— Oh, Dona Ana, do you think this year Dona Joana could spare some pitanga branches for our New Year?
— Dona Iracy, come on in, I was just about to put some coffee on.
— Oh, I couldn’t Dona Ana, I couldn’t, I don’t want to be a bother. If Dona Joana is with a client, I’ll come back later.
She started to turn around, pulling her kids down from the post at the gate. They never came inside our house. Donana knew this, but insisted anyway. Even the children couldn’t come in. Only the yard and the veranda, which had a dirt floor. They never set foot in the house. I went into their home whenever I wanted: it held some kind of fascination for me, I’d go for no other reason than to be in a place so full and alive, warm with so many things, dimly lit, the floors cool. There was only one door and a ventilation window with milky glass that tipped outward. Their room was above the workshop of an old cobbler, Mr. Jonas, who lived in the house in front. At five o’clock in the afternoon they’d light the oil lamp — that was when I most liked to be there, amid the strong smell of people and kerosene. Zininha had a rag doll. Grandma Ana made a boy doll for me. I’d take some of my mother’s fabric scraps and we’d play for hours, climbing on the bed, the benches, and the table, jumping on top, stuffing ourselves under the bed, whispering our fears about the monsters who peered out at us from the fireplace or from behind the red curtain. They’d grow and grow, becoming terribly large and cruel, hating children more and more, ready to sniff us out. Zininha’s scent: acrid and wet. She let out a wet laugh, her lips wet, her eyes wet with excitement about the monster. She cowered up against me.
— What are they going to do?
— They’ll come slowly, shuffling their feet so that we can’t hear them get closer. They’re going to crouch down and reach under here.
And Zininha would throw herself against me with excitement and fear, curl up behind my back, so that she’d be protected from the terrible hand that was approaching:
— No! Their hands are too fat, they won’t fit under here.
— Silly girl, they just stay out there and wait, all they need is a little piece of your dress and woosh! they’ll pull you out. And you know what happens then.
A nervous laugh.
— Tell me.
— First they smell you all over, just like this.
And I sniff Zininha with loud grunts like an evil monster. She laughs and pushes me away.
— And then they start to taste your skin in little bites, to see which parts are the best. They take a little lick and then a little nibble, a lick and a nibble, just like big kitten.
And I’d go slowly. Zininha was ticklish, she’d laugh and flail in all directions.
— Look out, Zininha, your leg is sticking out! Look — here comes the hairy monster’s hand!
She’d scream in terror and scrunch up behind me again.
— And then what? Tell me what else.
— And then, Zininha, something awful happens.
— What is it?
— I can’t tell you. If I do, you’ll scream and cry and it will ruin everything.
— I promise I won’t.
— All right. Well, then, Zininha, they rip off one of your arms — humfch, chrumf, murunch — they tear out your bones and rip your muscles apart in their hands and then lick up all the blood that spurts out. And they get smeared with your blood, and splinters of your bones get stuck in their thick fur as they chew up and swallow your whole arm. After that they come up to your ear like this and suck on it so hard that it pulls everything out from inside, your eyes, your teeth, your tongue, just like that.
Zininha squeals when I press my mouth up to her ear. One time, she bit me hard on the cheek. I howl from the pain and she escapes from under the bed. I chase her down the stairs and takes off onto the street. Dona Iracy is coming home, and her daughter skips in after her like nothing happened, helping her mother with her bags. I have time to hide in Mr. Jonas’s workshop while the two of them go upstairs. Zininha sees me from the corner of her eye and sticks out her tongue, swinging her shoulders.
— Dona Iracy, come back. Dona Joana’s out making a delivery. But of course you can take some branches.
— No, thank you, Dona Ana. I appreciate it, but I’d rather wait for her. It’s better that way, right? There’s no hurry. It’s not New Year’s Eve yet.
— Dona Iracy, don’t be stubborn, come here woman, and trim that tree — the fruit’s already gone. Son, go inside and get the garden shears and climb up in the tree where I tell you.
