Joaquim Ferreira — reminder, circa 1959–60
Joaquim Ferreira wasn’t a big reader and his choro didn’t have lyrics. But he liked listening to samba, was intrigued by the lyrics. My mother warbled as she worked around the house, and sometimes he would correct her on one of the verses. He liked Mario Reis and his tastes suggested he was into bossa nova, but he had a problem with it. Maybe it was a question of class: all those clean-cut boys with their American success. But he was clean-cut too: no drama, all concentration and restraint. Pronouncing each syllable clearly, nothing sentimental, only music. Dona Joana would get a song in her head and sing it all day long, the timbre of her voice fluctuating with her mood. If she messed up her stitching or became displeased with anything, get that smile outta my way, I wanna come over with my pain took on a militant melody, with a bellicose tone of defiance. First thing in the morning she was more sensitive to the romance of the world: I’ll have a quail’s egg for dinner, it’ll get me outta this pickle became a saccharine lamentation, emerging from a broken heart. Dona Joana wasn’t very attentive to words in general, and not only with regard to music. She trailed off in the middle of sentences, got distracted, mixed up names, and was still easily understood by all.
Joaquim Ferreira was the detailed one, an orderly man who had a hard time with any collective, particularly those that contained variables of diverse nature: for example, daily life. A focused subject, perhaps a little too focused. If everyone did his bit the whole world would be better off. It had nothing to do with Germanic selfishness or liberal individualism: doing one’s bit meant looking out for each other.
I found a kitten in the street and mother let me keep him. He has white and yellow tiger stripes. He stays all day in the cardboard box I lined with cloth. He doesn’t eat, doesn’t meow, doesn’t want milk. He didn’t even pee or poop. I think he’s going to die. His eyes get wide at any little noise. I try to make him happy by petting him, but I think I’m so sad that I only make him scared. I think we’re going to die. Guto got here last night, the same day I found the kitten. After Armando died, I knew he was going to be home soon — father said so. Someone called father, he hung up and said to mother: they got Armando, go get Guto’s room ready, and then he fell silent. Then he came and I was happy because he was alive and Lígia wasn’t going to be an orphan and also because I like him a lot and I thought he was going to die. I took the cat out of the box and put him on my lap, on my chest, to see if he might feel better by listening to the beat of my heart. But it only made him more scared. He took off running and went to hide in a corner and meow. He doesn’t want any of the bread or milk I left in a saucer near his cardboard box. I got a postcard from José — he’s in London. It was a psychedelic postcard and barely said anything. There was a lot of stuff written in English, and he called me baby. I’m happy Guto’s here, but he’s so sad. The whole house is weird. It seems like something worse is about to happen. It’s better not to die for now, mother needs my help. Hold on a little longer, kitty. He’s got quiet over there in his corner. Maybe if I’d left him in the street, the mother would have come back. Lígia doesn’t cry much, she’s cheerful. Guto still doesn’t put her in his lap. I don’t know if he’s happy to see her. She’s so cute. Mother took a photo of her and wanted to send it to Eliana, but we don’t know where she is. Dona Esther is coming by all the time to see her grandbaby. She’s weird. She was very sad at Armando’s burial. All in black, with a veil, she looked like something from the theater, and a little like a turkey buzzard, too. The kitten meows and meows and Lígia cries and mother comes to pick her up. I don’t want to pick up the kitten, dumb cat, afraid of everything. Here’s your milk, dummy.
When I was little and Armando was already grown up, he taught me how to play hopscotch. We didn’t have chalk, so he scraped the ground with a stone, making big squares, for someone his size, and then wrote HEAVEN in big letters, but upside down. I still didn’t really know how to read, but I knew that it was upside down and I complained. Armando told me that’s how it was supposed to be, because it was only heaven when you got to the top and started to come back. Then José, who was almost never home anymore, he had it out for me, and he came the next day and wrote other words. He wrote them firmly, with some kind of yellowish brown stone. The stone that Armando used was white. José wrote something along the side of every square.
Mother just came into my room. I’m here pretending to study because I don’t want to be out there, everything seems bad, Guto’s voice is thick and low, mother is letting Lígia stay in here so I can watch her while she makes dinner. Her crib is next to my bed, and she stays in there playing with a little bunny that mother made for her, with long ears for her to suck on. She makes little noises that other babies don’t make.
On our hopscotch court, José drew a large ball, like a lake, before number 1, and wrote HELL inside. Next to the first three squares he wrote, INFERNO. Beside four and five, he wrote FLAMES. Next to the sixth he wrote SCORCHED EARTH, and along the seventh and eighth, he wrote VERDANT FIELD + CLOUDS, but upside down, like HEAVEN. I didn’t understand the words when I got home and saw them. I had school in the afternoon and my brothers had class in the morning. When I came home and saw all that, those letters that I understood individually, but not how to put them together, I got really mad. I didn’t know what he wrote, but it was mine, and he had no right to mess it up. Guto was my friend, and when I got his attention, I asked for him to read it to me. He read it and I didn’t understand some of the words, but I understood the sequence and I didn’t like it. Guto said that we could erase it with a broom, but I knew that it wouldn’t do any good, it was already marked for good, scraped into the earth, and now that every part had its own name, this was what they’d be called, even if I wrote other names over it and nobody could read the words José had written. The first name was always the right one, I knew that, and Guto thought he could distract me because he didn’t want me to be sad, he thought that I was still too small to know about serious things.
