As with the works of all great artists, Ribeyro’s body of short stories is visionary because, through its many characters, it illustrates Peru’s paradoxes and contradictions, and lucidly probes Peruvian individual and collective psychology. Consequently, we could talk about a Ribeyrian figure: a subject whose existence lies between dreams and defeat, the most absurd hopes and the crudest disappointments. This figure is certainly a being who is constantly hounded by the temptation of failure, to cite the title of one of Ribeyro’s most memorable books. 

Published in the 1950s, Ribeyro’s first stories emerged at a time when many Peruvian authors were writing neorealist and urban works to represent the new challenges facing Peruvian society. During this period, Lima was going through a difficult transition. While it had been a large town prior, it grew rapidly during this time and became a metropolis, one that needed to renegotiate its identity as a shared space in order to enter a new phase of modernity. Ribeyro’s first stories—memorable works such as “Los gallinazos sin plumas” and “Al pie del acantilado”—tell this story. They are important testimonies of a changing, contradictory urban space, a product of Peruvian internal migration. Subsequently, the city must face a difficult process of mestizaje. 

After publishing Los gallinazos sin plumas (1955), he wrote Cuentos de circunstancias (1958) and Las botellas y los hombres (1964). All these collections portray Lima as a rapidly growing city, but one that nonetheless remains precapitalist and fractured, plagued by significant contrasts and social rifts. For these reasons, it’s fair to say that today, magnified by the size of a metropolis with over ten million inhabitants, the classic Ribeyrian figure wanders about: that subject struggling to carry the weight of frustration and mediocrity, but who fights tirelessly to integrate into a society that marginalizes him over and over again. We must only recall figures such as Roberto López, the protagonist of the story “Alienación,” and his fruitless struggle to “de-lópez” himself in an effort to rid himself of his blackness at any cost and become a white person from the United States. His efforts are so hair-brained and absurd that, despite fulfilling his wish of going to New York, where he ends up living among other marginalized subjects like himself, his American dream turns into an absolute nightmare. I also think of Pablo Saldaña, the chatty protagonist of “Explicaciones a un cabo de servicio,” who, finding himself unemployed and with no prospects, unleashes his pathological lying at a table in a bar in Lima. With a few drinks in him, Saldaña turns into a rich yet temporary businessman, since his lying gets him locked up for the night after he can’t pay his bar tab. Fernando Pasamano, the protagonist of the story “El banquete,” is similar to López and Saldaña. Pasamano is a landowner who has fallen on hard times but who is determined to regain his economic power and social influence. To do so, he burns a hole in his pocket putting together a huge party attended by the president of Peru. When it seems his efforts have paid off and his fortune will be recovered, an unexpected turn of events ruins his plans: there’s a coup d’etat while the party is going on at his house. Strangely, a trusted minister of the president organized the coup, which subsequently forces the president to step down. With Pasamano’s party going on and the president away from his post, this minister ends up taking advantage of the president’s absence to overthrow the government and assume power. All these adventures and misadventures, which abound in Ribeyro’s short stories, are nuanced with a subtle irony that, when it is not a harsh and revealing humor, exemplifies the vicissitudes and frustrations of Peruvian life. Ribeyro gives voice to many characters who are otherwise punished or forced into trivial and mediocre lives. He gives them fleeting moments of hope, until the institutional order, social prejudices, or simple disappointments push them back into the harsh reality of things. 

