Works

Transcrição

Works

2007
F r a n k f u r t
Dear Friends
It’s a great pleasure to present to you our highlights for Frankfurt, 2007. You are also
welcome to visit our site www.agenciariff.com.br, where you’ll find further information
about all our authors and clients.
Agencia Riff is about to complete 17 years of activity (on January 2008), and we’re
all very proud! We work as co-agents for important foreign publishers and literary
agents, selling rights in Brazil and Portugal. We also represent a list of essential brazilian
authors, taking care of their works in domestic and international markets.
Our co-agent Anne-Marie Vallat / AMV Agencia Literaria represents Agencia
Riff ’s authors for the Spanish Language, Portugal and France. Contacts with
Anne-Marie Vallat through email at [email protected], or
www.amvagencialiteraria.com
Our co-agent Nicole Witt / Literarische Agentur Mertin represents Agencia Riff ’s
authors for all other territories. Contacts with Nicole Witt through email at
[email protected], or www.mertin-litag.de (Cintia Moscovich, Erico Verissimo,
Graciliano Ramos, Luis Fernando Verissimo and Lygia Fagundes Telles are represented
by Literarische Agentur Mertin for all territories, including Spanish Language, Portugal
and France).
Please feel free to contact us at any time should you need more information about our
authors, reading copies, sample translations or updated rights lists. Contacts can be
made directly or through our dear friends Anne-Marie Vallat and Nicole Witt.
With our best wishes,
Lucia Riff, Laura Riff & João Paulo Riff
Contents
1
AUTHORS
3
Complete List
2
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Érico Veríssimo
Graciliano Ramos
João Cabral de Melo Neto
Rachel de Queiroz
HIGHLIGHTS 2007
2.1 Fiction
A COMÉDIA DOS ANJOS • Adriana Falcão
A DÉCIMA SEGUNDA NOITE • Luis Fernando Veríssimo
A VIDA SEXUAL DA MULHER FEIA • Claudia Tajes
AOS MEUS AMIGOS • Maria Adelaide Amaral
CONSPIRAÇÃO DE NUVENS • Lygia Fagundes Telles
DE CADA AMOR TU HERDARÁS SÓ O CINISMO • Arthur Dapieve
ELITE DA TROPA • Luiz Eduardo Soares, André Batista e
Rodrigo Pimentel
MEU MARIDO • Lívia Garcia-Roza
POR QUE SOU GORDA MAMÃE • Cíntia Moscovich
O HOMEM QUE MATOU O ESCRITOR • Sérgio Rodrigues
O VÔO DA GUARÁ VERMELHA • Maria Valéria Rezende
UMA PONTE PARA TEREBIM • Letícia Wierchowski
2.2 Non-Fiction
APRENDIZ DO TEMPO • Ivo Pintanguy
CÁ ENTRE NÓS • Maria Tereza Maldonado
PAIS, FILHOS E CIA ILIMITADA • Gladis Brun
PERDAS E GANHOS • Lya Luft
2.3 Children & Ya
23 HISTÓRIAS DE UM VIAJANTE • Marina Colasanti
FELPO FILVA • Eva Furnari
PREZADO RONALDO • Flávio Carneiro
QUANDO EU ERA PEQUENA • Adélia Prado
UÓLACE E JOÃO VICTOR • Rosa Amanda Strausz
VALENTINA • Márcio Vassalo
BRAZILIAN LITERATURE – CLASSIC AUTHORS
4
SAMPLE TRANSLATIONS
4.1 Fiction
A COMÉDIA DOS ANJOS • The Comedy of Angels, by Adriana Falcão
A VIDA SEXUAL DA MULHER FEIA • Sex Life of the Ugly Woman, by Claudia
Tajes
DE CADA AMOR TU HERDARÁS SÓ O CINISMO • From Each Love You
Shall Get Nothing But Scorn, by Arthur Dapieve
ELITE DA TROPA • Elite Squad, by Luiz Eduardo Soares, André Batista e
Rodrigo Pimentel
O HOMEM QUE MATOU O ESCRITOR • The Man Who Killed the Writer,
by Sérgio Rodrigues
O VÔO DA GUARÁ VERMELHA • The Flight of the Red Ibis, by Maria Valéria
Rezende
POR QUE SOU GORDA, MAMÃE? • Why Am I Fat, Mum?, by Cíntia Moscovich
UMA PONTE PARA TEREBIN • A Bridge to Terebin, by Letícia Wierzchowski
4.1 Non-fiction
PERDAS E GANHOS • Losses & Gains, by Lya Luft
Authors
Adélia PRADO
Graciliano RAMOS
Maria Adelaide AMARAL
Adriana FALCÃO
Ivo PITANGUY
Maria Tereza MALDONADO
Alcione ARAúJO
João CABRAL de MELO NETO
Maria Valéria REZENDE
Ariano SUASSUNA
João Silvério TREVISAN
Mariana VERISSIMO
Arthur DAPIEVE
Jorge de LIMA
Marina COLASANTI
Augusto Frederico SCHMIDT
José Cândido de CARVALHO
Mario QUINTANA
Bob FERNANDES
Josué de CASTRO
Murilo MENDES
Carlos DRUMMOND de ANDRADE
Kledir RAMIL
Paulo Emilio SALES GOMES
Carlos Herculano LOPES
Leticia WIERZCHOWSKI
Paulo MENDES CAMPOS
Cecília VASCONCELLOS
Livia GARCIA-ROZA
Rachel de QUEIROZ
Celso LUFT
Luciana SAVAGET
Ricardo RAMOS
Cintia MOSCOVICH
Luis Fernando VERISSIMO
Roberto DaMATTA
Claudia TAJES
Luiz Claudio CARDOSO
Rosa Amanda STRAUSZ
Cristiane COSTA
Luiz Eduardo SOARES
Sérgio RODRIGUES
Erico VERISSIMO
Lya LUFT
Suzana VARGAS
Eva FURNARI
Lygia FAGUNDES TELLES
Sylvia ORTHOF
Fernando EICHENBERG
Marcelo PIRES
Vitor RAMIL
Flávio CARNEIRO
Márcio VASSALLO
Zuenir VENTURA
Gladis BRUN
Listed by Genre
FICTION ❤♠♣
contemporary prose,
poetry & short stories
❤ NOVEL
♣
SHORT STORY
♠
POETRY
♦
NON-FICTION
H CHILDREN & YA
v
CLASSIC AUTHORS
w
THEATER
l
HUMOUR
t PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
n
FAIRY TALES
Adélia Prado
Adriana Falcão
Alcione Araújo
Ariano Suassuna
Arthur Dapieve
Carlos Herculano Lopes
Cintia Moscovich
Claudia Tajes
Cristiane Costa
Flávio Carneiro
João Silvério Trevisan
Leticia Wierzchowski
Livia Garcia-Roza
Luis Fernando Verissimo
Luiz Claudio Cardoso
Luiz Eduardo Soares
Lya Luft
Lygia Fagundes Telles
Maria Adelaide Amaral
Maria Valéria Rezende
Marina Colasanti
Rosa Amanda Strausz
Sérgio Rodrigues
Vitor Ramil
NON-FICTION
♦
Bob Fernandes
Fernando Eichenberg
Gladis Brun
Ivo Pitanguy
Kledir Ramil
Maria Tereza Maldonado
Marina Colasanti
Roberto DaMatta
Zuenir Ventura
CHILDREN & YA
H
Adélia Prado
Adriana Falcão
Cecília Vasconcellos
Cristiane Costa
Flavio Carneiro
Leticia Wierzchowski
Luciana Savaget
Marcelo Pires
Márcio Vassallo
Mariana Verissimo
Marina Colasanti
Rosa Amanda Strausz
Suzana Vargas
BRAZILIAN LITERATURE v
CLASSIC AUTHORS
Augusto Frederico Schmidt
Celso Luft
Erico Veríssimo
Graciliano Ramos
Jorge de Lima
José Cândido de Carvalho
Josué de Castro
Mario Quintana
Murilo Mendes
Paulo Emilio de Sales Gomes
Paulo Mendes Campos
Rachel de Queiroz
Ricardo Ramos
Sylvia Orthof
elaboração e versão em inglês dos textos
Fernanda Abreu
capa e projeto gráfico
Fatima Agra
foto da capa
Zeca Linhares
revisão
Alexie Sommer
editoração e impressão
FA Editoração Eletrônica
Rua Visconde de Pirajá 414/1108 – Ipanema
22410-002 – Rio de Janeiro – RJ – BRASIL
tel.: (5521) 2287-6299
fax.: (5521) 2267-6393
[email protected]
www.agenciariff.com.br
Highlights 2007
FICTION
NON-FICTION
CHILDREN & YA
The Comedy of Angels
ADRIANA FALCãO
Highlights – Fiction
The Comedy of Angels (A comédia dos anjos) is a book that starts with the end of a life: one fine morning in
May 1958, Dona Maria Madalena Teresa de Jesus Rita de Cássia Santana does not wake up. It is the eve of the
World Football Cup in Sweden, where Brazil will go on to win for the first time and leave the whole world
dumbstruck with the dribbles of Garrincha and goals of Pelé. As family and friends gather to mourn Dona Madalena, however, it becomes clear that the old lady is not ready for eternal rest: rather, she is bound on preventing her 24-year-old daughter Edith, mother of young Arthur, from falling for the charms of her ex-husband, a
football player named Paulo who will soon be called to play for Brazil in the World Cup. Adriana Falcão happily
confirms that Dona Madalena’s character was inspired by her own mother. Written in the light, playful style
that has already become the author’s trademark, The Comedy of Angels is proof that good literature and hearty
laughter can go hand in hand.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960 and raised in Recife, Adriana Falcão was first noticed for her TV scripts.She wrote
three popular series for Globo network, as well as a successful adaptation of Ariano Suassuna’s Play of Our Lady
of Mercy (O auto da compadecida). Her first novel, The Machine (A máquina, 1999), an irresistible fable about
undying love, was made into a successful film directed by Adriana’s husband João Falcão. Her latest book is an
adaptation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream where the plot is transposed to Bahia during Carnival.
Works
❤
A máquina - 1999, Objetiva
A comédia dos anjos - 2004, Planeta
Sonho de uma Noite de Verão - Coleção Devorando
Shakespeare - 2007, Objetiva
♣
O doido da garrafa - 2003, Planeta
♠
Pequeno dicionário de palavras ao vento (ill. José Carlos
Lollo) - 2003, Planeta
H
Mania de explicação (ill. Mariana Massarani) - 2001,
Salamandra
Luna Clara e Apolo Onze (ill. José Carlos Lollo) - 2002, Moderna
PS Beijei (with Mariana Veríssimo) - 2004, Salamandra
A tampa do céu – 2005, Salamandra
Foreign Editions
ITALY
Luna Chiara Apollo 11 - 2005, Fanucci Editore
PORTUGAL
Luna Clara e Apolo Onze – 2006, Âmbar
A comédia dos anjos – 2007, Âmbar
Twelfth Night
LuIs FERNANDO VERIssImO
A Shakespearian tragicomedy narrated by a French parrot – sounds unlikely? But this is exactly how Luis
Fernando Verissimo tackled the challenge of ‘rewriting’ one of Shakespeare’s stories with a modern twist and
produce his very own Twelfth Night (A décima segunda noite). After choosing one of the bard’s most luminous
plays, Verissimo traded the fictitious island of Illyria for a beauty parlour in Paris owned by a man named Orsino – after the duke in Shakespeare’s play – who is secretly besotted with Olívia, in mourning since the death of
her brother. The plot is further complicated by the arrival of Violeta, who in turn falls in love with Orsino. All
this is seen and recounted by Henri the parrot, a very peculiar bird who quotes John Lennon and Kierkegaard
in the same sentence. Henri’s comments take the readers on a trip through the Brazilian community in Paris,
whilst Verissimo rebuilds Shakespeare’s plot to include many elements of Brazilian culture as well as his sharp
sense of humour.
Born in Porto Alegre in 1936, Luis Fernando Verissimo is currently one of the most sucessful authors in Brazil.
With millions of copies sold, his books have been adapted for the stage and TV and have been translated in
seventeen languages. Son of renowned writer Erico Verissimo, the author has worked as a journalist and writes
for newspapers O Globo, O Estado de S. Paulo and Zero Hora. He is specially known for his short narratives
– crônicas – but has also penned celebrated novels such as The Club of Angels (O clube dos anjos).
Author’s Website: www.luisfernandoverissimo.com.br
Works
❤
O jardim do diabo – 1988, 2005, Objetiva
O clube dos anjos – 1998, Objetiva
Borges e os orangotangos eternos – 2000, Cia das Letras
O opositor – 2004, Objetiva
A mancha – Coleção Vozes do Golpe – 2004, Cia das
Letras
A décima segunda noite - Coleção Devorando Shakespeare
– 2006, Objetiva
♣
Histórias brasileiras de verão – 1999, Objetiva
Aquele estranho dia que nunca chega – 1999, Objetiva
A eterna privação do zagueiro absoluto – 1999, Objetiva
As mentiras que os homens contam – 2000, Objetiva
A mesa voadora – 2001, Objetiva
Sexo na cabeça – 2002, Objetiva
Todas as histórias do analista de Bagé – 2002, Objetiva
Banquete com os deuses – 2003, Objetiva
O melhor das comédias da vida privada – 2004, Objetiva
O nariz e outras crônicas – 2004, Editora Ática
Orgias – 2005, Objetiva
♠
Poesia numa hora dessas – 2002, Objetiva
H
Comédias para se ler na escola – 2001, Objetiva
Festa de criança: Para gostar de ler junior – 2001, Editora Ática
O santinho – 2002, Objetiva
Foreign Editions
ARGENTINA
Borges y los orangutanes eternos – 2005, Editorial Sudamericana
CATALONIA
O opositor –Editora La Campana (to be published)
DENMARK
Borges of de Evige Orangutanger – 2003, Glyldend Al
FRANCE
Et mourir de plaisir – 2001, Éditions du Seuil
Borges et les orangs-outangs éternels – 2004, Éditions du Seuil
Le doigt du diable – 2006, Éditions du Seuil
Ed Mort e outras histórias –L’écailler du Sud (to
be published)
GERMANY
Kleine Lügen – 1999, Europa Verlag
Der Club Der Engel – 2001, Lichtenberg Verlag/Droemer
Vogelsteins Verwirrung – 2003, Droemersche
Verlagsanstalt
Meierhoffs Verschwörrung – 2006 – Droemersche Verlagsanstalt
JAPAN
Borges e os orangotango eternos – Fusosha (to be published)
KOREA
Borges e os orangotangos eternos – Woongjin Think Big Co. (to
be published)
O clube dos anjos – Woogjin Thin Big Co. (to be published)
PORTUGAL
O clube dos anjos – 2001, Dom Quixote
As mentiras que os homens contam – 2001, Dom Quixote
Borges e os orangotangos eternos – 2002, Asa
Comédias para se ler na escola – 2002, Dom Quixote
O melhor das comédias da vida privada – Dom Quixote (to be
published)
A mesa voadora – 2003, Dom Quixote
Sexo na cabeça – 2004, Dom Quixote
ROMENIA
Borges si urangutanii eterni – 2005, Curtea Veche
O clube dos anjos – Curtea Vechea Publishing (to be published)
RUSSIA
O clube dos anjos – Ast Publishers (to be published)
Borges e os orangotangos eternos – AST Publishers (to be published)
SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO
Borges e os orangotangos eternos – Trivic (to be published)
GREECE
Borges e os Orangotangos Eternos – 2007,
Agra Publiactions
O Clube dos Anjos – 2001, Enalios
SPAIN
El club de los angeles – 2001, Plaza y Janés
As mentiras que os homens contam – Nortideas Comuniccación,
S.L. (to be published)
HUNGARY
O clube dos anjos – Publishers Eri Kiadó (to
be published)
UK
The Club of Angels – 2001, Harvill
Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utans – 2004, Harvill
ISRAEL
Borges e os orangotangos eternos – Bambook
Publishers (to be published)
USA
The Club of Angels – 2002, New Directions
Borges and the Eternal Orangutans - 2005, New Directions
ITALY
Il club degli angeli – 2000, Ponte Alle Grazie
Le bugie che raccontano gli uomini – 2004, Ponte Alle Grazie
YUGOSLAVIA
O Clube de los Anjos – 2002, Narodna Knjiga
Sex Life of the Ugly Woman
CLAuDIA TAjEs
“The ugly woman is not simply an æsthetical deformation. The ugly woman is a frame of mind.” This is how
the protagonist of Claudia Tajes’ Sex Life of the Ugly Woman (A vida sexual da mulher feia) describes her own
situation. Jucianara is an ugly woman – not extremely ugly, because those are considered by some people to
have their own sort of charm, but plain ugly in a way that can both make her invisible or have her stand out in
the most embarrassing way. This is the fate of ugly women that the world does not treat in the same way as it
does the pretty ones. Jucianara learns this at a very early age, and she uses the material provided by her own life
to draw a portrait of every ugly woman’s fate in modern society. Candid, witty and often outright hilarious, the
book follows Jucianara’s misadventures throughout life, from the different treatment received from her family
and friends at school to her adult love life. A best-seller which put Tajes into the literary spotlight, Sex Life…
is currently being adapted as a TV series, a film and a stage play.
Claudia Tajes was born in Porto Alegre in 1963 and spent many years working as a writer in advertising until she started writing fiction in 2000. Author of four novels and three short story collections, she was soon
noticed for her ability to turn tragedy into comedy, weaving stories full of irony and good humor in a fresh,
unmistakable style. She currently works as a scriptwriter, adapting her own writings as well as creating original
stories for TV.
Works
❤
Dores, amores & assemelhados – 2002, L&PM
Vida dura – 2003, Planeta
A vida sexual da mulher feia – 2005, Agir
As pernas de Úrsula e outras possibilidades – 2001, 2006, Agir
Louca por homem - histórias de uma doente de amor – 2007, Agir
♣
Dez quase amores – 2000, L&PM
Foreign Editions
PORTUGAL
Dores & Amores - 2005, Palavra
To My Friends
mARIA ADELAIDE AmARAL
To My Friends (Aos meus amigos) deals with two very difficult, inseparable subjects: death and suicide. Maria Adelaide
Amaral, author of celebrated novel Luisa, tells the story of a group of friends who come together after one of them
commits suicide. With Leo’s death, his old friends try to keep his memory alive and find the manuscript he supposedly
wrote just before jumping out of a window. They all come from the same generation and share an unhappy apathy with
their own lives. The search for Leo’s lost manuscript triggers a torrent of conversations and memories which expose the
personal crisis of a specific generation – those who left a strict upbringing to embrace the excesses of 20th century’s final
decades – and the evolution of Brazil and its uncertain democracy. Told characteristically in Maria Adelaide’s intelligent,
dry and humorous style, To My Friends is an elegy to friendship and, ultimately, to the love that binds people together.
To My Friends is being adapted to a TV series (TV GLOBO), and will be launched in January, 2008.
Born in Porto, Portugal, in 1942, Maria Adelaide Amaral moved to Brazil when she was twelve. After graduating in Journalism, she began a sucessful career as a playwright, and made her literary debut with Luisa, Almost a Love Story (Luísa,
quase uma história de amor), the portrait of the generation that came of age during the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1990s,
she collaborated in some of the best examples of Brazilian writing for TV, such as the adaptation of Eça de Queiroz’s classic The Maias (Os Maias), and Letícia Wierzchowski’s The House of the Seven Women (A casa das sete mulheres).
Works
❤
Luisa, quase uma história de amor – 1986, Globo
Aos meus amigos – 1992, Globo
O bruxo – 2000, Globo
Estrela nua: Amor e sedução – Coleção Amores extremos – 2003, Record
H
Coração solitário (ill. César Landucci and Mauricio Negro) – 1996, Global
w
Ó abre alas – Coleção Dramaturgia de Sempre – 2000, Civilização Brasileira
Tarsila – 2004, Globo
Mademoiselle Chanel – 2004, Globo
Melhor teatro (edited by Silvana Garcia) - 2006, Global
Conspiracy of Clouds
LYgIA FAguNDEs TELLEs
Conspiracy of Clouds (Conspiração de nuvens) is Lygia Fagundes Telles’ first collection of stories since Invention and
Memory (Invenção e memória). The stories are a combination of memories and fiction – according to the author, ‘some
of the facts I speak about have happened, others could have happened but did not... this book is completely different
from my previous ones’. Lygia was inspired by saying of St. Augustine: ‘Memory is the home of the soul’ and embarked
on a journey to this house of memory. Whilstvisiting its different rooms, she find pieces of her own past and chooses
to recount them as they really happened, or transforms them into fiction. The author tells of her trip to Brasília in the
company of fellow writers in the middle of Brazil’s violent military dictatorship, in order to hand the Minister of Justice
a petition against the fierce censorship of that period. She also revisits some of her other books and characters, using her
own past to create a true gift to readers.
Born in São Paulo in 1923 and author of over thirty works – novels, short stories and memoirs -, Lygia Fagundes Telles
is the great lady of Brazilian literature. Elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1982, she won the prestigious
Camões Award, the major reward in Portuguese-language literature. Her stories spring from the clash between external
reality and our internal desires and fears. Among her most famous books are The Girls (As meninas) and Stone Danse
(Ciranda de pedra).
