STRANGERS YET INTIMATE (other text from 2013 that s resume a very clear initial appearance of Beatriz; in these time, all my writtings was like a static painting by very charged collor that suddenly begin to move and talk like a hell)
Hence the careful elaboration of multiple, sometimes intersecting, viewpoints, forcing the reader to oscillate between themselves and the characters, between some characters and others, between one plot and another, constructing a multiple and prismatic reflexivity within this specular medium. In no way, in the operating system of Faulkner's writing, as in that of the Romantics, is one side of a contradictory construction discarded in favor of a unity of meaning. The sum of all meanings prevails, the coexistence of opposites, as the narrative developed here, in so many of its instances, enacts, with its horizon the infinite reflexivity that is also a property of the fragment, "which is not merely one among other possible forms of expression, but the form of expression par excellence, necessary, since it is the form conscious of the limits of the presentation of the whole."
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STRANGERS YET INTIMATE 2013
ResponderExcluirAs I got to work setting up the poolside tables and single-handedly cleaning up all the mess left behind by thirty-odd guests with hyperactive throats and intellects, I noticed everyone scurrying into the inn or their own rooms, most of them already a bit tipsy, uninterested in what Saturday night might offer them beyond the confines of that beach and house. The island itself didn't have much urban appeal, except for the locals walking monotonously along the boardwalk of the district's shopping center until ten or eleven at night. The last time I entered the inn, to get a floor cloth, I noticed Carmen and the other girls trying to prepare a grilled fish in the kitchen with eight hands. There was still a good deal of work to do when, leaving the kitchen, I noticed her sitting alone in the wicker chair on the oceanfront veranda. With a glass of gin in her hand, she stared out at the silent darkness of the beach through the palapas and coconut trees in front of the illuminated pool. She had the compact serenity of a tree. Her blond hair, tanned skin, and blue-gray eyes were a single hue on the shadowy balcony.
As soon as she noticed me looking at her from inside the kiosk, she moved imperceptibly with a slight haste and smiled at me with a vague air, as if she had just considered a possibility of something abstract and, upon seeing me there, promptly abandoned the idea. I continued to look at her inquisitively, and the small, imperceptible reactions of her movements gained a swiftness of apprehension. "What is it?" she asked from there. I didn't answer. I just smiled, looking down, and lit a cigarette. Her eyes now showed a harder, unusual shine. Perhaps she had been drinking and thinking too much; from a distance, I could already sense an unforeseen factor acting on her, an unusual chemical interfering with her body. When I didn't respond and remained impassive within the semi-darkness of the kiosk, smoking with a smile partially camouflaged by shadows, she silently retreated to her initial position of a motionless tree. She seemed amusedly annoyed that, having sensed from an unexpected angle the proclaimed force of my inquisitive gaze, she had also been unexpectedly shy about her own thoughts or betrayed a sign of weakness. At night, under the moonlight, her amorphous mood swings were less threatening, but always worthy of some caution.
ResponderExcluirMy smile had frankly left her curious, and my eyes, which she had momentarily stared at from a distance, reflected, in the complete absence of rational reflection, the aluminum, the wind, and the black sky of great, silent provocations. She knew I lived in permanent exile up there, in the metallic vastness above the all-too-human and sentimental clouds. Her sudden manner had been a provocation, too, or a counter-provocation, seeking to diminish the importance of mine with a sudden dowry of virginal veils, concealing the true contents of her mind from me. That immediately restored her lightness. Our relationship was like a religion made of unstable fictions. I finished smoking and went over to talk to her. As soon as I stepped onto the balcony, I said: "There's nothing else to do here but be happy with each passing day (...)" She laughed vaguely. I was right: she had drunk too much and was enveloped in a deeply alcoholic haze. ---What were you thinking before you saw me there at the kiosk(?)---, I asked. She sobbed like a little girl before speaking and I couldn't resist the urge to grab her hair and offer to go to the kitchen for a glass of water.
