(“É para lá que eu vou”)
Beyond the ear there is a sound, at the far end of sight a view, at the tips of the fingers an object—that’s where I’m going.
At the tip of the pencil the line.
Where a thought expires is an idea, at the final breath of joy another joy, at the point of the sword magic—that’s where I’m going.
At the tips of the toes the leap.
It’s like the story of someone who went and didn’t return—that’s where I’m going.
Or am I? Yes, I’m going. And I’ll return to see how things are. Whether they’re still magic. Reality? I await you all. That’s where I’m going.
At the tip of the word is the word. I want to use the word “soirée” and don’t know where and when. At the edge of the soirée is the family. At the edge of the family am I. At the edge of I is me. To me is where I’m going. And from me I go out to see. See what? to see what exists. After I am dead to reality is where I’m going. For now it is a dream. A fateful dream. But later—later all is real. And the free soul seeks a place to get settled. Me is an I that I proclaim. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the nothing. I am nothing. Once dead I shall expand and disperse, and someone will say my name with love.
To my poor name is where I’m going.
And from there I’ll return to call the names of my beloved and my sons. They will answer me. At last I shall have an answer. What answer? that of love. Love: I love you all so much. I love love. Love is red. Jealousy is green. My eyes are green. But they’re so dark a green that in photographs they look black. My secret is having green eyes and nobody knows it.
At the far end of me is I. I, imploring, I the one who needs, who begs, who cries, who laments. Yet who sings. Who speaks words. Words on the wind? who cares, the winds bring them back and I possess them.
I at the edge of the wind. The wuthering heights call to me. I go, witch that I am. And I am transmuted.
Oh, dog, where is your soul? is it at the edge of your body? I am at the edge of my body. And I waste away slowly.
What am I saying? I am saying love. And at the edge of love are we.
The Dead Man in the Sea at Urca
(“O morto no mar da Urca”)
I was at the apartment of Dona Lourdes, the seamstress, trying on my dress painted by Olly—and Dona Lourdes said: a man died in the sea, look at all the lifeguards. I looked and all I saw was the sea that must have been very salty, blue sea, white houses. What about the dead man?
The dead man in brine. I don’t want to die! I screamed mutely inside my dress. The dress is yellow and blue. What about me? dying of heat, not dead from the blue sea.
I’m going to tell a secret: my dress is lovely and I don’t want to die. On Friday the dress will be at my house, and on Saturday I’ll wear it. No death, just blue sea. Are there yellow clouds? There are golden ones. I don’t have a story. Does the dead man? He does: he went to swim in the sea at Urca, the fool, and died, who gave the order? I swim in the sea with caution, I’m not an idiot, and I only go to Urca to try on dresses. And three blouses. S. came along. She’s meticulous when it comes to fittings. What about the dead man? meticulously dead?
I’m going to tell a story: once upon a time there was a still-young man who enjoyed swimming in the sea. And then, one Wednesday morning he went to Urca. In Urca, on the rocks of Urca, I don’t go because it’s full of rats. But the young man didn’t care about the rats. Nor did the rats care about him. The white row houses in Urca. He cared about those. Then there was a woman trying on a dress and who got there too late: the young man was already dead. Salty. Were there piranhas in the sea? I pretended not to understand. I really don’t understand death. A young man dead?
Dead from being the fool he was. You should only go to Urca to try on cheerful dresses. The woman, that’s me, wants only cheerfulness. But I bow before death. Which shall come, shall come, shall come. When? that’s the thing, it can come at any moment. But I, who was trying on the dress in the morning heat, asked for a proof of God. And I smelled the most intense thing, an overwhelmingly intense fragrance of roses. So I had fitting proof, the fitting and the proof; of the dress and of God.
One should only die of natural causes, never from disaster, never from drowning in the sea. I beg protection for my loved ones, who are many. And this protection, I am sure, shall come.
But what about the young man? and his story? He might have been a student. I’ll never know. I just stood looking at the sea and the houses. Dona Lourdes unflappable, asking whether to take it in at the waist. I said yes, that waistlines are supposed to look tight. But I was stunned. Stunned in my lovely dress.
