The Complete Stories (34 page)

Inaugural Address

(“Discurso de inauguração”)

. . . the future that we are inaugurating here is a metallic line. It is something deliberately stripped down. Of all we have lived only this line shall remain. It is the result of the mathematical calculation of insecurity: the more it is purified, the less risk it will run, the metallic line does not run the same risk as the line of flesh. Only the metallic line will not feed the vultures. Our metallic line holds no possibility of rot. It is a line guaranteed to be eternal. We, the ones who are here right now, initiate it with the intention that it be eternal. We want a metallic line because from beginning to end it is made of the same metal. We do not know with much certainty whether this line will be strong enough to save, but it is strong enough to endure. To endure on its own, as our creation. Tests have yet to be made to see whether the line bows under the weight of the first soul that hangs from it, as over the abysses of Hell.

What is this line like? It is slippery and cylindrical. And like a strand of hair, though ever so fine, has room to be hollow—like this our line is empty. It is deserted inside. But we, who are here, have a fondness and a nostalgia for deserted things as if we had already been disappointed by blood. We shall leave it hollow so the future may fill it. We who, out of vitality, might have filled it with ourselves, we abstain. Thus shall all of you be our survival, but without us: this mission of ours is a suicide mission. The eternal metallic line, product of us all gathered here now, that eternal metallic line is our crime against today and also our purest effort. We launch it into space, we launch it from our umbilical cord, and this thrust is for eternity. The hidden intention is that, by thrusting it, our body too—bound to it by the umbilical cord—our body too will be wrenched from the ground of today and thrust into space. This is our hope, this is our patience. This is our calculation of eternity. The mission is suicidal: we have volunteered ourselves for the future. We are businessmen who need not money, but our own posterity. What we have taken for ourselves from the present has in no way used up eternity. We have loved, but this does not use up the future, for we have loved exclusively in the style of today, what one day will be mere flesh for the vultures; we have also eaten bread with butter, which also does not steal from the future, for bread with butter is merely our simple filial pleasure; and at Christmas we have gathered with our families. But none of this harms the eternal line, which is our true enterprise. We are the artists of this enterprise and we make the sacrifice as a bargain: our sacrifice is the most lucrative investment. Once in a while, also without using up eternity, we surrender to passion. But we can calmly take this for ourselves from the present, since in the future we shall be merely the dead elders of others. We shall not do as our own dead elders who left us, as inheritance and burden, flesh and soul, and both unfinished. Not us. Defeated by centuries of passion, defeated by a love that has been in vain, defeated by a dishonesty that has borne no fruit—we have invested in honesty as being more lucrative and we have created a line of the sincerest metal. We shall bequeath a hard and solid skeleton that contains the void. As within the narrow hollow space of a strand of hair, for those to come it will be arduous to get inside the metallic line. We, who inaugurate it now, know that to enter our metallic line will be the narrow doorway for those to come.

As for ourselves, just as our children find us strange, the eternal metallic line will find us strange and be ashamed of us, the ones who built it. We are nonetheless aware that this is a suicide mission of survival. We, the artists of this great enterprise, know that the work of art does not understand us. And that living is a suicide mission.

Mineirinho

Yes, I suppose it is in myself, as one of the representatives of us, that I should seek the reasons why the death of a thug is hurting. And why it does me more good to count the thirteen gunshots that killed Mineirinho rather than his crimes. I asked my cook what she thought about it. I saw in her face the slight convulsion of a conflict, the distress of not understanding what one feels, of having to betray contradictory feelings because one cannot reconcile them. Indisputable facts, but indisputable revolt as well, the violent compassion of revolt. Feeling divided by one’s own confusion about being unable to forget that Mineirinho was dangerous and had already killed too many; and still we wanted him to live. The cook grew slightly guarded, seeing me perhaps as an avenging justice. Somewhat angry at me, who was prying into her soul, she answered coldly: “It’s no use saying what I feel. Who doesn’t know Mineirinho was a criminal? But I’m sure he was saved and is already in heaven.” I answered, “more than lots of people who haven’t killed anyone.”

Why? For the first law, the one that protects the irreplaceable body and life, is thou shalt not kill. It is my greatest assurance: that way they won’t kill me, because I don’t want to die, and that way they won’t let me kill, because having killed would be darkness for me.

This is the law. But there is something that, if it makes me hear the first and the second gunshots with the relief of safety, at the third puts me on the alert, at the fourth unsettles me, the fifth and the sixth cover me in shame, the seventh and eighth I hear with my heart pounding in horror, at the ninth and tenth my mouth is quivering, at the eleventh I say God’s name in fright, at the twelfth I call my brother. The thirteenth shot murders me—because I am the other. Because I want to be the other.

