Granta 121: Best of Young Brazilian Novelists Read online

  In the North Zone and the outskirts, invisible to the media and rather less crystallized in Rio’s for-export imagination, the process of expelling the original population was faster and less subtle than in the favelas of the South Zone, without the risk of unfamiliar intimacy. Under the pretext of revitalization, a word that in pre-Olympics times could justify all kinds of atrocities, removals and arbitrary displacements, tens of thousands of people were ejected from their homes to create unlimited space for the new absolute owners of those areas: developers and their armed political allies. Marks painted on doors sprang up like death sentences to determine which houses were to be demolished in forty-eight hours in the ghettos of Vila Autódromo, Jacarepaguá, Taquara, Campinho, Madureira, Maracanã, Olaria and the area of the docks.

  Disrespect for residents’ rights to resettlement; the immediate transfer of any justice-department official critical of the process; the use of tasers to rouse beggars; the beating of street workers, itinerant vendors and handymen by Municipal Guards prior to dumping them in human warehouses in the wheezing edgelands of the city in an operation the municipal government called, without irony, ‘Shock of Order’: these were some of the marks of that decade that cariocas chose to ignore, corrupted by the promise of a World Cup, an Olympics, four subway stations, expressways, a pair of museums and stadiums – the provincial desire to be Londoners or New Yorkers in the tropics, to emulate cosmopolitanism through an urban plastic surgery that never came to be but was widely depicted in colourful graphics in the newspapers.

  In those early years of the 2010s, the city was beginning to be lost for good to some of its long-time residents. Whoever was unable to pay for the New Rio was swept away to the hot, dusky outskirts that continued to grow virus-like along the deteriorating railroad lines outside the Olympic beltway. The price of real estate inside the small pearl necklace delimited by the sea and the Tijuca Massif came to be regulated by the international market, out of proportion to the real purchasing power of its inhabitants in 2013: rent for a thirty-metre-square efficiency apartment in an overpopulated building in the shadowy concrete corridors of Copacabana was equal to that of a similar apartment in Paris or New York and twice that of one in Berlin or Lisbon.

  In little more than three years between the first and second decades of the twenty-first century, the same economic process that doubled or quadrupled the price of housing transformed the real into the world’s most over-evaluated currency. In those days Tomás Anselmo’s financial adviser would phone him at 5 p.m., twirling his finger in a glass of whisky and soda with lots of ice, to say things like: ‘Listen, my man, I’m going to move the entire investment into the Interbank Deposits and the return we’ll put in that mutual fund; I’ve been talking with the people at Factual and they’ve been unclear about the market, so it’s time to protect your principal and take out only the return from a fixed-yield fund.’

  Less informed natives of every age proudly repeated the headlines in the New York Times and the Guardian about the country’s growth and the rise in the cost of living – without suspecting, or deliberately forgetting, that the abundance of money was the same that financed risky loans, the business of celebrated super wheeler-dealers that drained competitiveness from industry. When, in November 2009, shortly after the archangel Gabriel announced the Olympic Prophecy, the Economist published an article stating that at some time ‘subsequent to 2014’ Brazil would be the fifth-largest economy in the world, surpassing the United Kingdom and France; that the only risk in Brazil thereafter would be excessive pride; that Brazil, unlike India, had no ethnic or insurgent conflicts; that Brazil, unlike China, was a democracy; and, further, that Brazil, unlike Russia, exports more than just oil and weapons, it was believed that the future of the country of the future had arrived.

  Years later, Tomás Anselmo would say, with spiritless eyes: ‘The issue of the Economist with the statue of Christ the Redeemer taking flight on the cover was the start of our defeat. They hung that magazine on office walls throughout the city like a painting on an altar. Most people never read the twenty-page special on the magic future of Brazil, but they had it framed. What weeks! What months! There were mornings in those days! They took that material as a theophany, as if it had been written not by a group of gringo journalists with tentacles linked to investment funds of Beelzebub himself but by an apostle in ecstasy transcribing the voice of God as it narrated paradise to him and ordered him to take the text to the seven churches of Asia. We believed at that moment that we were condemned to prosperity – and unfortunately that was not our last ingenuous act. Better if the Economist had reprinted in its pages on Brazil the apocalypse of St John, now that the old things have disappeared and so many people dry the tears from their eyes, of that there can be no doubt.’