Silence
(“Silêncio”)
The silence of the night in the mountains is so vast. It is so desolate. You try in vain to work not to hear it, to think quickly to cover it up. Or to invent some plans, a fragile stitch that barely links us to the suddenly improbable day of tomorrow. How to surmount this peace that spies us. A silence so great that despair is ashamed. Mountains so high that despair is ashamed. The ears prick, the head tilts, the whole body listens: not a murmur. Not a rooster. How to come within reach of this deep meditation on the silence. On that silence without memory of words. If thou art death, how to reach thee.
It is a silence that does not sleep: it is insomniac: motionless but insomniac; and without ghosts. It is terrible—not a single ghost. It’s no use wanting to people it with the possibility of a door that creaks while opening, of a curtain that opens and says something. It is empty and without promise. If only there were the wind. Wind is fury, fury is life. Or snow. Which is silent but leaves tracks—everything turns white, children laugh, footsteps crunch and leave a mark. There is a continuity that is life. But this silence leaves no trace. You cannot speak of silence as you do of snow. You cannot say to anyone as you say about snow: did you feel the silence last night? Those who did don’t say.
Night descends with its little joys for those who light the lamps with the weariness that so justifies the day. The children of Bern drop off to sleep, the last doors are shut. The streets shine in the cobblestones and shine empty now. And finally the most distant lights go out.
But this first silence is still not the silence. Wait, for the leaves in the trees will settle down better, some belated step on the stairs may be heard with hope.
But there’s a moment when from the rested body the spirit rises alert, and from the earth the moon up high. Then it, the silence, appears.
The heart beats upon recognizing it.
You could quickly think about the day that has passed. Or about friends who have passed and are forever lost. But there’s no use avoiding it: there is the silence. Even the worst suffering, that of lost friendship, is just an escape. For if at first the silence seems to await an answer—how much do we burn to be called to answer—early on you discover that it demands nothing of you, perhaps only your silence. How many hours are wasted in the dark supposing that the silence is judging you—as we wait in vain to be judged by God. Justifications arise, tragic, forced justifications, excuses humble to the point of indignity. How pleasant it is for the human being to reveal at last his indignity and be forgiven on the argument that he is a human being brought low by birth.
Until you discover—it doesn’t even want your indignity. It is the silence.
You can also try to fool it. You can drop, as if by accident, a book from your nightstand. But, the horror—the book falls into the silence and gets lost in its mute and frozen vortex. And if a deranged bird began to sing? A useless hope. The song would merely graze the silence like a faint flute.
So, if you are brave, you won’t fight it. You enter it, go along with it, we the only ghosts on a night in Bern. You must enter. You mustn’t wait for the remaining darkness while faced with it, only it alone. It will be as if we were on a ship so uncommonly enorm
ous that we didn’t realize we were on a ship. And it sailed so far and wide that we didn’t realize we were moving. A man cannot do more than that. Living on the shores of death and of the stars is a tenser vibration than the veins can take. There is not even the son of a star and a woman to act as a pious intermediary. The heart must appear before the nothing alone and alone beat high in the darkness. The only thing sounding in your ears is your own heart. When it appears completely naked, it is not even communication, it is submission. For we were made for nothing but the small silence.
If you are not brave, you mustn’t enter. Wait for the remaining darkness faced with the silence, only your feet wet from the foam of something that sprays from inside us. Wait. One unsolvable for the other. Side by side, two things that do not see each other in the dark. Wait. Not for the end of the silence but for the blessed help of a third element, the light of dawn.
Afterward you will never again forget. There’s no use even fleeing to another city. For when you least expect to you may recognize it—suddenly. While crossing the street amid cars honking. Between one phantasmagoric burst of laughter and another. After a word uttered. Sometimes in the very heart of the word. The ears are haunted, the vision blurs—here it is. And this time it’s a ghost.
A Full Afternoon
(“Uma tarde plena”)
The marmoset is as small as a rat, and the same color.
The woman, after sitting on the bus and casting a peaceful, proprietary glance over the seats, choked back a scream: beside her, in the fat man’s hand, was something that looked like a fidgety rat and that in fact was the liveliest marmoset. The first seconds of woman versus marmoset were spent trying to feel that it was not a rat in disguise.
Once this was accomplished, some delightful and intense moments began: observing the animal. The whole bus, as it happened, was doing nothing else.
But the woman had the privilege of sitting right beside the main character. From where she could, for example, study the itty-bitty thing that is a marmoset’s tongue: a stroke of a red pencil.