Author’s Website: www.lygiafagundestelles.com.br
Works
❤
Meus contos preferidos –2004, Rocco
Histórias de mistério – 2004, Rocco
Meus contos esquecidos – 2005, Rocco
Ciranda de pedra – 1954, Rocco
Verão no aquário – 1963, Rocco
As meninas – 1974, Rocco
As horas nuas – 1989, Rocco
♦
♣
Antes do baile verde – 1970, Rocco
Seminário dos ratos – 1977, Rocco
Mistérios – 1981, Rocco
A estrutura da bolha de sabão - 1991, Rocco
A noite escura mais eu – 1995, Rocco
A disciplina do amor – 1980, Rocco
Invenção e memória – 2000, Rocco
Durante aquele estranho chá – 2002, Rocco
Conspiração de Nuvens – 2007, Rocco
Foreign Editions
FRANCE
La discipline de l’amour – 2002, Éditions Payot & Rivages
Les pensionnaires - 2005, Éditions Stock
GERMANY
Nackte Stunden – Rütten & Loening, Berlin Gmbh
HOLLAND
De Meisjes – 1998, Uitgeverij De Geus
ITALY
Ragazze – 2006, Cavallo Di Ferro
Antes do baile verde – Cavallo Di Ferro (to be published)
PORTUGAL
As horas nuas – 2005, Presença
As meninas – 2006, Presença
Verão no aquário – 2006, Presença
Ciranda de pedra – Presença (to be published)
From Each Love You Shall
Get Nothing But Scorn
ARTHuR DApIEVE
What happens when a middle-aged ad executive falls for a very young trainee at his agency while listening to
R.E.M.’s It’s the end of the world (and we know it) at a rock concert? Sparks fly, then they die, and a heated affair
slowly turns into a melancholic love story. Journalist Arthur Dapieve’s fiction debut, From Each Love You Shall
Get Nothing But Scorn (De cada amor tu herdarás só o cinismo), has earned much praise from the critics. It tells
the obvious yet unique story of Dino and Adelaide whilst alluding to Rio’s bohemian culture and Brazilian and
international pop music; the title, for instance, is a line from a famous samba by renowned composer Cartola.
Arthur also dialogues with great names of contemporary literature such as Italian Dino Buzzati, who´s A Love
Affair served as direct inspiration for his first novel, both in the names of the main characters and in the plot
itself. From Each Love... introduces an original talent of new Brazilian fiction.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1963, Arthur Dapieve is a well-known cultural journalist with a weekly column in
the O Globo daily newspaper since 1993. He teaches writing techniques at Rio’s Catholic University, has recently hosted a successful comedy TV show on the cable network and is working on another one. He is also the
author of five non-fiction and comedy books including BRock, a well-praised history of 1980s Brazilian rock,
and the biography of Brazilian pop icon Renato Russo. Dapieve is currently working on his second novel.
Works
❤
De cada amor tu herdarás só o cinismo – 2004, Objetiva
Eu sou uma criança – Objetiva (to be published)
♦
Essays, Biographies
BRock: O rock brasileiro dos anos 80 – 1995, Editora 34
Guia de rock em CD (with Luiz Henrique Romanholli)
– 2000, Jorge Zahar Editor
Renato Russo: O trovador solitário – 2000, 2006, Ediouro
Morreu na contramão: O suicídio como notícia – 2007, Jorge Zahar Editor
Os Paralamas do Sucesso (photographs by Mauricio Valladares, comments by Bi Ribeiro, Herbert Vianna and João Barone) – 2006, Senac
Rio/Jaboticaba
l
Manual do Mané (with Gustavo Poli and Sérgio Rodrigues) – 2003,
Editora Planeta
Elite Squad
LuIz EDuARDO sOAREs
ANDRé bATIsTA
RODRIgO pImENTEL
Written by prominent anthropologist Luiz Eduardo Soares in collaboration with André Batista and Rodrigo
Pimentel - two former operatives in Rio de Janeiro’s special police force, BOPE - Elite Squad reveals for the first
time and viewed from the inside the strenuous training and dramatic day-to-day life of the men sent to fight
at the forefront of the guerilla warfare against drug lords in Rio’s slums. It is a compelling fictional account
based on the actual experiences of the writers, where the reader can hear the voice of the policeman himself and
follow his daily struggles while serving as a killing machine whose only logic is war. Elite Squad stems from the
same material behind violent and controversial new film by director José Padilha (Bus 174), which premiered at
Rio’s Int’l Film Festival last September. After the film was distributed throughout Brazil in thousands of pirate
copies following a leak in the editing room, BOPE unsuccessfully tried to prevent its national release scheduled
for early October, which only boosted its popularity.
Luiz Eduardo Soares is one of Brazil’s most influent authors in the field of public security. A PhD in Political
Science, he is currently Secretary of Life Valuation and Crime Prevention in Nova Iguaçu, an important Rio
suburb, and teaches at universities. He has 11 books to his credit, including the best-seller Pig Head (Cabeça de
porco, 2005). André Batista is a police captain in Rio de Janeiro. He served at BOPE between 1996 and 2001,
and also graduated as a lawyer. Rodrigo Pimentel spent several years as a policeman, including a five-year span
at BOPE between 1995 and 2000. He co-produced Bus 174 and currently works as a security consultant.
Works
♣
Meu casaco de general: 500 dias no front da Segurança Pública do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – 2000, Cia das Letras
Cabeça de porco (com MV Bill e Celso Athayde) – 2005, Editora Objetiva
Elite da tropa (com André Batista e Rodrigo Pimentel) – 2006, Editora Objetiva
Legalidade libertária – 2006, Editora Lumen-Juris
Segurança tem saída – 2006, Editora Sextante.
My Husband
LíVIA gARCIA-ROzA
In the novel My Husband (Meu marido), former psychoanalist Livia Garcia-Roza once again turns her sharp
eye to her favorite subject: human relationships and the subtle and intertwined ingredients they are made from.
Bela and Eduardo have been married for a few years and live in a spacious flat in Rio de Janeiro with their
son Raphael. Bela, who comes from a small provincial town, teaches English as a foreign language; Eduardo
graduated in Law and works as a head constable at one of the city’s precincts. Told by Bela, the story reveals
the gradual undoing of a family brought about by her husband’s drinking problem and erratic behavior, in
stark contrast to Bela’s solid family background. In a clear, direct style, the reader is shown flashes of Bela and
Eduardo’s everyday life: the husband’s drinking binges, his constant absences, and the gap that opens up between them as their son grows. The author cleverly uses the wife’s perspective to build a vivid and ultimately
tragic account of an ordinary middle-class marriage.
Psychoanalist Livia Garcia-Roza was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1940. Whilst working as a clinical therapist for
over thirty years, she has written many articles on psychoanalysis for several newspapers and magazines. She
made her literary debut in 1995 with Girl’s Bedroom (Quarto de menina), already considered a contemporary
classic, where she deals with the pains of growing up and finding your own place in the world of turbulent
modern relationships. Livia is married to fellow writer and former psychoanalist Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza.
Works
❤
♣
Meus queridos estranhos – 1997, Record
Cartão-postal – 1999, Record
Solo feminino: Amor e desacerto – 2002, Record
A palavra que veio do sul – 2004, Record
Meu marido – 2006, Record
Ficções fraternas (editor) – 2003, Record
Filhos e cenas (withFernando Bonassi) – 2004, Callis
Restou o cão e outros contos – 2005, Companhia das Letras
A cara da mãe – 2007, Companhia das Letras
H
Quarto de menina – 1995, Record (‘Highly Recommended’
label by FNLIJ)
Cine Odeon – 2001, Record
Why Am I Fat, Mum?
CíNTIA mOsCOVICH
A writer puts on forty-eight and a half pounds in only four years. How could this have happened? How could
she have completely lost control of her own body and never even realize it? Could the roots of the problem lie
in her past, in the family history, in all the love - and hate - shared by children and their parents? These are the
questions that guide Why Am I Fat, Mum? (Por que sou gorda, mamãe?), journalist Cíntia Moscovich’s highly
praised new novel. As the narrator searches for the reasons why she put on so much weight so quickly, she embarks on a journey through memory focused on her Jewish family of European immigrants, and especially on
her strained relationship with her mother. At the end of this very personal and often painful journey, not only
does she find her own lost body, but also the strength to become a full-fledged writer. The narrator’s quest is
also a universal search for ways to be happy inside one’s own skin, carried out sensibly and often hilariously by
one of the most original voices in new Brazilian literature.
Born in Porto Alegre in 1958, Cíntia Moscovich reviews books for the daily newspaper Zero Hora and has
worked as translator, copy-editor, press assistant, literary consultant and teacher, as well as having directed Rio
Grande do Sul’s state Book Institute. Her first solo work, the short story collection The Kingdom of Onions
(O reino das cebolas), was shortlisted for the Jabuti award. She is also the author of a well-praised novel, Two
Equals (Duas iguais) and two additional volumes of short stories.
Works
❤
♣
Duas iguais – 2004, Record
Por que sou gorda, mamãe? – 2006, Record
O reino das cebolas – 1996, L&PM; new edition Record
(to be published)
Arquitetura do arco-íris – 2004, Record
Anotações durante o incêndio – 2000, 2006, Record
Foreign Editions
PORTUGAL
Duas Iguais – 2006, Pergaminho
Arquitetura do arco-íris – Pergaminho (to be published)
SPAIN
Duas Iguais – Tusquets (to be published)
The Man Who Killed the Writer
séRgIO RODRIguEs
If all the stories in the world have already been written, it is time to kill the writer and rewrite them all over
again; shuffle the cards and start the game afresh. Journalist Sérgio Rodrigues has done just that in The Man
Who Killed the Writer (O homem que matou o escritor), his first literary venture after a well-established reputation in the Brazilian press. The writings in this collection point to a new literary trend for the 21st century: a
motley, colorful combination of crime novel, short story, metalanguage, comedy and farce. The title-story tells
of a failed writer who finally manages to achieve success thanks to a bizarre twist of fate. Others are set in places
as improbable as a home for retired artist-apes. The Man Who Killed the Writer is a witty exercise of style that
proves there is no salvation beyond literature, and earned its creator the definition of ‘one of the new authors
leading the way to a Brazilian literature of the 21st century’.
Born in Muriaé, Minas Gerais in 1962 and living in Rio de Janeiro since 1979, Sérgio Rodrigues built a solid
reputation as one of the best writers in Brazilian journalism, having lent his pen to several major newspapers
and magazines such as O Globo, Jornal do Brasil and Veja. He is the author of a novel, The Flowerville Seeds
(As sementes de Flowerville), two short story collections and a comedy book, and is currently working on his
second novel.
Works
❤
As sementes de Flowerville – 2006, Objetiva
♣
O homem que matou o escritor – 2000, Objetiva
What língua is esta? – 2005, Ediouro
l
Manual do mané (with Arthur Dapieve and Gustavo Poli) – 2003, Planeta
The Flight of the Red Ibis
mARIA VALéRIA REzENDE
The Flight of the Red Ibis (O vôo da guará vermelha), Maria Valéria Rezende’s first novel, is the tale of an
unlikely and deeply moving love between Rosálio, an illiterate construction worker in São Paulo, and Irene,
an HIV-positive prostitute who has lost the will to live. He needs someone to listen to the stories he has to
tell – even though he doesn’t know how to read or write; she in turn needs someone who can truly love her.
Together, these two anonymous and invisible people weave a beautiful tale about the need for affection that
afflicts people in the modern world, specially in cities as vast and harsh as South America’s largest metropolis.
In a truly original voice, the author deftly crafts a narrative both sophisticated and very easy to read. She draws
inspiration from classical references such as Thousand and One Nights as well as from the pace and language of
cordel, a traditional style of popular writing very common in north-eastern Brazil. The Flight of the Red Ibis is a
breath of fresh air in Brazilian fiction.
Born in Santos in 1942, Maria Valéria Rezende is a nun of the Congregation of Our Lady–Canonesses of St.
Augustine. She spent over thirty years teaching literacy, first within the working class movement in suburban
São Paulo, and then in north-eastern Brazil, where she now lives. The author travels frequently abroad to act
as a consultant and organize workshops. A great revelation of contemporary Brazilian literature, she has also
written two short story collections.
Works
❤
O vôo da guará vermelha – 2005, Objetiva
♣
Vasto mundo – 2001, Beca
Modo de apanhar pássaros à mão – 2006, Objetiva
H
O arqueólogo do futuro – 2006, Planeta
Foreign Editions
FRANCE
O vôo da guará vermelha – Editions Metaillié (to be published)
PORTUGAL
O vôo da guará vermelha – 2007, Oficina do Livro
SPAIN
O vôo da guará vermelha – Santillana (to be published)
A Bridge to Terebin
LETíCIA WIERzCHOWskI
A Bridge to Terebin (Uma ponte para Terebin) is based on the life of the author’s grandfather, Jan Wierzchowski,
who emigrated to Brazil as a young Polish man in 1936, three years before Poland’s invasion by the nazis. After
discovering the letters sent to Jan by the family he had left behind, Letícia decided to retrace her grandfather’s
steps and examine the price we sometimes pay for our freedom. In the poetic, moving style that has become
her trademark, the author recounts Jan’s one-way journey. She observes both the joy and the sorrow he encountered, when the dream of a brand new life was mixed with the pain of leaving behind his country and his
relatives, many of whom he would never see again. Unable to return to Poland for tweny-eight years – even
though he fought in the war for his country’s liberation – Jan led a fascinating, brave existence, and his granddaughter Letícia does honour to this life in her splendid novel. The author was also inspired by the story of her
relatives who stayed in Poland during the somber years of German occupation.
Letícia Wierzchowski is among the best contemporary Brazilian authors. Born in Porto Alegre in 1972, she has
over ten books to her credit. They include the hugely successful novel House of the Seven Women (A casa das
sete mulheres), translated into five languages and adapted into a TV series aired in over twenty-three countries.
Letícia also used her Polish origins as inspiration for the acclaimed book of children’s tales The Wawel Dragon
and Other Polish Tales (O
O dragão de Wawel e outras lendas polonesas).
Works
❤
H
[email protected] – 1999, LP&M
Prata do tempo – 1999, Record (new edition to be published)
O anjo e o resto de nós – 1998, 2001, Record
A casa das sete mulheres – 2002, Record
O pintor que escrevia – 2003, Record
Cristal polonês – 2003, Record
Um farol no pampa – 2004, Record
Uma ponte para Terebin – 2005, Record
De um grande amor e de uma perdição maior ainda – 2007, Record
O dragão de Wawel e outras lendas polonesas (with Anna Klacewicz)
– 2005, Record
Todas as coisas querem ser outras coisas (ill.Virgílio Neves) – 2006, Record
O menino paciente (with Marcelo Pires, ill. Virgílio Neves) – 2007, Record
Foreign Editions
GREECE
A casa das sete mulheres –Enalios Publications
(to be published)
ITALY
La casa delle sette donne – 2004, R.C.S Libri
PORTUGAL
A casa das sete mulheres – 2003, Âmbar
SPAIN
La casa de las siete mujeres – 2004, Ediciones
B; 2005, Byblos (pocket)
El pintor que escribía – 2005, Ediciones B
Um farol no pampa – Ediciones B (to be published)
YUGOSLAVIA
A casa das sete mulheres – Alfa Narodna (to be
published)
Apprentice of Time
Highlights – non-fiction
IVO pITANguY
Apprentice of Time (Aprendiz do tempo) is the latest book of memories by cosmetic surgeon Ivo Pintaguy. It is a compelling account of his childhood in Minas Gerais, through his early years in hospitals around the world to his life today as
one of the world’s most respected surgeons. We learn that young Ivo lived in such close contact with nature and animals
– his hometown, Belo Horizonte, was then a city surrounded by wild forests –that he took to walking around town with
a boa constrictor coiled around his neck until the snake was killed by his cousin. There are vivid recollections of his cultivated mother and his father, who was a general surgeon and inspired Ivo’s passion for the medical profession. The author
recounts his move to Rio de Janeiro in his early twenties to study, and then to the US, France and England to attend
several specialization programmes, before returning to Brazil to start a brilliant career in cosmetic surgery. Apprentice of
time reveals the life and thoughts of one of Brazil’s most interesting and celebrated personalities.
Born in Belo Horizonte in 1926 and known around the world as one of the greatest names in cosmetic surgery
of all times, Dr. Ivo Pitanguy is the head of a famous clinic in Rio de Janeiro and teaches as an invited professor
at over one hundred institutions - hospitals, universities and associations - in forty-eight different countries. He
is the author of a vast body of work in his field, and was awarded the prize of best scientific book of the year for
Aesthetic Surgery of the Head and Body. His memoirs have been published in Brazil, France and Spain.
Works
♦
Mamaplastias – Guanabara Koogan
Atlas de cirurgia palpebral – Colina/Revinter
Direito à beleza – Record
Aprendendo com a vida – Best Seller
Aprendiz do tempo – Nova Fonteira (to be published)
Foreign Editions
FRANCE
Les chemins de la beauté, J.C. Lattés
GERMANY
Aesthetic Surgery of the Head and Body – 1981, Springer Verlag
Plastische Eingriffe an der Ohrmuschel, Springer Thieme Verlag
SPAIN
El arte de la belleza, Grijalbo
USA
Plastic Operations of the Auricle, Springer Thieme Verlag
Between Us
mARIA TEREzA mALDONADO
Between Us (Cá entre nós) is a collection of short essays on the main subjects psychoanalist Maria Tereza Maldonado has encountered during her consultations, her seminaries, in emails from readers and in the social
projects she is involved in. Modern life has completely transformed traditional family arrangements and given
rise to many new problems and questions which still remain unanswered: how can parents learn to deal with
children of different unions? What about adult children who stay at home after a certain age? How to build
solid ties within changing contexts? How can parents teach their children the basic principles of conflict management, a crucial survival tool of contemporary society? The essays are divided into four chapters according
to the main subject, and they can also be read separately. Between Us is an important book for parents, people
who work in education, and anyone wishing to build better relationships within the family.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1949, Maria Tereza Maldonado is a psychologist with over thirty years of experience and has
written twenty-five books. She has taught at universities and coordinated hospital teams, and currently works on social
projects with NGOs and as a family therapist. Her much-requested conferences deal with behavior, family ties and
personal development. Her clear, light, compelling style exposes complex ideas in a simple way and allows theoretical
concepts to be used practically.
Works
H
Viver melhor – 1998, Saraiva
Redes solidárias – 2001, Saraiva
Florestania: A cidadania dos povos da floresta – 2002, Saraiva
Nos passos da dança – 2006, Saraiva
t
Psicologia da gravidez – 1976, Saraiva
Nós estamos grávidos – 1978, Saraiva
Comunicação entre pais e filhos – 1981, Saraiva
Casamento término e reconstrução – 1986, Saraiva
Vida em família – 1989, Saraiva
A arte da conversa e do convívio – 1992, Saraiva
Os caminhos do coração – 1995, Saraiva
Os construtores da paz – 1997, Moderna
Amor e cia.: E tudo isso acontece no fundo da gente – 2000, Saraiva
As sementes do amor: Educar crianças de 0 a 3 anos para a paz –
2003, Planeta Brasil
Recursos de relacionamento para profissionais de saúde – 2003, Reichmann & Affonso
Maturidade – 2004, Planeta Brasil
Pensando na vida – 2005, Planeta Brasil
Cá entre nós: Na intimidade das famílias – 2006, Integrare
Histórias da vida inteira – 1994, 2006, Integrare
Palavra de mulher – 2007, Integrare
Parents, Children & Unlimited Co.
gLADIs bRuN
Parents, Children & Unlimited Co. (Pais, filhos & cia. ilimitada) is psychologist Gladis Brun’s first incursion into
writing. It offers a ‘survival guide’ for the modern world where families can no longer be defined as a single unit
consisting of mother, father and children living under the same roof, but have become much more complex couples living separately, children with only one parent or siblings from different relationships, multiple family
names. Using the example of a ficticious family, Gladis analyzes characters and situations to unveil these often
strained relationships involving stepmothers, stepfathers, half-siblings and the children of divorce. Contrary to
the nostalgic opinion claiming that the family is a thing of the past, the author shows that, however complex
all these new relationships might be, it remains possible to live in harmony even while tackling the difficult
subjects of financial issues between divorced parents or the rituals and expectations of love.
Gladis Brun was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1942. She trained in Psychology and was one of the founders of
the Brazilian Family Therapy Association (ABRATEF) in 1984. Gladis is a member of the American Family
Therapy Academy (AFTA) and often teaches seminars and workshops in Brazil and abroad. In 2002, she received the prestigious AFTA Award for Innovative Contribution to Family Therapy. Gladis is also the author
of Loves Me, Loves Me Not: Portraits of Divorce (Bem-me-quer, mal-me-quer: Retratos do divórcio).
Works
♦
Pais, filhos & cia. ilimitada – 1999, Record
Bem-me-quer, mal-me-quer: Retratos do divórcio – 2001, Record
Losses & Gains
LYA LuFT
Losses & Gains (Perdas & ganhos) is one of the greatest successes of Brazilian publishing in the past decade.
With more than seven hundred thousand copies sold and translated into over ten languages, it topped all the
important best-seller lists in Brazil for over 54 weeks. Part memoir, part essay, the book is made up of short
narratives that are either deeply poetic or written as an almost direct conversation with the reader. Lya’s fluid,
no-nonsense but very delicate style examines, with great sensibility, the joys of love and pleasure as well as the
pain of death and loss – a subject the author knows quite well. Her book shows how it is not only possible but
also worthwhile to reinvent one’s life at any age, and that happiness does not depend on youth or riches, but
on being able to enjoy every stage of the journey with the same curiosity and open-mindedness. Far from the
immediate satisfaction encouraged by modern culture, Losses & Gains is an invitation to discover the more essential beauties in life.
Born in 1938 in Santa Cruz do Sul, southern Brazil, Lya Luft was already an established poet, novelist, short
story writer and translator when her carreer took a leap with the tremendous success of Losses & Gains, closely
followed by the volume of short stories To Think is to Transgress (Pensar é transgredir) and In Other Words (Em
outras palavras), a collection of her essays published in the weekly magazine Veja. A keen examiner of human
feelings, Lya has written eight novels, including the classic The Partners (As parceiras), reprinted more than
twenty times.
