Granta 121: Best of Young Brazilian Novelists

by Unknown

  LION

  Luisa Geisler

  TRANSLATED BY ANA FLETCHER

  * * *

  LUISA GEISLER

  1991

  Luisa Geisler was born in Canoas, Rio Grande do Sul. A columnist for Capricho magazine, she is the author of Quiçá (2012), which was awarded the SESC Prize for Literature. She now lives in Porto Alegre, where she studies social sciences and international relations. ‘Lion’ (‘Leão’) is taken from Geisler’s story collection, Contos de mentira (2010).

  Her mother would get off the phone soon. Mia sat down on the kitchen doorstep. She looked at her conquest with a smile. Her dandelion on fire. The long white seeds, each with its own flame, yellow and red and orange and grey and red and yellow. The smell of burned grass. The flame came together around all the seeds, reached the stem of the dandelion. Mia heard her mother say goodbye on the phone. She threw the stem inside, onto the kitchen floor, and trampled it with her small shoes.

  When her mother got to the kitchen, Mia was in the garden. But the little stem was by the door, next to the stove. Mia’s mother smiled with her mouth, but not with her eyes. She picked up the stem. She threw it in the bin, alongside burned leaves and napkins and a singed dish towel and a colouring book reduced to ashes.

  In the garden, Mia foraged through carnation bushes. It would take her less than a day to find a perfect object. She was the girl with the short blonde hair. Eyes brown like the earth that clung to her knees. At school, Mia was the shortest in her class. Her size helped her squeeze in among the twigs. Her quick little arms between leaves and branches. She didn’t always go looking in the garden. It was in the garden, though, that Mia would find the treasures.

  Mia appreciated the rarities. Materials that were different and new. Her experiments had taught her that certain things didn’t work, like spoons and cups. And then there were days that were urgent – days when experiments and novelties could wait.

  It was always the same process. Wait for her mother to light the stove and leave the kitchen, have the object ready, go in, run. Wait. Leave, run. She’d already tried plants and money and colouring pencils, without any trouble. She’d got to know the whole neighbourhood in her hunt for objects.

  It was in a red carnation bush that Mia found the cat. Yellow. Smelling of wet dog. Yellow eyes, yellow fur, brown streaks wrapping its body like swathes of fabric. Paws a yellow so light they were white. Eyes and pink nose outlined in black felt-tip pen. The black mouth opened in a miaow.

  Mia and the cat swapped glances. Mia pounced.

  A side staircase separated the garden and the kitchen. Mia sat on a step. With shins swinging, she held onto the cat. Perhaps just the paw, or the ear, Mia thought. Just a little bit.

  That evening, Mia’s mother had friends over. Once she’d put the water on to boil, she took a plate of biscuits through to the living room. Mia ran to the kitchen and lifted her head to spy on the lit hob. It was far back, close to the wall. She heard steps. Swiftly, she opened the oven door, shoved the cat inside, closed the door. A miaow. She turned in time to see her mother walk into the kitchen.

  ‘Mia?’ Her mother was smiling with her eyes and her mouth. ‘What are you doing, love?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That’s all right then . . .’ her mother said. She walked over to the stove, turned it off and picked up the kettle. On her way to the living room, she sneezed.

  ‘Bless you,’ Mia said.

  Her mother thanked her. Was her mother catching a cold?

  ‘No, love.’ Her mother scratched at her nose. ‘It was probably an insect or something, it’s so dusty. Spring makes my allergies flare up.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Do you want to come and have tea with us in the living room?’

  Mia shook her head. Her mother smiled and headed to the living room, carrying the teapot. Mia pulled the cat, by its tail, from the oven. The cat clawed and wrestled and scratched and wriggled and quarrelled and quarrelled and scratched. Mia ran to the garden. She held onto the cat with both arms.

  She discovered that the cat was mesmerized by a loose thread dangling from her shirt; she discovered that the cat would chase any piece of thread that moved. Later, she discovered that the cat liked to capture small things, trinkets; to chase not just threads, but any moving object. She discovered that the cat liked things that tried to escape. The better they were at escaping, the quicker, more daring they were, the harder the cat chased them.