I think it was always a little bit like that. I could count on Guto to protect and help me, but for knowing about serious things in the world, I paid attention to José. He sent me a tape of the Beatles, called me little sister, told me I’d flip if I were with him in London, he wrote me that I have to hear Tommy by The Who, but he didn’t send me a tape and I think I still don’t have that record. He lives with his friends in a big, old house, he says that it’s the best, a superfamily but without the judgment: there’s children, babies, music, and everyone laughs and cries and talks and everything’s great, nobody polices anybody else, he tells me that I have to get hip to the idea that the world is a lot bigger than Vaz Leme number 7, by a long shot, that medicine is great, it lets you understand your body, see inside it, it saves people and births them from their mothers, but there are other journeys before that, that the world is just starting now, in this precise and exact moment, that medicine and school can wait, and what I need to do is get out, take off, see what’s out there, smell the roses because life is short and it’s going fast, baby, a lot faster than at Vaz Leme 7, let me tell you. A chill wind is gonna come, the leaves will fall, my dear, and you won’t have seen anything, honey, you won’t have smelled the scent of poppies at sunrise, shivering to death.
Sometimes I think just that, my brother: that I’m a little baby girl hidden behind her mother’s skirt, a coward who still needs the board that Grandma Ana put over your yellow HELL — that board that was the bridge to goodness, guarded by good angels who never slept and who were stronger than the worst HELL. And I crossed the bridge and then could begin the game: tossing the stone, hopping through the infernos and flames because the angels at the bridge that grandma built gave me strength. And then I get angry about it all, about Vaz Leme and this cat that won’t eat and meows with fear, about my own fear and laziness. Sometimes I pack my backpack, sometimes I write stories of girls who leave, sometimes I listen to Janis Joplin and cry by myself
, sometimes I kiss Nando and he squeezes my breasts and feels up my legs and we listen to Janis Joplin together and I forget about my sadness and I smell the scent of the poppies at sunrise and I remember the way Armando’s hands made me fly. I used to cross over your hell feeling nice and warm because Armando held me firmly and made me leap like a ballerina, before grandma’s bridge was ever built, Armando’s warm hands lifted me, I flew and fell into his lap and I was glad there were infernos and flames and everything else because I liked to fly with Armando, until my father got home and Armando never came back and you left and never came back. Once I wanted to be Rita Lee. Another time I wanted to be in London with you. But sometimes I think that you’re an asshole who got left out because you’re just a nothing, a nobody, zero.
Ligía went to sleep, the cat is sniffing at the bread dipped in milk. Today is Friday. Father got home and supper is almost ready.
Jussara — loose leaf paper, probably April 1970
I don’t remember the cat. I remember very little from those days. Jussara was studying for her college entrance exams and was helping out a lot with Lígia. When I’d studied for those exams in the back room, she was still playing hopscotch on the front patio. Even after José’s words were washed away by the rain and she’d redrawn the game, Jussara kept the board where it was. Maybe I’ve confused the cat’s cries with Lígia’s, and for that reason have a vivid memory of her as forlorn. The whole house was vulnerable and forlorn. In that supper, maybe that’s it, there was a confusion that even up to today I attributed to my reserves of hallucinations, at that supper when our father took an eyedropper from his vest pocket and said the cat was still to small to know that its discomfort was caused by hunger, that for this reason Jussara needed to feed it milk from the eyedropper, force it down if she had to. My mother said something about the fish being tender and in my memory it was recorded that they were feeding Lígia with the eyedropper and giving her tender fish, which sounded a little crazy because she was too big to be fed with an eyedropper and too small to digest fish. My fingers were half-crooked, I was afraid of dropping her on the floor, I preferred not to pick her up. I felt like I had been made permanently dirty, something covered in stench and sweat, it seemed to me that Lígia got upset whenever I came near. My father no longer held evening meetings, he didn’t play the flute. He was no longer part of the union, maybe it was shut down by the regime. Sometimes people came over, but it was rare, and I don’t think they were his colleagues. He didn’t like these visits, and sometimes they were young people, they might have been from the organizations, other times they were shadowy figures whose provenance I couldn’t determine. Those were confusing times, every utterance cut short, everyone suspected, I was always half-dirty and disheveled, returning to the home I’d left four years before. I hadn’t lived with my parents in the time before I went to prison. A lot of work, studies, marriage, the new house. Eliana pregnant, anyway, maybe some of those people had been guests in the house in that time and it was I who was the stranger there and everywhere else. Aside from the deaths of Eliana and Armando, my insomnia and auditory hallucinations made memories of this period dirty and diluted.
