The mother is very well done. Maybe because he’d gone without seeing her for so long, José was able to capture her younger self, with a clarity that I’d either lost or never had. Reading her, I laugh to myself at my young mother. Her daydreams and coquetry. Always wearing a cameo necklace draped over dresses she’d sewn herself. José remembers the patterns and styles: he fills entire pages with the delicate elegance of a woman who deftly played the bad hand life had dealt her, warding off misery with a needle, fabric, and dreams. Always motherly light and fatherly shadow. The father José depicts is powerful enough to subdue and restrict the mother’s light. Her sewing, her proud posture, the melodies she distractedly hummed, broken by fugues and feints, are her ways of evading oppression and staying sane. There is no harmony. The father and the fag are almost nothing in themselves, only lifeless puppets of a cruel destiny that renders the theater bloodless. There is no blame, they’re just part of the world, or its impossibility. Above all, they’re opaque.
I become annoyed by the simplicity of the story of José and his brothers. When simplified, the terms become the exact opposite of my own, and in those terms, my own, the story is banal. But see for yourselves:
The first sound, still blended with my dreams, the sound that accompanies my rest upon the earth — I’m not yet lying in bed, at home, between four walls, but with a blanket, pillow, and music that returns to me my body: it’s the pitter-patter on the stairs announcing my mother’s approach. I half open my eyes as her dress brushes against the footboard on the bed, leaving behind a soft morning scent and sending the dust dancing through the light streaming in between the blinds. G. is already in the shower and mother’s dress, her thighs and her back, undulate beside Amado. Our room is snug, and her body makes tight, gentle turns until she’s seated on my brother’s bed, leaning over to tousle Amado’s hair and whispering, wake up, it’s time for school. Amado prolongs the caress by rolling over and moaning, not yet, just a little longer, but she’s back on her feet. And then she turns to me, her face appearing over me. The blinds are tall and she is short, and the morning light creates a halo around her hair, gathered back in a bun. Her head floats in the air, her bright eyes and parsimonious smile intensify this cloud which does not darken, but attracts, absorbs, and clashes with the solid mass that comes to hug me, raising me up from bed with earthy warmth. The morning ritual is broken off, hurried, or modified if G. comes in before it’s over: dressed, clean, silent, and smelling of coconut soap. He puts his folded pajamas away in the drawer, straightens up the bed without bending to kiss his mother. He says only “morning” to her “good morning.” G.’s morning mills this mixture of earth and sky with what remains of nighttime and slumber, and the day asserts itself with the slam of a door downstairs and the smell of the bread that my father eats behind his morning newspaper–mask. I never saw G.’s body, he got dressed in the bathroom and slept in his pajamas. Amado’s body, at breakfast, still smelled of sleep — I think he only ever wet his hair at the sink to smooth his cowlicks and pretended to have showered. Amado’s body is where my perception of my own begins. G.’s body was its limit. I came from my mother’s body and would end up in my father’s.
Such were mornings in our house: talking and listening, everything moving and changing. I began speaking late, and unlike my brothers, I had difficulty learning to write. Our household wasn’t one of many words, but it communicated in other ways. The stairway announced who came and went, the smell of each client stated what kind of work our mother was brought, and at night the way the door opened to admit our father determined what time we’d go to our rooms. In the dark our house grew and was taken over by its true owners: the floor, the walls, the pots and pans, the armchair, the door, the roof, the cracks. They don’t do anything, they’re neither good nor bad, they merely expand, occupy more space, like a foot that emerges from a split shoe. They make themselves comfortable and discuss their own affairs. The sleeping bodies were likewise among the owners of the house, because the bodies weren’t people. They weren’t mother, father, son, and brother: only bodies.
The morning dust brought us back and the house returned to a shape our eyes recognized, but only in the places we passed through. Except for me: I was small and still didn’t have the power to intimidate those things, to make them cease exuding their own personalities, not even with the help of the morning light. Mother, father, and Amado had this natural ability to transform a door into a door, the floor into the floor. But not G. He was turned too far inward to notice anything different, and had no concerns about whether things around him behaved one way or another. He’s the only one to whom the stairway never sang when he went up and down.
José — unpublished manuscript
The father had the smell of bread, Amado that of sleep. And the mother, she smelled warm and soft. Only G. smelled of coconut soap, something that strips away all other scents, a smell of a thing and not the smell of a person. G. doesn’t have a scent, a sound, or a body. He nearly lacks a name. Only an initial. Is that what I was? I worry about what remains, what’s left behind. About what Marta will remember of her grandfather. I usually don’t worry about things I can’t control — my image, for one. It’s an old agreement I made with myself, one that’s now begun to waver. That girl of Teresa’s, the argument with Otávio, my retirement, being the grandfather of a girl who is another man’s child. But what am I saying? Look here, Armando would say, look here, whenever he began a lie.
