Moldy Strawberries Read online

  Copyright © 1982 by herdeiros de Caio Fernando Abreu

  English language translation © Bruna Dantas Lobato, 2022

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2022

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Ebook ISBN 9781953861214

  Cover art: Jean Dubuffet, Evolving Portrait (1952) The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

  This work is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Funding for the translation of this book was provided by a grant from the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation.

  This publication was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the Nimick Forbesway Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Moldy

  Dialogue

  The Survivors

  The Day Uranus Entered Scorpio

  Passing through a Great Sorrow

  Beyond the Point

  Companheiros

  Fat Tuesday

  I, You, He

  Light and Shadow

  Strawberries

  Transformations

  Sergeant Garcia

  Photographs

  18x24 : Gladys

  3x4 : Liége

  Pear, Grape, Apple

  Still Life

  Music Box

  The Day Jupiter Met Saturn

  Those Two

  Moldy Strawberries

  Translator’s Acknowledgements

  In memory of

  John Lennon

  Elis Regina

  Henrique do Valle

  Rômulo Coutinho de Azevedo

  and all my dead friends

  To Caetano Veloso.

  And for

  Maria Clara Jorge (Cacaia)

  Sonia Maria Barbosa (Sonia de Oxum Apará)

  and all my living friends

  As for writing, a living dog is worth much more.

  —Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

  I thought it was lovely, back then, hearing a poet say that he writes for the same reason that trees bear fruit. Only much later did I come to realize this was all but affectation: that men are intrinsically different from trees and need to know the purpose of their fruits, choosing what they’ll bear, studying who will receive them, and not always giving them the ripe ones, but the rotten, and even the poisoned.

  —Osman Lins, Guerra sem testemunhas [Unwitnessed War]

  Moldy

  Dejadme en este campo, llorando.

  —Federico García Lorca, “¡Ay!”

  The fire and smoke monster

  stole my white clothes.

  The air is dirty

  and the season is new.

  —Henrique do Valle, “Monstro de fumaça” [“Smoke Monster”]

  Dialogue

  For Luiz Arthur Nunes

  A: You’re my friend.

  B: Huh?

  A: You’re my friend, I said.

  B: What?

  A: I said you’re my friend.

  B: What are you trying to say?

  A: I’m just saying you’re my friend, my companheiro. That’s all.

  B: There’s something behind this, I can tell.

  A: No. There’s nothing. Don’t be so paranoid.

  B: That’s not what I’m talking about.

  A: What are you talking about, then?

  B: I’m talking about what you said, just now.

  A: Oh, right. That I’m your friend.

  B: No, that’s not how it went: that I’m your friend.

  A: You feel it too?

  B: What?

  A: That you’re my friend?

  B: Stop confusing me. There’s something behind this, I know it.

  A: Behind the friend?

  B: Yeah.

  A: Nope.

  B: Don’t you feel it?

  A: That you’re my friend? I do, yes. Of course I do. Don’t you?

  B: It’s not that, but not like this.

  A: You don’t want it to be like this?

  B: It’s not that I don’t want it: it’s that it’s not.

  A: Stop confusing me, please, just stop confusing me. It was clear in the beginning.

  B: And now it’s not?

  A: Now it is. Do you want to?

  B: What?

  A: Be my friend.

  B: Be your friend?

  A: Yeah.

  B: Friend – companheiro?

  A: Yes.

  B: I don’t know. Please, stop confusing me. It was clear in the beginning. There’s something behind this, don’t you see?

  A: I see it. I want it.

  B: Want what?

  A: For you to be my friend.

  B: Huh?

  A: I want you to be my friend, I said.

  B: What?

  A: I said I want you to be my friend.

  B: You said that?

  A: I said that?

  B: No, that’s not how it went: I said that.

  A: What?

  B: That you’re my friend.

  A: Huh?

  (ad infinitum)

  The Survivors

  For Jane Araújo, a Magra

  (To be read to the soundtrack of Angela Ro Ro)

