She was fascinated. She noted the scattering of pimples on his face. But that didn’t affect his good looks or his masculinity: hormones were raging in there. That, yes, was a man. She gave him a huge tip, way too much, that surprised the young man. And she said in a sing-song voice and with the mannerisms of a romantic girl:
“I’ll only let you go if you promise you’ll come back! Today even! Because I’m going to order some vitamins from the pharmacy . . .”
An hour later he was back with the vitamins. She’d changed clothes, and was wearing a sheer lace kimono. You could see the outline of her panties. She made him come in. She told him she was a widow. That was her way of letting him know she was available. But the young man didn’t get it.
She invited him to tour her nicely decorated apartment leaving him speechless. She took him to her bedroom. She didn’t know how to make him understand. So she said:
“Let me give you a little kiss!”
The young man was taken aback, he tilted his face toward her. But she quickly reached his mouth and nearly devoured it.
“Ma’am,” said the boy nervously, “please control yourself! Ma’am, are you feeling all right?”
“I can’t control myself! I love you! Go to bed with me!”
“Are you crazy?!”
“I’m not crazy! I mean: I’m crazy about you!” she shouted at him as she tore the purple covers off the big bed.
And seeing that he’d never understand, she said to him, dying of shame:
“Go to bed with me . . .”
“Me?!”
“I’ll give you a big present! I’ll give you a car!”
Car? The young man’s eyes glittered with greed. A car! It was all he desired in life. He asked her suspiciously:
“A Karmann Ghia?”
“Yes, my love, whatever you want!”
What happened next was awful. You don’t need to know. Maria Angélica—oh, dear God, have mercy on me, forgive me for having to write this!—Maria Angélica let out little shrieks during their lovemaking. And Alexandre had to stand it feeling nauseated, revolted. He became a rebel for the rest of his life. He had the feeling he’d never be able to sleep with a woman again. Which actually happened: at the age of twenty-seven he became impotent.
And they became lovers. He, on account of the neighbors, didn’t live with her. He wanted to live in a luxury hotel: he had breakfast in bed. And soon quit his job. He bought wildly expensive shirts. He went to a dermatologist and his pimples cleared up.
Maria Angélica could hardly believe her luck. What did she care about the servants who practically laughed in her face.
A friend warned her:
“Maria Angélica, can’t you see that boy’s a gold-digger? that he’s using you?”
“I won’t let you call Alexandre a gold-digger! And he loves me!”
One day Alex did something bold. He told her:
“I’m going to spend a few days away from Rio with a girl I met. I need some money.”
Those were awful days for Maria Angélica. She didn’t leave the house, didn’t bathe, hardly ate. Only out of stubbornness did she still believe in God. Because God had abandoned her. She was forced to be grievously herself.
Five days later he returned, full of swagger, full of joy. He brought her a tin of guava preserves as a present. She started eating it and broke a tooth. She had to go to the dentist to get a fake tooth put in.
And life went on. The bills were mounting. Alexandre demanding. Maria Angélica anguished. When she turned sixty-one he didn’t show. She sat alone before her birthday cake.
Then—then it happened.
Alexandre said to her:
“I need a million cruzeiros.”
“A million?” Maria Angélica gasped.
“Yes!” he answered annoyed, “a billion in old cruzeiros!”
“But . . . but I don’t have that kind of money . . .”
“Sell your apartment, then, and sell your Mercedes, get rid of your driver.”
“Even so, it wouldn’t be enough, my love, have mercy on me!”
The young man lost his temper:
“You miserable old wretch! you slob, you whore! Without a billion, I won’t go along with your indecency anymore!”
And in an impulse born of hatred, he left, slamming the door.
Maria Angélica stood there. Her body ached all over.
Then she slowly went to sit on the living-room sofa. She looked like a casualty of war. But there was no Red Cross to rescue her. She sat still, mute. Without a word to say.
“Looks like,” she thought, “looks like it’s going to rain.”