  In those perplexing times, Tomás Anselmo complained that the balneary of Saint Sebastian of the River of January had become not only more expensive, but also distant from the references of his infancy and youth. In place of the neighbourhood movie theatres and old bookstores where he spent his sleepwalking adolescence were evangelical churches and fitness centres. In place of the French copper lamp posts and orangish light, the new fluorescent light of Rio de Janeiro was mendacious in its attempt to hide the darkness in which the city will forever live. In place of bars and restaurants and nightclubs with names so old they had lost their meaning, like Penafiel, Luna Bar, Garage, Real Astoria, 69, Carlitos, Basement, Giotto, Bunker and Caneco 70, monsters of mirrored glass, the irrational multiplication of pharmacies and drugstores, several per block. In the emptiness of each of those spaces now occupied by shelves of shampoo and tacky modernistic entrances, Tomás saw an aquarium of tables and chairs en route to the oblivion that he himself so feared, until the last photo of each of those old haunts was finally burned.

  And not only were the theatres and bars dying, but also old witnesses of time: in Rio de Janeiro even the statues in the squares were disappearing or being dismantled by thieves to melt down their bronze, even though the squares were enclosed by fences to ward off the sleep of beggars. In the Passeio Público, the little angel of the Fountain of Love, by Master Valentim, was wingless and armless. In Praça Quinze, General Osório’s sword, cast from the bronze of cannons in the Paraguayan War, had disappeared. On the sidewalk of Copacabana, the glasses on the statue of the poet Drummond, sitting with his back to the sea, were gone. At least the theft of his glasses would prevent his seeing the ugly passing of cars and buildings to which he was condemned for all eternity.

  A man imprisoned in himself, his feet stuck to the ground, his sight faded, he was the statue, decrepit before forty, with the feeling of waking up every day with the hangover that arises between two acts of a drama: How did I end up here? Just what city is this? Lost in a narrative of déjà vu illustrated with paranoid determination, the act of reconstructing that path, which would be the same as taking his feet from the ground or finally treading on it, seemed impossible. Tomás Anselmo didn’t know how to begin.

  In the years that preceded the fall, when Tomás Anselmo was not in the street sighing and taking inventory of his losses, he would shut himself at home with his wife, turn on the air conditioning and organize small orgies lubricated with champagne in Martini glasses. He stuffed himself with psychedelics and never wrote but recorded music on his recently purchased sound equipment: sparse bass, sharp guitar riffs built by infinite overdubbing, atmospheric beats, synthesizers to die for. And he would spend hours mixing the cuts and trying to classify his sexy-melancholy compositions: chillwave, glo-fi, neo-fusion, landscaping, hyperglitch pop, minimal electro-shoegaze, weightless psych-ambient, etc. When the parties ended, before going to sleep, he would delete from the computer the tracks composed specifically for that select and scantily dressed audience – that, then, was his public and his stage in the nearly five years when he didn’t write.

  An invitation to a night out with one of his few remaining friends (they called themselves ‘the resistance’) provoked the
repetition of various phrases: ‘Go out? What I really want is for everyone to go home’ or ‘The only purpose of a cabaret is for single men to find willing women. The rest is a waste of time in a foul environment!’ And Tomás remembered that he had no reason to look for women outside his air-conditioned palace of fifty square metres, outside the peace of his domestic desert, and later would trot out the litany that his closest friends knew by heart, until they stopped listening to him: that the euphoria and self-absorption of the carioca in the 2010s was unbearable, that the revitalized and illuminated Lapa was a hotbed of tourists, stupidity and obscurity, that there was practically no music or theatre by a contemporary compatriot that made him want to leave the house, that the poets in the city were pyrotechnic punsters and the writers of prose were zombies, blind mimics of dead traditions, and that any table in the city occupied by artists seemed to him torturous vulgarity: limited thoughts, full of formulas and recipes, bowing down to the powerful, to the old prevailing ideas, to paternalism and the thirst for money.

  At a table in Rio de Janeiro in the 2010s, the artists who wasted their time on Earth exchanging information about plans and intrigues could be divided into two large groups: those with government money stapled to their foreheads and those who had labels for TV networks or their advertisers stapled to their foreheads. Anyone who wasn’t part of either of the two groups would be fighting for crumbs from those circles, orbiting them attentively and then conspiring savagely to become part of them through the collusion with the aristocracy that fills positions in the complex and swollen organizational charts of ad agencies, production companies, the network itself, newspapers and TV, or through public notices and fellowships and handouts offered through the three branches of government.

