MPB’s biggest secret isn’t Roberto Carlos’ childhood accident. MPB’s biggest secret isn’t where the deck that João Gilberto Elba Ramalho let pass for him under the door of his hotel room ended up. The biggest mystery in MPB isn’t Gal Costa’s cause of death. MPB’s biggest secret is not Ivete Sangalo’s political position. MPB’s biggest secret is Edna.
Edna Assunção de Araújo, 55, is brunette, has curly hair, is approximately 1.60 m tall and has not been seen or heard from in public for over five years. Why should? Now she is the widow of the singer Belchior, about whom I wrote the book Belchior Just a Hispanic Boy (Although, 2017). During the period when the artist disappeared from public view, from 2007 to 2017 until 30 accompanied him.
Edna at her husband’s wake: For some, the widow would have kept an unpublished recording of Belchior
Image: Jarbas Oliveira/Folhapress
‘Owner’ of unreleased album?
She saw him play shows for a happy audience of two, oversaw the production of a mysterious and unprecedented album that many swear was “better than ‘Alucinação'” (1976 album, #16 on the chart according to a poll of the 500 greatest MPB albums by 2022 from the podcast Discoteca Básica),” watched concerts by other unknown artists in the audience, watched her husband sketch for an already legendary personal translation of Dante Alighieri’s “A Divina Comédia”, and slept along the immortal author under a rendition of “Apenas a Latin boy”.
After Belchior’s death, Edna was present at the mourning rites and funerals held in honor of her partner in Fortaleza and Sobral, Ceará, the birthplace of the MPB bard. He even spoke to a packed theater. From then on, the whereabouts of Edna from São Paulo became an impenetrable mystery.
The couple in November 2012 in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Porto Alegre: “double isolation”
Image: Bruno Alencastro/UOL
disinterest in inheritance
For Belchior’s heirs, this disappearance became a major problem for the division of the artist’s fortune and the administration of his estate, the widow’s disappearance complicated things terribly. Incommunicado, Edna was removed from the inventory in 2019 because the judiciary had difficulty citing her (“Given the negative results for the widow’s subpoena, I nominate Camila Henman Belchior for the position of executor,” the judge pointed out, based on one of the singer’s daughters).
In September 2022, three years after the inventory began and still no word from the widow, Belchior’s family (his three daughters Camila, Isabella and Vanick and son Mikael) submitted a request for legal assistance to the only three addresses they had contact, all in São Paulo. However, none of the specified addresses are active (the report of the tab went through them all).
Brazilian ‘Bob Dylan’, in a photo from 1979, when the album ‘Era uma Vez um Homem e Seu Tempo’ was released
Image: Disclosure
the widow’s sister
Last year, a more consistent lead emerged: the address of a fashion boutique in São Paulo’s South Zone that would be owned by Edna’s sisters, Hélia and Eda. The three, who were very close, would certainly keep in touch. After confirming the link and the boutique’s existence, this week’s report attempted to establish some communication:
Good morning. are you helia
Can I help. Who do I talk to?
— I am Jotabê Medeiros, reporter, journalist. I’m here to ask you about your sister Edna.
— I don’t know you, I have nothing to say, honestly. how did you get to me
— Well, I’m a reporter, right? Let me ask you: Is Edna alive?
— [Silêncio]. I have nothing to say to you I’ve seen a lot of things you wrote and I don’t agree with anything. It’s your point of view, it’s what you think. If I were a serious reporter I would do my research and try to get the truth before I write.
I was looking for. But they never received me. The people who might say, “Look, I’m disputing what you wrote,” those people haven’t given their version out.
“I appreciate your visit, but with all due respect, please excuse me.
Edna with the surgeon Russen Conrado, author of a book about the idol
Image: Jotabê Medeiros/UOL
documentation and books
Edna’s world hadn’t come this close to the outside world in half a decade. However, soon unreleased information surrounding the Edna & Belchior saga could emerge through the films, records and books that are about to be released. The forthcoming release is that of the documentary “Procurando Belchior” directed by Eduardo Albergaria (with a screenplay by Daniel Dias, Leonardo Edde and the director himself, set to premiere in the second half on Canal Brasil). The film traces the couple’s journey through Uruguay and Rio Grande do Sul during their tenyear selfexile.