The girl called, saying that she hadn’t received the letter–reports I promised, maybe some kind of problem with her email. No, I still haven’t sent them, I lost your address, I lied. Her name was Cecília. On the telephone she sounds older, her voice lower, slightly hoarse. She was also more formal. Losing her address was a terrible excuse. It demonstrates a disinterest that I’d like to have but don’t. Maybe this was the reason she drew back, and why Teresa remained absent between us. I tried to redeem myself. I said I’d send them today. And now I’ve just sent them — come what may. Anyway, it’s just foolishness, only a girl and her novel. She’s already spoken with others. I’ll just be one of those clueless cultural subjects like the ones the anthropologists interview in their research — like those teachers and principals who maybe only told me what I wanted to hear. Illustrations, an actor from a decade I don’t even remember, from a story I never chose.
To be honest I don’t really remember what José was like when he was little. It’s as though he hadn’t existed. From elementary school I remember more. He was always glued to Armando, and that embarrassed me. I remember things from before that, too: holidays we spent in São Carlos, Grandma Ana’s house, the way she taught him to read. It seemed to me that he knew how to read perfectly well, and was only too stubborn to do it on command. Back then I thought that stubbornness was an expression of will, a personal decision, the fruit of freedom. I had to force myself to work hard at my studies and I found it unfair that Grandma Ana would give more attention to the one who wasn’t asking for anything, who wanted the world on his own time. After they figured out he was nearsighted, he was always losing his glasses. He’d find a way to break them, and with all the household money spoken for, it wasn’t unusual to see him wearing glasses held together with surgical tape. A strange bird: maybe that was my feeling with regard to José.
With Jussara things were different. She was younger, just a child. We became close when we were older. We all liked her — except maybe for José. He comes and goes, and disappears for long periods of time. I said that maybe he didn’t like Jussara because in my memory he was a being that disliked everything about its situation in the world. But I retain only a few scenes of my youth in which I can see that clearly. He’s only two years younger, we went to school together, I know that we shared the same room and I remember quite well his spot at the table — but not much about him.
We likely choose our enemies the same way we choose friends. What I mean is that the enemies we select are a fun
damental part of our formation: the counterexample is as essential as the example. Enemies can be as liberating as friends can be constraining. I hope I’ve been able to help José as his enemy-elect. Armando was my friend. We shouldn’t be afraid when a student selects us as an enemy, and sometimes it’s wise to be cautious when they offer friendship. It doesn’t always go well. Evil is on the loose, it’s in our hearts, and we aren’t entirely adults at every moment — when we accept a challenge to combat, or pick a fight with a student, we’re capable of hurting them more than we realize, interrupting their flow and sending them into an abyss from which they sometimes can’t climb back out.
Even immobility is flux. Flowing amid what reconstitutes us daily. Here and now are never only here and now. We do not possesses the neurological ability for inertia (except those who’ve suffer trauma). The blind who regain their sight have enormous difficulties with things in movement. To a blind man, a teacup is its volume, and his estimation of its capacity doesn’t change according to his position. Abyss. Immobility is stopped movement — everything flows, it’s necessary to put up resistance in order not to be carried along with the flow — and resistance is a movement. Holding still and thinking without writing. Thinking almost without thinking: the abyss returns and draws me in. There are so many things we don’t do in life. One boy needed glasses and only after six months could I get him an appointment. Six months at eight years old, an eternity for not knowing what you can’t see, for thinking yourself stupid, inferior. I wasn’t able to get Mauro’s stepfather jailed. His mother promised the judge that she’d start giving the boy a bath, and take good care of him. The judge scowled, losing his composure. The mother said yes sir, and Mauro continued to be abused by his stepfather. With a child like that, it’s impossible to reconstruct his ways of perceiving the world. He came to us already offering himself, slouching into others, brushing against them. He got his ears cuffed, waited out benders, was struck by slurs and stones. It’s what he knew. , bend over, take it. He was a slight boy, and provoked his classmates’ violence. He got too close to their desires. The nicer teachers, the ones with a softer touch, who took time out for each student — they were the ones who got it the worst. Later the bony yellow hand, scrawny but with a blind man’s sense for the body’s pathways, stumbled over nipples, earlobes: mouth smeared across mouth in the moment of embrace. They got scared, angrily threw him off, suddenly understanding the cruel nicknames: Little faggot, little fag. How could the boy be reached? Only Mauro knew.
The stricter teachers had a better chance. Posture, limits, concentration, silence, order. The law of the group. It didn’t matter if one kid was shortsighted, the other dyslexic, or if the third had watched his father beat his mother the night before. In school everyone was equal and there was work to be done. The tough teachers helped him more than the sweet ones. The rules were clear and the prejudices all had names. Filthy, scrawny, black, lazy, weakling, wannabe, half-starved, dirty-minded, loser, faggot, idiot. A name is a model as well as a mirror: it’s a place in the world. What can be named exists. It is fixed, precise. Perhaps this is why it reassures, whereas the condescension of the nice teachers only disavows. When they condescendingly deny the name they introduce the vague and terrifying model of nullity.
