a fatherly testimony

Thu, 3 Apr 2008 22:48:19 -0400

Here we are, sitting in your work van, a white, ’71 Ford van with barely more metal than rust holes. The windshield has a world map of cracks that grows larger each passing season. The seats, more exposed cushion than vinyl, precariously hold our bodies on this calm and muggy summer afternoon. You’ve just returned home after working another twelve-hour day as a carpenter in our small, rural Minnesota town. Your arms, tanned from hours laboring under the sun, straddle the steering wheel as you readily look over at me in the passenger seat and ask me how my day was.

This is the ritual to which I’ve assigned myself. Each day, at precisely the same time, I run home from wherever my nine-year old curiosities have driven me that day and wait for your arrival. Most days I’m exploring the woods that surround the river as it meanders through our neighborhood. Always arriving home a few minutes before you, I wait inside our house, straining my head out the large picture window to see when your van turns the corner and pulls up outside. If for some reason I don’t see the van when you turn the corner, I can usually hear the van’s disjointed shifting as it comes to rest near the curb in front of our house.

Before you have a chance to turn off the ignition, I’ve already made my way into the passenger seat. You move your black, cement-stained lunch pal from the passenger seat to give me room to sit. After we say our hellos, I sheepishly look over at you and ask the question, the one I ask each day: “Did you bring me any wood?” Your job as a carpenter and my joy at building tree houses and other contraptions makes us a good combination. I already have enough wood to build several go-carts, tree houses and ladders. Maybe it’s the father-son ritual that makes me keep asking.

We sit for a few more minutes, not saying too much, but reacquainting ourselves, father and son. You’re in your mid-40s by this time, still somewhat rugged and in great shape. I look up to you.

We walk the fifty or sixty feet from the van to the house, where mom has dinner prepared. You wash up and sit down at the table, happy to be home from work and with your family. Your demeanor, always reserved and humble, doesn’t let on to this much—but I can tell. You become more relaxed, patient and your smile is more evident.

After dinner, you are exhausted from your day of climbing roofs, hauling cement, and pounding countless nails into shingles and two-by-fours. You crumble onto the couch. The TV silently beckons your attention, but you don’t watch it, your mind and body having their first real chance at rest all day.

But as usual, and this must be part of my ritual, too, you begin to perk up after a few minutes, me hovering over you and asking when we can go outside.

Even though it’s early evening, the sun and humidity have not released their stifling grip. In the garage, clean and always in order, we grab our baseball mitts and head out to the back yard. My mitt, just recently purchased from the local Coast to Coast store; your mitt, the leather stained dark from numerous chemicals intentionally and unintentionally spilled on it over the years, is worn and held together by one leather string. We grab a baseball, one of about ten I have in an ice cream bucket by the back door.

Baseball is probably the easiest sport for you to play. Since an accident with a joiner at work left you without significant parts of two fingers on your throwing hand, you struggle to grip firmly most balls. A football is nearly impossible for you to throw, but you still play catch with me. A basketball even harder, as the flick of your wrist releases very little power to the ball when two of the most powerful fingers used in this action aren’t there. Yet, on occasion, you still shoot baskets with me.

We play catch for fifteen or twenty minutes, father and son. You don’t have trouble with throwing the ball a certain distance, but your accuracy is shaky. And when we’re done, you move to the garage and putz around, repairing things that need repairing and straightening up the mess I probably made. I run over to a friend’s house and spend the remaining daylight hours riding bike or climbing trees.

Now some thirty-odd years later, I’m a father myself, with the same worries, fears and joys that you experienced. Though you aren’t a man of many words, a man who relies heavily on talking to communicate things, you clearly communicated many things to me. While your faith is strong and important in your life, you rarely talked about it. But that didn’t matter to me. I understood who you are and the important things in your life. And to me, those wonderful occasions when we, father and son, played catch in the backyard, those occasions communicated more to me who you are than all the words you ever spoke.