And there were its teeth too: you could almost count close to thousands of teeth inside that brushstroke of a mouth, and each tiny shard smaller than the next, and whiter. The marmoset didn’t close its mouth a single moment.
Its eyes were round, hyperthyroid, complementing a slight underbite—and this combination, though it lent a strangely shameless expression, formed the somewhat cheeky face of a street kid, the ones with a permanent cold and who sniffle while sucking on candy.
When the marmoset leaped onto the lady’s lap, she held back a frisson, and the bashful pleasure of someone who’d been singled out.
But the other passengers looked at her in a friendly way, approving of the event, and, blushing a little, she accepted being the shy favorite. She didn’t pet it because she didn’t know if that was the right gesture to make.
And the animal didn’t suffer from the lack of affection. In fact its owner, the fat man, bore it a solid and stern love, like a father’s for his son, a master’s for his wife. He was a man who, without smiling, had a so-called heart of gold. The expression on his face was tragic even, as if he had a mission. A mission to love? The marmoset was his dog in life.
The bus, whipped by the breeze, as if streaming with banners, drove on. The marmoset ate a cookie. The marmoset rapidly scratched at its round ear with its dainty hind leg. The marmoset squealed. It clung to the window, and peered out as fast as it could—startling faces in passing buses that looked astonished and had no time to verify whether they’d really seen what they’d seen.
Meanwhile, near the lady, another lady told another lady that she had a cat. Whoever had something to love, mentioned it.
It was in that happy familial atmosphere that a truck tried to cut off the bus, there was nearly a fatal collision, the screams. Everyone rushed off. The lady, running late, for an appointment, took a taxi.
It was only in the taxi that she recalled the marmoset.
And she regretted with an awkward smile that—the days so full of news in the papers and so little concerning her—that events should be so poorly distributed that a marmoset and a near-disaster could happen at the same time.
“I’ll bet,” she thought, “that nothing else will happen to me for a long time, I’ll bet I’m in for a dry spell.” Which was generally how things went for her.
But that same day other things did happen. All of which even fell under the category of goods to declare. They just weren’t communicable. That woman was, moreover, a bit silent with herself and didn’t understand herself very well.
But that’s how it goes. And no one’s ever heard of a marmoset that failed to be born, live and die—just because it didn’t understand itself or wasn’t understood.
In any case it had been an afternoon streaming with banners.
Note to Erico Verissimo
I don’t agree when you say: “Sorry, but I am not profound.”
You are profoundly human—and what more can you want from a person? You have a greatness of spirit. A kiss to you, Érico.
Such Gentleness
(“Tanta mansidão”)
So the dark hour, perhaps the darkest, in broad daylight, preceded that thing that I don’t even want to attempt to define. In broad daylight it was night, and that thing I still don’t want to define is a peaceful light inside me, and they call it joy, gentle joy. I am a bit disoriented as if a heart had been torn from me, and in its place were now the sudden absence, an almost palpable absence of what before was an organ bathed in the darkness of pain. I am not feeling a thing. But it’s the opposite of a torpor. It’s a lighter and more silent way of existing.
But I am also uneasy. I was prepared to console my anguish and my pain. But how do I deal with this simple and peaceful joy. I’m just not used to not needing my own comfort. The word comfort occurred without my sensing it, and I didn’t notice, and when I went to seek it, it had already transformed into flesh and spirit, it now no longer existed as thought.
I’ll go to the window then, it’s raining hard. Out of habit I’m searching the rain for something that at another time would have served as comfort for me. But I have no pain to be comforted.
Ah, I know. I’m now searching the rain for a joy so great that it becomes acute, and which puts me in contact with an acuteness akin to the acuteness of pain. But the search is no use. I am at the window and this is all that happens: I see the rain with benevolent eyes, and the rain sees me in harmony with me. We are both busy flowing. How long will this state of mine last? I realize that, with this question, I am taking my pulse to feel where that painful throbbing from before will be. And I see that there is no throbbing of pain.
