“Love then, too, not that I know of.
I know it turns into a raw material
that life is in charge of turning into anger or rhyme. “
When love becomes rhyme,
she had seen a poetry like this beautiful Leminski.
And when it turns into anger,
turns a process, most of the time, and ends up on a family stick.
I have been a judge for almost 23 years,
and of those 23 years, 16 I passed on a family stick.
And it was there, in that space,
where I could watch, as a privileged spectator,
the denouement of the end of love.
And she was very distressed and very perplexed,
because how can you speak of justice, when love ends?
People live in a society,
we live in a society that cultivates an idealized love, a romantic love,
a love “until death do us part,” and every time we confront each other
with some setbacks or with the end of a project
which results in the end of love, the frustration is very great.
And the expectation of who arrives on a family stick
is a very painful expectation,
because love never ends at the same time for the two,
or it hardly happens.
No one is having breakfast at seven o’clock in the morning.
and then one looks at another and says:
“Yes, our love is over, what a coincidence that is love.”
This is not how it happens.
Love ends and does not always end at the same time.
And he who is spoken of the end of love,
when he comes to justice, expects the judge to be fair.
And what does it mean, pro-judge, to be righteous at the end of love?
For that person, it means restoring the affection that does not return again.
And the frustration is too great, and the hurts are too great,
and the parade of tragedies, routinely before my eyes,
made me realize the anguish that it is you to have a place of power,
which is the place of judge, and can not be useful to those people,
in the experience of that pain, which is so individual.
In those 16 years, I have surely performed more than 20 thousand audiences.
And there was no audience in which I finished my work,
thinking that he had achieved a result that was at least satisfactory
to relieve those pains of those who sought justice,
as if requesting authorization
to live the end of love without so much pain and without so much sadness.
And I also had the opportunity to accompany, during this period,
the profound transformation through which society has passed,
and especially families, in recent years,
because few institutions have changed as much as families.
For you to have an idea, until 1977, divorce was prohibited in Brazil.
People died married and unhappy.
Until 1988, we are talking about yesterday,
a married man having a child out of wedlock
was prohibited from carrying out the registration of that child,
because the constitution protected marriage,
and the children were treated differently.
Luckily relationships have changed.
and, for the most part, have changed for the better.
Today the affective, family relations are more plural,
are more horizontal, more democratic,
but as in life nothing is flat,
we also suffer from shallower relationships.
And I have had the opportunity to
the rupture of these ways of relating over time
when, for the first time, I received a couple very young to divorce,
and they had been married for three months.
And they arrived at the hearing to make the divorce very resentful,
one evil looked at another,
and I said, “But are you sure you want to divorce?”
“Marriage was not quite what we expected.”
I said, “Well, what did you expect it to be a marriage?”
And then you realize the confrontation between the expectation that is created,
motivated and encouraged by this consumer society,
it’s reality;
because idealized marriage is one that plays music,
the couple have soundtrack for breakfast in bed,
people wake up in a good mood,
no one sets the table, no one takes a towel off the bed,
and everyday life happens without anyone having to do anything,
without any inconvenience being experienced.
Then when we begin to perceive the arrival in justice
of a generation that grew up without learning to be contradicted
and that the first setback is a mourning brought about by the end of love,
we begin to reflect: which way we are treading
and what kind of society do we want, by incensing values
which are not really values that concern humanity.
Because no one has to live in hell to be married,
no one is obliged to submit to the yoke of the other or to the obedience of the other,
but there are rules of conviviality, care and responsibility
and especially of affection which, if they are not worked and cared for,
they are not the natural attributes of humanity.
And justice, in this context,
I realized that I could do this during the hearings:
aggregate these values of culture, art,
justice, education,
which are all values that are born from the same root of humanity.
And maybe my experience before the magistracy helped me a lot,
because, before being a judge,
I was a screenwriter and a theater producer.
And many times in the hearings, I had to help myself from fiction.
to show some couples
that “Othello” by Shakespeare, who was a jealous,
suffered from a pathology he could see in fiction,
but he could not see in his own life.
Other times I interrupted the audience, ran on the computer
and he fished some text of Roland Barthes’s “Fragments of a Loving Speech”
which is almost a Bible for those couples
who relate, fall in love and separate.
So it was possible to use fiction, movie references,
book references, mythological references
for those people to see
as naturally victims of pain
which are natural to humanity itself.
Tolstoy has a phrase that says happy families all look like,
and that the unfortunate are unhappy each in their own way.
Of course he wrote this as a super-author who is,
but if he were a family judge, he would surely change that phrase a little,
because both happy and unhappy families are profoundly different.
And a judge needs to understand that the pain experienced by those people
is individual.