VISION OF SPLENDOR
(“Visão do esplendor”)
Brasília
Brasília is constructed on the line of the horizon. Brasília is artificial. As artificial as the world must have been when it was created. When the world was created, a man had to be created especially for that world. We are all deformed by our adaptation to the freedom of God. We don’t know how we would be if we had been created first and the world were deformed after according to our requirements. Brasília does not yet have the Brasília man. If I said that Brasília is pretty they would immediately see that I liked the city. But if I say that Brasília is the image of my insomnia they would see this as an accusation. But my insomnia is neither pretty nor ugly, my insomnia is me myself, it is lived, it is my astonishment. It is a semicolon. The two architects didn’t think of building beauty, that would be easy: they erected inexplicable astonishment. Creation is not a comprehension, it is a new mystery. —When I died, one day I opened my eyes and there was Brasília. I was alone in the world. There was a parked taxi. Without a driver. Oh how frightening. —Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, two solitary men. —I regard Brasília as I regard Rome: Brasília began with a final simplification of ruins. The ivy has yet to grow.
Besides the wind there is something else that blows. One can only recognize it by the supernatural rippling of the lake. —Wherever people stand, children might fall, and off the face of the world. Brasília lies at the edge. —If I lived here I would let my hair grow to the ground. —Brasília has a splendored past that now no longer exists. This type of civilization disappeared millennia ago. In the 4th century BC it was inhabited by extremely tall blond men and women who were neither Americans nor Swedes and who sparkled in the sun. They were all blind. That is why in Brasília there is nothing to stumble into. The Brasilianaires dressed in white gold. The race went extinct because few children were born. The more beautiful the Brasilianaires were, the blinder and purer and more sparkling, and the fewer children. The Brasilianaires lived for nearly three hundred years. There was nothing in the name of which to die. Millennia later it was discovered by a band of outcasts who would not have been welcomed anywhere else: they had nothing to lose. There they lit fires, pitched tents, gradually digging away at the sands that buried the city. These were men and women, smaller and dark, with darting and uneasy eyes, and who, being fugitives and desperate, had something in the name of which to live and die. They dwelled in ruined houses, multiplied, establishing a deeply contemplative race of humans. —I waited for nightfall like someone waiting for the shadows so as to steal out. When night fell I realized in horror that it was no use: no matter where I was I would be seen. What terrifies me is: seen by whom? —It was built with no place for rats. A whole part of us, the worst, precisely the one horrified by rats, that part has no place in Brasília. They wished to deny that we are worthless. A construction with space factored in for the clouds. Hell understands me better. But the rats, all huge, are invading. That is an invisible headline in the newspapers. —Here I am afraid. —The construction of Brasília: that of a totalitarian State. —This great visual silence that I love. My insomnia too would have created this peace of the never. I too, like those two who are monks, would meditate in this
desert. Where there’s no place for temptation. But I see in the distance vultures hovering. What could be dying, my God? —I didn’t cry once in Brasília. There was no place for it. —It is a beach without the sea. —In Brasília there is no way in, and no way out. —Mama, it’s lovely to see you standing there in that fluttering white cape. (It’s because I died, my son). —An open-air prison. In any case there would be nowhere to escape. Because whoever escapes would probably go to Brasília. —They imprisoned me in freedom. But freedom is only what can be conquered. When they grant it to me, they are ordering me to be free. —A whole side of human coldness that I possess, I encounter in myself here in Brasília, and it blossoms ice-cold, potent, ice-cold force of Nature. This is the place where my crimes (not the worst, but those I won’t ever understand in myself), where my ice-cold crimes find space. I am leaving. Here my crimes would not be those of love. I am leaving on behalf of my other crimes, those that God and I comprehend. But I know I shall return. I am drawn here by whatever frightens me in myself. —I have never seen anything like it in the world. But I recognize this city in the furthest depths of my dream. The furthest depths of my dream is a lucidity. —Well as I was saying, Flash Gordon . . . —If they took my picture standing in Brasília, when they developed the photograph only the landscape would appear. —Where are Brasília’s giraffes? —A certain cringing of mine, certain silences, make my son say: gosh, grown-ups are the worst. —It’s urgent. If it doesn’t get populated, or