Sunday: Chaos Day – 10/24/2024 – Tati Bernardi

My father is 83 years old and has not needed or wanted to vote for at least ten years. This is one of the greatest joys of my life – the city and country are grateful.

He is a right-wing extremist. It wasn’t his horrible algorithm that led him to this: it was his horrible algorithm that led him to this. But how can a nice, pet-friendly guy and a gay couple be like this? My father is the spitting image of the São Paulo I once knew so well, complex to those who study it and crystal clear to those who think reading too much is a crime.

On Sundays, when he would pick me up from my mother’s house and we would go for a walk in the parks or the mall, I would always feel nauseous in the back seat of the car. My dad was driving the car, slamming on the brakes and yelling out the window: “Hey, Sunday, it’s do-something-stupid day!” According to his theory, Sunday is a bad driver’s day, the one who learns to drive or who leaves home just to have fun, without haste, often accompanied by a hangover, without the obligation to go to work.

I don’t know if my father’s children, residents of Villa Karau, are incompetent Sunday drivers, but they are certainly very bad voters. They voted heavily for Bolsonaro, and according to the Datacarlos website, they will vote for Nunes on Sunday. The old people always carry their old tin bowls and whistle incoherently in search of orange thrushes. My father sneezes in the backyard and voices from different homes wish him well (where I live, if I die, they will only find my body when social media cancels me and I don’t show up to respond).

I’m not keen on memorizing names, but I swear that when I meet them, at the doors of their precarious homes with expensive security systems, wearing modest T-shirts with big, worn-out logos, I feel something tender and sweet. good. I miss when I fell asleep on the sofas with the sun rays gently beating on the pink goblin fabrics.

How many times have you felt the opposite in the house of friends from the intellectual elite? It was annoying, feeling like I was being watched while I was eating with a knife in the wrong hand, talking too much, perhaps too loudly or using rudimentary Italian English.

I was part of the groups that helped warm up Paul’s campaign. Within a few months I left some and silenced others; I couldn’t stand it. They were a mixture of naivety, arrogance and repeated mistakes. Applause and thoughts directed towards you or towards those who already think like them. Little jokes to excite heirs taking their first year of literature and make street smarts vomit.

The climax was when they launched the friendship bracelet. I understood that the frightening and false image of the rebel needed to be changed, but you cannot turn an intelligent and brave man, capable of beautiful paradoxes, into a Teletubbie. Paul Taylor Swift. Imagine taking these complicated boys, half florists, half fascists, and putting Paul’s friendship bracelets on their arms marked with religious tattoos or age spots?

The large percentage of the Eastern Province population that doesn’t vote left always bothers me, but nothing bothered me more than an entire campaign making jokes about cake. “Paul’s dough, the more you beat it the bigger it gets!” -honestly!

_{As part of the TODAS initiative, Bound Gifts for women with Free two-month digital subscription.}

Current link: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click on the blue letter F below.