If it were possible. My story perceived as a thing, without words, voiceless, but apprehended whole, solid. She’s going to ask: Where did you go to college? Why did you choose education? Which professors left an impression on you? Where do these concepts come from — the importance of prison? Of the resistance? What can I say about Lígia’s expression when she saw her first burial? When her understanding finally linked the deceased to the corpse, memory to rot.
I retired out of cowardice. Some of my colleagues were calling for a revolt, ready to fight for their rights, fair compensation for services rendered, the dignity of intellectual labor. In my case it was cowardice. They were going to do exactly what they wanted: change the rules for retiring and shaft the emeritus faculty. The truth is that it all bored me, I didn’t see the point of getting involved. But it’s easy to be bored when your own retirement is already guaranteed. Thirty-five years at the university, fifteen at the high school. During high school, I worked in a bank, and during college I gave test prep lessons at the community center so that I could buy my own books and not be a burden at home. My father was calm and had friends. He worked for the Post Office and belonged to a labor union. On Saturday evenings he hosted a choro circle with his friends at our house. On Sundays we’d go out, walking or by bus, to see the city. My father liked the stairway at the Museu do Ipiranga, the tributary waters of the Amazon trapped in aquaria, rising and dividing with the curves of the grand banister. We rarely went into the museum proper. My mother liked to go in and see the costume collection, but we’d wait for her outside, wandering between the houses of rich Arabs and through the well-kept parks. In ’70, after I came home, he had a stroke, his hands went rigid and he could no longer play the flute. His mouth, severely twisted at the start, slowly returned to something like its former shape, but it never went back to normal. Forced to take disability, he retired, and died a few months later.
Armando played ukelele. Armando drew. Armando had girlfriends. Many. He had everything. He liked my family. He was loved. Armando was loved everywhere. He never managed to be invited into my father’s choro circle, only because it wasn’t possible, but my father still enjoyed himself with Armando on the nights he stayed late after studying. I hear my father’s flute, his sharp trills, joyful — a spritely, fluid story. The complete opposite of his deep, clipped speech. I remember the sound of Armando’s ukulele and his concentrated expression loosening into a malicious and waggish smile whenever he managed to accompany my father. My father would say, the boy’s got something, maybe he’ll really be able to play one day.
The flute never left its black case during the week. When he was young he’d played for a professional group. No such thing exists in Brazil, Joana, enough boasting, a professional is someone who lives from his work — do you know anyone who makes a decent living that way? No? Well then you’d better choose your words carefully before talking and in this case there’s nothing to talk about anyway. You were in love, so you misremember things. They played at parties, public events, my mother would tell us when our father wasn’t around. I imagine he’d had artistic and intellectual ambitions he kept under strict control, the way an alcoholic negotiates drinking. The Saturday choro circle attested to the fact that he wasn’t a real alcoholic, he was capable of indulging moderately for social enjoyment, not out of desperate necessity. He’d studied a lot in his youth: he was a poor boy from the country who managed to get a job in the postal service so that he could continue his training. He devoted himself to music with the constancy of someone building his future, someone who isn’t in a hurry, because he knows it’s inevitable, who doesn’t get distracted, because without that breath he pulled through puckered lips, he lacks oxygen, gets giddy, and doesn’t know how to live. With the joy of an extremely timid person who finally steals a kiss from his crush after months of longing, that kiss — warmth spreading through the entire body, and the other, her smooth skin — that supreme delight, no need to say it. My father was happy, Dona Joana told us, and always calm, he walked tall among his many friends, he played, and when he laughed his eyes shone.
What happened? Our mother, tell us quickly, our father, here he comes now. This is literally from José’s book, whether quoted or taken from memory — it doesn’t matter. It invades my thoughts and takes me where I don’t want to go. But I let it pass, let it speak. I don’t want this version: this childhood, this father, this mother. May it sing instead, something prohibited in my father’s choro circle.
