Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  For purposes of typographical ease, she will be henceforth referred to as O. Apart from the sexual element implicit in the letter, she bears no resemblance to the protagonist of the well-known Story of O. “O” refers additionally here to the perfection of a circle, the spirality of this love affair, O as a mystical letter combining the angelic and the carnal in man, etc. The two horns may represent the other two women in Abel’s life, whom he now finds reembodied in O. The dot in the middle of the ideogram might be for the bullet wound where O shot herself on her wedding night, after her bridegroom raped her with his icy glans. (The bridegroom, Olavo Hayano, is a yolyp, about which more later.) The dot might also be for O’s second vulva, or her second being, or her second perfection, for she is twice-born, has four eyes, and has been a double, a Janus, an amphibian, etc., ever since she fell down an elevator shaft on her tricycle at the age of nine. She is 32 during the assignation. Also she is 23.

  Abel, as might be expected, is questing for Paradise, and he finds it in O, literally. When they fuse, the mystical bird, the Avalovara, which is inside both of them, and which is really made up of a swarm of tiny birds, takes flight, and O and Abel become one to the point of sexual duality and even interchangeable ownership of the immediate vulva.

  But I’m getting ahead of the story.

  From the outset, the work is staggeringly episodic. It is composed of eight books, each with a separate theme, subject, form, and style, each broken up into numbered and lettered segments (two books have 10 segments, two have 17, one has 24, etc.). The segments of each book grow progressively larger (probably in some prefigured arithmetical progression which requires scrutiny beyond my patience) and the books are all interwoven, a method of presentation which can derange even a careful reader, especially since Lins is diabolically clever at withholding any information that might lead to clarity.

  To avoid derangement I read four of the sections separately; and read this way they are accessible set pieces. In one of these, “The Spiral and the Square” (the spiral being an equivalent to time, the square to space), Lins, through a parable of a merchant and slave in Pompeii, explains the theme and the geometry of the overall work, which is a spiralling palindrome within a square. The palindrome, in Latin, is: “SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS,” which has a mysterious double meaning: “The farmer carefully maintains his plow in the furrows” and “The Plowman carefully sustains the world in its orbit.” Since we are also talking about sex here, I suggest a third meaning; but since Lins didn’t spell it out I won’t either.

  A second discrete section is “Julius Heckethorn’s Clock,” and I found this the most satisfying section in the book: mysterious, as Lins likes it, but also complete. In it Julius builds, in the 1930s, a clock of almost miraculous complexity, equivalent, in the author’s intention, to this novel. “Julius is aiming at this,” writes Lins: “to place people, as they face the sound systems of his clock, in the same attitude of perplexity that they undergo before the universe.”

  The clock is so complex (it plays the introduction to a Scarlatti sonata) that it stands “as a symbol of the astral order.” By the time it finds its way to Brazil, three decades after its creation, no one alive has heard the full phrase from Scarlatti, though the clock, presumably, has chimed continually. It will reveal the full phrase, full complexity, perhaps, when O and Abel climax; just as an eclipse of the sun will take place about the same time, and U.S. rockets will be fired from Brazilian shores in a great public sabre-rattling.

  Both the spiral and the clock sections are Borgesian in style and relate only metaphorically to the O and Abel story.

  The other two separable sections are “Roos and the Cities” and “Cecelia Among the Lions,” and are the stories of the two women, other than O, in Abel’s love life.

  The Roos section is Abel’s chase of the ethereal Roos (she quotes Anacreon verbatim) through several European cities, Abel panting heavily, Roos generally giving him the back of her frosty neck. Yet he loves her, wants her, sees in her face the mystical city for which he is questing. But he never scores, and he wonders if he should have shown her his sexual equipment as a persuader.

  The Roos section is essential to Abel’s mystical quest, but this does not keep it from being boring and absurd. Roos as a character is as thin as an interface, and the dialogue at the pair’s anguished farewells is so fatuous it’s hard to believe Lins wrote it: “Thanks for the lakes” … “If you can, send me a postcard at Ravenna …”… “I will” … “I’ll never be able to thank you enough for coming to Milan.” Or: “Goodbye. Send me a postcard.” … “Roos … I was happy this afternoon! I feel as if I’d been inside a drum. A loud drum. As if I were surrounded by a rhythm. A roll. The drum.”

