MAVECCHIO, São Domingos da Bocaina - Lima Duarte (MG), October 2021
I sat down next to the old man as soon as he came within reach in that shack. I tried to start off smiling, cheerful, and familiar, while helping myself to coffee and bread and butter. The old man, younger than me, was actually a real savage, as K describes in his books, only silent in advance, or discontinued out of eccentricity. He had struggled to read the papers I had shown him and finally decided to ban the tape recorder, the cell phone, everything but paper and pen.
"Bourgeois, disillusioned intellectuals in contact with suspicious men on the run from the law," he said disdainfully. Tired, dizzy, too lazy to speak, fending off questions with a lens of difficult memories. He had ground himself in the immediate reality, the better to distance himself from the mountainous observation of the surroundings. It was certain that the old man knew that K himself had provided me with the correct coordinates to find him there, apparently resting. It was because the old man had already read K's books and approved. There was no misunderstanding about this. However, old Adamastor didn't mince his words when provoked:
"No, I don't understand. Why so much memory of so many things gone? I've wandered aimlessly from one place to another ever since, indifferent to the places, right down in the dumps, so as not to attract enemies. What's certain is that a deep joy came with me, in that gold taken from the Rio do Peixe, at that time. I also leafed through the newspapers, as if nothing had happened. I knew the boy could have suddenly become important, like a story. But I admired the slow, calm word of each newspaper, without giving any news of him for a long time, never! Defended from everything, the boy. Sneaky, drenched in the emptiness of his own trail," the old man said, laughing.
From the beginning onward, I noticed a certain change in him. His insignificant laughter, moistened with half a cup of coffee, now spoke as if dragging out a voice in a cubicle, like a shadow, free from scolding. There, in the quiet of that corner, he seemed to be playing at thinking, presenting ideas that he himself would later question (and I wrote everything down in my notebook, turning his speech out of the corner of my eye into a series of judgments of long observation, all mixed with that constant simulation, which tired to the point of confusing any scrutinized study of the real events. The old man continued:
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ResponderExcluir"AaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaRaaaaaaa! There he is!" We effortlessly avoided the whispers, isolating everyone here and there, in that country party. Confused Communists ruined everything, according to the boy: "fraudsters, masked, regulars in the spell of all that dirty money entering the air." When asked, the boy was perplexed. I swear to you: the boy trembled, fearing the Party's bigwigs, and the madmen who, frightened by the newspaper's questions, were now that enormous danger, hovering in a threat over everything. Suddenly, even the television news, which comes, suddenly all that, occupying a place of danger in the boy's life, AND IN MINE! And what was suspense and yawning, until a day ago, in the boy surged with rage, a frightening exasperation. "THERE WAS A GUY HERE. SO AND SO. "YOU KNOW? SON OF A BITCH!" the boy kept saying, one day. A little less than a month later, we attacked. "Wait a minute! Have some coffee made with a blowtorch," the old man said, interrupting himself.
ResponderExcluir"What do you mean, Mr. Adamastor? 'WE ATTACKED'????? 'Attacked' what? In the name of God!"
It was obvious that, there in that isolated district, thirty kilometers of dirt road from Lima Duarte, no one bothered him. He was quiet until dawn, if necessary. And so cold! There he slept the last of time.
"Some one-eyed member of the Party, apparently, confessed to Agnelo his desire to kill us, you know? Or the boy was all agitated, thinking something like that. And the boy saw it all happening up ahead, before anyone else. An ugly event. The sinister designs were there. By surprise, many were angry with the boy and, by extension, with us. Thunder struck, right there in that small town, a mining machine, smashing junk on the riverbank every day, all day long, while those opinions from the town worried the boy. It was the size of a breath, until our march on the river sparked interest among the entire village. At night, every cachaça joint absorbed some tumultuous conversation, the mining gossip bubbled, from every shot of pinga emerged a host of confidences and foolish plans. Imagine, sir: that didn't save anyone from the chaos that followed, when the whole environment began to slip into our conflict with Agnelo. The unnerving hubbub wouldn't subside. Dangerous! Until, in a complete misstep, the boy and I finally summoned that courage, cutting through everything, caring nothing, and putting that pagan black girl to work at the NGO headquarters. It became reckless, foolish. It was sheer recklessness. It wasn't worth the risk, bringing Agnelo here, unconscious, like a greasy sausage.
