All right. Now let’s talk a bit about Diva and just how beautiful she was. Though nothing’s indisputable when it comes to beauty—personal preference will always result in a “but” or a “not so much” to just about anything—Diva was worthy of standing among the most beautiful women ever seen. Ah—this she most certainly was! She had green eyes, with the same gleam in them as her father’s had, ever so slanted and crowned by a pair of eyebrows like perfectly drawn black velvet, and her lashes were so long and thick that, were they any longer, they would have likely impaired her vision; her high cheekbones and perfect nose could easily be used as a model for any plastic surgeon today; her full lips and slender neck may well have been what Audrey Hepburn sought to imitate years later. All this, and a body with the most harmonious proportions and golden skin, a color alone that ensured its owner eternal beauty.
Fortunately, she had a happier fate than her equally-beautiful ancestor, Maria Cafuza, and unlike Cafuza, Diva was fully aware of her uncommon beauty; she simply didn’t know if it was a good or a bad thing. When her mother, in all her sorrow, would sit her on her lap, holding her face between her hands, peering at her in such a way she seemed to want to disappear inside her daughter’s eyes, the young girl felt a sharp pain and a confusing mixture of guilt and anguish for making her mother wish to fall into a deep, dark abyss. She would cry, kick her legs, and close her eyes in an attempt to stop her mother from disappearing. However, when it was the slave women or her father looking upon her, their faces reflecting the happy harmony gained from contemplating some beautiful object or scene, she felt at peace with herself, capable of transferring this happiness to those she loved.
It was her grandmother, Açucena Brasília, who one day explained the reason for this internal struggle and how to deal with it: “You, my dear, like everyone, in fact, just to a greater degree, hold the power to inflict pain or bring joy. This often doesn’t depend on us. It depends on the eyes of the beholder, and in such cases little can be done. But there is one thing that you can do, and that depends on you alone, which is to choose what you wish to cause more of: pain or joy. And after you choose, you should dedicate yourself to this choice. That way, you’ll be able to better control these two feelings that, wanting to or not, everyone causes.”
Diva, actually, chose more of everything. She chose to also call attention to the beauty of the things around her, things that were so mundane, so common, so within reach, things we see with such frequency that we take them for granted. Revealing the beauty in everyday things: that was why she began to take her camera into her grandmother’s yard and photograph the corncobs half-removed from their husks, the bunches of bananas, the jatoba berries, the numerous and undervalued dried flowers of the central plains. She photographed vegetables, took close-ups of flowers and fruits, and saw to developing and enlarging the prints in the darkroom she had built in her house, emphasizing the characteristics of each subject and revealing surprising forms no one had ever noticed before, despite or perhaps because they’d been seen over and over.
If today photography is an expensive art, just imagine back then, when it was rare to boot. But being the sole heiress to a millionaire father has to be good for something, and Diva’s passion began when her father gave her a camera for her twelfth birthday, the same year Diana América died.
Diva Felícia’s life, like the turn of the century in which she lived, was full of novelty and excitement.
To begin with, she was the first woman in her family to regularly study in a school. She had her tutor—who only spoke French with her—but she also attended a girls’ school for some years. She was also the first to travel abroad.
After her mother’s death, her father took her on a long trip to Europe. They traveled by boat, passing through Italy, England, and France, where Diva remained for four years, studying art and, especially, photography and lab techniques. At one point her father asked whether she didn’t wish to live in Europe, but she responded that no, she wanted to return to her land, the country where she had been born.
She found everything in Brazil to be more striking, more vibrant. She loved the landscape, the breeze, the smells, and above all the light, which was a bit excessive for some, but for her it was an intense source of pleasure. She loved the light, whose different shapes and intensities she knew how to appreciate and admire. She would say that, like Goethe on his deathbed, her final words would likely be: mehr Licht, more light!
