by John Keene
ANTHROPOPHAGY
The poet sleeps without the need to dream.
—Mário de Andrade
Every day the quickening passage of the years manifests itself around him, in him. The morning light burning its entry through the shutters, too bright to bear except in blinks, winks, the armor of fished-out-of-pocket spectacles. The endless clangor and perfume of the streets outside the windows, once a comfort, now a menace, requiring a miracle to survive another Carnaval. The heat, as if every oven, stove and kiln in Rio were firing, glazing him and all but the hardiest to half their size. The sheet music’s notes, like the newsprint’s accounts of the unfolding and distant world war, the dictator and Depression closer to home, all sliding inexorably away from his fingers and eyes. His knees, back, the ankles that rattle with each hike up a stairwell, each trek across the University of the Federal District’s grounds. The liver’s complaints after another glass of beer or cachaça, another snort of cocaine. All those words that gushed like water from a fountain, that now have to be hunted with an unsteady hand and head. The heart’s berimbau quivering in irregular time, a rhythm only the reaper can and will discern if allowed. Except in those moments when the hours fall away, disappear, he lying on his side, in dreams or awake and a record cycles on the player, Debussy, Villa-Lobos, Pixinguinha, or a disc grooved from the recordings of catimbó from his journeys across the northeast, its sonorities drumming out a bridge between the present and the past; and behind him, beside him the one who—unlike the glittering young men in his circle of friends, the well-bred law students and witty budding writers who claim to celebrate him, the young, poor blond athlete from Porto Alegre he met in the stall on rua Conde de Lage seeking a sinecure, through his, the distinguished writer’s, intervention, at the Ministry of Culture, the beautiful and not so beautiful sycophants who say they have read his Macunaíma and studies and poetry and the ones who have managed to mis-memorize a few lines—like this one, known only by his first name, gained in the passageway between the Budapesto’s dining room and its kitchen, by his braided locks and his careful gait, trained through climbing the hillside shanties ringing the city, by his dark arms embracing, knotting around the writer’s chest, their fingers interlacing, locking as he enters, moves, dances inside him, the beat mutual and infinite in its tenderness and knowingness; or later, the day after, crouching over his desk, having just finished breakfast downstairs once the cup of cafezinho and the bowl of half-eaten papaya, the glass of freshly squeezed orange juice have been cleared, the letters to Anita and Murilo and Henrique and Manuel written, the reviews for his column, and he begins the strophe,
“Heroic anxiety of my feelings
to awaken the secret of beings and things.”
or
“They are forms . . . Forms that burn, individual
forms, jostling, a jingling of elusive forms
that barely open, flower, that close, flower, flower, unformed
inaccessible,
In the night. Everything is night. . . . ”
and who need regard the message of the clock’s hands, acknowledge the calendar’s insistent story? Then, he rests the pen beside the typewriter and blotter and rises, puts on his straw hat to shield his rice-powered face and bald pate, bows the canary tie around his neck, and dives out into the afternoon, walking toward the competing planes of gold sand and the Atlantic’s silvery waves, the lines blurring like a freshly painted watercolor. The Cariocas, beachcombers, bathers, the steady stream of vacationers from the nearby hotels pass him, on their way to the huts, umbrellas, the beckoning water. He is here, in Lapa, on the rua Russell, peering at the roofs of Niterói, and there, on the dais in the Municipal Theater in São Paulo, Oswald, Di Cavalcanti, the other radicals at either side of him at the podium, our Pierrot, our Miss São Paulo, our brown-skinned, bucktoothed hero with such character, beginning the excerpt from The Hallucinated City, to hoots and catcalls, while thinking to himself, then as now, we must never let the lies and the tears devour us, we must devour and savor the years.
III
COUNTERNARRATIVE
“If there is any genre in which it matters to be sublime,
it is evil, above all.”
Denis Diderot
THE LIONS
“If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Good evening.
. . . .
Or should I say, Good morning.
. . . .
Of course it could be whatever we want it to be. I want—
. . . .
Decree. Good morning, good evening, good night.
. . . .
Under the circumstances you could lose sight—
. . . .
—of such distinctions. Or forget them. Time of day, night time, time itself—
. . . .
—slips through your grasp when you’re. . . .
. . . .
