Afonso Reis Cabral - Pão de Açúcar

2018, Afonso Reis Cabral, Brazil, Portuguese,

Original title: "Pão de Açúcar" (Sugarloaf Mountain) by Afonso Reis Cabral.

"In February 2006, the Porto Fire Brigade rescued a body with marks of aggression and naked from the waist down from the well of an abandoned building. The victim, who was ill and had taken refuge in the basement, had been beaten over several days by a group of teenagers, some of whom were as young as twelve. Rafa had found the place on one of his usual forays into the "dirty areas", and that kind of tent immediately piqued his interest.

Then, torn between attraction and repulsion, he wondered if he should keep the secret to himself or share it with his friends. But what value is there in a treasure that cannot be shown? A dizzying novel about a true case that shook the country, a fascinating incursion into the lives of a victim and his aggressors, Pão de Açúcar is a masterful combination of fact and fiction, with real and imaginary characters meticulously drawn, which confirms the talent and literary maturity of Afonso Reis Cabral."

"In February 2006, Brazilian transsexual Gisberta was brutally murdered in the city of Porto, Portugal, by a group of 14 teenagers. The case went to court and mobilized the LGBT movement at the time, but resulted, as the most serious sentence, only the imprisonment of eight months for the eldest of the boys, then 16 years old.

Gisberta died at the age of 45 with her body violated for several days and, in the end, it was thrown into a well. She left Brazil at the age of 18, fleeing the high rates of murders of homosexuals in the 1980s in São Paulo. This fact, so commonplace for the country that kills the most transsexuals in the world, was widely discussed in Portugal, generated a play, a documentary and the song Balada de Gisberta, composed by Portuguese Pedro Abrunhosa and performed by Maria Bethânia.

The most recent immersion in Gisberta's story took place by the young writer Afonso Reis Cabral with the publication, in 2018, of the book Pão de Açúcar,  released in Brazil by HarperCollins. The title refers to the place where Gisberta spent her last days, a tower in the city of Porto, deactivated and intended for the homeless and with a parking lot. It is no coincidence that this immense concrete archway that pointed to the sky sheltered Gisberta in a basement, a kind of basement, the underground of the architecture that carries in its name something dreamy."

The book was republished in 2021.

Available via acritica.net

and goodreads.com

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