“What happened, my son, is that one day the time came when dying wouldn’t do any good, a time when life became order. Just life, without mystification.” And then there was José’s father, “the man behind the mustache” (something he never wore), “serious, simple, and strong, who almost never speaks” (Drummond by José).
I don’t know if my father was the strong type. Was he, like all of us among the living, simple? Who is simple? All right, that’s enough José, please. I don’t mean to get worked up: I like the character José created, his father — or, I should say, I don’t like him so much as find the construction of this family tree intriguing. It’s almost charming to see the way we’ve been sketched by my brother’s gaze. We are links in the evolutionary chain that leads to him, homo sapiens, homo sexualis. Thus my father is transformed into a man from Itabira, this pride, this hanging head with fatigued retinas. His eyes were afflicted, glazed, distracted, closed. I wouldn’t use fatigued, José. Our father’s eyes were gray.
José mixes the expressions of different poets and writers in his work, he doesn’t credit them or use italics. He says that the written word is like money: it’s not the property of whoever coined it, but belongs to the person using it. He always was a little thief, it’s true, always had an alibi at the ready. It was his fault I once got my nose broken and gave a boy on our street a black eye. Agnello, the other boy, had special marbles that were different than everyone else’s — who knows where he got them. He accused José of having stolen some. José denied it, said it was a lie, that Agnello had cheated in the last game and was creating a distraction with this lie. He tackled José and I ended up in the middle of it. José knew I would get involved — he only stood up to Agnello because I was there. I told him to give back the marbles. José, red with hatred, said he didn’t have them. He turned his pockets inside out to show that all he had were regular marbles. I knew something was up. I recognized the attitude of indignation and injustice that appeared each time he came home from school with low grades: he was always prepared with a tall tale of persecution or the like. I still doubted him, though he made his denials boldly, eyes glistening with hatred for my lack of solidarity. José’s fists were clenched but his body betrayed that he was afraid and ready to flee. I was ashamed of him, of his head cowering between his shoulders, of the way he attacked from a defensive posture. Agnello did something he shouldn’t have: he reached out to give José a light slap on the face and teased him, you’re gonna cry, aren’t you, little baby? I punched him in the face before I could think and since I didn’t know how to fight, I ended up with a broken nose. Because although we played ball together, although we earned pocket money together by keeping an eye on people’s cars while they went market down the street, although we played war, hide-and-seek, and everything else, we also fought. Fighting was a ritual among us: a time was set, people watched, we had rival clans — but I wasn’t part of this ritual, and because I was always strong, no one ever messed with me. I think that was the first time I’d really needed to fight. Days later, with an itchy bandage on my nose, I saw Agnello’s marbles in the room I shared with José, and laughed. I couldn’t even get mad at José, only laugh at my own stupidity. When I told him that he really was a big son of a bitch, José countered that Agnello was a bully who thought he could cheat anybody smaller, and that he deserved to be taught a lesson. And what did I have to do with it, José? You’re the older brother.
I went to the cemetery on Eliana’s birthday to see the ma
keshift grave we’d made her. This was a few days ago. After Lígia witnessed her first coffin descend into the earth — the old ropes rubbing the varnish, the undertakers’ dirty clothes, the way they hopped over the open grave, the tombstone, the cement spread with care, and the earth covering it up again, hiding everything, pretending that it’s all just dirt — she felt cheated by our tribute. In the universe of childish superstitions, where concrete tombs grew out of the dirt, she feared some kind of divine retribution. She didn’t want to go for strolls in the cemeteries anymore, and she began to doubt my explanations of even the most trivial things — after death our bodies are eaten by insects and worms, we’re born from our mothers’ bellies, every ring on the rattlesnake’s rattler represents a year of life — and, against my wishes, she asked her grandmother if she could be baptized, she learned to pray, and crossed herself devoutly whenever she passed a cemetery or a church.