Why yes, she did also speak German, having learned from reading Goethe and other German poets in the original. She had been captivated during her travels through the Rhine Valley and the romantic roads winding through Bavaria. She never learned of her biological father’s German heritage, but it was as though some ancestral element had filled her with admiration for the German language and culture, and she had the great ability to soak up the sounds of the language like a sponge, and effortlessly assume the characteristics of that people so distant and different from her own. Caetano Acioli never revealed the identity of her biological father, because the reality was he didn’t know either, and even if he had, he would never had said so. He considered himself the true father of the girl he loved so much, whom he had watched being born and raised as his own, without hesitation and without question. The only person who could have revealed the identity of Hans G. was Açucena, but Diana had never told her mother where he was from. She told her, of course, that he was a poet—“a sublime poet, mother, absolutely sublime!”—and enthusiastically compared him to Goethe and Schiller, but she must not have thought it important to mention his nationality. At any rate, even had Açucena known, she also would never have said anything, for she wholeheartedly respected Acioli’s choice, and she also considered him her granddaughter’s true father. In the case of Diva, the most interested of all parties, it never occurred to her that Caetano Acioli might not be her real father.
She returned from Europe at the age of seventeen with an ecstatic love for Brazil and its people. She enjoyed walking through Rio, stopping to appreciate the way the light cast down over the homes, the buildings, the monuments, the squares. She would walk along the beaches, soaking up the luminosity of the sand and sea. She would sit on a bench in one of the city squares for great lengths of time, marveling at her city and everything she intended to do there.
She’d had the luck of arriving at a moment of fevered enthusiasm and great change, when Rio de Janeiro was a hotbed of passionate ideas. Princess Isabel had just signed the Lei Áurea, abolishing slavery, and celebrations spread throughout the city, an effusive commemoration of the arrival, even if belated, of a new era. The shoe stores on the Rua do Ouvidor, full of freed slaves giddily spending their meager savings on the footwear they’d dreamed so long of and could finally use, were a spectacle in themselves, swaddled in a euphoria that no one could hide.
And why should they? The city was full of elation, the city was rejoicing, the city laughed out loud. From the balconies of their homes, residents would toss flower petals that coated the streets and sidewalks. People would parade through the streets, in carriages or on foot, in groups whose joy went round and round. Musicians gave impromptu concerts on the streets and in the squares, dancing left and right to the pulsing drumbeat of the newly freed.
There was no better time to be in the country’s capital.
Soon thereafter it came time for the protests and impassioned cries of the Republicans. At any given moment one could hear voices on the streets singing “La Marseillaise,” the anthem adopted by the radical Republicans, as enthusiastic young students marched through the streets.
One afternoon, Diva was eagerly following one such group, when everyone stopped so that a handsome young man with coffee-colored skin, his mustache carefully groomed, could climb atop a crate to deliver a speech with passion and charisma:
“We want a people’s republic,” he said, “a republic of popular protests, a republic with liberty, equality, and universal rights for all citizens. This is the republic we desire!
“We don’t want a republic that seeks balance, where power acts as a moderator, a republic of compromise, a republic where the highest virtue is the exercise of power.
“We want a republic that allows the collective exercise of freedom. Not merely a governable republic, but an ungovernable republic, should it be necessary, should this be necessary to make ours a republic of the people.”
Roundly applauded by the captivated onlookers, the young man was hoisted on their shoulders as they continued their march, everyone singing with great emotion: “Allons enfants de la patrie . . .” Farther up ahead, the march came to another stop and the young man once again climbed atop the crate to offer another eloquent speech.
“The perfect homeland is not a motherland, with its feminine traits of sentiment and love, and it is not a fatherland with the masculine traits of power and force. The perfect homeland is a brotherland, a nation of citizens with equal rights.
“The good Comtean dictator, the one who leads the masses, where is this dictator? Such a dictator does not exist.”
He ended his speech exhorting the public in French.
“La Republique doit être un gouvernement?” he yelled while the crowd responded, “Nooooonnn . . .” He continued, his voice resounding: “La Republique doit être le peuple!” To which the group responded wildly, “Vive le peuple!”
Diva Felícia, full of joy and enthusiasm, followed the group a little longer, singing along to the anthem that stirred her as few others had. She wanted to go on listening to the inspiring words of the young, visionary defender of the republic.
It was not possible that day, but in the days to come she would indeed have other chances to listen and applaud him as enthusiastically as the others. Or perhaps more enthusiastically still, because her presence was soon noted, and it was not long before he approached her and introduced himself. His name was Floriano Botelho, he was an engineer, and believed that a republic was the only way to civilize Brazil, to make this land a country that lived up to humanity’s noblest ideals. He was twenty years old and had just arrived from Paris.
