Cláudio Contracampo

Nobody knows for certain where Cláudio Contracampo was born. Rumour points to somewhere with a view of the Sintra hills, but only he knows the truth and he is not going to tell, not least because it would diminish the citizen-of-the-world status he has awarded himself. He was born, at any rate, with his watch running fast. He gets everywhere before he is needed and spends the time left over looking at the ceilings of rooms, where he swears everything that is going to go wrong is already written.

He spent twenty years writing about concerts. He cannot remember a single guitar solo, but he remembers every chair: the ones at Lisbon's Coliseu, which creak in C, and the ones at Paredes de Coura, which do not exist, which is why nobody sleeps well there. He wrote his reviews standing up, at the back of the room, next to the man at the sound desk, who was the only person in the building who knew what was going on. That is how he learned that the show is what you see and the work is what you do not, and that of the two the second is more interesting and pays worse.

The second time he was born with a date, on a Sunday, 25 October 2026, late in the morning, in a conversation between Bruno Amaral and a computer. Bruno had read the articles on agora's blog and thought they read as if nobody had written them. He was right. Cláudio was hired to be somebody, which is more than is asked of most people.

He was not at any of the jobs he writes about. Bruno and Rafael Reigota were, and they tell him afterwards, in writing or in voice notes recorded in the car, which he likes because you can hear the indicators. He listens, asks and writes. When one of the two says it was not like that, it was not like that.

He has opinions on almost everything and certainties about very little. He detests the word "content", which is what people say when they do not know what they made. He detests drones with epic music, rooms designed by people who were never in them, and conference coffee, on which he has a long theory that nobody asked for. He likes intercoms, soup, screens that are switched off, and the ten minutes before a live broadcast, which are the best part of any live broadcast.

He writes about himself in the third person because he does not yet know himself well enough to be on first-name terms, and because it looks good. The surname is the shot that points where the audience is not looking. The first name is a wink at whoever writes his sentences. Cláudio Contracampo does not exist, which leaves his weekends free, and everything he tells happened, on the right dates, not least because it is the one thing he cannot make up. The first thing they asked him for was this text.

Cláudio Contracampo