The 1970 World Cup, entire series of plays, Jairzinho’s joy, Pelé’s leap, Tostão’s ranking, his hope, the malice of a fakeout, and something free and determined, a group of large, fearless men, this remained with intensity among the fragments in my memory. Today, it makes me happy to remember. Today I understand the sequence of the plays and their link to each game. At the time I was excited, I learned of each pass between black holes. The feeling was too big, too crushingly sad to fit in my chest. And if it didn’t work? If the ball didn’t make the goal? If they intercepted a pass? If we didn’t win? What would become of us? And those big, valiant men? And Brazil, what would become of it? We had a TV, it was small and black and white; I remember the games in color, the tight shorts, and various plays in slo-mo, ultra-slow, centuries, the muscles tensing, the leg turning, the foot catching, the ball fitting perfectly, smacking against it to go flying, traveling, sailing over, spinning with style against a forehead that alters its trajectory and sends it flying like a bullet to the goal. An immense joy rings out, my father quiet, staring in that fixed way the stroke had left him, a mask that swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple rising and falling and then, after the goal, his shoulders relaxing, his head lowering, his blink delayed. There were other people around, maybe friends of Jussara’s and neighbors who didn’t have TV. I remember the small children, and Lígia on my mother’s lap. Everyone jumping and shouting, hugging, my ear aching, I stretched my mouth wide to unlock my jaw, I went out to the street and felt the fluttering of my heart. Once again, disaster had been avoided. We’re not going to die, not now. They’re good, they’re the best, it’s clear and scientific, but that’s not enough. Other times we were the best and still lost. Being right or certain never matters: there’s disappointments along the way, and others who are certain, something we only perceive later, when everything is over. But it won’t be that way this time, I have faith that it won’t. We’ll save ourselves, I believe in God the father we will. Our Lady the Untier of Knots will light our bath and confuse the spirits of our adversaries. I thought things like that, they lacked any kind of center, I wasn’t even thinking, they were phrases that flew through my head, coming from who knows where. I was afraid for the children and for Lígia, for all the women of Brazil, it seemed to me that if we lost the Cup, it would be a truth that lasted forever, an eternal never again was at play in that Cup, in the feet of those Brazilian demigods. What insanity was this? Violent, bizarre rationale.
This was how I lived through the conquest of the triple championship and the few other things I clearly remember about 1970, a clarity that is, perhaps, excessive. It’s not the games I remember, but individual plays made by specific players, and the feeling of imminent catastrophe that would befall us all in the event of a loss. I don’t remember the cops dragging me out of my home, or my arrival to prison. I imagine the cells were down below, because I do recall going upstairs for interrogations. But I think there was sunlight wherever they held us. I remember the sound of the cell door opening, the cold that clutched at my stomach, the desire to vomit. I remember that I didn’t talk. In my first few days back at home, I remember the desolation of the house, Lígia’s cries, Eliana’s chills, and Luiza’s voice on the telephone. I don’t remember anyone telling me about Armando’s death or Dona Esther’s later on. I remember Dona Esther whispering in Lígia’s ear and the disappointment in her eyes. Today I can’t imagine what the day-to-day life at home and at work in the schools must have been like. I know that I resumed my position as principal and teacher before winter vacation began in July. I don’t remember who, nor where, nor in what situation, but they told me my file with the Department of Political and Social Order had been pulled and it was clean, there was no impediment.
With everything lumped together, memories and the unremembered, I start to think I got it wrong. Maybe no one has ever considered me a traitor except myself. And something else: I don’t remember this having been important in the last twenty years, but it returned with a vengeance in the days after my retirement, as I think about this interview, and as I leaf through old papers and prepare to abandon the house. In any case, if it’s still so strong, it can’t be a false problem. Yes, the first step over which the others aggregated, forming this calculation that has perturbed me, shaking my mind from the inside, generating friction and infections, blocking vital channels, forcing others to break open, after which things calmed until this violent resurgence at the onset of old age — this first step might have been a misunderstanding. No, misunderstanding is a bad term, it presupposes truth and lies, which might have been different. That, right there, is the truth. It might have been some other way — it always can be. Now we’re getting into what-ifs, as the commentator on the game put it the other day on the radio.
The term is bad because it doesn’t take into accou
nt that there was a propitious environment for this kind of calculation to be made. If it weren’t for that, things might have been altogether different: Luiza’s voice, the doubting eyes I spied, perhaps in error. I never understood, for example, why they let me stay on as principal. Maybe they weren’t so organized, or maybe I wasn’t so dangerous. It was a fertile time for paranoia in general. Any flap of a butterfly’s wings in Japan might have precipitated the formation of this history of betrayal in me.
Brazil: love it or leave it — last one to leave, get the lights. Man is dead, then as now. Vietnam, Albania, the Soviet Union, Mozambique, Mao’s Red Book, Guevara dead and mythified, Allende still alive. But this life of buses and bakeries, the life of classrooms and waiting in line, was the same miserable life as always.
Ay, ay,
What a thankless life the tailor leads!
When he errs he ruins the fabric
And when he succeeds, the clothes don’t please
If it slips, your hand?
I’m cutting the cloth.
And if they’re disappointed?
I’m cutting the cloth!
I Didn't Talk Page 14