Only this: it is raining and I am watching the rain. What simplicity. I never thought that the world and I would reach this point of wheat. The rain falls not because it needs me, and I watch the rain not because I need it. But we are as united as rainwater is to rain. And I am not giving thanks for anything. If I, just after being born, hadn’t involuntarily and forcibly taken the path I did—and I would always have been what I truly am now: a peasant in a field where it is raining. Not even thanking God or nature. The rain doesn’t give thanks for anything either. I am not a thing that gives thanks for being transformed into something else. I am a woman, I am a person, I am an awareness, I am a body looking out the window. As the rain isn’t grateful for not being a rock. It is rain. Perhaps that is what we could call being alive. No more than this, but this: alive. And just alive with a gentle joy.
Soul Storm
(“Tempestade de almas”)
Ah, for all I know, I wasn’t born, ah, for all I know, I wasn’t born. Madness is neighbor to the cruelest prudence. I swallow the madness because it calmly makes me hallucinate. The ring you gave me was made of glass and broke and love didn’t end, but in its place, hatred of those who love. The chair for me is an object. Useless w
hile I’m looking at it. Tell me please what time it is so I can know that I’m living at this time. Creativity is unleashed by a germ and I don’t have that germ today but I have the incipient madness that in itself is a valid creation. I have nothing more to do with the validity of things. I am freed or lost. I’m going to tell you all a secret: life is fatal. We keep this secret in muteness each faced with ourselves because it’s convenient, otherwise we would make every instant fatal. The chair object has always interested me. I look at this one which is old, bought at an antique shop, Empire style; you couldn’t imagine a greater simplicity of line, contrasting with the red felt seat. I love objects all the more when they don’t love me. But if I don’t understand what I write the fault is not my own. I must speak because speaking saves. But I don’t have a single word to say. The words already spoken gag my mouth. What exactly does one person say to another? Besides “how’s it going?” If they allowed the madness of candor, what would people say to one another? And the worst is what a person would say to himself, but that would be salvation, though candor is determined on a conscious level and the terror of candor comes from the part that exists in the utterly vast unconsciousness that joins me to the world and to the creative unconsciousness of the world. Today is a day with many stars in the sky, at least that’s what is promised by this sad afternoon that a human word would save.
I open my eyes wide, and it’s no use: I merely see. But the secret, this I neither see nor sense. The record player is broken and not to live with music is to betray the human condition that is surrounded by music. Besides, music is an abstraction of thought, I’m speaking of Bach, Vivaldi, Handel. I can only write if I am free, and free from censure, otherwise I succumb. I look at the Empire chair and this time it’s as if it too had looked and seen me. The future is mine while I live. In the future they’ll have more time to live, and, to haphazardly write. In the future, they say: as far as I know, I wasn’t born. Marly de Oliveira, I don’t write you letters because I only know how to be intimate. Besides I only know how to be intimate whatever the circumstance: that’s why I tend to be quiet. Will everything that’s never been done, be done one day? The future of technology threatens to destroy all that is human in mankind, but technology doesn’t reach madness; and so that’s where the human part of mankind has sought refuge. I see the flowers in the vase: they are wildflowers, born without being planted, they are beautiful and yellow. But my cook said: what ugly flowers. Just because it’s hard to understand and love something spontaneous and Franciscan. Understanding something hard is no advantage, but loving something easy to love is a great step up the human ladder. I am forced to tell so many lies. But I’d like not to have to lie to myself. Otherwise what do I have left? Truth is the final residue of all things, and in my unconscious is the truth that is the same as the world’s. The Moon is, as Paul Éluard would say, éclatante de silence.* Today I don’t know whether we’ll be able to see the Moon because it’s already getting late and I don’t see it in the sky. Once, I looked up at the night sky, circumscribing it with my head leaning back, and I got dizzy from all the stars you see in the countryside, since the sky in the countryside is clear. There is no logic, if you think about it a little, to the perfectly balanced illogic of nature. Of human nature too. What would become of the world, of the cosmos, if mankind didn’t exist. If I could always write the way I’m writing right now I’d be in the middle of that tempestade de cerebro that means brainstorm. Who invented the chair? Someone with love for himself. So he invented a greater comfort for his body. Then centuries passed and never again did anyone really pay attention to a chair, since using it is merely automatic. You need courage for a brainstorm: you never know what might come frighten us. The sacred monster has died: in its place was born a little girl who was alone. I am well aware that I’ll have to stop, not for lack of words, but because these things, and above all those I only thought and didn’t write, don’t normally get published in newspapers.
The Complete Stories Page 44