This view of the human condition in Ribeyro’s work, however, is not limited to the Peruvian context. In Paris, where he arrived at the beginning of the 1950s and would write much of his work, Ribeyro lived firsthand the dilemmas of exile and alienation. Such experiences are clear in a handful of stories in the series titled “Los cautivos,” published for the first time in Lima in 1973 as part of the second volume of La palabra del mudo. In these stories, Ribeyro explores the heartache of the marginalized in Europe and examines the otherness of the Peruvian subject within a new cultural context. This is particularly true of the title story, “Los cautivos,” as well as “Agua ramera” and “Los españoles.” Europe is not a particularly hospitable place for Ribeyro’s characters in these stories; rather, it is the backdrop for subjects who wander through its old cities. While they are drawn by a certain wanderlust, they are also marked by solitude, astonishment vis-à-vis an unknown world, and a sense of existential tedium. His protagonists generally stay in cheap hotels or modest pensions in which they form friendships with other marginalized people within European society. They are characters who, given their anonymity, vaguely identify as “Peruvian,” when not referring to themselves simply as “South Americans.” Another example of European disillusionment is in “La juventud en la otra ribera,” from 1977, a story in which Ribeyro wittily expresses his desire to demystify Paris’s splendor. The protagonist is a very Ribeyrian character: a bureaucrat. In the story, Dr. Plácido Huamán, a “doctor of education,” is sent from Lima to take part in a conference in Geneva. Before getting to his official destination, Huamán plans a visit to the French capital to fulfill a wish he’s had his entire life; that is, to see Paris, and, if he’s lucky, to have a romantic fling there. At first, Dr. Huamán’s wishes seem like they might come true when he meets Solange in a Parisian café. She is a beautiful French woman with whom he has a short-lived, shallow romance. Nonetheless, in the mediocrity of his existence, Huamán classifies his fling with Solange as one of the “golden pages of his life.” The truth is, his luck in love is short-lived and, in a kind of bitter paradox, it’s Paris itself that teaches the aging educator a cruel lesson. In reality, Solange and her group of miscreant friends are only interested in robbing the naïve doctor of the few dollars he has and, after doing so, murdering him. Thus, far from being a city of splendor and romance, in Ribeyro’s stories, Paris becomes a rotten city, a place full of petty thieves where Huamán meets his cruel destiny. 

It could be said that a tone of skepticism and a discrete air that seeks to maintain human dignity in the face of humiliation and adversity consistently accompany Ribeyro’s characters. However, it would be incorrect to reduce his entire body of short stories to the categories described above. We must remember that Ribeyro was prolific in this genre and that, beyond his initial neorealist and urban themes, his short story writing is full of experimentation and offers a range of proposals. That said, it’s no exaggeration to say that Ribeyro’s stories easily dialogue with those of the genre’s best writers. In stories such as “La insignia,” “Ridder y el pisapapeles,” or “Doblaje”, but also in the superb work “Silvio en El Rosedal,” Ribeyro displays his deep familiarity with fantastic literature and establishes important points of contact with works by Poe, Kafka, Borges, and Cortázar. Additionally, his reserved, elegant style calls to mind the best works of other short story masters, such as Chekhov or Ribeyro’s much-admired Maupassant. These are authors who, like Ribeyro, examine the lives of individuals wrapped up in solitary battles and living in a reality that vanquishes them time and time again. In this same vein, the many lost battles Ribeyrian characters face may lead readers to believe that defeat is a constitutive part of the human experience, and even a universal literary theme. This said, it is also true that, despite their repeated failures, Ribeyro’s characters are always dignified in the face of adversity. They possess a quiet heroism, and their greatest virtue is awakening the strongest sense of empathy in readers, while, at the same time, moving them to reflect on their own life adventures. 

With the passage of time, it has become clear that Ribeyro’s work was written in quiet defiance and against the flow of his historical moment. Recent texts on his work by writers who are now beginning to gain recognition in Latin American literature, such as Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez or Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, remind us that in the 1960s, when Latin American literature exploded with novels rich in the verbal experimentation and lofty, totalizing aims of the Boom, Ribeyro remained faithful to his voice and art. He stayed at the margins of the great literary banquet of the time period. In this faithfulness lies our second big lesson about Ribeyro’s work: he personifies the ethics of an artist who, far from the temptations of success, continued working with exemplary tenacity until he forged a body of work that, in its apparent anachronism, is transcendent today. 

A more intimate Ribeyro emerges in the fourth and latest volume of La palabra del mudo, published for the first time in Lima in 1992. In it, we are confronted with a series of texts in which the author encounters the past; these stories revisit moments from a life that begins with the innocent world of a child from Miraflores and ends with the wise skepticism of old age. On the one hand, we encounter an autobiographical tone in stories such as “Sólo para fumadores,” “La casa en la playa,” or “Surf.” On the other hand, a nostalgic air traverses the pages of the “Relatos santacrucinos” series. As the protagonist of “La música, el maestro Berenson y un servidor” indicates, these stories look to recuperate the traces of “happy and unhappy times, finding only the ashes of some, and the call of those still alive.”

A new reading of the stories in La palabra del mudo is likely to remind us that, given their lot in life, Ribeyro’s characters will feel progressively empty inside, or disillusioned, or will be plagued with bad luck. But, as stated in the prologue of the last volume of La palabra del mudo, if “writing is a form of conversing with the reader,” then we, the readers, only stand to thank Ribeyro for the privilege of taking part in this fascinating conversation. Luckily, thirty years after the Peruvian writer’s passing, the dialogue continues, because classics never allow for goodbyes. They only offer opportunities to meet again. 