Works
❤ A asa esquerda do anjo – 1981, 2003, Record
As parceiras – 1990, 2003, Record
O ponto cego – 1999, 2003, Record
Reunião de família – 1982, 2004, Record
O quarto fechado – 1984, 2004, Record
Exílio – 1988, 2005, Record
A sentinela – 1994, 2005, Record
♣
Pensar é transgredir – 2004, Record
Em outras palavras – 2006, Record
Silêncio dos amantes – Record (to be published)
♠
O lado fatal – 1988, Siciliano
Secreta mirada – 1997, 2005, Record
Para não dizer adeus – 2005, Record
H
Histórias de bruxa boa (ill. Susana Luft) – 2005, Record
A volta da bruxa boa (ill. Susana Luft) – 2007, Record
♦
Histórias do tempo – 2000, Siciliano
Mar de dentro – 2002, Record
O rio do meio – 1996, 2003, Record
Perdas & Ganhos – 2003, Record
Foreign Editions
CATALONIA
Pèrdues i guanys – 2005, Grup 62
DENMARK
Perdas & Ganhos – Bazar Forlag (to be published)
FINLAND
FRANCE
Pertes & Profits – 2005, Editions Metaillié
GERMANY
Gezeiten des Glücks – 2005, Ulstein
HOLLAND
Geven en Nemen – 2005, De Boekerij
ISRAEL
Perdas e Ganhos – 2006, Kinneret-Zmora
ITALY
Perdite e Guadagni – 2006, RCS Libri/Bompiani
NORWAY
PORTUGAL
Perdas & Ganhos – 2004, Editorial Presença
Pensar é transgredir – 2005, Editorial Presença
Reunião de família – Pergaminho (to be published)
A asa esquerda do anjo – Pergaminho (to be published)
As parceiras – Pergaminho (to be published)
SPAIN
Pérdidas y ganancias – 2005, El Pais/Aguilar
SWEDEN
UK
Losses and Gains – 2007, Vermilion
YUGOSLAVIA
Dobici i gubici – 2006, Laguna
23 tales of a traveller
Highlights – Children & Ya
mARINA COLAsANTI
23 Tales of a Traveller (23 histórias de um viajante), is renowned writer Marina Colasanti’s latest book. In the
novella - whose stories can be read both independently and as a single continuous tale - the author draws from
her own travels which influenced her way of seeing the world, teaching her to watch everything with eyes that
are simultaneously foreign and native. The book tells of a traveller knight who arrives at a kingdom where he
finds a prince living in complete isolation. After hearing some of the traveller’s stories, the prince becomes fascinated by them, and decides to join the stranger in a journey through the lands he owns, but has never seen.
As they proceed, and the traveller unravels his tales, Marina shows how narrative itself can be a journey, while
her lyrical style takes the readers on voyages of their own. Like a box containing other boxes, astonishingly filled
with mythical elements, her fascinatingly modern tales overlap and intertwine to forge a common meaning.
Born in 1937 in Asmarra, Eritrea, to an Italian family, Marina Colasanti came to Brazil as a young girl. She is
internationally acclaimed for her short stories, poems, books for children/YA and essays, and has worked in
journalism, advertising and translation, as well as being a highly-praised artist. Among her many titles are the
award-winning short story collection A Marvellous Idea (Uma idéia toda azul) and the collection of essays Ships
to Faraway Lands (Fragatas para terras distantes).
Works
♣
Eu sei mas não devia – 1995, Rocco
Contos de amor rasgado – 1986, Rocco
O leopardo é um animal delicado – 1998, Rocco
Um espinho de marfim e outras histórias – 1999, L&PM
A casa das palavras – 2002, Ática
A morada do ser – 1978, 2004, Record
♦
E por falar em amor – 1984, Rocco
Aqui entre nós – 1988, Rocco
Fragatas para terras distantes – 2004, Record
♠
n
Rota de colisão – 1993, Rocco
Gargantas abertas – 1998, Rocco
Fino sangue – 2005, Record
Poesia em quatro tempos – Global (to be published)
Minha ilha maravilha – 2007, Ática
Entre a espada e a rosa – 1992, Salamandra
Penélope manda lembranças – 2001, Ática
Doze reis e a moça no labirinto do vento – 1982, 2001, Global
Uma idéia toda azul – 1979, 2002, Global
A moça tecelã – 2004, Global
23 histórias de um viajante – 2005, Global
H
O lobo e o carneiro no sonho da menina – 1985, Global
Um amigo para sempre – 1988, Quinteto
Será que tem asas? – 1989, Quinteto
A mão na massa – 1990, Salamandra
Ana Z., aonde vai você? – 1993, Ática
Longe como o meu querer – 1997, Ática
O menino que achou uma estrela – 1988, 2000, Global
Cada bicho seu capricho – 1992, 2000, Global
O verde brilha no poço – 1986, 2001, Global
Um amor sem palavras – 1995, 2001, Global
A amizade abana o rabo – 2002, Moderna
Ofélia, a ovelha – 1989, 2003, Global
Uma estrada junto ao rio – 1985, 2005, FTD
O homem que não parava de crescer – 1995, 2005, Global
A menina arco-íris – 1984, 2001, 2007, Global
Minha tia me contou – 2007, Melhoramentos
Foreign Editions
ARGENTINA
Ruta de colisión – 2004, Ediciones Del Copista
COLOMBIA
Fragatas para tierras lejanas – 2004, Grupo Editorial Norma
El hombre que no paraba de crecer – 2005, Grupo Editorial Norma
Lejos como mi querer – 2006, Grupo Editorial Norma
FRANCE
Une idée couleur d’azur – 1990, L’Harmattan
LATIN AMERICA
Um verde brilla en el pozo – 2004, Global
La jovem tejedora – 2005, Global
Un amor sin palabras – 2005, Global
Entre a espada e a rosa – Babel (to be published)
PORTUGAL
Um espinho de marfim e outras histórias – 2005, Figueirinhas
SPAIN
Penélope manda recuredos – 2004, Anaya
Uma idéia toda azul/Doze reis e o labirinto do vento – Anaya (to be published)
Felpo Filva
EVA FuRNARI
Felpo Filva is a rabbit, who is also a poet. Felpo has always been a lonely rabbit – perhaps because his schoolmates constantly made fun of his lopsided ears. So Felpo lives alone writing poetry until one day, among the
many letters he receives, one catches his eye: it is a letter sent by one of his fans, a she-rabbit called Charlô, who
disagrees with some of his poems. Thus begins a provocative correspondence between the lonely poet and the
witty Charlô. This simple idea is brought to life with perfection by Eva Furnari, one of Brazil’s major names in
children’s literature. In telling the story of Felpo and Charlô, she introduces young readers to different forms
of writing – including poem, letter, song, biography and instruction manual – in a light, funny prose full of
invented words and original illustrations. Felpo Filva is a gem sure to please readers aged 7-10.
Born in Rome, Italy, in 1948, Eva Furnari came to Brazil when she was three years old and has lived in São
Paulo ever since. She trained as an architect and has been writing and illustrating children’s books since 1980.
Her more than fifty titles have earned her several prizes, including five Jabuti awards for best illustration and a
prestigious award from the Critic’s Association of São Paulo for her entire body of work. Her stories have been
published in Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia and Italy.
Works
Foreign Editions
H O amigo da bruxinha (ill. Eva Furnari) – 1993, Moderna
A bruxinha Zelda e os 80 Docinhos – Coleção Piririca da Serra
(ill. Eva Furnari) – 1994, Ática
Angelito – 1997, Ática
Bruxinha e as maldades da Sorumbática (ill. Eva Furnari) –
1997, Ática
Cocô de passarinho (ill. Eva Furnari) – 1998, Companhia das
Letras
Lolo Barnabé – 2000, Moderna
Os problemas da família Gorgonzola – 2001, Global
Rumboldo – Coleção os Bobos da Corte (ill. Eva Furnari) –
2002, Moderna
Felpo Filva (ill. Eva Furnari) – 2006, Moderna
Zig Zag (ill. Eva Furnari) – 2006, Global
Cacoete – 2006, Ática
EQUADOR
ITALY
LATIN AMERICA
MÉXICO
La niña del árbol – 1999, Libresa
Zuza y Arquimedes – 1999, Libresa
La strega Zelda e gli ottanta pasticcini – 2006,
Mondadori
La brujita encantadora – 2005, Global Editora
La brujita Atarantada – 2005, Global Editora
La Brujita y Godofredo – 2005, Global Editora
La Brujita y Federico – 2005, Global Editora
Los Problemas de la Família Gorgonzola – 2005,
Global Editora
Nudos – 2005, Global Editora
El secreto del Violonista – 2002, Editora Larousse
Dear Ronaldo
FLáVIO CARNEIRO
Every child has a dream. If the child is a boy living in Brazil, chances are his dream will have something to do
with football. That is precisely the case of twelve year-old Arthur, also known to his friends as Penguin, who
plays centre-forward for the junior team of São Cristóvão, in suburban Rio de Janeiro. Dear Ronaldo (Prezado
Ronaldo), is Flávio Carneiro’s latest book for young adults and tells how Arthur starts writing to famous player
Ronaldo – dubbed ‘The Phenomenon’ – to share his passion for the game. In the four letters he addresses to his
idol, the boy shares his moves in the field, his friendships with old neighbour Mr. Almeida, who is a writer, and
with Wall, who plays defense for the team, as well as some key moments in Brazilian football – both real and
imaginary. Arthur’s letters are a delicious snapshot of Rio’s everyday life and reveal how football and literature
can connect in the sense that they are both made of dreams - including Arthur’s greatest dream of all, to play a
game at world-famous Maracanã stadium. Ages 10 and up.
Born in Goiânia in 1962, Literature PhD and professor Flávio Carneiro is an award-winning writer of novels,
short stories and books for children and YA. He collaborates as a literary critic with Rio de Janeiro’s newspapers Jornal do Brasil and O Globo. His two film scripts have been awarded prizes by the Ministry of Culture.
His most celebrated book for young readers, Lalande, was deemed ‘Highly Recommended’ by the Brazilian
National Young Adult and Children’s Book Foundation. He just won the Barco a Vapor Award from Editora
SM for his new juvenile novel, A Distância das Coisas, to be published February, 2008.
Works
❤ O campeonato – 2002, Objetiva
A confissão – 2006, Rocco
♣
Da matriz ao beco e depois – 1994, Rocco
H
A corda, Rita! (ill. Rogério Nunes Barros) – 1986, Globo
A casa dos relógios (ill. Carlos Gomes de Freitas II) – 1999, FTD
Lalande (ill. Rui de Oliveira) – 2000, Global
O livro de Marco (ill. Avelino Guedes) - 2000, Global
Prezado Ronaldo – 2006, Edições SM
A Distância das Coisas – (to be published, Editora SM)
♦
Entre o cristal e a chama: Ensaios sobre o leitor – 2001,
Editora UERJ
No país do presente: Ficção brasileira no início do século
XXI – 2005, Rocco
When I Was Little
ADéLIA pRADO
Renowned author Adélia Prado’s first title for children, When I Was Little (Quando eu era pequena) was recently published as part of the re-launch of her entire body of work. Inspired by the author’s own childhood, it
combines memories and fiction to tell the story of Carmela, a young girl living during World War II in provincial Brazil. Carmela does not attend school yet, and her father, who works in the railways, builds miniature
pieces of furniture as a hobby for his daughter to play. The girl’s pleasures are the simple things in life – nature
and animals. It is easy for readers to recognize where many of the patterns that distinguish Adélia’s poetry come
from, and similarly to recognize in little Carmela the young Adélia herself. Like the author, the girl is very religious and keenly aware of her surroundings as she describes her grandfather, with whom the family lived for a
while, and their financial difficulties during the war - the second-hand clothes, the prayer during storms, and
her discovery of poetry. When I Was Little is beautifully illustrated by Elisabeth Teixeira and aimed at children
aged 7-10, but can also be enjoyed by adult readers.
Born in Divinópolis, Minas Gerais, in 1935, Adélia Prado is a poet, novelist, short story- and crônica-writer
who published her first book, Baggage (Bagagem), at age 38, urged by fellow poets Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna. She went on to establish herself as a foremost Brazilian author with
the stage monologue Mrs. Nuts (Dona Doida), based on her writings and played by Fernanda Montenegro in
Brazil, Portugal, Uruguay, Italy and the US. Adélia has fourteen books to her credit.
Works
❤
Quero minha mãe – 2005, Record
Cacos para um vitral – 1980, 2006, Record
Os componentes da banda – 1984, 2006, Record
O homem da mão seca – 1994, 2007, Record
Manuscritos de Felipa – 1999, 2007, Record
♣
Filandras – 2001, Record
Solte os cachorros – 1979,2006, Record
♠
Bagagem – 1976, Record
O coração disparado – 1977,2006, Record
Terra de Santa Cruz – 1981,2006, Record
O pelicano – 1987, 2007, Record
A faca no peito – 1988, 2007, Record
Oráculos de maio – 1999, 2007, Record
H
Quando eu era pequena – 2006, Record
Uólace and João Victor
ROsA AmANDA sTRAusz
Uólace and João Victor (Uólace e João Victor) is Rosa Amanda Strausz’s most celebrated book for children and
exposes the social divide in Brazil through a day in the life of two young children living in the same big city,
but who never met. Uólace lives in one of the city’s many slums, while João Victor is a typical middle-class boy.
They seem to have nothing in common but, as the story develops, Rosa Amanda shows that, although set apart
by a strong social barrier, both children strive to survive and be happy in the same way. Uólace and João Victor
won the João de Barro award and was chosen by the National Young Adult and Children’s Book Foundation
as one of the best works of 1999. The book was adapted for part of a TV series directed by Fernando Meirelles
(City of God) and aired by Globo network, and a French edition was published by Éditions Métaillié. The story
told in Uólace and João Victor is a very realistic portrait of Brazil’s social differences and a gem for children
around the world. Ages 8 and up.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1959, Rosa Amanda trained as a journalist and worked for several newspapers and
magazines before turning to writing. Her first book, short story collection Least Common Multiple (Mínimo
múltiplo comum) won the Jabuti award. Rosa Amanda’s true passion, however, is children’s literature, and her
fifteen books breach subjects not often present when writing for children such as new family arrangements,
strained social relations and urban violence.
Works
H
Mamãe trouxe um lobo para casa (ill. Fernando Nunes) – 1995,
Ed. Salamandra
A coleção de bruxas do meu pai (ill. Fernando Nunes) – 1995,
Ed. Salamandra
Uma família parecida com a da gente (ill. Ivan Zigg) – 1998, Ática
Um nó na cabeça (ill. Laurent Cardon) – 1998, Salamandra
Deus me livre! (ill. Mirna Maracajá) – 1999, Cia das Letrinhas
Salsicha quer falar (ill. Ivan Zigg) – 1999, Ed. Moderna
Para que serve essa barriga tão grande? (ill. Ivan Zigg) – 2003, FTD
Alecrim (ill. Laurent Cardon) – 2003, Objetiva
Uólace e João Victor (ill. Pinky Wainer) –1999, 2003, Objetiva
Fábrica de monstros (ill. Michele Lacocca) – 2005, Global
Quanta Casa/Coleção Tião Parada – (ill. Eduardo Albini) - 1998,
2005, FTD
♦
Teresa, a santa apaixonada – 2004, Objetiva
Foreign Editions
FRANCE
Un garçon comme moi – 2005, Editions
Métailié
Uólace e João Victor– pocket edition, Éditions du
Seuil (to be published)
PORTUGAL
Teresa, a Santa Apaixonada – 2005, Oficina do
Livro – Casa das Letras
Valentina
máRCIO VAssALLO
Valentina is a princess who lives in a castle on top of a hill. She is a pretty girl who laughs easily and leads a
happy life with her parents, her garden and the splendid view from her window. But there is one thing Valentina does not understand. Every day, her mother and father go down the hill early in the morning to work,
and they only come back at the end of the day. But aren’t her parents a king and queen? They must be, if she
is a princess. Since when do kings and queens have to work? Her parents tell her they must go down the hill
to make sure their princess can take her dreams into the real world. So one day her parents decide to take Valentina down the hill with them, and the girl is amazed by what she sees: all the girls look the same, dress the
same and want the same things - they all want to be a princess. And Valentina feels happy because she knows
she is already a princess, up there where she lives, in one of Rio’s poor favelas. Valentina is another lovely tale
for readers aged 8 and up created by one of the most celebrated Brazilian writers for children, and beautifully
illustrated by artist Suppa.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1967, Márcio Vassalo spent part of his childhood in the Amazonian region. This
experience gave him an innocent outlook on life and a talent for popular language which work as precious allies
when writing for children. Books like The Dreamless Prince (O príncipe sem sonhos) and The Boy with Rain on
His Hair (O menino da chuva no cabelo) have been internationally acclaimed and helped to build Vassalo’s reputation as a distinguished voice in children’s literature. He also wrote a biography of poet Mário Quintana.
Works
H
A princesa Tiana e o sapo Gazé (ill. Mariana Massarani) – 1998, Brinque-Book
O príncipe sem sonhos (ill. Mariana Massarani) – 1999, Brinque-Book
A fada afilhada (ill. Marilda Castanha) – 2001, Moderna; Global (new edition to be published)
O menino da chuva no cabelo (ill. Odilon Moraes) – 2005, Global
Valentina – 2007, Global
Da minha praia até o Japão – Global (to be published)
Brazilian Literature – Classic Authors
C arlo s D r u m m ond de A ndrade
Érico V er í s s i m o
Graciliano R a m o s
Jo ã o C a b ral de Melo N eto
R achel de Q u eiro z
Brazilian Literature – Classic authors
Itabira, 1902 – Rio de janeiro, 1987
Regarded by many as the greatest Brazilian poet of all time, Minas Gerais-born Carlos Drummond de Andrade produced everlasting works such as Feeling of the World (Sentimento do mundo, 1940) or Love is Learned
Through Loving (Amar se aprende amando, 1985). Despite also distinguishing himself as civil servant, a newspaper writer and a translator, he owns his reputation and his huge fan base to verses combining the innovative spirit of first-generation Modernism with self-reflection, social concerns, formal sophistication and, most
importantly, a direct dialogue with the reader. Among over twenty volumes of collected poetry, the Poetic Anthology (Antologia poética, 1962), edited by the author himself, is distinctive because the poems are arranged
according to the major subjects that define Drummond’s work, building a faithful panorama of his œuvre.
Drummond’s equally celebrated short narratives – crônicas - show a more everyday side of the author; his latest
collection, When It’s Football Day (Quando é dia de futebol, 2002) – with a foreword by Pelé - is a selection of
his best writings on Brazil’s favourite game.
Works
♣
Confissões de Minas – 1944, Record
Contos de aprendiz – 1951, Record
Passeios na ilha – 1952, Record
Fala amendoeira – 1957, Record
A bolsa e a vida – 1962, Record
Cadeira de balanço – 1966, Record
Caminhos de João Brandão – 1970, Record
O poder ultra jovem – 1972, Record
De notícias e não notícias faz-se a crônica – 1974, Record
Os dias lindos – 1977, Record
70 historinhas – 1978, Record
Contos plausíveis – 1981, Record
A lição do amigo: Cartas de Mário de Andrade – 1982
Boca de luar – 1984, Record
O observador no escritório – 1985, Record
Tempo vida poesia – 1986, Record
Moça deitada na grama – 1987, Record
Auto-retrato e outras crônicas – 1989, Record
Quando é dia de futebol (Edited by Pedro Augusto Graña
Drummond and Luis Mauricio Graña Drummond) –
2002, Record
O avesso das coisas – 1987, 2007, Record
♠
Alguma poesia – 1930, Record
Brejo das almas – 1934, Record
Sentimento do mundo – 1940, Record
A rosa do povo – 1945, Record
Claro enigma – 1951, Record
José e outros (José/Fazendeiro do ar/Novos poemas) – 1954,
Record
Viola de bolso – 1955 Record
Lição de coisas – 1962, Record
Antologia poética – 1962, Record
Versiprosa - 1967
A falta que ama – 1968, Record
As impurezas do branco – 1973, Record
Discurso de primavera e algumas sombras – 1977, Record
A paixão medida – 1980, Record
Corpo – 1984, Record
Amar se aprende amando – 1985, Record
Poesia errante – 1988, Record
O amor natural – 1992, Record
A vida passada a limpo – 1994, Record
Farewell – 1996, Record
Declaração de amor (ill. Mariana Massarani/edited by Pedro Augusto Graña Drummond and Luis Mauricio Graña
Drummond) – 2005, Record
Boitempo I ( Menino antigo) – 1968, 2006 Record
Boitempo II (Esquecer para lembrar) – 1973, 2006 Record
H
História de dois amores (ill. Ziraldo Alves Pinto) – 1985,
Record
O sorvete e outras histórias – 1993, Atica
A cor de cada um – 1996, Record
A palavra mágica – 1996, Record
A senha do mundo – 1996, Record
Vó caiu na piscina – 1996, Record
Criança d’agora é fogo – 1996, Record
Histórias para o rei – 1997, Record
As palavras que ninguém diz – 1997, Record
Rick e a girafa – 2001, Ática
Foreign Editions
PORTUGAL
Obras de Carlos Drummond de Andrade (8 volumes) – Edições Europa América
Antologia poética – 2002, Dom Quixote
D. Quixote (ill. Portinari) – 2005, Dom Quixote
SPAIN
O amor natural – 2004, Ediciones Hiperion
Sentimento do mundo – Ediciones Hiperion (to be published)
FRANCE
Histoire de deux amours – 2002, Éditions Chandeigne
La machine du monde et autres poèmes – 1990, Gallimard Poésie
Poèmes – Éditions Chandeigne
ITALY
Quando è giorno di partita – 2005, Cavallo di Ferro
Sentimento del mondo – 1987, Giulio Einaudi
L’amore naturale – 1997, Adriatica Editrice
HOLLAND
Farewell – 1996, Uitgeverrij de Arbeiderspers
DENMARK
52 Poems – Borgens Forlag
Erico Verissimo
Cruz Alta, 1905 – porto Alegre, 1975
With over forty books to his credit, Erico Verissimo is a renowned and widely translated Brazilian fiction writer.
He had a successful career as a journalist and a teacher, as well as working in international organizations. Erico’s
multi-faceted and hugely creative body of work delights readers of all ages and tastes. His series of classic stories
for children ushered in several generations of new Brazilian readers, and he is equally cherished by the wider
public thanks to best-sellers such as Consider the Lilies of the Field (Olhai os lírios do campo, 1938), a story of
lost love and ultimate redemption. The epic Time and the Wind (O tempo e o vento, 1949-61), possibly Verissimo’s most famous work, follows a 200-year old family saga in southern Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul. Packed with
action, conflict and romance, this critically acclaimed and widely read series became the author’s masterwork.
His stories can also verge on the fantastic, as shown in Incident in Antares (Incidente em Antares, 1971): set in
a ficticious town on the shores of river Uruguai, he uses a rebellion of the dead to expose and discuss Brazil’s
social and political situation after World War II.