8 April 2008

the dragon of rabieh

Mon, 3 Mar 2008 14:12:32 -0500

Inspector Sharbel Barud was picking his teeth while listening to the firemen’s explanations. This case was starting to get on his nerves. For the past five days he had been spending his time visiting the inhabitants of Rabieh gathering information regarding the strange creature that was spreading panic in the upscale Mount Lebanon village once made famous by the Italian-Belgian singer Salvatore Adamo. The facts that had been established thus far were not very conclusive. Some witnesses claimed to have seen a dragon, others a dinosaur.
In a country where the majority of the people were so superstitious that they took astrologists’ predictions as gospel and preferred healers to doctors, it was not easy to separate fact from fiction, illusion from reality. He was skeptical by nature and did not take his mother’s religious practices seriously: she lit candles so he would return safely from his assignments, invoked Saint Sharbel so he would find a suitable wife and never swept the Wednesday before Easter—called “Job’s Wednesday”—for fear of being devoured by ants in her sleep… He was admittedly proud of being Maronite, but he didn’t really believe in the miracles that were attributed to the villages’ statues which were said to ooze oil, water and blood.
“It’s like the Loch Ness case: a lot of fuss about nothing!” he told himself, thinking about a documentary on the mysterious Scottish monster that had recently been aired on television. The latest theory was that the monster was in fact an elephant that had escaped from a circus, and that the shape emerging from the water—the object of the famous and controversial photograph—was in reality nothing more than the unruly pachyderm’s trunk. Inspector Barud got back into his Jeep, took the cap off a bottle of Almanza beer and quenched his thirst.
“Take care of the problem for me as soon as possible,” his boss, Superintendent Jamil, had said to him.
Take care of the problem? Easier said than done! Avid for sensationalism, the local media were confusing the issue by putting forth the most far-fetched hypotheses, and the locations where the animal had reportedly been spotted were too far apart for the establishment of a safety zone to be effective. But Inspector Barud was not one to allow himself to be intimidated. Endowed with an imposing stature, he already had several spectacular arrests to his credit: the Zalka bombers, the assassins of the jeweller of Burj Hammud, the Qornet Shehwan bank robbers… At the station, he did not hesitate to resort to farruj, a torture method consisting of binding a suspect’s hands and feet and attaching him to a stick set horizontally between two chairs. His theory was simple: an offender will never spill the beans if he hasn’t first spilled some blood.
Considering the presumption of innocence to be an aberration, he had inverted the rule to make it more compatible with reality: “Everyone is guilty until proven innocent.” Impressed by his strong-armed methods, his colleagues had nicknamed him “Dirty Harry.” In order not to let them down, he had a duty to find the akrut of a monster that was ravaging yards, dirtying swimming pools, biting horses and devouring chickens as quickly as possible.
“Inspector Barud?” said a voice.
“At your service,” he responded, addressing the woman who had called to him.
“I think I can help you…”
Intrigued, he came back to reality and looked her up and down. She appeared to be in her sixties. She was plump, had prominent cheekbones and generous breasts, which were shown off by her low neckline. But her somewhat vulgar appearance was tempered by her black hair, which was elegantly rolled into a bun, and by her beautiful green eyes, which sparkled with intelligence.
“Let’s hear what you have to say,” he grumbled, pulling out his notebook and pencil.
“It’s my son, Detective. When he was fifteen, he brought a strange-looking lizard back from Indonesia in his backpack.”
The inspector raised an eyebrow, clearly interested in the story.
“One day,” she continued, “he lost the animal in the Rabieh forest, near our house. He never did find it after that. He just called me from Germany, where he is right now, to warn me that the creature you are looking for is probably his lizard, which would be full grown by now.”
“A giant lizard! And what kind of lizard was this?”
She plunged her hand down the front of her shirt, pulled out a piece of paper, and handed it to him.
Inspector Barud squinted and read aloud:
“The Komodo Monitor.”
He made a skeptical face. He didn’t like the sound of that name. He wrote it down in his notebook nevertheless, took down the woman’s address and phone number, and asked that she thank her son for his kind help. “Next time, make sure he buys a goldfish or a canary, like everyone else.”
That evening, the inspector rushed home to consult the encyclopedia that adorned his bookshelf. He had never had the occasion to leaf through the volume, given to him by his Uncle Albert the day he graduated from junior high school. He recited the letters of the alphabet in a low voice to locate the letter “M,” then began to look for the word “Monitor,” sticking his tongue out in concentration. Five minutes later he found it. The photo illustrating it showed a terrifying creature, halfway between a dinosaur and an alligator. It had a long nose and short, powerful legs, and its massive cuirass was covered with bony plates. He had never seen anything like it and had no idea that such an animal could exist, or at least that it still existed today. He feverishly began to read the entry devoted to the animal:
The Komodo Monitor or dragon (Varanus komodoensis) is the largest living species of lizard. Located in Indonesia, it has fearsome jaws with sixty serrated teeth, grows to an average length of 2.5 meters and weighs 165 kilograms, though specimens reaching over 3 meters in length have been recorded. When it attacks a large prey, the Komodo Monitor first breaks its spine with a movement of its head and then tears it to pieces with its sharp teeth. It behaves differently with smaller prey: it catches them in its mouth and shakes them so hard that their bodies burst. It has such a large appetite that a 52-kilogram Monitor has been known to ingest 26 kilograms of meat in 17 minutes. If a victim were to escape from the “monster,” it would die from its bite, for the bacteria contained in its saliva are so virulent that they prevent healing and cause death from blood poisoning within days. Adults eat pigs, wild boars, deer, dogs, buffalo and horses. Younger Komodo Monitors feed on mice, birds, small lizards, rats and insects.
The inspector shuddered. So the hypothesis the woman had put forth was in fact plausible. The lizard her son had brought back from Indonesia had grown to maturity in the forest and, naturally, it had transformed into an enormous animal forced to survive outside of its natural habitat in an environment it hadn’t chosen. He turned down the corner of the page that he had just read and, with the encyclopedia under his arm, went directly to see his boss, who seemed more nervous than usual.
“Can you believe it, Barud,” Superintendent Jamil grumbled, “our people, who survived fifteen years of civil war, are panicking at the thought of an animal prowling around in Rabieh. The television stations are running stories about it, wild rumors are spreading, people are shutting themselves up in their homes after 6 pm, hiding from an invisible monster… Even the Minister of the Interior, who lives in the area, personally commanded me to find an immediate response to the inhabitants’ concerns!”
“I have the answer!” the inspector retorted, proudly opening the encyclopedia to the dog-eared page.
Inspector Jamil put on his glasses and skimmed through the article. In his astonishment, his jaw relaxed.
“Are you… are you sure about this?” he stammered, wiping his brow.
Inspector Barud hesitated for a moment. Was he really sure of what he was putting forth? Had the woman with the green eyes misled him? And what if it were merely a starving wolf, after all? Could he defend the Monitor theory without running the risk of being wrong? His instinct had never yet failed him. Once again, he obeyed it.
“Absolutely!” he said forcefully.
The superintendent jumped up, went to a closet, opened it and pulled out a pump gun. In a determined voice, he exclaimed:
“E lafékkélak raébto! I’m going to wring its neck!”
First thing the next morning, the order was given to all Mount Lebanon police units to spread their nets over the area, guns in hand, and to kill the animal without warning. Assisted by the Boy Scouts of Lebanon, the firefighters organized patrols and beats, and night watchmen were posted at every street corner. On the initiative of Superintendent Jamil, quarters of poisoned meat were placed in the forests to serve as bait for the roaming monster. Army helicopters were even called in to keep watch over the area. But all of these efforts were in vain. In spite of the search and the resources that were deployed, the Komodo dragon was never found. Did it die from poisoning? Did it migrate to a less hostile area? And what if it had only ever existed in the minds of a handful of cranks? Furious at having misled the population because of a bunch of incompetent fools, the Minister of the Interior punished Superintendent Jamil by sending him to Nabatiyeh, on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Transferred to the Hermel district, a Hezbollah stronghold, “Dirty Harry” is champing at the bit. He has not given up hope of someday solving the mystery. To avenge his honor, scorned by a lizard.
Based on actual events.

