While some admire cars, wines, horses, weapons, and others are enthusiastic about the speech of politicians who promise worlds and funds that they know they will not fulfill, there are those, more daring, like me, who are attracted by a good story, a good romance, by books.
Although there are different tastes in this matter, the novel seems to be that genre in literature that appeals to most, if not all, people. However, the short story has been gaining more and more space among readers because it is generally a shorter, direct story.
It doesn't matter if you like the story or the novel, the interesting thing is to read. Reading makes us more human, makes us better beings, more tolerant beings. Who reads, learns more, knows more, lives longer! Reading favors the human spirit moments of deep joy, pleasure, happiness.
Anyone who thought that in this pandemic I was socially isolated, was wrong. Every week I traveled to a different place, and with different people, through reading. There were many places I met, people I talked to, emotions I felt. And the most interesting thing about all this is that you don't contract or transmit the coronavirus!
In this quarantine, my first trip was to Bahia through reading the novel “Mar Morto” by Jorge Amado. In it I learned that it is “sweet to die at sea”. I had a good laugh with the stories of old Francisco and Rosa PalmeirĂŁo. I was moved by the love story between LĂvia and Guma. Finally, I prayed that the fishermen would find Guma's body, but the author preferred to leave him at the bottom of the sea, living with Iemanjá, the final destination of strong, brave and virtuous men.
In the second week of the quarantine, still affected by the reading of the previous week, I started to read another book by Jorge Amado, this time “Capitães de Areia”. In this book I learned that smallpox mainly affected the poor, the unprotected, the street children, and I compared it to the coronavirus. The life stories of Father José Pedro, Boa Vida, Gato, Sem Legas, Professor, João Grande, Lollipop, Dalva, D. Aninha, Zé Fuinha, brought me to tears and, at times, to laughter. Finally, I must say that it was the life stories of Pedro Bala and Dora that moved me the most. The love between the two of them was innocent, pure, contradicting the environment where they lived. When Pedro Bala joins the union, taking the side of the strikers, the stevedores, it seems that he redeems himself for all his crimes.
I could cite many other places and people I met in this quarantine through reading, but for now, perhaps affected by the death of George Floyd and Miguel, the boy who fell from the 9th floor of a building in Recife, where his mother worked as a maid, I will just quote the book “Black Brother” by Walcyr Carrasco. In this book, I discovered that prejudice is latent in Spanish culture and that it kills as much as traffic, drugs, urban violence.
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Finally, books transform us, take us to imaginable places, provide us with indescribable pleasures, noble feelings, true emotions. Whoever reads is never alone, because there are always a lot of authors, characters around. Literature, poetry, short stories, romance, make life more joyful, attractive, exciting, full of hope. Think about it!
