Curiosities

Provocative, high-spirited and controversial, Torquato was a staunch militant for the counterculture in Brazil. While he got into fights and provoked people with his column Geléia Geral (General Jam) in the Rio newspaper “A Última Hora”, he also brought news from the world of international pop and the Brazilian underground.

It was he who denounced the mafias involved in song copyright in the country, challenged the songwriter Ataulfo Alves and was involved in an unusual scene on the Copacabana beachfront, when he met his adversary, the cartoonist Jaguar of Pasquim, who always provoked the Tropicalists in the weekly Rio paper. Without giving the cartoonist a chance, taking him totally by surprise, Torquato ripped off his glasses, threw them on the sidewalk and stomped on them, to the utter surprise of his victim. He then completed the act by saying: “You don’t need glasses, because you can’t see anything anyway”.

And yet this same protestor and non-conformist lived in permanent crisis with himself, anguished and distressed. His high consumption of alcohol also contributed to accentuating Torquato’s depressive state. It was in the same year that marked the return of Gil and Caetano from exile that the Brazilian cultural scene was witness to a tragedy: the suicide of Torquato on November 10^th, 1972.

He was found dead in the bathroom of his apartment, having sealed the windows with sheets and opened the valve of the gas heater.  He left a note with disjointed sentences, ending with a request not to wake his son Thiago, three years old at the time.

In spite of his apparent tranquility at his birthday celebration a few days before, with his wife Ana and friends, Torquato’s actions had been demonstrating that he was not well. He had burned a large part of his poetry, got rid of his vast collection of Brazilian folk literature and destroyed his typewriter, saying that he would never need it again.