M. THE PREGNANT, Belo Horizonte, 2002
I had just discovered that I had been pregnant for two weeks with a French boy who played the piano and studied physics at the same university (UFMG) where I was doing my master's degree in literature, and who earned a living teaching at public schools in the neighborhood where I lived with my family, Santa Luzia. I also did proofreading work for several people – I reviewed all types of academic texts: monographs, theses and articles – until one day, to my surprise, a lady who worked with indigenous government issues (where I had worked before) handed me a package full of loose papers and said:
--- These are literary texts and poems by a 17-year-old nephew of mine. I promised him that I would ask someone specialized to read, review and help him organize a book. I will pay for the service, but as soon as you finish analyzing the material, I would like you to go to his house and, with some tact, explain to him that no one publishes a book at 17.
I got home and took the pile of writings out of the package. The first page read “SUBSINOSE,” followed by one of the most absurdly unintelligible pieces of prose I’ve ever read in my life. The boy, however, seemed to suffer from some kind of exalted faith in that poetic and philosophical confusion I was reading, as it flowed out in a torrent over almost two hundred pages, and gave me the impression of something written in a feverish state of delirium and urgency; other times, I felt like someone writing in a burning room, and I began to feel a certain dread at the thought of having to go to that place and encounter that tormented mind. I had no doubt that what I would find in that apartment in Jaraguá, in Pampulha, was a young man on drugs, confused and lost in some kind of permanent schizophrenic hallucination.
That wasn't exactly what happened. It was undeniable that he was using some kind of drug, but besides being extremely handsome, he was also (or so it seemed to me at first) extremely calm, attentive and polite. I was surprised to learn that he lived alone in that two-story apartment with an outdoor area in that semi-detached village where most of the residents were (surprise!) from the Air Force, including a sergeant with whom, upon arrival, I thought I saw him flirting, not very likely to rationally admit the hypothesis. She was strictly uniformed, blonde and strong, and greeted us with a booming voice quite appropriate to her uniform and rank. She was pretty, though. Anyway, he invited me in and got a pot of coffee and his cigarettes before we went up to the "room" where he "worked."
--- Have you graduated yet, K?
ResponderExcluir--- No.
--- Are you in your last year?
--- No. I'm taking a supplementary course.
--- And do you work?
--- I work in a bakery nearby, making bread.
--- Bread?
--- Yes, and other things.
--- And after work, let me guess, you read and write these things. Right?
--- These things were written a long time ago. It's been years since I wrote them, I just read them.
--- Years? But you're only seventeen!
--- They were written until I was fifteen, in Salvador. Then I had to stop.
--- Why?
--- Because I started swimming three or four thousand meters a day at the club where I trained, to become an athlete.
--- And did you become one?
--- I won two silver medals, in a competition with those who were already federated. And then I gave up. I started working as an office boy at UFBA with the director of my father's department, who taught social sciences there. I met some older, bohemian people, enrolled in a film script course and started drinking and smoking too much. I stopped training. A little later I left Salvador.
-- Did you come here, Belo Horizonte?
ResponderExcluir---No. I mean, first I went to live with my grandfather for a while, in Santos Dumont, in Zona da Mata. My grandmother had just passed away.
---Anyway, so there are texts here that you wrote when you were thirteen, fourteen, right?
---Right.
---I noticed that you frequently cite some authors that I am only reading today, at twenty-six, for my master's degree. Nietzsche. Artaud. Lautreamont. Rimbaud. Don't you feel confused sometimes?
---No.
---And do you really want to publish a book?
---I do.
---And are you going to pay for it out of your own pocket?
---No.
---How are you going to publish the book then?
---I just said that I want to publish it. I didn't say that I could. What did you think?
---There are very obscure things, difficult even to understand. For example, what is SUBSYNOSIS? And what is EMA?
Here, he, who until then had shown himself to be a perfectly normal, coherent and balanced human being, burst into a fit of laughter that, at first, seemed to me to some extent understandable, but as I realized that he had been secretly laughing at me like that the whole time we were talking, I became distressed. Then he said:
--- SUBSINOSE is the composition technique I invented, which consists of finding the hidden text beneath any text, not just literary, crossing out words and pieces of words, entire sentences, when necessary, until the great enigma emerges, like a monster.
ResponderExcluir--- Enigma? What enigma?
--- EMA, he said, and started laughing again in that strange way.
--- So EMA is like God to you? A hidden God that inhabits all texts?
--- No. EMA was the word that took over the first text I submitted to the SUBSINOSE technique. It was a text about CIN-EMA, you see? I crossed out CIN and then the entity EMA emerged, which presides over SUBSINOSE. The EMATOGRAPHIC MANIFESTO is there in the package.
He laughed and laughed.
Continue in one minute
ResponderExcluirShortly after, he did something that seemed surreal to me. He took a bottle of liqueur 43 from a nightstand and asked me to try it, filling a small crystal glass. I loved it, you know. And the coffee was wonderful. Then he said he thought I was very pretty and took my hand and before I knew it I was in his bed moaning loudly.
ResponderExcluirLater that same day, he took me to the bus stop and I told him I was pregnant. It was strange, he seemed indifferent to me. He looked at my belly, even after he had already seen me naked, and simply said:
--- It doesn't look like it. I want to see you again.
--- I'm going to have the baby, even if the father doesn't want to be with me.
--- And do you want to be with the child's father? Does he have money?
-- I really wanted to. They're a rich family from Europe. But he doesn't want to hear about me. He asked me to have the baby removed. He said he'd pay for the abortion. It was horrible.
ResponderExcluir--- Your bus. Isn't that the one over there?
--- That's him. Bye.
--- Bye.
