by João Almino
June 29, night
Enough for today. It’s already midnight, and I’ve made it a habit not to go to bed after eleven. I’ve been rising early and tomorrow I’ll continue.
In the late afternoon Carolina called me to find out when she can bring her friend. We agreed on five days from now.
July 1
I won’t be able to move forward with the book. For the past two days I haven’t stopped thinking about Eduardo Kaufman, which paralyzes me. I have to decide. Either I forget about him and am brief in my comments about him, or else the whole book will be about that bastard and his bastardy. A contemptible person doesn’t deserve a book. One possibility is to restrict myself to the photographs, abandoning words entirely. I think of photography as an infinite alphabet of images that creates a visual language of the world.
[July 1]
3. Evening at seaside
I couldn’t understand why Joana was interested in a jerk. Just because he was rich, filthy rich? Arrogantly rich. He thought money bought everything. A rich man pretending to be generous. I wasn’t going to give up Joana. And I wouldn’t let on about my jealousy of that disgusting nobody. I knew Joana; she’d announce it to half the world as if it were extremely funny and totally absurd.
An intense reciprocal sexual desire had brought us together. We had never spoken of love or marriage. A lack of romanticism? Perhaps. But we had needed each other, we felt pleasure being together, and why couldn’t the heart be the spring for that river of desire? Now that her desire had ceased, and so I wouldn’t lose her, I imagined that her elusive if not unreachable heart would be receptive to an engagement ring. I remembered the word “epiphany” that I’d heard at Mass when I was a child in Porto Alegre. Over time I came to learn its meanings, of sublime, transcendental, divine manifestation. That word gave a flavor of nobility to my pedestrian mind, softened my coarse character, and made me feel like a superior person, detached from my carnal vulgarities.
– It doesn’t help. You’re selfish. You think only of this. You never gave me any affection, Joana told me when she refused the ring. In fact it wasn’t an impressive piece of jewelry. The band was narrow, made of a small amount of cheap gold. I should have predicted that to melt Joana, the affection would need weight and many carats.
– This what? I knelt and tried to kiss her feet.
– Don’t be ridiculous. Now that you can’t get any other woman you come bother me.
– I’ve had it. You’ll never see me again, I threatened. Out of vanity, I should have initiated our break-up. I didn’t want to go through the humiliation of being abandoned by her. Most of all I didn’t want to hear it confirmed that she’d leave me for Eduardo Kaufman. I’d thought that we wouldn’t reach such extremes. My threat would make her regret what she’d just said.
– It’s all over. And what’s more, I’ll need the apartment. Get out, she screamed, furious.
Joana was determined to throw me out of the building and out of her life over some tacky, tawdry drama.
Night fell, relentlessly, without pity or forgiveness, slowly killing me like some indifferent, calculating assassin. I awoke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. An entire life, marked by impermanence and instability, weighed me down. I didn’t want to be an Eduardo Kaufman, but I wanted to be myself even less. I should have accumulated diplomas, saved money. At least I could have started sooner to pay into a pension fund that would give me financial security when I could no longer make a living from my photography.
My problem was that other people considered me a mediocre photographer and had no sense of the great artist living inside me. And Joana, taking me for a vulgar man, was incapable of seeing the great lover in me. The thing was I couldn’t forget Eduardo Kaufman. A worse problem tormenting me that night was that I was thinking about calling him to accept the job offer.
Ironically, people sometimes said to me, “You really are an artist.” And I felt like an artist when at four in the morning I set out my few items of clothing, my photographic equipment and my laptop; when I packed my bag, looked at my empty wallet and foresaw hunger, illness and decadence. I felt like an artist when I said farewell to Rio with a night photograph, # 3 (see pasted above).
In that photograph, between black and dark gray, the water traces curves of froth on the deserted beach. The undulations of the sea and a diffuse brightness on the horizon can be discerned. Visible on the granulated sand are the signs of almost erased footsteps. Like the other ones I had taken since starting to prepare myself for departure, that was a photograph of my fear.