I was there, hiding behind my grandmother’s skirt, waiting for a solution to this feminine impasse. Dona Iracy was saying, no, no, what’s the hurry? Grandma Ana was insisting we do it right then — go on, son, are you deaf? They go back and forth and don’t get anywhere.
— When Dona Joana gets home I’ll come back and Nico will climb the tree, he’s done it before, look at him, he’s like a monkey, never stays put on the ground. Hey, kid, get down from the gate, you hear? Sit still for a minute, Mother Mary, if this doesn’t stop, just look at his leg, it didn’t heal right.
My father appeared at the end of the street. Dona Iracy was in a hurry to gather her chicks and get going. She had the chest and the butt of a brooding hen, and her chicks tottered along behind. But leaving without saying hello would be rude. My father was timid, but with a broad smile he smoothed Zininha’s hair and stuck his hand out for Dona Iracy.
— Joaquim, our neighbor needs some pitanga branches for her New Year’s party.
— Oh, it’s not a party, Dona Ana, we’re too poor for that kind of luxury, it’s just to have a pleasant smell in the doorway. Good afternoon, sir, I don’t want to be a bother, I was just going, I’ll come back later.
— “It’s no trouble at all.
They were already moving inside, shooing Nico and Zininha along.
— “Son, run inside and get the garden shears and cut some branches with new leaves, they have a better smell.
I brought the shears but didn’t want to go up the tree. I knew how to climb, I even enjoyed it, but I didn’t want to do it with my father watching, and certainly not the pitanga tree, which had high, thin branches that were difficult to climb. I was shy and self-conscious about my awkwardness as a fat kid. My father knew it but he didn’t perceive depth of my shame. Or he discerned it and took it upon himself to teach me a lesson in front of the neighbors, fortify my character, and get me to snap out of this spoiled-child routine. He was so cavalier about something so minor to him and so enormously major to me that I burned inside, turned red, and swore I wouldn’t do it. Twiggy Nico, ready to climb, stopped himself when he saw my father’s stern gaze. Sensing that the situation had taken a serious turn, Dona Iracy wanted to flee the scene, but didn’t dare say a word. Unlike the desires of the women in the house, my father’s weren’t divulged with words. I couldn’t look him in the eye and neither of us spoke. But I felt his gaze boring into my head as I stared at his dusty shoes and the thunder of his anger and disappointment. Amado was looking down and laughing from the window in our room. He came bounding down, took the shears from my hands and climbed to the very top of the tree. Freed, I ran inside blindly to my room to smash my face into the pillow and smother my screaming hate. G. was studying at the desk behind the door.
— Shut up, faggot.
Under the pillow, little by little, I let it all out. I bit the pillowcase so that no one could hear me, my heart pounding as the tears streamed from my eyes, clenched with rage. But after a while it was all gone. It made me tired, weak, the voice of my father directing Amado to the best branches seemed far away, sweet and deep. I was the one in the tree and my father was happy with my fearlessness, easily accomplishing his orders. Everyone was laughing at Amado’s monkeyish stunts in the tree, even our father was laughing. Even our father. Zininha was me, whom you watched with laughter, it was me who pretended I
was going to fall before flipping off a branch onto the ground. I went to the window to look out, and I laughed, too. I went back down and helped Zininha and Nico gather the branches from the ground.
José — unpublished manuscript
When we’re little, the weakness of others is profoundly irritating. We cant’t admit that it’s not some kind of stratagem, a wily way of getting something that might require too much honest effort. Artifice, like fireworks. Fire that is not fire, imitation. Imitation is not being — it’s something else with no relation to the original. It enchants. It enchants because it perverts and transforms. We can no longer discern the lie. A liar, whoever says that verisimilitude and fraud are unrelated. José lies flagrantly when he describes what he was, what we were. He lies, but it’s him, it’s really him, that boy who won’t climb the pintanga tree and later makes his glorious ascent in the body of his imaginary brother Amado. An invention, this boy who doesn’t have a shred of courage to approach a girl, but who, in the guise of a monster, will suck her brains out. I’m the one who says shut up, faggot. He does what I say. Boys, when we’re young, confuse femininity with weakness. We allow girls to be treated differently: she’s a girl, soft, prissy, dissembling. It’s like that: full of the Ss and Ps that adults transform into princess, petite, precious, and prudent. When we’re young boys, we’re attracted to this feminine ease, but it’s a temptation we reject in the most violent possible manner: by beating and destroying, if necessary, but certainly by tormenting with the name we give to the crime: faggot.
