Ars Longa
A short story of clouds.
“I live departed.” The life history of what could have been, this is the history of a master of the words.
The typical man in his things, atypical in all the others — these other things did not matter. The great Marco Antonio Bianchi. We can refer to him with that pompous title. He fought the hardest imaginary duels, aspiring to conserve and stimulate what he was never sure of possessing.
We know Mr. Marco Antonio mainly from his famous company:
The Balzacian provides:
- literary services in general
- characters, heteronyms, and pseudonyms creation
- consulting on rhymes, metrics and rhetorical tropes
When he called his company The Balzacian, he could not have anticipated that the name would end up being used mostly as the vulgarized adjective we know today. Although the unusual, barely mnemonic subtitle, The Balzacian, the company’s main name, got so attached to people’s minds that is still a reference in Brazil, also a geographic one, especially in Good Retirement, a beautiful Paulista neighborhood. It was through The Balzacian that he felt fulfilling his self-appointed mission of encouraging the production of literature and poetry, or rather of High Literature and High Poetry, as he wrote with proper, respectful capital letters. In fact, he always spoke in order to sound those initial capital letters. His main business was selling characters he created or worked on, we know.
Tireless, throughout decades he served writers who wrote (or was trying to write) all sorts of texts: novels, short stories, poetry, plays; speeches, movie and ad scripts; opera lyrics and libretti; and even emails, and social media posts. He knew no limits to his writing. A competing blogger gave him the nickname Grandpa Lexicon, an awkward-sounding epithet his teenage grandchildren Luca and Giovanni adopted to joyfully poke him. We were lucky to count on his big generosity, which was completed to his talent. That is how we feel. For the writers who exaggerated the possibilities of what they did, he warned that “teleology is to continue walking in the same direction when the path has already been lost”. The ideas of the old man with a perennial smile live in countless texts that he began or continued writing.
Actually, not exactly perennial. He’d usually get outraged in two situations: when clients wanted to negotiate for a case or character for Short Forms (“any Fernando Pessoa’s sonnet is worth more than everything you could have said in life!” — he growled once); and when he listened to or read what he called debauchery against the great men of the language. Antonio was not the grumpy type, especially dealing with apprentices, but puns use to gave him itches. Bianchi said, “this kind of wordplay is the most virulent use of words”. But every time he’d heard one, he speculated about the best term to describe the phenomenon: “paronomasia or metonymy? — when in doubt, please do not do it”, so he always joked.
For him, these twentieth-century Linguistics addicts were especially naive while lecturing us that what came to be called — with the pomp of science — autopoiesis, should be used with many reservations: “metalanguage is to walk backward, boys, but mankind was made to move forward”. This assumption has a more rhetorical effect than logical sense, I know.
Mr. Bianchi’s way of moving forward is something we have perceived with curiosity since it maintained the posture of guardian of the tradition, the tradition he’d always call the good one — an expression we should listen to with the proper capital letters. In private conversations, he had recognized a childlike grace in knock-knock jokes, the only joke with words he accepted to being made in public.
Acknowledging it, the brats of old times played pranks on him. This issue only ceased when we installed an intercom in the upper storeroom, whose rented half provided the livelihood, added to his inheritances (a small justice form destiny), allowed him to live this profession which was always rare and today is at risk of disappearing.
His horror with the song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was mistaken for an unwillingness to make puns, but his criticism of this song had another motivation: “The house of the Lord is the infinity in which a person is allowed to be only when invited by the Lord Himself.” To be completely honest we should admit he had a joke of this kind, which he used to explain “tautology is standing still”:
— Knock, knock!
— Who is it?
— The one who is what he is.
So he laughed alone, quite differently from the interlocutors who usually did not laugh.
In his crusade towards knowledge, he did not confine himself to writing: he adored music — but abstained from discussions of which status of poetry Would the lyrics of popular songs fit or not into would fit or not for the lyrics of popular songs. He loved especially classical music, which gave him great “nonverbal emotion”.
