MONSTROUS CONCERT Writing to the sound of

 

Monstrous Concert, whose extravagant music was absurd and drowned out the creaking of the dock cranes, the noise of traffic, the ship whistles, and the shouting of the people around me. I light a cigarette and stand there, unsure whether it's the disturbing, beautiful, and sad, or the unreal, a heat of sweet blood, rising from the underground rooms and warehouses of wildlife trafficking: a breath of animal blood hangs over the entire city, like carrion. Everything is calculated in enormous quantities and multiplied to infinity in an overwhelming way, so to speak; nothing has the familiar names and references anymore, the unity of the world as something with nothing special to distinguish it from anything else. I then change paths, through an interior courtyard to a studio with a large open window, allowing a view of the beach to the horizon below. On the easel, an unfinished portrait of a girl sitting in that same window. Recent brushstrokes, whose features reminded me of Sabrina struggling to emerge from the mists. Beside it, there was a table with old paint stains, on which sat a rectangular palette covered in glossy paint. "Here's her portrait," the man said, taking the canvas from the easel and handing it to me. "It's five hundred reais," he said. "But it's a painting from memory, my brother. Three hundred!" I replied. "The beach ahead puts my voice to the world, bluntly, 'God strikes beautifully,' 'a man's hand for hot handling'... 'and I still have the chance to light up this place, oh, if only, if only!'" – But it's the only one I've worked on from memory, three hundred and fifty – in my opinion, I had achieved similar effects, and I vaguely remembered the praise Zolá gave to a Monet painting: "a woman dressed in white, sitting in the shade of the foliage, her dress sprinkled with points of light as if they were large drops of water." Now, I have to pass by the supermarket, with the painting under my arm, on the street. I had sworn to save on the word love, but what has been written so far seems frivolous enough to bear it; it would be impossible to write about something else. I had become her idol! And sometimes she truly cared for me like an old woman, as if, at any moment, I might shatter into pieces. But let's think of love here as an indescribable kind of gravitational force; not a brute force, exerted by the planets in their orbits, but simply, Einsteinianly there: a cosmic mathematical property of space itself. Her face had become a luminous darkness, her body a magnet whose bikini tightened so tightly it would set a saint ablaze. Her voice floated out and above the delicate network of luminosity of her face. A deep interest in tenderly exceeding herself, throughout the joyful lunch, welcomed with humor. It's possible that the extravagant music from the beginning hasn't stopped playing until now... I was listening to it when I took the painting off the paper, generating an oceanic inclination toward profound subjects, in the marine cadences of expired reserve.