Floriano was an idealist, a visionary, tireless. He was part of a republican club and described in great detail his dream to transform Rio and Brazil into a city and country that would provoke awe in all who visited.
The republic that soon arrived, however, was a devastating disappointment for the passionate young man. He had placed such hope in a new, egalitarian, modern country of brotherly love that the republic that actually came to be, beginning with its very proclamation—uninspiring, vague, and disunifying as it was—left a bad taste in his mouth. How was it that the republic of his dreams had been proclaimed by a group of military officers? After chanting “Long live the Republic” a few times in the middle of the Campo de Santana, the officers had then abolished cabinet posts and set out on a military parade throughout the city. Where were the people? Where was everyone? Whose hands were it that held the fate of the country? It was said the parade made its way through the streets of Rio in complete silence, with the old and cantankerous Marshal Deodoro wearing a look of displeasure, his coloring a bit green—it was said, no doubt the result an attack of shortness of breath.
Floriano could not accept that.
But the fact is that the republic was what it was.
Everything that followed later was one more bucket of cold water on the young engineer’s revolutionary fire.
The spirit of speculation that overtook the country’s elite, the accumulation of wealth at all costs, the massacre at Canudos, the terrible events of which news arrived daily via the newspapers, the creation of a modern market of stocks and backroom deals—all of these novelties that were swept in along with the Republic filled Floriano with disgust. He never tired of repeating that the republic of the military and the elite was not his republic.
He decided to leave politics behind.
It was at that time that the couple decided to marry. Diva took Floriano to meet her grandmother. It was at this time, too, that she took the photo of her grandmother that she would later set aside as her favorite. Seated on her wicker chair, adorned with necklaces, bracelets, rings, her silk dress and shawl, a smile on her face and surrounded by her sweets, her flowers, her friends, and the black women she’d freed, Açucena was the image of a self-proclaimed queen, the manifestation of a rich and well-lived life. Aunt Magnólia is also in the photo. Standing next to her mother, with her diaphanous air of sanctity. Missing is her half-brother, Dionísio, who was never there at the same time as Diva. He refused to accept her as a sister, just as he’d never accepted his mother. He considered himself rejected by them, and paid them back with still greater rejection.
When they returned to Rio, Floriano’s disappointment had already lost a good part of its intensity and, almost without noticing it, which is generally how these things happen, he drew closer, little by little, to the positivist technocrats of the new republic. When he was invited to work with Mayor Pereira Passos on the reurbanization of Rio, he could not refuse. The mayor, also an engineer and urbanist, was a family friend of Floriano’s and knew the young man had studied in Paris and had seen close-up the monumental reforms of the French capital under the much-discussed Baron Haussmann, reforms that would serve as a mode for those Pereira Passos had in mind. He needed young men like Floriano around him, and he spared no arguments to win over the young man.
Rio suffered from narrow streets and a heavy concentration of the poor in old mansions in the city center, where its precarious sewage system was considered a serious public health threat. It had become increasingly impossible to tolerate the urban chaos that had taken hold, principally after abolition, when the newly freed slaves abandoned the plantations and sought refuge in the cities, where they lacked for everything. The port had also become unfit to handle the growing volume of commercial transactions.
The order of the day was to modernize the port, bring about basic sanitation systems, and complete an urban-reform project.
All this might appear well and good, but the problem was that the military men and the technocrats, who preached progress above all, would bring about this great urban transformation using methods that allowed little room for ifs, ands, or buts. The mansions in the city center were declared public enemy number one, and the order was to summarily “raze them to the ground.” This was followed by decrees granting the mayor exceptional powers to disappropriate and take possession of homes without any sort of judicial process, much less indemnification. The poor were literally thrown onto the streets.
The terror of modernity quickly took hold in the name of the works that were moving full steam ahead. Progress and civilization were noisily moving in, waging fierce battle against the tumult, disorder, and “the rabble and their filth.”
Floriano, at the very beginning, earnestly asked if it weren’t possible to employ methods that were less authoritarian, less disastrous, to relocate these residents. He was told that there was not; there was no time to lose with such discussions, what had to be done had to be done, no matter who it affected. In the end, it was all for the common good, and everyone would later understand and give thanks for the changes that needed to be made by any means possible in order for Brazil to become a country that inspired confidence and acceptance from the rest of modern Western civilization.