The result may surprise many people who have a readymade and readymade idea of what Edna would have represented in the life and work of the Sobral bard. “The film seeks a look that defies the notion of people being quick to judge, a symptom of the disease that plagues Brazil. Many have not properly understood or heard Belchior. It’s these gaps, these crevices and these encounters that we must have. But now, with the ‘Belchior camera’, showing the street, the walls, what he saw and felt and what the people there saw and felt have portrayed,” says Albergaria. During the investigation, the film crew uncovered unreleased images, gathered valuable testimonies, and promises to show the misty story from a new angle.
While Edna was at Melchior’s side, she was known as “Edna Prometheus”, a curious reference to Aeschylus’ Greek classic, “Prometheus Bound”. The play is about a curse: after Prometheus stole fire from Zeus to give to humans, he is punished by the god and chained to a rock where he is doomed to remain there for eternity.
In the misogynist version of the moniker “Edna Prometheus,” Belchior would have been chained to her as in Greek myth
Image: Collection UH/Folhapress
Character of Greek tragedy
For Belchior fans, who generally call themselves “Belchianes”, Edna’s codename allows for a double interpretation: the rock would be Belchior itself, a very strong gravitational force; or, in the most misogynistic version, who was chained to the rock and remained there for all eternity was Belchior (Edna would obviously be the rock).
Paranoid, overprotective, intelligent, short tempered, tough, sweet, wild, welcoming, capable of abusing animals and playing hidden in the Mega Sena while preventing her husband from playing, manipulative, cultured, prophetess, stallholder: in the In recent years she has had many facets and the legend of Edna grew out of dough with organic yeast. It has already been reported that she suffers from panic syndrome, that she is a Daimist or a follower of the União do Vegetal (UDV) religion.
It is easy to see that a significant part of the suspicion or prejudice against Belchior’s widow stems from the fact that, as a romantic couple, they do not conform to the classic seductive woman cliché. What is certain is that more people suffer from it than people who miss it.
Without access to Belchior’s inheritance or music production rights, how would the widow survive?
Image: Collection UH/Folhapress
Calculation or sincere love?
His approach to Belchior, for part of the singer’s family, would have been the result of a choice, a meticulous calculation. In 2006 Edna worked on the production of a joint show in Fortaleza. I took care of the artists staying at the Caesar Park Hotel in the capital Ceará, transportation and other arrangements. “Jorge Mello, your taxi has arrived! You can go and I’ll take care of the paperwork at the hotel,” said one of Belchior’s partners and former partners, singersongwriter Jorge Mello, and recalled when he first saw her.
During this period, Edna worked as a curator for an artist collective at the Hotel Grand Marquise in Fortaleza, but she was not missed by everyone: “I cannot say anything about this woman because my contact with her was very quick and I confess that my saint is not suited her,” says the painter and sculptor from Ceará, Mano Alencar.
Plastic surgeon Russen Moreira Conrado from Fortaleza, soninlaw of one of the singer’s brothers Nilson Belchior, had a halfhour conversation with Edna on the day of the funeral on May 1, 2017. In his book Belchior — O Silence do Amor, published a year later, he writes: “Perhaps when she was feeding herself there was some desire to disappear from space [Edna e Belchior] double insulation.”
For many people, Edna’s sense of responsibility for Belchior’s fate is something that remains strong even after such a long time. “What would someone think after ten years of isolating a singing genius, a man with an unusual culture and knowledge from the world?” Russians asked.
active CPF
The search for Edna’s whereabouts is owed to many factors, from unburied paragraphs to professional vanity, from the legal to the aesthetic after all, the producer, art dealer, tourist assistant and manager of a proPalestinian NGO (the activities she carried out throughout her life may turn out to be different according to sources) confessed to interlocutors who carried in a suitcase the ultimate production of one of the biggest names in MPB. This possibility keeps interest in his character adding to the romantic vibe of his crazy trajectory alongside Belchior.
The fact is that Edna left no trace. The amazement it evokes is: how would it survive? Without access to Belchior’s music production resources, without the “instant Airbnb” network provided by the singer’s fans in the country, how does one keep up? During that halfdecade, she did not claim a pension, resort to the Auxílio Brasil, declare no income tax, sell or buy anything, open or close companies.
“Is Edna alive?”. Edna’s sister, Hélia, answered the only question she allowed herself to be asked with a hint of a smile. If the readers allow the reporter a bit of impressionism and use, without the sarcasm component, a phrase popularized by unsuccessful Bolsonarism, it is clear and certain that Edna’s CPF remains active.