LETÍCIA, Belo Horizonte, 2000
I sat in front of him in class (the second year of high school, as they said at the time) at Colégio Pampulha. He had just arrived from Salvador, and everyone called him “baiano”, despite his lack of accent and fair skin. He quickly got along with everyone and really liked playing soccer. The playboys in the class thought he was funny, kind of crazy, you know?, but there was a group of potheads who orbited around him all the time, because he lived alone in a large apartment near the school, and he also smoked a lot of tobacco. He would often arrive in class in a trance, despite being quite discreet and controlled. Behind him sat an older boy who hung out with the playboys, although he wasn't exactly one (Tales), who at some point discovered that K read a book called THE DEVIL'S WEED a lot, which an uncle of his (Tales) also read a lot and had lent him to read. There was always silence when one of them said something about the book, and everyone could see that K took those Carlos Castaneda subjects seriously. It was like his religion.
"The great enemy (K kept saying) is the fact that we never believe in what is happening to us. It is always the intellect that deceives us, because it receives the message first, but instead of giving it credit and acting immediately, it procrastinates’’
Until one day, in the middle of a chemistry class, the teacher interrupted so that some people from TAM, from Pampulha airport, could come and announce a selection process for two job openings there – one for men and one for women. Everyone in the school who was within the required age wanted to take the test, scheduled for a week later. Many were excited about the possibility of working at TAM, the largest national airline, but in the end the positions went to those who lived closest to the airport. Guess what: me and K.
The day after our “incredible feat” was confirmed, the entire school looked at us (K and I) as superior beings who, breaking away from that ridiculous herd of ordinary, boring students, would enter a new and chic universe, of people who were always in transit through the air, traveling or arriving in BH with an air of importance, well-dressed, not to mention the famous people and the fact that we would now have a salary, that we could pursue a career in the company. A huge avenue of possibilities had been opened before us – at least that was the general feeling that day, and we acted accordingly.
That same day, I arrived at the classroom with my hair, which reached down to my butt, cut to shoulder length, and perfectly made up, according to the instructions of the director of TAM. K asked me:
--- What did the director talk to you about when you were hired? --
--- Nothing special. She just said that my body type and my voice were the best suited to fill the position. And that living near the airport was a great advantage for the company --- I said
--- Well, it was very different for me. For example: what did you write in the essay about “What do I expect from the future?” that they asked you to write in the test? ---
--- I don’t know, I don’t even remember it. Something very simple. I mentioned faith in God and the desire to prosper in life. Why? What did you write? ---
--- You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. The director looked at me with the essay in her hand, trying to make it clear that she was only hiring me because I was good-looking and lived across from the airport. At the end, she said, staring into my eyes mercilessly: ‘’I HOPE I’M NOT MAKING A MISTAKE, MR. K’’, and then handed me my work uniforms ---
-- And what did you write in your essay to make her so suspicious? ---
ResponderExcluir--- I began by writing that my relationship with the future was not one of waiting, but rather of a search for clairvoyance. And that a poet became a seer (voyant) through a long, enormous and well-calculated disorder of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering and madness; he searches for himself, he exhausts all the poisons in himself, to then keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture in which he needs all faith, all superhuman strength, where he becomes among all the great sick man, the great criminal, the great damned (and the supreme wise man!, because he reaches the UNKNOWN) ---
At that point, K began to laugh in that strange way he sometimes laughs. Then he explained:
--- I wasn't taking it very seriously. I went to take the test because I was hanging out with the guys, who really wanted the job. Then yesterday the phone rang and they called me to the agency. I didn't even remember what I had written, I was totally stoned. It was on the way that I realized. I thought: DAMN! ---
--- Well, it doesn't matter anymore. We're going to premiere today, at the same time: 1:30 p.m. Don't be late, okay! ---
--- Certainly not. I'm making fun of this. I just don't know how to tie a tie. Do you know how? ---
ResponderExcluir--- I know ---
--- So come over to my house first and help me. I've never worn this kind of clothes in my life ---
In fact, I wasn't used to the outfits either. However, I found it incredible how easily K adapted to those clothes after I tied his tie. When we entered the airport together, he moved so easily that it seemed like he had been working at TAM for years, while I was left trying to figure out what to do with my hands, which were shaking a little from nervousness.
ResponderExcluirFor the first two months, I worked next to the check-in line, guiding the passengers; then they put me on the loudspeaker in the VIP lounge. K worked standing next to the check-in desk, inside, tagging and carrying the luggage to the conveyor belt, which was not at the counter, as is usually the case in airports today (that's why he complained so much about the weight: he had to carry the luggage to the conveyor belt, about three meters behind him, and some of the luggage was really huge). Friday and Saturday from 7:00 p.m. onwards was a shame, with so many passengers and so much luggage. I remember that everyone who worked there, behind that counter, where all the airlines were gathered together, wondered if he wasn't too young to work --- he didn't look seventeen, but thirteen or fourteen, I don't know; his clothes looked really good on him, and I remember seeing, on his first day, two girls from Varig smilingly welcoming him from afar, while he received his first instructions from Lidiane, who did the TAM check-ins.