And so they built wide avenues, like the grand boulevards of Paris; they erected gorgeous buildings that were to serve as splendid display windows onto the new capital of the new republic; they built systems for wastewater and the rainwater drainage. As they did so, public health workers began their work, cleaning, sterilizing, setting fire to the homes considered irrecoverable, destroying furniture and any trash containers considered a health risk, vaccinating and revaccinating those who seemed too poor and much too likely to become a walking vessel of diseases inherited from the colony and the Empire, all of which it was imperative to eliminate without delay.
It didn’t take much time, really, for Floriano to become completely convinced that the modernization of the country was priority, and if to accomplish that it was necessary to collaborate with the city’s authoritarian elite, that was the price to pay for progress. And if everything comes with a price, did not progress, too? Yes, without a doubt, the modernization of the country came with a price. His dream country became a world that was spick and span, where progress could be measured with a ruler by engineers like himself. His enthusiasm regained, he was soon repeating “Now we shall become civilized, we shall rise to the challenge of humanity’s progress!”
It wasn’t long before other Brazilian capitals sought to follow Rio’s example. Floriano was one of the technocrats invited to participate in plans to urbanize Salvador, the country’s third most populous city, where the same discourse heralding sanitation and hygiene, the battle cry to make the city clean and orderly, was put into action. The conglomerations of houses in the city’s central neighborhoods, immoral places overrun by the poor, were condemned as breeding grounds for disease.
Floriano, almost without realizing it, had become an ardent defender of the necessity of these demolitions and the effective means that ought to be adopted to accomplish them. That’s how, with his vehement nature, he became a technocrat more than anything else, a stalwart for progress at all costs. The republic of his former dreams, his distant republic of the people, was buried without honors or glory in the same tomb as the fleeting dreams of his youth.
Diva, too, even if she never forgot the verses, never again sang “La Marseillaise.” She dedicated herself entirely to her photos.
Through the world of photography, she had stumbled upon a fascinating path that was truly her own. She no longer photographed vegetables, flowers, and fruits in nature, as before. She began to isolate them, placing them against neutral backgrounds in her studio. The techniques she employed—photographing her subjects outside of their natural settings, in close-ups that were overexposed—brought forth, with rare force, the irresistible beauty and perfection of their natural forms. A handful of peeled pequi fruits against a neutral background, a single corncob, solitary on a flat surface, a bunch of tamarinds at rest, the lone flower of a blooming banana tree with a miniscule cluster of banana embryos, a composition of dry flowers from the Brazilian savanna: these were the serene still-lifes she captured with her camera.
By one of those coincidences that occur in the arts world, the work of Diva Felícia had many similarities to the work of British photographer Charles Jones, who lived at roughly the same time. Both of them, each in his or her respective country, were precursors, by a matter of decades, to some master photographers of the still-life who would emerge later. Unfortunately, the better part of Diva’s photos was lost in the fire that destroyed the family mansion in the neighborhood of Flamengo, a fire started by her daughter-in-law, married to her oldest son, Eudoro, after learning the Botelho family had declared bankruptcy. But this is a story for later.
Diva and Floriano had two boys, Eudoro and Gaspar, and after a considerable gap, they also had a girl, Ana Eulália. But the couple’s marriage was hardly a healthy one.
Floriano had changed in several ways, not only in the sort of republic he sought. By this point, his friends were the country’s new businessmen and peddlers of influence, the so-called arrivistes of the Republic, whose goals were the rapid accumulation of wealth and the ostentation of their luxurious lifestyles. He had acquired an obsession for elegant dress and cultivated the conspicuous consumption of imported goods and works of art. He took a liking to the game of poker and to the casinos. Bit by bit, his marriage with Diva became a sort of front, indispensable to his position but lacking emotion and companionship. He spent his days involved in his projects, and at night went out with his new friends, whose company Diva did not care for.
She, for her part, set up her atelier and photography lab in one of the rooms of their enormous house, and there she spent a good part of each day; that is, when she wasn’t walking around the city, absorbed in her search for new shapes, sizes, and lighting for her photographs.
