Categoria: herons and scavengers… (novel)

25. Finale

Translated by Angela Telles-Vaz

It happened, if I’m not mistaken, during one of the many afternoons when we had to pray aloud, after the national anthem, before going upstairs. In that twilight of a dream, that threatened another nightmare of night blindness, in that afternoon of fire-red, it was said that a list of the new ones dismissed was going to be read. The names would fly over the silence, as sacred birds. Perched on one of the zombies, and he would be resurrected.

Et Ressurrexit Rex!

with the soloists, the chorus and all the grand orchestra of Beethoven’s Missa Sollemnis. The black mass would come to an end for some of those victims who would escape, thus, from the eternal sacrifice.
At the time, I never asked myself if I deserved to be there or not. For me, it was enough being poor to deserve it, even though I knew that there were students in a worse situation, because they were marginalized orphans, besides being poor. They were unaware of the math and geography of Minas Gerais. They had been hunted down like the stray dogs that the Animal Care office takes to the soap factory. Actually, the streets remained cleaner without them, a social soap.
Similarly, the idea of leaving didn’t hurt or touch me. I didn’t know if I deserved that ite missa est that they were throwing at me so unexpectedly. I said before, that the first emotion was of insecurity and sorrow for having to separate myself from my little friends. I think that the joy of giving up everything was overcoming and nourished inside of me the fantasy that one day, they too, would leave that place.
After that terrible scene, in which I was pulled up next to my brother and my crippled namesake was pulled out of the line, with frightened eyes, after that, we went upstairs. I kept thinking that perhaps the night would be like any other.
The morning would be like to die backwards.

We talked a lot and they looked at me as if I were a god. My voice faltered and came out in a whisper. Hermes cried. My little friend made of bronze or copper, the painting that El Greco forgot to paint, tall and skinny and with huge and transparent eyes, the little bronze was seized with a convulsion, shaking his sharp bones. I also remember Zé da Silva looking at me with a strange smile, he seemed happy for me, perhaps. It was all very confusing.
I learned later, that the big ones put little pieces of paper with written addresses, inside the hem of their pants, wrote names on the pack of cigarettes, they knew by heart streets and numbers. They had the most heroic mission that may have already been in any of the wars of humanity: to bring to the parents, mothers, uncles, godparents and neighbors, what do I know?, bring the news, not that life was lived but how life was lived. Hope, in fact, is going to die exactly at the moment when the last man dies.
All useless, the addresses they knew by heart unless. On Hallelujah morning, they stripped us of our clothes and gave us brand new overalls.
They uncovered the stone tomb and a gust of fresh air kindled our soul. I’m already on a train. There stood the shroud frayed overalls, some full of piss, keeping in their hems the convicts in distress. In there, stayed the two black angels, Antonio and Sinuca, to stand guard to the door of the tomb. I lie. Antonio took us, together with Aluísio. Only one black angel stand guard the entrance like a malnourished Cerberus: Sinuca, who had thin legs, the patched executioner. He would stand guard in vain, because the pious women wouldn’t go there with their perfumes.
Ah, the pious women were crying while waiting for us. The mothers and the aunts and the sisters and the godmothers would be waiting for the melancholic group. A skeletal bunch of hairy boys, in those days it was terrible to be hairy. Lips were swollen and injured, feet were dusty and chapped, white spots all over the face.
I remember two happenings during the course of the trip.
A kind man, hat on his head, sat next to me and asked me questions, where I was coming from, where I was from, the name of the institution, my voice cracking down muttered little bits of each answer. Before leaving he gave me a coin. I got a match box and kept it there with care, not understanding anything. It was the treasure that I shouldn’t deserve, something should be wrong, I, free, and with money in my hand.
The other fact was with the fat and fair skinned woman with very black hair. The train stopped at whatever station. She put her face at the window and, facing me, entered the car, talking very loudly. She held me, smoothed my hair, left in a hurry and soon came back full of grief, with a bunch of bananas in her hand, soon disappearing. That bunch of bananas terrified me. Geraldo talked about giving it away and the terror dissipated because the cross seemed to break off in pieces and hurt me less.
We stayed sometime at MAS (Minor Assistance Services), in São Cristóvão. I think for a few hours. The film jumps. There are cuts. Suddenly, two faces appear. Neuza and Maria da Glória! Would they be Neuza and Zélia? Neuza and Ieda? I’m not ashamed of being unable to remember. Too much light for a little heart poorly initiated in such splendid new secret rituals.
Is there anything left? I don’t know where it all ends. Now?, when crossing over the gate of MAS and entering inside a great unknown city. Or at the store we went in next?, where they bought us new clothes, that we wore there at the spot. It was also needed to go to a barber, to reduce our savage looking.
Before the arrival at the new home, a room in a quarter at Conde de Bonfim Street, a blessed, wonderful violent storm fell down, that tried but failed, to take away the mud of the white herons and wash away the blood splattered by the scavengers.
Hand in hand, wet to the skin, we walked the four of us, two little brothers, carrying the full weight of the enchantment, two older sisters, guardians, protective, they talk loud, they are happy, they also carry a burden and the work has to be sufficient to feed everyone.
And, at that moment, the Empress of Souls commands that I look back. There, those terrifying creatures, who stopped in time and remained looking at me, more and more distant, the white herons, memories of enchanting moments of childish joy, the fierce and implacable scavengers, memories of the astonished in the face of sufferings not understood.
I quickly close my eyes and say goodbye to all of them, I know that I feel a mix of horror and happiness.
But the Empress of Souls whispers malignantly that my farewell is vain:
    Those memories are being left behind, it’s true, but by my decree, you are doomed to remain handcuffed to them. Here is all the freedom that I grant you. For this is what you were born for. If you aspire for any other freedom, look up in the ethics of your future actions.