These two, for example, talked all the time during work hours, and I think that, much later, they had some kind of relationship. It was common, after work, on Thursdays or Fridays, for some of the airport employees to meet at the little bar on the corner of K's street, across from the terminal, to have a beer. Sometimes, we (the closest ones) would go to K's apartment to listen to music and smoke a joint. At TAM, there was a guy named Dario who worked with us, a very nice, older guy who sold the best skunk in the region, maybe in the city --- we always bought it from him, and there was a time, according to what I was told at school, that K would help resell Dario's stuff to students and other contacts. Whenever I went to K's apartment, I went alone, I mean, without my boyfriend, to whom I intended to get engaged soon --- he wasn't jealous of K, even though everyone at school thought we were having an affair (we weren't).
ResponderExcluirK’s apartment seemed like a parallel universe, made up of American jazz and avant-garde art. I remember one day when a young man arrived there in the middle of the night, with a bunch of drawings and canvases under his arm, and began to show us everything very timidly, almost only at the insistence of K, who seemed to be an enthusiast of those scribbles and smudges. The young man’s name was Mody, and he smoked and drank as if the world were going to end at any moment.
ResponderExcluirK: The need to paint, to produce art, as a metaphysical longing. The irritation of not doing this taking on the characteristics of a physical, neural disorder. Did our friend here ever think of giving up after that first explosion, that tropical dawn that occurs in the life of every authentic young artist? The pressure of not feeling the smell of a studio taking on the form of an intellectual vision in the midst of delirium and, finally, of a cure? My God, how much discomfort in the act of compulsive cigarette smoking!
MODY: “Nobody marries art. We always do violence to it,” Degas. In any case, I don’t expect to be saved from my personal limbo by the art evaluation group. Cortázar’s Rayuela is exactly that: days spent with books we want to read and paintings we like to admire. Nights with supposedly interesting and supposedly eccentric people. And all just to justify our absence from the international jet set.
ResponderExcluirK: Don’t you notice, Letícia. Etienne and I are interested in art to the point of almost being obsessed. He, for the creative process itself, in which he is immersed. And I, still stuck in the philosophy of its whys and wherefores. Sparking the relationship between art and drugs (here, K held up a sketch of a lizard’s head that seemed to have been done in a hurry, and continued): The orientalizing and spiritual properties of hashish, huh?, all subject to the mechanism of supply and demand. How to make the price of a lizard head skyrocket?
MODY: As a Fine Arts student, I have to admit that the commercialization of art has practically suppressed the possibilities of academic and formal justice based on specialized criticism. It is the “scent of scandal”, the ability to attract attention and monopolize the sensationalist commentary of the media that matters.
ResponderExcluirK: LOL! Still too avant-garde to put a price on one’s own paintings, huh?
MODY: I’ve been thinking about an exhibition.
K: Impulsive. Doesn’t fit into any defined category.
MODY: K is very perceptive when it comes to art, and also an insufferable bore. I’m part of the select group of people who “tolerate” him.
K: Disdainful. It’s not easy to enter the dominant system in the art world with paintings that don’t sell. Not even criticism has a place in events where people only go to be seen. In Brazil, such events don’t even exist. Why not turn art into a mere pastime and give up on creative adaptation to polite society altogether? Against the painter who 1- becomes fashionable and 2- becomes a good investment, The risky business of being a full-time artist.
Continue in one minute
ExcluirMODY: I cannot deny that, in a way, all my existential difficulties at the moment derive directly from the decision to be one. And I need a press release about myself.
ResponderExcluirK: I remain blasé about this. The touch that turns everything into gold, from one moment to the next, is a publicity chimera directed by consolidated investors. And this is the best justification to appease the feeling of failure. Justification that seems to strengthen, hour after hour, our incredible capacity to do nothing. To write poetry and be poor, to become an archimandrite of erudite exegesis on NOTHING. The long-awaited footnote ahead of its time, without any consideration for the artist's social image.
At that point, the meeting had already become insipid --- there was no second wind for that, after K dryly sentenced:
---In that book about the screen trade, Ken Follet puts the following sentence in the mouth of a show business thief: ‘’Privilege breeds boredom, and boredom breeds empty people like us’’ ----, which provoked a certain general, unspoken dissatisfaction.
Some time later, K told me at the airport that his painter friend had committed suicide. I told him:
ResponderExcluir---My God, he was so young. Were you shocked? ---
--- Shocked is not the word. Maybe some derived anxiety, the suspicious feeling of walking on the edge of the same precipice. Nothing too important ---
--- He lacked serenity, right? ---
--- Very impulsive, without a doubt. A tragedy ---
--- Not at all explicit about his own intentions? ---
--- “Gigantic expansion ad usum Homo sapiens of certain Zen slaps”, to stick with Hopscotch. I say: suicide is a complete act, which is self-sufficient and unfathomable. We should not tarnish it with psychoanalysis, it is cowardice ---
--Are you going to the Jaraguá party on Friday? ---
ResponderExcluir--- Of course I am ---
--- Jaque told me she likes you ---
--- Seriously? She told you that? ---
--- She did ---
--- Okay, I guess I won't commit suicide then. At least for now ---
--- Wise decision! ---
--- Come on, what about Lidiane? Didn't she tell you anything like that? ---
--- Aaaaahhhhhh my God! --
End LETÍCIA
ResponderExcluir