Weakness has a skill near to beauty: that of attraction. The attraction of admiration and rage, those two irresistible stirrings. An entrepreneur feels himself attracted by the beauty of a tropical beach and destroys its charm with a big hotel. It’s a rape. We rape only what we find beautiful and weak. Strong and beautiful is a physical impossibility, plausible only in porn and maybe in fiction. But what about ugly weakness? The question is whether it’s weakness that exerts attraction. And what type of attraction are we talking about? That of destruction. Because it’s not just about taking possession or demonstrating dominance — it’s that, too, but in the end we dominate something that no longer exists: we want every trace of it gone.
I think about groups of kids at the school and the inevitable fat kid they beat up on, about beggars burned with gasoline in the dead of night, about my sadistic dreams. At school and in the dead of night, there’s a mass mentality, group psychology and so on. We beat and burn to feel like part of a group. But it’s not just that. I’m thinking of the pleasure of screaming “son of a bitch!” five, ten times in a row from the stands, cursing out the tiny ref way down on the field (who really is a son of bitch), in unison with thousands of others. I think of the cowardice of the individual in a group, and of the great beauty of a group. I think of the chorus of children’s voices and my pleasure in patrolling the halls to watch students in each of the classrooms. But I refer as well to one specific instance — shut up, faggot — the pleasure of the man who beat me and administered the shocks. Along with the pain came an immense shame: I had known that pleasure.
Of course there’s a calculated utility to violence. In today’s column, João Ubaldo tells a story about a colonel who orders a peasant to flog some poor soul — another in his command, who’d been coming around to see his daughter — and promises him five hundred bucks to do the deed. The peasant says okay, he’ll see to it, but then he comes back saying he’ll need help. He returns with his head down, telling the colonel he’ll still do what he wants, but he’s hesitant. What is it, the cornel asks. Excuse me, Colonel. If you command it, sir, then I’ll do it, but there’s no way that man can withstand a lashing worth 500 bucks. Of course, there’s the primary, generic utility of demonstrating power, of showing who’s boss, and the specific utilities of vigilante justice, extracting a confession, forcing a victim to flee, smashing the head of the child: by that point it’s no longer about good, and heading toward evil. In the schools where I’ve worked, I’ve had numerous conversations with parents who hit their children. “Yes sir,” they’d say to me, “I know, I already spoke to my wife about it, I was never taught to beat my kids, and I’m not about to start now. I just do what’s natural.” The first time I heard that phrase, its significance didn’t register. How is it they were “never taught to beat” and yet the child’s nearly disfigured? Later I realized I’d made an error of calculation. The father only knew how to mete out a five-hundred-dollar beating: he lacked didactic skill with a lash. Beating makes up part of an education and is accepted by children. Ramiro, a nine-year-old boy, told me that when his father got nervous, he would turn red and tremble and punch the walls and break the windows in their house and destroy the furniture. That his father often grabbed his kids and hugged them to his chest, that his grandfather was very violent and his father had promised he’d never beat his own children. But not the mother, who struck them with a rod whenever they did anything wrong. I made a remark, somehow disapproving of the mother. She could barely speak to me, she was so enraged — just look at what the boy’s grandfather did to his father. But hitting a kid isn’t wrong, Ramiro shot back, it’s in the Bible. Jesus hit people who did bad things, and my mother isn’t violent, she only hits us when we do something wrong and dad ends up ruining everything in the house.