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ResponderExcluir"Just a lame excuse to go see Carmen; she and the other girls are making dinner. I told the guests that Saturday night here was every man for himself; I didn't even think to go to the market to buy groceries. There was only a bunch of frozen fish in the freezer." "Oh," she said, placing the glass on the table next to her. She put her feet up on the chair and hugged her knees to her breasts like a teenager at a campsite. I continued to touch her hair and asked again, "What were you thinking about? You looked intense from a distance." "Oh," she hesitated, a little annoyed, and replied, "Oh my, you're like a premonitory bird of prey; you can't think with impunity around here anymore. I was thinking about a lot of things I never told you." "Oh," she confessed, laughing a different kind of laugh, throwing her arms through mine and continuing, "I love your hands." "Oh, I sobbed again." ----You told me that the other day(.) I'll go inside and get you a glass of water and then you can tell me all those things you never told me, okay(?!) ---, I said and headed to the kitchen,
and headed to the kitchen, where I found a small Roman carnival around the industrial stove: Carmen, the other three girls, Arthur and Susana, Juan and Vitória, and a pale, tall, and skeletal young man whom I identified with some effort as the rich, lay cyberpunk junkie simply seeking help to kick drugs. Saulo, his name. The men stood side by side against the refrigerator door, holding glasses of beer. Around the industrial stove, the trio of girls oversaw the preparation of a veritable school of fish, quartered on the board, seasoned and arranged in fillet steaks with a green sauce on top. My first impression was that they were exotic and exaggeratedly beautiful, slightly exuberant among the others, friendly and repetitive at the same time, as if they were always alone and tied to each other, trying to demonstrate a gregarious spirit for six, when in fact there were only three of them and that last quality they simply lacked. But it also seemed to me that they would become rapidly attractive after the second or third drink of something. Together they brought with them a style, something like a distracted and self-sufficient kindness that the other women there found extremely charming and tried unsuccessfully to imitate. They were amused as they drank and better able to bear the excessive kindness with which they were treated by the other guests.
ResponderExcluirI excused myself from the three men and opened the refrigerator door to get the bottle of water. They were laughing at something Arthur had said before I entered: his laugh was still that unnerving snarl, a startling facial inversion that turned his eyes into narrow slits and distorted his face like the roar on the face of a lion in an Assyrian bas-relief. Carmen, for her part, even though very young, felt that her sex gave her the right to approach and interact naturally with the girls around the stove. She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye as soon as I entered the kitchen and was surprised by how quickly and promptly I filled her glass with water and left. She must have known by then that the only person left out there was her, her newest idol. And I don't rule out the possibility that she felt a childish pang of jealousy... I mean, of her, not of me. It remains to say that Susana and Vitória seemed completely drunk and giggly to me, and that I was there for too little time to notice more than that. I returned to the balcony and she continued to stare at the dark beach fixedly with her arms around her knees. --- So(?) ---, I said, --- You love my hands(.) Now, tell me everything else(.) ---, she took the glass of water from my hand and drank it in one gulp.
ResponderExcluir--- You always had that casual, unaffected air, as if you were the most secure and complacent of men, always(.) I don't really know why I neglected to tell you all these things: for example, that I was still married and sleeping with my husband when we started seeing each other(.) I mean: all that time, you know... I was with him and with you at the same time(.) ---, she confessed, but I didn't feel any guilt in the slightly drunken tone of her voice, even though we had never made any kind of commitment until today. ---- Well, it's strange that you're only telling me now(.) But what difference could it make if we never promised each other anything(?) ---, I pondered neutrally, with the sober air of someone who wasn't feeling particularly affected by her revelation. --- I don't know, I think I was unconsciously trying to "erase my personal history", like in Castaneda(.) Maybe it was all a bit vulgar(.) ---, now she spoke as if trying to remove from us both that detestable air of gossips whispering among themselves and highlight the perspective that we were two loving wizards who never owed each other anything. --- Never mind, it's over(...) --- I said disinterestedly
ResponderExcluirand she retorted: "You're the kind of man women like to experiment with for free. Besides, you've lived with several women and ended up losing that irritating anguish of men who are too obedient to the rules of the social circuit, that constant low energy of those who are constantly defending their social image among others...." I interrupted her attempt at a complimentary comment before it delved into the shadows of my obvious antisocial defects and she concluded by saying I was just a lost soul armed with carnal voluptuousness. I asked: "Were you afraid I'd do something to let him know about us? Do you think he would have come to me with a revolver, for example...." Vibrating circles, as thin as clock springs, oscillated on the surface of the gin in her glass. I laughed, thinking that an unexpected and new noir poetry had now emerged in that woman's eyes. ----Of course not, how silly of you(!) But if he had presented me with some proof, I think I would have told him about you(.) He hardly ever looked for me in bed anymore, it was like a ship with a cracked hull slowly sinking in the sea of an extinct marriage(.) Whenever I tried to provoke some reaction of jealousy in him, he was so sadly tactless and ironic that I ended up feeling hurt and depressed(.)
