de ti, mas ficou perfeita,
concreta, fria, lunar.
Como pode nossa festa
ser de um só que não de dois?
Os dois ora estais reunidos
numa aliança bem maior
que o simples elo da terra.
Estais juntos nesta mesa
de madeira mais de lei
que qualquer lei da república.
Estais acima de nós,
acima deste jantar
para o qual vos convocamos
por muito — enfim — vos querermos
e, amando, nos iludirmos
junto da mesa
vazia.
THE TABLE
And you didn’t like parties …
But what a party, old man,
we’d throw for you today.
Your sons who don’t drink
and the one who loves drinking,
seated around the big table,
would forgo their sad diets
and forget their complaints,
we’d have good-hearted fun
and end up baring our souls.
You’d hear things, old man,
that would stun your ninety years.
We wouldn’t alarm you, though,
since with smiles on our faces,
the plump chicken, a choice
Portuguese wine, and a thousand
things from Nature’s bounty
that someone would prepare
and copiously serve up
in a thousand Chinese tureens,
we’d make you understand
that it was all in jest.
That’s right. Your tired eyes,
which are still able to read
across miles of field and spot
in those miles a calf gone astray
in the blue so blue,
would look into our souls
and see that rotten mud
and stare at us with sorrow
and curse us with fury
and gently forgive us
(forgiveness is a ritual
of parents as well as lovers).
Everything forgiven,
deep down you’d feel lucky
to have sons like us …
Truth is, you big old rascals
turned out a lot better
than I bargained for. Chips
off the old block, I guess …
Falling silent, with an arched
brow you’d call up a fond
and not entirely remote
memory, and laughing inside
and seeing how you’d thrown
a bridge from the crazy
pacing of your own father
to the horsing around of your sons,
knowing that all flesh
aspires to degradation,
but on a path of fire
and under a sexual spell,
you’d cough. Ahem, hey kids,
don’t be foolish. Kids?
A bunch of louts in our fifties,
balding, used up, burned out,
yet in our chests we preserve
intact that boyish candor,
that scampering into the woods,
that craving for things forbidden,
and the very simple wish
to ask Mother please to sew
not our shirts but rather
our torn and haggard souls.
What a great Minas dinner
it would be … We’d eat,
and eating would make us hungry,
and the food would be a pretext.
And even without any
appetite, we’d slice
and nibble until everything
was gone, tomorrow be damned.
Have some black bean tutu.
One more crackling, come on.
And the turkey? Fried manioc
flour needs to be washed down
with a shot of good cachaça,
and don’t forget the beer,
that true-blue companion.
Just the other day … Is eating
so crucial that only a fine
meal can bring to light
the best, most human part
hiding within us?
Is drinking so sacred
that only after he’s tipsy
can my brother tell me why
he’s miffed and shake my hand?
We guzzle, we gorge: how sweet
the smell of this food, how deep
run its Portuguese-Arab roots,
and how holy this drink
that makes us all a single
hundred-handed glutton,
braggart, and champion!
We even have the sister
who left us behind. A rose
by name, she was born
on a day just like today,
to make your birthday special.
She was a rose-amelia,
a name with a hint of camellia
and a much more delicate flower
than a rose rose, and she lived
much longer than her name,
but all the while she cloistered
the scattered rose. Beside you,
look: she blossoms again.
And here we have the eldest.
A quiet and devious sort,
he wasn’t priest material;
he loved immoralities.
Then time did to him
what it does to everyone,
and the older he gets
the more he’s your perfect
picture without being you,
so that if I unexpectedly
see him, it’s you who loom
before me in another
old man of sixty.
And here’s the learned lawyer,
the family college graduate,
but his most learned letters
are the ones written in blood
or on the bark of trees.
He knows the name of the tiniest
flower and of the rarest
fruit born from a genetic
marriage. He’s a city boy
who misses the wild outdoors
and a country boy nostalgic
for the scholar. And so
he’s become the patriarch.
Further down we have
the inheritor of your iron
will, your stoic temperament.
But he didn’t want to repeat you.
He thought it pointless
to reproduce on earth
what the earth will swallow.
He loved. And loves. And will love.
But he didn’t want his love
to be a prison for two,
a contract between yawns
and four slippered feet.
Brutal on first contact,
cool on a second meeting,
and affable on the third,
it seems he’s afraid
of being, fatally, human.
It seems he feels rage
but that honey transcends his rage,
and what clever, crafty ways
he has to fool himself
about himself: he wields
a force he’s unable
to call just kindness.
Look who’s sitting there.
She quit talking, not wanting
to feed with new words
the discourse always humming
among those of us less guarded.
She quit talking. Don’t take it
badly. If you loved her
so much, then something in her
still loves you, in that twisted
way of ours. (Not being
happy explains everything.)
I realize how painful
these family occasions are,
and to argue now
would kill the party, killing
you — no one dies
just once, nor once and for all.
Lots of lives will always
remain to be consumed,
owing to the clashes
of our blood in the different
bodies where it’s dispersed.
Lots of deaths are always
waiting to be slowly rein-
carnated in another dead soul.
But we’re all alive.
And not just alive: we’re happy.
We’re just like we were
before being us, and no one
will say that any of your children
were missing. There, for instance,
sitting at the corner of the table,
not with humility and perhaps
because he’s the king of conceit,