Translated by Amy Olen
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Photo: Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro.

Editor’s Note:  The following interview is featured in trilingual edition. See below for the text in English and the original Portuguese, and click “Español” to read in Spanish.

Brazilian author and journalist Lucrecia Zappi was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1972 but she spent her childhood and adolescence in São Paulo and Mexico City. Zappi is the author of two novels in Portuguese, Black Jaguar (2013) and Acre (2017). Her novels explore mythical worlds with vast geographies and primitive landscapes in Brazil in the tradition of Latin American authors such as João Guimarães Rosa and Graciliano Ramos. Additionally, her first book, Mil-folhas (2010) explores the history of pastry-making in the sugar cane fields of the New World. Zappi holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing from New York University, where she studied under E.L. Doctorow and Lydia Davis. She currently lives in New York where she is writing her third novel.

César Ferreira: Can you explain the titles of your books and briefly explain the plots of these novels?

Lucrecia Zappi: I chose the title Black Jaguar because it suggests the uncertainty of a presence. I’m inviting the reader to see an animal that is hard to find in nature but is considered to be a common feline in Chapada Diamantina, where the novel takes place. And this coming of age novel is about the search for identity and one’s unknown roots. I was interested in a physical journey of what’s not always visible.

The novel is set in Chapada Diamantina, which is now a Brazilian National Park in Bahia, where a 19-year-old girl from São Paulo travels in search of the father she’s never met. She arrives at a rustic inn, owned by people who are possibly her family members, and she decides to stay there without revealing her identity. She’s a botany student, and because the area has exceptional plant life, nobody seems suspicious of her intentions; that is, not until Beatriz begins forcing emotional intimacy with these strangers to the point of creating tension and distrust around her. During the weeks she spends with her family, a clandestine love emerges, and an unresolved murder occurs. Eventually, she will discover the rules of survival in the Brazilian backlands, against the backdrop of a seemingly calm and laconic existence.

The word acre got my attention even before I started writing the novel Acre since it suggests concrete and subjective notions of frontier and land, two themes that I’ve always been interested in. In the US, an acre is a unit for measuring land—a concept people generally understand. In Brazil, it’s a vast state that triggers the imagination in other ways, and not only because of its enormous distance from big cities like São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. It also borders Peru and Bolivia, and, on the Amazonian side, a jungle where areas inhabited by indigenous and non-indigenous people are poorly defined. Although Acre’s plot unfolds in São Paulo, the novel still evokes illegal activities like timber trafficking and an acrid or pungent flavor in the social relations woven throughout the novel.

In the opening pages, the reader has a clear sense that the integrity of Oscar’s marriage is threatened by Nelson, a former teenage rival and his wife’s ex-boyfriend back when all three used to live in Santos, on the coast of São Paulo. Thirty-plus years after having disappeared from their lives, Nelson returns to the city from Acre and moves into the couple’s building in downtown São Paulo. Their new neighbor’s proximity arouses Oscar’s jealousy and paranoia, as memories of being a teenager on the beaches of Santos in the 1980s reemerge like open wounds, and a sense of imminent danger invades him, a danger that is also present in the violence of the streets of São Paulo. Even though Oscar tries everything to lead a routine and transparent life, in Acre, personal boundaries conflict with the claustrophobia of shared spaces and the distrust of those living in them.

Susana Antunes: Why does Acre take place in São Paulo?

L.Z.: Because Acre is a story about São Paulo. I initially wanted it to be a frontier novel, a western. I wanted to revisit the narrative voices of Latin American classics, which are generally told from a masculine point of view, about rustic yet also mythical worlds, typically inaccessible and abandoned landscapes, and vast, boundlessly poetic territories. All of which lead to the search for one’s self.

I wanted to transport all these elements to a city because Acre is also about borders. From the start I saw a connection with the city, with life in apartment buildings where you don’t know your neighbors, especially in São Paulo, a city that can be inhospitable and violent.

When I describe this São Paulo—not denouncing it, but rather presenting it—I narrow the physical distance between people, redrawing its social cartography, putting it all under a raw emotional spotlight.

C.F.: What happens in Black Jaguar, which mainly takes place in northeastern Brazil?