  Not that Tomás Anselmo was pure and didn’t know how to circulate among those schemes and extract from them some money, some fame and some easy sex. Just the opposite – very much the opposite.

  Even so, to pay so dearly to live in that tomb of ideas with the atmosphere of a public bathroom, where a trip to a bakery in Leblon takes on the air of a Hollywood expedition, with paparazzi setting up portable offices on motorcycles, sending photos to Internet portals in real time of the latest celebrity who kissed her or his lover in public, where being any place, from a table at a bar to the Municipal Theatre, going along the beach, is to exercise their main vocation of seeing-and-being-seen, where all are foreigners in the city of their birth, divided into countless communities, zones, favelas, neighbourhoods, condominiums, fans, hills, samba schools, criminal factions, street corners, posts at the beach and tables at the bar, no longer made sense for Tomás and for a silent and growing minority who not only changed neighbourhoods but left the city for good, not for lack of money but simply because they could not bear it any more. Or so Tomás Anselmo wished to believe in the golden decade of the 2010s.

  Despite the self-deception, Tomás knew that the country and the tree-filled city and the people saying goodbye were only one person: Tomás Anselmo. He, who had never renounced anything, who had always been the target of someone else’s renunciation – a job, a woman – was finally haunted by the awareness of never once having given up.

  But soon everything would disappear.

  GRANTA

  * * *

  STILL LIFE

  Vinicius Jatobá

  TRANSLATED BY JETHRO SOUTAR

  * * *

  VINICIUS JATOBÁ

  1980

  Vinicius Jatobá was born in Rio de Janeiro. He has written criticism for Estado de S. Paulo, O Globo and Carta Capital. He has also contributed to the anthology Prosas Cariocas and to the film guide 1968 Cinema Utopia Revolução!. Jatobá has written and directed several short films, including Alta Solidão (2010) and Vida entre os mamíferos (2011). Currently, he is at work on his first novel, Pés descalços, and completing Apenas o vento, a collection of short stories, from which ‘Still Life’ (‘Natureza-morta’) is taken.

  You see the house and its time, the house and the house alone, though your secrets, your fears and silences still exist there, locked away behind the denseness of the closed doors and shuttered windows, your fears and silences desperate for an opening to escape a winter that seems eternal, to leave behind the low rumble of trapped accumulation to which they are held captive and ownerless, and you see, you see the house, you don’t flee from it or ignore it, you see that the only thing that seems to move in its atmosphere is dust suspended against a fine thread of sunlight, that time itself sleeps lazily on the stupefied clocks, you see the proud furniture relinquishing its strength to despondency, cracking and losing its exuberance and shine, the quilt on the silent bed becoming a filthy cloak where any trace of the smell of its owners is lost amid the dusty fury, the grime, the tears on the ceiling and the weeping in every corner

  at first he didn’t want to buy the plot and thought the whole thing absurd but I argued that nowhere in the world was so perfect for us to live as here, only here could we be eternally happy, as I’d dreamed of since childhood, and who doesn’t want happiness, we’d build the house of our dreams here and live out the countless days that lay ahead of us, and Paulo just looked at me, silent, aloof, proud, his eyes condemning me as if it were inappropriate to want to be happy here, thinking me mad and crazy and fragile, and I loved him for it, even for that, for making me feel simple in his arms, paralysed under the stare of his dark eyes, all those cold nights together, squeezed against each other, submerged under the covers, yes, your madwoman, I’m your madwoman, I said in silence, and he there, staring at me as if buying a plot of land in a place as boggy and humid as Irajá was something really quite stupid, Paulo always so intelligent and learned and me so ignorant, as he would say shamefaced to his friends, forgive her for not speaking properly and not knowing anything about politics, yes, a little airhead, and I know I’ve only ever really understood my sewing machine, which was all I had in life besides God, my dear God, that machine has brought me pleasure, bricks and mortar, the two of us alone night after night, doing battle, dreaming, accomplices, keeping secrets that we still share, I knew it wasn’t stupid to buy that plot and I said come on, man, are you made of sugar, for Paulo was always so clean and perfumed and he hated mud and dirt and always wiped his feet on the mat, even though the mat was so filthy it was like not wiping them, he wiped them more for the gesture, he furnished himself with gestures, and he went mad whenever his son, all smiles, took the dog into the living room, years later, when the sludge had gone and the house existed and the neighbours had multiplied, and then I went further, I said come on, man, this is where I want to have children, I said, and he ended up giving in, though not without first thinking it was all madness, a godforsaken shithole with no tarmac or anything out there in the back of beyond, but it was a simple matter of me having headaches for weeks and weeks until he changed his mind, feeling nauseous whenever he came close to me in bed in our little rented room in Cascadura and there I’d be, hearing the deep breathing of my heart, and there I’d be, feeling the smooth fabric of my nightdress touched along the line of my buttocks, and even then I had terrible headaches that only stopped when he finally gave in, I who was always excessively pretty and who always got the men worked up on the tram or the tramps in the streets where I walked, restless, as if I were inappropriately clothed, feeling myself naked in front of everyone but keeping a calm face for I was Paulo’s woman, the man I love and the father of my child