Works
❤
O resto é silêncio – 1943, Companhia das Letras (new edition to be published)
Noite – 1954, Companhia das Letras (new edition to be published)
O prisioneiro – 1967, Companhia das Letras (new edition to be published)
O tempo e vento: O continente (02 vols.) – 1949, 2004, Companhia das Letras
O tempo e vento: O retrato (02 vols) – 1951, 2004, Companhia das Letras
O tempo e vento: O arquipélago (03 vols) – 1961, 2004, Companhia das Letras
Clarissa – 1933, 2005, Companhia das Letras
Música ao longe – 1934, 2005, Companhia das Letras
O senhor embaixador – 1965, 2005, Companhia das Letras
Caminhos cruzados – 1935, 2005, Companhia das Letras
Olhai os lírios do campo – 1938, 2005, Companhia das Letras
Um certo capitão Rodrigo – excerpt from O Continente, vol. 1 – 1970, 2005, Companhia das Letras
Ana Terra – excerpt from O Continente – 1971, 2005, Companhia das Letras
Incidente em Antares – 1971, 2005, Companhia das Letras
Do diário de Sílvia – 1978, 2005, Companhia das Letras
Um lugar ao sol – 1936, 2006, Companhia das Letras
Saga – 1940, 2006, Companhia das Letras
♣
Fantoches – 1932, Companhia das Letras (new edition to be published)
Contos – 1942, Companhia das Letras (new edition to be published)
H
O urso com música na barriga (ill. Eva Furnari) – 1938, 2002, Companhia das Letras
A vida do elefante Basílio (ill. Eva Furnari) – 1939, 2002, Companhia das Letras
Rosa Maria no castelo encantado (ill. Eva Furnari) – 1936, 2003 , Companhia das Letras
As aventuras do avião vermelho (ill. Eva Furnari) – 1936, 2003, Companhia das Letras
Os três porquinhos pobres (ill. Eva Furnari) – 1936, 2003, Companhia das Letras
Outra vez os três porquinhos (ill. Eva Furnari) – 1939, 2003, Companhia das Letras
As aventuras de Tibicuera – 1937, 2005, Companhia das Letras
♦
Essays, Biographies, Memories
México – 1957, Companhia das Letras (new edition to be published)
Israel em abril – 1969, Companhia das Letras (new edition to be published)
Um certo Henrique Bertaso – 1972, Companhia das Letras (new edition to be published)
Solo de clarineta – 2 volumes –1973, 1976, 2006, Companhia das Letras
Gato preto em campo de neve – 1941,2006, Companhia das Letras
A volta do gato preto – 1946, 2007, Companhia das Letras
Foreign Editions (selected list)
FRANCE
PORTUGAL
ROMENIA
Le temps et le vent – Albin Michel
Olhai os lírios do campo – 2001, Dom Quixote
As aventuras do avião vermelho – 2005, Ambar
Outra vez os três porquinhos – 2005, Âmbar
O urso com música na barriga – 2005, Âmbar
A vida do elefante Basílio – 2005, Âmbar
Os três porquinhos pobres – 2005, Âmbar
Rosa Maria no castelo encantado – 2005, Ambar
Clarissa – 2006, Âmbar
Incidente em Antares – 2006, Âmbar
O retrato vol. I : O tempo e o vento – 2007, Âmbar
O retrato vol. II : O tempo e o vento – 2007, Âmbar
O continente vol. I: O tempo e o vento – 2007, Âmbar
O continente vol. II: O tempo e o vento – 2007, Âmbar
Incidente em Antares – 2002, Editura Polirom
Graciliano Ramos
Quebrangulo, 1892 – Rio de janeiro, 1953
Graciliano Ramos was born and raised in the dry lands of Alagoas, in northeastern Brazil. Shortly after publishing an unusually realistic first novel about forbidden love, Caetés, civil servant Graciliano was accused of subversion by the government. His ten-month span in jail inspired the masterwork Memories of the Gaol (Memórias
do cárcere), a turning point in Brazilian literature which portrays the hardships of those imprisoned during
the Estado Novo (‘New State’) regime in the 1930s. Although he only published six works in his eighteen-year
career, Graciliano nevertheless became one of Brazil’s greatest writers, widely translated and adapted for the
stage and screen. Deeply scarred by the harsh life of the dry lands, his characters struggle to thrive in a hostile
environment. The award-winning Anguish (Angústia) tells of a man’s loss of faith due to poverty and the abuses
of Getúlio Vargas’ regime. Another classic, Barren Lives (Vidas secas) introduces cowboy Fabiano, whose tale of
survival in the poor rural areas of northern Brazil remains as fresh and moving as when it was first written.
Author’s Website : www.graciliano.com.br
Works
❤
Caetés – 1933, Record
São Bernardo – 1934, Record
Angústia – 1936, Record
Vidas secas – 1938, Record
♣
Histórias de Alexandre – 1944, Record
Insônia – 1947, Record
Viagem – 1954, Record
Linhas tortas – 1962, Record
♦ Essays, History, Biographies
Infância – 1945, Record
Memórias do cárcere – 1953, Record
H
A terra dos meninos pelados – 1939, Record
O estribo de prata – 1984, Record
Recife, 1920 – Rio de janeiro, 1999
The strongest Brazilian contender for the Nobel Prize, poet João Cabral was raised in Recife and moved to Rio
de Janeiro in 1942, the year he launched his first poetry collection, Stone of Sleep (Pedra do sono). He had an
important career as a diplomat in Europe, South America, Africa and the Caribbean. With verses emphasizing
rationality, João Cabral gave a new vigour to Brazilian poetry and became one of its key references. He was
admitted to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1968. With a distinctive process of poetical construction, rational and precise, he viewed poetry as the result of an objective attitude towards concrete reality; this accounts
for his strict formal style. The best-known piece in his rich body of work, Death and Life of Severino (Morte e
vida Severina, 1955) follows the journey of a man fleeing the dry lands in search of a better life. Wherever he
goes, Severino faces death, poverty and hunger, but the birth of a child comes as an ultimate symbol of hope.
João Cabral won numerous awards for his work including the Luís de Camões, the highest reward of the Portuguese-speaking literary world.
Works
♠
O Cão sem plumas - 2007, Objetiva
O Artista Inconfessável – 2007, Objetiva
(new editions of all other titles to be published by Objetiva)
Morte e vida severina e outros poemas para vozes (O rio, Dois parlamentos, Auto do frade) – 1955
Auto do frade – 1984
Prosa – 1997
Serial e antes (Pedra do sono/Os três mal amados/O engenheiro/Psicologia da composição/O cão sem plumas/O rio/Paisagens com figuras/Morte e
vida severina/Uma faca só lâmina/Quaderna/Dois Parlamentos/Serial) – 1997
A educação pela pedra e depois (A educação pela pedra/Museu de tudo/A escola das facas/Auto do frade/Agrestes/Crime na calle Relator/Sevilla
andando/Andando Sevilla) – 1997
A educação pela pedra – 2004, Nova Fronteira
Rachel de Queiroz
Fortaleza, 1910 – Rio de janeiro, 2003
Novelist and short-story writer Rachel de Queiroz is a major representative of the Brazilian Regionalist literary movement, and was the first woman admitted into the Academy of Letters in 1977; she also worked as a
journalist, a playwright and a translator, as well as acting as Brazil’s representative for the UN. In 1957, Rachel
was awarded the prestigious Machado de Assis Award for her over twenty works including novels, short stories,
crônicas, plays and books for children and young adults. After growing up in a farm in the north-eastern state
of Ceará, she stunned the Brazilian literary scene at the age of 20 with masterwork 1915 (O Quinze, 1930),
whose unadorned, powerfully realistic style recounts the struggle of a family fleeing the severe drought of 1915
to find a better place to live in the Amazon. Along the way, hunger, exhaustion, and the unexpected solidarity
of a few generous strangers leave their mark. Decades later, Rachel would once again portray the people of her
homeland in Maria Moura’s Notebook (Memorial de Maria Moura), the saga of a family girl who becomes a
fearsome warrior leading seasoned warriors in a quest for revenge.
Works
❤
O Quinze – 1930, 2004, José Olympio
João Miguel – 1932, 2004, José Olympio
Caminho de pedras – 1937, 2004, José Olympio
Galo de ouro – 1950, 2004, José Olympio
Memorial de Maria Moura – 1992, 2004, José Olympio
As três Marias – 1939, 2005, José Olympio
Dora, Doralina – 1975, 2005, José Olympio
♣
A donzela e a moura torta –1948, José Olympio (new edition to be published)
O homem e o tempo – Mapinguari – 1964, José Olympio (new edition to be published)
O caçador de tatu (selection by Herman Lima) – 1967, José Olympio (new edition to be published)
As terras ásperas – 1993, José Olympio (new edition to be published)
Cenas brasileiras – 1997, Ática
A casa do morro branco – 1999, José Olympio (new edition to be published)
Falso mar, falso mundo: 89 crônicas escolhidas – 2002, José Olympio (new edition to be published)
Melhores crônicas (edited by Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda) – 2004, Global
Um alpendre, uma rede, um açude: 100 crônicas escolhidas – 1958, 2006, José Olympio
H
Xerimbabo (ill. Graça Lima) - 2002, José Olympio
Memórias de menina (ill. Mariana Massarani) - 2003, José Olympio
O menino mágico (ill. Laurabeatriz) – 1969, 2004, Caramelo
Cafute e pena-de-prata (ill. Maria Eugênia) – 1986, 2004, Caramelo
Andira (ill. Suppa) 1992, 2004, Caramelo
w
Lampião: A beata Maria do Egito – 1953, 2005, José Olympio
Foreign Editions
FRANCE
L’année de la grande sécheresse – 1986, Éditions Stock
Jean Miguel – 1984, Éditions Stock
Dora, Doralina – 1980, Éditions Stock
Maria Moura – 1995, Métaillié
GERMANY
Das Jahr 15 – 1978, Bibliothek Suhrkamp
Die drei Marias – 1994, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag
Maria Moura – 1998, Schneekluth
ITALY
Memorial di Maria Moura – 2006, Cavallo di Ferro
SPAIN
Tierra de silencio – 1995, Alba Editorial
USA
Dora, Doralina – 1984, Avon Books
The Three Marias – 1963, University of Texas Press
Sample Translations
Fiction
A COMÉDIA DOS ANJOS • The Comedy of Angels, by Adriana Falcão
A VIDA SEXUAL DA MULHER FEIA • Sex Life of the Ugly Woman, by Claudia Tajes
DE CADA AMOR TU HERDARÁS SÓ O CINISMO • From Each Love You Shall Get Nothing But Scorn, by Arthur Dapieve
ELITE DA TROPA • Elite Squad, by Luiz Eduardo Soares, André Batista and Rodrigo Pimentel
O HOMEM QUE MATOU O ESCRITOR • The Man Who Killed the Writer, by Sérgio Rodrigues
O VÔO DA GUARÁ VERMELHA • The Flight of the Red Ibis, by Maria Valéria Rezende
POR QUE SOU GORDA, MAMÃE? • Why Am I Fat, Mum?, by Cíntia Moscovich
UMA PONTE PARA TEREBIN • A Bridge to Terebin, by Letícia Wierzchowski
Non-fiction
PERDAS E GANHOS • Losses & Gains, by Lya Luft
ADRIANA FALCãO
Comedy of Angels
Sample translations - Fiction
Translated from the portuguese by Fernanda Abreu
In spite of all the controversy surrounding the case, it is practically a
proven fact: when Maria Madalena Teresa de Jesus Rita de Cássia Santana
was found dead, on that morning of May, 1958, the window of her room
displayed a small sample of the terrible storm unleashing outside - some
twenty to thirty square feet of water.
It is said the rain began at about four in the morning and went on
for many many hours, a phenomenon caused by the arrival of autumn’s first
cold front.
The heavier clouds had no choice but to cast down electrical discharges together with thunder and flashes of lightning.
Bolts cracked.
Houses crumbled.
Roofs went flying into the air.
Streets became rivers.
Rivers experienced a different sort of enthusiasm, much more appropriate to a geographical accident belonging to the family of waterfalls.
Many umbrellas were opened, thinking maybe they were flowers,
since it is unusual for umbrellas to know they only unfurl because someone
has opened them.
The word ‘storm’ has appeared in many versions of this story, sometimes with reference to some fact confirming a statement, other times as a
simple comment.
Testimonies vary in some points, but the emotional state of witnesses
should be considered.
Edith, 24, born in Rio de Janeiro, separated, woke up to thunder ‘at around
ten past nine’.
She jumped out of bed.
According to her statement, while getting dressed, she wondered:
‘Why did mummy not call me at half past eight?’
She concluded dona Madalena was perhaps particularly anxious that
day, busy nursing her own worries, which was totally like her.
It didn’t even occur to her that something more serious than that
might have happened.
Mentally, she started to go through the order of things.
Day of the week: Monday.
Things to do that Monday: finish the letter she had been writing Marcelo for months now, trying to explain why she wanted to break up their
relationship.
‘I’ll do it today and not one day later’, she promised herself.
‘What if I left it until next week?’, suggested the ‘other one’.
Ever since she was a child she felt that way, as if there were two Ediths,
‘herself ’ and ‘the other one’.
The problem was that neither she nor the other one had a single ounce
of self-confidence, and they kept inverting their roles, to such an extent that
Edith no longer knew if she was ‘herself ’, if she was the ‘other one’, or if she
was both.
‘I’ll think about it later’, she decided, not knowing if the decision was
the other one’s or her own.
She left the room.
Before going into the bathroom, she overheard part of the song the
housemaid sang every morning: a heart-felt tune whose lyrics were the words of
a dialect combining Portuguese, Guarani and the English of corny love songs.
Consolação Popyguá, 69, housemaid, born in the Paraguayan chaco, at first
declined to comment on the strange events following that morning.
She explained her own silence with a single sentence: ‘Things concerning the unknown are the unknown’s own personal business.’
We know that when Edith entered the kitchen Conceição was too
busy with sustained notes, kitchen appliances and multipurpose ideas to wish
her ‘good morning’.
She told a pan she had just scrubbed, ‘There, now you look new’, and
then she mumbled, ‘I woke up when it was still dark only because of the
light’, probably referring to a bolt of lightning.
Before resuming her song, she made a plain remark:
‘What about dona Madalena? It will soon be lunchtime and she is
still not up.’
An exaggeration.
The clock on the wall showed a quarter past nine in the morning,
seventeen minutes past the hour to be exact; Edith was very precise in her
account. She said that before going into her mother’s bedroom she took her
stomach medicine ‘with a sip of warm milk’, which must have taken two
minutes at the most. Then she climbed the stairs. Another thirty or forty seconds. According to her calculations, she must have entered dona Madalena’s
room at about twenty-one minutes past nine.
And there it was.
Artur, 5, woke up to a scream which kept screaming in his ear forever, like
all screams death pulls from the throat of people.
‘I ran to see why Mum was screaming, and then she closed Grandma’s
door to keep me from going in, but dona Consolação went in, and then she
came back out, and they were both crying, Mum said Grandma had died,
and dona Consolação said I must be happy ‘cause Grandma was now in
heaven and she was going to meet Grandpa Gaspar, and then Mum started
to cry even more, and then she told dona Consolação to get me a glass of
water and sugar which I poured in the sink and then she went into the living-room to talk on the phone.’
Marcelo, 26, unemployed journalist, spare-time philosopher, and practically bankrupt businessman, woke up with the phone ringing.
‘It took me some time to believe what Edith was telling me. Everyone
who knew dona Madalena was absolutely certain she was never going to die.
It was not like her to die.’
Paulo, 25, separated, football player, was late for an important engagement
when he got his son’s call.
‘I happily answered the long-distance call for I knew it must be Artur, but I was obviously upset at the news. I was at least a little bit upset, I
swear.’
Confetti must have been awake all through the night, watching over his
mistress, and at no time did he show any sign of distress. According to Edith,
by the way, when she went into her mother’s room he was calmly lying by
the corpse’s feet, wagging his tail.
Dona Madalena was lying in bed in the same position she usually slept
in, hugging a pillow which when alive she used to call ‘Gasparito’, but her
eyes were wide open.
And her eyes remained open until dona Consolação closed them at
ten o’clock sharp, ‘a pretty hour for ending a visit’, during a posthumous
anointing of the sick which included candles, oils and the words ‘may the
Lord forgive you all your trespassings in this silly life down here’.
The family doctor came with Marcelo, who still had a few vague
hopes.
Hope number one: that everything was just a misunderstanding, and dona
Madalena was only sleeping soundly under the effect of alcohol or tranquillizers.
Hope number two: that the problem was reversible, who knows, maybe a cardiac massage?
Hope number three: that this all was a nightmare.
It wasn’t.
Dr. Alberto’s verdict mentioned ‘instant death by hypoxia’ or something of the sort, and as he himself calculated the said hypoxia must have
occurred between five and six in the morning, give or take.
‘The tragedy’, ‘the disgrace’, ‘the event’ or ‘the news’ (terms varied according to the disposition of speakers) was quickly spread.
It was soon the only subject of conversation in the neighbourhood.
‘It’s life.’
‘The person’s there, then we look and she’s gone.’
‘Dona Madalena, of all people.’
‘So young.’
‘So strong.’
‘So good.’
‘It’s so good of you.’
‘Drinking did it.’
‘Smoking did it.’
‘Negligence did it.’
“A collapse did it.’
‘No doubt it was a spell someone cast on her.’
‘Maybe the nervous system?’
‘She was never right in the head.’
‘But she had a great heart.’
‘A violent heart attack.’
‘Poor thing.’
‘It’s Edith I pity, the poor woman.’
CLAuDIA TAjEs
Sex Life of the Ugly
Woman
Foreword
I am that woman who crosses the room to make some copies, or
gets up to have some coffee from the thermos, and overhears two colleagues
whispering in a supposedly low voice: “If you had to choose between Ju and
death, who would you pick?”
I am what everybody calls an ugly woman. Not very ugly, a kind of
woman some claim to have her own charms. I have read over and over how
Cleopatra was very ugly, and she nevertheless had Julius Caesar and Mark
Antony and hundreds of other men she wanted. But obviously being a queen
must have helped some.
At the firm’s annual holiday party, when every girl wins some sort of
award: Best Ass, Best Mouth, Best Tits, Best Thighs, and other honours bearing no relation to dedication or effort - only to God, and perhaps a personal
trainer - I am the one who never gets anything. Best Neck would already
have made me happy. Or possibly Best Ears. I could never win Best Nose:
mine is rather large for society’s current standards. Maybe things would be
different had I been born in Cleopatra’s time.
I am that woman who changes her hair and it’s always for the worse,
she who goes out in a new outfit and nobody notices, she who spends entire
parties pretending to dance with friends when she’s actually dancing alone.
What few people know is that, for me, all this has a scientific purpose: I have
for some time now been studying the sexuality of the ugly woman, a subject
which, as far as I can recall, has never been treated in women’s magazines,
afternoon TV shows for housewives, or self-help books.
It is important to stress that the subject of my observations is myself,
although there are common aspects between the experiences I will describe
here and those of other women - all ugly, naturally. Stories heard since I
was a girl in family reunions, confessions of friends, and all those conversations unintentionally overheard or intentionally listened to in public toilets,
crowded buses and bars filled with young and old sad women.
The following chapters elaborate on all this, and they have led me to
conclude, at the end of my study, that the ugly woman is not only an aesthetical deformation.
The ugly woman is a frame of mind.
2. Theses on the Ugly Woman
2.1. The Name
Parents to a newborn baby girl can never conceive that some day their
daughter will become an ugly woman. However, maybe due to some kind of
instinct, they will seldom give that girl a pretty name.
There is no ugly woman named Nicole, and it is rare for one of them
to be called Julia, Leticia, Barbara, Yasmin. On the other hand, there are
countless ugly Crisleides, Rosineides, Greicelanas, Claudiomaras, and all hybrids combining two or three names in a single, unheard-of proper noun.
I myself have been registered under the name Jucianara and, whenever
I nagged at my mother for giving me that name, she invariably answered:
‘No name would have suited you better.’
2.2. Genesis
I begin this chapter by ignoring my childhood, for I consider all children to be pretty, although my colleagues, friend and family in general, siblings and parents did not seem to share this opinion. My grandmother on
my mother’s side was always complimenting me for being nice, while never
failing to mention her other grandchildren’s looks. I regard this today as a
consolation prize, just like my most glorious achievement at school: being
crowned Miss Congeniality. A prize category usually inspired by the jury’s
compassion rather than the contestants’ assets.
When I left childhood behind I carried with me all the pounds I
should have shed in parks and playgrounds where I jumped and ran. These
were joined by many more as I grew up, and from ages eleven to seventeen
I can say I gained much more volume than I did height - a pattern I would
stick to for life.
My skin, my hair, my mouth, my legs never resembled those same
body parts I used to see since a tender age in ads for soaps, lotions and shampoos. And, although I eventually came to use those same products, they never
improved my looks. My hair remained rebellious, growing upright and sideways. My legs did not become long and smooth. My breasts, which went
from nonexistent to inconvenient at a time the world was not yet ruled by
implants, felt the effects of gravity day after day. Finally, my pimples did not
disappear with the oily cosmetics that should have made me prettier. Perhaps
they even multiplied and came to resist all kinds of treatment, truly mutant
pimples, as I used to call them.
To achieve the picture, a wardrobe in no way whatsoever influenced
by fashion dictated my style. The clothes my mother chose, always pants and
shirts, would no doubt have suited better any one of my brothers. The rest
was handed over by an older cousin, which always had me looking like last
fall/winter/spring/summer’s current fashion. If women were sporting loose
trousers, I would wear the tight ones my cousin no longer wanted. When
girls wore mini-skirts, I, like a radical Muslim, would hide myself under long
skirts straight out from last season.
I must mention that the fact my middle-class family did not have
the financial means or even the information necessary for me to dress more
appropriately was not in any way determining in making me look worse. I
remember a very ugly classmate, Andremara, daughter of a car dealer, who
would parade everyday clad in garments from the very same stores I most admired. Far from justifying the father’s investment, the clothes only enhanced
the bad looks of that stout and short girl, while at the same time causing the
jealousy of all the other girls. Every single one prettier than she, except for
me. Every single one poorer than she, just like me.
On the day Andremara came to class wearing overalls of outer
space inspiration, similar to those an actress on a TV soap had worn some
days before, she was nicknamed Futuristic Sausage. And until the day
she left the school at the end of the term, in tears, she was never called
anything else.
ARTHuR DApIEVE
From Each Love You Shall
Get Nothing But Scorn
Week One
Michael Stipe yelled one last time:
‘And I feel…’
One hundred voices bellowed the answer:
‘Fine!’