ResponderExcluirWhen I met you at that party, I immediately felt that I was in front of a future sexual partner(.) I calculated everything: that you were young and didn't have much money, that you were in excellent health and had few human ties, that you lived far from your family or didn't even have one, that you probably wandered the world aimlessly like a lonely gypsy, indifferent to the harshness of life around you(...) That's why I soon became your friend, asked for your cell phone number and asked where you were staying(.) It's a feminine flaw, trying to sexualize friendship so quickly(.) ---, she said and looked at me with a hint of water shining in her eyes. --- No way, please keep sexualizing our friendship(.) It's a gift, not a feminine flaw(.) In fact, I remember you called me to the reception of that crumbling boarding house in Amaralina, where I was temporarily living, and completely ignored the presence of the doorman, saying: --- ''Listen, I've had a fixation for you ever since that night we slept together(.) I don't know how to express myself properly, you live in a very different world from mine(.)'', and kissed me(.) ---, I remembered, finding it funny when I looked at the doorman and caught him with his gaze suspended in a trance of expectation, as if we were two characters who had suddenly invaded that boarding house to film a scene from the eight o'clock soap opera.
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ResponderExcluir"It's true, that's how it began (...) he he (...)" she concluded, pulling me close by the arm. I crouched down awkwardly and kissed her arms and knees. From then on, we began exploring more unpredictable areas of Salvador in her car. We'd get out after driving around the city and walk hand in hand through the sea smells of the Lower City pier or the blinding floodlights in front of Soho, always searching for the perfect obscure restaurant with a corner table, no acquaintances from her real estate world or her husband's clinic. We'd talk about ourselves, facing each other, making confessions that even after hours of conversation remained sealed in amber, our hands brushing for a long time in small, reciprocal admonitions charged with violent sexual passion. --- I love your hands, again(.) I like them touching me(.) You know what: I felt guilty for my husband, back then(...) It was never difficult for any woman to deceive a spouse the first time, because the deceived person has no antibodies, is not vaccinated against suspicion and does not pay attention to delays, accepts the most absurd explanations, allows the most clumsy patches of stories and schedules to fix the big tears of absence in everyday life(.) ---, she said,
she said, seeming to speak with the authority of an expert on the subject. ---- Once a little girlfriend passed me by, but I liked her so little that I preferred to look at things from a more pragmatic side(.) Besides, my heart reacts differently to that kind of thing, because I've never had to worry about other people's opinions... because there have never been others in my life(.) Little by little I got used to the idea that, at least in the places I've been most of the time, people were worth absolutely nothing right from the start(.) But at least of the women I truly loved I keep a gracious memory and a feeling of deep friendship, even though I never saw most of them again(.) ---, I concluded and she immediately came back with the flashbacks of her ex-husband: --- ''What are those wrinkled clothes (?)'', my husband asked me one of those nights when you and I were at my family's wooden house in Guarajuba(.) I looked at myself in the mirror and saw three strands of your hair stuck to my velvet skirt. Looking, I just felt something warm and wet throbbing inside me and I didn't say anything, feeling that my shy, silent pantomime was soaked with the memory of our bodies inside that wooden house(.) Silently, I forced my spirit to stability and dissimulation, while my body inside the skirt remained trapped in the eruption of his(.)
ResponderExcluirHe looked at me suspiciously that day, and I gave him a final dark look, which probably said more than he wanted to know, until one day he summoned the courage and asked me (:) "Are you having an affair (?)?", his face contorted from crying and his whole body trembling (.) I limited myself to saying no, even though I knew it was already impossible to convince him and that my expression exuded a cold, serene, and metallic expression of superiority, of a beautiful sexual secret continually experienced (.) ---, as soon as she finished speaking, I remembered in every detail that wooden house in the condominium in Guarajuba. It was like that, even safer and more remote than any motel we had ever stayed at. She had rarely gone with her husband to that house. Within its obscure security, partially invisible between coconut trees and yellow ipês, the house dominated the view of the saltwater lagoon that on the banks looked like an oasis of white sand surrounded by dark glass. The smell of the sea that seeped through the blinds was more saline and acrid than that of the sea in front of the inn.
ResponderExcluirDuring those clandestine encounters in the wooden house, she already seemed athletic and flexible to me as she does now, perhaps without the current agitated resonance, but already with that pleasant and pronounced firmness between her legs that reminded me, during my passage into her body, of a certain corruptibility of a French courtesan, which has now softened somewhat because of the divorce. The neural flickering of her face was always stilled before me after making love. But I remember seeing her several times in the early evening, feeling with a certain urgency beside the bed, searching for her wristwatch among the clothes thrown on the floor. Whenever we met in the wooden house, she would leave the watch discreetly visible. "---I've noticed you don't much like indiscreet conversations," she said, probably seeing me sink into strands of memory shining strangely in my eyes. I reflexively reached out to take the empty glass from her hand, not quite understanding the full extent of everything she had just said.
