I was told that Chico Buarque could not do lunch on a Monday. That is one of the three days a week when he joins the odd assortment of friends and fellow enthusiasts at a soccer field outside Rio de Janeiro. Chico (as he is familiarly referred to) may be one of Brazil’s greatest living musicians, and the author of critically acclaimed novels, but at the field there is no talk of music or books. People gather to enjoy the beautiful game and Chico, who covers the midfield with great verve, is just another player.
A biographer once noted that soccer is his greatest passion - one that drove him to become sports correspondent for Brazil’s largest national newspaper during the 1998 World Cup. “I don’t know if it is my greatest passion,” he replied when I finally asked him about it during our Tuesday lunch. “It is certainly what entertains me most.”
Chico is to Brazilians what John Lennon might have been to the British if he were still alive, or what Bob Dylan might be to Americans if he were still exciting. In 40 years as a composer and singer he has created the sort of musical heritage that, in a European context, could be claimed only by Jacques Brel (whom he admires greatly).
Such comparisons only begin to explain Chico’s role in Brazilian culture. Women adore his boyish good looks, green-blue eyes and shy grin as much as his exquisitely delicate lyrics. Some have even said that everything they know about love - and lovemaking - they learned from listening to his songs. Men admire him unreservedly. “There is no one like Chico,” I was told by a trio of weathered bricklayers in a bar near his football field.
Most adults in Brazil can name a favourite Chico song. Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva, Brazil’s president, courted his wife to the sound of “A Banda” (The band), the song that propelled Chico to national fame in 1966. Earlier this year, to mark his 60th birthday, singers, filmmakers, writers, TV stars and politicians were falling over each other to hum, whistle or sing their preferences. He is perhaps the only person about whom Brazilians hold a unanimous opinion. (Always wary of such accolades, he has declared that “unanimity is for fools”.) As some have aptly put it, Chico has provided the soundtrack of Brazilian life for the past four decades. In the meantime, however, he is wearing the hat of a man of letters following the publication of his latest novel, Budapest.
We met for late lunch at Garcia Rodrigues, a brasserie and delicatessen on one of the bustling thoroughfares in Rio de Janeiro’s fashionable Leblon district. Chico had walked from his nearby penthouse flat. It was a drizzly winter day, and he wore an untucked white flannel shirt criss-crossed with red pinstripes over a white T-shirt and jeans. We sat at his usual table, out of sight in a corner at the far end of the dining area, next to the wine cellar. He didn’t need the menu to order his favourite dish: snowy grouper fillet with aromatic oil and herbs.
”Had I not become entangled with music,” Chico said at the outset, “I would have become an author much earlier.” Budapest is being publicised as his third novel, after Estorvo (Turbulence, 1991) and Benjamin (1995). In fact, he had already published an Orwellian fantasy called Fazenda Modelo (Model Ranch) in 1975. Why does he now disown it? “I wrote it at a time when the military dictatorship censored popular arts, music, theatre, TV, but not literature.” Chico’s run-ins with censors in the 1960s and 1970s are well documented, as is his craftiness in eluding them - inventing pseudonyms, or developing a knack for writing obliquely open-ended lyrics, such as his famous, triumphant protest samba “Apesar de Voce” (In spite of you). “In writing Fazenda Modelo I was reacting to that censorship,” he says. “But for me, my literary career began with Estorvo.”
The transition from music to literature was not straightforward. “Some people thought I was using my popularity as a singer to sell my first novel. For others, it was almost a sacrilege: a practitioner of a minor art daring to enter the field of high art.” He is aware that his appeal as a musician does not cross over to literature. “Most people know my music but will never read my books.”
He also realises that as a novelist it is impossible to escape 40 years of penning song lyrics, musical plays and film scores. “Whatever is original in my writing comes from my musical apprenticeship. I look for rhythm in words. I imagine words as if they were musical chords. Often I’ll write something, read it, and find it musically unsatisfactory. There is a musical imperative in my choice of words.”
Our food had not yet arrived and we were already discussing in earnest the similarities and differences between making music and writing novels. “The creative impulse is identical. But while the process of writing a song entails only a brief period of solitude before it becomes a gregarious act, writing a novel is lonely from beginning to end.” Chico appears to relish this loneliness. “I live on my own now.” He has been divorced for 10 years. “Sometimes I think I’m losing my ability to talk because I have no daily interlocutor. Occasionally I find myself speaking to the newsreader on TV. Of course she never replies.”