She was baptized at six along with her cousin Renato, the son Armando had with Luiza, born six months after his father’s death. When Luiza returned to Brazil from France, he was already five years old. Our comrade had returned to get back in touch with her roots. She baptized her son and paraded with a samba school at Carnaval — rituals that slaked her thirst. Luiza was one of Armando’s many simultaneous girlfriends. She wanted to make a family for herself and her son. With her quiet goodwill, my mother accepted these additions to our Sunday dinners. The boy was her granddaughter’s cousin, after all. But obviously things didn’t stop there: Renato went to a French day school — his mother’s thirsting roots were not so parched as to compromise her little one’s brilliant future — but on several afternoons each week Luiza couldn’t pick him up from school. She had an arrangement with a taxi driver who picked him up and took him to Dona Joana’s house, where he spent the rest of the day, took his bath, and ate his dinner. Often it wasn’t until he was already asleep that she came to fetch him, smiling but exhausted, worn down by the various jobs she worked so she could pay for his schooling and build a life that seemed strange to me. Her ambitions, her certainty about where she wanted to end up and what she needed to do to get there — all of it was strange to me. The cold revolutionary determination was still there, but it was now put to work making money and advancing her career: her drive seemed to bloom from those those cadavers, a violent and powerful manure.
We are all one with the universe. Living by death and dying by life (Heraclitus of Ephesus). We rejuvenate ourselves seventy times per minute and this is what exhausts us. Our cells reconstitute the molecules of our bodies (ourselves), which die second by second, our cells degrade and ceaselessly transform. “We” never are: we are only our bodies, the same as a second ago, dying of so much rejuvenation. If it weren’t for death we wouldn’t live (Edgar Morin). Every error builds a safe step on which I ascend and ascend and ascend — but where? A sound like glug, glug, glug, like the people in Lígia’s cartoons. I’d like to find a way of speaking about the necessity of cadavers and killings in our intellectual and creative lives, for that pretty girl of Teresa’s. But any word that gets at death is dangerously attractive to young minds. It’s frighting to be in young hands, though inevitable. I completely understand Nelson Rodrigues’s advice to youth: grow old, my sons, grow old as fast as you can. But, like an old asthmatic who refuses to give up his cigarettes, I am incapable of disbelieving in the improbable things they bring me.
During the week the flute never left its black case until my father met Armando. The prohibitions on the black case and its music were broken by the ignorance that any such taboo existed. I remember the shock in José’s eyes, reflecting my own, that afternoon when my father came in and found us in the living room: I was reading, José was doing his homework, and Armando was tinkering with his ukelele. Armando, with his back to the door, hadn’t noticed him enter. Instead of the usual succinct hello on his way to the kitchen, he signaled for us not to let on to Armando that he’d come in. With a bemused smile, he crossed his arms, stood and listened for a while, and then tiptoed to the credenza underneath the stairs, took his flute from the case and began to accompany Armando. Startled, my classmate paused for a second, but then, perceiving the challenge, he began to follow my father’s rhythm, slow at first but soon reaching such a crescendo that Armando cried out, I can’t keep up! I can’t keep up, my fingers are burning! He tossed the ukelele onto the sofa and they both doubled over laughing. José and I looked on, stupefied.
I keep reading to find out how José will describe this scene. Maybe because he has such a lively imagination, his memory is better than mine. I don’t remember my parents ever having said anything about not opening the black case or even once asking our father to play for us. We just knew the topic was off-limits, just like the black case. He only practiced after lunch on Saturdays, in the hour or two before his friends arrived for the choro circle. We’d be around, speaking softly or reading, my mother sewing something for us or doing the dishes from lunch. But we understood that he wasn’t playing for us. It was like a silent meditation that we weren’t to interrupt, someplace we shouldn’t trespass. It’s possible no one had ever said anything about it, but we just knew. I knew and I imagine José did, too, because we never asked him to play, even though for various reasons (these I remember well), we’d wanted him to. The isolation he maintained made for a kind of daydream. In those hours, I pretended to read while lying on the checkered wood floor, restraining the movement of my head and feet so that he wouldn’t be able to tell I was enjoying myself as I kept time with the music. Somehow I knew that he wouldn’t like it and was afraid he’d then stop playing when we were nearby.
