As if seasick, we stood staring at Teixeira, lost in amazement at the sight of such a strange human bird as this. He was a thin man, with sunken eyes and hands with extremely long, gnarled fingers, reminiscent of an insect’s tentacles. There was Teixeira, suddenly in front of us. The truth is that, when we had him there, we didn’t even remember why we wanted to see him. He made a strong impression. There was Teixeira in his large house at the foot of the volcano, on the outskirts of Lajes; there in that remote house was a man who, in his own words, had previously enjoyed writing outdoors, seated on tree stumps and surrounded by trees that were still standing. “All my work back then,” he explained to us, “was directed toward the clarity of the woods, I was strong and weak at the same time. Now all I do is give seminars on laughter therapy.”
For someone who taught how to laugh, he was very serious. Here was a man, about fifty years of age, who seemed to have withdrawn to the world’s end. He was friends with the taxi driver and did not stop asking him if he had already told us how he was not a book person anymore, but a professor of laughter.
For a specialist in this laughter therapy, he could not have been more serious. His head was stuck inside the collar of his military-style shirt — his trousers were also army issue — his hair neatly trimmed around his scalp, fixed in place with Pico hairspray, his cheek muscles were the tensest I’ve ever seen. He was so serious it was frightening, and yet he claimed to be on the side of laughter and said that in the summer he earned a living from classes in which tourists discovered the benefits of laughter for their health.
He told us that in the past — perhaps he had made this up so that we could have a go at laughing — he had been friends with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Aga Khan, Einstein, Cole Porter, Alfonso XIII of Spain and Caruso, most of all with Caruso. He said he had turned down a decoration from Mussolini and received the Legion of Honor at the hands of General de Gaulle.
He had led the opposite of a mundane life, which he had abandoned in order to write seated on tree stumps in the woods, an occupation that did not help him write what he intended. One day, in Africa, he received divine enlightenment. He was lost in life because he was still writing seated on tree stumps, and because what he was trying to put down on paper was very difficult, since he was in the throes of founding a new form of art, a totally immanent form, one without dimension, beyond reason. But — and this was the problem — he could not think up this form. His intention was to produce a work that would be devoid at least of the possible existence, or nonexistence of God. However, he was unable to discover this third way. There he was in Africa in some desperation and helplessly writing while seated on tree stumps, searching in vain for the aesthetic form of the future, when suddenly, in the pygmy village where he was staying, he discovered nothing less than the plenitude of laughter. It was like when Saul of Tarsus fell off his horse; but in his case he fell to the ground after having laughed a lot, having never gotten on a horse.
The day he discovered that for pygmies, if you don’t fall down laughing, your laughter is incomplete, he thought he could glimpse a new path in his life; he immediately gave up searching on tree stumps for the aesthetic form of the future and decided to carry out exhaustive research in the field of human laughter. In a square in New Delhi he saw three hundred people who each month got together to perform exercises that resulted in laughter. They all lay on the ground in a big spiral, resting the back of their neck on another’s navel. Laughter, he explained, is contagious and, because it is linked to the diaphragm, you only need one person to start and there is an explosion of joy. He said this in such an infinitely serious way that I was afraid that the one who would explode was Teixeira, whose extreme seriousness could result in a colossal outburst of laughter. He certainly was an unusual bird. Tongoy asked him if he had a family or lived alone. And then Teixeira’s head retreated even farther into the collar of his military-style shirt (made in Vietnam), which he claimed a famous Portuguese comedian had given to him while staying in Pico. “Family dead in Mozambique in laughable accident,” Teixeira replied almost telegraphically while offering us a Sinhalese tea. To drink this tea we had to sit on the floor in a corner of that house modeled, in the worst possible taste, on the inside of a tent. The last thing we felt like doing was sitting down and, given how much we had been drinking, trying a Sinhalese tea. “Laughable accident,” Teixeira repeated with a sadness that made us sit on the floor, even if only for a minute, since it seemed that this was the only way to avoid an unnecessary mishap.
I won’t forget the tea anytime soon, it was vomit-inducing and I’d swear it wasn’t Sinhalese. “The horror, the horror!” Teixeira would occasionally exclaim with a smile. Did he mean the tea? No, he meant his pet cat, which had a broken paw. “The horror!” he exclaimed whenever the cat drew near, and then he would be silent for a few seconds and finally come out with all kinds of transcendental phrases. “The dead do not laugh, laughter is linked to life, only laughter has a future.” He would come out with such maxims and then fall silent again. Suddenly, when we were least expecting it, he had a fit of noncontagious, incredibly disagreeable laughter, as hideous as his tea. I have never seen anything like it. His mouth was one huge black nail with a crack down the middle. His laugh was terribly metallic, dehumanized, as if it were the laughter of the future, the laughter that awaits us, canned laughter, laughter neither with God nor without God, neither with books nor without books, something indescribable it was so repellent.
“Illness draws you in on yourself, whereas laughter makes you more open,” he said with evident satisfaction. And he added, “The more open you are, the healthier you feel.” His maxims reminded me of a period in Spain when it was fashionable for writers who wished to advance their carreers to publish maxims from their private journals. It was considered intelligent. However, it had the opposite effect. Thinking is not within the reach of everybody and these maxims that made you feel embarrassed for their authors—“Women can wait longer than men,” for example — only reminded you that it’s different for Walter Benjamin or Elias Canetti to record a thought than for the village idiot to do so.