GENEALOGY
I
In the first of those seven weeks of living together, the old woman apparently only remembered this: that Foucault had revolutionized the study of history. Over the course of those days, however, she seemed to have the whole subject at her fingertips. Perhaps because, when our meetings began in that old house at the top of São Pedro Hill, she seemed to have spoken so comfortably with no one in ages.
The work meetings were paid weekly, and we were free to meet as often as we felt necessary for my NGO's political education project. Living with her was a blonde niece in her early twenties and a little girl who suffered from a murmur, her daughter; the child's father had lived there with them until recently, and when I started visiting the old woman's house, he still showed up from time to time, usually drunk.
The old woman's name was Lena; the niece, Melina; the baby girl, I've forgotten her name; and the husband, I mean, the child's father, his name was, oh man, I forgot too.
Lena taught in state schools and at a private college downtown, and I had put her on the project's payroll—I had managed to get the City Council to sign the agreement—at the request of a city councilor. It wasn't a dirty trick, however; she knew history, and she knew how to teach history like few others. She had a knack for communicating with the residents' associations where we conducted our "interventions," and we quickly became friends; and soon after, close friends.
II
ResponderExcluirWe had a rhythm, amidst the crumbling woodwork of her house. She talked a lot, chain-smoking, while that mop of limp white hair trembled atop her head.
"We live in a world of spoken words, driven by the endless farce of social life---it's nonsense to seek the monotonous ends of history by stringing together events like a dog assembling a Lego dog; the only History that exists is in the scattered materials that no one ever reads, alien to any meta-historical teleology," Lena said (it was the first week).
Her expression, as she spoke, was one of cold, intellectual disdain. When she started coughing excessively, she would run to the bathroom and take some medicine there. She would come back already smoking, thinking about making coffee. She gave the impression of having stared at herself in the mirror for a long time, self-medicating and morbidly assessing the situation: emphysema? Cancer? Pleural obstruction? And she began speaking again:
"All these horrible little amateurish, didactic conclusions, which are nothing more than a secret of the shoddy fabrication of reality, widely used by the newspapers we read every day---a metaphysical secret, first and foremost," she said.
"Metaphysical?" I asked.
Excluir"Yes, metaphysical, fabulating, Platonizing, crude, designed to make us believe in the existence of a principle of cohesion that directs the course of history, a ratio, when in truth everything that has happened until now has been the result of highly personal and petty disputes between men; of their scientific passions, of their fierce rhetorical slander, of their arguments filled with hatred, lust for power, for knowledge, and vows of revenge, always resumed step by step, at the mercy of the accidents along the way that imposed such selfishness upon them. This is where metaphysical exaggeration makes its appearance, to deceive us about a past where the precious essentiality of things was once intact, and which must be 'restored'; to infatuate us with the chatter of a discourse that erases every accident in order, in the pretentious error of its simplifications, to make emerge an image of a 'path to be followed', if not that of an incarnate guide himself, who comes to us like the eyepatch of a mule eternally tied to the cart of linear time --- according to Foucault: 'no delay in the meticulousness of the derisory wickedness of our beginnings here, only masks on unexcavated ruins' '' , she said
Suddenly, the old woman became slow, careful, waiting for her tongue to find the precise terms capable of advancing her rapid thought. She put her cigarette in the ashtray and touched her chest with her hand: cough, arrhythmia. She offered me water, as if I were the one in need of medical attention.
Excluir"NO EVOLUTION OF THE SPECIES! NO HISTORICAL DESTINY, ONLY THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SLEEP OF SOME OUTDATED DOGMAS. It is necessary to maintain humanity's past in the dispersion of its deviations, accidental, prolific, unpredictable, unstudied, very rigorously contrasting with the tedious collection of facts within which they seek to gaze and find the truth of being as a process," she continued.
Then, she suddenly remembered to make lunch, and the clothes to wash in the sink. All the sweetness that could exist in such a great intelligence extinguished by decades of exhausting domestic and educational work. Never on her face was there a serene expression of expectation, not even a remote one, of the woman who still dreams of or plans marriage. In her youth, she had already become like this, because of a boyfriend who abandoned her during a difficult time, and she had never returned to normal.
One minute
ExcluirIII
ResponderExcluir"Be gentle with me and eat, K," Lena said (it was the third week).
"I'm not hungry, Lena," I said.
"Does the food look that repulsive?" she asked, offended.
"Of course not, Lena," I said.
Then Melina appeared in the living room, carrying the baby girl. Lena asked questions. Melina said the baby's father had shown up last night. Lena asked more questions. Melina seemed patient, though a little unsure of her words:
"This time he started talking about how he was going to recover right away, that he wanted to come back and live here. I said no again. He said he hadn't had a drink in a week. I said, 'Good for you.' And he said, 'Come back with me!' And I said, 'No way.' Then I told him about the doctor. He said the girl would be better by the end of the year. Then I told him to get a job right away, and he got nervous. It ended just like the last time: him slamming the door and calling me a whore. I didn't even care!