Bernardino thought:
‘fuck me’
Two forty-four in the morning, January 14th, 2001.
The clock should have stopped right then and there, petrified, as if
it were eight fifteen in the morning of August 6th, 1945 in some Hiroshima
of the soul. Because right then, six minutes and three seconds into the live
version of It’s the end of the world as we know it (And I feel fine), Bernardino
understood the bald singer’s verdict. At that precise moment his eyes landed
on Adelaide’s. They didn’t simply meet her eyes, their eyes didn’t lock: they
just landed on hers. Softly like a little bird. While the theme-song of his
Armageddon died on the speakers and the band left the stage, saying thanks
both in English and Portuguese for all the applause, Bernardino found himself becoming the character of a second-rate ad. Man looks at girl, girl looks
at man, crowd parts and they slide towards each other on trolleys and tracks
operated by the film crew and unseen by the viewer. At the beginning, however, it was unclear what that scene was trying to sell. But Bernardino, creative director of Milano & Associates, better known in the market as M&A,
Bernardino, the genius of Napoleon III margarine, knew at once that this
was the end of his world - for the third time - and he felt fine.
That’s why he thought:
‘fuck me’
‘Dino, hiii, what a coincidence…’ Protocol kisses, cheeks touching.
‘We could as well have made a date… Terrific concert, uh? I loooved it.’
‘Fuck me!’
‘I came with some rocker friends of mine but we got lost in the crowd.
Too bad for them ‘cause I’m the one driving…’ She laughed, slightly tipsy,
looking around. ‘The cell won’t work, no calls get through. They’ll have to
manage.’
‘Fuck me…’
‘Looks like your vocabulary has shrunk since we last met, uh?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Adelaide.’ oh fuck me ‘Do you have any idea how long
I’ve been waiting to hear these guys live?… Almost twenty years, since I heard
Pilgrimage on old Fluminense FM for the first time. Were you in diapers?
Not quite? It went like boum! Too bad they didn’t play that one. It was like
lightning. I’m wired, I’m a bit drunk, I’m thrilled, I’m happy. All of which
accounts for being a retard. I’ll be all right in a bit, sorry.’
‘I was kidding… I can understand your situation, even if I hardly
know R.E.M. But I’ll want to know more, ok?’ Another look around, less
anxious this time. ‘Are you here on your own?’
‘I am. My wife goes to bed really early.’
‘So… Did you take the bus? Or… a taxi?!”
‘Yeah. I took a taxi, damned expensive.’
‘And how are you getting back? Did you keep it waiting?!’
Bernardino shrugged and shook his head at the same time.
‘I am a nice girl, I can give you a lift into town. Let’s go?’
‘oh fuck me’
Anti-despair pause.
‘Thanks, yeah, I was just wondering how I’d manage to leave this
place. You’re the only familiar face I’ve seen. But I think we should wait a bit,
let the crowd drain, everyone will be stuck in traffic anyway.’ do something ‘I
could use a drink, how about you? We could get a draft beer in one of those
booths. They’re Kaiser, but right now I could even stomach a Malt 90. You’re
not old enough to know, but Malt was the brand sponsoring the last festival… Well, anyway, it seems to be the most efficient way to talk the kids out
of getting pissed: get a horribly bad beer to pay your bills and give it exclusive
rights to sell inside the concert area. People hardly touch a drink.’
Adelaide was shaking her head up and down, sticking her tongue out
and smiling. Her hair was dark red, not ginger, and it fell straight over her ears
in light waves, making her look like the cocker spaniel in a Disney cartoon.
‘lady adelady adelaide light of my life flame in my flesh’
They walked almost in silence up to the booth in front of the main
gate, towards the parking lot where the car waited, focusing more on avoiding the moving crowds than on discussing the song Everybody hurts. Natural-
ly, many people had had the same idea, and there was still a huge line at the
booth. Nevertheless, even though they knew that at the end of the rainbow
there would be only two plastic cups filled with lukewarm Kaiser beer, they
both threw themselves at the drink as if reaching the free zone of a tag game.
Bernardino stared at the girl’s cheeks, beautiful cheeks, stretching to the sides
of her face, slighlty narrowing her light-brown eyes. Although she had not
yet graduated, Adelaide was already a myth of the advertising market. She
made a sensation not because of her professional skills - impossible to measure in the menial tasks she performed at M&A, such as searching for images
or scanning pictures - but because, on top of being beautiful, very beautiful,
and having a good body, a very good body, she was nice, extremely nice.
He had recognized these and other qualities of hers since the day
the girl had introduced herself claiming to be one of his fans during one of
those boring cocktail parties attended only by people of the same profes-
sion, during which people almost invariably drank too much to chase away
boredom and office colleagues. For him, however, Adelaide was the work of
a contemporary painter he did not like, a scribble by Mirò. He saw it, he
acknowedged its beauty, he experienced a fleeting aesthetical pleasure, he
recognized its value and then he moved on to the next painting in the long
gallery of nice women for whom you feel nothing. Now that she was a trainee
in the art department of the agency where he worked, whenever they met in
the lift Bernardino would prolong the conversation just to imagine that some
onlooker might think: ‘He’s doing her.’ It was an ego boost to be seen with a
beauty like that. But, no. He was not doing her, nor did he fancy doing her.
Until Michael Stipe decided on his disgrace. At that precise moment, during
the music festival Rock in Rio III, in the half-darkness of that field in Jacarepaguá, Adelaide was illuminated with a stroke by Rembrandt and she became
another picture, one of those pictures we fall in love with.
LuIz EDuARDO sOAREs, ANDRé bATIsTA AND RODRIgO pImENTEL
Elite Squad
Translated from the portuguese by Renato Rezende, with paul Heritage
Excerpt from the chapter “Friendly Fire”
A glade in Serra do Mar, wintertime, 3:00 AM, a few years before
After riding horseback for one hundred kilometers, without harness
or rest, starved and thirsty, completely depleted by physical exhaustion, with
raw thighs and butts, we had the option of sitting in a brine bowl or not.
Experience had taught us that sitting down was best, even at the price of
stabbing pain. Some fainted from pain. Nevertheless, it was better. Whoever
thought of sparing himself could not move the next day: the wounds became
inflamed and covered with pus; thighs, testicles and buttocks would swell.
As a result, being immobilized, the man failed the test. And the worst was
the humiliation of the discharge ritual: he had to dig a grave and simulate his
own death, lying down at the bottom of the hole.
Let us then skip the brine, because the best part comes next - or
the worst part, depending on the point of view. While some horses die from
fatigue - I am not exaggerating, they do die -, food is served. But if you are
thinking of a large and tasty meal, you are wrong. The food is thrown over a
canvas on the ground - remember that we are deep into the countryside and
this is a winter night. We have two minutes to eat. And I mean two minutes.
With the hands. Eat what you can, as you can – this is the motto. Anything
goes. At such moments we realize that, reduced to our minimum physiological common denominator, we humans are all similar to each other as well as
similar to the inferior mammals. The fight for survival is an ugly thing to see,
and worse still to undergo.
But after the storm, comes the calm, as well as after an extreme physical experience come contemplation, abstraction and intellectual improvement. Now, try to imagine the following: a group of filthy, muddy men,
reeking of horses, with flayed testicles, butts and thighs burning, exhausted
to the last drop of energy, still hungry and thirsty, black nails full of dinner
vestiges, greasy hands, all forced to listen to a long theoretical and boring
class on anti-guerrilla tactics, with no reference to actions, only to the fundamental concepts.
Then add the following ingredient: the class was given in a deliberately hypnotic tone. We were a group of unhealthy sufferers, sleepwalkers,
wraiths. We stared wide-eyed, knowing that the slightest nap would exact
a high price. Amâncio did not resist and lowered his head, intoxicated with
sleep. The instructor rose slowly, and went to him. He was ordered him to
squat on a trunk. The instructor took a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin
and placed the grenade on the dull-witted student’s right hand. A slip would
be the end of the brave pack. From then on, we did not take our eyes off
Amâncio - all watching our friend’s vigil. Fright woke up us as the best bitter
hot coffee could not.
Excerpt from the Chapter “Thousand and one Nights”
The Police Battalion of Special Operations, BOPE to the intimate,
arrives at the war scenario. We are hungry for invading slums, totally turnedon. Excuse me for speaking like this, but I am here to tell the truth, right? You
will soon discover that I am an educated man, with a level of education that
few people obtain in Brazil. Maybe you will be amazed when I tell you that I
attend a law graduation course in a college, speak English and have read Foucault. But that is for later. I will take the liberty of speaking in all frankness,
and, you know, when we are sincere we get carried away and not always our
words are sober or elegant.
If you are waiting for a well-mannered testimony, forget it. Best to
close this book right now. Excuse me, but I get annoyed with people who
expect at the same time the truth, and a gentleman’s speech. The truth has
to be evoked, called, and it only comes without restrictions, refusing to filter
that voice that comes from the heart. Therefore, the truth is much closer to
a common man’s speech than to court etiquette. This testimony is like my
house. It will be beautiful, sublime and horrendous, as I am, as has been my
life. And as your life is also, most probably. Welcome, the house is yours. In
the beginning, you will find some things weird, but later you will get used to
them. I also found things weird at the beginning. When I joined the police,
I found so many things strange! But soon I got used to them. We do get used
to almost anything. Therefore, my dear friend, - can I call you that? - fasten
your seatbelt and let’s go.
The first history happens at the Jacaré slum.
It was more or less like this. We arrive in Jacaré full of love -if you
understand me - and full of disposition. We hardly leave the vehicle and two
junkies run into us - because the vehicle stopped exactly after the curve of
the main slope. I was a lieutenant then, and in command of the patrol. They
did not have time to make themselves invisible or to try an escape. I caught
the taller one by the arm and shook him a bit so that the son of a bitch would
wake up and notice that he had fallen into a mousetrap. He was unarmed
and had a few of screws of cocaine packets in his pocket.
--So the little fairy is here to snort the “white”, yeah? Maybe the poof
also likes to attend protest marches all dressed up in white, asking for peace,
ah? Answer me, “mané’ (sucker).
--No sir.
--No sir what? Did you not buy charlie or do you not like peace protest marches?
--I don’t sell, sir. I bought only for my personal use.
--Ah! It’s for personal use, then it is OK, right?
I pulled an extinguisher from one of our vehicles and unloaded it at
the subject’s nostrils. He looked like a rissole:
--So you want snow? You want the white stuff? Here it is, animal.
Well, at this point I must admit that I felt hot and could not control
myself. But I only gave a few blows, because I had this great idea. I ordered
Rocha to stop beating the other junkie.
--Come here, the two of you. On your feet, looking at me. Heres, my
cell phone. You have three options: to call dad asking him to come and pick
you up, first option; to eat a dozen hard eggs, each one, without drinking
water, second; to take a trashing is the third. Which one will it be?
The two chose the eggs. I knew it. The last thing a junkie wants is
for his father to find out. What they did not know is that the eggs were in
the vehicle since the previous day, due to a slum occupation that BOPE was
conducting. In the scorching carioca summer, in January, the eggs certainly
corresponded to a good beating. God writes straight with crooked lines. Free
will was respected. Even so, divine intention was fulfilled. Please, do not
think that I am religious. This is pure prejudice. Nor that every policeman or
thief that mentions God is religious. Do you see? It is not only the policeman
that is prejudiced, after all. Speaking of prejudice, mark in your notebook
that I am black. Black in the politically correct meaning of the word, because,
from the merely physical point of view, I am mulatto, actually. But I insist in
making it clear - no pun intended - that I am black and I do prefer that you
think of me as black, OK?
The problem is that there were only a dozen eggs, forcing me to
improvise. But I am very creative, in all modesty. Therefore, the solution
was ingenious. While the shortest junkie quietly swallowed the eggs, before
vibrant cheers from my men, the other was buried to the neck in the garbage
dumpster. Tell me... an interesting sentence, was it not? If, at that moment,
you feel aghast and would like to evoke human rights, I think it would be
better for you to close the book, dude, because you at risk of feinting in a
little while.
Well, actually, I don’t want you to close the book, nor I would like
for you to have a bad impression of me. Don’t take what I say too seriously.
Sometimes, I speak whatever comes to mind, and I end up passing a false image of myself, as if I were heartless, perverse, or something like that. But it is not
the case. When you know me better, you will see that it is not like that at all. I
only insisted on telling the story because the end is very funny. It was like this:
I was going down the slum exhausted; it had been one hell of a night. More
than three hours hunting low lives, with no result. Two soldiers of my unit were
waiting in the vehicle. From a distance, I could hear their laughter. When I approached, they pointed the flashlight to the garbage dumpster, where we could
see the junkie’s head, buried in shit up to his neck.
--What are you doing there, dude? I asked.
--You ordered me to stay here.
-- You can fucking leave.
I swear that I had forgotten. If it were not by the noise made by the
rats, the boys would not have seen him either. And if they had not seen him,
he might still be there today.
Excerpts from the chapter “Black Tag and Blue Ribbon”1
I am not part of a comedy, rest assured. The Mangueira case is interesting. I mean, it is good that you know me a little better. And get to know
Reference to government-controlled medication, which displays a black tag on the
package. Sleeping pills are black tagged, and policemen usually have to take medication to sleep.
1
my BOPE colleagues. The previous story could be misleading. Above all
because, nowadays, if we speak of police, everybody immediately thinks of
absence of limits, traffic of influence, extortion and corruption. The episode
of the garbage dumpster ends up sounding sort of ambiguous, and you may
have the impression that, if the crack heads’ parents had appeared, my colleagues and I would have charged a sum to free the assholes. I want to make
this clear at once: that sort of thing does not happen in BOPE and never did.
Actually, there was one case or another, but the colleagues themselves found
a way of expelling those responsible, before our honor was defiled.
Beating up low-lives, executing criminals, this is our department, this
is what we do. But there are no business deals, no sir. With us, there are no
deals. It is funny and sad at the same time - that even the language of lowlives and corrupt police officers becomes increasingly similar. In the end, if
you look more closely, the money is the same, the motivation is the same,
and everything ends up in one single package: the police sell the weapons to
drug dealers, and then borrow them for the media show of political exhibitions. The following day, the police return the weapons after charging a fee
from the drug dealers. Those weapons are used against the police itself, but
the bunch that sells them could not care less for the consequences.
In the daily routine, when the BOPE does not act, the corrupt group
of the military police negotiates a percentage for the sale of the drugs, and
collects daily. Once in a while, somebody breaks the agreement, and shootings start. For this reason, it is important that I am entirely transparent, so
that you can separate the wheat from the chaff. With the BOPE there are no
deals. And if you forgive my lack of modesty, we are the best urban war troop
in the world, the most technical, the better prepared, and the strongest. And
I am not the one saying it: the Israelis come here to learn from us; the Americans also. This high quality is due to many factors, one of which is that there
is no other place in the world where you can practice everyday.
We are about one hundred and fifty men, approximately. Whenever
this number was increased, we had problems. It is not easy to enter the
BOPE. This I can guarantee. Not everyone is suited. We take great pride in
the black uniform and in our symbol: the knife nailed to the skull. Criminals
tremble before us. I won’t deceive you: with criminals, there is no argument.
At night, for instance, we don’t take prisoners. During night incursions,
if we see a low-life, he is going to the ditch. I know that this policy is not
right. But now it is too late. We kill or we die. Before the implementation of this policy, many years ago, a low-life would surrender when he felt
outnumbered or fenced in. However, the order of shooting to kill, without
accepting surrender, caused a paradoxical effect: it increased resistance and
violence against the police. Evidently, the subject knows that surrender is of
no use, and then he fights to the death. At least he can delay death and take
somebody with him.
Consequently, the number of reports alleging resistance followed by
death increased substantially and these are the records of civilians’ deaths in
confrontation with the police. On the other hand, the number of murders of
police officers multiplied. For revenge. That most sickening type of revenge,
directed towards an entire corporation. A mirror of the revenge practiced by
ourselves, sometimes against a whole slum community. Blood is a poison.
The more it is spilled, the more it fertilizes hate. And the wheel does not stop
turning. In the end, we all pay the bill, starting with society. That policy was
insanity. And now what? We are the heirs to the madness. We have to shoot
faster in order not to die. Meanwhile, politicians and scholars discuss the sex
of angels.
Excerpt from the Chapter “Dolphins of Miami”
The verb employed is “to work”. When a subordinate calls the commander on the radio and asks, “Boss, may I work the criminal?” he is asking
for authorization to make him sing, or, in other words, to make him tell
what he knows. In the same way that the governor is authorizing the Secretary of Public Security to authorize the commander of the Military Police to
authorize the policeman, when he says: “Do whatever is necessary to solve
the problem.” The governor enjoys the sleep of the just; the secretary sleeps
cradled by righteousness; the commander rests as a Christian; and the soldier,
at the end of the chain, finds his hands deep in blood. If shit happens, the
chain bursts at the weakest link, obviously. The soldier is guilty. The soldier goes to trial. The soldier’s name appears in lists of international entities
for human rights. The governor rests ambiguously in peace; the secretary is
subtle in preserving his conscience; the commander cultivates euphemisms
and resorts to long complicated words to protect his honor and his job. What
remains is the soldier, to whom killing is part of an unspoken job description.
Curiously, the ambiguity can only be cultivated in the solemn environment
of the Governor’s Palace, where imposture and violence are sweetened by the
elegant choreography of politics.
When the scenario is the slum, the rituals are different, less sophisticated. In the war zone, there is no space or time for solemnity and ambivalence. What was sweet becomes bitter, sours and falls rotten to the ground.
We, who operate at the other end of the decision-making chain, always get
the rotten fruit and digest it as we can. After all, maybe it’s a lie to say that
there are ambivalences only in the court rooms. They are everywhere. They
are here among us. And inside us, in me and in you.
A way of adapting ambiguity to the war scenario is to be amused with
the pain of others. I distrust our laughter. I still hear our laughter in the past,
and it sounds strange to me. I am not sure anymore that we liked what we
did, and that we really found it funny. But we did laugh; what else? And we
tried to enjoy practical tasks with a maximum of creativity. I, for instance,
was proud of inventing new modalities. We even had gala nights, with premieres and everything. A show that we really liked was called “dolphins of
Miami.” The premiere happened exactly on the night that we took advantage of Juninho’s resistance to test the efficiency and the beauty of the new
show. The idea was to soften his “macho” behavior with water.
Water is a great energy conductor. The idea was a more or less natural
development of the traditional tortures with plastic bags and water: asphyxiation and drowning. Every BOPE member leaves the barracks with his plastic bag, an item already integrated to the basic kit. The bag is placed over the
head of the lowlife, tightening the base, which is tied at the neck. The subject suffocates, pukes, and faints. This is the moment for loosening the tie. It
is disgusting, but effective. We eagerly worked Juninho for hours and hours.
First a beating, a good old thrashing, which usually is enough. Nothing. We
inserted wood shreds under his nails. The animal roared, but did not sing.
It was then that it occurred to me to premiere the Dolphins. We went to a
water tank, and removed two threads from the public illumination network.
We ordered Juninho to enter the tank and we dipped the tips of the threads,
one on each side. What a beauty! You should have seen it. He jumped with
lightness and grace. We only lacked a soundtrack and stage lights. Even so,
the son of a bitch didn’t sing. I dipped the threads in water many times. I
think he was close to death several times. I became nervous and annoyed. You
have to understand, hours and hours, and nothing. The blood went to my
head and I began to shoot the tank. I was finally contained by my colleagues.
I was out of myself. Luckily for the scumbag, a bullet path suffers a refraction
in a liquid medium. If it weren’t for that, he would be fucked. He almost did
not survive. I don’t usually miss my shots.
I radioed the commander. Told him we were working the scumbag for
a long time, without success. I wanted to finish off the scum, but I had to
listen my superior, given the special conditions that surrounded the case. He
told me to take the subject to DPCA, the police station for juvenile delinquents. I had to take him. The guy was white as a sheet of paper. Sly fellow.
Before the police officer, he muttered: “BOPE policemen tortured me” and
showed his purple fingers, with the lifted up nails. The officer was a shrewd
professional and did not disappoint us. He faced the subject squarely and
said: “Oh, yeah? Poor fellow... Are you hurting, are you, sonny” Do you need
me to call your Mom, you son of a bitch?”
If it were not for cooperation among police professionals, it would
be impossible to do our job with a minimum of efficiency. The population
complains about us because they think it is easy to maintain order in the city.
Hardly do they know that while dinner is being savored in family, in front of
the television, in the comfort of home, on the other side, in the underworld,
blood is being spilled, the low-lives’ and ours.
séRgIO RODRIguEs
The Man Who Killed
the Writer
First things first: I didn’t write the book everyone thinks I wrote, the
one that has been showering me with fame and riches since its publication,
just over one year go. Although many people might find that strange – while
others might say, I knew it, he never fooled me – the work was entirely finished when I found it, scattered in scrawls all over the walls of a flat just like
my own: all I did was edit it. They Kill Writers, Don’t They? was written by a
fellow called Austino Lemos, who used to be my next-door neighbour, and is
today deceased. I am quite aware that once people believe this my conviction
will be harsh, unanimous and just. This is exactly what I’m looking for.
Thus it is said, and be advised, seasoned reader, this is not a post-modernist mirror play: the man who now addresses you is a fraud, and I hereby
declare that the above mentioned is true.
There was a time – almost my entire life – when the literary potential of such a matter would have greatly interested me: reconstructed text,
identity exchange and such; to be honest, this is all that would interest me,
this literary potential, for that was the way I reacted to any subject. Not
anymore. Now that literary potentials make me want to throw up, Austino
stands for a once in a lifetime opportunity for change, and this is the only
reason why he interests me.
The rest – well, the rest is literature. I long for the moment when I
will put a full stop to this confession and get up, no longer a character, but a
true subject of great actions: go out into the sun, have a smoke at some street
corner, loose sight of myself. But this will take a little while yet. The path to
follow before liberation includes a second crime and begins at the Faculty of
Letters and Literature – a most appropriate place.
The idea occurred to me and Gabriel Ahlter around the third term
and the fifteenth pint of beer: to improve our sex life by creating a workshop
where carefully chosen first-year female students could act as inspiration – in
the nude or not, but preferably so – for descriptive poems which we decided
to name, and I can’t recall whose idea this was, aqualogues. The term was a
word play with ‘aquarelle’, and the need to explain it is proof enough of its
badness. Being drunk, we found it very funny.
