Sodomita

In Sodomita, Alexandre Vidal Porto turns his gaze to centuries past, recovering the true story of Luíz Delgado, a Portuguese viola player who arrived in Salvador in 1669, banished for the crime of sodomy.

In recounting the decades this figure from our history spent in Brazil, Alexandre blends historical fact and invention, bringing to life a fragment of an earlier Brazil, made up of rooms and courtyards, pots and drinking vessels. Delgado carried with him to Bahia the secret that had followed him through the streets of Lisbon, in an age not so far removed from the earthquake that would bring down the very faith that had condemned him.

Throughout this account, the narrator's voice echoes the language of the period with an irony possible only for someone looking back across the distance of centuries. A narrator who is at once there and here beside us as readers, moving from gravity to humor without visible transitions. What we have in our hands is a book that transports us not as inhabitants of the Baroque world, unaware of what awaits them, but as contemporaries experiencing the past with a sense of augmented reality that only literature can create.