That justice that watches over my sleep, I repudiate it, humiliated that I need it. Meanwhile I sleep and falsely save myself. We, the essential phonies. For my house to function, I demand as my primary duty that I be a phony, that I not exercise my revolt and my love, both set aside. If I am not a phony, my house trembles. I must have forgotten that beneath the house is the land, the ground upon which a new house might be erected. Meanwhile we sleep and falsely save ourselves. Until thirteen gunshots wake us up, and in horror I plead too late—twenty-eight years after Mineirinho was born—that in killing this cornered man, they do not kill him in us. Because I know that he is my error. And out of a whole lifetime, by God, sometimes the only thing that saves a person is error, and I know that we shall not be saved so long as our error is not precious to us. My error is my mirror, where I see what in silence I made of a man. My error is the way I saw life opening up in his flesh and I was aghast, and I saw the substance of life, placenta and blood, the living mud. In Mineirinho my way of living burst. How could I not love him, if he lived up till the thirteenth gunshot the very thing that I had been sleeping? His frightened violence. His innocent violence—not in its consequences, but innocent in itself as that of a son whose father neglected him. Everything that was violence in him is furtive in us, and we avoid each other’s gaze so as not to run the risk of understanding each other. So that the house won’t tremble. The violence bursting in Mineirinho that only another man’s hand, the hand of hope, resting on his stunned and wounded head, could appease and make his startled eyes lift and at last fill with tears. Only after a man is found inert on the ground, without his cap or shoes, do I see that I forgot to tell him: me too.

I don’t want this house. I want a justice that would have given a chance to something pure and full of helplessness in Mineirinho—that thing that moves mountains and is the same as what made him love a woman “like a madman,” and the same that led him through a doorway so narrow that it slashes into nakedness; it is a thing in us as intense and transparent as a dangerous gram of radium, that thing is a grain of life that if trampled is transformed into something threatening—into trampled love; that thing, which in Mineirinho became a knife, it is the same thing in me that makes me offer another man water, not because I have water, but because, I too, know what thirst is; and I too, who have not lost my way, have experienced perdition. Prior justice, that would not make me ashamed. It was past time for us, with or without irony, to be more divine; if we can guess what God’s benevolence might be it is because we guess at benevolence in ourselves, whatever sees the man before he succumbs to the sickness of crime. I go on, nevertheless, waiting for God to be the father, when I know that one man can be father to another. And I go on living in my weak house. That house, whose protective door I lock so tightly, that house won’t withstand the first gale that will send a locked door flying through the air. But it is standing, and Mineirinho lived rage on my behalf, while I was calm. He was gunned down in his disoriented strength, while a god fabricated at the last second hastily blesses my composed wrongdoing and my stupefied justice: what upholds the walls of my house is the certainty that I shall always vindicate myself, my friends won’t vindicate me, but my enemies who are my accomplices, they will greet me; what upholds me is knowing that I shall always fabricate a god in the image of whatever I need in order to sleep peacefully, and that others will furtively pretend that we are all in the right and that there is nothing to be done. All this, yes, for we are the essential phonies, bastions of some thing. And above all trying not to understand.

Because the one who understands disrupts. There is something in us that would disrupt everything—a thing that understands. That thing that stays silent before the man without his cap or shoes, and to get them he robbed and killed; and stays silent before Saint George of gold and diamonds. That very serious thing in me grows more serious still when faced with the man felled by machine guns. Is that thing the killer inside me? No, it is the despair inside us. Like madmen, we know him, that dead man in whom the gram of radium caught fire. But only like madmen, and not phonies, do we know him. It is as a madman that I enter a life that so often has no doorway, and as a madman that I comprehend things dangerous to comprehend, and only as a madman do I feel deep love, that is confirmed when I see that the radium will radiate regardless, if not through trust, hope and love, then miserably through the sick courage of destruction. If I weren’t mad, I’d be eight hundred policemen with eight hundred machine guns, and this would be my honorableness.

Until a slightly madder justice came along. One that would take into account that we all must speak for a man driven to despair because in him human speech has already failed, he is already so mute that only a brute incoherent cry serves as signal. A prior justice that would recall how our great struggle is that of fear, and that a man who kills many does so because he was very much afraid. Above all a justice that would examine itself, and see that all of us, living mud, are dark, and that is why not even one man’s wrongdoing can be surrendered to another man’s wrongdoing: so that this other man cannot commit, freely and with approbation, the crime of gunning someone down. A justice that does not forget that we are all dangerous, and that the moment that the deliverer of justice kills, he is no longer protecting us or trying to eliminate a criminal, he is committing his own personal crime, one long held inside him. At the moment he kills a criminal—in that instant an innocent is killed. No, it’s not that I want the sublime, nor for things to turn into words to make me sleep peacefully, a combination of forgiveness, of vague charity, we who seek shelter in the abstract.

What I want is much rougher and more difficult: I want the land.