Surprisingly, when applied, the general scheme of things was not bad
at all. It worked wonderfully – not in regard to quality, for the aqualogues
were almost always poor; but, whether carefully chosen or not, we scored
with a lot of young ladies. Most of them would whisper in my ear: You write,
oh, so well… I believe it was around that time that I got infected with the
damned virus, the disease of believing that life only makes sense when it is
woven together with art, and vice-versa; Art & Life, in short.
Art & Life? A whore’s disease cured by getting fucked, some foulmouthed reader might say, and he shall be right, in a way. But the truth is
that Ahlter and I were not interested in getting fucked. In fucking, yes, fuck
we did. I remember a great many supple student backs smitten by our intellectual babble, tentative at first, but soon soaring to a truly artistic level, a
point of no-return where it, the babble, the come-on, became the work itself,
surpassing such by-products as poetry or even sex. Were we cynical? Maybe a
little, but it only helped to build a favourable picture: it hasn’t been mentioned yet, but this was the early 1980s, a time when people were still allowed
to mix up old hippie stuff, recycled beatnik prattle and trite modernism and
re-emerge at the other side, blameless, well-known within a certain circle and
carrying an aftertaste of genital fluids. It was my idea – this one I remember,
although I can’t imagine what would have inspired me – to dub our duo ‘The
Dinosaurs’.
No one will remember it today, but there was a time when The Dinosaurs ruled the Earth. We crowded bars with our recitals, gave out autographs
on half-naked bosoms, and exhausted several print runs of copier reproduced
booklets while stuffing ourselves with solid, liquid and gaseous intoxicating
substances. We were - please excuse the cliché - young. The press loved us
for a while, until everyone forgot us, naturally, and The Dinosaurs became
extinct. Thus begins my predicament.
So much for a predicament, the reader might say, the same ill-humoured one as before. This is only normal, he might argue. We live in a pop
fragmentary society where memories are short-lived. Who will remember a
guy called Radar, who during his first football match as Flamengo’s centreforward scored four goals and became God?
Let me tell you one thing: Radar does, Radar remembers. Wherever he
might be, alive or dead, I can assure you Radar remembers.
Radar shouldn’t have come into this story, but since he has, let him
stay: he will be a good symbol of this infectious, acute and chronic recollection ex-famous people carry to their deaths. This, reader, is where predicaments do come from. As do tragedies. But let us not get ahead of ourselves.
Because if we did get ahead of ourselves I would have to admit that,
surely and in spite of what it may seem, the reason for my plagiarism goes far
beyond the base satisfaction of a long-nurtured desire for literary glory. Far
beyond. If my reading of Austino is correct, his whole body of work was designed to eschew the irrelevance of the written word and take the leap – the
unheard-of, the unconceivable leap – towards action. Compared to that,
what does a mere issue of authorship mean? In spite of what it may seem this
is no attempt at defence, for I swear I don’t care for this, rather the opposite:
they should condemn me; they should spit on my name. However, you must
understand that I was ill, and Austino Lemos cured me. At some point I
thought this was his true work, to cure me. He was the murderer of at least
one writer: the one begotten in the womb of my own head, an illegitimate
ghost in permanent embryonic form, gnawing away at me like a cancer.
Ahlter and I had a fight as soon as The Dinosaurs became extinct
– an inevitable fight, perhaps, for we were both witnesses of the other’s lost
happiness. He left the university, made new friends – Ronaldo Costa Pinto
and the gang at Troqueu magazine – and started to diminish what we had
achieved. He would laugh and dub our aqualogue phase the “pre-history of
literature”. This infuriated me to the brink of madness. Why? Well, I sorely
missed being a Dinosaur, a prince-philosopher, a really active writer, privy to
the mysteries of Art & Life like few others before me. I mean, I also missed
the girls, but what I missed the most was that second-degree consciousness
filtering everything – through eyes, ears, touch, intuition – into the lens of
literature. You write, oh, so well… I truly believed I was bound to achieve
great literary feats, and therefore great feats in life. I was, however, goingh
through some discouraging moments. I was lost and alone, and my friend’s
jeering tortured me until the day I apparently went too far. Unfortunately I
don’t recall what I said. Ahlter was truly outraged.
We never spoke again. I graduated and married Daphne, our old university friend, and my ex-brother Dinosaur did not attend either event; nor
did I attend any of his book signing soirées. When Gabriel Ahlter, now a
bald man, became “the best Brazilian writer of the new generation”, as more
than one motherless critic wrote, I was far away. Newspapers would gossip
about the womanizing writer’s last affair, beautiful and talented post-porn
novelist Beatriz Viotti. I stayed at home with Daphne, went out only to
attend classes and return carrying loads of papers to grade, and I remained
unpublished – except for a brief volume of poetry, Acute Poems – while I wrote and rewrote a novel of increasingly unsubstantial meaning entitled Life.
The repulsion I felt towards Ahlter’s first two books was both visceral
and rational and, I believe, only partly motivated by envy. I mention these
first two books because I haven’t read the others: by then back cover texts
and reviews were enough to confirm the guy was a fraud, a fake artist, an
outdated magician manipulating a shabby shadow-show. His obscenely high
sales figures only heightened this impression. In class, I had to restrain myself from taking offence in the student’s comments about Ahlter’s renowned
‘expressionist narrative’ or the brilliant character thingification technique he
used in Fruits Rotting in the Living-Room.
Daphne also had an unfavourable opinion of him, I mean, as far as
Daphne managed to have an opinion on any subject at all. It always seemed
to me that my wife had within herself every opinion, finding in each of them
a false note which made her discard it in order to examine the next one, and
thus successively – as one peels an artichoke, except there never was a tender
heart of meaning inside all those layers: there was only Daphne’s generous,
quivering heart. I liked my wife, but I was exasperated by the fact that, whenever I happened to be in one of those foul moods towards my former friend,
she always managed to find some sort of redemption in the bastard’s style
– it’s not that bad, he does know how to use adjectives…
Something she herself did not, but I never said so. I looked contrite
and pretended to admire Daphne’s odd poetry, at once confessional and undecipherable, five small booklets published during eight years of marriage.
(Ahlter, a cough. Daphne, a sob. For sooner or later, mid-confession,
it always comes. There was a time when I would pause to ponder the best way
to write a sob. A graphic sign, an exclamation mark? A stumble in the middle
of a sentence? Some sort of ellipse?
Or just like that, ‘a sob’?
But this must have happened in some other incarnation – I am in a
hurry, and no longer interested in expressing the sob. I don’t even know why
I would sob, now that I am almost on the threshold of a new era. Maybe
because, with or without a threshold, it is hard to look at one’s life and come to
the conclusion that your work, your best friend, your wife, everything that was
ever important has been reduced by your untalented stubbornness to the most
vile and predictable form of subliterature. Envy. Frustration. Betrayal. Death.
This is when confession loses momentum. The words. Sob. Get caught. They won’t come out.)
Like many other geniuses, Austino Lemos was an extremely unpleasant man. His sole quality was making himself scarce. He was always
holed up, and when he had to go out on the street to buy some absolutely
necessary item such as alcohol or tobacco, he knew how to scurry through
the empty moments of the day. It was rare to meet him in the lift – it was,
however, always a nasty experience. He was around fifty years of age, short
and squat, with a nose resembling a giant cashew nut and wandering, almost demented eyes. He smelled. His clothes were dirty. The door to his
flat, on the few times it was opened before me, revealed a patch of living
room in a state of grotesque disarray. He didn’t work, and no one knows
how he made a living, but even though he lived in such appalling squalor,
he must have had some kind of income, for he didn’t seem to do anything
and spent seven days a week locked inside his home. Toinho, the janitor,
said he went into the flat to solve some electrical problem and found there
was no furniture, no television set, nothing, only a few chairs, and the rest
was rubble.
Toinho would return once more to the lunatic’s flat, this time with
company. The doorman and I found Austino Lemos on the floor of his bedroom. His body was scribbled on from top to toe in ballpoint pen, a thing
my break-in partner didn’t find odd: the lunatic himself had done that, he
said, you could tell by the way the letters were arranged. Between us finding
the body and the hearse’s arrival to take him away to forensics – suspicious
death – many hours went by. Hours? Toinho must have had to phone the
appropriate authorities, let the manager of the building know what had happened, get someone to keep the children away, I don’t know. That time
apart from time, the time I spent alone with the dead man, can’t be measured
in the same way as normal time. I am vaguely aware that it all took a while
– in Brazil these things do.
When the hearse arrived, the body was practically in its original position, face down by the bed, eyes vitreous. Toinho came in with the two guys
and didn’t notice the perhaps insignificant difference in the way the legs
were positioned. I was trembling, assaulted by a violent emotion, and hadn’t
managed to put them right after undressing the corpse and turning each fold
inside out to make sure I didn’t loose a single word.
Yes, the text was beautiful. As for my act, it was an atrocity no man
should ever perpetrate: if anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.
Unless, maybe, he is a writer too.
After arranging the corpse’s position, I waited for Toinho’s return by
walking around the house in a daze. In the kitchen, I saw the key to the back
door attached to a key-ring shaped like a skull. I reasoned Toinho would not
realise it was missing, for we had come in through the front door. And I slipped the skull key-ring into my pocket.
What followed then is as vivid and remote as one of those newspaper
pictures flanked by a text explaining some long action, but showing only a
frozen fraction of it. The first thing the hearse guys said was that it smelled
like two and a half days. Toinho proceeded to say indeed, he had noticed the
smell from the lobby with his eagle’s nose – he was familiar with that sweet
sickly smell of people rotting – then he thought: I’m going to get someone to
go in with me, otherwise, you know, they’ll say I was stealing and shit.
One of the hearse guys, an older guy, told Toinho he shouldn’t have
done that, gone inside like that, it was against the Law. And he gripped
Austino’s legs to lift him up. The other one caught hold of his arms, and off
they went.
This left me in shock. What did I expect, an epiphany? The hearse
guys didn’t say much. I wanted a fright, maybe, some sort of hilarity, any sign
that someone had recognized the splendor of the literary-funerary object rotting before us. The only comment the younger public undertaker managed
to utter was: Look at this one, all written up, remember that fag in Honório
Gurgel who had a dick tattooed on his ass? He said it when he was leaving.
We didn’t hear the older man’s answer, if he did answer.
The two of us remained alone. Toinho observed the flat was filthy. I
agreed this was true: it was filthy, it was a mess, and therefore full of clues to
the death of its tenant. The Law would see that it remained that way.
I said this with my hand inside my pocket – this is the picture, the
frozen moment – feeling for the small skull. I didn’t realise then that I was
already acting like a criminal.
Even before transcribing every single part of the scatological text I was
able to recall – moving around the house alone in a trance while Daphne was
away at the beach, pulling at my hair in frustration for not being able to grasp
the exact order of some intercalated sentence trickling down his leg – and
thus before re-reading once more my Pierre Menard work and seeing that
it was good, but no more than an epilogue, I already knew I had to go back
to that flat. I hid the three sheets of paper at the bottom of my underwear
drawer, turned on the TV and waited for my wife to come home. I was calm,
aloof in a rather pleasurable way. I remembered the text once more, trying
to link each fragment to its corresponding part. For instance, on the palm of
the left hand
the murderer wears a mask in the shape of a rough plastic face where one
can read the word ‘mask’ written repeatedly in different colours and fonts. The
mouth is a slash that cries:
‘Death to the writer!’
The short passage of that untitled work I had read made me conclude
Austino did not condemn all writers to death – only those who behaved like
whores, like Gabriel Ahlter, betraying the great writer who might have existed inside them for the sake of social acceptance, money, sex, whatever; those
who launched a book a year and filled newspapers with irrelevant articles
and statements; death, then, to the prolific scholar overblown with nothing,
to the legion of Rubem Fonseca impersonators, to the psychoanalytical fiction writer, to the bearded populist, to the experimental cynical, to the thesaurus scholar, to the author of the decade’s greatest best-seller, to the wordy,
to the excessively dry, to the vain and to the naïve – death to whoever had
once been or might come to be an author of empty words. And I happily
thought: this includes Gabriel Ahlter, Ronaldo Costa Pinto, Beatriz Viotti,
Cícero Lucas. Among so many others.
The police, of course, carried no investigation. Our police never investigate anything. They said it was a natural death, heart-related, and some
relative was expected to show up, although somehow I knew Austino didn’t
have any relatives, or those he had didn’t wish to see him. The flat was left to
rot. As far as I know, no detective ever paid it a single visit.
I should know. In the following weeks, I often worked late at the university, giving an extra-curricular class entitled ‘From Knut Hamsun to Allen
Ginsberg: a path of eternal hunger’. The reader is not expected to believe
that. Daphne did, and that is enough.
A few feet away from her, stealthly as a murderer, I spent endless nights
reading. Reading? Deciphering is more like it: I was hunting, I was chasing
the words which made up every inch of every underside of every carpet, every
side of every slat of every shutter, every margin of every book lying around the
place. Austino’s flat was a point of text whose infinite mass had been shattered
into millions of pieces by the Big Bang. Sentences written with razor blade on
a cupboard’s door were answered in blood on the bathroom mirror, and corrected in bean soup and excrement on malodorous heaps of towels and sheets.
Whole chapters had been inscribed on the walls in invisible ink, the words having to be burned in order to reveal themselves, and for that purpose I invented a torch which provided me with both moments of bliss and anxiety; at one
point I wondered if that was how the story ended, everything up in flames.
It didn’t end like that. I found dazzling aphorisms scribbled on the
back of shop receipts and forgotten inside empty beer bottles in the back toilet. I followed dialogues drafted on paper once used for wrapping bread, copied onto the butter’s surface, and immortalized on the almost empty fridge,
equally etched on each side with grooves I initially mistook for accidents.
The smell of death was alcoholic, pervasive. Ants disfigured sugar metaphors on the kitchen table. Fungus absorbed diphthongs. And everywhere
there it was, written, suggested, represented, turned into drama or into a slogan: death, death, death to the Writer. The murderer’s motivations were only
visible in epiphanies painted here and there, blotches of uncertain meaning,
like the shimmer of an inaccessible stained glass window. To Austino, this
was the perfect death: the writer bleeding around the home like a wounded
animal, oozing final and equally mortal words. In that flat I learned that the
only hope lies in silence.
I believe I was a good restorer, guessing the artist’s primitive intention
behind the numerous gaps. In less capable hands, the work of extracting the
book contained within that home would probably have ended in disaster.
None of this is said with any views on justifying myself. I’m not even claiming co-authorship of the masterwork, although I could have done so. I
humbly and candidly confess that I would have been unable to devise such
an intrigue, much less an extraordinary detective such as Elias, that fat, gauche and flatulent scholar, historian, literary critic, writer’s biographer and
archivist, the only person in the world who insists on reading the text of a
malignant and superior mind in the wake of hideous crimes. The scholar’s
reasoning is that once he determines the monster’s aesthetic pattern, he will
be able to anticipate his next attack and set a trap for him, arrest him. He
obsessively lets himself be caught in the theories he spins, gradually abandoning his other interests, as if the mystery of murdered writers – no longer very
interesting to the police, who pretended to believe they were isolated events,
and not the work of a single psychopath – provided an excellent subject for
the corollary of his scholar career.
Our critics’ Babelian judgments about the book still leave me stunned.
They all read what they want to read, say whatever they want to say, and live
as they can – nothing new about that. But none of them accepts it. Like the
detective, all critics search for the pattern. They all think they have found it,
and each has his or her own version for it. Elias’ search, like the critics’, is
aesthetical, that is to say, moral. The murderer’s search goes much further.
Yes, the fat detective finally finds the pattern, but too late – the murderer is
already under his bed.
It’s pathetic. I am sick of this diseased little world. The threshold,
please!
And I’ll no longer speak of what is known. As I write, They Kill Writers, Don’t They? enjoys the reputation of a contemporary classic, as I didn’t
doubt it would while I was extracting it from the garbage, giddy with gratitude. To sign it with my own name? It didn’t cross my mind. I’d still not
begun to understand Austino. Not even when, after two months of archaeology, I’d gathered a sky-scraper’s worth of notes and the neighbouring flat
no longer held any secrets for me, not even then did I begin to understand
Austino. All I wanted was to glorify him. I was not the writer, I was the
writer’s neighbour – only without me he wouldn’t exist.
I believed I would tell Daphne everything when the book was finished. In the meanwhile, I justified the nights spent at the office with a lie,
saying I’d found the solution for Life, and wow, I was thrilled, dying to finish
it. The truth is that I avoided talking to my wife ever since the day I decided
to keep silent about the unspeakable: if anything is sacred... Maybe I already
knew more than I was aware.
Two more months and the dead man’s book was done.
Four months – those who wished to do so have already calculated
– four months separate the finding of the scribbled body and the novel’s last
full stop. Four months way too difficult for Daphne, who at the beginning
of the fifth announced she needed time-space or something like that, and left
home on a rainy morning carrying lots of suitcases. One week later, thanks
to a picture in the paper, I found out she was banging – guess who. Yes,
subliterature – don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. Ahlter was smiling without
showing his teeth, Daphne was showing far more than her teeth. They were
in front of an Italian restaurant in Leme.
This day is etched into my memory with DVD quality. I stood there,
paper in hand, for one hour or more, looking at the photograph. I wasn’t
thinking. Then I felt a sudden urge to go back to Austino’s flat and get in
touch once again with the text engraved on walls and objects, to rethink the
entire book, my entire life. I crossed my living room as if I was drowning and
the next door flat was a life-buoy in the fog.
I opened the door and almost fell backwards.
‘Sorry I scared you’, said Toinho, closing Austino’s door and arranging
his broom and mop inside a big bucket. ‘Place was revolting’, he went on,
‘some folks complained about the smell.’
‘What?’
‘The loony’s flat. I spent hours inside. Tell you something, this was a
crazy bastard. You can’t imagine the hard work.’
‘...’
‘But it’s fine now.’
‘...’
The service lift went ‘glup’ and swallowed the janitor. I stood there,
petrified. looking at the door of the neighbouring flat, a twin to my own, as
if in a mirror. Austino now existed only in my transcriptions. My wife had
swapped me for the enemy. There was no turning back now. I would publish
the book with my name and have done with it.
It was the success everyone knows: reprints, translations into seven
languages, interviews even on the hegemonic TV. Some assignment editor
remembered the Dinosaurs, that carefree university partnership: who could
have foretold they’d have such a success on their own? Then came the tiresome repetition of my enmity with Ahlter, the exhaustive rehashing of adultery,
and I became a public cuckold – what’s the point in being a famous writer
when you are a public cuckold? Otherwise, it was the usual Babel of critics:
‘Tragic fable about man’s division between culture and nature”, Ivan
Silviano, poet.
‘A crazy and very funny jet of anti-literary vomit disguised as a mutant
crime novel’, Robério Stardust, cultural journalist.
‘A divertissement with airs of Kafka’, Aníbal Nabuco, ex-minister.
‘Never has toilet paper achieved so noble a weight’, Gabriel Ahlter, but
it was natural to have one or two negative opinions.
However, one should not be overly harsh with these critics. Even I
only managed to fully understand the book much later, almost one year after
it was published, when Daphne got in touch with me again saying she was
sorry. I took her in. She said she had been insane, but could see everything
clearly now: Gabriel Ahlter had been a mistake, a fuckup, her life was with
me. I listened to her. She said They Kill Writers was much better than Fruits
Rotting in the Living Room. I fucked her. Smoking a cigarette, she cried and
said Ahlter hated me badly, that one day he was seriously coked-up and told
her he had seduced her only to humiliate me, and this was why he humiliated
her too, in front of everyone, reciting her poems and laughing at them. I listened to her. She said Ahlter hated me so much he had a photo of me printed
on the bottom of his toilet, and shat on my head every single day. It was so
childish it became funny. Enough, I said. And I kicked her out.
I spent the rest of the night staring at the walls of my office as if my
eyes carried some sort of fire which could make the words of redemption
bloom from those walls. At some point, when I went to the bathroom and
examined the mirror in search of lipstick cryptograms I knew were not there,
I saw two bleary eyes stuck in a green face. I was sorry Austino was dead. It
would be so good to be able to talk to him.
It would be so good to be able to kill him.
Only then did I understand. What a fool I was. To imagine Austino
Lemos would write what seemed to be a metalinguistic crime novel only for
the sake of the game, for fun – this meant I didn’t know Austino Lemos.
Why on earth do some writers think they have to be metalinguistic, as if
their trade contained something very magical and very special – the miniature model of the whole universe – while accounting technicians, for instance,
don’t care for such things? Imagine the prescriptions of a metalinguistic doctor. Fuck metalanguage, Austino was saying. I’m interested in the body.
And thus the confession ends. I lay my feet on the threshold.
What came later, of which I now write, seemed to be already written.
I think I managed to avoid Elias by the Cazuza statue in Leblon, for I haven’t
seen him after that. The digital clock at the corner showed seven past four in
the morning. The writer was having a whisky at the back, by himself. Only
his table was occupied. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I know
we exchanged civilized, tentative sentences, as happens when old friends consider a new approach. We left the bar when the ribbon of the horizon was
starting to brighten above the ocean. Ahlter was drunk and I, magnificently
sober, had an easy task of pushing him down to the sidewalk. I banged his
head on the concrete bollard many times, twenty times I think. I banged it
on the concrete bollard until I saw the first specks of brain matter spill from
that famous bald head.
If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred, I recognized Walt
Whitman’s booming voice over the waves in Leblon. At last, a writer who
had never struck a wrong note in his lyrical exaltation? I was answered by the
bard himself: The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every
constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
I’m not sure I understood. I didn’t care. I knew the crime would feed
Ahlter’s bonfire, making his mythology eternal and increasing threefold the
print run of his stupid books, one thing feeding the other for years on end,
and once again I didn’t care. I went home and had a bath. Then I calmly
packed my bags.
After a few scares, I ended up succeeding in changing my country,
my name and my life, but that is the beginning of a story I shall not write.
Neither this one nor any other, ever again. Not a single line.
mARIA VALéRIA REzENDE
Flight Of The Red
Heron
Translated from the portuguese by Holly michaelsen
in memory of
Dorothy Stang,
Margarida Maria Alves
and all those who,
for love, allowed themselves to be sown in our soil
to one day bear the fruit of justice.