L.Z.: I tried to shape this novel through an intimate first-person voice, getting into that blanket of silence that prevents people from coming to terms with their deepest feelings and fears. There’s a sense of loneliness, vulnerability, and rage in the somewhat dark portrait of a rural and timeless Brazil. And I was really inspired by the scenery in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, where Juan Preciado travels through a land inhabited by ghosts as he searches for his father. I also like the work of the Brazilian writers Graciliano Ramos and João Guimarães Rosa, who portray in a unique light and with exceptional language this region of the Brazilian Northeast and its almost cosmic fight for survival.

There’s something about an impenetrable distance, and I love folk tales; so simple and yet so evocative and complex. I like that about these modernist writers, and in a more contemporary context, or in more recent novels in which the land has a very strong presence, I’d add an author like Raduan Nassar. I feel like I was revisiting these authors in this first novel by placing the story in such a remote and uninhibited area like Chapada Diamantina. This is an area where you can still hear the voices of thousands of old coffee growers, and the voices of the landowners, even if there are almost no families living there, in what was transformed into a National Park in the 80s. Life in Chapada is still permeated by superstitions and a simple, meager existence.

S.A.: In your fiction there are images of dirty walls, cracked streets, urban scars, lots of concrete. How does the environment in Acre influence your characters’ behavior?

L.Z.: Acre’s characters breathe the air of a hostile city, where prejudice, brutality and decay lurk on every corner. São Paulo in my novel is a rotten beauty—used up and grimy—with its endless walls of graffiti and apartment buildings with old air conditioning units hanging from the windows. There’s a direct relationship between the neglected, aging city and the protagonist couple. There’s a sense of self-sabotage in living a passive existence.

C.F.: One of the main characters in Acre, Marcela, says she is not interested in the “world of memories.” However, memories haunt the narrator. For example, Oscar has “violent memories from being a teenager,” symbolized by a pocket knife. How did your own memories influence those described in Acre? For a writer, what is the purpose of the past?

L.Z.: In Acre, flashbacks of the Oscar-Marcela-Nelson triangle pop up. They’re in the 80s, in their teen years, during the golden age of surf culture in Santos. Marcela’s husband narrates this—Oscar, a man in his fifties who is trapped in his own fate.

Marcela is a woman who decides she won’t look back at her previous life, perhaps because when she was a teenager, instead of going to school, she always had to work to help her single mother, in contrast to middle class kids like Oscar and Nelson. Also, she has prominent indigenous traits, which could make her the object of veiled racism.

I’m interested in the sense of falling or collapse that happens when people who look for an image of themselves in the past discover that they have become another person, far from the young, heroic person they were in their youth. That’s where Oscar stands when the novel begins. And when Nelson returns, Oscar is forced to look back and recognize that he has changed. From that point on, what does Oscar decide to do? That’s what I’m interested in exploring.

S.A.: In Black Jaguar, the narrator is female. In Acre, the narrator is male. How did this change happen? Which was harder for you to create?

L.Z.: They’re two very different voices. Beatriz is 19, she leaves São Paulo and travels to Chapada Diamantina, while Oscar is 50 and hardly leaves his own neighborhood. In both cases, I wanted to explore fragility and insecurity when faced with an enemy that’s sometimes invisible, and that could also be the landscape’s emptiness, a shadow, a murmur.

Black Jaguar is more visual and has a protagonist who loves plants and who finds herself in a maddening landscape with exceptional plant life. In Acre, we’re in a city where sounds forcefully come into play—anything from the TV in the apartment next door, to the sounds of elevator cables. This all exists in a reduced space of doors and windows.

To me, this was my biggest challenge, that is, representing the sensorial side of each voice. How Beatriz breathes, what she feels, how the world is shaped from what she sees. And what she does with what’s not visible.

With Oscar, it’s similar when it comes to invisibility, and his wife’s role here is fundamental. I think creating Oscar’s voice was harder because he constantly projects himself onto his wife. He’s an insecure and jealous man, predictable to a certain degree.

C.F.: You have a very visual kind of writing. Have you ever received a proposal for adapting your novels to film? Have you written screenplays for TV or movies?

L.Z.: I never thought about my novels being adapted to feature films because the scenes, for as visual as they are, wouldn’t necessarily display well on film. I was surprised that a Brazilian film company approached me about making Black Jaguar into a film, and the thought of writing a screenplay started spinning around in my head. I’m still thinking about it.

