MAVECCHIO, Juiz de Fora, September 2022
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh, Halfeld Street, from the park of the same name to Station Square. And vice versa. In fact, having disembarked at Station Square, coming from Barbacena, I walked up the street towards the park, but stopped at the Municipal Theater to have a beer at the Hong Kong Bar. I grabbed a small table there, at 10:30 a.m., and watched the movement of passersby. An incredible optical sensitivity to the reflections of the cold sun on the shop windows, and its symphony of intermediate tones, made my entire Gestalt tremble like a harmless mystery, seeking in our lips some syllable, the fruition of something vaguely named, yet which demands excessive and exhausting observation. "The ship to sort with the oil of a mouche," according to Leon Paul Fargue, heralding a certain feminine contamination, born of the aforementioned mystery. It is commerce (an entity with a satanic background, according to Baudelaire) that attracts so many beautiful young women here, even now, when the shops have just opened their doors --- a busy Friday creeps into the pedestrian area. I turn to the counter and order a cheese and ham pastry and some sugarcane juice --- and immediately, I light a Winston. In my notebook, there is a phone number and an address where I can find a man named Vidal. According to my notes, it is the house of his sister. It is not easy to follow the thread of this story --- it took me almost a year to get in touch, as K himself tried to dissuade me from this search. I do smell something important, however, for the sixth volume of my memoirs—I, who once interviewed Pedro Nava himself, a year before he shot himself in the heart, à la Getúlio Vargas. And at 86 years old! Probably the longest-lived suicide in human history. Suicides, as far as I know, kill themselves well before the age of 60. Most of them are still young.
The main reason for my current investigation (a huge detour from the monolithic course that constitutes my experiences here) is K's assurance that here, during the time he lived in the city, a decisive epiphany occurred, which quickly plunged the entire world into chaos. Having observed world events retrospectively, up to the point where the region begins to appear in his books, I couldn't help but grant him a certain credence—a dangerous act of faith, which has been bringing me ever closer to a lucidity bordering on madness. Especially since, at the time of "K's adventure," I was also living in the city, although I had little or no contact with the "boy." Mr. Adamastor's account, about a year ago, left me deeply impressed, astonished, in fact, and having followed the course of the Peixe River toward the Paraibuna for a month, the testimony of some riverside communities only increased my perplexity---to the point where I located the headquarters of a mining cooperative in ***, whose machinery had been vandalized and set on fire by hordes of illegal miners precisely at the time when K and Mr. Adamastor disappear from the map, and the story becomes endless. I reprimanded myself and directed my investigation to more pleasant human horizons. I mean... in the can, in the can, really?
ResponderExcluirOkay, I admit it: I was intimidated by an anonymous phone call in the middle of work and gave up. I ran home with my pants wet. That's all.
ExcluirBefore I could even put my lips to my fifth pint of beer, my phone rang. It was already past noon, and a woman's voice was gently inviting me to her apartment, at 1998 Avenida Rio Branco, not far from where I was (already a bit "high," by the way).
ResponderExcluirThe woman was slender, thin, tall, with blue eyes and very straight black hair. She must have been around thirty-four. She said her name was Maria and she was Vidal's sister. Very politely, she offered me a cup of coffee. As I sipped, I heard a long, mournful cry coming from the back of the kitchen. I looked at Maria, perplexed.
"It's my brother, he's playing," she said.
Then she went to the back bedroom door and suggested I follow her. She opened it. On a mattress stretched out on the floor, his head buried in pillows, lay a man wearing a Juventus jersey, a Juventus hat, Juventus shorts, and Juventus socks; he was holding a video game joystick in front of a gigantic plasma screen. On the screen, where Juve was facing Fiorentina, it was snowing on the field, and the score was one to zero for Fiorentina.
"Vidal, this is Mr. Mavecchio, K's friend," Maria said.
Suddenly, Vidal paused the game and got up from the mattress. I noticed several empty beer cans on the floor near a minibar. I wasn't the only drunk there that morning.
ResponderExcluir"It's just that I bought a new video game, and I'm enjoying my vacation here. I live in Rio, I'm a public defender," he said.
"No problem," I said. "Do you think we can talk now?" I asked.
