He picked up a guitar-shaped pen and added one more line at the bottom of the page:
Not the greatest hits. Not the most famous. As melhores. The best ones. The ones that had saved his life. geraldo azevedo as melhores
— and underneath, in smaller letters: Deixe tocar até o fim. (Let it play until the end.) He picked up a guitar-shaped pen and added
He smiled, pushing the paper toward her. "I’m making a list. Geraldo Azevedo: as melhores. For my funeral." The best ones
The first on his list was (1977). He remembered 1977. He was twenty-three, hiding in a tiny apartment in Recife, the military dictatorship breathing down every neck that dared to think. He had just lost his brother, disappeared. The song came on a crackling transistor radio: "Quem parte, leva a esperança / Quem fica, perde o lugar." (Who leaves, takes hope / Who stays, loses their place.) Tomás cried for the first time in months. That song was a caravan carrying his grief away.
She went pale. "Your funeral?"
The second: (1981). He wrote it with a trembling hand. 1981 was the year he fell in love with Clara, a woman who painted with coffee and whispered poetry into his ear while he slept. They danced to this song in a kitchen flooded with moonlight. "Tudo que se move é sagrado / Tudo que respira é um ser." (Everything that moves is sacred / Everything that breathes is a being.) Clara was gone now — cancer, '99 — but every time he heard the first acoustic guitar notes, she was there, barefoot, spinning in the kitchen.
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