S.A.: Mil-folhas is totally different from your novels. Can you explain a bit the research you did for it, and other details about the book, like the illustrations?

L.Z.: My starting point was to investigate how sugar cane fields changed the gastronomic landscape. Then my search became more etymological, on the origins of dessert names. I researched the subject for three-plus years, and the end result is a mapping of a gastronomic journey that’s more social, open and universal, and always on the sugar trail. There are some elements in the book that are more fantastical, like the chapter on the enchanted land Cockaigne that was so popular during the Middle Ages. On the more journalistic and less fictional side of things, I looked for sociological documents about slavery and its strong role in the confection of extremely elaborate dishes, while acceptance of native ingredients was still developing. There was the belief that quality belonged to the Old World.

C.F.: Are you working on a new novel?

L.Z.: Yes, I am. It’s set in the contemporary United States, at a time when two young women decide to meet up again, ten years after they committed a brutal murder. It’s a meditation on what seems like an impossible friendship, and a visceral reflection on the transition into adult life, all starting from the memory of a crime and years of incarceration.

César Ferreira and Susana Antunes
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Translated from the Portuguese by Amy Olen
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Entre São Paulo e Bahia: Uma entrevista com Lucrecia Zappi

(versão em português)

Autora e jornalista brasileira, Lucrecia Zappi, nasceu em Buenos Aires, Argentina, em 1972, tendo passado parte da sua infância e adolescência em São Paulo e na Cidade do México. Zappi é autora de dois romances em língua portuguesa: Onça Preta (2013) e Acre (2017). Os seus romances exploram mundos míticos do Brasil com vastas geografias e paisagens primitivas, seguindo de perto a tradição de autores da América Latina, tais como João Guimarães Rosa e Graciliano Ramos. Adicionalmente, o seu primeiro livro, Mil-folhas (2010), explora a história da confeitaria dos canaviais no Novo Mundo. Zappi é Mestre em Escrita Criativa pela New York University, tendo contado com a supervisão de E.L. Doctorow e Lydia Davis. Atualmente, Zappi vive em Nova Iorque e escreve o seu terceiro romance.

César Ferreira: Você pode explicar os títulos de seus livros e muito brevemente os enredos desses romances?

Lucrecia Zappi: Onça Preta se chama assim porque traz a incerteza de uma presença. É por isso que escolhi esse título, convidando o leitor a ver um animal difícil de ser encontrado na natureza, mas considerado um felino típico da Chapada Diamantina, onde se passa a história. E este romance de formação é sobre a busca da identidade e das raízes desconhecidas de alguém. Estava interessada em uma jornada física do que nem sempre está visível.

O romance está ambientado na Chapada Diamantina, hoje um Parque Nacional, na Bahia, para onde viaja Beatriz, uma paulistana de 19 anos em busca do pai, que nunca conheceu. Chega a uma pousada rústica, propriedade de sua possível família, onde decide ficar sem revelar sua identidade. Ela é estudante de Botânica, e como a área tem uma flora única, ninguém suspeita de suas intenções, não até que Beatriz começa a forçar uma intimidade com esses estranhos, a ponto de desencadear tensão e desconfiança ao seu redor. Durante as semanas que passa com a família, surge um amor clandestino e ocorre uma morte não resolvida. Pouco a pouco, ela vai descobrir as regras de sobrevivência no sertão brasileiro, atrás de uma existência aparentemente pacata e de poucas palavras.

A palavra acre me chamava a atenção antes mesmo de começar a escrever o romance porque ela traz noções concretas e subjetivas de terra e fronteira, dois temas que sempre me têm interessado. Nos Estados Unidos da América, acre é uma unidade de medida agrária, um conceito bem compreendido pelas pessoas em geral. No Brasil, é um estado vasto, que provoca a imaginação de outras formas, não só pela distância enorme das grandes metrópoles, como São Paulo ou Rio de Janeiro, mas também porque faz fronteira com o Peru e a Bolívia, e do lado da Amazônia, uma selva onde tampouco está bem definido o território habitado, seja por indígenas ou não. A trama de Acre, apesar de se desenrolar em São Paulo, não deixa de evocar atividades ilícitas como o tráfico de madeira e um gosto acre ou pungente nas relações sociais que são tecidas ao longo do livro.

