or the lack of respect. If a boy tries to sneak a look at them in the toilet, or if someone tosses a toad in the middle of their dance circle, they run and tell the teachers. But most of the time we settle our differences among ourselves. The girls may make fun of us, but we steer clear of them, too. Some of them, the prettiest ones in particular, are real pests. They know how to get us in trouble, and they stick out their tongues at us the moment we get back into the classroom. Others are more bashful or fearful, with nothing to make them stand out of the crowd. But one thing’s for sure: girls smell good. Even when they’re drenched with sweat. I like sitting down beside a girl at the same desk after recess. It makes you sleepy. One of my friends mentioned it to me. A strange, nearly blind kid with thick glasses who has to bring objects right up to his face, as if he was smelling them. He’s pale and skinny, but he’s also a mile-a-minute talker who’s full of funny stories. When I ask him about his eyes, he doesn’t know what to say. He thinks he sees just as well as everybody else. Often I watch him walking around the schoolyard, disoriented, colliding with the walls, then walking along them, eyes and mouth agape. The girls are nice to him because they don’t suspect what he tells us. Funny stories, true ones, too, like why girls smell the way they do, or the way they go to the toilet. I know he’s right because Lili never closes the door when she goes for a pee. Girls are another race.
Since school started, we have more fun in the evening, too. We barely have enough time to eat and do our homework before it’s bedtime. On the other hand, weekends and holidays are worse, longer and more boring than ever before. School, my classmates and the smell of girls have spoiled the pleasure of looking out the window. Only the accidents are any fun. The street is a string of human catastrophes: auto wrecks, pedestrians run down or poor people fallen from the tram. From our window we can see it all, especially since the ambulance takes such a long time to arrive and the police won’t touch a thing. The most they’ll do is call over the pharmacist to give first aid, or divert traffic around the dead body. All the while the corpse lies there, sometimes in strange positions, livid. People bustle to and from the bars, bringing the injured man ether or sugar water. The dead bodies lie there as people light little candles. No ambulance will take them. The attendant begs off in irritation, then hurries away. People bring newspapers to cover the dead man’s face, place candles all around him, then return to the bars to quench their thirst as they look on. Eventually the police leave and traffic flows around the spot. The morgue wagon takes its time, sometimes the whole day, because there are so many dead people in the city. All kinds of them.
When things calm down, the women go downstairs for a better look and their share of the gory details. They bring me along for company and, in their excited chatter, promptly forget all about me. The appearance of the dead man is fixed in my memory: his position, his contorted face, the colour of his skin as the heat of the day does its work. All around me, people are talking about the inevitable. His time had come, they say, you can’t escape destiny, somewhere it is written that God writes straight on lines that seem crooked to us. All we can do is pray; perhaps it’s for the best, the dead man has been forever freed from this vale of tears. The men stand around nodding gravely in agreement, sipping their beer alongside the distraught women. The women adore this kind of conversation and the men seize the opportunity to strike up a friendship, and enjoy a little laughter, and offer them a cigarette, which they smoke in imitation of the romance heroines.
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