ResponderExcluirIt was verbal, despite the photos we showed him in captivity. While he prayed half-heartedly, asking for God's love, the boy felt his thoughts fading: they only worked for a moment and then vanished. What a portrait artist, that boy was. There were photos of Agnelo in every possible way there, in that shack in the middle of the woods. It was enough evidence to move society, the newspaper, the police. Even a photo of a gay man eating gay men, in the roast chicken position. Even minors, and other such things. While the boy mumbled ugly words, rummaging through the muck of all that ugliness turned into a photo, Agnelo stared into the dark, watching the hand of a soul come in the wind. A cold wind that caught his foot. Or was it the fear of us taking him straight to the police, spreading photos on the chief's desk like dog mush, assuming all those conversations.
ExcluirThis time, the conversation wasn't dry, and the boy felt a raw need to loosen up the man, since the whole thing had scared him. And, with a bad eye, the boy confessed to me that it was a matter of one day, everything would end. He was spying on a world of people going down the drain, from Brasília to Juiz de Fora, and now he knew that no amount of caution was enough anymore. Everything would be covered in the Federal Police's ink, and now it was up to Agnelo to facilitate our disappearance upriver, before everything got messed up. We didn't follow the backwardness of ignorance, and we didn't threaten violence either, just tricked with brains, until things turned out to be prophecy, taking up space in the bank account to wait. It was like a runaway cattle movement, me and that boy. We could even follow that stretch of the Rio do Peixe, after the Federal Police's additions in the middle of the country.
ExcluirSomehow, however, they saw that I had a prison record, up North. They asked: 'SCRAMBLING WHAT, IN THESE PARTS???' To avoid just facing the men, I answered briefly, laughing a bit sourly, unfunny. In the darkness of it all, I thought, remembering the boy with the Party members, in the darkness of it all there must be someone more evil than me, the boy and everyone else combined. Even so, it was in the confusion of my language that the police shook the shadows of the case," the old man said.
Excluir"Mr. Adamastor. Let me understand, then. You kidnapped Agnelo, right? More or less. And for a short period of time (three days), everything stopped, even time, while 'something' was decided in that captivity. And can you detail how it was done? Can you try to explain who made the decision, and why? I don't need to tell you that I'm immune to any literary impulse, since K himself assured you of this. He insisted that only you could speak about the case; that he himself, K, had a very partial version of the case, almost delirious in its paranoia, and should keep it to himself, forever. So what?!" I said.
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ResponderExcluir"Here you must imagine, I can only guess, I risk being wrong. The one who saw and calculated everything, at that point, was the boy. I think that's why he freaked out. Everything I saw was through the boy's eyes. I could be wrong, but toward the end, that boy seemed so isolated from everything and everyone that I suppose we overlooked the possibilities of controlling everything he had in that environment, and suddenly. One day, it was ordinary work. The very next, it came like a fright, the boy, with his head in a mess, asking me for a quick, unpredictable decision about wanting to set fire to the NGO and demanding honesty from me about what to do next, with the list of criminals he pulled from his pocket, wanting to get to the bottom of it right away, to go after them, follow the trail, with an authority of imagination. I said calm down, boy. Horrible agitation, the boy. Suddenly, he had no time for anything. A contagious schism, a paranoia that led in a torrent, from fear to anger, constantly. A repetition of improvisations that drove me crazy, with those powers of foreboding.
In silence, waiting for me to agree to do something extreme right away. We salivated for a while there, the taste of blood in our mouths, soon spat out. From within the soft core, then came that fury. The list was too long, and the whereabouts of each of those things no dog in the woods could find anymore. Agnelo was left, in the newspaper's sights, for us to quickly forget about, before he disappeared. Deadline over. The days no longer fit within time, when Lucinha served the fatal coffee at Padaria Portugal, where she worked in the mornings. I parked the van next to it, at the entrance to a building's parking lot, where the security guard was an acquaintance of mine. From afar, on Rio Branco, I saw the boy cross the street and walk alongside Agnelo, already wobbly, toward the van, with the sound of a rat emerging from a tiny hole. They climbed into the van, over Agnelo's dusty foot, already losing their spirits as they lay in the backseat. A naughty boy's trickery, that day. To judge him as bad? A vaguely planned work, but executed flawlessly. A snail's broth, inside the vain. Far from that bustling slum, from the city, the newspaper, the police, the NGO, politics, the captivity was no less boring.