"Sure," Vidal replied, opening the minibar and offering me a can. I accepted.
"Let's go to the balcony, you can smoke there."
It was the sixteenth floor of the building, and down below, a human caterpillar stretched along Rio Branco, long considered the longest straight avenue in Latin America—the famous "green wave," which playboys used in the wee hours of the morning to perform their hookups.
Those initial, gentle, superfluous exchanges brought us together in a vicissitude that nourished that morning with a certain reciprocal openness to the configuration of our behaviors. He certainly knew I would interrogate him. However, the fact that he knew he was capable of wreaking havoc and twisting my narrative made him a symbol. Perhaps he had acquired some tricks throughout his career. He didn't seem like the terrified Sancho Panza of K, but rather the gravitating and real remnant of a failure that had transmuted him into the distant rite of overcoming the past through the heroic resistance of a body resigned to slowly gaining weight.
ResponderExcluir"At that time," Vidal said, "my temperament constantly led me to perceive the risks of the worst as already happening. The meticulous fabric of that entire plot forced me into a timid posture that worsened in the face of something always evil and greater than myself." Fear, the proximity of astonishment, deprived me of form during that experience with public law, and I reproached myself, I sought to deserve the auspices of the cautious people of the legal world, which only existed in my imagination.
ResponderExcluir"Without a doubt, we're talking about a period when Lulism, even under Dilma, was a center-left takeover of PMDB. Governability, concessions, veto manipulation, blackmail, and backroom deals --- the microcosm is reflected in the macrocosm, right? Constant PT readaptation to escape the Federal Police. Until, when they needed to talk to Congress, the government no longer had a social base. The calculating leaders capitulated, disappearing in a futile expedient," I said.
One minute
ResponderExcluirDilma's economic management was confusing. The controversy quickly escalated. In her first year in office, it was gnawing at us. I would wilt in front of people when I had to explain the kind of work I was involved in: GOVERNMENT BIDDING, VIA NGOs. At the same time, the Workers' Party's militancy was hitting the middle class hard, robbing us of our pride and weakening our path to the empty theatrical dimension into which the nation had plunged since Lula. The 'Father of the Poor' (a deliberate identification with the dictator Vargas) was now embracing the liberal jokes inherited from FHC, reflected in the polished metal of the oligarchic structure in Congress. Saving Sarney's neck involved freeing him from having to account for the corruption that had been going on since the end of the dictatorship, and even before, and reducing the Workers' Party to a screen of backstage coronels. That's what the Workers' Party soon did. Right: liberalism of dubious content, a simple backdrop for undefined private interests, in politics and economics.
ResponderExcluirThe electoral aims of the PAC (growth acceleration plan), whose festive and expensive inaugurations saw Dilma appear alongside an aggressive and insulting Lula, ushered in the worst season of direct attacks on the press and democracy in the country. Workers' Party activists throughout Brazil became a noisy and harmful mob. K and I laughed about it, until the Federal Police and the press intensified their surveillance of the nation, and through a vague haze, at first, we began to better see the inconsistency of what we were involved in," Vidal said.
ExcluirLips pursed, in an elusive line of argument, stifling yawns. The substance of his testimony quickly took on the neutral rarity of a citizen immune to self-serving bias. The young man spoke with a cutting clarity, as if speaking in writing. By isolating ourselves on that balcony so far from the ground, we had unwittingly created a universal mirror, in which we saw reflected the country's recent and past events united into a single, cohesive catastrophe.
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluir"There was also the PT blogosphere, bent on falsely defying the offended pride of the Party's bigwigs. All journalists fired from the national press, kept on air with public funds from the PT government, paid far more than they were worth. No real information there, just the allied mystification that surrounded the leadership with utopian pleasantries to keep alive the distant myth of the past. By that time, the historic PT had long been a hollowed-out tradition reduced to smithereens, requiring the caresses of its ideological reservists (since there weren't enough positions for everyone in the top echelons) to save itself from its own follies in professional politicking. Unscrupulous sybarites sleeping on ever-increasing net worth (see the bill for Dilma's dinner in Lisbon, upon her return from Davos: R$30,000.00; her entourage occupied 30 rooms at the Ritz and the president stayed in a presidential suite that alone cost the people R$26,200 per day).