8 March 2008 | published by Words Without Borders. Used by permission.

the man who killed the writer

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:20:15 -0500

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 an apartment 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 neighbor, and is today deceased. I am quite aware that once people believe this my conviction will be harsh, unanimous, and fair. This is exactly what I’m looking for.
Thus it is said, and be advised, seasoned reader, this is not a postmodernist 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 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, lose 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 girls. 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 foul-mouthed 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 all it did was help to build a favorable 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 photocopied booklets while stuffing ourselves with solid, liquid, and gaseous intoxicating substances. We were—please excuse the cliché—young. We were the darlings of the press 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-humored reader 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 center forward 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 inconceivable leap—toward action. Compared to that, what does a mere issue of authorship mean? In spite of what it may seem this is no attempt at defense, 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 women. 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, going 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 toward 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 offense in the students’ comments about Ahlter’s renowned “expressionist narrative” or the brilliant character thingification technique he used in Fruits Rotting in the Living Room, for instance.
Daphne also had an unfavorable 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 toward 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 get caught. Sob. 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 elevator—it was, however, always a nasty experience. He was around fifty, short and squat, with a nose resembling a giant cashew and wandering, almost demented eyes. He smelled. His clothes were dirty. The door to his apartment, 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 knew 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 apartment 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 apartment, 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, it is the human body. Unless, maybe, it is also a writer.
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 realize 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 answer he did. The two of us remained alone. Toinho observed the apartment 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 realize 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 from 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 apartment. 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 colors 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 out 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 apartment 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 extracurricular 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, stealthy 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 apartment 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 apartment 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 career as a scholar.
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’s search, like the critics’, is aesthetic, that is to say, moral. The murderer’s search goes much further. Yes, the fat detective finally finds the pattern, but too late, when 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 skyscraper’s worth of notes and the neighboring apartment 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 neighbor—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 done the math—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 an hour or more, looking at the photograph. I wasn’t thinking. Then I felt a sudden urge to go back to Austino’s apartment 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 apartment was a life-buoy in the fog.
I opened the door and almost fell backward.
“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 apartment. 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 elevator went “glup” and swallowed the janitor. I stood there, petrified. Looking at the door of the neighboring apartment, 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 be 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.

