Guavira Número 6 ________________________________________________________________________ PATRICÍA GALVÃO: THE PRIVATE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BRAZILIAN FEMINIST WRITER David William Foster1 porque não poderei contar as gargalhadas que já estou ensaiando. (Patrícia Galvão, Paixão Pagu 128) Only two women's names have routinely been attached to the momentous Semana de Arte Moderna, which, in São Paulo in an audacious display of modernist culture in February 1922, laid the definitive groundwork for contemporary Brazilian letters and sealed the fate of that city as the new cultural center for Brazil: increasing, since that date, São Paulo has steadily displaced Rio, so dominant in the nineteenth century, as Brazil's dynamic culture center, as befits that country's reigning megalopolis. Both of the women in question were painters: Anita Malfatti (1889-1963), who saw the equally important Armory Show New York in 1913 and was inspired to spearhead a similar show in São Paulo; and Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), who impressive canvases have gone on to become, in the visual arts, veritable icons of the Semana. However, there was a third woman, Patrícia Galvão (1910-62).2 Galvão may be found mentioned on the margins of the subsequent cultural flourishing in the 1930s that flowed from the Semana,3 although it was not until Norma Bengell's femi-nist film on her, Eternamente Pagu (1987),4 that Galvão begins to enjoy something like a general cultural recognition. I wish I could say that the efforts of feminist literary scholarship in Brazil (whose existence is somewhat debatable, certainly at least on institutional academic terms) has served to confirm Galvão's importance in the bibliography of research on the Semana and, as a consequence, in Brazilian cultural history (yet, see the entry "Pagu" in the Dicionário de mulheres do Brazil).5 However, this work has fallen to the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos, whose biography and anthology of Galvão constituted the first major bibliographic entry; the editorial work of Geraldo Galvão Ferraz, Galvão's second son, and the criticism of the American David K. Jackson—and the translation, along with his wife, Elizabeth, of Galvão's only known novel, Parque industrial (published in 1933 under the pseudonym of Mara Lobo); there is now a growing second-wave bibliography on Galvão, but as of yet not much of it published in Brazil, where the writer remains absent from major historio-graphic works.6 1 Regents’ Professor of Spanish, Humanities and Women’s Studies – Arizona State University - ASU 2 It is common to identify Galvão by her family nickname, Pagu, although her son claims that she actually repudiated that childish moniker when she resigned in 1940 from the Communist Party (Ferraz 3). To be sure, it is common to identify Brazilian women authors, artists, musicians by their first name, Clarice Lispector being the most obvious example. Other examples are the artist Tarsila do Amaral (mentioned in this paper), the movie star Carmen Miranda, and the composer Chiquinha Gonzaga. All of the 1500 individuals who figure in the Dicionário mulheres do Brasil are entered by their first name. I will here adopt the arrogance of the outsider foreign scholar and identify Patrícia Galvão as simply Galvão. 3 Galvão, of course, would have been too young to have actually intervened in the founding activities of the Semana, although she seems to have been involved in the 7 Guavira Número 6 ________________________________________________________________________ ongoing project of the Semana well before the end of the decade of the 1920s. See the chronology of her life provided by Ferraz in his introduction to the edition of her Safra macabra. Earl Fitz (183-85) recognizes explicitly Galvão's relationship to the so-called Modernist revolt, and connects that importance to the emergence of women writers in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century. 4 In which Bengell—herself an actress of considerable importance—perpetuates the denomination of Galvão as Pagu. See my analysis of the film (Foster, Gender and Society 83-96. 5 The U.S. feminist scholar Vicky Unruh has written of Galvão's relationship to Modernism, along with another overlooked and often maligned female writer, the Argentine Norah Lange. 6 For example, there is no entry for her in the electronic data base, DEDALUS, for the libraries of the Universidade de São Paulo, considered the premier academic institution in the country. Nor is she mentioned in the three-volume História da literatura brasileira, which, although published in Portugal, involved extensive collaboration by Brazilian scholars, and she is given only two passing references in the volume dedicated to Brazil in Roberto González Echevarría's and Enrique Pupo Walker's The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. 