ResponderExcluirBut the truth was that there was little more to remember than that of the communications of our entranced bodies, nothing beyond that slow, prolonged physical ascent in her company to the ecstatic plateaus of the wooden house, bleached by the moonlight from the window, under which she appeared to me feline as a jaguar. And finally, very grateful, loquacious, and hurried. I would arrive at that point of our encounters in a popular car falling to pieces within the light of the guardhouses that appeared long above the dark lagoon, overflowing or nearly dry on the white sand shores, depending on the tide of the day, and find her sitting in her bra and panties on the leather sofa, a cigarette between her fingers and a slight pressure of anxiety around her eyeballs. She would immediately serve us two greenish drinks that I don't quite remember what they were, and the glasses would begin to sweat. That done, we functioned perfectly in the double bed like a fully wound music box. Each expected the other to clearly understand the erotic mechanism of their union and silently make the necessary adjustments for things to go smoothly.
ResponderExcluir---Our love is like the love of the elements, it carries us back in a whirlwind to a younger self, freer of psychological complications and commitments (.)---, thus she threw into the air, for me to perceive, the suggestion that her husband was, in contrast, a more delicate man than I, something that might weaken us as confidants but strengthen us as lovers, for what she really meant was that he was too delicate and I was more impetuous and satisfying, without a doubt. She spoke of him as if gazing at a vague, low figure on a small beach clouded by dull memories beside the bed. When she rose contentedly from the bed onto the loose parquet floor of the room, clutching a few pieces of clothing against her breasts, her buttocks danced glistening in the moonlight; the moonlight there always showed a silvery saturation that overflowed from her sweaty, sated body in slow motion. ---Every day that passes you know my body better than anyone else(.), ---, she observed, and thinking better now, she said that as if there was still someone somewhere else, excessively delicate and clumsy.
ResponderExcluirLater, driving my dilapidated car through the fetid fumes of Paralela Avenue, I remember vaguely wondering if she slept with anyone other than me. I laughed at myself, experiencing a pang of jealousy, remembering that shadow of a character I hadn't yet realized was her own husband. --- He will always remind me of a gentle, paternal elf(.) How depressing(!) Too paternal and compassionate to keep me aroused(!) Once, before we were married, I remember being alone with him on a couch during a gathering of friends we had in common, and he started stroking my back as if I were a baby and he wanted to burp me after giving me the bottle(.),--- she concluded disparagingly, about her ex-husband. All of that had happened in the middle of Salvador's torrid summer, and summer anywhere, but especially that of tropical cities, seems to women like a lover one must sexually revere before he suddenly leaves. Sweat stains their makeup and cakes their hairstyles on the street under the scorching sky, bringing on the sweat of the nights for two.
ResponderExcluir"I missed your youthful, well-placed punches, your boyish face and eyes that sometimes redden like an animal's, but that's just the superficial movement of something happening inside you. Compacted energy, but always flowing like a river.," she mused, complimentary, and this time I felt slightly flattered. Anything related to my well-done energy work made me proud. It was right at the end of that summer that she announced that her family was selling the wooden house and that in the following days we would have to meet at her cousin's apartment in Stella Maris. The cramped apartment was on the edge of a beach overgrown with giant cacti and frequented by surfers, who planted their boards in the grass above the dunes to smoke marijuana while crouched in small circles.
ResponderExcluirI swam there almost every morning before breakfast, as summer faded. They were days stranger than the previous ones (probably because divorce was approaching), in which she sought me out, possessed by a hitherto unknown animal intensity. The end of the marriage must have been very near, because it made perfect sense. She made lobster and potato salad, and we read all afternoon, when we weren't busy in bed. The usual: crime novels. I swam through the violent lash of the waves there, returned home smoking a cigarette, and sometime after breakfast made love to her as if I were a sailor fresh from six months at sea. That late summer, in particular, she deliberately pushed the envelope so that I would feel like a prostitute. This cathartic, prostitute-like quality was new to me, her willingness to fulfill my every sexual desire and extract her own pleasure as a subdivision of mine. Her body had simply lost all sense of inhibition or shame, as if an old blockage had suddenly collapsed within her. An undeniable improvement, after some minor adjustments and attitude compensations.
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