Father likes looking at corpses, too. But he prefers to examine them from close up, like plants in the botanical garden. He lifts the edge of the newspaper to study the face, attentively and authoritatively, without a sign of fear. He says nothing, but he does not approve of the fatalism of the onlookers. He looks for a brief moment, then moves on, squeezing my hand to reassure me. Often we encounter dead bodies on our Sunday walks, particularly at the water’s edge. They wash onto the rock jetty, among the flotsam, driven by the currents of the bay. The fishermen haul them in, or tow them out to sea if decomposition has set in. Most of the time the bodies snag on the rocks, where they bob up and down on the gentle swell, festooned with seaweed. The bodies are covered with signs of crabs at work, and by the marks of the rocks. Some are as desecrated as the body of Christ on Good Friday. Women’s bodies draw more interest and larger crowds, an outpouring of comments and jokes. Only rarely are they towed out to sea. Groups form, people sit down in a rough circle while the boiled crab and grilled sardine vendors do a brisk business with their unexpected customers.
All these corpses — the victims of accidents, the drowned, the mutilated beggars, the naked women and the greenish babies — come as no surprise. They’re someone else’s dead. When night falls it won’t be our feet they’ll come to tug on. Still, I feel a vague sense of foreboding, especially when they’re not nice to look at, when they take on the strangest shapes in my imagination. But I get used to it. With time, their forms become simply interesting.
From our window overlooking Vargas Avenue, we have a splendid view of the military parade. The people in the street have to make do with makeshift grandstands in the direct sunlight. Early on the morning of September 7, our national holiday, we’re awakened by the frenzy of preparations: workers cleaning the pavement, trucks roaring, artillery pieces rumbling by, squadrons of horses and tanks. Then come the throngs of soldiers pushing and shoving to get into parade formation. The whole thing is a gigantic merry-go-round that stinks of kerosene, horse dung and dust, complete with banners and regimental standards, gleaming brass bands and national flags.
At our house, the festival is underway. Friends drop by to watch, neighbours stick their heads through the door asking for ice, we pop the caps off beer bottles and nibble standing up. Down on the sidewalk people crowd around the bars, and children are waving green and gold pennants. A carnival with military music. The atmosphere turns more and more to hilarity, much to the displeasure of the pot-bellied officers. People cheer our military exploits, from our defeat of Paraguay to our victory over Germany. Who can doubt the courage of these intrepid soldiers, half-breeds for the most part, but undefeated on the field of honour? What a race! Then they sing the national anthem while we children giggle at the pissing horses, which remind us of our aunts and their moon-water.
The women have nothing to say about military matters, except to sigh with longing as the mighty host of would-be husbands marches by with a show of virility. It makes them want to pee, and the racy jokes resume as my mother tells them exactly what she thinks of all this shamelessness. As the day drags on, the heat grows more intense, and the parade begins to fade. The more repetitive it becomes, the more we see its ridiculous side. The uniforms seem straight out of a comic opera, the soldiers look more and more like corpses, the rhythm of the brass bands makes us long for Carnival, the pot bellies and double chins of the officers seem more prominent, and we forget completely about our enemies the Germans. As President Vargas drives by in his Rolls Royce, a final surge of enthusiasm sweeps over the crowd, and from then on it’s all downhill.
After the parade, the women make a bee-line for Praça Republica to mingle with the soldiers. My brother and I are the only ones who stay on until the end. He loves the military life, snapping to attention, saluting the flag and complaining about how I don’t care. I just can’t take any of it seriously, and I don’t have any patriotic feeling. While everyone is singing along with the anthem or saluting the flag, I just watch. The soldiers seem as ridiculous to me as the colours of our flag. Once I even told that to my brother. You’re a traitor to the fatherland, he answered.
8
HOW CURIOUS IT IS to think back to all those things, the finely detailed faces that have remained like scars in my mind, cut off from the ebb and flow of life. But when I look at my paintings, the process is reversed. I can return to the past. Scenes forgotten and events forever erased are reborn with all the clarity of a film. Even if the theme of the canvas seems separate from my own experience, it can still reveal and rekindle memory, and transport me back to the past.
There I come upon the faces of my childhood, the made-up women, the rigor mortis mouths of the dead, the colour and light of a particular place or moment. I had to create this huge complex of shadow and ink tracing in order to finally clear away the debris of long-buried memories. In the process, he who believed himself free finally came to see himself as nothing more than the creation of his predestination — like larva infected by the eggs of midges that believe they will become butterflies but are nothing more than nests and nourishment for graceless, colourless parasites.
Those are my feelings as I resuscitate the things I’d done my utmost to forget. The new identity I’d toiled so hard to acquire has turned into a trap. From now on I will gladly surrender to the role of bit player in a farce conceived in the eyes of a solitary child. All this effort just to return to the starting point. All these paintings just to return to the little boy I had hoped to lay to rest. The people around me hardly notice, so tough has my outer shell become, polished by the buffing of chance. My layers of masks have stratified, and my extremities are sharp. I’ve turned into a reptile of sorts, with a carapace of steely scales protecting a soft, vulnerable body.
Look at this blind soldier surrounded by cripples in a painting that seems to exhale toxic vapour — that’s how I re-en countered one of my classmates, the one who used to tell me how good girls smell. Or this canvas that I’d wanted to symbolize exile, yet which turned into a faithful representation of the drowned, draped by multicoloured garlands of seaweed. All these human machines — the marionettes, the disconnected mechanisms and dismembered dolls which I believed to be allegories of alienation — are nothing but street corpses, ghosts that have come back to tug at my legs in this cold land. My scarecrows are soldiers falling into rank; my agitator is one of the street vendors of contraband junk. My railway station scenes of immobilized crowds turn out to be the landscape of the public health clinic. The man falling before the firing squad is the figure of my father losing his footing on a makeshift scaffold. The women of the Mango district press against me, accompanied by made-up shrews, Holy Virgins with breasts exposed and the statue of St. Anthony surrounded by slashing hordes. The obese stroll nonchalantly among the emaciated with their covetous stares, while the impotent bourgeois stroke the flesh of young ladies seeking their future. The Creole mother and child that vaguely resembles a religious icon is really the young housemaid with her baby, pregnant once more, on a visit to my mother to beg for pardon.
Colour is even more misleading. I realize that the delicate pink-violet tone I applied under the eyes of a young girl was first given to me by the gums of a corpse left too long in the sun. Or that the pale green hue of a mulatto woman’s eyes belongs to the skin of a white woman who’d drowned. Do I delight in the effect of a sunset I’ve successfully completed? Immediately the ecchymotic pustules on a forgotten leg surge back into my consciousness to claim their rainbow colours. In truth, all the reds, yellows, greens and indigos were already there, and far more beautiful, in the sunlight. The tones reflected in the purplish face of a cardinal are identical to the ruddy tinge of an obscene drunkard from my childhood. His eyes, even his licentious grin perfectly match my cardinal’s. The emaciated ivory of a Christ is drawn directly from the pallor of Ambrosio the transvestite who would religiously evoke the vigour of the divine rod in the most scabrous terms. And the gleaming roundness of that death’s head behind a blue veil reminds me of the breast of a pretty young mother lowering her eyes as she unbuttons her blouse to nurse her child. Keeping track of my ideas is a near impossibility, especially late at night. The only way to calm the whirling waters, exacerbated by lengthy exposure to artificial light, is to drown them in alcohol. If I don’t, the flashes of light behind my closed eyes will not let