With a keen sense of smell and sight, it wasn't difficult to perceive the "pact" behind the rhetorical workings of Lulism. The social, socialist echo served only to color the enthusiasm of a militant base easily manipulated from above, with public money and other perks. In this context, I believe, the context surrounding you and K must have been that of an external situation in which it is only possible to participate in a kind of abandonment of time, behaving like a silent, nocturnal growth of poisonous mushrooms; as if a parallel universe were transfusing itself into the unreceptive island of everyday images, through a paranoid need to constantly educate oneself in the shadows. This, at least, is the K presented in your books dealing with the period. And you, what do you think of this?
Excluir"I don't know how much I can add to what K. wrote. At least about the NGO episode, which is quite illustrative of what was happening throughout the country, on several different levels. That's it, no less. As for Agnelo, I have no idea. The lobby's harassment existed, and so did the Party's. Personally, K was a wavering crystal, reflecting many different worlds. In general, he was always 'quietly hallucinating.' I remember a much earlier period, when he lived with his daughter's mother in São Sebastião, in an old apartment with a huge bathtub in the bathroom and a window in the master bedroom that overlooked a pre-university course that filled the sidewalk across the street during break time. He had stopped smoking cigarettes and used marijuana to detox. Whenever I visited him, he seemed obsessed with the girls from the pre-university course across the street. He spoke with an indecipherable contentment, very difficult to decipher. The fact, however, became clearer the day I happened to pass by during recess and caught him chatting with that group of anxious little girls. He seemed to be intertwined, nestled in the smoky shadows from which long, drawn-out laughter emerged.
ResponderExcluirThey would often go there to smoke with him when his 'wife' wasn't there. That day, incidentally, I assumed she was at her mother's house in Santos Dumont, taking shelter. It was around the time he began studying with Professor Letícia Arnault at the Methodist Institute. I say this because it was from that time on that he became possessed by those Toltec oddities; his physical appearance transformed very rapidly, and apparently, this endowed him with a pineal eye to intuit things behind things, to the point of paranoia. The confusion grew with the invitation to participate in that first bidding process. By that time, the Lula administration's credit expansion policy had already consolidated an electoral hegemony that would be difficult to overcome. At the same time, enigmatic words I heard in the NGO's corridors aroused vague suspicions about the mediocre communist enthusiasm that had been born within it by vague socialist adventures. Fear, to a certain extent, considering what I read in the newspapers. It still seemed to me a thicket of loose ends, ripening illicit tendencies and exercising the possibility of deviant self-management. Fear, venality, partisan passion, criminal association, prevarication.
ExcluirThe Workers' Party's power play was beginning to be tarnished by Dilma's interventions in the economy: billion-dollar subsidies to handpicked companies to grease the palms of the leadership and Congress, and the use of public banks to manage interest rates; in addition to the madness of trying to contain inflation by freezing the price of gasoline and public transportation. According to Idelber Avelar's book: "(...) a sequence of decrees published today was in stark contradiction to equally federal decrees from just a few weeks or months earlier, all testifying to proactive attempts to achieve maximum growth while simultaneously reducing interest rates through government intervention, in a move that could only lead to inflation," Vidal said.
Excluir"Byzantinism and rhetoric, in search of political solutions incapable of structuring the State as circumstances demanded. According to the Greeks, the fourth chalice was madness. Familieira money seeking quick results, the Workers' Party's fourth term, and all the countercyclical nonsense when there was not even a trace of global contraction; the Workers' Party's spending spree spiraled out of control, and soon signs of fiscal distortion emerged in the government's accounts, which no longer added up. Newspaper reports stirred up turmoil in the people's spirit, explaining the Workers' Party's New Economic Matrix. Four years later, the country was plunged into the worst recession in its history (a recession essentially perpetrated by the Workers' Party, which continues to this day). 14 million people were unemployed, a 10% drop in GDP per capita, and an absolute fiscal collapse. That's when the K reappeared publicly on the internet, dragging a horde of enraged sorcerers behind him. During the Confederations Cup, he was seen throwing stones at a FIFA car and fleeing tear gas under the hooves of military police horses in Salvador. He soon moved to Barra, and soon after, to Ondina.