Gray And Crimson
Of cravings and desires of the body there are many ways to take care because, since the beginning, nearly all life is this, but now, more and more, it is a
hunger of the soul that taunts Rosálio, deep within, hunger for words, feelings
and people, hunger that is thus a whole lonesomeness, a darkness in the hollow
of his chest, a wide-eyed blindness, seeing all there is to see here, not one living
thing, not even an ant, a scent of nothing, the walls of dried up, gray planks,
all that gravel and sand, dull gray, the huge, concrete skeleton, colorless, the
edifices hiding any horizon, a weighty, low, gray roof touching the tops of the
buildings, sheet of lead clouds that remain steadfast, tracing neither birds, nor
sheep, nor lizards, nor the faces of giants, they bring no message, and this is
all there is to be seen, never knowing sunrise or sunset, neither morning nor
afternoon, all so very here, so close that his gaze goes to come right back again,
stunted, unable to stretch further, neither outward nor inward, whirling like
a newly caged bird, drowning, blindness. Everything here is so nothing that
Rosálio cannot muster stories that make him leap to other lives, because his
eyes find no colors to paint them. Craving for greens, yellows, reds.
A whirlwind lifts the loose sand and makes the door grind against the
wooden fence, calling Rosálio to try the hidden paths through those excessive
walls, leave, escape, search for people and pasture for the famished soul. He
came by these paths, trails that fold back on themselves, making fools of those
who pass unsteadily by the mute letters that spy from all sides and mock the
unlettered man, Rosálio came scattering questions that the wind carried off in
a gust of dirty bits of paper, unworthy of answers and invisible to passersby,
lead by the smell that his body’s hunger helped to distinguish from the many
strange, gray odors that wafted through the high walls and here he took shelter, among so many others, Rosálios, who came by the same paths, taciturn,
clothed in gray sadness, and told him he could stay if he liked, there was a
shack and a pallet to lie down on, there was a black and crooked cauldron, there
was beans on credit, kindling to burn and warm oneself, a water-pump and a
bucket, there was shovel and hoe, if he wanted to work , if he could mix the
cement and sand into mortar, if he worked. He ate beans, worked, washed up,
slept, ate beans, worked, washed up, slept, ate beans, worked, washed up, slept.
They all left today, in this world only the non-color and the dull gray silence
remained, in Rosálio arose the hunger for voices, the hunger for red.
Suddenly, he remembers the tale the Bugre told, fills his pockets with
handfuls of gravel and goes out, aimlessly, holding the strap of the wooden
box that he never abandons, searching for colors of life in the empty streets.
Where did the people go? all vanished?, turned werewolves, fire snakes, wandering souls, mulas-sem-cabeça? Rosálio goes leaving a trail of gravel to mark
his path because he is not yet ready to venture into the world again without
knowing his way back and still has to pay the beans he ate.
Irene, weary, weary, how hard it was to think about nothing!, such an
effort to forget about the child in the wrinkled arms of the old woman in that
hovel embedded in mud, the yellow paper with the exam results, the doctor
talking, talking, talking, time passing, passing, passing swiftly, almost everyday
is Monday again, to go take some money to the old woman, to go see if the
promised medicine has arrived, get the package of condoms and hear the social-worker tell her she should give up her way of life. Irene laughs, bitter and
crooked, with one side of her mouth so no one sees the gap in her teeth on the
other side, even though no one sees her now, even though no one looks at her
full in the face, never. Funny that social-worker, “give up this life”, that’s right,
I’ll give it up, I don’t care if everything ends right this minute, that this life of
mine has only one door, straight to the cemetery, but would she take care of
the boy and the old woman? It would be fine, since Irene already can’t get the
money every week, many men don’t want anything to do with rubbers, they
look for other women, and she can’t do like Anginha, who wants to pass the
disease to everybody, hatefully, but not Irene, she couldn’t hurt a living soul,
not one, because of the sagüi, because of that wrenching feeling in her gut each
time she remembers. Oh! Anginha, if you only knew…
It was so long ago and so far away, but when I think about the sagüi the
agony is here, today. Oh the joy I felt when Simão returned from hunting, with
only two turtle-doves, not even enough to flavor the cassava flour, but with the
tiny monkey in the sack, so small that I could hold it with one hand, feeling the
heat and trembling of his sick body, oh it just made me want to cry!, days and
nights caring for him, wrapping him in the rag, holding him close to my heart,
giving it him water, drop by drop, with the tip of an orange leaf, bits of fruit, the
sagüi recovering day by day, already looking and smiling at me the way people
do, grateful, pulling my hair, oh how the little bugger is getting mischievous!, he
has no sense, wanting to free himself , go back to the wild, to get sick again and
die?, he mustn’t, I won’t let him, I didn’t let him go for one second, he wanted
to escape into the scrub, how difficult it is to live this way doing everything with
just one hand!, the other hand grasping the little bugger’s tail, I didn’t let anyone
hold him, for fear of being cheated, they could let him go, I didn’t trust… “This
girl will get sick, look how thin she is, she doesn’t eat or sleep for love of this marmoset, forget it, Irene, let the little bugger go, sleep!” Then Simão went to the village market and brought a thin chain, made a collar out of soft kid leather, now
I could sleep, play games in the ring holding on with both hands, like normal,
swing from the mango trees, with the tiny monkey safe at the end of the leash tied
to my wrist, to the leg of the table, to the trunk of the guava tree. I don’t know
how I could be so careless, I only remember the fright, the running, the sagüi
running, running, free in the open green, running, running recklessly round
the house, me running, running after him, so much, so much that I couldn’t
breathe, dizzy, dizzzy, dizzzzzzy, the little leash undulating like a snake before
me, the last impulse, the tip of the leash within reach of my foot, jumping, my
foot stepping on the leash, the jerk of the collar on the fragile neck, choking, the
pine-colored fur cooling between my hands, his eyes pleading for help, dimming,
the pain, the guilt, my remorse that never passed, it’s been so long!, until today.
Stop thinking, woman, think of nothing, think empty like this street,
think of your elbows hurt from rubbing in the windowsill, I’m so skinny!,
it’s the disease. She moves away from the window, crosses the room, the
feeble planks of the floor, someday this floor will cave in and the earth will
swallow me, the empty porch, no one, there are no clients, they ate and
drank too much, they are sleeping in their hiding places in some corner
of this immense abandoned city, Sunday afternoon all things slumber, the
other women are all sleeping, only Irene cannot, she waits for luck to bring a
customer, who knows, something, tomorrow is Monday, the boy and the old
woman, she drags her feet across the weathered marble floor to the rotting
door of the great house once stately, then slum, now brothel, she looks again
at the dampness of the street, dizzy, leans against the doorway and, when she
lifts her lids, she sees the man carrying the box, his eyes glued to her, coming towards her, she takes courage: perhaps he’s from the countryside, a new
arrival, one of those who still smells of earth and nature, new, innocent, it
doesn’t hurt to try, innocent, he’ll think the condom is for his pleasure, newfangled ways of clever whores, come here, my dear, come here.
Rosálio first sees the red stain in movement, surprising him as he turns
the corner, shining, a gust of air that relieves his throat choked by the gray,
then he sees the woman in the crimson dress, half a smile slowly appearing
before him, the hand waving incessantly to him “come here, come here,” he
goes, “come here,” the woman’s hand in his, the corridor, the room, the scent
of humanity, past-lived, multiple, concentrated, fainted colors, stained, but
still colors, in tatters to wear, in covers and curtains, faded throw-pillows and
mutilated dolls, in the remains of paint and wallpaper, images of saints and
bits of candles, plastic flowers, cracked trinkets, in fanciful forms of empty
vessels, in the torn labels of pots and boxes, colors of life, diminished, but
living, pulsating still, redoubled colors, multiplied in fragmented mirrors, in
shiny strips of satin, in the fringe of the red lamp, sparkles on sequins and
beads sparse in those things as tired as the woman, exhausted, having arrived
there after lengthy adventures, survivors, like Rosálio. The woman’s eyes, desirous and hopeful, the half-smile, open wound in the middle of her face,
her hands unbuttoning his shirt, grabbing the box from his hands, pushing
him toward the bed, the woman’s fingers searching the paths to the arousal
of his body seemingly absent because Rosálio is submerged in the world of
words, yearning for them, to hear them, to say them, to exchange them with
someone, but nothing is said from her mouth, she imposes with her feverish
hands, with her skinny legs, with the squalid female body, to which he surrenders his firm male body, thus, without words, and he does what she wants,
conquered by the pain that contorts her face. He surrenders his body but
maintains his spirit alert, trying to choose the words that he desires to offer
this woman when she should be willing to hear him.
Irene releases the man’s hand, closes the wedged door that lets out a
long moan, seems to come from her chest, she looks at the bed, how good it
would be to simply lay down, sleep, sleep, perhaps dream, forever, perhaps,
but tomorrow is Monday, the boy, the old woman, Irene’s mouth, professional, maintains the feigned smile, her trained fingers find the buttons of
his shirt and proceed further, she pushes him to the bed, the best way to gain
victory over this immense desire to sleep, do what has to be done, quickly,
she doesn’t bother to take off her dress, this one won’t complicate things or
demand anything, he’s innocent for sure, easily lead, I bet when it’s done he’ll
say “thank you,” seems he doesn’t even want to, Irene’s hands, professional,
efficient, the condom, the quick movements and there, finished, now to
receive the money, put him out, wash up and sleep, sleep, sleep.
Rosálio let her do as she wished and waits for what she will finally
say, he has so many words and couldn’t decide where to start, waits for her
first words, “that’ll be fifteen, young man”, Rosálio doesn’t understand, sees
her straighten her dress, she stares at the floor, holding her open hand out
to him, begging, such a poor hand!, he straightens his pants, his shirt and
cradles in his hand the one she offers, feeling sorry. “What’s going on, not
going to pay, are you?,” then it becomes clear and Rosálio knows what this
woman is and what he owes her, he has to pay her, that’s why she did what
she did, for the money he doesn’t have, his pockets still heavy with gravel.
Irene doesn’t want to believe what she hears, “I don’t have any money,”
tomorrow is Monday, there is nothing to take, nothing, nothing, she feels
the revolt rising in her chest, exploding in her throat, thief, shameless sonof-a-bitch, exploiter!, she raises her hands to defend herself from the blows
to surely come, she doesn’t even care about the pain, he can hit her, kill her,
if he wants, she screams, screams smart aleck, thief, son-of-a-bitch, I want
my money, my money!, she waits for the first strike, “sorry, ma’am, I didn’t
know, you wanted it, I didn’t even want to, I thought you’d be happy,” the
sweet voice, the blow that doesn’t come, the anger subsides, the desire to give
up on everything, sleep, sleep, but tomorrow is Monday. She sees the mass in
his pockets, her hands delve into them to withdraw gravel that she throws at
the window, the money, where is the money?, “there is none, I have nothing,
nothing, I’m sorry,” Irene sees the box thrown on the floor, give me the damn
key!, only then does she notice the chain with the key that he takes from his
neck and gives to her without resistance, inside the box a sling shot, a top and
old books, many, worn round at the edges from use, the pages as dark as the
tobacco leaves her grandfather rolled swaying in the hammock, for an instant
Irene goes back to the veranda of the old house and smells tobacco, feels faint,
the exhaustion, sleep, sleep in the hammock, but tomorrow is Monday, she
thumbs through the pages of the books, one by one, and finds nothing, only
words. What good are they?, words, “all words are carried away by the sea,”
went the song. She wants to rip the books but her hands lack the strength, she
wants to smash something, to break, to discharge the anguish and fury, she
raises a trembling hand, translucent like a sheet of paper, wanting to threaten,
advances towards the man who looks at her with shock and pity, who doesn’t
evade her, doesn’t defend himself, extends his arms, offers his open chest, how
long has it been, how long since Irene has known a chest to lean against!, to rest
against this strong and tender chest is like arriving, finally, at some place her
own, like going back to the beginning where nothing had been lost, not even
the sagüi, where she is still whole and doesn’t tremble, nor does she feel anger
and where there are still no Mondays.
Rosálio feels pity, so much compassion for this woman!, she reminds him
of that heron, red, with long and fine legs like rushes, which he had found once
tangled in the branches of the thorn bush, its feathers even more crimson, tinged
with blood, that he had set free and had wanted to nurse but, shrinking back,
untamed, it escaped from him, to bleed to death, who knows?, alone, helpless in
that desert so far from the swamps of its birthplace; but this one doesn’t, this one
came to fall against his chest, she doesn’t flee, Rosálio won’t let her, he makes his
arms a fence around her, rocks her, slowly, and starts to tell the story:
Once I was wandering alone, walking through a desert, only God and
I, in that place so far away, an endless wasteland, with sparse, dry scrub, I had
come searching for a place with living people where I could rest and then, in that
silence, I heard a sad moan that cut straight to my heart and saw a heron tangled
in a thorn bush, struggling, poor thing.
Rosálio knows not why he tells this sad story, why not remember something that will hearten the sad woman?, he just keeps telling, telling, slowly, drawing out the words, drawing the details and feeling the trembling dissipate from
this heron he held in his arms, interrupted by sobs, his chest dampening.
Keep telling, man, tell more, it’s early to be leaving, the day has not yet
come, while it is still dark tell me, tell more so that I may dream. Irene asks,
she, that never in her life wanted to ask anything from anyone, never, here
stands, she has nothing, truly, not even life has she now. Tell me where you
came from, tell me, tell me.
Rosálio remembers his job, the beans he owes, knows he has to go back
to the gray-colored place, but owes her too and has only words with which
to pay. He searches his memory for more things to recount, but the woman
already has slept and, in her slumber, smiles, a slight and more open smile that
has nothing to hide. Rosálio leaves silently, follows the gravel trail, goes dropping the rest of the stones to strengthen this thread that can bring him back.
His heart, now much more red, tells him that he will return tomorrow.
CíNTIA mOsCOVICH
Why Am I Fat,
Mummy?
Prologue
This is the painful and persistent beginning of the new phase in my
life. It begins right there, a bit further ahead, in the full stop to this prologue.
After that, I strive to distill the memory into invention. But only after that
full stop. For my trade is exclusively to write - which means making mistake
upon mistake - there is a book to be written. To use my own self as matter
for fiction: it is the only way of knowing what happened, because I need to
know what happened in order to start anew.
Never mind whether or not I manage to unearth the truth embedded
in this voluminous past tense. It matters even less whether the book is any
good. What does matter is to know: in the passing of time, all that is white
and clear in goodness and truth will change colour until it becomes the grey,
dull and shapeless core of something which means absolutely and utterly
nothing.
Forty-eight and a half pounds.
It was the doctor who said it, for I turned my back when stepping on
the scales. I turned my back in order not to witness in such tangible figures a
fact which my body had already been heralding with great scandal.
Forty-eight and a half pounds equal one hundred and ten slabs of
butter. Or forty-four roasted cuts of prime beef. The doctor said so. A weight
I had put on in four years, he also said after checking my old clinical files.
After he took my blood pressure, one-twenty over eighty, began the
least funny of games: the game of why.
Why did you put on so much weight?
Why did you eat so much?
Why are you so hungry?
I was too tired to take part in that game, so I absolved both of us with
a white lie: we both knew I had done everything wrong.
I lied in the name of peace. All my life, at least since my teenage years,
ever since I had managed to escape that addictive and bovine shape which
had previously moulded my body, I had dreaded to go back to what I was.
Each morsel I take into my mouth is - was - cooly and thoroughly analyzed,
each single morsel is the subject of much reflection and judgment, and all
excesses are punished with guilty remorse. For those forty-eight and a half
pounds to have stuck to my frame of hardly five feet, much water must have
gone under the bridge. A water and a bridge I myself didn’t see - there was a
four-year gap during which my body and my soul divorced, the open mouth
keeping the eyes closed. Ricardo, zealous and attentive husband, said I had a
fuller, stouter figure, but that it didn’t matter much.
Didn’t it?
Shame and dread prevented me from telling the doctor about this
aknowledgement of my own absence. Neither did I speak of my husband’s
mild generosity.
The doctor agreed to sign the armistice. But the peace between us
would only come when I lost the equivalent of all those butter slabs and
roasts of prime beef. No carbs, no sugar or fat, no eating out of scheduled
times. Fiber and protein, my best bet were fiber and protein. And I would
have one free meal per week - only one. After prescribing a battery of tests,
he promised to keep an eye on me: I had to report every so often to have my
weight checked. And one more thing:
“It is not that you are fat now.”
All right, my condition was not transitory: being fat had never been
a single episode in my life, I knew it, he didn’t even have to elaborate. But
elaborate he did:
“We’ll make your fat cells shrink”. He summoned my attention with a
swirl of his pen. “I know it seems unfair, but nature made you that way. You
are fat, period.”
Once more, again.
Cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose and what-not: eveything was perfect. The
tests confirmed it.
A person is overweight because of poor eating habits, lack of physical
activity, bad metabolism and genetics - besides other obscure variables like
anxiety, depression and such. My metabolism always worked very well, thank
you - and it is the only determining factor for obesity I manage to escape. In
short: I am fat because I eat and because my genetic predisposition wants it to
be so. I may come to believe that. Whether or not I know how I gained this
weight, the only thing I can change are my eating habits. And I can move my
body: one-hour walks, four days a week.
I hate walking.
In the last four years of my life, my body rebelled: I bloated as if I
wanted to fit into myself from the inside. On the ouside nothing would fit
me anymore.
Buttons wouldn’t find their casings, the metalllic teeth of zippers
would no longer interlock, bands, laces, everything shrank. I started to shop
for clothes in stores catering for special sizes. Yards and yards of cloth in the
shape of blouses, tunics, dresses, garments whose spectacular circumference
is only comparable to the grief they provide. Hidden in changing rooms,
panting, sweating women try to squeeze their folds into straight-cut fabrics,
disguising flabbiness in neutral colours. Protected by curtains, standing before addicted mirrors, airing their slack nudity underneath the fans, each of
these women stares the deterioration of fantasy in the face. Among frayed
elastic bands ans fabrics, the desire or the need to dress do not match a feeling of moral and aesthetical well-being; it is, on the contrary, a hassle which
must end soon, at once, immediatedly - the sooner, the better.
How did I manage to return to that obese teenage condition which
I had escaped with the help of chemical bombs and episodes of near inconsciousness? Forty-eight and a half pounds mean back to stage one, but
without the health needed to survive crazy drug cocktails.
Forty-eight and a half pounds weigh much more than they seem: I
became slow, tired, evasive. Very sad and very gloomy. Slow and tired like
my aunts, sisters of my dad, sad like Thin Granny, gloomy like Fat Granny. Evasive like my mother. My soul certainly shows through in this body,
this roomy body which became, through excess, so cumbersome. A burden. Reaching one’s ideal weight is a demanding task. Pain also has its own
weight. When quickened by memories, it weighs even more.
If the pain goes away, will I lose weight?
Something went wrong. In me, in life. In order to understand it, I
cross the threshold of memories. I try to rebuild each single day of each
month of each year. Not only of the last four years, but all the years of my
life. The past does not exist in its perfect state, raw and pure like a stone.
The past only exists because memory does, and memory is betrayal: it
both subtracts and adds, both tears and unites. Because it is non-linear,
and because the mind always whishes for a smooth ordainment of things,
memory exasperates: everything makes us want to stick our hands into
this murky limbo and pluck all things from it in their logical sequence
and completeness.
When things come back from oblivion they are always shattered,
shreds of what they were before time diluted them and other things overlapped them. Maybe this is why I embraced fiction, because it is the last
chance of bringing two facts together and making whole something which
is torn and incomplete. Fiction is the mortar for assembling parts. For putting together spare, stray things. Fiction might just turn ashes and dust into
solid stone.
A time when days loose their light and the world shudders with the
breath of yet another autumn. Although things resemble themselves, the appearance of what they are floats on the surface, a mockery of what they, these
things, hide in their essence. The tree remains a tree despite having lost its
leaves, but it relies on the memory of each cell to recompose itself. I am still
what I am, the result of all that has been, although my stretched stomach and
my shrunken feelings show me everything has changed. An Israeli writer said:
“I refuse to surrender a single grain of memory to the frozen claws of time.”
I am afraid, but I am ready to put that full stop and quicken the flow
of memories. The fight against frozen time. The prologue’s last breaths: then
it will start.
Mummy, it is to you I write, I need help. I need you to help me walk
this metaphysical path of memories. I need you to help me send this pain
away. I want to have a body again.
There is a book to be written, and in this book the facts will spring as
if by magic, however imperfect this magic might be. Possible answers, illusions to help shrink the grief and the body. The prologue ends. Then it has
already began. I start with a question mark.
Why am I fat, Mummy?
LETíCIA WIERzCHOWskI
A Bridge to Terebin
The old man in the photograph:
Since everything in this story ends or comes from a photograph, a
whole life can fit between two such photographs. This was the fate of Janek’s
first-born. One photograph in 1939, another in 1947, and then a third, this
time with little Irenka on her mother’s lap. And finally that letter, image-free,
a simple kraft envelope and my son’s trembling handwriting flying over the
blue lines, like a bird that is afraid to land.
For many years I have kept Janeczek’s pictures inside a paper box, until I myself disappeared from life, and my things, so few in number, probably
ended up in that very same box, struggling for space with the portrait of a
blond and rather sad little boy who may have known each of our destinies.
So I in turn became a picture in Brazil, in the two-story house Janek
built after he came back from the war. A picture with a black strip on the
frame sitting on a sideboard in the living room; a picture before which
my son would pray, bidding his children do the same, although today I
can imagine they must have felt for me the same tenderness they felt for
a sponge. Why would they care for me when they never even knew me? I
never sent any gifts. The Poland where I spent my old days was a sad place
which turned its old people into beggars. In the letters I wrote my son, I
could never avoid certain requests - for the sake of matka if not my own. I
wish I had sent those grandchildren something, something other than my
blessing, which was not very useful. But a whole sea is a lot of water, and all
the will in the world wouldn’t be enough to brave the Bolshevik offices and
their bureaucracy: Poland for the Polish. We were trapped inside our bottle,
doomed to die gasping for air, while in Brazil our grandchildren grew up in
a brand-new world and awed at the future, never suspecting where they had
come from. Never suspecting that behind them lay a whole chasm of stories,
forever lost.
Everything in these pages is part of a world that no longer exists.