In fact: I don’t want to sound mysterious, but I got the impression that he had made the bus appear with the power of his mind as soon as I started telling my “story,” because it still had half an hour to go. In a way, I went home spellbound. He was a little boy, very young, and yet he seemed to be controlling my thoughts from the first minute we met. Some time later, he would tell me that he had decided to use our relationship to “spy on himself” and “accumulate energy,” since he had been smoking, drinking, and taking drugs nonstop for a long time. When he mentioned Mody (a student of Fine Arts at UFMG who became famous for his paintings when he committed suicide by jumping out of the window of his parents’ house) and said that he belonged to that circle of artists, I understood that he was serious. And in fact, I noticed that as we met, and my belly grew, his face appeared increasingly “clean,” and his body grew stronger too. It was the first time I heard him pronounce the name Carlos Castaneda.
ResponderExcluirContinue in one minute
ExcluirOur relationship was wonderful at first, until I had my baby bump. He would always take me to restaurants on Isabel Bueno and to Lucas' cantina in Maleta. He had a salary and allowances. His family owned farms in Bahia. I would always sleep in his apartment, and whenever we visited one of his relatives in the city, he would introduce me as his fiancée and, this part was obscure, he seemed to make a point of saying that I was pregnant by someone else, that the father was a French physicist from a rich family. He would say this and stare seriously at people's shocked faces, extracting some kind of sinister comic pleasure from the situation. His relatives were really shocked, because of his age. Sometimes he would even quote the Bible. When we got home, or even on the street, he would laugh again in that strange way.
ResponderExcluirHis collection of rare vinyl records was huge, and he once confessed that he resold the most valuable ones to “suckers” for a fortune. He once took me to an underground cave in the city center, near Santos Dumont or Paraná Street, where, through orange crates full of old vinyl records, you could enter a dirty corridor, at the end of which was a huge bar, full of illegal gaming machines and horrible prostitutes. And his private library, made up (as I later learned) almost entirely of books stolen from friends and relatives, was incredible at the time. And I noticed that when he took the books from my master’s degree to read, I always had to rescue them from some hidden place on his bookshelf.
ResponderExcluirMy family really liked him. They thought it was very noble of him to date me publicly even though he knew I was pregnant with someone else. My father was an alcoholic ex-truck driver and my mother was a seamstress. Our house in Santa Luzia was large, although simple, and he would always drink until late, talking to my father and my younger sister in the backyard, next to the barbecue. I think it was only when my belly really showed that I realized that he not only had other girlfriends, but, in a discreet and cunning way, he was hitting on all my friends. Only God knows which of them he slept with or kissed while I was in the last months of pregnancy. There was a night when (I remember well) a tall, dark-haired friend of mine asked to sleep with us at his house, because it was close to the university, and she needed to be there early, and right after I retired sleepily to the second floor, carrying that big belly, between sleep and wakefulness, I heard those two laughing and glasses clinking and then the noise of the sofa and something like muffled moans coming from downstairs and I didn't have the strength to go and call him and in the toilet I peed the next day the condom floating all cum and neither he nor she was home early in the morning and the following week the same thing with Irene who was my best friend only ---------------------------------------
ResponderExcluirBut I don't really know what happened to this one because when she was a child she lived on the same street in the neighborhood as me, but then she married an old man who was well-established in the state administration and moved to a fancy apartment in Serra and then she was always going in and out of a fancy car, like a cocktail party here, an expensive restaurant there and those social and political events and those expensive clothes, you know I even trembled the day she came to meet K there in Pampulha and where I was living now he immediately set his eyes on her gym ass and I didn't feel K reduced to that vague anarchist ideal of looking without realizing Come on K it's already too late I'm so sleepy I said and she Wait a minute I loved this place and at the same time projecting herself and thinking about fitting into some kind of puzzle where such a young and happy boy and me and her and the mirror would fog up a lot after all the scandal of scandals soon crushed in a sneaky night and so many other absurd things so many mistakes I know it's not a matter of numbers the absurd thing is waking up in the morning pregnant and seeing K talking through the window and leaving that same afternoon for the intensive course for the supplementary course with that little girl from Patos de Minas from the building next door another test that I won't mention Kelly --------------------------------------------------
ResponderExcluirKelly was his age, you know, and in a hedonistic sense I could smell the no coincidence of those little dog friends who broke the chain without a story there is no boyish man advancing to a certain coefficient of love or a kind of daily matrimonial moss totally imperfect pregnant with another do you believe in a supra-reality that's what happened he was really very young and when Juquinha was born we were no longer madly in love and he knew I felt him slipping away there were strange things one morning he was pushing the baby carriage to the airport square in front of those stories of sheets and hair of lobby ladies he knew from before he had worked there and at the check-in counter inside he would pass by laughing at them and pointing to the carriage we are talking about the same thing I ask I have to be fair in my reserve then I would black out for a moment and suddenly those memories would come back all those beers in the central market eating liver with onions and okra with vinyls under my arm in front of the cages of wild animals and then he said I have to change one day I was very close to his face I've talked about him since then--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ResponderExcluirI spoke about him since then you have changed a lot you have no idea he said no I have to change cities while I spoke you see a lot of things in the air capturing disguises appearances drawing and observing he only said this the temperature of the body speaking half inwardly left me aside moving all the silence in the world through the lips before that accumulation of fragments of moments in trance crystallized in a dry goodbye as if suddenly there was another city in the absolute perspective of other girls entering the coherence of a totally new state of things I remember that I was only within a certain limit until he finally left and the limit expanded to the infinity of the ubiquitous and total understanding of the end with all its reasons of age associated with a kaleidoscope very difficult to understand of course he went to try the roman comique somewhere else making me obligatorily an accomplice of his madness beneath the conventional plot also that other esoteric direction
ResponderExcluirM. THE PREGNANT end here
ResponderExcluir