ExcluirIt was decided with Agnelo's photos there, which the boy showed me before speaking to him, imbuing each one with a strange meaning. Agnelo only responded later, saying things that danced in the air, trying to speak to the boy's inner sanity, which was becoming more and more brutal. Agnelo? Pure detours, accepting anything, approximately. At this, the boy resumed his whole story of what to do upon arriving in the city. First, he was to deny the newspaper, and only speak to the police in the sweaty cold, remembering only the distance between the barrão pig pen and the shooting range, that outline of a story alone, without developing anything else. 'THE ONE ABOUT NOT DOING ART ON THE WAY BACK,' the boy insisted. A story for the newspaper? I COULDN'T! In a hurry, very precise, disappearing with our names in the court records, in case they came to scare the police about the whole thing later. That dirty money, plague and witchcraft, looking inside only at the Party's, "OR WE'LL SHOOT EVERYONE", he he he, the boy was a bit irritated at that time.
ExcluirThe boy didn't want to lie down in the dirt; he must have been overreacting somewhere, with the noise of all that carrion. He seemed almost like a different person, sparing no fight there. He'd burst into tears in the darkness, without a fight back. Then, on the last day, he'd just fight back in the quiet. Agnelo got tired, and we left him at dawn. We set the whole corral on fire. We left," the old man said, laughing.
Excluir"Okay. I think I understand that part. K then disappeared. He reappeared five years later, in Salvador, all dissertations, in scandalous comfort. Everyone already knows this; it's in his books. And what about you? What did you do after he disappeared?" I asked.
ResponderExcluir"Your voice just keeps stretching, huh? Each point more questionable than the last. AaaaaaaaaaaaaaRaaa! I found a hollow escape, yes, just like the boy. In the looseness of time, I calmed the astonishment of body and mind, there near Milho Verde, in a silent forest where not even a whisper was spoken at night. In the core of the silence, bouncing, coming through it, the only discussion was that of a bird on a tree sprout, without any government of guilt. When I returned to Juiz de Fora, I read something in a newspaper. Those criminal, half-crazy characters the boy talked about. They had nothing to do with it. I loved the stillness of the Peixe River. It's still here today," the old man said finally.
End MAVECHIO here!
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ResponderExcluirRodrigo Guimarães
Fapemig-Unimontes
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges became globally recognized for his short stories and essays, which feature an intricate fictional plot, replete with (not always) apocryphal quotations, fragments, mythological allusions, and historical, philosophical, literary, and theological references. He also uses intratextuality, quoting and paraphrasing his own texts, becoming an Other. Borges wrote about imaginary writers, basing his work on falsified historical data and drawing on nonexistent archives. In short, he strove to blur the boundaries between "dreams" and reality, multiplying phantasmagorias in his limitless Library.
The undecidables in his Library constitute the most refined destabilizations of an entire hegemonic paradigm in the West, such as the common notions that underpin metaphysics, namely, reality, time, space, truth, and memory. Unlike Derrida, who devoted himself to deconstructing canonical words or concepts of logocentric thought, Borges shifts the entire bloc of logical thought by shaking, through paradoxes and other devices, the main pillars of the structure of rationality. He does not resort to doubt as a method of investigation to reach truth, as Descartes did, but inserts it, along with certainty, into the fictional realm: "I dreamed doubt and certainty." Just as Derrida did with différance, which sustains absence and presence in its process of differentiality, Borges grounds the thought of logos on a basis of simulacrum. In other words, there is no simple inversion of the dreamlike overcoming the real, but both are based on the playfulness of the game that makes it impossible to even locate the coastline that separates reality from fiction.
