All Dogs are Blue

by Leao, Rodrigo Souza

  There’s not a lot of chit-chat. Idle chin-wagging. Here it all boils down to screams or to I’m going to Paracambi. If you don’t eat, you’ll go to Caju.

  What is loneliness? It’s living without obsessions. But sometimes in life we have to choose between pounding the tip of a knife or letting ourselves get burned in the fire.

  Which is worse?

  A man dressed in jelly blew a kiss inside a Coca-Cola bottle.

  You shouldn’t write about asylum life.

  No. Everyone has an asylum nearby. Either your handbag is an asylum, or your home, or even your wallet. Lots of things can be an asylum. I’m not talking about untidiness, I’m talking about real asylums.

  Rimbaud showed up dressed like an Apache Indian. He said I was turning into General Custer.

  There were lots of flowers around the clinic. It was a nice place. That’s why I say asylums are such pretty places that they remind you of cemeteries. Those cemeteries with huge gardens.

  Rimbaud liked playing with fire. He lit candles. Baudelaire liked the dark. But he didn’t like fighting and he often disappeared when Rimbaud showed up. Rimbaud was my friend all the time. A real wild child.

  I’d never met anyone who’d been beaten.

  So I went to Disneyland and beat the shit out of Pluto, machine-gunned Mickey Mouse. All because I liked National ‌Kid and the Venusian Incas10. Violence is so fascinating, and our lives, so normal. I’m talking about a specific kind of violence. Everything can be violent. Even God.

  Not God: gods.

  I have rituals. I light one cigarette after another and let them smoke. I let each of the gods smoke their own cigarette. Sometimes I light them all at once.

  My gods smoke with me. It’s a mess, an orgy of smoke. And Rimbaud dances. Baudelaire runs away. I smile.

  What if they were joints? The gods would get totally stoned and turn into devils for life. They’d come in gods and go out demons.

  ‌Humphrey Bogart versus Charles Laughton

  The B Cops decide to leave the asylum. They didn’t come to any conclusions. What is a conclusion? It’s the certainty of having lost your defences. Someone opens a bottle of Coca-Cola. Someone looks for a recipe for happiness. Some eel in my hair declares that electroshock treatment is for getting back to normal. But do I really want to get my normal back? I don’t know about the cricket and the blue dog. They’re just blue animals. Blue is also the colour of her eyes. Granny comes and hugs me. She wants to dance a tango, but I don’t know how to dance so slowly. I dance to ‌a different beat. Acugêlê banzai!11

  I’ve been to Japan. It was a different kind of place. Not unlike an asylum. Full of people. Sometimes, when I think back on Japan, I remember Fearsome Madman. He was a nice guy. He’d killed six people. Strangled. Raped. He was a weird guy, but gentle with me. Like I said, he was afraid of my voice when I spoke in a lower, deeper pitch. Fearsome liked playing chess with himself. Who killed Fearsome Madman? It was a mystery that echoed throughout the little silence that existed in a place like that. I want to fill that silence with my voice.

  In my voice, a scream.

  But Haldol holds me back. It holds back my screams, whispers. I, having hidden tons of pills under my tongue, now take them all, no questions asked. Who knows if they help. I just know that I miss my two friends. Rimbaud appears and tells me he has AIDS. He wants us to become blood brothers. I agree to it and cut my thumb. Baudelaire appears and says he wants to become our blood brother too. Just the idea of dying from something other than the chip (or cricket) makes me happy. To die with Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Nothing could be better. Acugêlê banzai!

  I’ve been to China. Saying it like that makes it sound like I’ve travelled a lot. It was a very pretty place, full of people, bicycles and lots of clouds. The clouds, the clouds. There I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was a foreigner and I was madly in love with those far-away clouds, oh those wonderful clouds! Shapes in the sky. When the day is like that, a sunny day, a day like today, I no longer want to get out of here. I’ll sleep in the calm green of 6 mg of Lexotan. Hold on tight to my blue dog and enter into a pact with happiness. Remember China, its bicycles, its blood-red flag and, finally, those incredible clouds in the Chinese sky. I think I’ll be happier once I’ve taken the bloody blood oath. I want to die of anything, anything but of a chip I swallowed. I swallow the pills. One day, I swallowed three. Another day, I swallowed four. I don’t really know what I should do to get better. Simply because I’m a pterodactyl in a cage. A raven pecking at the belly of a scarecrow. A man who isn’t afraid of the terror of living without fear. Nevermore, no one here is afraid. Not even the Attorney General. He reminds me of a character in a Western or a gangster film. He uses a spoon instead of a knife. The Attorney plays that dangerous game where you stab the gaps between all your fingers with a knife, or in this case, a spoon. We only have spoons here. The old man does it skilfully, as if he’d been practising for a long time. Just for kicks. Letting the winds of adrenaline blow.

