PIRATE FRAGMENT 7

I returned from the Xingú River over a year ago, and now I feel like Joana wants to have a long conversation with me, as long as a crossing. However, all I can focus on are the items on the pharmacy shelf: thermoses, aftershave, aspirin, anti-allergy medications, disposable diapers. What an antiseptic world the pharmacies have compared to the Xingú!

I also realize that my adaptation to the civilized world hasn't been anything dramatic this time: Real Girl Liquid Make-Up, Plenamins, nail polish remover, scented exfoliators.

"What do you want to know, anyway?" I asked her.

"I want to know to what extent you'll continue to be contaminated by the passions of aesthetic modernism, now that you've calmed down in the city," she said.

"I seem like a blasé guy in the city, right? 'Spoiled with an overdose of sensational experiences,' as Dr. Behrens would say in Magic Mountain. 'If I don't get some exotic novelty every day,' I blame the world, life, the age of spiritual hardship, and I take refuge in cursed literature."

"Ascetic and presentist description wouldn't solve your problem anyway. You have to strain your eyes, in your case, or even the jungle becomes tedious. Your macabre desire to gratuitously afflict readers is an outdated surrealist remnant. With the perception of the body, in your stories, however, all that mystical broth of occultism reappears disguised as Adamic novelty."

"Easier to swallow than raw esotericism, with its ascended masters, swords of light, and prophecies. Of course, I see in this symptoms of people who do not value their own intellect, the cold testimony of sober perception, and who lower themselves to the level of the most vulgar superstition."

She had a point. My habit of meditating, starting at seven, kept me away from drugs, but it kept me awake around two in the morning every night, dragging her out of bed to keep me company, vigilant, as if I'd just disembarked from an expedition to the North Pole—stumbling and slamming doors—I'd make a strong coffee, light my pipe, and sit in the living room, staring at her tormented, insomniac face. Usually, I'd talk enthusiastically about the book I wanted to write, with a gold rush of only three years in mind, and what I'd do when it ran out.

"When you marry a swindler," she'd whisper, "try to keep him in suspense as long as possible. Turn him into a formless substance, malleable and susceptible to all sorts of idiotic impulses." And keep to yourself the axis and the will to make it move forward.

I looked down and saw her bony ankle, excessively white, with greenish veins on her foot. Her red-painted toenails seemed to taste good, like a school locker room and strawberries and cream.

"Anyway, tomorrow's a holiday. What are we going to do?" I asked.

I longed now, more than anything, for a cool, bourgeois stability without any scares. Swimming in the ocean and meeting rich people. The truth is, we didn't have much to talk about—I'd barely gotten married, and my secret thought was already: get rid of it, let go, quickly reach the ultimate dimension of the relationship.

"Your relationship with life is the same as that of a guy in an open field with a storm, K," she said.

Sudden emptiness of the air. Yeah!

"Ready and in action as soon as possible, but for nothing. Do you want the names of the characters? Hahahahaha!"

"No, because I already know they haven't written, nor will they write, any important manifesto."

I escaped and I'm not coming back, Joana!

She remained motionless, seemingly not breathing.

There were also a lot of strange rumors circulating in the media, that daily anxiety about the future of the country and the world.

Too much talk for too little real action? Always, it seems to me.

"I think we should seek, through money, an atmosphere of miraculous cures on the beach and quick, functional fixes for life situations that threaten to become complex overnight," I said.

"Surely sponsored by a cosmic organism that doesn't exist: GOD!" she said.

"I thought you'd been meditating enough to know that---"

"That's not God."

"They are uncreated lights and resonances. It's a mystery of consciousness."

"It doesn't explain much like that."

"Words don't explain anything. What explains is meditation itself, and that's it."

And after a few drinks:

"Above all, shrimp, succulent platters of shrimp, of all kinds, with which, in the restaurant, we feign a silent and enlightened opposition to everything that isn't very easy in politics," I said.

"And in fact, the more we drink, the more silent we become in this 'opposition,' to the point where people doubt its very existence," she said.

"Fermenting, right? Say this when someone queasy questions the courage of our commitment and our project."

"Chaos: a precondition for the democratic experience."