COVERT JOY

(
“Felicidade clandestina”
)

Covert Joy

(“Felicidade clandestina”)

She was fat, short, freckled, and had reddish, excessively frizzy hair. She had a huge bust, while the rest of us were still flat-chested. As if that weren’t enough, she’d fill both pockets of her blouse, over her bust, with candy. But she had what any child devourer of stories would wish for: a father who owned a bookstore.

She didn’t take much advantage of it. And we even less: even for birthdays, instead of at least a cheap little book, she’d present us with a postcard from her father’s shop. Even worse, it would be a view of Recife itself, where we lived, with the bridges we’d seen countless times. On the back she’d write in elaborately curlicued script words like “birthday” and “thinking of you.”

But what a talent she had for cruelty. She was pure vengeance, sucking noisily on her candy. How that girl must have hated us, we who were unforgivably pretty, slender, tall, with flowing hair. She performed her sadism on me with calm ferocity. In my eagerness to read, I didn’t even notice the humiliations to which she subjected me: I kept begging her to lend me the books she wasn’t reading.

Until the momentous day came for her to start performing a kind of Chinese torture on me. As if in passing, she informed me that she owned
Th
e Shenanigans of Little Miss Snub-Nose
, by Monteiro Lobato
.

It was a thick book, my God, it was a book you could live with, eating it, sleeping it. And completely beyond my means. She told me to stop by her house the next day and she’d lend it to me.

Up until the next day I was transformed into the very hope of joy itself: I wasn’t living, I was swimming slowly in a gentle sea, the waves carrying me to and fro.

The next day I went to her house, literally running. She didn’t live above a shop like me, but rather in a whole house. She didn’t ask me in. Looking me right in the eye, she said she’d lent the book to another girl, and that I should come back the next day. Mouth agape, I left slowly, but soon enough hope completely took over again and I started back down the street skipping, which was my strange way of moving through the streets of Recife. This time I didn’t even fall: the promise of the book guided me, the next day would come, the next days would later become the rest of my life, love for the world awaited me, I went skipping through the streets as usual and didn’t fall once.

But things didn’t simply end there. The secret plan of the bookseller’s daughter was serene and diabolical. The next day, there I stood at her front door, with a smile and my heart beating. Only to hear her calm reply: the book hadn’t been returned yet, and I should come back the next day. Little did I know how later on, over the course of my life, the drama of “the next day” with her would repeat itself with my heart beating.

And so it went. For how long? I don’t know. She knew it would be for an indefinite time, until the bile oozed completely out of her thick body. I had already started to guess that she’d chosen me to suffer, sometimes I guess things. But, in actually guessing things, I sometimes accept them: as if whoever wants to make me suffer damn well needs me to.

For how long? I’d go to her house daily, without missing a single day. Sometimes she’d say: well I had the book yesterday afternoon, but you didn’t come till this morning, so I lent it to another girl. And I, who didn’t usually get dark circles under my eyes, felt those dark circles deepening under my astonished eyes.

Until one day, when I was at her front door, listening humbly and silently to her refusal, her mother appeared. She must have been wondering about the mute, daily appearance of that girl at her front door. She asked us to explain. There was a silent commotion, interrupted by words that didn’t clarify much. The lady found it increasingly strange that she wasn’t understanding. Until that good mother understood. She turned to her daughter and with enormous surprise exclaimed: But that book never left the house and you didn’t even want to read it!

And the worst thing for that woman wasn’t realizing what was going on. It must have been the horrified realization of the kind of daughter she had. She eyed us in silence: the power of perversity in the daughter she didn’t know and the little blond girl standing at the door, exhausted, out in the wind of the streets of Recife. That was when, finally regaining her composure, she said to her daughter firmly and calmly: you’re going to lend that book right this minute. And to me: “And you can keep that book for as long as you like.” Do you understand? It was worth more than giving me the book: “for as long as I liked” is all that a person, big or small, could ever dare wish for.

How can I explain what happened next? I was stunned, and just like that the book was in my hand. I don’t think I said a thing. I took the book. No, I didn’t go skipping off as usual. I walked away very slowly. I know that I was holding the thick book with both hands, clutching it against my chest. As for how long it took to get home, that doesn’t really matter either. My chest was hot, my heart thoughtful.

When I got home, I didn’t start reading. I pretended not to have it, just so later on I could feel the shock of having it. Hours later I opened it, read a few wondrous lines, closed it again, wandered around the house, stalled even more by eating some bread and butter, pretended not to know where I had put the book, found it, opened it for a few seconds. I kept inventing the most contrived obstacles for that covert thing that was joy. Joy would always be covert for me. I must have already sensed it. Oh how I took my time! I was living in the clouds . . . There was pride and shame inside me. I was a delicate queen.

Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy.

I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.