  Rimbaud appears during gales. The winds that bring him make me wrap up in his scarf. He smokes weed. Puffs of smoke from Baudelaire’s pipe disperse close to me. He tells me that he’s a macumba priest. He tells me he has powers. He renews my language. I believe him completely. Rimbaud is the storm. Baudelaire is the wind. One ‌takes ether. The other, cocaine12. I’m just sad – I’m the guy who finds out that the coloured pills make me fat and stop me, more and more, from spending time with these old friends of mine. What’s life without friends? I’m like Emmanuel Bove, who secretly loved the friends he didn’t have. I’m friends with my eyes. They only see what I want. I look through my tinted glasses and see everything in black and white. Everything looks like a Bergman film.

  Actually, I look a bit like Charles Laughton.

  Just for a while, hopefully. Why drink coffee with sugar when you’re fat? Everything with lots of sugar. I look at clocks and coffee cups. I spit soap bubbles. I turn into a train that goes along without knowing where to stop. I transform myself into a writing machine and it writes whatever I want it to write. I ravenously attack an ant, and start plucking out hairs from my armpit. A little hair removal. I pluck out footprints. Chills. Certainties. Things I should do. I pull out ferocious eels and cover my belly with candyfloss.

  It’s June.

  ‌They’re having a festa junina13 in the asylum.

  The square-dancing lunatics are all in a line. The ones who take Gardenal don’t speak. Others take Haldol. Others are drug addicts. Others could kill for a cachaça and play snooker. No one wants to join the line and dance. No psychotic wants to dance. No dimwit wants to stop banging his head against the wall. But Rimbaud is happy and dances without any sadness. There he is, if you pardon my bluntness, with the knife between his teeth. He’s a gypsy spirit, the spirit of an Indian. Spirit of a pig. Thorn. Leprosy. AIDS. The silence of quicklime and myrtle, hollyhocks among the garden herbs. Rimbaud embroiders frangipani flowers on a straw cloth. Seven birds in the colours of the prism fly on the grey spider. Two horsemen gallop by Rimbaud’s eyes: Baudelaire and me. Everything that kills passes by me. What is this? Cocaine or ether? What is this new sound? Drums. I can’t dance, I can’t dance. He’s my friend, finally – a friend. Acugêlê banzai! I spit up into the air and open an umbrella. Baudelaire spits as he speaks. I use the umbrella to protect myself. Spits and sputters.

  I was ordered to be here. I didn’t want to come. I don’t want to stay, for fuck’s sake! Tell them I’m Charles Laughton, for fuck’s sake! Haven’t they ever seen a film? The abandoned ones would have a better life outside. Even I would. Let’s say I’m spending a season in hell, a season in my temples with my poet and actor friends. Tomorrow I’ll forget about them, but they’ll be back the day after tomorrow. I know they’ll never abandon me. That’s what friends are for, right? The street cleaner invites me to eat a box of Segredo biscuits with him. Life is a secret for me. I don’t know exactly what it means. In the outside world I look for my name in the obituar
ies every day. I’ve already decided: I don’t want to go to my funeral. I wonder what heaven for objects is like? Heaven for clocks, for TVs, computers, slingshots, forks, knives, spoons. We only have spoons here. No one eats with a knife and fork. They eat with their mouths open, except Granny who eats a bit like my grandmother; she’s skinny, soft, sweet. And one more very important detail: she gives me a kiss every time she passes by. I don’t really care much for kisses. Rimbaud forced me to kiss him on the lips once. I’ve told him, it’s no use, I can’t be what I’m not.

  Who knows, Rimbaud, maybe Verlaine will come along and fix that.

  Baudelaire appears wearing boxing gloves. Baudelaire is nearly always an annoying, cranky prick. And strong. I almost, almost, never say yes to Baudelaire. Rimbaud’s dirty. He needs to take a shower. Like Foucault always said, a good shower is a cold shower. Every lunatic should take a cold shower before bed. Electroshock comes from thermal shock.