7 Bengal, in her film, insinuates a subsequent erotic relationship between Galvão and Tarsila, although there appears not to be much in the way of independent verification of such a biographical detail. Bengal also insinuates a relationship between Galvão and the American-Brazilian singer Elsie Hous-ton, who comes to Galvão's rescue when she is released from prison in France on the occasion of her antifascist militancy there; Bengell plays the part of Houston in Eternamente Pagu. 8 In reality, the Library of Congress's 1945 first edition appears not to bear Ferraz's name, as it is not part of the cataloguing record. The OCLC First Search record for the first edition does, however, include Ferraz's name, although the 1959 edition, along with Ferraz's single-authored novel Doura-mundo does give due credit to both authors. OCLC reports that only seven copies of the first edition are located worldwide as reported by cooperating institutions, while only twenty-four report owning copies of the 1959 reedition. 9 Pace Andrea Dworkin's legendary assertion, in her book Intercourse, that all (hetero)sexual intercourse is basically a variation on the rape of women by men. 10 A truly lesbian trope here would be, precisely, for a woman to report a repudiation of the man's bearded mouth in favor of osculation with the female genitals, along with perhaps the allusion to the former as a ludicrous simulation of the latter. 11 There is another way of contruing this passage, and that is how Galvão may be seeing imposed on Andrade's face the genitals of other women with whom he has been and whose bodies she is forced to kiss through kissing him. This would be consistent with her complaints not only regarding Andrade's infidelities, but his indiscriminate sexual conduct. I am grateful to my colleague Isis Costa McElroy for this line of thought. 12 An appropriate, most assuredly, with which I appropriate by repeating them in the text of this essay. 8 Guavira Número 6 ________________________________________________________________________ 13 One cannot help but think of parallels to be drawn as regards the entwined fates of Octavio Paz and Elena Garro in Mexican letters. However, there is no evidence that Andrade set out to destroy Galvão's reputation as Paz is reputed to have done in the case of Garro, nor did Garro, despite all that, ever experience the oblivion that Galvão did, no matter how benign Andrade may have been with regard to her literary fate. Yet, when Ferraz published in 2005 a document of his mother's that he titled Paixão Pagu; a autobiografia precoce de Patrícia Galvão, it was something of a best seller, becoming promptly difficult to obtain even at major booksellers in São Paulo such as the FNAC, a vast cultural supermarket with various outlets in the city and, now, in other places in the country. If Galvão remains uninteresting for academic Brazilian scholarship, which is not known for its comprehensive dedication to modern writers, she now seems to have some cachet in the general Brazilian cultural imaginary. Paixão Pagu was written in 1940 as a private letter to Geraldo Ferraz, with whom she was entering into the long relationship that would last until her death in 1962. Ferraz was a writer and journalist, and they ended up collaborating well together, although Galvão was unsuccessful in her bid for political office in 1950. Galvão had been involved first in a sham marriage (to the poet Waldemar Belisário) in order to escape the rather stultifying paternal abode in Santos. Her real matrimonial goal was the poet and major spokesperson for the Semana de Arte Moderna, Oswald de Andrade. Since he was already involved with Tarsila do Amaral, Galvão knew her parents would never approve, and hence the sham marriage.7 Gal-vão's marriage to Oswald de Andrade was a stormy one: she both had a son with him (Rudá, who has cooperated with Ferraz in providing material in his possession about their shared mother) and engaged fully in the radical politics that made her the first female political prisoner in Brazilian history, during the infamous fascist-like Estado Novo of Getúlio Vargas in the late 1930s and 1940s. Her past included not only her imprisonment, but her publication of Parque industrial, her direct involvement with the Brazilian Communist Party (which insisted on the pseudonym for the novel, considering it a serious personalist breach on Galvão's part to publish it under her own name), and living in 1932 and working the area of the fabric mills east of the central core of São Paulo, which gave her some of the practical information contained in her novel; Parque industrial remains a singular publication event as the only social realist novel signed (if pseudonymously) by a Brazilian woman writer. The text that has now appeared under the title of Paixão Pagu is, as I have stated, a private accounting of her life and feelings Galvão addressed to Ferraz at his request.