“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“Things happen, they don’t need us.”
It’s truly difficult to separate the author’s biographical details from the powerful sadness that permeates these pages—the same sadness that drives us to greedily absorb every single word, to reach the end without missing a single detail, a single vibration, a single gesture.
Rio de Janeiro, 1970s. “The temperature of this novel is always above 31ºC.” Little Camilo, a pale bourgeois in a dusty, impoverished neighborhood, witnesses the appearance of Cosme, Cosmin, a young mulatto brought into the house by his father with little or no explanation. Camilo has been lame since birth and has grown up among women: his sister, his elderly nurse, his depressed mother, his young housekeeper; his father, a doctor, is almost never around. And so Cosme immediately becomes the little man of the house, with his calm and mysterious charisma (“people like him have lost their mold”). Camilo hates him.
Decades later, a grown-up Camilo, gray and solitary, reconstructs the events of that distant summer and his hot, muddy homeland. In the fifty-year-old’s memory, which the author didn’t have time to quickly become a childhood story, slow as a ford, he transforms hate into love, into first love, into his only love. Exactly halfway through the book, Heringer includes a small experiment: he asked anyone who wanted to participate to indicate the name of their first love in an online form. Countless responses filled five pages with names and loves never forgotten, made eternal by the paper and the gentleness of the protagonist, who frees them one by one to celebrate his Cosmin, lost forever but never abandoned.
The book is short, and it would be of little use to add further plot details. But there are two stylistic devices worth focusing your curiosity on. One is the sun: looming, unbearable, searing the skin, almost like the one that afflicts Camus’s Mersault. Graphically, it is represented by a small sunburst, which reappears menacingly whenever something reminds us of the sun, be it shattered shards or spilled blood. Like an omen or a curse from which there is no escape.
The other stylistic note is the photographic inserts, unsettling, like the parentheses in which the author inserts his most extemporaneous suggestions—they break and dictate the rhythm together, as in a dance. As Giuseppe d’Orsi aptly writes in his note to the graphic design, solitude and tenderness meet in the empty space of possibilities, possibilities that in the novel, as in Heringer’s life, will bend to the negative, leaving us, who quote Eggers without reservation, the poignant work of a formidable genius.
Writteb by Delis
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Victor Heringer, L’amore degli uomini soli, Safarà, Pordenone, 2023
Original edition: O amor dos homes avulsos, Companhia das Letras, Rio de Janeiro, 2016