To tell or not to tell. Caio Fernando Abreu: subject and not-said of the speech of the AIDS in the novel Onde andará Dulce Veiga?

In this article we discuss the novel Onde andará Dulce Veiga? (1990), by Caio Fernando Abreu, focusing on the issue of AIDS, the not-said of its speech and the subject. Considering the historical and social context around AIDS in the 1980s, the period that goes the plot of the novel, this analysis is guided in questioning how the disease is built throughout the book. In Caio Fernando Abreu’s Onde andará Dulce Veiga? we are faced with an unnamed narrator who goes in search of Dulce Veiga, a singer who made some success in an age previous to the moment when the narrator tells his story and who disappeared mysteriously. The period of success and the very figure of the singer Dulce Veiga are identified with the Radio Age and its glamor. Amid the search for the singer the narrator becomes involved in a plot in which AIDS is a means in the form of the unsaid. The disease presents itself, in a roundabout way, amid the destruction perceptible to the senses of space-time elements present in the narrative and through the effects of decay that the narrative suggests.