  What about Sri Lanka? she asks me, dark and fierce, and I answer, Why not? Undeterred, she continues: At least you could send me postcards from there, so people would think wow, how did he end up in Sri Lanka, what a crazy guy that one, huh, and they’d die of saudade, isn’t that what you care about? A kind of saudade: and you in Sri Lanka, pretending to be Rimbaud, who never actually went that far, so everyone would weep, oh how sweet he was and we never offered him enough to make him stay with us, palm trees and pineapples. Talking incessantly, she fans herself with an Angela Ro Ro record while she smokes incessantly and drinks incessantly her cheap vodka, no ice, no lime. As for me, her voice so hoarse, I’ll stick around and protest, spray paint against the nuclear plants, still hungover, a monk day, a slut day, a Joplin day, a Mother Teresa day, a shit day, while I keep that stupid eight-hour job to pay for that authentic leather chair where your royal highness has parked your precious ass, and this exotic Indian redwood coffee table where I’m resting my feet, bare and tired again, at the end of another week of useless battles, escapist fantasies, weak orgasms, late payments. But we’ve tried everything, I say, and she says, Yes, of cooooooourse, we’ve tried everything, even fucking, because after so many borrowed books, so many films seen together, so many sociopolitical existential blahblah shared points of view, it could only lead to this: the bed. We r
eally tried, but it was a bust. What happened, what in the name of God happened, I kept thinking afterwards as I lit a cigarette with another, and I didn’t want to think about it but I couldn’t get it out of my mind and your limp dick and my nipples which didn’t even get hard, for the first time ever, you told me, and I believed you, for the first time ever, I told you, but I don’t know if you believed me as well. I want to say yes, that I believed her, but she doesn’t stop, so much mental spiritual moral existential attraction and none of it physical, I didn’t want to accept that was all it was: that we were different, oh we were so different, we were better, we were more, we were superior, we were chosen, we were vaguely sacred but in the end my nipples wouldn’t get hard and your dick didn’t go up. Too much culture kills people’s bodies, man, too many films, too many books, too many words, I could only consume you by masturbating, there was the entire Library of Alexandria keeping our bodies apart, I stuck my finger up my pussy night after night saying deeper, sweetheart, burst with me, fuck me, then I’d flip over onto my stomach and cry on my pillow because back then there was still all this guilt disgust shame, but now it’s fine, The Hite Report liberated fucking. Not that it was too little love, quite the opposite, you told me later, it was too much of it, did you really believe that? In that filthy bar where we used to drown our impotence with buckets of idiotic juvenile lyricism, and I said no, dear, it’s just that being the bored-bourgeois-good-intellectuals that we are, your thing is men and my thing is women, we could even make a great couple, like Virginia Woolf and her lover, what was her name again? Vita, right, Vita Sackville-West and her fag husband, now calm down, darling, I have nothing against fags, would you pass me the vodka, what? And do I look like I have money for Wyborowa? No, I don’t have anything against lesbians, I don’t have anything against degenerates in general, I don’t have anything against whatever sounds like: an attempt. I ask for a cigarette and she tosses the pack at my face like she’s throwing a brick, I’ve been getting anxious, my friend, dear old word that one, anxiety, two decades of everyday life but I get, I get, I have something tight here in my chest, a tussle, a thirst, a heaviness, oh don’t start with these stories of we-betray-all-our-ideals, I’ve never had any fucking ideals of any kind, I just wanted to save what’s mine, what an egocentric elitist capitalist thing to do, I just wanted to be happy, dumb, fat, ignorant, and totally happy, man. It could have worked out between us, or not, I don’t even know what that means, but back then we hadn’t figured out yet that you wanted to take it up the ass and I wanted to lick pussy, oh how adorable our books by Marx, then Marcuse, then Reich, then Castañeda, then Laing under the arm, all the foolish colonized dreams in our little idiotic heads, scholarship at the Sorbonne, tea with Simone and Jean-Paul in Paris in the ’50s, then the ’60s in London listening to here comes the sun here comes the sun, little darling, then the ’70s in New York dancing disco at Studio 54, now in the ’80s we’re here, chewing on this nasty thing and unable to swallow or spit it out or even to forget the sour taste in our mouths. I’ve read everything, man, I’ve tried macrobiotics psychoanalysis drugs acupuncture suicide yoga dance swimming jogging astrology roller-skating Marxism Candomblé gay clubs ecology, all that’s left is this knot in my chest, so now what do I do? I’m not copying Pessoa but in each corner of my room there’s an image of Buddha, a picture of Oshun, another of baby Jesus, a poster of Freud, sometimes I light a candle, pray, burn incense, smudge sage, ward off the evil eye with salt in every corner, I’m not asking you for a solution, you’ll get to enjoy the people of Sri Lanka and later will send me a postcard telling me whatever, a night like last night, by the river, there must be some river over there, a murky river, full of dark reeds, but yesterday by the river, without making any plans, suddenly, completely by chance, I saw a guy with olive skin and slanted eyes who was…Huh? Of course there’s some dignity to all of this, the question is where, not in this dark city, not on this poor, putrid planet, inside me? Now, don’t start with self-knowledge-redeemers again, I already know everything about myself, I’ve dropped acid more than fifty times, I’ve done six years of psychoanalysis, I got sick of clinics, remember? You’d bring me Argentine apples and Italian photo comics, Rossana Galli, Franco Andrei, Michela Roc, Sandro Moretti, and I’d look at you full of Mandrax and drool sob I lost my joy, my night fell, they stole my hope, while you, generous and positive, touched my shoulder with your hand and in spite of everything lively saying over and over, react, companheira, react, the precise motivation behind your little privileged head, your creative po-ten-tial, your left-libertarian lucidity, blahblahblah. People turned into corpses decomposing in front of me, my skin was sad and dirty, the nights never ended, no one touched me, but I reacted, got unsick, went back to what they say is normal, and where’s the motivation, where’s the fight, where’s the creative po-ten-tial? Do I kill, not kill, quench my thirst with dykes at Ferro’s Bar, or get drunk alone on a Saturday as I wait for the phone to ring, and it never rings, in this apartment I can only afford with the sweat of the creative po-ten-tial I pull out of my ass, for eight hours each day for that fucked-up multinational. But, I try to say, and she cuts me off, gently, Of course it’s not your fault, love, we fell into the exact same mousetrap, the only difference is that you think you can escape, and I want to wallow in the pain of the metal stuck deep in my dry throat, pass me the cigarette, no, I’m not desperate, not more than I’ve always been, nothing special, baby, I’m not drunk or crazy, I’m lucid as fuck and I confidently know I don’t have a way out, don’t worry too much, dear, after you leave I’ll have a cold shower, some warm milk with eucalyptus honey, ginseng, and Bromazepam, then I’ll lie down, then go to sleep, then I’ll wake up and live for a week on sencha and brown rice, absolutely saintly, absolutely pure, absolutely clean, then I’ll have all the drinks, I’ll snort five grams, crash my car into a wall or call the suicide hotline at four in the morning or pester some fool while whimpering things like I-need-a-reason-to-live-so-much-and-I-know-this-reason-is-only-inside-me-blahblahblah-blahblahblah, until the sun comes up behind the dark buildings, but don’t worry, I won’t take any drastic measures, beyond keeping going, is there anything more self-destructive than persisting without faith? Pat me gently on my head, on my heart, she stops and asks, I had so much love once, I need it so much, so much, man, I haven’t been allowed. I stretch out my arms and she’s suddenly so small pressed against my chest, asking me if she’s really ugly and sort of slutty and too old and totally drunk, I didn’t use to have these lines around my eyes, I didn’t use to have these creases around my mouth, I didn’t use to look like such a tired dyke, and I tell her again that no, that she looks great like that, disheveled and alive, she asks me to put on some music and I choose Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major, No. 2, I want to leave her like this, sleeping in the dark on this old couch, next to the wilted poppies, absorbed in the distant lullaby from the piano, but she tenses up, violently, asks me to play Angela Ro Ro again, so I flip the record over, my love my great love, we dizzily walk to the bathroom together, where I hold her head over the toilet while she throws up, and without meaning to I throw up too, at the same time, the two of us in an embrace, sour particles over our tongues when our mouths meet, but she flushes the toilet and pushes me toward the living room, toward the door, asking me to go, and kicks me out to the hallway saying, Don’t forget to send me that postcard from Sri Lanka, that murky river, that olive skin, may something very beautiful happen to you, I wish you a lot of faith, in anything, it doesn’t matter what, like that faith we once had, wish me something very beautiful too, anything wonderful, anything that makes me believe in anything again, that makes us believe in everyone again, that takes away this rotten taste of failure from my mouth, of defeat with no grandeur, there’s no way, companheiro, we got lost in the middle of the road and we never had a map, no one gives rides anymore and night is about to fall. The lock turns in the door. I need to lean against the wall so I won’t fall. Behind the wood of the door, mixed w
ith the piano and Angela’s hoarse voice, I can hear her say over and over that everything’s fine, everything is going along fine, just fine, fine. Axé, axé, axé, I repeat until the elevator arrives, axé, axé, axé, odara!

