Projects & Studies Log

The Slum/O Cortiço (1890), by Aluísio Azevedo, is one of the most brutal portraits of Brazil's socioeconomic formation. Beyond merely describing an environment, the novel stands as a powerful critique of the power structures of 19th-century Brazil, exposing how the nation-building project was constructed upon the systematic exploitation of marginalized bodies and territories. The naturalist narrative, with its relentless determinism, serves as a lens to reveal the inner workings of savage capitalism, patriarchy, and racism, which do not operate in isolation but in destructive synergy.

At the center of this machinery is the relationship between João Romão and Bertoleza, a microcosm of the country's foundational violence. The rise of the avaricious Portuguese immigrant is built upon the unpaid labor and constant surveillance of the enslaved Black woman. Bertoleza is not a helper, but the initial productive foundation, whose body and toil are appropriated as a natural resource. The false promise of manumission and marriage symbolizes the perverse mechanism of an unpayable debt, which perpetuates servitude under the illusion of mobility. The moral climax of the work is the moment this logic reaches its paroxysm: in seeking to ascend to the white bourgeoisie, João Romão must erase his exploitative origins. Bertoleza, from a financial asset, becomes a social liability and is discarded, handed over to the slave hunters. Her suicide is the tragic confirmation that, for the logic of capital he represents, her existence was always "nothing." This dynamic makes explicit how the nascent national wealth fed on slave labor only to later try to exclude that same population from the narrative of progress.

Azevedo's critique, however, is multifaceted and also targets the hypocritical moral codes governing private life, especially that of women. It is here that the contrasting trajectories of Pombinha and Rita Baiana become paradigmatic. Pombinha, the "flower of the tenement," is raised with the bourgeois ideal of purity and submission, a pedestal that is, in reality, a cage repressing her physical and psychological development. The visit to the prostitute Léonie, orchestrated by her own mother, unveils the cynicism of this system: to achieve the socially accepted end of an "honorable" marriage, the most "impure" means are valid. For Pombinha, however, the so-called "fall" is not a condemnation but an awakening and a form of subversion. Freeing herself from her husband's yoke and pursuing an independent life is her ultimate act of agency. Her "perversion" thus becomes a tool for liberation from suffocating puritanism.

In radical contrast, Rita Baiana is born, in the social imagination of the work, already stereotyped. Her exuberant sexuality is not seen as an achievement or a transgression, but as a "natural" attribute of her race and social condition. While Pombinha's transformation is a psychological journey with contours of rebellion, Rita is constantly animalized and treated as a force of nature, an object of desire that destabilizes the masculine order (as seen in Jerônimo's ruin). This contrast reveals society's double standard: the sexuality of a white woman is a moral battleground, while that of a Black woman is pre-destined and naturalized, robbed of complexity and agency. Both are victims, but of distinct mechanisms of oppression: one through class repression, the other through racist animalization.

Finally, the tenement itself as a collective character completes this anatomy of exploitation. Its description as a living organism that grows, sucks in, and expels individuals is the ultimate metaphor for the economic system. The residents (Portuguese immigrants, washerwomen, etc.) are consumed by João Romão's profit-driven logic, who rents out filthy cubicles and feeds on their misery. The promiscuity and violence that erupt there are not random, but a direct result of the dehumanizing conditions imposed by capital. Miranda's townhouse, with its plots of adultery and ambition disguised behind lace curtains, shows that the bourgeois "order" is as corrupt and driven by instincts as the disorder of the tenement; only its trappings are different.

It is concluded, therefore, that O Cortiço is much more than a depiction of customs. It is a fierce diagnosis of a society sick at its root. Azevedo uses the tools of Naturalism (environmental determinism, zoomorphization, the pathologization of behavior) not to simply record, but to accuse. He shows how the Brazilian modernity project was consolidated upon the inseparable triad: the exploitation of class (in the tenement), of gender (in the women's trajectories), and of race (in the figure of Bertoleza and the representation of Rita). The work's disturbing relevance lies precisely in this denunciation: more than a century later, the mechanisms of dehumanization and disposal by class, race, and gender, albeit in new guises, continue to operate at the heart of our social structures. The novel's power lies in forcing us to confront, without romanticism, the often bloody foundations upon which we stand.

Moldy Strawberries, 1982 (Caiu Fernando Abreu).

Moldy Strawberries, by Caio Fernando Abreu, is one of the most subtle and at the same time most devastating portraits of the failure of a generation's dreams. Beyond a mere chronicle of post-counterculture decadence, the book stands as a powerful critique of the repressive structures operating in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s, not only the explicit political repression of the dictatorship, but those more insidious ones, prejudice against dissident bodies, the impossibility of love between equals, loneliness as the norm, and the slow corruption of all affection by external forces (society, work, other people's morality) and internal ones (fear, silence, self-censorship). The stream-of-consciousness narrative, with its prose that deliberately suppresses commas to simulate the speed of thought, serves as a lens to expose the gears of an affective capitalism that turns human relationships into disposable objects, and, above all, to show how personal defeat is articulated with the collective defeat of an entire generation.

