“What are you doing here, Michele?” I repeated.
“I came to help Amancio bury you. Bye-bye, sweetheart.”
Before the trapdoor could be closed, I shouted, “Michele, Michele, please, call Amancio, call Amancio.”
Amancio appeared at the trapdoor opening.
“What do you want?”
“Amancio, you’re my best friend. Get me a thick notebook, several pens, and a little more kerosene. Before I starve to death, I want to write a novel. I have the feeling it’ll be my masterpiece.”
“I’ll get it for you,” I heard him say.
It took him some time to return. I thought about my power of attorney with subrogation rights. Then I remember who it was that once told me that causing a tetanus infection was a good way to get rid of any enemy. Michele.
Later, the trapdoor opened and several pens and a thick notebook were dropped down. And also several cans of food and drinks. I saw Amancio’s face in the trapdoor opening.
“Amancio, did you subrogate to Michele the power of attorney I gave you?”
“Yes, why—?”
He didn’t finish the sentence. I heard a shot and the thud of a body falling to the floor. Michele was a genius, an evil genius. She slammed the trapdoor shut.
Was Amancio lucky enough to have a quick, maybe painless death, or was Michele going to leave him bleeding like a pig? But there’s nothing worse than starving to death, I thought. Those cans of food wouldn’t last long. I had to find a way less slow and painful to dispatch myself. Using the lantern, I looked around the cellar for something sharp to cut my wrists. I didn’t find anything. Perhaps I could tear open my veins with my teeth. It wouldn’t be easy to do. But it didn’t have to be that day. Another hypothesis was to set fire to the straw mattress and die of asphyxiation. But it didn’t have to be that day.
I could take advantage of the silence, the solitude, to write. That was it: leave a message for posterity, a masterpiece that would surely be found one day beside my skull, which would generate great publicity for my book.
I sat down on the bed, placed the table in front of me, picked up one of the pens, opened the notebook, and began to write furiously.
Publishers would fight like hyenas over the right to publish my book.
the brotherhood of swords
I WAS ONCE A MEMBER of the Brotherhood of Swords. I still remember when we met to choose the name of our Brotherhood. I argued, at the time, that for our survival it was important to have a respectable name and purpose and gave as example what had happened to the Brotherhood of São Martinho, an association of wine fanciers who, like the character in Eça de Queirós, would sell their soul to the devil for a bottle of Romanée-Conti 1858, but which came to be known as a fraternity of drunks and, discredited, closed its doors, while the Brotherhood of the Most Holy, whose declared objective is to promote the worship of God through invocation of the Holy Sacrament, remained in existence. In other words, we needed a worthy title and objective. My colleagues replied that the society was a secret one, that in a way it was born (this was said ironically) discredited, and that its name didn’t matter in the least, as it would never be made public. They added that the Masons and the Rosicrucians originally had nice titles and respectable objectives and ended up suffering accusations of every kind, from political manipulation to kidnapping and assassination. I insisted, asking them to suggest names for the Brotherhood, which in the end was done. And we began to examine the various proposals on the table. After heated discussions, four names were left. Brotherhood of the Good Bed was discarded because it sounded like an association of layabouts. Brotherhood of Fanciers of Feminine Beauty, besides being too long, was considered reductionist and aesthetical. We didn’t consider ourselves aesthetes in a strict sense; Picasso was right in hating what he termed the aesthetic game of eye and mind manipulated by connoisseurs who “appreciated” beauty and, after all, what was “beauty”? Our brotherhood was one of Fuckers and, as the poet Whitman said in a poem correctly entitled “A Woman Waits for Me,” sex encompasses everything: bodies, souls, meanings, tests, purities, gentleness, results, promulgations, songs, commands, health, pride, maternal mystery, seminal fluid, all the hopes, benefits, donations and concessions, all the passions, beauties, and delights of the earth. Brotherhood of Roving Hands, suggested by one of the poets in our group (we had lots of poets among us, obviously), who illustrated his proposal with a poem by John Donne—“License my roving hands, and let them go before, behind, between, above, below”—although pertinent because of its simplicity in privileging knowledge through touch, was rejected for being an elementary symbol of our objectives.
Finally, after much discussion, the name Brotherhood of the Swords was adopted. The richest of the Brothers were its main defenders: aristocrats are attracted by things of the underworld, fascinated by lawbreakers, and the term Sword as a symbol of the Fucker came from the criminal world. A sword penetrates and wounds, and is thus the penis as, erroneously, outlaws and the ignorant in general see it. I suggested that if some symbolic name were used by us, it should be that of an ornamental tree grown for its flowers, for after all the penis is commonly known in our language as wood or club, and wood is the generic name of any tree in many places in Brazil (but, correctly, not of bushes, which have a fragile trunk), but my reasoning came a cropper when someone asked what name the Brotherhood would have—Brotherhood of the Woods? the Stalks?—and I had no answer. Sword, according to my opponents, had vernacular power, so once again the riffraff made their valuable contribution to the enrichment of the Portuguese language.
As a member of the Brotherhood of Swords I believed, and I still believe, that copulation is the only thing that matters to the human being. To fuck is to live, nothing else exists, as the poets know very well. But was a Brotherhood needed to defend this absolute axiom? Of course not. There were prejudices, but they didn’t interest us; social and religious repressions didn’t affect us. So what was the objective in founding the Brotherhood? Very simple: to discover how to obtain, fully, orgasm without ejaculation. The queen of Aragon, as Montaigne relates, well before that ancient realm united with Castile, in the 14th century, following mature deliberation by her private counselor, established the rule, keeping in mind the moderation demanded by modesty within marriages, that the number of six copulations per day was the legal limit, necessary and suitable. In other words, in those days a man and a woman copulated, in a suitable and modest manner, six times a day. Flaubert, for whom “une once de sperme perdue fatigue plus que trois litres de sang” (I spoke of that in one of my books), thought six copulations a day humanly impossible, but Flaubert was not, we know, a Sword. Even today it’s believed that the only way to come is by ejaculation, despite the Chinese for over three thousand years affirming that a man can have several consecutive orgasms without ejaculating, thus avoiding the loss of the ounce of sperm that is more tiring than hemorrhaging three liters of blood. (The French call the exhaustion that follows ejaculation “small death,” which is why one of their poets said that the flesh was sad, but Brazilians say that the flesh is weak, in all senses, which strikes me as more poignant; it’s worse being weak than sad.) It is calculated that a man ejaculates on average five thousand times during his lifetime, expelling a total of a trillion spermatozoa. All that for what and why? Because in reality we are still a species of monkey, and all of us function like a rudimentary genetic bank, when it would be enough for only some to operate that way. We of the Brotherhood of Swords knew that man, by freeing himself of his simian atrophy, backed by the peculiar virtues of his mind (our brain is not, I repeat, that of an orangutan), could have consecutive orgasms without ejaculating, orgasms that would give even more pleasure than those of the seminal kind, which make the man merely a blind instrument of the instinct of preservation of the species. And that result filled us with joy and pride; we had succeeded, through elaborate and difficult physical and spiritual exercises, to achieve the Multiple Orgasm Sans Ejaculation, which became known by the acronym MOSE. I cannot reveal what these “exercises” were, for the vow to maintain secrecy prevents me. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t even mention the subject, even in this limited way.