Who knows. Maybe for José it would have been less humiliating to get his hide tanned from time to time than it was to suffer our father’s silence. Who knows. The teachers shamed the parents in their meetings, they call them sir and ma’am and speak softly, almost sweetly, ma’am, your boy is coming to school dirty, you need to teach him to brush his teeth, blow his nose; ma’am, he doesn’t do his homework, you need to help us out; sir, he never sits still in class, he’s a mess, he can’t pay attention to anything, education begins at home; ma’am, your boy sleeps through class, is he going to bed late? he’s cutting class, does he have to be at home to take care of his younger brother? no, he can’t, children aren’t supposed to work; he’s belligerent, has a foul mouth, be careful what you say in front of your children. They name the offspring of malfeasants. And then at home the rod is brandished with lust, the lash comes down and is raised again. The content of these admonitions isn’t relevant: they’re about shame and public humiliation. Perhaps?
I remember Cecília’s shock at the violence she saw in the schools, in the students’ families. What can I say? I always knew what to do when one of them came at me. Stare them down, talk it out, listen, strip them of this habit of yelling and beating, otherwise you add to it. Consider the words, hesitations, and expressions of the father, the son, the mother, and try to understand the unique and personal holy spirit which illuminates the triad. Not that I always succeeded. Many times my holy spirit went head to head with that of the family, canceling my ability to listen and see, and I reacted aggressively to the indignation I’d already developed before I even learned the names and life conditions of that mother, that father, that aunt (or neighbor or stepfather or grandmother) who took an eleven-year-old girl into filthy bars to pimp her out, who encouraged their eldest son to whip his sister because she looked the wrong way at the wrong boy. I reacted without knowing that the teacher who spoke with such slow and carefully correct Portuguese had divided the class into blacks and browns and dusky in-betweens, had already identified the snot-nosed kids with skinned knees, unworthy of her precious time. People do what they have to do. What else can I say?
I figure things out by writing them down. The solitude of my annotations, my authors, and my personal vocabulary helps to organize my reasoning. I’m not writing about my ideas or my work, but about ideas and works. The same goes for public debates, interviews for newspapers and magazines: there’s a specific battle being waged, a real point in play, and my voice makes an intervention in what I know. But memory? I manage to understand the posterity of ideas, because they’re a single development, albeit fraught and divided, of what came before, and an argument over
what will come next, and next, and next.
A lone rooster does not a morning make:
he will always need the other roosters.
One to gather up this cry of his
and send it out with another; and another rooster
to gather up the cry of the cock before
and send it out with another, and the other roosters
who along with many other cocks crisscross
the morning sunbeams with their crows
Thus the morning, from its first tenuous thread
is woven among all the roosters.
[ . . . ]
João Cabral de Melo Neto — “Weaving the Morning,” 1962–65
The word, like movement, is divine, without any conjugation, not even the impersonal third person, without tense except the present. It is what is offered. Appearing and appearance. A tenuous thread — this we understand quite well, I suppose — that one sends out and another gathers up, and the morning is made by the crossing of various threads being woven. We understand that many different songs make up the morning. The song is made in the singing. And not just one song: many are necessary. Okay, okay. And now they’re songs, attention, that’s plural, not the singular with “songs,” nor with “roosters.” Okay, okay. Calm down, don’t get ahead of yourself. It’s easy, concordance, it seems obvious, very well, but you won’t get the point just by saying okay. Try to say no sometimes. Say, no, one rooster certainly can make something. He makes: this is important, too. The rooster is important, not only his song. His solitary song is still a song and from it springs the light. And the fact that he sings it is important, even if his song never echoes. You understand this option for saying no? Let’s get a little further into yes. Pay attention, Lígia, we’re moving on, don’t accept things so quickly, resist a little, savor the taste, find it strange. Or, okay, let’s devour it, absorb it with enchantment, let it touch all of our senses, just read it and swallow. Yes, that’s it, your disposition toward the world, the whole world, which goes on forming itself in a sequence of yesses. And one day, maybe today, you’ll sing and in your song everything you’ve swallowed will resound. The song that Marta’s generation will hear and weave into other mornings. I leave Lígia to the side: she learned how to swallow me with various nos and estrangements. She sings her own song now. It seems I only know how to think adversarially. That’s what’s lacking in this interview — not merely the feeling of the verb in the past tense, this interest in the solitary cock crow, not so much his song as his person — but not knowing with whom I argue.
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