[July 1, afternoon]
4. The shapes of the problem
Early in the morning I called my mother in Porto Alegre. She gave me news of my two sisters who still kept her company and of the three older ones from her first marriage who had moved to São Paulo with their husbands.
– I’m going to Brasília on business, I told her.
No, I hadn’t married yet. No, I wasn’t going to get married. Yes, I had settled down. No, no drugs, never again, that was ancient history. No, I had stopped drinking too, not to worry. Yes, it was enough money to cover my expenses and in Brasília I was going to earn more.
– Why don’t you stay with one of your brothers? she suggested.
Antonio, who had made a career as an engineer, was the off-spring from Mother’s first marriage. Despite being only one year older, he talked to me as if he were my father. Mother became a widow, and from her second marriage were born myself, my two sisters, and Gustavo (“Guga”), younger than I am and a university professor in Brasília.
– I’d go crazy if I had to live with Antonio even one day. And there’s no room in Guga’s apartment, I told Mother, and ended the conversation with words that were both proper and cordial. She had been a Portuguese teacher and was still a language purist. She always corrected both my Portuguese and my deportment. Between the two things, she was content with the easier one—in other words, vocabulary and grammar, carefully packaged in a polite formula.
With the sun already up, I walked along the beach aimlessly, camera over my shoulder, noticing: the choppy sea; the foam swimming around my feet; and the patterns that the water, the wind, and the crowds beginning to arrive from the outskirts of town made on the sand, like in the abstract photo above, in black and white, # 4. I liked to make the photographs indifferent to time and place but the date and the place of that photo became etched in me, like a brand burned into me with a firebrand. The use of the ninety-millimeter lens and the closing of the diaphragm to an aperture of f/16, with an exposure of 1/60 of a second, would permit total depth of field. The morning light strikes a perfect angle on the sand. Each grain of sand appears in perfect clarity, highlighted in a silver impression. I initially called that photograph “The Shapes of the Solution,” changing this years later to its current title. I often used titles that revealed what I felt and weren’t merely descriptive. Those enigmatic, sharp-textured shapes traced themselves both in the sand and in my mind. Between one distraction and another, an idea became stuck like chewing gum to the bottom of my thought: I’d keep the duplicate keys to Joana’s apartment. Then, while I was searching for the perfect angle, combining the maximum amount of information in a slightly asymmetrical composition, I convinced myself that my most basic problem was that I needed Eduardo Kaufman’s money to pay the rent if I had to leave Joana’s apartment. That’s why I’d put aside my pride and principles to be used later during boom times. There on the beach, my most basic problem was taking the shape of an immediate solution that would transport me from Rio to my anti-Rio. At least that’s what I thought. I wanted once again to explore Brasília’s lunar landscapes, its feminine lines and crimson hues.
July 4
I liked that Carolina brought her friend, the photography apprentice who wants to help me organize the archives. Her name is Laura. Although I could barely make out her shadow, from her voice I discerned her delicate figure. She seems tall and thin. She brought regards from Joan
a. Laura’s parents, ranchers in the Pantanal, have known Joana a long time and she stayed with them more than once.
My goddaughter was in a hurry and left, saying she was late for a reception at the American Embassy. Laura stayed part of the morning.
– Mr. Cadu, I’ve seen several photographs that you published, she said.
– I forbid you to call me Mister. Don’t remind me of my age. We’re colleagues.
She wanted to see my archives. I pointed out the location of the boxes with the printed material and of the hard disks with the digital reproductions. To continue my Book of Emotions, I asked only that Laura open the computer file with the photos of my old photographic diary and help me locate the photograph of some eyes.
– What woman do these feline eyes belong to? They’re beautiful, seductive.
– That was the first photograph I took of a journalist I met when I returned to Brasília.