  The cold invites the fire. Jump over the bonfire, Rimbaud.

  Jump, you bastard!

  A dimwit and a bipolar woman are married by a hot psychologist. There are some good doctors. Most of the doctors are nice. My dad comes by. My sister comes by. My brother, my sister, Adélia and Anália, our sweet maids, with the strength of a thousand Haldols.

  I’m sad and everyone is happy.

  I’m reminded of the festas juninas of my childhood.

  Because I’m fat, I dance with the fattest girl. That’s life. Fatty with fatty. Skinny with skinny. Ugly with ugly. Pretty with pretty. I’d like the prettiest girl. I want to screw the psychologist. That’s life. Lunatic with lunatic.

  They made a huge bonfire out of paper and the lunatics’ dirty nappies.

  That guy who dared to leap over the flames got taken up the arse by the huge blaze of shit. That’s what yesterday was like. And that’s what today is like. Nothing changes. When you’re a kid. When you’re an adult. Life drains away into the sea through a sewer pipe. Thank goodness the sea is green, the colour of my brother Bruno’s eyes. His eyes are clear, free of suffering. If you don’t suffer, you’re not alive. If you’re alive, you eat French fries. It’s a good thing there are always French fries to ease the burden. The days are all alike and keep repeating themselves. No one ever asks nicely if they can enter my life, but they always find an excuse to leave. Neon veins remind me of the signs I saw in New York with Rimbaud. Now that would make a good chapter title: the poets in New York. I can see myself lost in Columbia University or even in Harlem. Here we go: I’d be the king of Harlem. I’d screw the little Jewish chicks and kill the Irish bootleggers. Then I’d say: this is my motherfucking territory, bitch!

  I take my pills with a Coke. The coconut sweets travel up my veins. The peanut brittle arrived dirty. Some idiot might think I’m lost in this party, dancing with the fattest girl in the room. I wanted to dance with Clarissa. I wanted to dance with the psychologist. But Granny lets loose, dancing down on the ground. Can she get back up? Only with a winch.

  Call the paramedics, quickly, please. Actually, better call the cops.

  Focus. Out of focus. I’m blind.

  Deaf and dumb. My nerves are lit up but everything’s dark.

  Fearsome Madman appears in my dreams. He says Rosebud killed me. My head’s exploding. Who killed Fearsome? The foetid veins in my head scan my speech. Rimbaud wants to marry me. Baudelaire is neurasthenic; he’s always distant, even at the party. He’s not going to found modernity with that perspective.

  So I say to him: let’s be modern, Baudelaire.

  It was only then that he saw the girl passing by him. She was the passante. Later he told me that he never saw her again. God, Baudelaire is difficult! He likes to watch the girls go by in skimpy bikinis on the beach. It was only after Baudelaire that Vínicius de Moraes wrote ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. The girl who when she passes, makes each one she passes go Ahh is the passer-by, for fuck’s sake! The sea always beats down on the rocks of illness. The Lexotan 6 green sea. The Haldol 5 blue sky. The Rivotril white clouds. Everything is illness in mental illness, even the lovely Girl from Ipanema. Why haven’t they come up with a cure for my illness?

  Why are they building rockets to go into space?

  I have a delusional episode while Alfonso appears and tells me he’s going to Paracambi. God, that guy should just go fuck off.

  To keep repeating that ditty.

  Poor thing.

  I wouldn’t wish being pitied, being seen as a poor bastard, on anyone. I’m not asking to have a place in heaven because I’m a poor bastard – far from it. I want to have the same look in my eyes that a lynx has for its prey. That Rimbaud has for his Abyssinia. Baudelaire’s movement and his beautiful flowers. I can’t stand taking the role of the victim. My role is the toilet roll. I’m a child and I don’t know the truth. The truth, out there, is in the eyes of my brother Bruno, who doesn’t know or care about anything. He lives happily with his nothingness. Everyone has nothingness.

  I’m not nothing, Rimbaud. Want a cigarette?

  I’ll never be nothing. I can’t want to be nothing.

  Besides, I’ve got all the pills in the world inside me.

  Rimbaud, I’ll always be the one ‘who wasn’t born for this’, I’ll always be the one who waited for a door to open up for him in a wall without a door.

  Rimbaud, we’re bored of this party now, right? Baudelaire even wrote a poem. As for us, nothing. Although that story about New York might be interesting. What do you think?