Never again will a man leave his country behind in the same way the Polish
left Poland in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century. In those times, all
departures were final: people left with their souls, clothes in a bundle and
hearts torn between hope and fear. People left forever in search of a future,
of dignity more than riches. Not that men today are stuck in the same place.
Quite the opposite: even in this box where I find myself hiding I can see them
hurrying by, in their trans-continental trains and their supersonic planes,
crossing the earth in a few hours, plugged to their computers and mobiles
and pagers - electronic beasts such as this very one where history tattooes
itself, printing itself on the luminescent display like a star trapped inside a
plastic cage. I am a photograph on a table, and from here I unveil the topography of this electronic miracle. In my time people used pens, and when I
was a boy people still used the quill. But my time, like I said, is over. People
would disappear in the mists of invincible distances, and whole years would
go by without a single word from them. Not so today; today men travel, they
come and they go bearing their extenuated souls and their worked-up bodies,
poor angels no longer able to fly without the help of metal and technology.
The trip Janek and so many others made was a chasm, splitting life
in two pieces which remained forever separate. There was no coming back…
Weeks at sea, hundreds of creatures packed inside a ship bound towards the
unknown. There were no booklets, no folders, no photographs. Money was
not returned in case of an accident, risk was all there was. Thus Janek went
searching for his future in Brazilian lands, and then war came and made
things even worse. Ah, this was all so long ago… I myself am a prehistoric
creature printed here in this photograph, and my great-great-great-grandson,
upon seeing me, laughs at my clothes and thinks I am some kind of oneeyed doll, some game, some puppet without a stage. His judgment is not so
far removed from the truth: I am but a puppet forgotten by the years, lying
crumpled in drawers, covered in dirt, trampled by the Nazis, humiliated by
the Russians and ignored by the Americans. I am part of a number in history
books, I am the name no one utters anymore. I am the shadow. The root
beneath the earth… I am no longer, that is the truth.
But the great-great-great-grandson’s smiles make me laugh, as does the
curiosity inherited from his own mother, whose hand stubbornly traced these
very lines, colouring them with imagination.
I laugh at the great-great-great-grandson, and I bless him, this boy
unruly as the sun. Some part of him began to take form many years ago,
when my first-born came into our house in Terebin and solemnly announced
he was leaving for Brazil. Some part of this blond boy with huge black eyes
was born in that last moment, in our small living-room in Terebin. I still remember well… It was summer, and the year was 1936. The sun was shining
and we were all at home, and Aniela was kneading the bread. But I keep no
pictures of this, and you will have to take my word.
Sample translations - non-Fiction
LYA LuFT
Losses & Gains
Translated from the portuguese by michael
Wolfers for Vermilion, an imprint of Ebury publishing
From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the forms of things.
By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs; but all that I
have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account.
At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature,
of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I
am eighty, I shall have made more progress; at ninety I shall penetrate the
mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvellous
stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a
line, will be alive.
(Hokusai Katsushika, 1760-1849)
For Fabiana & Fernanda - and Rodrigo - who form part of the gains
Contents
1 Invitation
Finding the tone
2 Drawing in the depth of the mirror
The brand on the flank
Theories of the soul
3 Taming to avoid being devoured
The geisha in the corner of the room
Dancing with the scarecrow
4 Losing without losing the self
My lover Hope
Old age, why not?
Mourning and rebirth
5 The time of life
The tone of our life
1 Invitation
I am not the sand
where a pair of wings is sketched
or bars before a window.
I am not merely a rolling stone
on the world’s tides,
on every beach rebirthing another.
I am an ear clamped to the shell
of life, I am construction and demolition,
servant and master, and I am
mystery.
Hand in hand let us write the script
for the theatre of my time:
my destiny and I.
We are not always in tune,
nor do we always take ourselves
seriously.
Finding the tone
What is this book?
Perhaps a complement to my 1996 novel Rio do meio. I write along
the same lines, taking up some of my usual themes. All my work is elliptical
or circular: plots and characters peek here and there behind a new mask. I
do this because they were not exhausted in me, I go on telling them. I shall
probably carry on in this way to the last line of the final book.
So what is this book?
I shall not call it ‘essays’, because the solemn tone and the theoretical
underpinning suggested by the term are not my style. Certainly not novel or
fiction. Nor are they teachings – I do not have these to give.
As in many fields of activity, new methods of work and creativity arise
that need new names. Everyone will give this narrative the name they wish.
For me it is that same word in the listener’s ear, which I find so pleasing and
use in novels or poems – a call for the reader to come and think with me.
What I write is born out of my own maturing, a path of highs and
lows, shining moments and shadowy areas. On this route, I learned that life
does not weave a web only of losses but furnishes us a succession of gains.
The balance of the scales depends largely on what we can and want
to perceive.
opportunity and betrayal but tenderness, friendship, compassion, ethics and
delicacy.
I think that on the route of our existence we need to learn this discredited thing called ‘being happy’. (I see eyebrows raised ironically before this
romantic declaration of mine.)
Each one on his path and with his particular characteristics.
*
*
I meet a friend, a distinguished pianist, and I report that I am beginning a book, but as always at the start of a new work, I am still looking for
the right ‘tone’.
He finds that apt, so a writer is looking for the tone? We laugh, because we find in the end that both of us are looking for the same thing:
finding our tone. The tone of our language, of our art, and – this is true of
anybody – the tone of our life. In what tone do we wish to live it? (I did not
ask how we are condemned to live.)
In melancholy semi-tones, in brighter tones, with speed and superficiality, or alternating joy and pleasure with profound and thoughtful moments.
Only skimming the surface or from time to time diving into deep
waters.
Distracted by the noise around or listening to the voices in the pauses
and the silence - our own voice, the other’s voice.
Will our tone be one of suspicion and mistrust or will it open portals
to an endless landscape?
This depends partly on us.
In the instrument of our orchestration, we are – along with genetic
or random accidents – the tuners and the performers. Prior to this, we construct our instrument. This makes the assignment more difficult, but much
more stimulating.
I sit here at the computer and I think about the tone of this book,
which I must find. At this starting point I sense it as a whisper to the reader:
‘Come and think with me, come and help me in the quest.’
Although it is a private word, this might at some moments seem a
cruel book: I say that we are important, and good, and capable, but I say too
that we are often futile, we are too often mediocre. I say that we could be
very much happier than we usually allow ourselves to be, but we are afraid
of the price to be paid. We are cowards.
Nevertheless, the book must be hopeful: I am one of those who believe
that happiness is possible, love is possible, that there is not merely missed
In art as in human relations, including a variety of loving relationships, we swim against the current. We attempt the impossible: total fusion
does not exist, complete sharing is impossible to achieve. The essence cannot
be shared: it is discovery and surprise, the glory or damnation of each – in
isolation.
However, in a conversation or a silence, in a gaze, in a loving gesture
as in a work of art, a narrow window may open up. Together, the performer
and his spectator or his reader will stare – like two lovers.
That is how people, skinning knees and hands, end up.
So I write and shall write: to stimulate my imaginary reader – substitute for the imaginary friends of childhood? To search within and to share
with me so many anxieties about what we are doing with the time that is
given us.
Since living must be – until the last thought and the final gaze – a process
of self-transformation.
What I write here is not mere daydreams. I am a woman of my time,
and I want to bear witness to it with all the skill I can: giving scope to my
fantasies or writing about pain and puzzlement, contradiction and grandeur;
about disease and death. Regretting the word spoken at the wrong time and
the silence when it would have been better to speak out.
I write continually about the way we are to blame and innocent in
regard to what happens to us.
We are authors of a good part of our choices and omissions, daring
or compromise, our hope and comradeship or our mistrust. Above all, we
must decide how we employ and enjoy our time, which is in the end always
our present time.
But we are innocent of accidents and brute chance that robs us of
perfect loves, people, health, employment and security.
In such a way that my perspective of the human being, of my self, is as
contrary as we provocatively are.
We are transition, we are process. This disturbs us.
The flow of days and years, decades, serves growth and increment,
not loss and restriction. In this perspective, we become masters, not servants.
People, not frightened little animals that run without knowing exactly why.
If my reader and I can agree on our reciprocal tone, this initial monologue will be a dialogue – even though I may never gaze upon the countenance of the other who in the end becomes a part of me.
So my art shall have achieved some kind of goal.
(…)
Dancing with the Scarecrow
(translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin)
I have said or insinuated here that maturing should be seen as something positive and that aging does not mean losing one’s individuality.
One of the reasons for our frustrations – both men and women – is
that we live in a culture that glorifies youth and worships physical beauty
beyond all reason.
If maturity is the fruit of youth and old age is the result of maturity,
living means going along naturally weaving the fabric of our existence. A
process so deceptively trivial for those involved in it, so singular for those
observing. So insignificant in the context of the history of humankind.
Following this current, within our circumstances, carrying the baggage we’ve been given and which we’ve acquired along the way, we navigate.
We choose some of the itinerary and draw something in the margins, accompanied by positive presences, but also finding it hard to live well – this
fact being a monster that is always ready to finish us off.
We don’t always notice it: it’s a part of our culture, education, media,
personality. It’s in magazines, in the minds of those around us and those we
love; it’s inside of us. It grows and thrives in direct proportion to our inexperience in dealing with it.
The enemy is varied; it has many heads. We are many, said the demon
that possessed one unfortunate soul in Christian literature. They all control
and inhibit us: the imposition and acceptance of unattainable goals; not appreciating ourselves; giving in to prejudices; the absence of personal values; the
superficiality of all kinds of relationships; our consequent fear of the process,
which, instead of making us evolve and grow, scares us with annihilation.
We need to move beyond the idea that we are merely heading towards
our end, slowly deteriorating and fading away.
This is our most destructive specter, since it feeds on our fear of
death, and grows unchecked because our inner emptiness grants it extraordinary space.
If we want to grow as human and thinking beings (rather than merely survive), this bedside clock or wristwatch – especially the one in our minds – should
only be what it is: an instrument for measuring and coordinating everyday activities, for delimiting different phases with their highlights and limitations, their
rewards and hardships, but generally meaning growth, not mutilation.
At each transition we carry out our rituals, lose a few assets and gain
others, some won at great effort. I am referring to our inner assets.
Those that do not expire even when our bank is collapsing or the
country going bankrupt; those that we do not lose even when a loved one
dies; those that in pain, illuminate us; in happiness, help us enjoy life more;
and in boredom – when everything seems so uninspiring – stir up submarine
currents of energy even when the surface appears to be dead.
When we think everything is over, that we’ll never again be touched
by happiness or emotion, everything good that was hidden away emerges in
full vigor and force.
I speak of these treasures: they can overcome what paralyzes us. They
can rise above this culture of the here-and-now, opportunity, consumption,
fashion, being on top, non-stop fun and games.
In childhood everything is always now.
We are immersed in living.
Little by little we learn to distinguish before and after, perhaps by our
momentary separation from a comforting presence that comes and goes in
a still undefined time frame. This absence becomes real in a flash when the
person returns. “Hey, weren‘t you here?“
We finally emerge from these warm waters and realize that we exist
– in time. We are in process, en route, on course.
Our limbo becomes clear and our story begins.
When I was a girl I used to like waking at dawn to savor what was forbidden, because we children had to remain quiet in bed until our mother called
us. I would go over to the window and open it slowly so as not to make any
noise. How magical the garden was at that hour! Brimming with the night that
was ending, brimming with expectations for the day about to begin.
At that age I didn’t see the passing of time as something hostile, but a
kind of spell that brought about transformations: the cocoon with its promise of glittering wings.
Why now, with a larger body, rougher skin, wrinkles and experience,
would I be in decline and not natural transformation – like everything else?
What is beautiful in a baby is unattractive in a teenager; what dazzles
in a young person can be out of place in someone more mature; just as old
age – if it is not a caricature of youth – has its own enchantments.
***
“But what can be positive about growing old?” I was once asked. “Give
me one example and I’ll believe you.”
Our inner qualities come up trumps, asserting themselves over our
physical qualities. Contrary to what happens to our skin, hair, the sparkle in
our eyes and firmness of our flesh, they tend to improve: intelligence, kindness, dignity, our ability to listen to others. Our ability to understand.
But there must be something inside that can come up trumps: physical
wear and tear will be compensated by our inner sparkle. We will not have
to mutilate ourselves with unnecessary surgery, heavy makeup, extravagant
clothing... nor will we have to hide ourselves away because we are mature
or old.
If the transformation that takes place in our bodies is inexorable, its
speed and characteristics depend on genetics, how we look after ourselves,
health and inner vitality. When something is inexorable there is only one
thing to do, and it is not running away: it is living it as best we can. The issue is not freezing life, but traveling with it instead of staying static and being
left behind.
Unless we are really foolish we should like our appearance at every
stage. We should be able to look in the mirror and say: Well, this is me. Not
extraordinarily well-preserved, nor falling to pieces. I am the way people are
at this stage. And if I am like this, then I like myself.
I am my story.
Because we are not just our appearance; but we are also our appearance. To reject it is to reject what we have become. For this reason, while
neglecting one’s appearance is sad, it is pathetic to want to look twenty years
old at the age of forty, or forty at the age of sixty. We should want to be beautiful, dignified, elegant and vital sixty-year-olds or eighty-year-olds.
Eighty-year-olds who are still happy.
***
Someone once lent me a book in which the sentence “The goal of life
is death” was underlined.
Well, I believe that the end of life is death, but that the goal of life is a
happy life.
Words become worn like stones in a river: they change form and
meaning, move place, and some disappear, becoming the sludge in the riverbed. They can even reappear renewed further on.
Happiness is one of them.
It has become banal because we are living in an era in which strong
emotions and desires are vulgarized – it is all fast food, prêt-à-porter, microwaveable, quick and easy... and often anemic.
While, out of enchantment and profession, I have chosen the terrain of
words, I know how much some are contaminated by use and become aggressive
or contradictory, or take on ironic or ingenuous airs. They can become confusing and inefficient, lead to misunderstandings or clarify meanings.
I am familiar with the way they take over our experiences, giving them
faces, clothes and airs we had never imagined.
I like things – people and words – that are disconcerting. Their imprecise
contours provide us with a point of departure for reflection and creation.
But some words and circumstances frighten me when I peek behind
their seven veils. Many express the transformations of our time, changes in
behavioral standards, progress and advances – in addition to the shadows and
sterile anguish, the waste. Some have to do with ideas that are not only rarely
attained, but when they are, have little to do with freedom and happiness.
The passing of time should mean becoming more complete, if we
didn’t carry with ourselves the founding prejudice of our time: that only
youth is beautiful and has the right to be happy; maturity is dull and old age
is a curse.
Maturity need not be the beginning of the end, nor must old age
mean isolation and drought. Our ties with lovers, family and friends can be
strengthened, interests can become more varied, and we can enjoy the good
things in life even more.
Being alive is being able to refine our awareness that we are too valuable
to waste trying to be something we aren’t, can’t be or don’t even want to be.
***
“That’s how time is: it devours everything by nibbling away at the edges,
gnawing, eating, clipping and consuming. And nothing and no one will escape it,
unless they make it their pet.” (Blind Spot)
Accompanying me through this book, readers will help me unravel time
– time that has been reflected upon, thought through, hated, feared and won.
Why are we so afraid of it?
Why – when did we decide it was a threat instead of a promise? Or:
when were we taught to think like that... and why do we accept it?
We live in a civilization that has given us more time but loathes the
passing of time.
“You state that time does not exist... so why do you write so much about
it?” a journalist once asked me.
She was – and wasn’t – right. It has been a backdrop or even a character in my works. By stating that it doesn’t exist I mean that it doesn’t exist
as something that determines my beliefs or pessimism if I do not want it to.
It is not a powerful external entity that, from a certain age (determined at
random or by world health organizations), sets me on a downhill roll without allowing me to react.
We can react in many positive ways: taking on board and appreciating
each phase of ourselves; not resigning ourselves to received ways of thinking
or giving up as soon as the first wrinkles set in; never resorting to the false
rebelliousness that makes one a caricature of youth.
Some popular myths about the possible joys of maturity are pathetic.
An independent, 65-year-old woman bought a new apartment. The comments she heard were stimulating, but she found some disconcerting:
“With this lovely apartment now, you’ll have heaps of men.”
“A modern gym has just opened near your new building. Now you certainly won’t have any problems meeting guys.”
In this pathetic kingdom of futility, these concepts don’t encourage
us to live, but to freeze. Rather than proposing the construction of positive values, they seed an undergrowth of foolish ideas. Time is an ogre that
devours children, and moments of crisis will toss us about like rag dolls or
straw men...
If my outlook bestows meaning on what is real and external, then I
can declare that the world has a place for me regardless of my physical beauty
or appearance and age. But if my outlook on the world sees things through a
lens that is cynical, or silly and superficial, I might as well pack my bags and
get out ahead of time, well before the plenitude of maturity.
Like so many other things, living will change my body. But it will only
hold the power over my soul that I give it.
Our most intimate companion – the time we live in – will only become
our executioner if we allow it to. We will spend our existence tied to a scarecrow, which, instead of frightening away harmful birds, stops us from flying.
We must turn the tables.
Accepting what is natural as natural, taking on board what cannot be
changed. There is a whole range of good reasons to live well and instigating things to discover, which I previously might not have had the time or
wisdom to even try.
***
We are so frivolous that we have become incapable of loving life as
it is given to us and achieved at each stage. We are dominated by a kind of
restlessness that does not make us more productive and open to new things;
rather, it is the childish agitation of one who is never satisfied because he has
never found himself. This makes us fragmented and lost.
If we fall outside of the status quo – determined by others and not
always real nor worthy of respect – because we are too tall or too fat or too
old or less sophisticated or less wealthy and less powerful, we do not allow
ourselves to be naturally desirable and loving.
As such, we do not allow ourselves to be loved.
A mature or old body can be healthy and harmonious, just as a young
body can be sick or deformed. But comparing a mature or old body to a body
in the plenitude of youth is childish and cruel.
Having greater peace of mind and knowledge, strengthening our own
beliefs – in short, being an individual – requires reflection, strength and individuality. But such concepts are passé, out of fashion. We are constantly
called upon to ”live it up” – whatever that means.
When I was young I used to hear (even today, sometimes) things like:
Don’t get married young – live it up first! This was only valid for the young
men; young girls readied themselves to be submissive and polite. These days
I hear: Don’t have kids too soon, live it up first!
I am not exactly sure what I think of this expression, I guess because I don’t use it. What I do know is that living it up is not essentially
acquiring, buying, enjoying, owning, traveling, dancing, having sex, consuming. All of this is part of it, and it’s great, but what exactly does living
it up mean?
For some, it is being in fashion, even if the garment on offer is completely beyond (or beneath) our wildest dreams. For others, it is having consumer products that have nothing to do with their own desires.
Tied like defenseless animals to ideas we don’t even approve of, we
are victims of fantasies created and fed by the media, industry, fashion, commerce – which want to sell us symbolic goods, valued above all else: the
beauty of the moment, and eternal youth.
This fear of physical difference is so widely disseminated that it is not
uncommon, when asking after someone, to hear the – at the very least – peculiar answer (accompanied by a sweeping gesture):
How’s your daughter?
Huuuuge!
And how’s Joe?
Well, he’s immense!
It doesn’t occur to them that I might want to know if the person is
traveling, if they’ve had another child, finished their studies, if they’re sick,
happy, retired, remarried.
Our current obsession is, even before money and social status, physical appearance. Living is not advancing, but consuming oneself and becoming thin. But part of growing up is the fact that my bones grow longer, and I
no longer take size 25 shoes. Part of growing up is the fact that as adults our
bodies change and continue to undergo transformations.
Part of the process of life, not death, is that at 60, 70, 80 years of age my
step won’t be as sprightly, my skin will be wrinkled, my body less erect, my
eyes less shiny. But what is not a part of life is considering myself disposable
and hiding myself away without the right to move, act, actively participate
– within my natural limitations.
I haven’t been to the swimming pool for years – no way am I going to let
someone see my body the way it is!
Those who seek themselves as they were twenty or forty years ago will
feel as if they no longer exist. As if the person in the mirror is – rather than
a continuation of that earlier person – a betrayal of nature.
***
Regardless of genetics, actual possibilities and age, we are always frustrated because we are not blonder, darker, thinner, taller, more athletic, because our skin is not smoother, or our eyes more seductive.
Why do we accept and cultivate the pathetic idea that only youth is
good and beautiful, with the right to dare, to renew, to love? Allowed to be,
to occupy space?
Much of our suffering (I refer to the dispensable things) comes from
the fact that we are so childish. In addition to the pain we feel because of what
we are not physically, we suffer because of what we have yet to do:
Buy every product on the market.
Go to all of the fashionable places.
Above all: never take it easy, never be content, never accept oneself.
Stopping to think – that’s unthinkable: it would be too painful.
This is not the sign of a restless mind but of a weak soul. This is not
living life, much less living it up.
In the same manner, no one suddenly stops in the middle of this race
to only then, out of the blue, realize that they exist as a complex human being, with a path and destination...
We do not suddenly, on a whim, decide to set aside time to love, time
to be decent, generous, to reflect, to look within ourselves and at those who
live with us. Time to question ourselves. Time to show our children something we think, time to be faithful companions and partners to the ones we
love.
We don’t work like that.
Our phases are not divided into dykes and dams: they are flow and
running water. Therefore, it is always time. But it must be natural, it must be
a part of living together, not an instant inserted into our routine like a foreign
body when we are feeling restless or guilty. A love that talks is a habit. If never
practiced, it will not unexpectedly produce good, mature fruit.
Even in our sexuality, in spite of all the to-do, freedom and incredible array of information available (most quite dubious), we are still very
primary.
We end up bowing to the obligation to be sexually fantastic (almost
always lies and deception arising out of insecurity), but as human beings
we may be weak. If the media offers us the key to being happy in bed – or
out of it – in ten lessons at a low price, perhaps we should stop to think and
conclude that it is merely bait, that happiness in love is not born of our performance, but the tenderness that betters and intensifies our performance.
We need to learn to fight ridiculous standards; to discover who we are,
what we like, how we like to be – how to be happier. This isn’t in magazines,
on television, in the advice of friends: it is intimate, personal, untransferable.
Each and every one of us needs to understand this and build their own happiness.
That’s how happiness is: each person, each day, accepts the kind on the
market... or makes their own.

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