The cover of “Lagartos de Madeira e Zinco” (Lizards of Wood and Zinc) announces a book of chronicles, a genre that balances between journalism—capturing the reality as it is—and literature, in the way that this reality is presented, painted with the colors that turn text into timeless images. A chronicle often becomes a second life for journalism and a prior, internal life for literature, surviving the passage of time. These texts have endured long enough to now be compiled into a book.
The chronicles in “Lagartos de Madeira e Zinco” were originally published in the newspaper *Notícias*. They offered a weekly encounter with characters whose fates seemed etched into their very names, like João Matandza, John Perigo, and André Ximovane. But they also offered an encounter with the author himself. Now compiled into a book, we get a large portrait of victims of their own circumstances, lives that have collapsed in on themselves. These are people-characters emerging from wooden houses and rusted zinc sheets, lovers of simple pleasures, children of families who live thinking only of the future, as if it were the only way to navigate the burning coals of the present. These are social chronicles, but not with the aim of didactic preaching; rather, they are marginal scraps of the daily fabric of the suburbs, scraps that tailors discard and that clog the drains. We get to know the stories of these people-characters, we see the sepia-toned light in the landscapes they move through, and we feel the smells they emit. Here, description—a tool borrowed from journalistic reporting, which Hélio Nguane masterfully sculpts—plays an important role. Consider the opening paragraphs of the chronicle "The Unidentified Body":
“The basin was parked in a lonely corner of the house. Filled with water, onion leaves, cabbage, garlic, pepper, and rice, the container gave off a characteristic smell. Flies buzzed around the area. The owners of the house were rehearsing their departure. The sun was gradually releasing intense rays. The rooster was preparing its vocal cords, dew beautified the green grass and other plants.
The door opened, the sheets of wood and zinc that make up the house were sweating, and every three minutes, a drop left the roof and hit the ground. The earth was damp, and the footprints of the rooster, which had crowed three minutes ago, were still visible.”
In this chronicle, we have the geographies and lives that animate much of these texts. This incursion into the suburbs with their characteristic stories is reminiscent of the two volumes of “Cadernos de Memória” by Aldino Muianga or “Xicandarinha” by Calane da Silva.
Other chroniclers, like the Brazilians Nelson Rodrigues and Fernando Sabino, have taught us that chronicles, despite exploring the minutiae of everyday life and the burdens we carry, are also made of the humor found in the unexpected, the unforeseen. We find this in Nguane’s book as well; for example, in "Newcastle Quis Matar a Festa I e II" (“Newcastle Wanted to Ruin the Party I and II”), which tells the story of a family that had been fattening a chicken since June to enjoy at the end of the year, only to find it dead from illness just before Christmas.
But, as Rubem Braga once said, writing chronicles is living out loud. Often, we find the author's confessional texts, and we feel that strange sensation of being caught on tiptoe, listening over the wall of a neighbor’s house. In chronicles like “Lagartos na Cama” (“Lizards in Bed”) or “Madeira e Zinco” (“Wood and Zinc”), we sense the anxiety that drives the chronicler and the despair of someone watching the last grains of sand fall through the hourglass.
Hélio Nguane writes from the perspective of the defeated, without the pretense of saving them or making them heroes of their own stories.
Regarding this book, “Lagartos de Madeira e Zinco,” it is worth recalling what Baudelaire wrote about Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*: "As long as there exists, by virtue of law and custom, a social damnation that artificially creates hells in the midst of civilization, and complicates with human fate the destiny that is divine... as long as there is ignorance and misery on Earth, books like this one may not be useless."
(By Elton Pila)