ResponderExcluirSo he writes one book after another, until Hillary Clinton is crushed in the 2016 US elections. Newspapers, here and abroad, give the impression of knowing about his existence, off the record, while Black blocs and other citizens join in increasingly large marches in the streets of the country in 2013. Some time later, Congressman Eduardo Cunha becomes Speaker of the House and threatens impeachment. "Got any more nerve?" I asked.
Excluir"Yes, it does. I wonder today if K's social life in Salvador was concentrated in bars or on the beach (laughs). Or somewhere in the gold trade on Sete de Setembro Avenue. I can't imagine him leading anything politically, stirring up the country bumpkins in front of newspapers spread out on bar tables. Much less mixing with the crowd, or any other kind of social segment. I only see a loner, hands behind his back, walking discreetly in the quieter parts of his city. Discussing politics? NO! Definitely far from the webs of state order, I venture to assume that K devoted himself to long meditation on the qualitative essences capable of, even today, heralding industrialization as the panacea capable of emancipating the country, as the Workers' Party always does in its electoral bravado. They had sixteen years to do so, and the attempt was mediocre, futile. And does industrialism perhaps supply a domestic market here? With inflation spreading worldwide, why are Democrats in power in the United States? There is no source of power in the country that doesn't derive from the state. This is why the fight is becoming fierce in the current elections.
ResponderExcluirThe PT's work is the hysterical political bossism in its whirlwind of possibilities, the same one that, under Dilma, broke the Brazilian electricity sector --- "a decisive component of the collapse that sent millions of Brazilians back into poverty." "The intensification of the dirigiste model of uncontrolled spending and the arbitrary and political concession of tax incentives that produced such a collapse." The gigantic creative accounting derived from Petrobras' deficit with Eletrobras, a body of power troubled by conflicting decrees, which attempted to hastily correct what previous decrees had caused. And in return for so many favors, the PT begins to complain about the market's limp protector. Jealous of power, Dilma finds no tougher way to tame the stray flock, and capitulates in the clutches of the widespread insurrection of society: the market, the media, the Federal Police, organized and disorganized civil society. Between the lines, she spews all kinds of nonsense to justify the fiscal collapse under the PT. Reduced to a small, ruined world, the Workers' Party intelligentsia no longer attends parties, interviews, visits, and lectures. Lula is finally arrested.
ExcluirWhen the Workers' Party (PT) later attempts to cross that boundary, which has been kept in flux over time, it encounters its "rigor mortis." While the PT is driven from power, however, the BNDES (Brazilian Development Bank) remains involved in reckless operations devised by the PT government, through which it raises money on the market at 13% and 14% interest and lends it to SELECTED COMPANIES at 3% and 4% interest, with the Brazilian taxpayer, the common people, paying the difference out of their own pockets. The result: 66 million Brazilians with their names on the SPC (Brazilian Social Security System), Vidal said.
ExcluirAlthough we chatted until the early hours of the morning (funny!), we never mentioned K.'s name again. He was something like the result of excessive meditative concentration in the midst of a sugary vacation, pure quantum phosphenism radiating from the sovereignty of his disdain for the world.
ResponderExcluirEng MAVECCHIO here!
ResponderExcluirPost script
ResponderExcluirME (alien)
ResponderExcluir(in the middle of the street, then, inorganic pleasantries, the friendly being, the laughter under thunderous dins that raise squeaks of hot phlegm in the throat, echoes of interesting female voices, quick car maneuvers in the shadows of suspicious corners and revolver grips typical of low-visibility environments --- then I pretend to close myself in a deaf, macabre attitude, of someone who cares little, that resonates with a lack of consideration for danger --- those fireflies released in the calm possessive virtue of whoever dominates them --- an air of energy concentrated in the middle of the body as if by addition, that's when we enter a supreme dilemma: I close my eyes and see the WALL OF MIST, and immediately it's there, before my open eyes: and now the day replaces the night, not gradually, but from a dawn full of sea breezes to a sunny afternoon – and beyond it, everything that is spoken is spoken at a different speed, right? You also realize that everything is stored by a different memory, as ancestral as it is erotic, which ‘’friends’’ every instant with its real conscious correlate: the energetic body, the freedom to ‘’remember’’ only your real self, the other self.