  When she heard her mother call her to dinner, Mia’s clothes were covered in bits of grass and yellow hairs. She was so covered in cat that she answered, ‘I’m coming,’ and forgot to go. She was still lost in thought when her mother crossed the garden, with no smile around her mouth or in her eyes, sniffling.

  ‘Mia.’

  ‘Hello . . .’ Mia said. An unthinking ‘hello’, like when you answer the door buzzer. The ‘hello’ of someone who doesn’t know who it is they’re talking to.

  ‘Where did that cat come from?’

  It took Mia a moment to answer.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  Her mother sneezed.

  ‘That cat. Whose is it? Where did you find it?’

  ‘I just found him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Mia,’ her mother said, ‘we can’t keep it. It might have an owner who’s looking for it.’

  ‘He might not have an owner.’

  ‘Mia.’

  ‘Mum . . .’

  ‘That cat’s not ours. I’m allergic; it’s not good for me. Who’s going to look after it?’ She faced Mia. ‘And who’s going to take it to the vet? We can’t keep it. Come and eat your dinner.’ She sneezed.

  Mia left the garden without a word. The cat stayed behind. The felt-tip pen outline opened in another yawn. Mia, though, remained silent. She was silent during dinner, and during her bath. Silently, she ignored her mother before going to sleep.

  Her silence came to an end with an ‘ah!’ late the following morning. She’d found the cat again, asleep amid the pansies. Mia took the cat in her arms and carried him to the garage behind the house. The dark garage with its one high-up window and its shelves and boxes and the smell of mildew.

  She played and prodded and kept one eye on the clock and she played and kept the other eye on the cat. She couldn’t let any hairs fall on her clothes. The cat wasn’t a dog. It kept still and it squirmed out of hugs and tried to fight and tried to scratch and fought and tore into little plastic balls after trapping them. Mia liked the cat more than she did any dog, more than the little balls he destroyed, more than anything. Ten to midday. Mia ran to have lunch. Her mother eyed her up between forkfuls.

  ‘What have you been up to this morning?’ The mother’s eyes went from her food to her daughter.

  ‘Stuff for school.’ Mia concentrated on eating quickly. ‘For class on Monday.’

  ‘I didn’t see you in the house.’

  ‘Because I was doing it in the garage.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘I wrote a story.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘A cat.’

  Her mother went back to looking at her food.

  When she went back to the garage, Mia looked for the cat everywhere. She found him and took him in her lap and passed her hand over his soft fur. She chatted to him in whispers. She told him about her mother. She told him how they’d be caught if they weren’t careful, but she’d be there for him. She stroked his back. The cat stretched his tail upward, daintily, and Mia carried on stroking him down the length of his tail.

  Mia went to school in the mornings, and in the afternoons she went to the garage. Always watchful. She brought back what was left of her school snacks for the cat. There were nights when the cat ran away, but Mia would go in search of him. She searched the whole neighbourhood, in trees, through parks, among other sleeping cats. She’d bring him back to the garage. She knew her mother didn’t keep track of where she spent her time. If she ha
d to go out to look for the cat, she left quietly.

  Her mother stuck to her own routine. As long as her daughter was in the house at mealtimes, she didn’t worry. The kitchen had been clean for days, she’d felt no more tingling in her nose and Mia was keeping on top of her homework. It had been days since she’d had to go out at night knocking on her neighbours’ doors, asking if they’d seen her daughter. She said to Mia’s father:

  ‘Whatever it is that’s keeping her busy, long may it last!’

  He laughed loudly.

  ‘Have you considered that it might be something worse? I wouldn’t be surprised if Mia were building a missile in there, just waiting for The War.’

  Her mother laughed. She laughed like someone who’s heard a joke so many times they’ve forgotten why it’s funny.

  Mia sat with an old sheet on her lap and the cat on top of it. She was telling him about how she’d almost been found out the other day.

  ‘I had a yellow hair on my clothes.’ She stroked the cat’s head. ‘And I couldn’t get it off!’

  She heard the garage door opening. Her mother’s voice.

  ‘Mia?’

