Categoria: herons and scavengers… (novel)

2. The trip

Translated by Angela Telles-Vaz
Proofread by Izabel Arocha

There was much light around us. It seemed that we were in a glass palace. I don’t know how we got there because I’m already sitting inside the train. Geraldo is next to me. I see through the window that outside, my mother cries. Aunt Ananísia sticks her face through the window and asks:
Who will care for them?
Aluísio will.
Who?
He is that one over there; someone pointed to a burly lad, quite fat, fair skin, curly hair, I would later remember, like the statues of the god Apollo. I would also always remember him later when hearing the word puffy.
Lad, are you going to watch them?
Yes ma’am!
Care for them, Aluísio, for God’s sake! Care for them. Don’t let anyone mess with them, no! And she kept pointing at me and Geraldo.
My mother cried louder and Geraldo also began to sob. I didn’t understand how it was possible to cry in a place so beautiful, with so much light!, I’m inside the train!, my first trip!
The fact is that the trip was more fascinating then all the rest. I wore my little black cloak, vintage type, involving the whole body, sleeveless, the arms loose inside. I was looking forward to the first motion.
As I write now, I remember that Antonio, the supervisor, was also there. He was a huge mulatto with fair skin. He had a hat. I just remember that detail because during a stop he fills the hat with guavas and runs to catch the train already in motion. It was him that just told something and we all sat silent and my aunt repeats her request to Aluísio,
lad, you’re going to be responsible, lad, we rely on you, lad,
my mother is in despair, I hear a thud, everything starts shaking, and instead of the train moving forward, they are the ones that are slipping back: the aunt, the mother and the others, faster and faster, until there’s complete darkness outside.
Geraldo cries. Does anyone else cry? I do not recall. Myself, Geraldo, supervisor Antonio and the lad that had received the recommendations of the aunt: Aluísio. On the trip we learned more. He was a resident of the orphanage were we’re going to, but helped the supervisor, bringing and taking the students back. I don’t know if it was during the trip or after that I heard:
Aluísio is Antonio’s wife.
My comprehension did not reach the subtleties of the sentence. I am well aware of my comprehension of the fact at the time: they slept together, they were married. And “sleeping together” I just understood it as sleeping together. Nothing else mattered. I did not know that you had to be a woman to be the wife of John Doe. That I had no other way but accept the truth, keep it, I might need it another time. But why all the giggles when they repeated the sentence?
Some time after the beginning of the trip, I discovered a truth that filled me with joy. If I looked out the window, while the train moved, everything was going backwards but it was the train that moved. However, if I looked at the floor of the train, it seemed to stop and only shake. No, it didn’t stop, that was the wonderful truth. It seemed to stop but it moved. I remained like that for a long time, focused on thinking that it seemed to stop, that everything seemed to stop, if I kept looking at the floor.
And here I am, already in a truck. We are all crowded inside the back of the truck, it’s already night. Years later, Geraldo remembered that we went from Rio to Cruzeiro, in the State of São Paulo. From there, we took another train, to a station that had another name besides João, João-I-don’t-remember-of-what. After some time, we took the truck to Campo do Meio. I don’t know about that, there are no such details within me. From Brazil’s Central Station train, one powerful engine, I see myself on the truck. A lot of people now, all piled up, it’s dark, they speak, move, I cover myself with my cloak.
Now, we are walking towards the house. It’s already night, I go hand in hand with Geraldo. Suddenly I realize I’m without my cloak. He warns me that nothing can be done, the truck has left already. The cloak is gone/disappeared. It was black, it was warm, it was a piece of my hometown Manhuaçu, that accompanied me and it was a constant and vivid reminder of the sad look of my mother who had made it for me when I started going to school.
So, at some point, we entered that house. This moment is also completely erased from my memory. But inevitably we entered. Yes, of course we entered, because my heart will not ever forget the handful of memories that drew inside me. Some memories are white and off, like herons that fly in the fog; others are vivid, sharp, have smell and volume, like a fierce vulture, with its sharp claws, or its ruthless beak, bloodthirsty…

to be continued on next sunday.

    A man entirely alone, would not have any memory; nor need it. (Pierre Janet)

    Mr. Freud was wrong.
The unconscious has no power over us, but memory does.
Memory is like an Empress of Souls. She decides what we will remember for all times and what goes out from within us for the rest of our lives. We can learn to broaden memory. We can, in therapy, rescue memories that seemed lost. But WE CANNOT FORGET, by choice, what the Empress of Souls doesn’t allow to be forgotten.
It’s the terrible game between the memories we have, and what we cannot forget, it’s the game that defines each human being. We are this sum. Here there are no subtractions. What is erased was not ours; what we are no longer, or shall never be.

1. Background

Translated by Angela Telles-Vaz
Proofread by Izabel Arocha

The facts prior to my arrival at the train station follow:
We had traveled to Rio, Mom, Geraldo, Amelia, Angela and I. Three days of travel in the cabin of a truck, Geraldo at the back with the helper. On the second day in Muriaé, Angela turned five years of age. March the 24th 1949. I was therefore, six years old and nearly nine months.
The trip today is more like a short sequence of photos, pieces of memory, a short scene from a silent film, scratched, very clear, a complex assemble in which images are mixed inside each other.
The scenes of the truck, the lunch at the Inn, on her birthday; all of us sitting on the sidewalk around mother, on a dark and dead night, sleeping and leaning on each other, while she talked to a resident of the city (Leopoldina?).
At President Vargas Avenue, a man stopped the motorcycle and in distress, we crossed the broad street. I thought that I would never see him again. It was the first time that I recall having had this idea, seeing or feeling this kind of thing, I believe that a moment will not repeat itself.
After the motorcycle man, we are already at the apartment of my aunt. Telephone, little cars stand below, 1 Washington Luis Street, Apartment 801, telephone 32-8366. Was it really that? Geraldo threw a penny from the top floor and we went down to try to find it to no avail. I don’t know how many days we stayed there.
At the next scene, I’m already looking at the iron gate of MAS (Minor Assistance Services). Some boy is telling me that it would be impossible to run away through there. But why would anyone want to run away from there?, I think. I’m wearing a blue overall, like everybody, the priest teaches us a song with words I’ve already forgotten:

    We want God, ungrateful men… Faith is mocked by fools… Of our faith, Oh Virgin, Bless the call…

What would be the call?, I think. The music penetrates me and chokes my soul, the excitement hurts and the priest dissolves and disappears.
Of course Geraldo had to be there because every now and then he reappears as if by magic. His presence makes me feel safe. I know that soon he will be twelve years old!
I’m among some boys and one of them puts his stiff finger on another one’s face and says:
Hey kid!
And the boy while turning around hits his face on his finger. Everyone laughs. I think I laughed too. I do the same with a neighbor:
Boy!
But the word sounds foreign and disarmed. Embarrassed I cringed. There, boy was not called boy but kid. Or otherwise child. Child, kid, the words danced inside of me.
I don’t know how many days we were in that building. Had we slept there? Certainly we did, because I remember the visits, I remember the apples and I remember the sad look of my mother. And if someone asked me what was a widow…
… in those days, I knew a very sad children’s song:

    There’s a cliff so high
That nobody can reach.
There sat the poor widow
Who sadly began to cry,
To cry,
To cry…

…and if somebody asked me what a widow was…
…I would say that a widow was what my mother was.
But my mother was not a widow. She just left her drunken husband, carrying her offspring to the big city…
Suddenly the gate, the priest, the touching song, the kids, the visits, everything is going back. I’m on the train.
I’m on the train!
I finally arrived at the station. Years later, I would find out that it happened on a Good Friday.

      to be continued on next sunday.