Preoccupied. Aren’t you?
. . . .
I rib you but I can smell it. In my case, I have been, so much to do. Think about. You think about it, how common it is to say that, so busy. So easy to lose sight—
. . . .
Of the mountain for a single peak, too. I, never. Too many do, though. You—
. . . .
Want to speak. Your crying request. Here I am. There are some things you never forget, no matter how hard you try. They root, linger, you’d once have said. You can’t forget them, I’d say.
. . . .
You take time out of the equation, you can’t take time out, forget.
. . . .
So much does get lost in the transmission. But I came. On precious time.
. . . .
I still am a man of few words. I had to learn how to use them from you. Once upon a time they could hardly understand me. You could. You, wielder of words. Language welder. Were.
. . . .
There. That should be better. Now’s the time to speak. Precious time. Yours.
M-.
Mmm. I doubt you’d believe it, but I hurried over. Even now, despite everything, still. You know I’ve always had an affinity for non-punctuality, all that messing with time, untimeliness as you used to describe it. Some things can’t be rushed, and yet others can’t be postponed. How do you un-time? Slip through its grasp? I learned from you.
Mmm. . . .
I learned that it’s best to keep time itself out of sync. Take its beat, remake it in your own. Be untimely. The drumbeat always sends a letter to the future. Say you happened to be the only one to arrive early for a meeting . . . and a bomb goes off. Wouldn’t it have been better to be late then?
Mmm. . . .
Or the chartered plane that you were to fly to that restive region went down mysteriously into the river, but if you arrived well in advance and boarded an earlier flight, you cheated fate, or the person attempting to shape it. All those other unfortunate people, though.
Mmm. . . .
The hands of fate, I suppose, or fate’s handler. Hangman. Honcho. You know who I mean. All those car crashes, overdoses, bodies found at the bottoms of drained swimming pools, riverbeds, earthen dams, sudden bathroom electrocutions, sharp, heavy projectiles flying through windows while people were eating their morning meals, the staged robberies where the robber always manages to accurately hit the bull’s eye of the heart, kidnappings without ransom notes, bones shattered into a thousand pieces so that they’ll never heal again, disappearances, heads left in mailboxes, hands and ears and tongues stapled to doors before dawn,
such a remarkable arsenal this particular fate possessed, wouldn’t you admit? What I learned from you: how to glide out of fate’s schedule. Un-time oneself.
Mmm.
Mmm. Though before we ever had need to speak of such things I can recall us sitting facing each other, just like now, what was it, twenty-five years ago? Just like this, our noses not touching but close enough that we filled each others’ lungs. Do you recall that?
Mmmo. . . .
Sitting like this? Nostrils to nostrils, oily sweat and blood masking our faces in the sheer black silk of that night, we each could smell the other’s throat exhaling the hours, the years, of endurance, our elation and fear, all flavored with tobacco and the cheapest palm wine, with every breath. The smell of death so near too, nearer than the tips of our noses, our lips brushing against each other, our chests and knees fusing as one, and the smell of life as well, potentiality, the horizon that we would seize.
Mmmo. . . .
Just like this, in darkness surrounding us like an empty arena, so dark that even after our eyes had adjusted and we could feel our pulses passing between us we still had to rely on our other senses to confirm we were still sitting there. The only sounds the intermittent gunfire, later the mines going off, the rockets, the ground a rattle beneath our soles, the dirt and grass and plastic we could not wash off our tongues. There you go.
Much better. . . .
We even kept the radio off because we knew exactly what he would be saying: I appeal to you, vanguard of our nation’s liberation, I appeal to you at this grave hour.
Grave hour, dire.
We could recite it by heart, with the flourishes and the drumbeats, the two of us, the emphases and the pauses, I because I had heard it so many times from his mouth and initially I believed it, as I did you, you because you had written it, such a way with words, like the griots, the oracles, you and I just like this, the night so enveloping we had only our senses to ensure we were still sitting there.
Sitting there, and here.
