INTIMATE NOTEBOOK
I
My name is Eliane, I'm twenty-three years old, in my fifth year of law school at a crappy private college in the city, financing my course through FIES (Brazilian Institute of Education and Training), and I'm not very credulous about getting a "passport to prosperity" after I graduate and leave the filthy job at that dirty little bar on Espírito Santo Street, downtown Juiz de Fora.
Early last night (I study in the morning), that guy who works at the NGO nearby (I'm keeping an eye on him!) and his coworkers sat at a table here and ordered a beer and a side of pork rinds. With him, named K, was a dark-haired guy, a blond guy with blue eyes who looked gay, and a very thin girl, almost as thin as me, who's a twig; she also had blond hair, but curly, and blue eyes like her friend's; they could even be siblings, or cousins.
At first, they talked only about work: late payments, advertising budgets, event calendars, institutional agendas, news stories. After the third beer, I noticed the topic had changed, and everyone seemed more animated and intimate:
"Cinthia here writes very well," the blue-eyed man said. "She has notebooks full of short stories and poems. Some are unbelievable. I wonder where she gets all those stories from. So much imagination!"
"Seriously, Cinthia???" K asked. "And how can I read it?"
"Tribuna de Minas will publish a short story of mine this weekend. And my first book is being evaluated by FUNALFA this year," Cinthia said.
"K also writes," the dark-haired man said.
"I heard about it," Cinthia said.
"I'm currently blocked." "Maybe it's a spiritual crisis," K said.
"Nothing comes out anymore?" Cinthia asked.
"I sketch a little in my diary every now and then. It's just my navigation notebook, not literature." K said.
"I doubt it." Cinthia asked. "There must be a lot of poetry in it, yes. Diaries are always like that. They're increasingly published and read, by the way."
K laughed, pulling a grimy, crumbling notebook from his backpack. He opened it to the end and began to read aloud:
ResponderExcluir"Staying quiet at home and doing nothing. Yesterday, three whole hours. Things that are suddenly heard, after half an hour of internal silence, are not the same as during everyday external silence. Gradients: no music, no smoking, no reading, no talking: three days. Stretching: concentration improved, breathing finally balanced. Sleep became fetal. No drinking, no drinking, no drinking."
As soon as he finished reading, he drank his beer, and they laughed. He closed the notebook.
"It looks like a Beckett character locked in the back room of an octogenarian aunt's house, trying to prolong his own consciousness in an increasingly empty time," Cinthia said.
"And it is," K said.
"Foucault studied this, at the end of his life." Antônio (the one with blue eyes) said.
"What?" Vidal (K's dark-haired friend) asked.
"Techniques of the self. In a lecture called 'Sexuality and Solitude,' he talks about techniques of the self, self-care that individuals apply to themselves, seeking some transformation for the better, to pursue some kind of improvement, or even happiness, or purity, or even some supernatural power." Antônio said.
ResponderExcluir"And also the Arts of Existence, common among the Greeks and Romans," Cinthia said.
"Oh really?" K asked.
"Yes! Establishing behaviors, self-discipline, working the body like clay; the mind and behavior as a work full of criteria, style. Which paves the way for autonomous subjectivation and a singular interpretation of one's own desires." Cinthia said.
"This really happens in my diary. In fact, I follow ancient practices, which I learned from reading Carlos Castaneda. One of them is keeping a navigation notebook and a strategic list of behaviors." K said.
In a voice that seemed to float through that collective intoxication, Cinthia continued:
"The question of writing, forgotten by Foucault since The Order of Things, reappears at the end of his life through his interest in 'self-mastery,' 'practice of the self,' 'aesthetics of existence,' 'government and deciphering of the self as a subject of desires.'" A literature of the everyday self, in which he distinguishes three subspecies:
the individual notebooks, which the Romans anciently called 'hypomnemata,' a collection of things said and heard, which served as fragmentary raw material for subjectivation; correspondence, which is a way of expressing oneself and others; and the intimate notebook, like yours—I loved the name you gave it: navigation notebook—a narrative of spiritual experiences and prescriptions, seeking an extrasensory goal.
ResponderExcluirBeer fumes and smelly cigarettes. Only K didn't smoke, there at that table. Their conversation, however, messed with my brain. I returned home around eleven o'clock, and after my shower, I remembered a pad I had in my closet drawer and started writing things in it:
"Fucked. Desperate. Poor. Someone bury me deep. Tomorrow is Friday, and I'm not ready to leave the scene yet." I'm going to the party at Marlene's house, and there, in the middle of the night, I'm going to break up with the relationship once and for all. No half measures. ENOUGH!''
II
ResponderExcluircontinue after the lunch
The fact is, I'm not a really pretty girl, period. At most, I have my charm, a minimum. In our little clique, on Marlene's rooftop, I'm the one who's had the fewest boyfriends. Only ugly men hit on me. Among them, I try to encourage the ones who have cars or better jobs. However, I feel that at the end of this path, all that awaits me is heartbreak.