  Leaping up, Mia stuffed the cat in a large box under the sheet. That was what the box was there for. Mia’s mother saw her daughter in the garage. She asked if she was all right. Mia nodded. Her mother smiled.

  A noise.

  The yellow cat scrabbled out of the box and emerged from under a pile of fabric, smelling of wet dog. Mia looked to the door.

  ‘Nobody came for him.’

  ‘What if I told you they had done?’ Mia’s mother sniffled.

  Mia was looking at the door. She looked at her mother.

  ‘You can keep him, Mia.’

  ‘But what about your allergies? And his other owners? And the vet?’ Mia was flapping her arms as if she wanted to take flight. ‘He’s not ours.’

  ‘We’ll figure something out.’

  Expressions of relief, like when you take your shoes off at the end of the day. Mia and her mum looked at each other, smiled. They hugged. Mia looked at the cat, hoisted him onto her lap. Her mother talked about a pet shop nearby, about schedules, about dinner. She left the garage. As soon as the cat’s paws touched the ground, Mia started to glance about the garage. She wondered when her mum would light the stove again.

  GRANTA

  * * *

  BEFORE THE FALL

  J.P. Cuenca

  TRANSLATED BY CLIFFORD E. LANDERS

  * * *

  J.P. CUENCA

  1978

  J.P. Cuenca was born in Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of the novels Corpo presente (2003), O dia Mastroiani (2007) and O único final feliz para uma história de amor é um acidente (2010), which will be published in the US in 2013. His work has been published in German, Portuguese and Spanish. ‘Before the Fall’ (‘Antes da queda’) is taken from a new novel, forthcoming in 2013.

  He has never committed the indiscretion of admitting, especially to himself, that his desire to abandon the city was reciprocal – that it also desired to abandon him. To go away of one’s free will would be quite different from being expelled, or, worse, being seen as someone in flight. Would renouncing one’s native land not be the rejection of its people? Is it possible to run away without being a coward? Whatever the answers, the very questions were defeats that he was unprepared to accept.

  It was necessary to maintain the superiority of the one who abandons over the abandoned, the lucidity of the lover who says farewell and who, starting from a bright and irresistible point in the timeline, decides to be alone. Guaranteeing such a status before his personal diaspora was an inescapable issue. He himself, the son of emigrants, had an example at home: he feared being forgotten by professional colleagues, by the press, by his ex-wives, by the retinue of female admirers who had never met him (precisely because of that), by bar-room conversations – the proscription of those who depart, the name that ceases to be remembered until finally it is never spoken again. Besides going away, he needed to be missed. Exactly what his family, upon escaping from the shipwreck of its circles of origin in the seventies, had been unable to do.

  His fondness for the meagre social legacy accumulated over thirty-seven years contrasted with the ill-disguised disdain he had not only for his conquests but also for their arena: Rio de Janeiro. The city, as he was wont to repeat, making instant antagonists in bars, would be the cultural capital of the Extreme Occident if not for Buenos Aires, the financial capital of the Extreme Occident if not for São Paulo, and was moving, then in pre-Olympic times, towards becoming a slightly poorer and a lot more exotic Barcelona in the backwaters of the southern hemisphere.

  More exotic and more expensive: the real-estate boom, which transformed shacks in the shanty towns of Rio’s South Zone into boutique inns run by Frenchmen in the post-tropical Mykonos that the favelas suggested in the days of the new armed peace, was already part of an irreversible process.

  If in the early years of the twentieth century the narrow streets and the thousands of tenements in the city centre, focal points of diseases like smallpox and the poor, were demolished to make room for Haussmannian boulevards surrounded by mansions and art-nouveau buildings (which would also be razed for the construction of architecture-free skyscrapers so dear to the economic miracle of the military dictatorship decades later), at the beginning of the twenty-first century the tearing down of shacks to emulate the Parisian hillside would be a political and aesthetic impossibility – even if their conditions weren’t all that different from the tenements of a hundred years earlier: piles of garbage, inadequate sewers, violence, tuberculosis, urban chaos. Not by coincidence, the men and women expelled from the centre by the urban renewal undertaken by Mayor Pereira Passos from 1902 onwards were the same ones who cleared the tropical forest of the hills and transformed it into favelas. It was a vicious circle, an uroboros not of a snake but of a dog chasing its tail – a very common sight in the streets of Rio de Janeiro at any time.