Me — evaluation notes, undated
Those of us who work in education are an emphatic, opinionated, and by nature optimistic class of workers: a noisy bunch, both men and women, since our voices are our instruments. It’s a bit like being an actor, though always playing for the youngest audience. How can it be that we manage to change so little? I don’t mean opinions, but the concept of education itself: the classrooms, the buildings, the schedules, the rows of desks, the various channels of control of the universities. I’m not talking about buying computers, putting TVs in the classrooms, holding lessons under a tree. The stakes of what we failed to change are much higher. Maybe the methods of evaluation are correct and the problem is all the repetition. We repeat the same material our whole lives. We flip the calendar to hide the evidence, that it’s years of our own lives that we repeat, not merely the material. We ought to be preparing children for the world. We’re a public space for socialization, knowledge, life: children come into contact here with an unfamiliar organization and develop new ways of relating to each other, their identities reflected in different forms, building new possibilities for subjectivity to carry into the world.
But if we think in silence, without speaking, out in the open with just a scarf and our ID, intact and insensible to our surroundings, closed off in our fusty interiors‚ then one day — and not one rainy day, because catching a cold doesn’t strengthen the powers of reason — one fine day on which the sun only appears in the colors and shapes of things, without any shining, your hands, still stiff perhaps, rubbing together, or gesticulating, or cradling your chin, scratching your ear and your head in involuntary trajectories originating in your tangled thoughts as you wander through a São Paulo cemetery on a gray Wednesday in July — if we think in this way, we can inquire deep within ourselves about what exactly makes up the condition of this world, of this life that we’ve consigned to the schools. The obvious first question concerning the schools is this: are we the world or do we prepare for the world? That is, are we the world or its didactic simulation? And is family a part of this world or not?
Yes, we could limit the question to public and private. Maybe that way we’ll correctly delimit our problem and return to that pair, the public and private, so precious to Brazilians — to their separation, intersection, and promiscuity — distinctions which are apparently the primordial basis for the construction of the civilized civilization that we are not.
My legs are still strong, but as the tangle of thoughts thickens I lighten my pace — my lungs can no longer keep up. The temptation comes to interrupt my stroll, to sit down on one of the benches, to lean my forehead into the palm of my hand and prop my elbow on my thigh — to use my arm to create that thigh-to-head circuit so propitious to thought. But my back hurts and I prefer to stand leaning against a grave, my right foot on the ground, leg locked, my left leg on the tomb, dividing my body’s gravity in half. I recall one of Luis Fernando Verissimo’s columns in the paper, about a man gazing into a fire and meditating on the gravity of human affairs, which will only be fully realized when we’re fossils. We too will imprison energy below the earth and we will be like coal, oil, and the decomposed remains of everything that ever lived, integrated into the explosive layer of the planet: what could be more grave? All organic material, from the jabuticaba tree to the potato, yearns for it, this subterranean respectability, this mineral dignity after the ephemeral frivolity of life. From dust to dust, but now after our time in the sun, as another category: combustibles. I brood over this idea of death as becoming-flammable. Not exactly the fact in itself, but its association with our incessant hunger for minerals, and for returning to the great immobility we once were. To unite fossil with explosion. Death and dung are so common, and we appreciate the latter only for transforming organic matter once more: a tree bending over a grave, mineral as transition between human and plant. Fossils and combustion are less domestic images, more the slow and archaic aspects of a larger universe over which we have no control. Our time doesn’t contain them, our view doesn’t stretch. And suddenly a spark, a boom, sound and light, heat. Verissimo’s column contains the thoughts of a man gazing at the fire. Had it been written in a wet month, it almost certainly would have mentioned the importance of air to this process. Air at the beginning and at the end.
A campfire, a bonfire: it only catches when the spaces for oxygen to pass between the logs are well calibrated. You have to think of which way the fire will collapse and which passages will close and open when it does. Maybe more sensation than thought, because not all the facts are at hand: which log is drier or more hollow than another, which way the wind will be blowing the hardest, where the fire will pull the hardest. So you have to weigh the
kindling and the knots in the wood as you arrange the logs. And even, so adjustments are still necessary throughout the process, and extra attention paid if it’s a wet month. And oxygen, at the end. Air, smell, heat, light, and sound.
Maybe we live in wet years, when you get down to it, and things are sticky, making calibration of the air difficult, and more necessary for turning oxygen to fire, for making our students sing, emit heat, and be consumed, emitting light. The sound that green wood makes: violent pops, squeals expelling sap, leaping flames, the solitary ember that scorches the carpet and later burns out. Fire can’t resist: it dies, the charred logs cool. But this is just an image without much use, child’s play of transforming one thing into another, a thing into words, words into history, history back into a thing. Classic images of education: student as the earth where we plant our seed, student as the seed we nourish and help to grow, student as the wild animal we tame, the clay we mold, the stone we sculpt, the bird we teach to fly. The wood that burns. It’s not even a good metaphor. But it would be a big hit at a school assembly or in one of José’s stories: talk and fiction, spaces for subjects and not ideas. The thought that creates generous paths on which others might tread, to attain new vistas, paving another few paces forward, or at least breaking new ground: this new thought is strange to the insensible and luminous subject that writes I, says I, thinks of itself as I, can discern things only from the perspectives of the I. The idea of student-kindling exposes this sterile I.
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