rather, overpopulated, it will be too late: there will be no place for people. They will feel tacitly expelled. —The soul here casts no shadow on the ground. —For the first couple of days I wasn’t hungry. Everything looked to me like airplane food. —At night I reached my face toward the silence. I know there is a hidden hour when manna descends and moistens the lands of Brasília. —No matter how close one gets, everything here is seen from afar. I couldn’t find a way to touch. But at least I had this in my favor: before I got here, I already knew how to touch from afar. I never got too discouraged: from afar, I would touch. I’ve had a lot, and not even what I touched, you know. That’s how rich women are. Pure Brasília. —The city of Brasília lies beyond the city. —Boys, boys, come here, will you, look who is coming on the street all dressed up in modernistic style. It ain’t nobody but . . . (Aunt Hagar’s Blues, Ted Lewis and His Band, with Jimmy Dorsey on the clarinet.) —That frightening beauty, this city, drawn up in the air. —For now no samba can spring up in Brasília. —Brasília doesn’t let me get tired. It pursues a little. Feeling good, feeling good, feeling good, I’m in a good mood. And after all I have always cultivated my weariness, as my richest passivity. —All this is just today. Only God knows what will happen in Brasília. Because here chance is abrupt. —Brasília is haunted. It is the still profile of a thing. —In my insomnia I look out the hotel window at three in the morning. Brasília is the landscape of insomnia. It never falls asleep. —Here the organic being does not decompose. It is petrified. —I would like to see scattered through Brasília five hundred thousand eagles of the blackest onyx. —Brasília is asexual. —The First instant of seeing is like a certain instant of drunkenness: your feet don’t touch the ground. —How deeply we breathe in Brasília. Whoever breathes starts to desire. And to desire is what one cannot do. There isn’t any. Will there ever be? The thing is, I am not seeing where. —I wouldn’t be shocked to run into Arabs in the street. Arabs, ancient and dead. —Here my passion dies. And I gain a lucidity that leaves me grandiose for no reason. I am fabulous and useless, I am made of pure gold. And almost psychic. —If there is any crime humanity has yet to commit, that new crime will be inaugurated here. And so hardly kept secret, so well-suited to the high plain, that no one would ever know. —Here is the place where space most resembles time. —I am sure this is my rightful place. But the thing is, I am too addicted to the land. I have bad life habits. —Erosion will strip Brasília to the bone. —The religious atmosphere I felt from the first instant, and that I denied. This city has been achieved through prayer. Two men beatified by solitude created me standing here, restless, alone, out in this wind. —Brasília badly needs roaming white horses. At night they would be green in the moonlight. —I know what the two wanted: slowness and silence, which is also my idea of eternity. The two created the picture of an eternal city. —There is something here that frightens me. When I figure out what it is that frightens me, I shall also know what I love here. Fear has always guided me toward what I desire. And because I desire, I fear. Often it was fear that took me by the hand and led me. Fear leads me to danger. And everything I love is risky. —In Brasília are the craters of the Moon. —The beauty of Brasília is its invisible statues.
I went to Brasília in 1962. What I wrote about it is what you have just read. And now I have returned twelve years later for two days. And I wrote about it too. So here is everything I vomited up.
Warning: I am about to begin.
This piece is accompanied by Strauss’s “Vienna Blood” waltz. It’s 11:20 on the morning of the 13th.
BRASÍLIA: SPLENDOR
Brasília is an abstract city. And there is no way to make it concrete. It is a rounded city with no corners. Neither does it have any neighborhood bars for people to get a cup of coffee. It’s true, I swear I didn’t see any corners. In Brasília the everyday does not exist. The cathedral begs God. It is two hands held open to receive. But Niemeyer is an ironic man: he has ironized life. It is sacred. Brasília does not allow the diminutive. Brasília is a joke, strictly perfect and without error. And the only thing that saves me is error.
The São Bosco church has such splendid stained glass that I fell silent seated on the pew, not believing it was real. Moreover the age we are passing through is fantastical, it is blue and yellow, and scarlet and emerald. My God, but what wealth. The stained glass holds light made of organ music. This church thus illuminated is nevertheless inviting. The only flaw is the unusual circular chandelier that looks like some nouveau riche thing. The church would have been pure without the chandelier. But what can you do? go at night, in the dark, and steal it?
Then I went to the National Library. A young Russian girl named Kira helped me. I saw young men and women studying and flirting: something totally compatible. And praiseworthy, of course.