I don’t remember my mother’s smile. Oh!, yes!, she wasn’t at home! It was Sunday, when we saw, Geraldo and I, through the grids of a window of a ward of the Moncorvo Filho Hospital, it was on Sunday, when we saw, from afar, her extremely melancholic smile and her vague glance of Nyobe-Hecuba.

Curitiba, August 6 1974.

24. Rebellion

Translated by Angela Telles-Vaz

The death of Chump was followed by a period of silence and terror. Yes, there, nobody was willing to smile. My little friends told me that he had died as a result of too much beating. They spoke softly, fearful that another would listen and tell. Someone spoke about the funeral, about a wooden cross stuck on a grave. Playing stopped, the smiles fled from their cages like birds.
The Angel of Death hovered over everything, like a black but invisible kite. The Angel of Death had the appearance of a white wax corpse: like a stone, the looks of a church saint, living-dead. He flew low and the mysterious muffled rustle of his cloudy wings could almost be heard. He came and went and, by feeling his presence, we looked seriously at one another, wanting to understand what was going to happen next. The eyes lowered, the heart stirred, like a wild cloistered puppy, who throws himself against the grids until he dies.
Our little hearts full of fear.
At night, he would also come to watch. Now his wings are made of frozen water. We tried to dream of our mother and sisters and godmothers but suddenly, noticed his face in front of ours, all black, with two holes for eyes and his breath was warm and smelled of rotting in wet soil. In a jump we would wake up. He had escaped. He would be breathing the face of another one. The mattress was pulled more, trying to cover also the head, but the legs, much shrunken, started to ache and the mattress fell off. The head would offer itself for another cursed breath.
Gradually our terror ceased, sank like sand in water that was beginning to hum again. The cup of life returned to stillness, to the mermaids, to the small cars made of clay, to the ladybugs, who knows?
Suddenly, everything is blurred and my heart races.

Climbed on the wall, I see the big ones, screaming, cursing, I don’t understand anything. I stick obstinately to Valdemar, fearful that we get close to the riot. They are on top of the wall, almost all, without exception. They throw stones and insults towards the priest’s house. But the scream is always the same:
I’m hungry!
I’m hungry. This is not what they felt, they should be afraid to die from the beatings.
It looked like a war, like a catastrophe, it was noise and too much horror for my frightened soul.
Priest son of a bitch! I’m hungry!
It wasn’t a solitary and orphan voice. No, no! It was a crazy bunch of jackals, I’m hungry, that cried their throat out to the sunny sky, I’m hungry, a swarm of bees, priest son of a bitch, that someone made incited with a cane of fire, I’m hungry, an anthill under boiling water, son of a bitch, wasps willing to kill Achilles with ferocious stings on his mortal tendon.
I’m hungry!
We, the little ones, tucked in a corner, listened with cowardly attention, thinking about what would come afterwards.
Sinuca arrived at the courtyard, shouted, roared, whistled, the big ones advanced with sticks in their hands, howling like a pack of wolves that found their prey.
Pack of wild gorillas in anger. The supervisor came in and shut himself up.
The stone throwing and the screams were fading. By then, we got the courage and, helping each other, climbed the wall to see, on the outside, the whole city in a circle, watching attentively.

