Self-portrait
Murilo Rubião
In the birth record book of the mother church of Silvestre Ferraz, current Carmo de Minas, I find, next to mine, the names of my parents: Eugênio Alvares Rubião and Maria Antonieta Ferreira Rubião. 1916.
My father, a man of good humanistic culture, was a philologist and belonged to the Minas Academy of Letters. He wrote with rare elegance, despite grammarian. From him I inherited the shyness and a certain ceremonious air, which has deprived me of the sympathy of numerous people. Some of them women, which is unfortunate.
In Belo Horizonte I lived for twenty-five years. Some happy, some sad. There I intend to die. In Bonfim cemetery, if it’s not a distress for those who survive me.
I attended primary, secondary and Law School, and I can say, without a shadow of pride, that I have never been a first student in any subject.
As a writer, I have achieved some success in the bureaucracy of letters. Three times president of the Brazilian Association of Writers (Section of Minas Gerais) and vice-president of the First Brazilian Congress of Writers.
It took me seven years to write and publish my first book “The Ex-Magician”. It didn’t get any better for that.
I started early to make a living. I worked in a candy factory, sold scientific books, was a teacher, a journalist, a newspaper and a radio station director. Today I am a public servant.
Celibate and with no religious belief. Two serious gaps in my character. I do, however, feed a solid hope of converting myself to Catholicism before death comes.
Much I could tell of my preferences, of my loneliness, of my sincere appreciation for the human species, of my persistence in wearing little hair and excessive mustaches. But my biggest boredom is to still talk about my own person.
1 RUBIÃO, Murilo. Autorretrato. Leitura, Rio de Janeiro, Sept. 1949.