  In the 2010s, more discreet and effective than razing the shacks in the South Zone was militarizing the area, constructing ten-foot-high walls on the borders of favelas, and gradually removing the oxygen from their residents. Part of the initial process of asphyxia were reforms that camouflaged the improvisation, incarcerated the area and opened a pathway, albeit without widening the slopes and alleys that bled throughout the hills, for the arrival of new characters: officers of the Brazilian armed forces and their mafioso ramifications, contractors, real-estate agents, foreigners, new capitalists, banks, presses, bistros, abstract-art galleries, American Apparel, Japanese frozen-yogurt shops in place of the old shoemaker, students of design supported by their parents who occupied by themselves the erstwhile shack where a family of six used to live and was now a Luxury Loft, an Upscale Condo, an elegant cubicle with an oblique view of the sea, costing 4350,000 for twenty-five square metres. It was Rio’s version of gentrification, the occupation of a degraded urban area by a richer social class through displacement of its original inhabitants: Hackney, Greenwich Village, Williamsburg, Kreuzberg, Canal Saint-Martin, Vidigal, Cantagalo, Rocinha, Pavão-Pavãozinho, Chapéu Mangueira, Providência, Saúde.

  ‘It’s like art. It’s hard to explain exactly what it is, but you recognize it when you see it,’ Tomás Anselmo once said, pointing to the first Starbucks on the Rocinha hillside, inaugurated in the summer of 2015.

  If in the beginning a small cup of coffee tripled in price, afterwards it was the rent and then the purchase of property. And the official light bill, the official cable TV, the official tax, the official outlaw and a cultural process integrated with development, which led Tomás to discourse for hours about how music, funk dances, mini-shorts clinging to the asses of girls in the favela, libertinage and the manner of screwing were being rapidly gentrified in the protected South Zone favelas, now invaded by the middle class. Even the favela dances and bars began to look like copies of those found at street level, in a kind of Möbius strip of gentri
fication.

  The uproar was beyond normal. Although the new colonizers, whites and gringos (even Brazilians), were apparently sympathetic to the exoticism and disorder of the favela, deep down they harboured the hope of a general clean-up. On the other hand, the original residents could no longer hide their prejudice against the newcomers from down below and their irritation with the ostensive policing – they were still under the control of armed men, sympathetic to every type of arbitrariness against blacks and the poor. They had spent decades in a ghetto dominated by drug traffickers at war with the police and with rival factions, now only to lose their houses and street corners to people who never spent a moment in their lives doing honest work of any kind. They ended up selling their houses and leaving for obscure outskirts without asking the obvious question: Why is it that now, when life has improved, we have to go away?

  Slackers, spoiled rich kids, idlers, soap-opera characters, gays, would-be artists, self-styled intellectuals, incipient suckers and spittle on the ground: ‘Up their ass.’ It was the same prejudice encountered in ultra-elite Ipanema at seeing Arpoador taken over by favelados on Sundays, or South Beach filled with Eurotrash tourists, or Key West with pot-bellied drunks disembarking from cruises paid for in ten instalments, or Greenwich Village crowded with suburbanites from Connecticut, or the cafes on Boulevard Saint-Germain dominated by ignorant Americans, or the country-club pool full of nouveau riche from the Barra da Tijuca. It was that same prejudice based on race, social class, money and culture that began to be found unabashedly in any favelado beginning in the second half of the 2010s.

  The word ‘community’, a euphemism for favela used for decades by journalists, samba composers and sociologists, became synonymous with cultural patrimony deserving of protection, manifesto, patronage by the state, walls. It always was or may yet be too late: the favela is still at war. It discovered in itself the restorative nostalgia for the Rio de Janeiro of the golden years of the bossa nova and, for some, the military dictatorship – a longing for the past that, until then, was the exclusive property of the retired crowd living in carpeted apartments at street level.