"If I'd been here, he'd only see one thing!" Lena said.
"I think I did the right thing," Melina said, looking at me.
Lena laughed at my flirting with Melina.
"K is already part of the family. Isn't that right, K? It doesn't hurt to hear a little about our problems," Lena said.
ExcluirI was embarrassed.
Dropping a corner of my eye, Melina turned and walked into her room, with that "look how I shake" look of a fiery teenager---but her hips were firm, sculpted, well-developed, of a grown woman with a long sex life ahead of her.
"When she can go back to college," Lena said, "I hope she doesn't get pregnant again any time soon. It's a bad road. She was unlucky to get involved with that bum right at the beginning of her course. There's no way she'll fall dead. She could still do very well, if she's smart."
IV
ResponderExcluirI confess that I was astonished that a woman so definitively alone in the world, and especially in her inner world, would so fiercely scratch at the idea of the contemplative life.
"Contemplation," said Lena, "is the product of the imaginations that form in the mind of a man whose physical vigor has diminished, whose satiety has settled to a minimum, who has withdrawn, resentful, withdrawn, compacted into a dark core where delirium has replaced desires and appetites, and allowed him to mold himself morally based solely on reflections and words, the source of his most cherished and inflexible superstitions." The ethics of conformity here stretches what's left of its muscles in soft sociopathy, in the drama of bloated psychic control of hermeneutic hallucination, in the illusion of yogic soft power, in the circumstantial victimhood that its pessimistic ideas sought to sublimate, in the expectation of a magical social reward.
"So, you accept the fact of limitless lassitude as a normal part of life? Can you digest this calmly? Aren't you equally passive, from an existential point of view?" I asked.
She was horribly offended. For a moment, she seemed to swallow hard. Immediately after, she burst into a thunderous, pained, mad laugh, coming from the sullen recesses where her precarious will to know had taken refuge.
"This end-of-the-world outlook, this apocalyptic objectivity, with which newspapers and historians pretend to amuse themselves, is the sub-intellectual residue of the supra-historical point of view, the sensationalism, the reinvented Egyptianism of the society of the spectacle, with its high-tech financial yoga and its rigged vassalage. The fact that I'm a poor devil in the middle of all this, like almost everyone else, doesn't intimidate me. Undoubtedly, the human body is conditioned by physiology, and the little soul that remains, from the body's struggle against time, from this curse of the struggle for survival, is immediately destroyed by the rhythms of rest and celebration with which the entertainment industry takes possession of our anxious human remains. What remains, it invites intoxication with food, axiological, ethical, sexual, and deleterious poisons---the result is irremediable death drives." If what you are asking me is whether I have any hope of achieving the salvation of my soul through erudite, genealogical historical research, my answer is simple: I do not believe in the comforting game of recognition, and I work today with the idea of having a few years of life ahead of me in the most serene way possible,” she said.
Excluir
Excluir"Perhaps you, Lena, hide from us, your friends, an unsuspected capacity to dramatize your own instincts. I understand perfectly how absorbing, how addictive, this hopeless solipsistic game can become; and also that the tranquility of life or continued contact with nature do not serve as fuel for it. To what extent the euphoric profit you derive from all this misadventure can be mistaken for a suicidal neurotic tenacity is a question so rich in new poisons for the body and soul that I refuse to investigate it for myself," I said, and she laughed.
"You're just a child, K; a spoiled boy, gifted, through who knows what biographical circumstance, with what combinations of marvelous mental disasters, with a completely gratuitous and seemingly unmotivated dark irony." Where have you ever seen a fifth-rate playboy like you trying to elevate yourself so high above everything and everyone, to the point of questioning the iron hand of the necessities of life that, with the permission of the democratic state of law, ruin the body and soul of unhappy humanity abandoned to the chance of the laws of the market?'', she said
At that moment, I think we were looking each other in the eye, because I wasn't too happy with that diagnosis either. That's when Melina appeared in the living room and said:
Excluir"She's finally asleep. Whew!"
It was Tuesday afternoon.
Lena suddenly got up and went to smoke a cigarette by the window while she attended to household chores with Melina. She gestured for me to come over. Through the window, the vast view showed the mountains, at the foot of which the city was billowing smoke. We looked down at the city below, while Melina made cups of coffee for the three of us.
The old woman had an arrogant, self-assured face. And an impassive demeanor. Clearly, she was at rock bottom, and she intended not to give in to any perplexed indignation, the kind that turns into hydras on a megaphone. No radical method of salvation on the horizon, no fantasies, no spiritual illusions, until the old flame, intoxicated and wounded from head to toe, finally ceased to burn, from one day to the next.