Let’s leave the work for another day, I told her. We talked. She’d always been interested in photography. I concluded from one of her comments that she doesn’t have a boyfriend. She lives alone in an apartment rented by her parents.
– Use my darkroom however and whenever you want. You’d be doing me a favor. It really isn’t being used . . .
She’s from the interior of Mato Grosso. Does she have indigenous features? I felt that her hands were small and her skin very smooth. Her voice is contained without being timid. She liked Marcela and vice versa. Marcela actually whimpered with pleasure at the pats she received.
[July 6, at night]
5. Marcela’s eyes
I disembarked in the Pilot Plan carrying luggage filled with photos and cameras. I arrived with all expenses paid and an apartment on loan from Eduardo Kaufman at 104 South. The deal with Eduardo also included the purchase of equipment for my darkroom.
Brasília aroused the rustic fields with green caresses. I redis-covered in it the sensual and audacious wide-ranging poetry that could be read as baroque, then as Arcadian, further along as Concrete, then as marginal poetry and even as pure haikus . . .
I recalled what Joana had once said to me. I spent a Carnaval with her in Rio when I was living with Eva, Paulo Antonio’s sister. Eva had remained in Brasília to attend her brother’s carnivalesque political rallies. I was in bed with Joana when we heard the shouts in the streets and then the news on television about Paulo Antonio’s disappearance. “No fall of the government is worth the memory of our rendezvous, of this bed,” Joana said to me. And she was right, despite the tragedies that followed.
Paulo Antonio won in the past, but Eduardo Kaufman wanted to revive the memory of the disappeared former President to pose as the heir to a noble cause, thus increasing Eduardo’s chances of being elected to Congress.
– His government matters less than the man and the image of him fixed in the people’s memory, Eduardo Kaufman explained in his office in the North Bank Sector. I’m going to finance a TV documentary about Paulo Antonio. These days culture is image. The entire world makes and remakes itself in movies and photographs. And television has the power to bewitch; it gives a different meaning even to trivial conversations.
Later, addressing me:
– Cadu, I want concrete things: photographs.
– What you really want is to revive illusions, I responded.
Everyone looked at each other. Besides Eduardo himself, there was an attorney specializing in raising funds to support culture, a filmmaker, a skinny girl with an expressive face and fine chin, and Eduardo’s chief-of-staff in Brasília. Framed by the window, Brasília was its own organic, sculptural promise, the bossa nova of architecture. It suspended its monuments in mid-air, full of grace, as its architects intended.
The girl with the expressive face exchanged glances with me. How old could she be? Not more than thirty. Just as I had noticed the generous proportions of her breasts for such a small, lithe body, she surely had appreciated my tall muscular physique. I allowed my eyes to penetrate her white blouse of lightweight wool and her equally white brassiere whose lace trim was discernible. I delighted in those volumes offering themselves uninhibitedly across the table.
I thought: was it possible Eduardo didn’t worry that the rumor of the affair between his ex-wife and the former President would be revived along with Paulo Antonio? He should leave that cadaver in peace instead of trying to make a trophy of it.
– Paulo Antonio was downtrodden and resentful.
With this additional provocation, I got another look from the skinny girl, this time a cheerful glance. I prepared my camera. I pretended to be photographing the room, used the zoom and tried to catch the girl who’d smiled at me from a good angle. She fled my viewfinder with the skill of someone avoiding a gun about to go off, and I ended up following the direction of Eduardo Kaufman’s finger pointing toward the table.
There was a pamphlet printed with a photo of Eduardo alongside half a dozen Indians, all embracing the trunk of a samaúma tree. The photo was accompanied by an explanation of everything that Eduardo Kaufman and the Indians made out of that tree a meter-and-half in diameter and forty meters in height: from the wood they made boats, wood veneer, and cellulose; from the tufts or kapok, buoys and life jackets, mattress and pillow stuffing, in addition to thermal insulation; from the seed, edible oil and oil for lighting as well as soap; and from the water extracted from the roots and trunk, hair tonic and medicine for schistosomiasis.