However, he was less enthusiastic about the vocal repertoire, claiming that the “words drain my spirit, exhaust my attention”; and he was even less enthusiastic about opera: “if you want to say something, say it; if you want to sing, play it.”
He appreciated Fine Arts as long as they did not use words: “if your work needs words, you shall need these words: (…)”. Without saying anything, he would leave demonstrating the persuasive force of the silence.
So he laughed alone, quite differently from the interlocutors who usually did not laugh.
Although he was averse to some novelties such as motion pictures, “the duck of entertainment media”, he was in favor of things like subway system and airplanes: “they are the expansion of the vertical exploration of the planet, as literature and poetry are the great explorations of languages”. He bequeathed us a handful of works — written by hand, of course.
With his commissioned writings, he spread famous characters’ variations he euphemistically called “character enhancements”. Tenderly, he wallowed in other people’s works. “How many good lessons Machado de Assis’ Bentinho, without jealousy, would have given to the world?” We heard as he added, “Romeo chose self-esteem rather than true love.” He also complained that “Mario Vargas Llosa’s Don Rigoberto never prioritized his Fonchito”, and he scolded about “King Lear’s ego”. In his candor and typical Italian grandiloquence, he argued that, except for Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma, “all characters can be fixed”. He preferred the victory of goodness “the good victory”; after all, everything should end well. So he justified giving discounts to people who ordered characters with virtuous personality.
When he noticed he was getting old, he started feeling the need to bring back “his” characters. This was the dilemma of his fading years. “I will not die alone!,” he shouted at a writer who refused to give him back the Jewish prima donna he wrote for a Greek drama to be set in Chicago in the 1940s — the cliché among clichés.
He applied Balzac’s characters return principle — and comically failed while doing it. Unlike the French genius, who spread the same characters through his own books, our mister Bianchi used the mentioned principle as an attempt to bring back the characters sold to other people’s fictional writings. It didn’t matter if written complying paid orders, in his mind those characters belonged to him.
He kept writing no matter what: he wrote as if time was not passing.
It took me a long time to figure it all out because I rarely visited him. He did not complain about that. “That one who cannot wait is the one who waits.”
His life — which he counted not by wars he saw, but by orthographic reforms he suffered — was lacerated and interrupted by the early death of his only muse. “A disease whose origin we never knew, but of which we will remember it forever because forever we will remember the loved one that such an illness took from our life”. The devastation caused by his muse’s disease was the alibi — “an honest alibi”, he honestly claimed — to never finish any story he wrote standing by his own name: “our finitude is all finitude we shall deal with”.
I left home too early and not accepting his dreamlike manner, which sometimes made me feel a little embarrassed. It is a real shame, I admit. And worse, I feared deprivations, for listening to sad stories of emigre grandparents through my whole boyhood. Perhaps that’s why he made me make sure that the main decisions of his burial were left to his grandchildren — not to me.
Even the rain climate feature of our city was a creative note for him, who told me that “the rain is mom taking care of our garden”. He was the father no one else could be. About my mother he never said enough: “not evenPetrarch would dare to believe himself capable of honouring her”, and thus he would excuse himself for not being Petrarch. “God’s notes of what it would be and of what it was your mother are all the poetics that precede her arrival to life”.
My boys chose the tombstone, as my beloved father had assigned them to choose. That’s the one we see now as we say goodbye to him for the last time here at this funeral. If not justifiable, but for reasons, we must understand. He would have a good laugh about it. Of course, they chose to stamp a heart Emoji. And under it, we read what was written with a light, unmodulated sans serif typeface: #love
My boys chose the tombstone, as my beloved father had assigned them to choose. That’s the one we see now as we say goodbye to him for the last time here at this funeral. If not in a justifiable way, but for reasons we must understand. He would have a good laugh about it. Of course they chose to stamp a heart Emoji. And under it, we read what was written with a light, unmodulated sans serif typeface: #love
Mom’s death was dad’s damned quill.