  the house, you see the house, with its abandoned backyard and the FOR SALE sign now rusted and cracked in the relentless heat, the wilted yellow leaves scattered about the yard and dancing to the circular motion of the wind, the old wooden dog kennel surrendering to the termites, the grass relentlessly growing, even in gaps in the tarmac, gradually invading a world it used to rule

  it was mad to buy a plot so far away from where I worked as a horseback guard, riding through the Olaria bush until I was exhausted, until the stars cried out in the coal-black sky, a cool breeze cut through the s
tuffy heat of the thick scrub and I felt at one with the animal, breathing to the same rhythm as he and feeling content, lost to the music of the gathered night, and then trotting proudly along the trails of a morning, whistling at the girls and frightening away the boys who ran about killing whatever creatures they found, riding along the pathways, working and studying a lot, putting up with ten years of sleeping badly in that house that took shape without any help from me as money was so scarce, sleeping with pain in my back, lying there drained on the improvised bed and listening to Vera in the half-light pedalling away on her machine, sewing non-stop, sewing as if milking her subsistence from the ether, until I managed to get into the police and could finally buy a decent bed with an American mattress and I began to sleep peacefully and without any pain in my back, then I bought a suit to wear for my new job, an elegant suit like film stars wore, the American and English ones I so admired and that appeared in magazines, and I went about walking on air but always in the same dark green suit as I hadn’t enough money to buy another one, that suit was my fortress, and as it tore I’d get embarrassed in front of my friends because of my wife’s awful patching, but I resigned myself to it as there was nothing else for it with so little money, and what money there was went on the house, a man dependent on his woman for subsistence, depending on her sewing and tailoring to be able to live a little of the life I wanted to have but lacked the resources for, sometimes I found a note or a bit of shrapnel in the pockets of my trousers and she smiled at me in complicity, quietly, never saying a word, and that was the money I used to go out with my superiors, to get to know the world and see things and I felt guilty that she couldn’t join in with what I saw, even though I didn’t want her there in my world, even though I wanted to be free of her charitable stare, always planning to leave her but never daring to go through with it, always fantasizing about escape routes, until finally she got pregnant after years of silent suffering, years of thinking she was dry, that she was a desert, wanting it for years, and when I saw her full and expectant smile I knew I’d never leave her, she doubled the amount of sewing she did and put money aside, in a hole behind the wardrobe, for when the child came, she talked of her plans for extending the house and I listened in horror because I wanted to get out of there, a desire that would forever be frustrated for lack of courage, for loving her too sincerely, for admiring her without daring to admit it nor totally giving myself over to it as she did, she who was busy building walls in her mind, walls that would further and forever reinforce the foundations of that prison I wanted to leave without saying a thing, leave her to her mad dreams that grew in every sense and direction, go and live like the police in films, but I did worry about her, the image of her bent over the sewing machine all day disturbed me, I was scared of her stomach bursting and flooding the house, I feared showing signs of my wanting to escape, signs she hardly noticed as she made her little self-sacrifices, wearing the same threadbare clothes and eating second-rate meat, saving crumbs to build the castle of her dreams, ignoring the present and living in the future like a madwoman, shaming me with those charitable eyes, the thought of which made me feel sick when I was with the other women I slept with, Vera putting money aside and me running around with other women, lying, deceiving myself, rehearsing how I’d escape, spending what I didn’t have, until one day