8 January 2008 | published by Words Without Borders. Used by permission.

keep on/no peek

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:20:11 -0500

We come and go. Not jot nor pip of a why, just the odd what if of an end. No line to help us cross the sky that marks the dead from these that breathe.

Can you stop the ebb of that swirl that sucks at your brain? The one that can etch an atom bomb of keen white or black and make it stick to your soul?

Think for one sec on last year’s Vee Tech kill spree. Or the more up-to-date blast from the past that sprayed death to a few at NIU. Can’t, can you? Don’t wan tuh, do ya? Can’t blame you. Seems too far flung to fling back in the face. Just a dust speck sprung from out there space. Past. A trace. E...rase.

But for me? Those scenes crop up and keep. Stab me. Poke round the den of my head. Keels the side of my “I” brow. Keeps my chin in. Eyes cast down. Can’t jut or strut when each tick could be the last. Don’t know when a click of a Glock be the last tick tock.

“Be thar yond of thy ken,” the Ole Cap cries. “Sure as the crow flies. Aye, my son, blast that sun in me eyes!” And then the blast. The one that lasts. Stems the cells, quits the clang of the bells, no more yells, no hues of greens or reds. Just those stains of the ones that bled.

My eyes curl like whipped dogs that flee from the hard slant of rain that streaks in the wind. So I do the same as you. I for...get. Push it back like an old bag filled with who knows what. Who cares. And I think: Maybe Jesus jeers. “Get to it. Put your hands to the plow and break your back to save souls!” But then I see that he ain’t Mo. “Let’s GO...NOW!” And the waves spread high for us Jews to run, again.

More too. The ones who knew. Could see it come. The smart ones. Touched by God’s flame. No shame. Just saw Life and took it. One chance they had and. They. TOOK it.

I want that now. I still got to run. But I run to the job. The Mart. To get gas. Ride my bike in last day of fall. Tie my shoes and run to open my skull. Fuse my lungs with the Great Heir who longs for me to run to him. I say I will but I don’t.

And when my feet and my hands and my tongue stick. I try to pry them loose but the freeze claims the still piece. That dry piece of a soul lost. Am I a sane mad man? To know it all but not to do? Oh but drops of “do” like the drops of dew, but is that the kind of reign the King asks of me? I think not. I cling to the cry. I crawl toward the sky, but then when night falls I just lie. I lay, I lie. I wait till the dark can cross my one seen I. I wait for my time. Like an owl who hoots from a high tree. Catch me, catch me, who can catch me from this perch? Not one. Oh, yes, one. Just one. But when will he come? To send to send.

8 December 2008

calm milk

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:20:08 -0500

Long ago Sarah laughed. Her furrowed womb would finally be full, a miracle to outdo the stars. Every part of her flesh came alive. God teemed her breasts with buckets of milk. One telling of the story says that Sarah gave milk not only to Isaac but to all the children in the Abrahamic entourage - passing on sustenance where there was once nothing.  So it is – Sarah, mother - Abraham, father - of many nations.  Drawing milk to secure life is not forgotten in exile. It pressed up the taunting thorax of mountains who teased Moses with anticipation for the other side - the wet Jordan River that he'd never cross. Here, Joshua and all Israel anxiously licked her lips for the land ripe with milk and honey.  Later, when judges ruled Israel, the tenderness of warm milk became a weapon. It allured the wicked Sisera into a deep tired sleep which gave Jael the occasion to drive a stake through his temple. The arm of Israel gained strength that day.   And as Judah's eyes were white as milk so too the lover of Solomon's verse and the captured in Isaiah's vision -
You will drink the milk of nations  and be nursed at royal breasts.  Then you will know that I, the LORD, am your Savior,  your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.
When an innocent teenager turns the corner and robes as the blessed virgin, the nourishment that God gifted to Sarah finds paradox. Empty and tired from the journey down Rahab's sash and into the confines of a womb, the infant Jesus exits in the violence of birth and first breaths, gasping for air. Sticky and blind from the light of new stars, he roots, dotting his mother's breast until she helps him to find her calm milk.  The baggage of enlightened reason often tames such myth. Call up none of that now. The earliest followers set Jesus in this one celebrated act. It is here where the stars bent down and illuminated the transaction of creator and created, image of God and image of humanity, feeding each other in a nuzzling embrace that collapsed heaven with earth, only weaned when the mountains drip new wine and the hills flow with new milk - down the road at the inn that hosts the end of days.

The earliest representation of Mary with the infant Jesus at her breast. From the catacomb of Priscilla in Rome, dating from the beginning of the third century C.E.

8 December 2006