By Frei Betto on August 28, 2024
Frei Betto, photo: Bill Hackwell
Life is the dust that the gale raises in the street and spins out of control in the spiral of bewilderment, always surprising.
I never sensed that I would die early or late, except in prison during the military dictatorship. There I doubted if I would get out alive. I prepared myself for the final outcome. Torture was recurrent; tension, permanent; transfers, frequent (eight prisons in four years, the last two among common prisoners).
Among political prisoners, the lethal temperature reached its peak during the kidnappings of diplomats. In prison I attended three: that of the Japanese consul in São Paulo (March 1970) and those of the German (June 1970) and Swiss ambassadors (December 1970). This last action resulted in the liberation of Friar Tito de Alencar Lima, exiled from Brazil by the dictatorship.
While the kidnappers put pressure on the government, visits were suspended in prison, including those of lawyers, and the external guard was reinforced. It would not have been a surprise if there were executions, in accordance with the threats.
Apart from that period, nothing made me foresee death. Not even the traffic accidents I suffered. The most serious was in my adolescence, when the car driven by Toninho de Matta (who would later become an award-winning car racer) collided with another car and overturned. I didn’t even get scratches.
Illnesses, the predictable ones: measles, chicken pox, etc., and scabies when I lived in the favela. In 2020 I had a stent implanted. I escaped (so far) from Covid, but I had dengue fever in the 1980s. Life has two phases: the candy store and the pharmacy. I already entered the second one…
In September 1985, when I was 41 years old, a card reader predicted that I would live to be 57. I took note of it without worrying, because the Russian fortune-teller made a prediction that proved her talent: that in two months I would be well known in a foreign country. The woman did not know who I was or what I did. She only knew the name that appeared on my identity card – which is not my religious and literary name – and my date of birth.
The consultation was the result of chance. I went to return a book to a married couple friend and there was the psychic in the apartment with her cards and snails. The fact is that in November of that year my book Fidel and Religion came out in Cuba with the long interview given to me by the communist leader. The 300,000 copies of the first edition were not enough to satisfy the demand.
I turned 57 in 2001 and I didn’t even have a cold. I guess God decided to postpone my expiration date. And now I reach my eighties with the same disposition of 40: many work trips in Brazil and abroad, lectures, consultancies, weekly articles and several literary projects to conclude and start.
By pure coincidence I have just finished book number eighty, which analyzes the Gospel of John and completes the tetralogy edited by Vozes. The Gospel of Mark (Jesus militant) and the Gospel of Matthew (Jesus rebel) have already been published. Luke’s (revolutionary Jesus) will be released soon. Now I am starting to work on a new novel.
When I was 60 years old I visited a school and a 10th grader asked me how many books I had written. I replied 50. He did a mental calculation and replied, “You mean you started writing at the age of ten?”
My relatives and friends complain that they no longer have shelves to hold so many of my books. My great-nephew, Lucas, told his mother when he was 8 years old, “Uncle Betto writes a lot because he doesn’t work…” And Ricardo Kotscho affirms that I keep on bread and wine, in the basement of the convent, a team of little friars who write what I publish.
We are a family of seven siblings (five men and two women). We were eight, but God loved Tonico, the youngest, so much that he hastened his survival). My siblings gave birth to my 16 nephews and nieces and these to my 24 great-nephews. Thank God we are all friends, without any disagreement between us.
To what do I attribute my healthy 80 years? First, to genetics. My father survived to 89 and my mother at 93. Then, to factors that every longevity specialist recommends, like my friend Jorge Felix: good friendships (Aristotle considers it the number one condition to be happy); good humor, meditation/prayer, reading, physical exercise and a balanced diet. Above all, don’t get overheated. As Oscar Wilde would say, “life is too important to take seriously”.
As the son of my mother (Maria Stella Libanio Christo, one of the most renowned culinary specialists in Minas Gerais) I appreciate good food, but I am satisfied with little and with the trivial. As for sweets, I just can’t resist my indispensable “magdalena”: guava and cheese candy. As long as the cheese is fresh and the guava candy is as red as the Coca-Cola label (which I can’t stand). I’m wary of dark guava candy if it’s mixed.
Pilgrim of God, I travel aboard a paradox. As the Portuguese poet Antônio Gedeão wrote: “my village is the whole world”. Always working, as an inveterate disciple of St. Dominic and confrere of Thomas Aquinas, Giordano Bruno and Bartolomé de las Casas, I have traveled through four continents and still today I return to the convent to change suitcases. As Kotscho says: “God is everywhere. Betto has already been…”
I am in love with a woman: the Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila. And I suspect that God is jealous of me….
I know that we all have an expiration date (and factory defect, which theology calls original sin). I thought Queen Elizabeth II was the exception… And I am not attached to life, although I do not want to hasten the divine designs. I just hope not to give work to third parties. Nor try to fool the lady with the sickle with the hospital paraphernalia that weighs down health plans and fattens hospital bills.
I can say it now: enraptured with utopia, I am happy. And I have made many people happy. I have even deserved biographies. Better to have a biography than an obituary?
And with all due respect to my spiritualist friends, I don’t want to go back. I prefer eternal life. Because I think it is tender. If it is not, patience. It was worth this existence. I am no longer afraid of anything or nothing.
Anyway, as I wrote in A arte de semear estrelas (Rocco), “I don’t know if my life is correct / I only know that it is not a straight line / Full of curves, rounded angles / It builds bridges over turbulent waters”.
Frei Betto is a liberation theologian from Brazil. He has written many books including Frei Betto: Biography with a preface by Fidel Castro
Source: Cubadebate translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English