A family judge who does not like people,
who does not want to understand
the contradiction that is our human condition,
should not be a family judge;
because we are precarious beings, wandering, contradictory,
we miss many times, we hit others,
and what we have in common is precisely this humanity
so dense, so strong and that makes us affirm affection,
despite all the mishaps
and despite the realization that love one day comes to an end.
To conduct these audiences in a more humane way,
trying to understand what each had to say of his place,
was extremely helpful, first to appease my anguish
faced with the inability to resolve those conflicts;
then, because I realized that people, when they felt authorized
to be less perfect and less idealized,
they could experience mourning and sadness with more autonomy.
Because this same society that idealizes that beautiful family
margarine photography,
that family that everyone is happy all the time,
this same society demands from us a permanent happiness,
a perpetual euphoria that is incompatible with our human condition.
So it’s like a judge authorizing someone
to the right to experience sadness and pain,
which are natural, passing, but which are natural.
And it came to pass that in a certain audience, and this is not common,
because usually those who seek justice want a quick solution,
anyone who seeks justice wants a sentence, a decision.
And it often happened that I had to waste a lot of time
so that the couple had the possibility
of vomiting resentments,
to bring the leftovers of love into a courtroom,
which is a space that historically
it’s not meant for it, it’s not designed for it,
but which is often the only space
where those people can talk and can find alternatives,
not for the big issues of separation,
but for the more trivial questions
and that they care very little for numbers and statistics.
How do you pack and leave your home?
What time did you disappear the jacket of the dress?
What do you do with a book when it’s autographed to the couple
and the author is a couple’s passion?
Who gets these leftovers?
How do you manage this everyday?
So sometimes it was necessary to extend the audience time a little,
to try to understand what kind of conflict was that
and what kind of expectation was the one that arrived on my pole for a decision.
And a story happened that touched me deeply,
which was a story that, at the hearing, a mother arrived
asking for the custody of three children.
She had left home four years ago
and no longer had contact with these children.
Very tense the environment, everything very difficult,
the father did not want her to have custody of the children,
because, according to him,
she would have abandoned her children during this time and now she came back to get it.
And the story is that the mother was sick, she had a deep crisis of depression
and had to leave home to be treated.
And after four years, a little better, already rehabilitated and under therapy,
wanted to go back and take over the relationship.
The father resisted, and I thought it was crazy that man was so hard,
because how will you hold a person accountable?
because she suffered an illness or had depression.
I could not blame the woman
more than she had ever suffered from the disease.
The story continued rolling and after all, in the middle of the audience,
comes the revelation that he was already with another woman.
I’ve been getting angrier yet.
I said: how can you?
He leaves the woman with depression,
do not want to let the mother get close to her children
And, besides, is she with another woman?
And all the stories that come in the family stick have many versions.
And it’s a place where I’ve learned to judge people very little,
because I have learned that it is not possible to judge without hearing.
And here comes the father version.
That mother had a chronic depression for more than ten years
and he always cared for his wife throughout this period.
He worked on board,
he turned to account for the woman’s crises, the children’s crises,
never occupied the woman’s family with nothing,
until one day he got home, the children were three days without eating
and the woman devastated.
He had no one else to turn to for help,
She called her mother-in-law, asked her mother-in-law to take the woman and time went by.
He organized himself, continued to look after his children, and walked away.
She went to do the treatment and did not return to socializing, nor to seek,
or as part of the treatment or lack of will, was not clear.
But the fact is that he did not ask for her divorce,
because she needed the health plan he had.
And he did not dare break the bond
and kept the health plan so she could treat herself.
So it was not a story of many failures.
It was a story of a tragedy,
where everyone was right in their perspective.
And this process took about two years,
because I was able to schedule hearings every three months
with the presence of the children, with the rapprochement of the children,
with the attempt to bring the mother back into that familiar environment.
And at the end of two years, the guard was finally shared.
They divorced and each went to live off their children,
because parenting and conjugality are different things.
So there are arrangements that do not depend only on a decision.
They depend on listening and depend on time.
And if for many years I was responsible for observing and deciding
several of these processes of disaffection and separation,
I also had the happiness of having many marriages,
because, as a family judge,
I was fortunate to be able to hold weddings, which I love.
And always in these marriages, from this experience that I had,
of these ruptures, by frustrations, idealizations and promises not fulfilled,
my care was for the bride and groom to promise each other
not eternal love, an ethereal love, a love “until death do us part,”
fidelity to life, monopoly of sexuality, no.
What I asked for is that one promise to another the daily care
with affection, with the responsibility
and with the certainty and freedom that one was with the other
by choice and by love.
And this is the invitation I make to you,
because I truly believe that justice is much more just
the more affection you bring to justice.
No, the more affection, the more freedom,
the greater the possibility of people getting justice.
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
Be First to Comment