Oblivious to all this, Armando opened our father’s black case and music poured out. Music for Armando, music with Armando — a cheery complicity between master and disciple that I’d never known, and which never expanded to include me, never spread throughout the house or spilled over into other rooms, or any of our father’s subsequent habits. Joaquim Ferreira’s timidity, and his music, were translated for his children by Dona Joana, in all their depth and sensibility. She cultivated in us the fear of an awesome and powerful being, of the furies we should beware, lest we provoke them. Armando’s presence, which already had made my childishness so apparent, had now transformed my father into a complex person.
If there were any doubts about Renato being Armando’s son — and I entertained some, although they had more to do with things Luiza let slip than anything else — they vanished when the boy got to be eleven or twelve years old, the age when I met his father. Lígia began to look at him differently, and the little boy’s politeness began to irritate me. In Renato I discovered what had aggravated me about his father and about things from that period I didn’t know how to name. Seduction as survival strategy.
After a few months, Armando got tired of the ukelele. It was like him to get bored by passions. But what he’d opened in Joaquim Ferreira, that black box, wasn’t as fickle: our father didn’t understand that Armando’s enthusiasm for music was merely a boyish caprice. The condescension of my friend — awkwardly thanking the flautist, who then laughed in that strange way, being out of the habit of laughter — my friend, who egged my father on with his ever more nimble but fickle ukelele: he began to pain me.
As adolescents we stick to our companions. Everything pulls us out of the house and we return full of power to a space that seems miserly and meager. As cells multiply, we catch the scent of things we don’t understand but nevertheless desire. Eliana acquired a scent that drove me wild. I couldn’t understand it or acknowledge it. She’d come and go and didn’t seem to perceive her own scent: that was what got me. I adored the way her laughter began as hesitation and then opened, wide and wet. Her teeth are always so white in my memory. Wet little things shaped like I don’t know what — something delicious and untouchable. Others began to imitate her delayed laughter. She would blush and her skin, that color, is what remains most alive to me. Golden and smooth. The sunset caught in the
reflection of a brass urn. Shining and nameless, that pink filling her cheeks and spreading across her radiant face. When I finally managed to touch that skin, I trembled. We tend to think of adolescents as foolish, but today I realize how much courage it took for me to touch her face. If something were to enchant me today with such intensity, I doubt I could muster the courage that I had then. I trembled: I wanted to go slowly, feel the soft hair that covered her skin, follow the route I’d mentally traced so many times, it was happening, she closed her eyes, half opened her lips, bringing me at last those precious shards of light — it was like that.
I found the letters, my reports. They’re fine documents, nothing as serious as I remembered in terms of form, and rather pertinent in their content. Something wasn’t working well in the engine of education. Humanitarian messianism, revolutionary catechism, and utilitarian pragmatism had all evaporated, and as the teachers crashed and burned, the blame was laid on the students. Parents charged us with the discipline they’d never imposed, students demanded respect they never offered, the teachers asked for meaning they couldn’t find themselves. Everyone expected the schools to give them whatever they couldn’t create in their own lives. With a tsunami’s sterile violence, this dissatisfaction invaded the schools. The principals waged their battles without knowing what war they were fighting. Why educate? To create free men, revolutionaries, critics, useful citizens. Every decade had its objective. And now? There’s no escape from complexity. The complexity of the world, of the country, of the city, of the neighborhood, of the family, of every subject, especially of the human experience; the complexity of childhood, of adolescence, of maturity, of old age and death. The sad sack man who has a brother, a father’s brother, the mother’s brother, son, envy, brother-in-law, he has to take a bath, shave, attend the meetings, sweep the breadcrumbs, he’s jealous, he has money, lacks money, time, anger, boredom.
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