  “Cecelia Among the Lions” is much more vital, almost naturalistic at times, with abundant and vivid dialogue as it sketches Abel’s early, lower-class life in the city of Recife. But its earthy realism also mingles with wild surreality as Lins tells the story of Cecelia, the social worker and hermaphrodite, and of Abel’s passion for her—his embrace of contraries, as the author neatly puts it.

  Lins at one point calls this novel an imitation of an ancient morality poem. An inkling to at least part of his moral intent emerges in the Cecelia section, where Abel views the people of Recife as being lost privately within a lost nation. He sees Brazil as absent of meaningful focus, moving chaotically, erratically, the Recife people possessed of an “incapacity … for any permanent effort of continued obligation.” Abel sees himself as one of these, unable to commit himself to any revolutionary action, writing for reasons he cannot understand, questing for the ungraspable, but questing artificially through dreams and hallucinations.

  The theme of oppression looms over the work, as it looms over modern Brazil, and Lins embodies this oppression in Olavo Hayano, a lieutenant colonel in the army, and also a yolyp. Lins defines the yolyp at considerable length, but piecemeal, before he connects it to Hayano, typical of his narrative method. Only six yolyps ever exist at one time in the world in any generation; all are male, born with a spiny placenta which wounds the mother so grievously that she never reconceives or even fully recovers; the yolyp’s face is visible in the dark; he is sterile, and brutal; and he’s also O’s husband.

  Living with a yolyp, living with Brazilian political oppression; these themes (among others) merge throughout the four remaining sections of the book, some of which will put you to sleep. All four concern either the assignation or the histories of O and Abel—even though we never find out how they met, or became lovers, or what they are truly up to in this assignation. Is it a suicide pact? Just another moment in the affair? Will they confront the yolyp? Follow the spiral to Paradise and find out. Maybe.

  Abel-Lins spells out his views on the yolyp question in an essay which he serves up, as usual, piecemeal, in the last quarter of the book. A major point—articulated—is that “an artist can remain faithful to the questions that absorb him most intensely and still do his work, ignoring sordidness and brutality.…” The writer who thinks this way is contaminated, Abel argues; but in so behaving he also “rescues an anomaly … that the expansion, purity and sovereignty of spiritual life are not incompatible with oppression.”

  Lins’s novel stands as an argument favoring this view. But whether he proves or negates the same point with the story of O and Abel as they ignore the yolyp and pursue their spiritual ends, is arguable. But then almost everything in the book is arguable, for Lins creates Abel as a man who can rationalize any issue, who accepts the world’s mysteries as existent and worthy of scrutiny, but is unable to translate them into graspable metaphors. Abel’s imagery is forever shifting, fantastic, confounding, and his quest is built on this imagery.

  Lins tells us his own attitude early on when he speaks of this book as the “tracing out … of a trajectory of which the protagonist is ignorant and the meaning of which has still not been defined for the author.”

  In this authorial confusion, as well as in the story�
��s maddening obliquity, the book evokes comparison with the work of Robbe-Grillet, and Alain Resnais, separately, and most particularly in their collaboration: the great non-sequitur film, Last Year at Marienbad, on whose meaning they disagreed. Also, many sections of Avalovara are voyeuristic in the way of Robbe-Grillet’s anti-analytical novels; only Lins extends the voyeurism to Abel’s surreal imagery, whose meanings are as moot as those of Robbe-Grillet’s furniture. Also, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch comes to mind as a precursor of any novel written in numbered sections. And in the Paradise sequences, when lubricity is at flood, Lins drops much of his punctuation and moves nonparodistically into the style Joyce gave to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.

  Lins, like Abel, began as a banker with a degree in economics and finance. He published his first novel in 1955, and three more novels thereafter, plus two books of stories. His works won prizes and some were published in France, Spain, and Germany, but until now, nothing has appeared in the United States. At his death his work-in-progress was a novel.

