“Heroic anxiety of my feelings
to awaken the secret of beings and things.”
or
“They are forms… Forms that burn, individual
forms, jostling, a jingling of elusive forms
that barely open, flower, that close, flower, flower, unformed
inaccessible,
In the night. Everything is night…. ”
and who need regard the message of the clock’s hands, acknowledge the calendar’s insistent story? Then, he rests the pen beside the typewriter and blotter and rises, puts on his straw hat to shield his rice-powered face and bald pate, bows the canary tie around his neck, and dives out into the afternoon, walking toward the competing planes of gold sand and the Atlantic’s silvery waves, the lines blurring like a freshly painted watercolor. The Cariocas, beachcombers, bathers, the steady stream of vacationers from the nearby hotels pass him, on their way to the huts, umbrellas, the beckoning water. He is here, in Lapa, on the rua Russell, peering at the roofs of Niterói, and there, on the dais in the Municipal Theater in São Paulo, Oswald, Di Cavalcanti, the other radicals at either side of him at the podium, our Pierrot, our Miss São Paulo, our brown-skinned, bucktoothed hero with such character, beginning the excerpt from The Hallucinated City, to hoots and catcalls, while thinking to himself, then as now, we must never let the lies and the tears devour us, we must devour and savor the years.
III COUNTERNARRATIVE
“If there is any genre in which it matters to be sublime,
it is evil, above all.”
THE LIONS
“If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.”
Good evening.
….
Or should I say, Good morning.
….
Of course it could be whatever we want it to be. I want—
….
Decree. Good morning, good evening, good night.
….
Under the circumstances you could lose sight—
….
— of such distinctions. Or forget them. Time of day, night time, time itself—
….
— slips through your grasp when you’re….
….
Preoccupied. Aren’t you?
….
I rib you but I can smell it. In my case, I have been, so much to do. Think about. You think about it, how common it is to say that, so busy. So easy to lose sight—
….
Of the mountain for a single peak, too. I, never. Too many do, though. You—
….
Want to speak. Your crying request. Here I am. There are some things you never forget, no matter how hard you try. They root, linger, you’d once have said. You can’t forget them, I’d say.
….
You take time out of the equation, you can’t take time out, forget.
….
So much does get lost in the transmission. But I came. On precious time.
….
I still am a man of few words. I had to learn how to use them from you. Once upon a time they could hardly understand me. You could. You, wielder of words. Language welder. Were.
….
There. That should be better. Now’s the time to speak. Precious time. Yours.
M-.
Mmm. I doubt you’d believe it, but I hurried over. Even now, despite everything, still. You know I’ve always had an affinity for non-punctuality, all that messing with time, untimeliness as you used to describe it. Some things can’t be rushed, and yet others can’t be postponed. How do you un-time? Slip through its grasp? I learned from you.
Mmm….
I learned that it’s best to keep time itself out of sync. Take its beat, remake it in your own. Be untimely. The drumbeat always sends a letter to the future. Say you happened to be the only one to arrive early for a meeting… and a bomb goes off. Wouldn’t it have been better to be late then?
Mmm….
Or the chartered plane that you were to fly to that restive region went down mysteriously into the river, but if you arrived well in advance and boarded an earlier flight, you cheated fate, or the person attempting to shape it. All those other unfortunate people, though.
Mmm….
The hands of fate, I suppose, or fate’s handler. Hangman. Honcho. You know who I mean. All those car crashes, overdoses, bodies found at the bottoms of drained swimming pools, riverbeds, earthen dams, sudden bathroom electrocutions, sharp, heavy projectiles flying through windows while people were eating their morning meals, the staged robberies where the robber always manages to accurately hit the bull’s eye of the heart, kidnappings without ransom notes, bones shattered into a thousand pieces so that they’ll never heal again, disappearances, heads left in mailboxes, hands and ears and tongues stapled to doors before dawn, such a remarkable arsenal this particular fate possessed, wouldn’t you admit? What I learned from you: how to glide out of fate’s schedule. Un-time oneself.
Mmm.
Mmm. Though before we ever had need to speak of such things I can recall us sitting facing each other, just like now, what was it, twenty-five years ago? Just like this, our noses not touching but close enough that we filled each others’ lungs. Do you recall that?
Mmmo….
Sitting like this? Nostrils to nostrils, oily sweat and blood masking our faces in the sheer black silk of that night, we each could smell the other’s throat exhaling the hours, the years, of endurance, our elation and fear, all flavored with tobacco and the cheapest palm wine, with every breath. The smell of death so near too, nearer than the tips of our noses, our lips brushing against each other, our chests and knees fusing as one, and the smell of life as well, potentiality, the horizon that we would seize.
Mmmo….
Just like this, in darkness surrounding us like an empty arena, so dark that even after our eyes had adjusted and we could feel our pulses passing between us we still had to rely on our other senses to confirm we were still sitting there. The only sounds the intermittent gunfire, later the mines going off, the rockets, the ground a rattle beneath our soles, the dirt and grass and plastic we could not wash off our tongues. There you go.
Much better….
We even kept the radio off because we knew exactly what he would be saying: I appeal to you, vanguard of our nation’s liberation, I appeal to you at this grave hour.
Grave hour, dire.
We could recite it by heart, with the flourishes and the drumbeats, the two of us, the emphases and the pauses, I because I had heard it so many times from his mouth and initially I believed it, as I did you, you because you had written it, such a way with words, like the griots, the oracles, you and I just like this, the night so enveloping we had only our senses to ensure we were still sitting there.