Three times Brazil's literary "immortals" voted worse than a pro-Bolsonaro wage worker

There are votes I'll never understand.

First: hi.

How are you?

The worker stuck on a 6x1 schedule (six days on, one off) who votes in the people who then vote to keep that inhumane system—especially now, as Brazil debates such an important change to it—is far from a flat character. Quite the opposite: this is someone who contains multitudes. Just as curious are some of the historic elections held by the Academia Brasileira de Letras (the Brazilian Academy of Letters), whose rather small electorate decides by secret ballot which candidate gets to join them.

Few people know how someone becomes an "immortal," as members of the Academy are called. The process looks less like winning a literary prize than running a campaign: the hopeful sends a letter to the Academy's president and, according to this report by Intercept Brasil, would do well to have allies and patrons among the members before doing so; in the months leading up to the vote, tradition calls for visiting them. Their body of work? Well, it counts, of course. It just doesn't count on its own.

Which is how we end up with at least three occasions that were, to say the least, botched.

In 1958, Guimarães Rosa, author of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (Grande Sertão: Veredas), lost 27 to 10 to Afonso Arinos, then a congressman for the UDN, an anti-communist party backed by the landed elites.

Rosa wouldn't be elected until 1963, and even then he put off his induction for four years, afraid his heart wouldn't take it. He was finally inducted on November 16, 1967, and... died of a heart attack three days later.

In 1980, the same Academy honored Mário Quintana with the Machado de Assis Prize. But months later, it gave him 6 votes to Eduardo Portella's 31. That's right: 31.

Portella had served as a minister under the dictator João Figueiredo (and, to be fair, he was fired after backing a teachers' strike). According to the journalist Jayme Copstein, Antônio Houaiss went so far as to ask Quintana to drop out of the race to protect Portella's chances; the thing was, Academy members wanted to send the dictatorship a political message by electing one of the regime's newest adversaries. The poet, however, stayed in the race, because he thought that would make a win by the former minister all the more meaningful.

But Mário Quintana went on to lose two more times, in the elections that followed. He was never elected. After his death, he was given a place in the symbolic 41st chair.

In 2018, Conceição Evaristo went alone, without a patron, to hand in her letter of candidacy, backed by a petition with more than 20,000 signatures. Look, I'm not questioning the stature of Cacá Diegues, one of the great names of Brazil's Cinema Novo, who won Chair 7 with 22 votes. But Conceição got one vote. One. No Black woman had yet held a seat in the Academy; the first wouldn't come until 2025, with Ana Maria Gonçalves, but that's a conversation we've already had around here.

In this Brazilian election season, as we watch open-mouthed while millions of workers defend pro-Bolsonaro scoundrels (whose sole contribution to public debate is to lay bare how bankrupt bourgeois democracy is), it's almost ironic to realize that bad choices aren't exclusive to mere mortals; the Academy's immortals can back me up on that.

Emanoel.