She was considered an eccentric woman. She wore clothes that were unique; she had her own style, and refused to follow the latest fashions from Paris. She had no girlfriends, since she didn’t care for the petty comedy that was Rio’s social scene, and preferred to be on her own. For some years she had been part of a group of painters, but discord and rivalries overshadowed the tenuous commonalities between them. Her only true friend was an old painter, a solitary resident of the secluded Morro de Santa Teresa, with whom she would speak for hours about art and life and for whom she often posed nude, without her husband ever suspecting a thing. She missed her grandmother Açucena and also her aunt Magnólia, and ever since their passing she had never returned to the house at the foot of the mountains. She had practically no contact with her half-brother Dionísio, who had always treated her as a stranger, if not almost an enemy.
Her two sons and her daughter were away at boarding school, and she only saw them on weekends. The idea of boarding school had come from Floriano; she had agreed, thinking it would be best for her children.
Many people considered Diva too eccentric, too strange, even a bit off the rails. Perhaps she was. She had, it’s true, led a very solitary life. She spent her childhood and her early adolescence with a sick and often absent mother, and a much older father, whom she idolized but who found it hard to converse with a child. The unforgettable short stays at her grandmother’s house were nothing more than this, short stays, and could not make up for things that were missing in her daily life. Her time studying and traveling in Europe was always spent at the side of tutors who, no matter how kind they were, could not be considered equals or companions. Later came her marriage with the impetuous republican who soon became a technocrat much too self-involved. No matter how much she loved them, she could not demand of her children that they occupy the empty spaces that did not belong to them. Fortunately, she had her art and gave herself over to it with complete, and even satisfying, abandon. She was not an unhappy woman. She had realized herself artistically. Despite the voids in her life, she was fundamentally at peace with herself.
So she had a curious reaction when she discovered that Floriano kept a separate garçonnière for himself in the Lapa district, where he would rendezvous with known cocottes of Rio’s bohemian nightlife. She obtained the key to the tiny apartment and, with her camera, began to inspect the location. Decorated with imported furniture, walls lined in light green silk, and curtains of emerald velvet, the place was certainly furbished in good taste, even if much too modern. She spent hours there photographing everything in detail. Then she went to the Mansions Le Ciel sur La Terre, which belonged to Mme Marie Lamber, and which housed the cocottes Floriano admired. She introduced herself to Mme Lamer as a photographer who wished to include the girls in one of her projects, and would pay, of course, for their time spent posing.
Diva wasn’t exactly sure what her intent was. Hers was an almost instinctive reaction—to photograph the garçonnière and the cocottes. It was a sort of defensive attitude, a way to prepare herself for something, a decision that she intuitively knew she ought to take. She also wasn’t very clear about the emotions that guided her actions. She felt neither sorrow nor resentment, since she had long stopped loving Floriano; nor was it some sort of rage at feeling her supposed ownership over her husband challenged, for she no longer considered him hers; nor was it some inexplicable feeling of humiliation at his betrayal, for she did not see their relationship in that way. Nor was it surprise at realizing how little she knew her husband, for she had also discovered long ago that it was impossible to truly know another person, any one person.
No, it wasn’t any of that, but rather the shock of coming to the sudden realization that, from that moment on, one way or another, her life would have to change. It was the arrival of something unexpected, setting into motion something that had been stalled on account of a stability that made no sense, but which had existed for so long that it seemed impossible that she might still have the ability to change it. The abrupt rediscovery of this ability had brought her to that crossroads, not knowing how to proceed, but proceeding so as to be able to think the way she knew best: through the magic eye of her camera.
When she finished photographing the cocottes—a project that lasted weeks—she saw that she was in possession of material of startling originality. In the beginning, she had photographed them right there, in the bedrooms, from several angles and varying positions, taking close-ups, shooting at mid-range, their entire bodies, sitting down, lying on the bed, in the bath, laughing, crying, smoking, getting dressed, talking to one another. Soon, however, she began to take them out to pose in unexpected settings throughout Rio. Unlike with her work with the vegetables, flowers, and fruits she took from nature and isolated in her studio, she took the opposite approach with the women, positioning them nude or seminude as fruits of the earth, transforming them into one more element of nature, integrating them into the landscape. Legs and arms sprouted like branches from trees, bushes mingled with an unknown species, the foliage fused with body hair, bulbs revealing a certain resemblance to the women’s breasts.
