Book, It is always the hour of our death amen[LS]

After the captivating “If God calls me, I won’t go”, Mariana resumes her neurotic, human and delicious outburst now telling the story of the septuagenarian Aurora, found unconscious and barefoot on the side of the road and looking for a certain Camila. For an amnesiac, Aurora remembers a lot: her mother brushing her hair until it looked like “an electrified wig”; of his tragic religious mistake, when he prayed as a child and said “now is the time for our death, amen”; the years he taught Portuguese at a rich school; of its cowardice in the face of the military dictatorship: “this country insists that we have to risk our own lives, it seems to forget that all we have is this misery of life itself”; of a carnival in which she tried to lose her virginity to a young boy dressed as a baby; of a media lover who spoke impeccable Portuguese, but also knew how to drink and socialize in a sleazy bar and, above all, of the many deaths of his daughter Camila, always alternating with sunny moments in the company of his best childhood friend: “Camila remained my best friend from the moment he looked back and asked if it was soaked with ch or x”. Were these memories real or did she memorize them from the many books she read, protected, indoors, from the infinite dangers that exist outside? Camila, after all, is the dead daughter (who died from suicide, from a scorpion bite, from an accident on the road, from being run over by an ox, from very hot food on her head, from pigeon fungus, from a falling coconut, from a somersault or pirouette between two beds) or the beautiful friend – “much better than being the beautiful woman is being her friend, whom no one will remember to examine how her thighs or knees have aged, and who can sweetly accompany the paths of decrepitude…” ? Could a mother, so obsessed with human finitude and so obliterated by the possibility of a daughter's death ("you can't pick up the tiny baby without feeling the empty spaces with your fingers, the soft spot sighs, you lament the geographical slowness of her plaques…”) remember anything about her life? Aurora doesn't even know if she really had a baby. He asks himself, when touching his belly, if he was ever able to have a child inside, “not having a child is practically making sure of the absence of tragedies”. Here death is feared, repeated, imagined, exaggerated, scrutinized and listed in so many ways that it is almost possible to laugh at it or - I believe Mariana has achieved this feat - to overcome it.