Eulálio has reached the biblical age of one hundred years. It is the oldest surviving offspring of the d’Assumpção, an ancient noble family, which was instrumental in the design of Brazil through the centuries. From generation to generation the first name Eulálio was handed down until the birth of a daughter interrupted this tradition.
was unethical in many ways is Eulálio in a hospital in Rio de Janeiro. The Hospital: filthy. The resort: not even able to enter his family name right in his medical records (he is not a real “Assunção”!).
The space: an ordinary dormitory. His roommate: uneducated people, all fell, half deaf, the paralyzed, the other confused one. He himself: packed in diapers, left to his pain, although you could still relieve with opiates. Probably his daughter Dona Maria Eulália has him (also old already eighty years) accommodated. How he would be transferred to a traditional, run by nuns hospital. But he is as poor as a church mouse.
This Eulálio grew up in best conditions. In his childhood streets and squares bearing the name of d’Assumpçãos. The father, “was an important politician, Senator and Republican the first hour,” has an engaging hands in coffee and arms and lets in Botafogo a spacious villa with marble bathrooms, outside at the foot of the mountains, a ranch with rich farmland and pastures and finally build another chalet in Copacabana. Everywhere completed house staff work to insure the comforts of the privileged family.
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4.7 (348)
“ Amazing as always, gave her a week to finish a big assignment and came through way ahead of time. ”
In the infamous banquet at the villa of the bon vivant, politicians of all stripes, the Haute-Volée and the most attractive women of the city meet. With extensive travels overseas the father brings his son close to real life.
The ship passages to Europe, the accommodation and the pleasures will be spared no expense. You live in Paris at the Ritz, ski runs in the Swiss Crans-Montana, to begrudge cocaine … Today, all this is perdu. The villa: for next to nothing as embassy building sold to the Danes, until they moved to Brasília. The Fazenda: 1947 expropriated for the construction of a highway. The chalet: demolished; there stands a skyscraper today. After his father’s death (it was a politically motivated attack or rather the revenge of a horned husband?), It went with the d’Assumpçãos down. Know
At the funeral of the father Eulálio learns his future. Matilde singing the Requiem in the choir. After that, he is hardly master of his hot desire for this woman with “almost brown skin”. In a society that strictly separates rich and poor, black and white, the difficulties promises. Neither parent homes agrees with the misalliance. To date Eulálio makes himself and his daughter from something, why Matilde after her birth without comment from family life vanished (in childbirth died? Caught in the water? …) her memory he still holds high, mystifies the beloved woman above everything like a legend. But the truth is sobering and profane.
Recently, Eulálio restless. Certainly one has messed up his medication, mixed arsenic in his food. Why does the TV with the barren telenovelas should run continuously and the sound will always be asked louder? Speaking drops him hard enough. And what he reports everything! His great-great grandfather came with the Portuguese royal court to Brazil, he was the confidant of Queen Dona Maria, the madman. His grandfather has “eaten at the table of the Emperor Dom Pedro II. [And] corresponds to Queen Victoria”. But none of those present has the slightest idea who those people were, and no one is interested in a unrigged celebrities of the past, especially if he daherbrabbelt so disjointed as Eulálio jumping between fragments of his Vita and his ancestors back and forth, fantasy and reality mixed that you might think smooth, the old man spins.
as long as the nagging, sick old man is awake, circling jumbled thoughts in his head. In a continuous monologue he tells times of Matilde, sometimes from the glorious past of his ancestors, sometimes from their decline in the generation of grandchildren, Prehistory and great-grandson. Although one must not put his information on the sequence of generations to weigh. On the overall impression it arrives, and fits somehow. His “memory is a real mess, but it’s all there … just no outsider is allowed to intervene, like a maid who clears away the papers to the study dust wipe”.
It can be not deny: We readers are the only audience this unfortunate narrator. The poor man with the rich but chaotic store of memories is left in its last phase of life alone. In vain he wants a befitting interlocutor, even if his brain porous punches him some trick. If he wants an active life, it remains nothing more than to act in his own inner world, and only at this level we read. The beautiful nurse on the morning shift, he dictated his memoirs, very distinguished gentleman and employers, it instructs to care, so no spelling errors are attributed to him. At this young woman with the gentle hands he has, after all, accustomed, although their language, dress and manners are simple (they like whistles in their work). He concocts even euphoric future plans for her.
“If I get out of here, we get married my happy childhood on the farm, the place.” But then move back other nurses on, scatterbrained, upset the drugs and not listen to him, like everyone else …Sometimes Dona Maria Eulália visited him at his bedstead. The daughter has become strange and bizarre aged and under the influence of her son … or grandson or great-grandson – so exactly can Eulálios brain does not arrange the past. During need “the younger people somehow huddled in my head in a corner,” the salon for the elderly is increasing. Eulálio himself knows that his memories are shaken up like autumn leaves, and therefore itself does not take very serious.
Thus the novel gets an ironic, amusing tone without exposing the centenarians per ridicule. In the end, remains an ambiguous impression. As the things Eulálio spreads, specifically the development of Brazil reflect, at least in the non-Brazilians reveals itself not without secondary literature. Moreover, the multiple broken figure of the protagonist is hardly suitable to convey a general social message. The irony in the narrative and the uncertainty and inconsistency in the factual further weaken the relevance of their statements. What remains are the entertaining story of the decline of a dynasty, one individual family fate, the turning point of the grotesque-comic anti-hero Eulálio represents.
Spilled milk by Chico Buarque Review. (2019, Nov 18). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/spilled-milk-by-chico-buarque-my-review/