When the rebellion calmed down, the Angel of Death returned. With eyes of fire, it was no longer the Angel of Death but the god of Vengeance. Fear blew from the North and South and East and West and the shroud of silence covered the pack of jackals, drowned out the hum of the bees, started to suffocate the ants in distress and asphyxiated the rebel wasps. Shroud of terror.
There’s a flaw in my memory. As if, the next part that I lived, had been taken away from me. There’s no fit between the previous scene and the next one.
I’m already in the fatal line.
The line runs through a corridor, up the stairs and ends up in a small room overlooking the dorms. There’s a rumor up there, something like a waterfall of thin voice, no, no, something like the chant of crazy laundresses far away. Gradually, as we move forward the rumor changes. They are convicted souls now, who hallucinated, snarl. They are convicts that mourn with long moans. Now we can hear the sound of the correction paddle, mixed with the horrible cries. So much cry, and the paddle can be heard. It’s a blow after another.
Would this be the biblical weeping and the gnashing of teeth?
    “The angels shall come forth, and server the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth,”
cries the huge man who looks like a giant of stone, victorious, in the center of the Sistine Chapel.
We climb the steps do the slaughterhouse, to the bleeding. Somebody finds me. It’s one of the big boys, he has already cried and gnashed his teeth, now is joined a group of old ones, that observe.
Jorge, don’t be afraid. Put out your hand, the other, repete without fear. Don’t be afraid. If you remove your hand, he will hit with more power on top of the fingers. If you put out your hand with courage, he will hit lighter. Don’t cry, don’t be afraid.
And he and the others also repeat to the younger ones: Don’t be afraid, he hits a few times and move forward. Don’t be afraid!
Judgment day approaches, the earth shakes, the Lord of thunder explodes relentlessly, one, two, three, four, how many would they be?, but it wasn’t enough to perceive the trumpets of the angels because the cry increased.
The only consolation, the only relief, the only balm was that steady hand that held my shoulder and carried me, guided my steps, pulled me with delicate confidence, while the voice that I could no longer hear
don’t be afraid.
His eyes lit me intensely, I felt no fear. In face of the god, he pushed me, I stretched my hand, the paddle fell on, my soul was on fire, I stretched the other one, my body charred, I continued to stretch my hand and felt that I had won the divine grace because the fury of the judgment decreased considerably. With burning hands, I started to cry and Zeus cried thunderous,
the next one!,
who stretched his little hands in distress, I didn’t see, I heard the rays plunging in space and he began to scream desperately with his tiny voice of a child of six or seven years old, thin and malnourished.
The dorm was the abode of pain and I always remembered that dark scene, when I was forced to pray a Hail Holy Queen:
    mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
My little friends showed their hands, crying. We were ashamed of each other. All had, in place of hands, two inflated balls, with twisted fingers, bluish-red.
Cringed in our beds, clumsy fetuses, sobbing, full of terror, there are times when the soul cannot think of anything.
All the sobbing was drowned by sleep, as puppy dogs not wanted.

On the next day, at dusk, we were put in line. The Priest! The black figure slid softly, walked in front of us, up and down, up and down. Finally, he stopped in front of all of us and threw up a mellifluous song, delicate and harmonious. The voice sounded like the skin of a small animal, fluffy, soft and warm. The black vulture walked and talked and kept moving up and down, up and down. I didn’t understand anything. I understood that all was a lie. It was all very beautiful, but it was a lie. That silence of fear, the memories of the despair of yesterday, that was true. It was true. Not that voice slithering here and there, those sparkling little eyes; that snake stroll with its forked tongue stretched like the tail of the Chimera.

    You are the salt of the world.

In fact, all the tears of yesterday had been salted.

      to be continued on next sunday.