TIAGO, Belo Horizonte, 2000
First of all, I would like to say that I only found out that I had a cousin from Bahia when an uncle of mine, named Ucello, whom I liked a lot, invited me to visit him in Salvador, where he was living at the time. My cousin, K, who was about three years younger than me, who was seventeen at the time, spent the whole day hanging out with some girlfriends and swimming thousands of meters a day at the Bahia Athletic Association. In the first few days (I stayed for about twenty, at their house, in Rio Vermelho), he barely noticed my presence, and I spent the whole day by the pool in their condominium, listening to music on my headphones while high on marijuana. Then the weekend came and he took me (at his father's request) to Piatã beach, where the owner of the beach shack treated me like a son. He made me swim to a rock shaped like an Indian's face, far from the sand, not caring much about the fact that I thought I was drowning all the time. On the way back (we hadn't talked at all until then) he congratulated me vaguely and seemed more open to conversation. We ordered a beer and I asked him if he liked rock music. He said:
--- No ---
--- What do you listen to? ---
--- Classical music ---
--- Only? ---
--- I don't listen to much music. I read a lot ---
--- What do you read? ---
---Nietzsche and Rimbaud ---
--- Your mother said you write ---
--- I write ---
--- What? ---
--- Poems ---
--- About what? ---
--- Nietzsche and Rimbaud ---
--- Hahahahahahahahaha! Jim Morrison also wrote poems about Nietzsche and Rimbaud ---
--- Who? ---
--- Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors ---
--- I don't know ---
--- I'll give you a CD as a gift ---
--- Okay ---
The next day, my morale with him seemed to have improved. He wanted to go to a store to buy more of the band's CDs. That's when I asked him if he had ever smoked marijuana and he admitted that he had never. So we smoked. It was frustrating for him, it had no effect at all.
ResponderExcluirHowever, months later, we met again in Santos Dumont, MG, during Carnival, and he only listened to The Doors and always had his own supply of marijuana. He picked up the neighbor of our grandparents' house on the first day and would only show up on the street at dawn, in a trance, saying that he wanted to smoke some later.
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ExcluirAlmost a year later, he moved to Belo Horizonte, almost at the same time as I did, and then a kind of collaboration began in the artistic field, because the music we listened to was only classical jazz and the intellectual field in which we conducted our investigations was that of radical poetic license. I don't know how long it took for the words SUBSINOSE and EMA to take center stage not in everything we wrote, but in everything we experienced. The confusion of texts was so great that no one could tell who had written what anymore. I was studying advertising at a private college and my relationship with concrete poetry was toxic, to the point of crossing out anything from a text that wasn't a noun. The Ematographic Manifesto, however, seems to have been written by me, while K spoke uninterruptedly to the sound of some Coltranesque syncopation --- it seemed that the text, once subsynotically violated, was saying exactly the same thing as he was. I read and reread the ‘’final result’’, until I couldn’t resist and asked him one day:
ResponderExcluir--- And what is EMA, after all? ---
ResponderExcluir--- Well, you wrote this ---
--- I did just what you suggested. I crossed out the dead weight, and lightened the burden of the texts. I freed, freed the text from the egomaniacal pedantry of the original author ---
--- And what was left was EMA. THE NAGUAL ---
--- NAGUAL? What is the NAGUAL ---
--- EMA ---
--- I don't understand ---
--- So I'll show you what it is ---
--- What time is it? ---
--- Six thirty-five ---
--- So? ---
--- Let's go ---
It's not exactly possible to describe what happened that night, but I'll try to be as objective as possible, with a very unpromising effort of memory.
First of all, I must say that when we arrived in Belo Horizonte, I found myself in a kind of limbo. I clung to the rave-goers from my college and the rest of the time I was in the void of existence. K didn't, he had a teenage social life, derived from the school where he studied. All of this that I'm going to describe happened before he started working at Pampulha Airport.
ResponderExcluirI can't say exactly where we got off, I just know that we walked for kilometers in silence, going up, down and down streets that I had never seen in my life, until, to my relief, we arrived at Praça da Liberdade, and we continued walking around the area. That's when K, perfectly silent until then, drew my attention to a crowded, very fancy-looking bar-restaurant and seemed willing to go in and sit down.
