Re-Cordis.

Beginning a book on a new keyboard, without knowing where it will take me, is a journey I have never explored before.

I have written academic books, theses, articles, and many things I kept in a virtual trunk that, capriciously, I managed to make disappear.

Not long ago, I remembered that before I was ten, while attending catechism classes in the Catholic Church, a teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said, I want to be a writer, but not a writer as soon as I grow up; I will be a writer at fifty.

As I write these lines, I am forty-nine years and two months old. Now I must choose what I will write first. In recent years, I have faced great challenges to maintain my health and improve from a condition I have carried since birth.

The first cry came in 1976, on January 11, at 11:31 in the morning, on a hot day in the Brazilian interior. A low-weight child was soon wrapped in bandages to hide the two small hernias near his tiny sex, which said he was a boy, the first son of the man with the mustache and the woman with the thin waist.

For about forty days, the house remained in constant celebration. On the fortieth day, the small baby, who had not gained any weight at all, returned to the hospital. The doctor with the gentle voice and deep breathing reassured the woman with the thin waist that everything would be fine, that it was a simple surgery to repair the small bulges in the baby’s lower belly.

The afternoon was beginning, but the surgery was not. One of the guests was missing from what, in the mind of the man with the mustache, would be a quick celebration in which the baby would return home soon, still in time for more festivities. The doctor with the hard voice, who would be responsible for keeping the baby unconscious and free from pain during the surgery, did not appear.

The city next door was exactly twenty kilometers away, and he arrived in eleven minutes. Within fifteen minutes, the ampoules were broken and the needle entered the baby’s skin. The baby saw several flashes and went dark, and went dark, and went so completely dark that his little heart stopped too.

The little fingers turned purple at the exact moment when the man in white, with the gentle voice, took four steps and placed his index finger on the baby’s small left chest. His suspicion was confirmed in milliseconds: the baby had lost his rhythm.

The man with the gentle voice heard a bebop beat in his mind, and his fingers began to drum a massage that continued for eternal twenty minutes, during which the boy entered the rhythm and left it more than thirty times; to be exact, thirty-five times he stopped and returned.

The radio was playing, beyond the horizon there must be some beautiful place to live in peace. The doctor with deep breathing hummed in his mind, what good is paradise without love, and with all the love in the world he was certain that the small baby would always breathe again.

The silence filled the mind of the doctor with the hoarse voice and deep breathing. He counted thirty-five cardiorespiratory arrests and knew that this deafening of the small heart had now been longer, a pause greater than the previous thirty-four. It was time to reach into the pocket of his short-sleeved white shirt, open the small bottle, and, in the manner of a prayer, drop three tiny drops into the baby’s little mouth.

He breathed even more deeply and felt, at the tips of the fingers that were still keeping the beat of the imaginary jazz, the little heart return to tam, tam, tam, very slowly in the first three measures, accompanied by an Our Father who art in heaven, and then accelerate like a samba-school drum section, synchronizing with the doctor’s own heart.

That is how the small baby was born again.

Months passed, and the baby gained a few hundred grams. The woman with the thin waist began to notice something that left her with a flea behind her ear. Whenever loud-speaking visitors came, the boy, who was beginning to aim his eyes at his little hands, moved his fingers and hands with a strange swaying.

The boy had a somewhat limited sound alphabet. He understood only the consonants, and by no means could his small mind comprehend what came after those consonants. His little brain did not process the vowels.

Apparently, the boy had a way of hearing the world that resembled the buzzing of bees. He could not hear vowels, and all sounds were an endless buzzing of consonants. This strange language of consonants made him unable, in his first and early second year of life, to understand the meaning of words, and caused an unexpected mother tongue to appear.