At the center of this machinery are the three stories that give the book its soul, Moldy Strawberries, Those Two and Sergeant Garcia, but it is in Those Two that we find the most perfect microcosm of the period's symbolic violence. Raul and Saul, two office workers, build a silent friendship made of coffee, records, drawings and a thrush named Carlos Gardel. Their intimacy is never named as love, but it is so dense that it overflows into nighttime embraces and exchanges of gifts (a Van Gogh painting, a cage). The office where they work is described as "a desert of souls." Anonymous letters denounce the "abnormal and ostentatious relationship." They are fired. As they leave, they hear an insult from their former colleagues, but the narrator tells us that they did not hear it. And the book pronounces, "Almost everyone inside had the clear sensation that they would be unhappy forever. And they were." Raul and Saul, not. They take a taxi together. This ending is not a happy ending in the romantic sense, it is a dignified ending, a minimal act of resistance that refuses the bitterness that consumes those who stay behind. Caio Fernando Abreu shows that unhappiness is not a biological destiny but a social choice that becomes naturalized, and that survival, however fragile, can come in the form of a taxi door closing in the face of an insult.

Abreu's critique, however, is equally cutting when it turns to internalized repression and to eroticism that blends with violence. It is here that the story Sergeant Garcia becomes paradigmatic. The young Hermes, recruited for a physical aptitude exam, is stripped, humiliated and examined like an animal. The sergeant who oppresses him is the same who, hours later, offers him a ride and places a hand on his thigh. The scene in the brothel with Isadora, a transvestite who dreams of dying strangled by her own scarf like Isadora Duncan, is one of the most disturbing moments in Brazilian literature, sex is not consummated with pleasure but as an invasion that the narrator endures in silence. The story's final sentence, "Once awake, you will not sleep again," echoes as a condemnation and a promise. Here awakening does not lead to tragedy but to a kind of painful lucidity. The young man's body is marked but not annihilated. His leaving the room, sitting in the square and looking at the clouds, is an act of precarious renewal. Caio does not offer redemption but refuses the pathos of martyrdom.

In radical contrast to the explicit violence of Sergeant Garcia, the story Beyond the Point (present in this expanded edition) operates in the register of purest stream of consciousness. A narrator walks in the rain, without an umbrella, clutching a bottle of cheap brandy to his chest, going to meet someone who calls him, someone whose name he will forget before arriving. He falls, the bottle breaks, he gets up, continues. And at the end, he knocks and knocks and knocks on a door that never opens. What makes this story brilliant is the stylistic device of suppressing commas in certain passages, creating a hallucinatory rush of thought that mimics the insatiability of desire and the impossibility of stopping. The door that does not open is not just the door of the beloved, it is the door of meaning, of welcome, of an answer. And the "point" in the title is that point of no return where hope has already become delirium, but movement continues because stopping would be more unbearable than knocking forever. This story, more than any other, reveals Caio's prose as a kind of physiology of anguish, the wet body, hunger, the broken tooth, the tongue searching for a name that does not come. It is stream of consciousness in its purest state, and for me, the most beautiful in the book.

Finally, the title Moldy Strawberries condenses the author's entire thesis. The strawberry was once fresh, red, sweet. The mold is time, repression, prejudice, the impossibility of living love without a mask. But the title story ends with an unexpected twist, the protagonist, who tasted moldy strawberry in his mouth, at dawn leaning over the terrace, asks if it is possible to plant live strawberries there. And he answers, "He thought so. That yes. Yes." The book, which could have been merely a requiem for a generation of survivors, refuses easy mourning. The bet on the possibility of planting fresh fruit, even in arid soil, is the opening gesture that saves the work from mere victimhood. It is not a happy ending, it is an active ending. As Caio himself wrote in a letter to his friend José Márcio Penido (reproduced at the end of this edition), "creation is a sacred thing."

It is concluded, therefore, that Moldy Strawberries is much more than a collection of stories about disoriented young people from the 70s/80s. It is a fierce diagnosis of a society that makes its members sick through structural loneliness, diffuse homophobia, the impossibility of building bonds that are not eroded by fear. Abreu uses the tools of stream of consciousness, poetic prose and expressive punctuation not simply to record but to transmit the visceral experience of failure and persistence. He shows how the Brazilian project of modernity, with its "economic miracle," its controlled opening, its façade morality, was consolidated on a triad, political repression, exploitation of labor, and the interdiction of affection between dissident bodies. The disturbing relevance of the work lies precisely in this denunciation, more than four decades later, the taste of moldy strawberry still persists in the mouth of those who try to love in a world that insists on treating desire as a threat. The strength of the novel, or of this collection of stories that functions as a fragmented novel, lies in forcing us to feel, in the very flesh of the prose, what it means to knock on a door that may never open, but to knock anyway. And, every now and then, to hear in the distance a taxi pulling away.