Nas primeiras páginas, o leitor já tem uma clara noção de que a integridade do casamento de Oscar é ameaçada pelo retorno de Nelson, ex-namorado de sua esposa e seu ex-rival durante a adolescência, quando os três moravam no litoral paulistano, em Santos. Recém-chegado do Acre depois de ter desaparecido por mais de trinta anos, Nelson se muda para o mesmo prédio do casal, no centro de São Paulo. A proximidade com o novo vizinho gera ciúmes e paranoia em Oscar. As lembranças de sua adolescência nas praias de Santos na década de 1980 emergem como feridas abertas e uma sensação de perigo iminente o invade, também pelo que ele presencia nas ruas de São Paulo. Mesmo que Oscar faça tudo para que a sua existência caiba dentro de uma rotina transparente e previsível, em Acre as fronteiras pessoais entram em conflito com a claustrofobia dos espaços divididos e da falta de confiança dos que vivem ao redor.

Susana Antunes: Por que Acre acontece em São Paulo?

L.Z.: Porque é uma história de São Paulo. Inicialmente queria que fosse um romance de fronteira, um western. Quis revisitar as vozes narrativas de clássicos latino-americanos, geralmente com uma visão masculina do mundo rústico e mítico ao mesmo tempo, de paisagens abandonadas, geralmente inacessíveis, vastos territórios com grande força poética, que acaba levando à busca de si mesmo.

Quis transportar todos esses elementos para dentro de uma cidade porque Acre também fala sobre fronteiras. Desde o começo eu vi um relacionamento com a cidade, com a vida em prédios, onde você não conhece seus vizinhos, especialmente em São Paulo, uma cidade que pode ser inóspita e violenta.

Quando descrevo essa São Paulo, não o faço como uma denúncia, mas como uma apresentação, é sob uma luz emocional bruta, enquanto redesenho sua cartografia social ao estreitar as distâncias físicas entre as pessoas.

C.F.: O que acontece em Onça Preta cuja ação ocorre principalmente no nordeste do Brasil?

L.Z.: Tentei moldar esse romance em uma voz íntima de primeira pessoa, penetrando no manto de silêncios que impede os homens de chegar a um acordo com seus sentimentos e medos mais profundos. Há uma sensação de solidão, vulnerabilidade e raiva dentro de um retrato um pouco sombrio de um Brasil rural e atemporal, e eu diria que fiquei muito inspirada na paisagem de Pedro Páramo, de Juan Rulfo, onde Juan Preciado pisa em uma terra habitada por fantasmas quando está procurando por seu pai. Eu também gosto muito da obra dos brasileiros Graciliano Ramos, João Guimarães Rosa, que retratam essa região do Nordeste do Brasil e sua quase cósmica batalha pela sobrevivência, com uma luz e linguagem únicas.

Há algo sobre uma distância que você não pode penetrar. Além disso, eu gosto dos contos populares, tão simples e ao mesmo tempo tão evocativos e complexos. Gosto desses escritores modernistas por isso e, em um mapa um mais contemporâneo ou mais recente de romances em que a terra em si tem uma presença muito forte, incluiria um escritor como Raduan Nassar. E com este primeiro trabalho sinto que eu retomava esses escritores ao escolher uma área tão remota e abandonada como a Chapada Diamantina. Esta é uma área em que ainda ecoam as vozes dos milhares que cultivaram café ali e as vozes dos coronéis, embora já quase não existam famílias morando no que foi transformado em Parque Nacional nos anos 80. A vida na Chapada ainda é permeada por superstições e uma existência pobre e simple.

S.A.: Na sua ficção há imagens de paredes sujas, ruas rachadas, cicatrizes urbanas, muito cimento. Como o ambiente de Acre influencia o comportamento de seus personagens?

L.Z.: Os personagens respiram o ar de uma cidade hostil, onde o preconceito, a brutalidade e a decadência se farejam pelos cantos. São Paulo tem uma beleza cansada, carcomida, encardida, com infinitas paredes de grafite e prédios com velhas caixas de ar condicionado penduradas nas janelas. Existe sim um relacionamento direto no casal protagonista com a cidade. Há um senso de autossabotagem em uma existência passiva.

C.F.: Uma das principais personagens de Acre, Marcela, diz que não está interessada no “mundo das memórias”, mas existem memórias que assombram o narrador. Por exemplo, Oscar tem “memórias violentas de adolescentes”, simbolizadas em um canivete. Como suas próprias memórias influenciaram as descritas em Acre? Para um escritor, qual é o uso do passado?