Early critiques of his youthful experiments in fiction came from his father, Sergio Buarque de Hollanda, one of Brazil’s foremost historians and literary critics. A lover of popular music and close friend of the country’s greatest bossa nova artists, Chico’s father was tickled by the idea of having a musician son. (Chico’s older sister, Miucha, is also a singer.) “But I know he always wanted to have a writer son. Analysing this in a Freudian sense, I’d have to acknowledge a certain desire to please my father.”
Budapest is an elliptical novel set in Rio de Janeiro and in the eponymous Hungarian capital - a place the author has never visited. Its narrator, Jose Costa, is a professional ghost writer who finds himself irresistibly drawn to the Magyar tongue. “I wanted to tell the story of someone who falls in love with a language. At first I thought it might be an invented language. Then I decided on Hungarian.”
Chico claims a link to Hungary dating back to the 1954 World Cup. “That’s when Hungary put together that wonderful soccer team: Puskas, Kocsis, Hidegkuti, Bozsik. I pay tribute to them all in the book’s invented street names.” A decade later a Hungarian girlfriend introduced him to the language. “She taught me how to say ‘I love you’, and to pronounce all those footballers’ names correctly.”
He goes on to recall an adage from the time of Emperor Charles V about Latin being the language to speak to God, and Hungarian being the language to speak to the devil. “I had originally planned to ‘invent’ the Hungarian tongue. In the end I invented my Budapest and left in the real language.”
Straining as I was to conduct the interview in decent Portuguese, his cavalier attitude to languages came as a relief. I was also reassured by the opening line of Budapest: “It should be against the law to mock someone who tries his luck in another language.”
When the conversation veered back to his music, he talked about his uneasiness when performing. “It’s not exactly hell, but I’m happiest when the show is over. In the meantime I’m thinking, ‘Where will I have dinner?’” On stage, as in daily life, he has always been unadorned, rejecting the theatrical antics of contemporaries who embraced punk and glam rock.
Reputedly shy and intensely private, Chico seemed relaxed, even loquacious, and appeared to enjoy talking about his writing. “I feel more comfortable at home than on stage. And perhaps nowadays I’m spending more time on my literature than on my songs. But I will always consider myself a musician. Whenever I fill out a form, that’s what I write: Musician.”
As a musician, Chico has followed the bossa nova tradition of mixing popular and highbrow forms, infusing the already hybrid Brazilian rhythms of samba and choro with cadences of European impressionism and American jazz. As a writer of lyrics, he has excelled at composing deceptively simple songs that speak to men and women, young and old, rich and poor. His magic lies in persuading listeners that all those bittersweet songs of loss and hope are, somehow, about them. Chico makes people feel like the ugly girl in “A Banda”, who runs to the window believing that the band passing outside is playing just for her.
How, I asked, did a middle-class youth studying architecture in Sao Paulo become the people’s poet, writing and singing about the daily life of the underprivileged and the downtrodden, the hopeful and the heartbroken? “I didn’t need to visit a favela [slum] to write about its people, just as I didn’t need to visit Budapest. There is as much fantasy in my music as there is in my books. What little realism they possess comes from observing those social problems we just can’t ignore.” For instance, the growing gap between an ostentatiously wealthy minority and an impoverished majority. “There used to be social differences, but not like today. As a child I played soccer with kids from the favelas. Today’s social isolation, with people becoming more afraid of violence and locking themselves up in a bullet-proof world, makes that sort of contact almost impossible.”
Coffee came with almond madeleines that melted in my mouth. Surprisingly, Chico agreed to a second round. Then, before taking off, he shared one last story: “Around the time when Budapest was published here, I was walking down this very avenue and a man suddenly shouted out the first line of ‘A Banda’. A moment later, a passing driver yelled ‘Hey, Jose Costa!’. There, within a few seconds, was the arc of my entire career.” He grinned heartily at the thought, bade me farewell and walked away, almost unnoticed.
”Budapest” is published by Bloomsbury (£13.99).
Garcia Rodrigues, Rio de Janeiro
2 x raisin and olive bread
2 x snowy grouper
4 x espressos
4 x madeleines
3 x mineral water
Total: R$138 (£26)