ResponderExcluirIn his short story "August Twenty-Fifth, 1983," Borges meets Borges in a hotel room. This other person (himself) is much older. Startled, the narrator (the young Borges) asks: "So, is this all a dream?" The answer, not at all enlightening: "It is, I'm sure, my last dream." Who dreams of whom? This is the Aristotelian question posed by the young Borges. However, the answer is Borgesian: "You don't realize that the fundamental thing is to determine whether there is one man dreaming or two who dream of each other" (Borges, 2000c: 427).
ResponderExcluirThe double, as we know, is a recurring feature of Borges's short stories. It differs from the Platonic pair "model and copy," in which the logic of exclusion and a second, fallen term are evident. Nor is it equivalent to an operation of equality, like Socrates's "two Cratyli." Borges's perspective often inserts itself into a type of double logic. Therefore, the dialogue in the short story "August Twenty-Fifth, 1983" takes place in two times and two places. Understood in this way, it also differs from the Derridean logic of the supplement, since there is no simultaneous substitution and addition, but rather coexistence and overlapping of places.
ResponderExcluirOften, when Borges evokes dreams, he does so not to highlight merely the dimension of oneiricity, but rather of coexistence, of theatricality, in which many places are occupied simultaneously. In his essay "The Nightmare", Borges, when quoting Addison, observes that in a dream "we are the theater, the auditorium, the actors, the argument, the words we hear" (Borges, 2000c: 250).
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ResponderExcluirBorges summons another of his undecidables: memory, and resorts to the cunning of simulating small uncertainties, starting from the premise that memory is not precise and forgetting is inventive. Indeed, regarding memory, Borges' essays border on both extremes. In "The Immortal," he imagines a world without memory and time, while in one of his best-known short stories, "Funes, the Memorious," he constructs a character who, after an accident, acquired an infallible memory and perception. Funes does not need the aid of writing for remembrance. His memory is the "living memory" of which Tammuz speaks in Plato's Phaedrus. It is in direct contact with truth, not that of the Platonic world of ideas, but with the reality of objective perception and its retention. Funes remembers all the leaves of a tree, "as well as each of the times he had perceived or imagined it." Borgesian irony takes to its ultimate consequences a realistic representation of the world supported by a unique code in which each word or image corresponds to a specific object or situation.
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ResponderExcluirBorges summons another of his undecidables: memory, and resorts to the cunning of simulating small uncertainties, starting from the premise that memory is not precise and forgetting is inventive. Indeed, regarding memory, Borges' essays border on both extremes. In "The Immortal," he imagines a world without memory and time, while in one of his best-known short stories, "Funes, the Memorious," he constructs a character who, after an accident, acquired an infallible memory and perception. Funes does not need the aid of writing for remembrance. His memory is the "living memory" of which Tammuz speaks in Plato's Phaedrus. It is in direct contact with truth, not that of the Platonic world of ideas, but with the reality of objective perception and its retention. Funes remembers all the leaves of a tree, "as well as each of the times he had perceived or imagined it." Borgesian irony takes to its ultimate consequences a realistic representation of the world supported by a unique code in which each word or image corresponds to a specific object or situation.
It is the perfect language dreamed of by Leibniz, in which there are no ambiguities or polysemy in the representative function of words. Or, even less naively, Wittgenstein's attempt in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to develop a propositional language capable of depicting the world without the impurities of tautologies and nonsense. However, Funes's absolute memory is not an object of admiration for the narrator. On the contrary: "I suspect, however, that he was not very capable of thinking. To think is to forget differences, to generalize, to abstract."
ResponderExcluirBorges not only left his mark of undecidability on classical themes such as time, space, memory, and the notion of the self, but also created a labyrinth of unusual and playful paradoxes. The very way of looking at a coin, "The Zahir," and seeing both sides simultaneously—not because it's transparent, but because the subject looking uses spherical vision. Or, even, observing that the gigantic can be a form of the invisible, and therefore the face of God cannot be seen, due to its colossal size: "three hundred and seventy times larger than ten thousand worlds."
ResponderExcluirBorges's deconstructions are often nothing more than false paradoxes or disconcerting speculations about language; others, they are woven into a complex web of logical impossibilities, as in the stories "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Immortal," "The Writing of God," "The Book of Sand," "The Other," and "The Library of Babel."
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