When Diva saw that her work with the cocottes was done, she also realized that she already knew what she wanted to do next. She wanted a complete change, to spend some time back in Europe, to visit old acquaintances in Paris, and then return to Brazil to lead a completely different life.
She explained to her children that she was going to Europe for a few months and left a large envelope for Floriano that contained all the photos of his garçonnière and a tiny note saying that she had gone to Paris and, when she returned, did not want to find him in the mansion that had belonged to her father. She took the series of photos with the cocottes to show her friends, together with an older series of vegetables, flowers, and tropical fruits.
She set out on that trip to rediscover herself, to reaffirm who she was and her commitment to her art. She saw the country that had rebuilt itself after the war and was certain that her life, too, could be reconstructed. Three months later, she thought she was ready to return home.
On the ship back to Brazil, Diva met a Brazilian painter, a captivating young woman who was also returning from Paris, and the two became fast friends. Despite the difference in their ages, they had many things in common: Diva, a photographer, a stunning and well-lived woman with white hair, and Tarsila, a painter who was equally striking and bursting with a sophisticated youthfulness.
Diva eagerly showed her new friend her series of photos, which fascinated Tarsila. When they said their goodbyes, Diva gave Tarsila two of the photos that had bewitched her: one, a close-up of a solitary, bulbous squash that looked as though it were standing at attention; the other, a close-up of a bundle of tiny wild tomatoes that looked like black pearls lit from within.
In one of the long letters she later wrote to Diva, Tarsila sent sketches of what she was painting and asked her to note how the shapes and sizes from the photos Diva had given her on the boat had helped her to conceptualize the shapes and sizes in her latest paintings. She was insistent in her invitations that Diva visit to see the exhibition she was preparing, and also invited her to exhibit her photos in São Paulo. She spoke of her friends there and of how she was certain they would share her captivation by Diva’s work.
But Diva was unable to make the trip, though she had planned to do it soon thereafter. She returned to Rio to find Floriano’s stubborn refusal to accept their separation, which would be a blemish on the Botelho family name. Their two sons and daughter all supported their father, equally unwilling to accept their mother’s position. Despite her efforts, the force of inertia and the hypocrisy of her conjugal stability conspired to ensure her plans to separate did not come to fruition.
Diva, who had returned from Paris so certain of what she wanted and ought to do, was now confused. She hadn’t expected this pressure from her children and, above all, the unhappiness she saw on the face of her youngest, Ana Eulália. She had never managed to understand her daughter’s behavior and strange manners. In fact, when she’d been able to, Diva had tried to pretend not to see the scorn she long feared had lurked in Eulália’s heart. She told herself she was wrong, that all adolescents were the same, but she knew deep down that one day she would have to face her daughter’s disapproval of her lifestyle. How often we resort to magical thinking, this almost unconscious putting-off of an especially difficult situation, as though refusing to see it could make our problems finally disappear, or as though the attempt to put it out of mind would allow the necessary time for a solution to appear.
Diva maintained her habit of walking through the streets, absorbed in her task, her camera at the ready in her purse. These outings became her way to think. She was forty-nine years old and, unlike other women of her generation, thought herself entirely capable of anything; she loved life, the light, her art. Yet she was confused. She didn’t know what to do, where to find an exit. She could return to Paris—but no, she loved Brazil, this was where her children were, this was where she wanted to live.
Her entire life, she had always been distracted. While she was out walking one day, an inexperienced young man driving an imported sports-car he’d just received from his father gave in to the desire to attain a speed completely unfit for the city streets. Diva didn’t realize how dangerous Rio had become with the increased movement of cars and trolleys. Automobile accidents had wreaked absolute havoc in the city, which lacked adequate roads, signage, or transit laws. A luxury item, cars were seen as sporting vehicles whose ability to reach unthinkable speeds was the pinnacle of modern life. Running over pedestrians, even in cases of death, was met merely with a fine, and a tiny one at that.
The car sent her flying.
She hit her head on the asphalt and died almost instantly.
All that remained of her life was a brief moment, enough to see the incandescent glow that came over her to whisk her away forever in its phosphorescence, thus unexpectedly satisfying what, without her realizing it, had always been her greatest desire: More light!