  Lins also wrote for theater and television, published several collections of essays, wrote a travel book with his second wife, Julieta de Godoy Ladeira, also a writer, who survives him. He taught Brazilian literature, and won his doctorate at age forty-six. But fiction writing was the work of his life, and Avalovara the book of his life. Whatever its flaws, echoes, and excesses, Avalovara is a nonpareil work.

  1980

  * This review was written for The New York Times Book Review but not published. It is printed here for the first time.

  Lygia Fagundes Telles:

  The Girl in the Photograph

  Lygia Fagundes Telles, little known in this country, is one of Brazil’s most popular serious writers, a novelist and short-story writer who has been publishing since 1944, when her first collection of stories appeared. She has published ten other books since then, among them The Girl in the Photograph, the novel which appeared in 1973 under the title As Meninas. This publication is the first of several works by and about Latin American women in the Avon/Bard paperback series of fiction originals.

  The novel is obviously the work of an accomplished writer, and has had exceptional popularity in Brazil—a best-seller given eleven printings. I assume the book’s success is the result of its appeal to an audience of young women, plus the author’s substantial reputation—she published two other novels and five collections of short stories prior to this work. The three books which followed it were two collections of stories, and a book of fragments called The Discipline of Love, her most recent work, published in 1980.

  Her preference, clearly, is the short story, which is without doubt one reason this work is not as satisfactory as it should be, given her stature, her obvious talent, her insight into human behavior, her subject matter, which is rich in social detail, and her courageous views on political repression. The translation of the novel by Margaret Neves is clear and accessible, even when the author is being elliptical. Language is never a problem, but the form in which it is packaged most definitely is.

  The story concerns three young women, all living in Our Lady of Fatima Boarding House, run by Catholic nuns. The boardinghouse is perhaps a metaphor for Catholic Brazil in the 1960s, a time of social upheaval, torture of political prisoners, and radical resistance to fascism. The author seems also to use her three principal characters metaphorically, isolating them as types—components of contemporary Brazilian womanhood.

  One of the principal characters, the lovely Ana Clara, is a model who has dropped out of college, a child of loveless squalor now become a heroin addict, deeply into pathological promiscuity. The second is Lorena, child of wealth, militant virgin endlessly fantasizing her defloration by a married man, about whose life and love she speculates monomaniacally. She spreads her wealth magnanimously among her friends, who use her for their own ends, her largesse again metaphorically linked to a family of dynastic wealth (her brothers are named Romulo and Remo). The third girl is Lia, mulatto daughter of a Dutch Nazi (disaffected from Naziism). She is an intellectual, a sexually liberated young woman, a committed revolutionary.

  All three are linked to men who never appear in the story, the point being their obsession with insubstantial maleness. Ana Clara craves money and so has a rich fiancé whom she loathes. She loves, without really being able to give or accept love, Max, another addict, who gives her nothing she can use in life. Lorena throughout the book awaits the call from her lover, Dr. Marcus Nemesius, but the call never comes; he is less than serious about her. And Lia thinks only of Miguel, her radical lover, jailed for his revolutionary activity, but freed in exchange for a kidnapped ambassador. Lia prepares to go to Algeria to join Miguel and live a revolutionary life. She will crawl to him if necessary, yield her body to strangers to get to him.

  Of the three women, the most appealing is Lia the revolutionary, because she at least is an active figure in this world, a woman who, however subordinate to the male, is nevertheless aware of the need to be done with the victim status; and this is something the other women do not understand. The most satisfactory scene in the first half of the book comes when Lia confronts a young man in whom she has no interest, and takes him on sexually in the way one might feed a stray cat. It is a Tea and Sympathy encounter, taking place in a grubby and dirty office where revolutionary students talk about Malraux and Rosa Luxemburg and scheme about changing the world, which means raising their own lives an inch or two up from squalor through their intellectual visions of a better world.

  We are grateful for this scene on page 111 because it is at last a scene, and until this point Fagundes Telles has been giving us character. God, does she give us character.