"Confused, profound, a multitude of errors and ghosts intertwined with a few foci of random, material, discursive meaning, secretly populating a series of strange, dirty, desperate, or anomic movements. In a way, a disgusting omen of what the world will continue to be like for centuries, before it ends," she said, pointing to the residences and city streets below.
ExcluirShe laughed, which surprised me, or even astonished me.
Then, without any ceremony, she whispered in my ear:
"I want you to fuck her, K. Fuck her already, damn it! That's what you've wanted from the start, isn't it? Know that you have my support. A young man like you wouldn't waste so much time chatting with a dying old woman."
Then Melina arrived with our cups of coffee, smiling strangely at me.
V
ResponderExcluirI wonder now what right I have to let my real taste interfere in the story, when it's simply a matter of narrating what really happened.
It's true, Melina's breasts were inviting, large, beautiful. And she spoke just enough for me to continue existing in the dim light of the room.
I probably conveyed calm to her, even as I thrust my fingers into her wet vagina.
When I lowered my face and eyes, it was only to see what she was doing with her mouth after unbuttoning my pants.
No, in the end, I didn't consider the experience wholesome—I felt dominated and perverted by a kind of plebeian who knew what he was doing, without offering any resistance. No providential caution.
VI
ResponderExcluirDuring our last week together, in that house at the top of São Pedro Hill, the old woman insisted on looking at me only from a certain angle, always smoking, with the deliberate purpose of appreciating what she now rightly considered her "work."
No antidote. Anything like that, at that period in my life, was capable of immediately perverting my healthy instincts --- no warm welcome was necessary: just a bit of sexual convenience, combined with financial urgency, mixed with nervousness. It was enough for me to summon Mammon.
After those jolts of expectation stopped running down my spine, I had already slept with Melina about five times. And upon assuring herself that she had finally found what was beneath me, the old woman began to reward our relationship with increasingly scatological airs of familiarity:
Excluir"A pussy like hers is a real credit to a man's body, K. Ten years from now, you'll be masturbating just remembering what you did to my niece in her room the last few days. Speaking of which, don't you think it's time to find her a place on the project's payroll? Treat her at least as an available identity, even if you reject her later. You probably won't be together for long, right? But she needs to get back on her feet quickly, before going back to college, or she'll end up getting pregnant again, by some new criminal," the old woman said.
If I say it was at that very moment, or even that day, I would be trying the credulity of the attentive reader. The fact is that, on one of those later nights, which marked the trajectory of our last week of living together as a threesome in that house, toward a cruel refinement of life's stable arrangements, we were sitting at the table in the living room, discussing the presentation to the City Council of a popular initiative bill we had helped the São Benedito residents' association draft, when, suddenly... SOMETHING, AN OBJECT OF CONSIDERABLE MASS AND VOLUME, COMING FROM THE STREET IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE, VIOLENTLY SHATTERED THE LIVING ROOM WINDOW. The living room floor was littered with shards of glass. The old woman's immediate reaction was one of absolute, mute, contagious terror. She froze on the table in front of me, and before that sudden "timor mortis" could overwhelm her body and features and invade mine, a second object, two or three times the mass and volume of the first, flew violently through the unprotected window and struck the old woman squarely in the head. She fell dead to the ground before she could even utter a trembling syllable. Then, a visibly distraught man shouted from outside, in the street:
Excluir"SLUTT! WHORE!!!!!!!!!!!"
Melina left the room in terror, and the sight of the old woman dead on the floor, her forehead bloodied, took her breath away for a moment.
Excluir"IT'S HIM!!!!!" Melina said, then
"Call the police," I said, while thinking of something better. "I'll go outside and see."
"He's going to kill you."
"Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place," I said.
As soon as I said that, Melina gasped again and grabbed my arm tightly. Soon after, a third object flew through the window and hit me in the head too. I fell to the floor. I don't remember anything else.
VII
ResponderExcluirMelina's ex-husband had been on the run for over a month, and we had gone together to the old woman's wake at Parque da Saudade.
Melina now worked in her place at the NGO, albeit with other people. We hardly saw each other anymore.
One night, I saw her dancing at Musik, around two in the morning. She was with friends, and I thought about going to talk to her. However, when I got ready to go over to her, I noticed hairy man's arms emerging around her waist. One of them held a Rolex. They were the arms of the councilman who had fought for the approval of my project in the City Council.
Some time later, I passed by and greeted them in passing.
That night, as I walked home, I noticed nocturnal birds in the trees along the way, and cicadas. Within the emptiness of the night, everything that made no sense seemed beautiful and invigorating to me. As I thought about the cemetery, what kind of birds and cicadas might be there at that early hour, I heard a mental sound of maddened hammers inside my head—someone working furiously late into the night, trying to fix their outboard motor. Then I heard Nothing.