On the night of November 9, 1972, Torquato Neto celebrated his 28th birthday. He said goodbye to his friends, went home, waited for his wife to fall asleep, and around four-thirty in the morning, he took a sheet, entered the bathroom, sealed off all openings, and turned on the gas.

He left only a note in which he paraphrased a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, defining himself as someone who was visited by a “crooked angel” and who should “disrupt the chorus of contentment.” He politely asked that they not make noise so that his son Thiago would not be woken up.

The tragic gesture marked the end of the short but prolific career of one of the brightest poets of the second half of the last century: a total of about 30 song lyrics (including Dente por Dente, in partnership with Jards Macalé, Mamãe Coragem, with Caetano Veloso, Louvação, with Gilberto Gil, and Pra Dizer Adeus, with Edu Lobo).

Torquato also left behind many scattered writings in the form of poems, scripts, and manifestos, and had a brief stint in daily journalism, through his column Geleia Geral, published in the Rio newspaper Última Hora in the early 1970s.

Due to the unforeseen nature of his death, his intellectual legacy only reached bookstores a decade later, with the publication in 1982 of Os Últimos Dias de Paupéria (Max Limonad Editora), a work that had been organized by Waly Salomão (another poet who recently turned 80) and by Torquato’s widow, Ana Maria Duarte.

The book quickly sold out, became a rarity, and now fetches extremely high prices in used bookstores. Another attempt to bring Torquato Neto back to literary pages occurred in 2004, with the publication of two volumes: Torquatália – Do Lado de Dentro and Torquatália – Geléia Geral, the latter an updated and expanded edition of the 1982 work.

These volumes contain poems, songs, Torquato’s diaries, and other unpublished documents, such as the letters exchanged between him and the artist Hélio Oiticica, his close friend with whom he spent long periods in Rio and New York.

The two volumes together total almost 800 pages. Among the discoveries, the most revealing accounts are the poems from his adolescence kept at his parents’ house in Teresina, which, besides being anticipatory, show the poet’s affinity with writers from past generations; especially Ezra Pound, Cruz e Sousa, Castro Alves, and Drummond himself.

Born in Piauí, Torquato Pereira de Araújo Neto was born in November 1944, the son of a prosecutor and a housewife, and from a young age, he was a tormented character.

The shy boy, an only child in a family from Teresina, early on enjoyed reading Castro Alves, Olavo Bilac, Fagundes Varela, and Gonçalves Dias. At 15, he asked his father for permission to complete his studies in Bahia, and with the move to Salvador, he experienced the avant-garde period promoted by the rector of the University of Bahia, Edgard Santos.

There he met Gilberto Gil and befriended other tropicalists like Capinam and Caetano Veloso – who years later dedicated the song Cajuína to Torquato’s father, which asks “to exist, what is our destiny?” and talks about the fate of the “unhappy boy,” concluding that “life-matter was so fragile.”

Also during his time in Bahia, Torquato befriended Glauber Rocha and journalist Luiz Carlos Maciel. With this group, he moved to Rio and began to collaborate on newspapers and magazines.

Encouraging everything that could be classified as marginal, Torquato – except for Última Hora – almost always collaborated with short-lived newspapers like Presença and Flor do Mal.

A provocateur, he was also responsible for “tropicalist manifestos,” including the script for the television program Vida, Paixão e Banana do Tropicalismo, which was supposed to be the first in the history of the movement, in 1968.

From then on, everything changed – for the worse.

When things started to get tough, with the decree of AI-5 in December 1968, Torquato was on a British postal ship headed to London.

“I’m leaving because something is going to explode around here,” he prophesied to the friends who took him to the port. During his time in Europe, he divided his time between England and France, but when he returned to Brazil in the early 1970s, he didn’t feel much better.

Torquato had broken ties with his tropicalist friends, especially Caetano and Gil, as well as those from the Cinema Novo. He claimed to feel more depressed and – by his own will – he checked into the Engenho de Dentro sanatorium, being treated with strong doses of Mutabon D., an antidepressant.

In one of his final columns, he spoke of Luiz Melodia, an emerging artist at the time, and praised the song Farrapo Humano, which says: “I cry so much, hide and don’t say, turn into rags, try suicide”.

Over the last years, his internments in sanatoriums and problems with alcohol escalated, which began to reflect in his columns. In Geleia Geral, Torquato, now a respected lyricist, started controversies, sparked animosities, and isolated himself.

In his last column, published in March 1972, he once again hinted at his suicidal tendencies by talking about feeling like dying alone, “at the worst,” and “very hated.”

Or, as he had anticipated in Pra Dizer Adeus, “I’m leaving to never return, and wherever I go, I know I’ll go alone.”


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