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collections of poems,
some of which won municipal and provincial prizes. From 1930 on, burdened by a
disastrous marriage and numerous offspring, he worked as a gossip columnist and
copy-editor for various newspapers in the capital, hung out in dives, and
practised the art of the novel, which stubbornly declined to yield its secrets
to him. Three titles resulted:
Fields of Honor
(1936), about
semi-secret challenges and duels in a spectral Buenos Aires;
The French
Lady
(1949), a story of prostitutes with hearts of gold, tango singers
and detectives; and
The Eyes of the Assassin
(1962), a curious
precursor to the psycho-killer movies of the seventies and eighties.
    He died in an old-age home in Villa Luro, his worldly possessions
consisting of a single suitcase full of books and unpublished manuscripts.
    His books were never republished. His manuscripts were probably thrown
out with the trash or burned by the orderlies.

L UIZ F ONTAINE D A S OUZA
    Río de Janeiro, 1900—Río de Janeiro, 1977
    A precocious author, whose
Refutation of
Voltaire
(1921) was hailed by Catholic literary circles in Brazil and
admired by the academic community on account of its sheer bulk (it was 640 pages
long), its critical and bibliographical apparatus, and the author’s evident
youth. In 1925, as if to fulfill the hopes generated by his first book, Fontaine
da Souza published
A Refutation of Diderot
(530 pages), followed two
years later by
A Refutation of D’Alembert
(590 pages), thus
establishing himself as the country’s leading Catholic philosopher.
    In 1930,
A Refutation of Montesquieu
(620 pages) appeared,
and in 1932
A Refutation of Rousseau
(605 pages).
    In 1935 he spent four months at a clinic for the mentally ill in
Petropolis.
    In 1937
The Jewish Question in Europe Followed by a Memorandum on
the Brazilian Question
came out: a characteristically capacious book
(552 pages), in which Fontaine explained the threats that widespread
miscegenation would pose to Brazilian society (disorder, promiscuity,
criminality).
    The year 1938 saw the publication of
A Refutation of Hegel
Followed by a Brief Refutation of Marx and Feuerbach
(635 pages), which
many philosophers and even a few general readers considered the work of a
lunatic. Fontaine was, irrefutably, well versed in French philosophy (his
command of the language was excellent), but not, by any means, in the work of
the German philosophers. His “refutation” of Hegel, whom he confuses with Kant
on several occasions, and, worse still, with Jean Paul, Hölderlin and Ludwig
Tieck, is, according to the critics, a sorry affair.
    In 1939, he surprised everyone by publishing a sentimental novella. In
a mere 108 pages (another surprise), the book tells how a professor of
Portuguese literature set about wooing a rich, young and almost illiterate woman
from Novo Hamburgo. Entitled
The Conflict of Opposites
, it sold very
few copies, but its delicate style, its intellectual acuity, and the perfect
economy of its construction were not lost on certain critics, who praised the
book unreservedly.
    In 1940, Fontaine was interned again in the Petropolis clinic, where
he would remain for three years. During that long stay, broken by Christmas
holidays and vacations with his family (always under the strict supervision of a
nurse), he wrote a sequel to
The Conflict of Opposites
called
Evening in Porto Alegre
, whose subtitle (
Apocalypse in Novo
Hamburgo
) sheds light retrospectively on his work as a whole. The story
takes up where
The Conflict of Opposites
left off. Roughly written,
with none of the previous volume’s delicacy, acuity or economy,
Evening in
Porto Alegre
adopts various points of view without changing the
narrative voice, which is that of the professor of Portuguese literature, who
recounts an interminable yet hectic evening in the southern Brazilian city of
Porto Alegre, while simultaneously in Novo Hamburgo (hence the subtitle)
servants, family members and later the police are confronted