Not long ago Eduardo had become even wealthier—I was told—with the sale of one of his businesses to a foreign company. He wasn’t just a publicity magnate but the owner of a conglomerate. To pose as a defender of nature, he flooded the market with everything from natural rubber condoms to design objects made with indigenous technology and labor.
– Resentment can produce great works, Cadu, Eduardo answered after some time and several other subjects, as if he had continued pondering my provocation and had only just found the words he was looking for.
– You have to research and document at least one story. It shows how much Paulo Antonio transformed himself into a genuine superhero in the eyes of the people, he said. I don’t want to say that it’s right or wrong. Reality is reality. History with a capital H embraces popular religiosity and the processes of de-modernization. They’re transforming Paulo Antonio into a saint, as they did in the Northeast with Padre Cícero. He materializes in macumba yards. He has worshippers in the Garden of Salvation, starting with the prophetess Iris Quelemém herself. Who is the Paulo Antonio who appears in the macumba yards? What kind of miracles does he perform among his faithful? Marcela, who’s a journalist, can research this story.
So the skinny girl’s name was Marcela, pretty name. Then he turned to me:
– You should make the photographic history. And there’s also Vila Paulo Antonio, one of Brasília’s newest satellite cities founded less than ten years ago, with forty thousand inhabitants already. All the work has to have an anthropologist’s focus, because the memory left by Paulo Antonio reveals a great deal about our nation’s people.
It was already the third time he had referred to the “people.” If I could, I would eliminate that word from the language—an abstract and indistinct mass that filled the mouths of demagogues, justifying all kinds of things and provoking heated debate. In the people’s name, murders and robberies were being committed and crises created.
– Paulo Antonio will end up exalted by my photographs, in the first place because they don’t speak, I said.
– They don’t speak? Eduardo asked.
– Better yet, they don’t scream.
My brother Guga had once mentioned the advantages of a parliament of the mute.
– Muteness alone would be a great quality in a politician, I added.
Marcela’s eyes smiled, if not with approval, then with the recognition that my words made the conversation scintillating. I didn’t hesitate. It was the decisive moment. I zoomed in and took photo # 5. Her deep green eyes, slightly startled, like a ne
rvous, wild animal’s, were surprised by my flash.
July 11
Once again Laura spent part of the morning here. This time she helped correct the chronology of the photos, which genuinely interested her. She confronted the nudes quite naturally and she liked the flowers most of all. She wanted to know if I had already written about Marcela’s eyes and offered to help me with the photo collages throughout my Book of Emotions.
– I promise not to read it. I just want to make your work easier.
I regretted not being able to see the photos she takes.
– I don’t take photographs for the sake of taking photographs. My photos are a way of reacting to what bothers me, she said.
Then she shared her opinions about the day’s news with me.
I wish I had her enthusiasm. When one is young everything seems new, the future is long, the transformations of the world are frightening with their threats but enchanting with their promises. For old people like me, movement at a distance seems monotonous and repetitive. Laura follows each new case of corruption with an emotion that I can’t any longer feel for cyclical things. I believe this is one of the principal symptoms of old age: the sensation of déjà vu that drains dramatic qualities from the present. What does it matter to me that the economic world map has changed in these past two decades? Humanity hasn’t changed, and technology hasn’t yet managed to dominate nature’s fury with its earthquakes and hurricanes. I don’t want to say that nothing has improved. No one dies of cancer anymore or even AIDS. But if I can’t get enthused for what has gotten better, I also don’t feel any revulsion for what has gotten worse. So many new problems have appeared . . . New wars, new diseases . . . Brasília has grown more human and thus more cruel, capable of more terrible crimes. It lost the aura of a futurist city to become a city like all the others.
Laura wants to come here regularly, perhaps twice a week.