I'm actually keeping you a little open, because in truth, everyone can SEE a little, even if they don't realize it—a certain glow, huh? --- especially in those people walking with the sunny horizon in the background, which highlights the overtones, SEE! --- shrouded in a luminous, diving-suit smoke that dances with the possibility of entering the cone of light of another vision --- unrecognizable everyday life, traced in the crafts that sharpen COSMIC LISTENING, the drool of your pineal gland. With recapitulation, external noises become soft, better distributed in the brain, intelligible, predictable; a coagulating silence precedes each thought, which makes neurotransmitters malleable, clean, apt. A rattle made of disordered phrases, with gaps to stuff images into, a tongue full of venom against false teeth, a haunting, drowsy, zigzagging opacity, embracing a bit of the voodoo of "varied triviality," with a hint of déjà vu. Then a sport that plants itself on paper, fueling thought; then, like swift sparks in the cold warp of the Machine, the pressure of polishing, the poem with me stalls, run over in its own skid. After employing all possibilities, I reach the astral, the bloody threshold of the work, any precise explanation unnecessary here:
ResponderExcluirbusiness cards pinned to the soul, awaiting eyes soaked in plasma ionized by mirror neurons - exposed - scenes - smell of them among themselves photonic - very manager of hallucination I elect auxiliary succubi and at every moment I reclassify precedences - manifesting them makes the spectral procedure precise, accumulates the piece of indelicately realistic understandings - like the - l 'ebat qui apelle pour chaleur la sphére rose et chère - eh!, l 'umide corp de femme est pour la seule dragueur immobile - jouet de cet oeil d'eau morne - toujours fixe; and the chain taken from the bottom of this eye - this charm!, and the effect of tons of iridescent equivalence, storing that furtive energy of conspiracies, with their curved multitudes soliciting new banners of intrigue (among unlocatable spermatic photons sealing dubious political remains) --- (everyone realized that this joke was just the first attack of the day, and no one knew how to smile at something so strange and intact in its arrogance) ---
ResponderExcluirNOW WE LOOK AT EACH OTHER. THEY UNDERSTAND WHAT I SAY. THEY FIGHT SOME FEAR. THEIR EXPRESSIONS CHANGE, TURNED INTO SOME SUDDEN FORM OF INFLATED FARCE. I AM, YET, DETERMINED IN THE THIN COLD, SOLEMN, UNDISCUSSED, ECONOMIC OF HOPES AND SONGS. RED LIGHTS GO ON. OUTSIDE THE SUBJECT, EVERYTHING HAS LOST ITS SIGN, THE EXPERTISE OF SOLITUDE MENDED IN GOD. I ASK ABOUT IT. THEY TALK ONLY ABOUT IT. I SAY MONEY HAS BECOME AS CREATIVE AS THE BOND VIGILANTS, AND THEY STOP SMILING. A NERVOUS LAUGHTER. SOME SIGN OF FALLING APART ON MY FACE? THE HYPOCRISY OF THE USABLE CAME FROM MY TALK. I GOT THEM OLD BY STIRRING EVIL INSIDE EACH OF THEM. STIRRING THEM. WHAT A THING! IN THE STREET I WAS ENERGETIC AGAIN, FROM THE GEOUS LIGHT, OVERWHELMING IN THE HURRY TO FEEL THE CAST WEIGHT (tattooed by the depth of my vision) ---
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluir---How to free yourself from this whole causal chain that made you go from here to there and back again your entire life, preventing you from taking over the labyrinth of your visions, its expanse of amber cream, trampled in your gaze, wanting to open agitated curves within your SEEING---a vision that now came without any warning: the depths of your body moving, huh?, your solar plexus as solid as never before, your diaphragm seeming to rise without any command from you. A flash crossing your consciousness, the transfer of your energies, taken to the orgiastic furnace of metamorphoses. Pre-twilight evaporations? Before the wall of fog of perception, improvising sudden non-existences to cross it, key entrant, counter-cipher of the body converted into a flash of consciousness, pineal tremor, magnet of noospheric rutilances --- floating voluptuousness only recognizable by it: errant sums of fragmentary extra-sensory data, serpent of optic nerves reporting the whirlwind of light, bubbling with psychic energy)