ExcluirBefore breaking up with João, I kept the secret locked in my head. I greeted him with a cold kiss. The party was boring, until those guys with loud music in their car arrived outside. A bunch of sinister funk singers. They sat at our table, so I finally told João I wanted to talk to him in a corner.
João was studying law with me at college, just a few semesters ahead, and he worked afternoons with his dad at that cheap clothing store downtown. Our weekends consisted of two beers and a pizza in the neighborhood on Fridays, then going home to watch TV until we fell asleep. We fucked, of course, but very little. And besides, that wasn't the problem. I was fed up with him, his smelly feet, his face, his life. I said right to his face: "I don't want to date you anymore, João. You better get out of here if you don't want to get angry. No, I've already decided." No bear to fight with João. In five minutes, he was gone, without much protest, and everything seemed to fall into place, just as I wanted.
ExcluirAt the table, smart guys in sweatpants, full of pothead connections in the neighborhood. Initially, I was scared by the possibility of hooking up with any of them (ogres smelling from head to toe), especially since they didn't seem interested in me, but in Marlene. But I figured that after they got drunk, someone there would definitely want to sleep with me, even if it took a while. I did the math and there weren't enough women for everyone. Everyone does that when the going gets tough.
And I was right. They didn't shrug in the end, when the only one interested seemed to be me.
ExcluirBored, actually:
"So, you want some, buddy?" I said to the one they called Head.
He squirmed in his chair, embarrassed. So much posturing!
"We both win, look around you, idiot!" I said.
Another squirm.
"Okay then," he said finally.
I didn't know how to get rid of me anymore.
In the car, we rubbed noses a lot, after sniffing that coke of his. Afterward, I felt like a dog breathing down my neck. Drunk in such a way that everything I tried to whisper in my ear would just roll his tongue. The railroad tracks in the early morning, in that part of the neighborhood, was a deserted and eerie place, which excited me a little. It seemed like everyone could hear everything we did and said from miles away. I moaned loudly! After he dropped me off, I took a long shower and, in bed, opened my notebook and wrote:
"What can we do? Every now and then we have to give our asses."
And I slept.
III
ResponderExcluirNo acceleration in the pace of my life after that. The same old shit, nothing changed. It was as if my job at the bar were a diffuse shell over my days, after the concentrated shell of the college classroom. A prison for my instincts. I pushed through the days with my stomach, nauseatingly. I came to work after class and waited in silence for customers—after lunch, I watched the soap opera reruns on the bar's TV, then the afternoon show, while washing the dishes and cleaning and setting the tables. I affected indifference with most of the customers, who were a few punters, while I strutted frivolously when a better-off one showed up that caught my eye. Why?—I wondered. They rarely showed interest in me, although it did happen.
ResponderExcluirThen, that boy (K) showed up at the bar again. This time, he was accompanied by a pretty blonde.
K's face was vacant, perhaps annoyed. The blonde, for her part, seemed to contain an enormous amount of anger in a face that wavered like a high-voltage power line.
"Your life is getting dissolute. You have a daughter with me, remember?" the blonde said.
ResponderExcluir"I fell in love with how quickly K transformed.
"It's not easy for me, controlling my instincts in this city. Besides, we're not husband and wife anymore," he said, laughing.
He looked like he was madly searching for someone, someone other than the blonde. He kept checking his watch.
"You don't even write anymore," the blonde said.
"I just have a different rhythm now," K said.
"Escapist! A walking cliché entangled in a tangle of dark things. The day I went to pick up our daughter from your house, while you were in the bathroom, I saw a pile of women's panties drying on the clothesline." Have you found someone else yet?'' the blonde said.
'No.'' K said.
'Um, I know,'' the blonde said sarcastically.
'I've been attending church and church services.'' K said, 'Of course, I receive visitors, I visit women, and in my house I sit humbly, in silence, while some of them explain to me the proper way to run a home, how to dress, and how to eat.''
The blonde started laughing angrily. I couldn't help but laugh either.
Women don't forget things easily.
Women don't forget things easily. A sort of unfinished sentence seemed to thunder in the blonde's mouth, never leaving her mouth.
ResponderExcluirI appeared, bringing another beer. Maybe it helped K at that critical moment.
Surely, K knew that Juiz de Fora was a small town, where it's easier for someone like him to do evil. He seemed full of strange secrets.
"We won't lose anything by making up before you leave," K said suddenly.
He looked at his watch again, wanting to get rid of her as soon as possible.
"You're living in a dream world," the blonde said.
"I only want to talk to you about well-being. You and our baby, I worry about you," K said.
That was it, she was pissed.
"At least you don't smoke weed anymore," she said.
"I don't even write. Am I evolving?" K asked.