  The Day Uranus Entered Scorpio

  (Old Story with Benefits)

  For Zé and Lygia Sávio Teixeira and for Lucrécia (Luc Ziz or Cesar Esposito)

  They were all relaxed at home when the guy in the red shirt suddenly stormed in and announced that Uranus was entering Scorpio. The three of them stopped what they were doing and stared at him without saying anything. Maybe they didn’t understand what he said, or they didn’t care to. Or they simply weren’t willing to interrupt their reading, leave their spot at the window, or stop eating their chicken thighs, to pay attention to anything else, especially to something like Uranus entering Scorpio, Jupiter leaving Aquarius, or the moon being void of course.

  It was Saturday night, almost summer, and there were so many concerts and plays and full bars and parties and movie premieres at midnight and people meeting and motorcycles zooming by around the city, and it was so hard to give all that up to stay in the apartment reading, watching other people’s joy through the window, or trying to find some sliver of meat on the bones of the cold chicken left over from lunch. As they’d given up their Saturday, the three of them sitting there quietly listening to old Pink Floyd albums, so the neighbors wouldn’t complain like last time and then the police would come and the landlord would threaten to shut down that drug den (they didn’t like the expression, but that was what the neighbors, landlord, and police called it, tossing their secondhand books and Indian cushions everywhere, like they expected to find something illicit under them) – thus having given up their Saturday, and tacitly restored the peace with the low volume and almost no curiosity about each other, since they’d known each other for so long, they didn’t want to be thrown out of this peace that was so wisely and modestly earned, since the night before had revealed empty pockets and wallets. So they vaguely looked at the guy in the red shirt standing in the middle of their living room. And said nothing.