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ExcluirI had never seen such beautiful women in my life. And I thought it was absurd the way K, a seventeen-year-old brat, entered the establishment and with an unmistakable air of a boss, asked for a table for “four” and a very expensive craft beer (he wasn’t even old enough to drink on the street) --- mind you, we had almost no money, you know? Or we had some, but not for that. Then, K turned to me, sitting across from him at the table, and finally said:
ResponderExcluir--- Tell me everything about the agency, FERNANDO! ---
--- What? --- I asked
--- Ssssssssshhhhhhh --- he did it again, discreetly
So, I don't know what happened. I started talking frantically. I felt like an impostor, at first. But then I noticed that with each sentence I said, several women turned to look at us. Many were standing, inside and outside the bar, which was getting more and more crowded. And every time the tape of my performance ended, K would say something specific that had the power to make me talk nonstop again. Suddenly, he got up and walked over to some girls leaning against the bar and invited them to sit at our table. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. In the blink of an eye, there were not two, but several beautiful girls (some much older than us) sitting at our table, making all kinds of conversations, while K threw more and more fuel into the conversation, inspiring me with an embarrassing amount of lies to stretch the rope of that delirium even further. We were about three hours of immersion in that performance, until, seemingly out of nowhere, K asked for the bill and said we had to leave. In the end, we only drank three beers, the rest we sipped from the drinks of those girls, who protested our sudden departure.
ResponderExcluir---Damn man, what is this place? You never told me about it!---I said to him, on the street.
---I've never seen this place in my life. In fact, I've never been to this part of town---
---What? What do you mean?---
And he insisted again:
ResponderExcluir--- Ssssssssshhhhhhh --- as we walked along the outskirts of Praça da Liberdade, after ten o'clock at night.
That was when the second serious act of the night happened. We were walking side by side, along the sidewalk, when three brutes with big guns and the look of criminals appeared out of the darkness and flew at me. Through the gap between their legs, on the ground, I could see K running full speed about twenty meters away from where I was lying, being punched and kicked, while they searched my pockets. Luckily for me, K was brave and came back and stopped some distance away from them, offering his wallet. They told him to throw it forward. K did. The crazy guy opened his wallet, took out a twenty and dropped K's wallet on the ground, the documents scattered across the ground and they disappeared into the darkness of a corner.
After I recovered from the shock, we started walking again and K bent down, took a hundred dollar bill out of his sock and said:
--- We need to eat something ---
And we started again on that journey through strange streets in the city center. At one point I couldn't resist and asked him:
ResponderExcluir--- If we had money, why didn't we stay at that bar? ---
And he just answered:
--- Sssssssshhhhhhh ---
It was hard that way. Almost eleven at night, we bought a beer from a guy's cooler, I don't know where, and went into a pizzeria. We ate in silence and, right at the exit, a sinister-looking man, almost a beggar, stuck up behind us. K remained silent, until, when asked by the man what his name was, he answered:
--- GARCIA --- and started speaking only in Spanish to us.
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ExcluirThe man's behavior changed immediately when he "realized" that K was a "foreigner." He started talking about a bunch of places he knew where "parties were being held at that very moment," and where we could "easily find women." I confess that my spine froze when the guy invited us to go down through a small door to an underground cubicle near Santos Dumont or Paraná Street, who knows where that was. The fact is that, after going through another door, we walked a few meters down a dark corridor and, suddenly, we came face to face with a saloon where deafening music stirred up an indiscernible human confusion completely immersed in red light. There were an incalculable number of women (of all types, shapes, sizes and ages) serving or just dancing around the tables and slot machines, most of them occupied by the most evil-looking guys I've ever seen in my life.
ResponderExcluirK bought a beer for our ‘’guide’’ and invited him to sit at a table with us.
--- Just be careful not to mess with other people’s women --- the guy said, when he saw K almost put his hand on the hip of a girl who passed by smiling at him.
Most of the customers there (I had no doubts at the time) must have had revolvers on their belts.