L.Z.: Acre traz à tona muitos flashbacks do triângulo Oscar-Marcela-Nelson que viveram a adolescência em Santos nos anos 80 com uma cultura vibrante do surfe. Isso é contado pelo marido de Marcela, Oscar, um homem na casa dos cinquenta, sufocado pelo seu próprio destino. Marcela é uma mulher que decide não olhar para trás, talvez porque na adolescência tenha sido obrigada a trabalhar para ajudar sua mãe solteira, em prejuízo dos estudos, ao contrário dos jovens de classe média, como Oscar e Nelson. Além disso tem traços indígenas proeminentes, o que poderia torná-la assunto de racismo velado.

Estou interessada na sensação de queda ou de “colapso” de alguém que vai de encontro com o seu passado, percebe que se tornou outra pessoa, distante de sua heroica personalidade juvenil. Quando Nelson ressurge, Oscar se sente forçado a olhar para trás e reconhecer que mudou. A partir daí, o que Oscar decide fazer? Isso me interessa explorar.

S.A.: Em Onça Preta, o narrador é uma voz feminina. Em Acre, o narrador é uma voz masculina. Como esta transição aconteceu? Qual deles foi mais difícil de criar para você?

L.Z.: São duas vozes muito diferentes: Beatriz tem 19 anos, sai de São Paulo e vai para a Chapada Diamantina, enquanto Oscar tem 50 anos e dificilmente sai de sua própria vizinhança. Em ambos os casos eu queria explorar a fragilidade e a insegurança diante de um inimigo que é às vezes invisível, que também pode ser o vazio na paisagem, uma sombra, um rumor.

Onça Preta é mais visual, temos uma protagonista apaixonada por plantas em uma paisagem estonteante com uma flora única. Em Acre temos uma cidade, onde os sons entram com muita força, desde a televisão ligada no apartamento ao lado até os sons dos cabos do elevador. Tudo isso existe em um espaço reduzido de portas e janelas.

Para mim, esse foi meu maior desafio, representar o lado sensorial de cada voz. Como Beatriz respira, o que ela sente, como o mundo se forma a partir do que ela vê? E o que ela faz com o que não está visível?

Com Oscar é semelhante no que concerne aquilo que é invisível, e o papel de sua mulher aqui é fundamental. Acho que criar a voz de Oscar foi mais difícil porque ele se projeta constantemente na sua mulher. É um homem inseguro e enciumado, previsível até um certo limite.

C.F.: Você tem um tipo muito visual de escrever. Você já recebeu uma proposta para adaptar seus romances ao cinema? Você já escreveu roteiros para TV ou filmes?

L.Z.: Nunca pensei em meus livros adaptados para o cinema, porque as cenas, por visuais que elas sejam, não se desdobram necessariamente em um filme. Para minha surpresa, fui abordada por uma produção cinematográfica no Brasil para transformar Onça Preta em filme e a ideia de escrever um roteiro começou a me instigar. Ainda estou pensando a respeito.

S.A.: Mil-folhas é um livro completamente diferente de seus romances. Poderia explicar um pouco a pesquisa que fez, assim como outros detalhes que o livro apresenta, nomeadamente as ilustrações?

L.Z.: Meu ponto de partida foi investigar como os canaviais mudaram a paisagem gastronômica. Depois, minha busca foi para um campo mais etimológico sobre as origens dos nomes dos doces. Pesquisei mais de três anos e o resultado é um mapeamento de uma viagem gastronômica mais social, mais aberta e universal, sempre na trilha do açúcar. Há elementos mais fantasiosos no livro, como o capítulo dedicado à Cocanha. No lado mais jornalístico, menos ficcional, busquei documentos sociológicos sobre a escravidão e seu forte papel na confeção de pratos extremamente elaborados, enquanto a aceitação de ingredientes nativos ia se formando. Havia a crença de que qualidade pertencia ao Velho Mundo.

C.F.: Você está trabalhando em um novo romance?

L.Z.: Sim, estou. É um livro que se passa nos Estados Unidos, no momento em que as duas jovens mulheres resolvem se reencontrar, dez anos depois do crime brutal que cometeram. O livro é uma meditação sobre uma amizade aparentemente impossível e uma reflexão visceral da transição para a vida adulta, a partir da memória de um crime e anos na prisão.

César Ferreira e Susana Antunes
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee