by João Almino
[September 10, late afternoon]
44. Aida, Mauricio, and me
– Why don’t we go to the Garden of Salvation? I proposed to Aida, remembering the surgery room and the medium, the professor of theology who already considered me a friend.
Through him, I was able to schedule Aida’s operation for a few days from then, cutting into an enormous waiting list.
– May I go too? Mauricio asked when we were about to leave.
– No. This time you’d better not. It may take a while. Stay with your aunts, Aida said. Besides, your father is coming by here today.
Mauricio scowled.
I couldn’t find the one photograph that I had taken on that trip to the Garden of Salvation. If I find it, it will have the # 44. And if I don’t find it, too bad! There are facts I need to narrate, with or without a photograph.
In the operating room, when a priestess learned that Aida suffered from an incurable cancer, she was categorical in her claim:
– There are no incurable diseases. At least not here.
She told the story of a terminal cancer patient who had started to recover right there after the operation by the medium. Aida’s surgery would take place without cutting. Energy would pass through the medium’s hands to her body like a miraculous chemotherapy.
Aida felt unwell. She became dizzy.
– It’s the heat, I told her.
– I want to leave.
– Just a little longer, until the medium arrives.
If only one person believes in something impossible, like water turning into wine and wine into blood, he’s considered crazy. But if there are many, they depart the realm of madness for the realm of religious faith. If for Aida and a significant portion of humanity Jesus Christ was born to a virgin, resurrected from the dead and risen to heaven, if he could be eaten in the form of a thin round wafer and if some words spoken over a wine from California, Burgundy, or the São Francisco Valley, transformed it into the blood of that same Christ, why couldn’t she trust the healing powers of the invisible scalpel?
A blue sash crossed the medium’s khaki clothes. In front of him, a woman knelt. He placed his hands on her head:
– Without faith the energy won’t work. Have faith and you will be cured.
A beam of light entered the dark room through the glass roof like a divine message. Aida became solemn. Her fragility was obvious. She felt something that she later described only as “undefinable” when the medium placed his hands on her.
It was her last chance. For this reason I promised the gods and all the spirits of the Garden of Salvation that I’d believe in them and adore them for the rest of my life, visiting churches, temples, pyramids, and macumba yards, if Aida were saved. This was blackmailing the heavens, trying to bargain with the divinity, but at that moment not only did my coin of exchange seem acceptable to the gods, but I was also under the impression that at least one of them had heard me, because Aida’s mood improved.
When we got back to the apartment, we ran into Mauricio’s father.
– I need to talk to you, alone, he said to me.
We went to the building entrance. He confronted me with his furious eyes:
– You’re a pervert! You keep showing Mauricio pornographic videos.
– Me?
– Don’t try to deny it, he told me himself. And if you don’t get out of here now, I’ll go to court to take Mauricio immediately. I didn’t want to do this now because he’s company for Aida. But you leave me no alternative.
Tall, with light curly hair and a hook nose, he had twice the muscles I had. Better to let him win the verbal battle and for me to stay with Aida and Mauricio. In fact, he missed both targets: he didn’t manage to expel me from the apartment or take Mauricio; but without realizing it, he hit a third target: he made me give up the adoption process.
– What did he want? Aida asked.
– Nothing, I answered. Forget it! I want to take a photo of the three of us.
It’s the only one in which just the three of us—Aida, Mauricio, and I—appear. I took it with the automatic shutter. Mauricio is sitting on Aida’s lap, on the bed; I’m alongside hugging her. I’ve never liked seeing that photo because Aida, despite her revived spirits, was physically drained, and I feigned a peaceful state that I didn’t feel. I tried to look at the two of them with affection; however, my eyes barely hid my anguish.
[September 11]
45. Landscape dyed gray
I felt like a superior being, able for the first time to dedicate myself day and night to a cause, or more precisely to a person. I lived for the day-to-day, for Aida. I spent hours at her side, gave her the pain medications, answered the phone, took messages, prepared dinner, and took Mauricio to school. She would become distressed, and I lived her distress; she suffered, and I lived her suffering. I declined invitations to go out at night, even the ones from Paulo Marcos. I had gotten an informal leave from work. My boss liked Aida, understood that she needed me and didn’t deduct a penny from my salary.
But if some god had accepted the offer I’d made at the Garden of Salvation, others had found it offensive. The metastasis spread. The doctors didn’t recommend surgery or consider that Aida needed to be hospitalized. The medications were only palliatives.
On a December afternoon, we were admiring the blood-red royal poincianas bending over the hedgerow, with the cambuí trees in the distance, when Aida, altering her tone of voice, took on a grave expression:
– Tânia would be a perfect woman for you. She likes you, that’s easy to see. She asked you to be her daughter’s godfather . . .
– What are you saying?
– I’m going to die. You shouldn’t be alone.
– No one will ever replace you, I declared, full of admiration for the grandeur of Aida’s heart and for her magnanimous gesture.
I didn’t deserve either Aida or Tânia. In reality, I didn’t deserve women, always more loving and wise than I was.
[September 12]
In the only photo of Aida’s last days her sallow, drawn face communicates an air of resignation. She’s surrounded by her sisters, Mauricio in front, against the yellow bedroom wall. An aura developed over the course of her life illuminates the moral and spiritual dimension of her deteriorated, weak body.
At the funeral, only one person’s presence displeased me; it was Stepladder, who barely knew Aida and came uninvited. He irritated me talking about his projects. A large beverage company had bought several of his photos for a publicity campaign to be exhibited in newspapers, magazines, on television and on billboards all over the country.
I didn’t take photographs of the funeral, not even of Aida’s body. Her image in the funeral casket, however, is engraved in my memory more than any other. There her goodness and her love for me were forever preserved. Surrounded by the perfume of flowers, her face was all her faces, including her youthful one, the one I had seen for the first time twenty years earlier. Death highlighted her love for others, her religious feelings, and her dignity. I was left with a wound that not even time would be able to heal. I had lost something irreparable, unique, and irreplaceable. The life remaining to me had lost its color.
I had no right to anything of hers. Nor did I want anything of hers, with the exception of Mauricio, if I could. I would keep only the silver heart engraved with our names.
I took photo # 45, the first one after Aida’s death, on a cloudy afternoon following her funeral after those months of peaceful agony. I’d drunk my beer alone in the bar where we went often when I had the sudden realization that Brasília had changed in its most minute details. The entire universe had been dyed gray, as if a new copy of a technicolor movie had arrived in black and white. No other landscape could be more familiar. Nevertheless, the buildings, the interquadra posters, the signs full of numbers, the clover leaves of the little axis highway in the distance, everything seemed strange, beneath the even light of an overcast January.
46. Bigfoot and Termite
Around that time I moved to my studio at the end of North Wing and returned to the Ministry. Some of my co-workers who hadn’t gone to the funeral gave me their condolences. Others threw me a distant look that I attributed to one of two reasons: a malicious comment by Violeta about me or simply having lost Aida, my godmother and protector. On my desk I found a letter from Livia sent some time earlier. She thanked me for the photographs but forbid me to publish them.
I called Mauricio from there. I felt responsible for him and wanted to fulfill my promise to Aida.
– Never call my son again, you bastard, Mauricio’s father yelled from the other end of the line, interrupting our conversation. Pay attention to what I’m saying. Bastard! If you call again, I’ll break your face, you creep.
The world had changed and so had the mood of my department manager. She announced without preliminaries that in a month’s time she would no longer need my services.
I felt like a trapeze artist without a net, about to fall. Seeing my pirouettes in the air, Antonio would have the definitive proof that I should have listened to him: “Life also means working and building something.” I had dedicated myself to life. Life before, life ahead of and above everything. I had lived for women and, at times like that, it was women I still needed most. But among the ones who had loved me, Eva had committed suicide and Aida had died. I imagined myself at a charity bazaar being auctioned in front of an audience of women, all the ones from my triangles seated like a uniform mass, and Joana standing large as life right before me. At the announcement of the auctioned object, in other words, me, they showed their bodies and an ironic smile. Not one would give a red cent for me. Joana would be the first to say I was worthless. Would Tânia, whom I could now clearly see in the first row sitting with her legs crossed looking at once serene and engaged, be willing to buy me for my sale price?
Only photography redeemed me; it’s all I had left. If photography was a way of seeing the world, I had started to see it in a different way, and I owed that change mostly to Aida. Aida had been guided by higher values. Her memory helped me face life with less cynicism, and she would have been happy to know about my new photography projects. I should also admit that I wasn’t indifferent to the criticism of my exhibition, which may have contributed to my being even more receptive to the suggestions that Aida had made when she was alive. Besides, I weighed in my considerations the fact that I was losing my job, and taking photos of the most squalid satellite cities could bring me some monetary return, as opposed to the photos I had been taking. Above all I was attracted to the idea of taking photographs of Vila Paulo Antonio. I was tired of Brasília’s gigantic arches defying the smallness of man and the laws of gravity. I would compose a photographic essay about the contrast between the futurist city and the anti-Brasílias, between the modern monumentality and the open sewers, between the light, airy structures and the dirty walls rising from the ground.
The difficult thing was to create an original work, one that would bear my mark. I decided to visit Bigfoot in Papuda Prison. I had to see him; I shouldn’t put off the meeting that would have to take place sooner or later. I wanted to acknowledge him and take his photograph. I wouldn’t plagiarize Stepladder; my style was different, and they would be photos only of Bigfoot, not of any other prisoner.
I set foot in a prison for the first time. If Stepladder had come there and taken photographs of so many prisoners, why couldn’t I visit my son and get authorization to take his photograph? I was prepared for the worst. I knew the jail’s horrible reputation. Three prisoners had been killed in a prison rebellion less than a month earlier. Although it was visitors’ day, I waited almost an hour. While I was in the lobby I met reporters interested in the story of the Mexican singer Gloria Trevi, who was incarcerated there in Papuda. She was accused of kidnapping, rape, and corruption of minors and according to reports had become pregnant after being raped by two prison employees. I didn’t know yet how I was going to approach Bigfoot, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what I would say to him.
– What’s up? he asked me with an expression of displeasure. Because he had seen me with the reporters he thought I was one of them.
I noticed a mocking smile on his angular black face, where I sensed a mixture of suspicion and fearlessness. With large, alert eyes and short curly hair cut almost to the scalp, he was a tall, robust man who disguised his insecurity by developing muscles.
I was improvising what to say one word at a time. I introduced myself as a friend of Berenice and Ana, I knew Termite, I had arrived in Brasília several months ago, was a photographer . . . At first, I didn’t dare ask him to pose for me, especially considering I wasn’t allowed to enter with my camera. But I hinted at my interest in obtaining permission to take his photograph.
– To appear in the newspaper?
– No, no. Don’t worry. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the photographs yet.
– Then I’m not interested, buddy. Get lost.
What did Stepladder have that I didn’t have? Why had he been able to persuade all the prisoners to pose for him and I couldn’t convince Bigfoot?
– I’m going to spend some time in Vila Paulo Antonio taking photographs, I told him.
He seemed impatient, not understanding the reason for my presence.
– Berenice told me about your house in Vila Paulo Antonio . . . Would you consider . . . renting it to me?
The idea came to me naturally, and was also helped along by the need to pay cheap rent when I could no longer count on my Ministry salary. Ever since Aida’s death I’d been going through a hard time, my life seemed without meaning, and I avoided going out even with friends . . . Why not live in Vila Paulo Antonio for a while like a monk in a spiritual retreat and on top of that be able to take whatever photographs I wanted, and perhaps even sell them?
– No good. I’ll need the house real soon.
– It would only be for a week, two at the most.
– Depends on the money. I need some money. I wasn’t able to snag a job in here, you know? They’re reserved for the guys with good behavior. I’m what they call a “non-classified.”
We came to terms on the rent, and I left there with the impression that I’d participated in a good business meeting. Business creates friendships, that’s what I hoped.
Berenice called me, furious, when she heard directly from her son about my visit, and she tried to keep me from renting the house. Faced with my determination, she begged me to say nothing to Bigfoot about what transpired between us. She preferred it that way. That he never find out.
I set up my darkroom in Bigfoot’s house, but I’d have to leave it in two weeks when he got out of prison. I completed a series of photos of landscapes that would have nurtured Aida’s heartfelt rebellion; streets that had followed a plan inspired by Brasília and had become filled with disorder and poverty. I framed trash and sewage in spots as deserted as a crime scene, where sometimes an anonymous person wandered by. I wasn’t robbed or assaulted, perhaps because of the respect that Bigfoot’s house conferred in that Vila or for a simpler reason, the one that I’d once explained to Aida: nothing probable ever happened to me.
I quickly realized that those photographs were cold. Neither dreams nor imagination fit in them. Squalor isn’t just an objective piece of data. It doesn’t consist of precarious materials, or the nonexistence of things or food. It needs a face where the feeling of privation and unsatisfied desire can be seen. I wanted to take photographs not only of need but also of envy, desire, and revulsion.
I had already acquired the skill of photographing people—politicians and women, mainly. Now I would use my camera not to glorify people or to celebrate them or even to criticize them but instead to understand them. Following the precepts of great masters of photography, I snapped the camera’s motor on a woman I came across by chance on the street as if it were a machine gun searching for the exact moment and the correct exposure not only of light, mass, and texture but also of
poverty, exploitation, and dignity. In one of the photographs I took, a group of women is seen from the back. They’re in line for the government’s monthly food basket. Just one woman—the one I was photographing—looks back, in the direction of the camera. On her face wrinkled with indignation and despair, in the corners of her crinkled eyes and in her semi-open mouth revealing missing teeth, I read a protest against the behavior of the photographer, who was exploiting her squalor for aesthetic and commercial ends. Putting known theories into practice, I wanted to surprise her so that her shock would reveal some secret, some previously hidden quality or characteristic and capture her unconscious movements, which after the photograph would become the obvious, visible reality. Her protest was justified: I did in fact have the tendency to aestheticize squalor, and, in the end, the only reason the photograph turned out not to be a saleable product was because the editor of the local newspaper, whom Guga had introduced me to so that I could denounce Eduardo Kaufman, didn’t want to purchase my photographic essays on Vila Paulo Antonio.
The result of that essay didn’t satisfy me either. I ought to seek out the collaboration of the people I photographed, as Guga had suggested. My photos should reveal what was special and unique in each one of them; I should know their names and establish, if not a relationship, at least some contact with them. The solution would be to salvage my project of transforming Bigfoot himself into the main character of my photographs.
I had a brief conversation with him on the eve of his release from prison. I didn’t want to act like a tourist or a hurried reporter, I told him. Could he be my “guide” or “teacher” in Vila Paulo Antonio?
– I’ll pay another week’s rent if I can continue using your house. I wouldn’t even need to sleep there. I’d just leave the equipment there and use it as a base to continue the work I’ve started. It would be a matter of sharing the house with you for no more than one week.