The monsters no longer have to send their mirage planes, vampire jets, canberra bombers and helicopters, purchased from their American and European master devils themselves, to rain down bombs upon us, to stamp out our freedom like a boot heel on a new and fragile bloom. They no longer have to ravenously slaughter our little children, the seeds of our future, in their schoolhouses or their mothers’ wombs. They no longer have to destroy our factories, our banks and bourse, our villages and metropolises, all these the foundations of our freedom, they no longer have to salt our farms, uproot our trees, reduce our harrows and planters, our tractors and transport vehicles, to dust. They no longer have to poison our water engines and wells, these savage beasts who slaveringly covet the earth of our ancestors, these fossils who call us the missing link. They no longer have to take these steps, these demoniacal settler-colonialists, these aliens in our midst, with their cluster bombs and nuclear bombs, their handouts and NGOs and spies posing as missionaries bringing us the anti-salvation of their diabolical savior, their radioactive ideologies of capitalism and liberalism and individualism transmitted over TV sets and in records and books, through fashion and fads that wither our own indigenous culture and traditions like drought, in their pernicious pop culture which like a cancer devours the flesh and souls of our youth. No longer, my countrywomen and men, no longer, no longer. No.
No longer, those monsters.
No longer because they labor from the inside out now, through these Quislings in our midst, these walking tumors, these inhuman viruses, these beasts more depraved than any creature the gods ever bequeathed to us, these idolators among us who pray to the whiteman as their only deity and have pledged their being to sacrifice the black race to appease their abominable god, these psychopaths who have become impervious to reason and immune to the history and ethics and morality of our ancestors, the people, you, our people, more duplicitous and degenerate than the most unspeakable and unimaginable monsters ever placed or dreamt of on this earth, these traitors, these bootlickers, these parasites with their black skin and white hearts, cold empty hearts, lacking souls, these thieves who have conspired with the capitalist thieves in Washington and London, in Berlin and Zurich, in Toronto and Tel Aviv, to empty our pockets, strip our resources, rape our rich soil into a desert and turn our deserts into their tarmacs and derricks, this filth, this rot, this shit festering in our midst, circulating among us, like the air we breathe and the water we drink.
This filth, this rot, this shit, in our water and air.
But, my countrywomen and men, my fellow patriots, my fellow liberators, my fellow warriors, my sisters and brothers, my people, we have identified them and we must stamp them out. We will stamp them out, my people. We will cut them from the body politic, we will hack them out, we will dispatch the remains of their pestilence, ground to ashes and the memory of blood, and remit them and the foul scent that lingers after to those capitals that seek to destroy us, to Washington and London, to Berlin and Zurich, to Toronto and Tel Aviv and Johannesburg and Brussels and the Hague, and I shall be your tribune in returning us to the glories of our people, our past, our first days of freedom, of liberation and independence, but we must join together, hand in hand, arm in arm, armed in mind and body, we must, to wipe this pestilence out.
Hand in hand, arm in arm, this pestilence.
Victory is certain, once we extinguish this plague. Together. We. Will. Wipe. This. Pestilence. Out.
Out, in one draft. My ears had filled with versions of that speech since I was an infant.
Our leader did not believe a single word of it. I did, the rest of the country did, even the Quislings themselves knew what it meant. You did too, but in a different way. It was you speaking, as if with a microphone to your soul. The leader was ventriloquizing you, because you had placed not just him in your crosshairs, but everyone else. Including me.
Not everyone else, and at that moment. . . .
At that moment—me. Brother Quisling. What perfume, my stomach wrenches at the thought, though I would be lying if I said I did not smell it then and suppressed it.
I heard it and like a stylus to wax, a nib to paper, a needle to a groove. . . .
Sound. Your sense was sound, always sound, the most infinitesimal crackle or rustle, and you’d cock your head just so, as if the sound were right beside you, or behind you, or in front of you, just that quick, like a gazelle or a dik-dik, like you had invisible antennae instead of ears, a sonar, so exactingly tuned. The sound of words, of worlds. You could hear my mind’s pulse back then, the beat of my dreams.
Yes, the pulse of everything, and beyond. Months.
Mine, now you can’t have forgotten mine.
I can’t have forgotten.
You have, gods help you.
I can’t.
Mine was smell. Immaturity and ripeness, scents of all kinds, fragrances, stenches, nature’s olfactory artistry and legerdemain, anything created by the hand or mind of a chemist, anything that could be marked by scent, even emotions, usually emotions, I mined them, except when the mephitic truth was right under my nose. Fear sends out a terrible perfume. The worst.