I pause for a moment to say that Brasília is a tennis court.
There is a reinvigorating chill there. What hunger, but what hunger. I asked if the city had a lot of crime. I was told that in the suburb of Grama (is that its name?) there are about three homicides per week. (I interrupted the crimes to eat). The light of Brasília left me blind. I forgot my sunglasses at the hotel and was invaded by a terrible white light. But Brasília is red. And is completely naked. There is no way for people not to be exposed in that city. Although the air is unpolluted: you can breathe well, a little too well, your nose gets dry.
Naked Brasília leaves me beatified. And crazy. In Brasília I have to think in parentheses. Will they arrest me for living? That’s exactly it.
I am no more than phrases overheard by chance. On the street, while crossing through traffic, I heard: “It was out of necessity.” And at the Roxy Cinema, in Rio de Janeiro, I heard two fat women saying: “In the morning she slept and at night she woke up.” “She has no stamina.” In Brasília I have stamina, whereas in Rio I am sort of languid, sort of sweet. And I heard the following phrase from the same fat women who were short: “Just what does she have to go do over there?” And that, my dears, is how I got expelled.
Brasília has euphoria in the air. I said to the driver of the yellow cab: today seems like Monday, doesn’t it? “Yep,” he answered. And nothing more was said. I wanted so badly to tell him I had been to the utterly adored Brasília. But he didn’t want to hear it. Sometimes I’m too much.
Then I went to the dentist, got that, Brasília? I take care of myself. Should I read odontology journals just became I’m in the dentist’s waiting room? After I sat in the dentist’s magnific
ent death chair, electric chair, and saw a machine looking at me, called “Atlas 200.” It looked in vain, since I had no cavities. Brasília has no cavities. A powerful land, that one. And it doesn’t mess around. It bets high and plays to win. Merquior and I burst into howls of laughter that are still echoing back to me in Rio. I have been irremediably impregnated by Brasília.
I prefer the Carioca entanglement. I was delicately pampered in Brasília but scared to death of reading my lecture. (Here I note an event that astonishes me: I am writing in the past, present and future. Am I being levitated? Brasília suffers from levitation.) I throw myself into each one, I’m telling you. But it is good because it is risky. Believe it or not: as I was reading the words, I was praying inwardly. But, again, it is good because it is risky. Now I wonder: if there are no corners, where do the prostitutes stand smoking? do they sit on the ground? And the beggars? do they have cars? because there you can only get around by car.
The light in Brasília sometimes leads to ecstasy and total plenitude. But it is also aggressive and harsh—ah, how I would like the shade of a tree. Brasília has trees. But they have yet to be convincing. They look plastic.
I am now going to write something of the utmost importance: Brasília is the failure of the most spectacular success in the world. Brasília is a splattered star. It takes my breath away. It is beautiful and it is naked. The lack of shame one has in solitude. At the same time I was embarrassed to undress for a shower. As if a gigantic green eye were staring at me, implacable. Moreover Brasília is implacable. I felt as if someone were pointing at me: as if they could arrest me or take away my papers, my identity, my veracity, my last private breath. Oh what if the Radio Patrol catches me and beats me up! then I’ll say the worst word in the Portuguese language: sovaco, armpit. And they’ll drop dead. But for you, my love, I am more delicate and softly say: axilas, underarms . . .
Brasília smells like toothpaste. And whoever’s not married, loves without passion. They simply have sex. But I want to return, I want to try to decipher its enigma. I want especially to talk with university students. I want them to invite me to participate in this aridness, luminous and full of stars. Does anyone ever die in Brasília? No. Never. No one ever dies because there you cannot close your eyes. There they have hibernation: the air leaves a person in a stupor for years, who later comes back to life. The climate is challenging and whips people a bit. But Brasília needs magic, it needs voodoo. I don’t want Brasília to put a curse on me: because it would work. I pray. I pray a lot. Oh what a good God. Everything there is out in the open and whoever wants it has to deal with it. Though the rats adore the city. I wonder what they eat? ah, I know: they eat human flesh. I escaped as best I could. And seemed to be remotely controlled.
The Complete Stories Page 50