  The fat girl who danced with me explodes à la Mr Creosote.

  Her body, her guts, displayed on my chest. Her chest on my chest. She keeps dancing. Just her legs. Granny keeps dancing and I try to keep up. I’m not good at this. I miss Mr Creosote’s daughter. Miss Creosote.

  I didn’t want to dance with her, but I didn’t want her to explode like that.

  Her bits spread about all over the place.

  I want a milkshake.

  People who eat a lot don’t know what they’re eating. People who travel a lot don’t know where they live. Every time I take a trip I mess up. I throw shit into the fan of sanity. One time I went down to Rio Grande do Sul. A friend of mine lived there. He played drums in my rock band. He was fat just like I am today. He had a love hotel there in Rio Grande do Sul. His hotel was quite different from the asylum. He went to all the brothels.

  I’d already swallowed the cricket quite some time before that. I was twenty-one. It was my second sneak preview of hell.

  On the first day, Rimbaud, we went to the local brothel. Back then whores didn’t kiss.

  Nowadays they do everything. They might even pay you to have sex with them.

  Why are whores so clingy and so needy for love? I don’t like whores very much.

  I like to give and feel pleasure.

  I had a girlfriend at the time. She had blue eyes. They were the most beautiful blue eyes in the world. Even so, I went down to Rio Grande do Sul. When I tried to kiss the whore she blocked my hand. You can’t mess with my stuff. You have to pay. Paying for sex wasn’t part of my plan. I’d planned on flying the aeroplane of pleasure with her.

  We left the brothel with four whores. Acugêlê banzai!

  A long, long time ago I went to Korea. It was really different from Rio Grande do Sul. Every place I went looked like an asylum. There was a nuclear bomb there. One hell of a mess.

  My friend wanted to have a drunken orgy. I wasn’t really into that. I was a bit of a prude. Maybe today, after many orgies with Rimbaud and Baudelaire, I could have one with my friend. But I was barely in my twenties, just a kid. I wanted to have the whore all to myself. I wanted that whore with the feather touch. We got in the car. How many rooms does your house have? What does your mum do? I had my eye on the hotel maid, too.

  While the hands of the least pretty whore ran up and down me, in my friend’s Ford Landau, I got paranoid, because her hands were rough. I started to think she was a transvestite. What had happened to the feather touch? Pure paran
oia.

  Paranoia. My psychiatrist at the time had given me Melleril.

  But I didn’t like the colour of the pill. A sort of peanut brown, ‌a shit brown. Roberto Carlos14 used to dress in brown, then he started wearing blue and his luck changed. What had he done to lose his OCD? I have my own. I don’t like three, I prefer four.

  When I told Rimbaud that story about Roberto Carlos and the one about my numbers, he recommended two books of poetry ‌to me: Trilce and Quaderna15. One for three, another for four.

  For God’s sake, Rimbaud, don’t put me in a bind. I’d rather use numbers for Kabbalah, not for poetry.

  Unfortunately he only taught me what he knew, and he didn’t know much. That was when he told me about maybe going back to Africa, for his leg to get better.

  Let’s get back to the hotel.

  My friend told me that I had to vacate one of the rooms and stay where the staff sleep.

  Tonight you’re going to sleep here in the same room as Stallion. He’s going to hang you up by your little tits. Stallion was a big black man standing over six and a half feet tall. Rumour had it that Stallion had a dick so big he could have been a porn star. I just dabbled in sex with my little 15-cm-edition, PG-rated knob. I trembled the first time I saw Stallion. I wasn’t going to sleep next to that guy. He could easily rape me. When I saw Stallion again, I thought about getting out of there. I told myself: I’m not waiting for the third time, or else I won’t see anything ever again, just the spirit of the god of evil moving upon the face of the waters of Lake Guaíba.

  I left the hotel and went to the bus station. I was possessed by a fertile spirit of modern madness, one that had helped twentieth-century poetry many times and had put contemporary literature in its rightful place. My persecution complex had reached the pinnacle of its glory. I ran through the streets of Porto Alegre. The police saw me running. Police are automatons. They’re like scarecrows. Scarecrows with no eyes. And ravens peck at scarecrows. I was a solitary raven that night. Cops are the same all over the world. They shot at me. Mint bullets, peanut bullets, soft bullets. And rubber bullets.