Non mortale quod opto I

 K

(From the inert mass of delusions that faded with time, there remained, however, that remnant of groping apocalyptic poetry, in the exasperated wake of some kind of verbose vision of inner enormities. Yes, K then still cared deeply about history and space, when he set up shop somewhere new. And about all the ill-fame refined in the opposition that came with it. He wasted a gesture in a hitherto strange act of defiance --- turning against himself, defiant, his face set, sternly bent on evil alone, strong as discarded iron)

When I arrived in that small town in the interior of Minas Gerais, I was already completely undone; there was nothing left of my former self. However, my yawns of boredom soon became alarming, and they began to measure me there in that environment by the gradual progress of my transformation into a disorderly chronicler, according to the day's chimera. And by the frequency and style with which I had been "writing myself" in an inveterate over-obedience, my haste in making myself seen—sub or pseudo, or whatever—everywhere. My energetic madman's diction was astonishing, emerging from the circumspectness of the stack of reread newspapers, striking at the hard heads of others with a touchstone full of the dangerous perceptions of everything. I imagined myself a man of action, encased in pomp, as far as the eye could see. "I WANT!" and "BECAUSE YES!" were my main philosophical arguments, always with a provocative voice, always changed into a fight, cracking my fists, all moonlit temper, in extraordinary emphatic conditions! Indeed... and THAT was enough! To the curiosity for the unknown, for the extreme bizarre, the arrogant pinnacle pride that I had then, had come to join, in the trivial shortening of that stay, a general desire of the people for better things, that would put me on track. Depending on the moment, they were exasperated by my arrogant protagonism in everything, by my obscure presumptions and my multi-pomp, shouting virulently and mixing all conversations with poisons of nonsense and intrigue, which came to try to cool my demi-urgent form in the city, narrating me in their worst criteria, and leaving me to collapse in a vague and immense isolation without echo, which consumed my authoritarian aberration, inflating me with news from the national front and threats of a shaky and one-eyed personal future. Every chatter there reeked of the intellectual mediocrity of a huddle and greasy kitchen politics---dregs, cigarette butts, and trifles of intimate torment curdling themselves in the reasons for distorted facts, in tiresome grimaces of motives no one understood---in a fiction of indifference solidified under cigarette ash and feelings of ill-debatedness out of tune with real life, and every spontaneous counter-edge that gushed from my disdainful laughter eating away at their eyes, ruining them in a mirthless boast of completely nonexistent speeches. All to be taken all night, not even the drugs socialized at night pacifying the nerves, from that entire crust nothing being renewed during the day that would germinate the kernel of a soul--- consisted only of failure, those fillings I gather placed it on the frigid surface of doubts, disjointedly sunk in an unanswerable daily life, disengaged from life's dress rehearsal, monstrous in a microbe-like disdain of cold piss. While my only feeling was divine, that of cave-dwelling tantric meditative practice, they displayed blocks of suspicious thought whose muteness armored the farcical cynicism of not even understanding one another. Was it certain that my cathartic metamorphosis into a divine cosmic virus that infiltrates --- stardust?, globules of boiling blood and sperm, endless plasmatic reengineering of the tiniest atom of God teaching the terrifying kaleidoscope of Nothingness in combustion? --- ached within them with a cohesion as permanent as it was dangerous; it soured their faces with persistent nervousness and gloom; burdens and rancor, subconscious tastes of revenge, all without a clear theme, for an uninterrupted sealing of my fame, whose judgment in the city had become legion in the blink of an eye. Soon they would advance (in vain) eager to defeat me on my own ground with cunning and false kindness, croaking for petty gibberish and trifles, and in their pride they would fall ill without remedy, skewered, reporting malignant tumors and circumscribing their own heart attacks with chimeras of re-offended affront.