ResponderExcluirSometimes, two brunettes sat at our table and each one fought with someone, while the guide chatted with acquaintances in a corner. I can't say how long that all lasted. The fact is that, when the guide spoke to us again, I was completely drunk, having difficulty even speaking, and even then my spine froze again. He said:
--- You better get out of here fast. The weather is going to turn for the worse for you. I WARNED YOU! ---
And looking back, I noticed some guys scratching their waists while staring at me and K. This time, I was the one who took the initiative, because K (apparently already crazy) seemed ready to fight violently with that rough crowd, which I considered suicide. I stood up and K was forced to pay the bill, protesting, and in an instant we were back on the street.
It was almost three in the morning, and I could barely stand up. With great effort, we managed to reach Avenida Afonso Pena, somewhere near the Municipal Park, and K said he urgently needed to pee. I said that it was a bad idea to go out on the street, because a police officer might show up. He laughed at my concern, but he held his tongue anyway. Until, to my surprise, we passed in front of the reception of the Oton Palace, which was completely empty at that hour. He entered there quite naturally and walked to the elevator, as if he were just another guest. I followed his steps, and we stopped on the fifth floor. There was no bathroom. Then he stopped under a painting that looked like an imitation of Tarsila do Amaral and poured an unreal amount of pee on the wall, until a swampy puddle formed at his feet, on the carpet. After he finished, he simply said:
ResponderExcluir--- I need to smoke a cigarette, now --- and walked calmly to a very pretty balcony at the end of the hallway. He sat down on an upholstered chair and massaged his feet. He smoked. Total silence.
When we got back to Afonso Pena, he noticed that I hadn't said anything for a long time, and that I was falling against the iron doors of the store every two minutes, I was so drunk. The last time, he had to help me get up from the floor. He was laughing so much that I started to get irritated by it.
-- You didn't look so broken when you ran out of that bar. A saloon at the bottom of a red lake, huh? And now, them again! --- K said
ResponderExcluir--- Who them, for the love of God??? --- I asked, going from an alcoholic coma to a stone-like lucidity in an instant.
--- That --- K said, pointing to three figures that were walking toward us from about ten meters away
--- The robbers! --- I got exasperated
--- Those aren't robbers --- K said
--- What are they then? ---
--- The bus! RUN!!! --- he suddenly shouted, as the bus passed like a rocket next to my ear. I almost went deaf. I didn't have time to look. K was running at a fast pace about fifty meters ahead of me, while I, with an inexplicable effort, seemed to glide without the help of my legs towards the visual spot within which I expected to find, at the end, K and the bus.
I confess that this part is very difficult for me. I don't remember what happened. I don't even remember getting on or catching the bus. I only remember waking up in my room, alone, without any causal chain coming to my aid in organizing the memories of the previous night. So, recapitulating everything from the beginning, I understood that what K meant was that EMA was That, the NAGUAL.
ResponderExcluirSome time later, I started working in a bakery in the neighborhood almost at the same time that K was working at Pampulha Airport. The encounters decreased a lot.
We hardly saw each other. Until one Sunday afternoon, after leaving the movies with my girlfriend and parting ways at the bus stop, I ran into K on Afonso Pena again. I asked him if he had a joint he could get me and he said he could solve the problem. Then he stopped in front of the door of a residential building and invited me in, without further explanation. The doorman greeted him as if he had known him for a long time. We went up in a dilapidated elevator to the eighth floor, he took a key from his pocket and opened the door to a microscopic studio apartment, where there was only a huge suitcase and a worrying amount of bricks of plasticized marijuana stacked against the wall.
ResponderExcluir--- Damn. I just wanted a joint, bro ---
--- Help yourself ---
--- I didn't know you had a room here ---
-- It's not mine. It belongs to a friend from the airport. He uses the property for logistics. You know, it's tough to carry stuff from Pampulha to the city center ---
ResponderExcluir--- Damn! ---
As we were leaving, a cross-eyed girl who was entering the kitchenette in front came to greet K with a kiss on the mouth. He thought for a moment and said:
--- I think I'll stay here today. See you later! ---
TIAGO end
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