QUAL É A COISA, QUAL É ELA, QUE ENTRA PELA PORTA E SAI PELA JANELA?

WHAT IS IT, WHAT IS IT, THAT ENTERS THROUGH THE DOOR AND EXITS THROUGH THE WINDOW? Well... It doesn't quite fit... It's about Afonso Costa (1871 – 1937), and I'll explain why later. Afonso Costa, one of the main politicians of the First Republic: lawyer, university professor, leader of the Republican Party – which would later be called the Democratic Party, deputy, Minister of Justice and Finance, three times Prime Minister (in very short-term governments), president of the Portuguese delegation to the League of Nations, was the most loved and the most hated public figure of his time. Some considered him a great democrat, idealist, excellent orator, man of action and patriot, others the greatest of demagogues, self-serving, radical (in his relentless attacks on the Monarchy and the Church, for example), careerist and unscrupulous. He was perhaps the politician who most irritated Fernando Pessoa, although he also recognized some merits in him: on the one hand, the poet admired him for, as head of the Executive branch, fulfilling all his campaign promises – and, in this respect, he said: "I am not, evidently, his fellow party member, but I cannot be his enemy. I deny him my support; I cannot deny him my respect." However, he detested him for fulfilling all his promises in a drastic and undemocratic way, doing everything brutally and without listening to anyone, considering him one of the main culprits for the enormous instability, at all levels, in which the country found itself at the time – and, from this perspective, he wrote opinion pieces that tore him apart, calling him by the worst epithets. It so happened that, on July 3, 1915, while traveling by electric tram to Algés, intending to enjoy some peaceful moments by the sea, on Avenida 24 de Julho, upon hearing a gunshot followed by a flash, the Republican leader, in a time as turbulent as the beginning of the 20th century, interpreted a mere short circuit that had caused a small explosion as if it were an assassination attempt. Then, frightened, with the tram still moving, he threw himself out the window, suffering a head injury. And it is in this context that the riddle arises. A few days later, someone, jokingly, decided to circulate it: "What is it, what is it, that enters through the door and exits through the window?" Of course, Fernando Pessoa, through his most uninhibited and provocative heteronym, Álvaro de Campos, couldn't contain himself, and three days later, on July 6, 1915, in the pages of the newspaper A Capital, regarding a controversy related to the attribution of the quality of futurist (in the pejorative sense) to the Orpheu group, to which he belonged, he responded: "(...) I pass over the attribution of futurism that they intend to throw at us. Besides, it would be in bad taste to repudiate connections with futurism at such a delightfully mechanical time when Divine Providence uses electric cars for its high teachings." As expected, Pessoa's response to the newspaper fell like a bomb in the country of lethargy and "Yes, sir." But that's another story. That's for next time...