Boris Fausto didn’t see Brazil succeed. Will any of us see? – 04/19/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

“I’ve never been pessimistic, but we’re in a corner and Brazil will take time to work out, if it does. I won’t see it again.” The phrase heard by Boris Fausto in 2019, on the only occasion we spoke, came to mind on Tuesday (18), when I learned of the death of the author of “The Revolution of 1930”. Boris lived 92 years and did not see Brazil succeed. Will any of us see?

In May 2019, I reached out to the great historian to interview him about the book he was releasing. “O Crime da Galeria de Cristal” (Companhia das Letras) was one of his exciting “short story” exercises around murders of great repercussion in São Paulo at the beginning of the 20th century.

I was received with the kindness that, I learned, was typical of him. Real kindness and not simple politeness, the mark of someone who does not lose genuine interest in what the interlocutor has to say. Discovering our shared passion for the realistic crime literature of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler was a blast.

The Bolsonaro government was beginning at that point and, in contrast to the troubled but hopeful present in which Boris Fausto leaves us, the pessimism of Brazilians fattened in the humanist culture took on epic dimensions.

How had it been possible for us to sink so low? At that time, conversations (has anyone forgotten?) used to revolve around it. “Brazil once had a right-wing sociologist like Oliveira Vianna”, recalled my interlocutor, “but today there is no one who comes close to his intellectual stature. Who is the intellectual guru of these people, Olavo de Carvalho? Do me a favor! “.

Speaking of pistol shooting: criminality was not just at the center of the book that was our agenda. One of Boris Fausto’s repeated academic interests, something he believed to be rooted in his childhood as a reader of crime comics, it has been invoked as part of the explanation for the rise of the Brazilian extreme right.

“The issue of public insecurity, which is real and very serious, was one of the issues that the left overlooked,” he said. “This favored the hard-line, the thought that it is necessary to kill criminals. Security is a difficult topic to address because there are multiple aspects that go beyond the punitive dimension and police repression. But you have to try, right? The left opened up hand, left it in the lap of the right.”

The diagnosis is undoubtedly pertinent, but the author of “Crime and Everyday Life” knew there were many other balls on that pool table. Sufficient material for a great history book, “one made up of great characters and movements”, in his words.

There was no time. In his last years, the historian alternated between memorialism and the so-called small story, such as “O Crime da Galeria de Cristal”, which allowed him the pleasure of “talking about the city of São Paulo at the beginning of the 20th [passado]my preferred topic”.

The memorialistic vein had its high point in “O Brilho do Bronze” (Cosac Naify), from 2014, a sensitive mourning diary written shortly after the death of educator Cynira Stocco, with whom the historian was married for 49 years. He described the experience of writing this book as “very different”: “The distance between the object and my own life has never been so small”.

Now that Boris Fausto’s life is coming to an end, his books remain to remind us that, if Brazil has been taking a long time to succeed, there are Brazilians who do their part with flying colors.

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