When he said that, I remembered his notebook. I remembered my pad. "I struggle to keep the tedious outer shell of my respectability intact. It's not easy. Soon, everyone will find out that I dropped out of college and that I've set up a gold-mining raft with Mr. Adamastor, on which I intend to set sail in a few days," K said
ResponderExcluir"And when do you plan on coming back?" the blonde asked.
"When you've saved up some money, of course," K said.
"You know what? BYE!!!" the blonde said, and left without looking back.
I figured it was a good time to try to get closer and went to wipe down his table. I felt a lovely smile spread across my face. He was welcoming, gallant, and smiled back. We exchanged a lingering handshake. Then it flowed. We exchanged phone numbers, and we left the bar straight for his house later.
When I got home the next night after work, I wrote on my notebook:
"Perfect night, full of stars streaming through the window with the slow music of his house. Dark furniture in the shadows. He doesn't like to turn on the light at night; he looks like a ghost. Leftover restaurant food on the floor. Few words. A vague thought, about almost nothing, transforming anxiety into meditation." He told me a story after he ate me. But I forgot it.
IV
ExcluirI had no expectations of K, but I confess I certainly hoped to see him a few times, without any commitments. But three months after our meeting, he still hadn't shown up at the bar again.
ExcluirOne afternoon, squeezed into the corner of the bar, almost hidden from view, was that blond, blue-eyed couple (cousins, as I later learned) and that other dark-haired couple, Vidal—they were drinking beer:
"He just disappeared off the map!" Vidal said.
Colored supplements complaining about the insensitive world? I wondered. Total bullshit, just a tribe without the guts to help itself, in a moment of defiance.
"The NGO is going to close; it's in every newspaper in the country. It's become a police scandal," Cinthia said.
"And you, Antônio?" What do you think?" Vidal asked, distressed.
"I don't know: goods and commodities? Zinc, cocoa, rubber, coffee, tea, wheat, uranium, soybeans, any rubbish you could imagine, except GOLD!’’ Antonio said
"But that's it: not spending all night sitting at home, selling in the futures market and buying in advance, selling short, speculating on the rise, putting pressure on, in short, burning money in the market. No. MINDLING IN LOCU! HE'S GONE CRAZY!" Vidal said.
Excluir"We'll never see him again," Antônio said.
"What a shame, I so wanted him to read my book. It'll finally be published." Cinthia said.
I realized right away that she and K were, if not lovers, at least somewhat close. I must have given him a lot before they lost touch.
"My machines for making people see and hear, my curves of visibility and chatter against K's line of flight. One of the lines of the whole always escapes, there's no way around it. A kind of subjective profit arises whenever one of us (social herd animals) removes ourselves from the tangled web of forces of the system. Tangles that we, writers who stay, will hardly be able to untangle alone.’’ Cinthia said
"All you have to do is stay afloat and keep writing naturally," Antônio said. "Even domesticated, your creative juices can grow if you don't appeal to the transcendental values of the bourgeoisie. Write about the aesthetics of modes of existence, the ultimate real dimension of the devices of power and knowledge that suffocate us and control humanity. A type of creativity for each device, against each device, a painful distribution of singularities across the social field, trying to resist, trying to subjectify itself until I AM OR BECOME ANOTHER."
Excluir
Excluir"And I've been trying," Cinthia responded. "In one of the prose poems in my book, I wrote: 'Eternal tourists, the temporal identity that sweetens the world's elite with all its policed exteriority on duty. Petty politicians and ex-diplomats in line to buy a new iPhone, like everyone else. And the tycoons with their own expensive cuisine. Right: Dutch Jews with Greek palaces and Taiwanese companies; Euro-girls and country lawyers from Wyoming; retired investors, billionaires, their tourist ranches and five-star bungalows---all with straw-colored legs covered in blue varicose veins. And all the women in this milieu with made-up faces, surgical faces they never had when they were young, with stomachs shortened with a scalpel, breasts filled with silicone, and buttocks deformed by the elite's rhythm of rest and partying.' Artificial shine in the eyes searching for the bags in the limousine --- slowness of old age in the crystal pool full of white children with blue eyes’’
Excluir"Beautiful poem!" Vidal said, lighting a cigarette.
I realized that Vidal had hopes for Cinthia during that difficult time. Dashed hopes that would never come true.
"K is gone, leaving us buried in this garbage your poem describes. How can we live so long buried under garbage we only see in newspapers, on television, and in movies?" Antônio asked.
I laughed.
After the cousins (Antônio and Cinthia) left, Vidal was alone at the table, drinking. I thought it was a good time to try to get closer and went to wipe down his table. A lovely smile spread across my face. He was even more receptive than K, returning the smile. We shook hands, and then it flowed again. We exchanged phone numbers, and I left the bar straight for his house.
When I got home the next night, I wrote in my notebook:
"Do what?" Every now and then we have to give our asses away. This time I decided to charge R$200.00. Plus the Uber. He paid happily and said he wanted to see me again.
End INTIMATE NOTEBOOK
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