  Her choice of storytelling method is a fatal error in the design of this book, although I cannot forget all those readers who put the novel through eleven printings in Brazil. Why was I so bored with it up to this point? I do believe it was because the author chose to go the Molly Bloom route, and Molly the wondrous sometimes gets heavy, even for Joyce fanatics.

  Fagundes Telles does not eschew punctuation as Joyce did, but she eschews action. She chooses to define her characters by what they think, chiefly of themselves, and sometimes of one another. We come to know the specifics of Ana Clara’s addiction from her friends, Lorena and Lia (who are very easily confused until the book is well along, merely because of the “L” element and because of the switching of internal monologues from one to the other when they are talking together).

  The internal monologue is a tool, but only a genius can use it to the degree Fagundes Telles uses it. It becomes repetitive and obvious here, an unpleasant thing to say about a writer of her quality.

  If the reader is concerned only with an excursion into female ideology, the analysis of the three types through this method may present no problem. Fagundes Telles is obviously satirizing upper-middle-class vapidity, Catholic sexual repression, as well as the lethal joys of the drug culture. She also loads the cannons against men in all particulars: there isn’t a worthy one on or off camera in the novel, as far as we can tell. This may be hateful to the macho supremacists among us, but it really isn’t important. Her point is the females’ acceptance of subordination, the psychological rape and exploitation that they agree to without any comprehension of what is really happening to them.

  This is no doubt important, but as a story it all palls, until about three-quarters of the way through, when the author opts for action. Her story then is vitalized—Ana’s encounter with a Valentino freak; Lia’s class encounter with Lorena’s ridiculous and neurasthenic mother (another victim of male exploitation, but again the men are absent, the women are the problem); and finally, the turning of the virginal worm, when Lorena the child grows up to face the tragedy at hand, and behaves with love and wisdom and courage and foolhardiness.

  By ending the book on an active note, a most satisfying piece of behavior, the author unites the three principal characters meaningfully, and creates in them a dimension none of their interior meanderings h
ad been able to convey.

  A final point on the storytelling: the sections are discrete, and sometimes effectively so, but this works against the novel’s coherence. The author appeals to that in us which reveres small detail, private insights contributing to the epiphany; but she lacks the quality that vivifies such detail in a narrative and compels us to read on.

  The self-concern of the three young women is discouraging. Even so we would follow them willingly if we knew the intertwining of their lives was leading us somewhere. But there is no plot, there is only self-referential character, and then the fusing of the isolated lives in a climactic moment.

  Three flawed lives, three sad young lives, three lives that sputter along, each in an emotional wasteland of its own unique design: this is what the book comes to. It is an important spectacle but its presentation is tedious. The book should have been shorter. Fagundes Telles should trust us to understand behavior without marathon introspection. The monologue may work on the analyst’s couch to exorcise the demon, but on the printed page it turns the demon into a sleeping pill.

  1982

  Jorge Amado:

  Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars

  If we were back in the 1940s Jorge Amado’s new novel would be a great vehicle for Dorothy Dandridge, or maybe Rita Hayworth in brown-face. His heroine, Tereza Batista, is a lithe and loving copper-colored saint, a glorious nonesuch from the subcontinent, a fantastic beauty with a bod of bods, a prism of strength, a champion prostitute, a magnificent concubine, the personification of selflessness, a martyr to charity, a paradigm of virtue and fidelity, a cop-kicker and leper-licker, but also, sad to say, rather a bore, and a literary joke.

  Amado has written a sensual, comic work this time out, again about Bahia in Brazil, again with all the lavish detail of life as it is lived in the torrential spew of his imagination. Amado has his champions in this country, after his success with Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and other work published here since 1962. He has been publishing novels in Brazil since 1931 and is a respected artist at home and elsewhere. Perhaps there are abundant readers in the United States who will value this new work as they valued his others, who look to him for diversion from the North American landscape, and who revel in the small details of life in the provinces, the slums, the brothels and the aristocratic and bureaucratic degeneracies of Brazil.