He told me with great conviction. I loved knowing him. My Galician origin has influenced me a lot, because since I was a child I have had a double culture and hence I feel comfortable with the Greeks, with the Hebrews, I have frequented archaic cultures since I was little, that opened my doors, I am crazy about Homer, it is one of my obsessions, as much as setting the table, I am very much from my house, I receive very naturally. minimal elegance. I get excited about life. " It is interrupted and hums. " Romeo and Juliet , Tchaikovski. It's not Prokofiev, Tchaikovski." It refers to the music that glides through the glass-domed hall of the Palace hotel. "Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet are more incisive, harder. Tchaikovski's is more accommodating."

And from there he returns to his Homer, to the passion for the classics and to the classes he gave for a year at the Brazilian university of São Paulo around the myths of Latin America collected in La epic of the heart (Alfaguara). From the Mayans and the Incas to José María Arguedas and Los Profundos Ríos . "I'm also crazy about Wagner because I think he drank a lot at the sources of the Greeks. But I'm not going to Bayreuth anymore, Wagner's heiresses are fools."

Machado de Assis was missing. "Oops, passion. I'm going to show you something, dear." And approaching his mobile as if it were a magnifying glass he looks for a photo in which he appears with a dog of his next to the statue of the Brazilian writer at the headquarters of the Academy of the Brazilian language. "Whenever I go there, I pass by him and say a few words. 'If Machado de Assis existed, Brazil is possible.'" And then he shows his cane with a silver handle and the wood scratched by the bites of another dog he had, Gravetinho. "He loved cheese, especially French cheeses. A Brazilian millionaire sent him cheese in a basket."

Asked by the president of his country, Bolsonaro, says: "I don't like to talk about my country. To talk about it I would have to talk about the world, and everything is bad." And the Amazon ?. "The tragedy of the Amazon is ancient. There are several versions." He does comment on emigration and the part of guilt that Europe has over black Africa. "The future of Africa was decided without the presence of an African. Leopoldo, the king of the Belgians, was a murderer. Now we have to put up with Africa, which has a corrupt elite and a people in misery. Emigration is a great debate And something must be done. What did we do with apartheid ? Almost nothing. We are of extraordinary insensitivity and want to live without guilt. "

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