by João Almino
– Come here, Joana, come here! It was really her.
– Cadu, honey. How are you feeling? It didn’t bother me to hear that question again because her husky voice caressed me.
– Come here! I tried to pull her by the thighs.
– Don’t exert yourself. You need to rest.
– Joana, have you come back to me? Have you come to share what little time I have left?
– I’m your friend, always. And after a pause: You don’t deserve what’s happening to you.
Joana’s perfume entered through my nostrils, mixing with the smell of ether in the hospital. I tried to grope her.
– Calm down, I’ve already told you. Don’t exert yourself.
With the tips of my fingers I managed to touch her knees, which quickly pulled away from me.
– Just tell me: would you consider coming back to live with me? I insisted.
– Don’t make me regret coming.
– You’re still seeing that bastard Eduardo Kaufman, aren’t you?
– What a stupid question!
– Look on the closet top for a box I put together a few days ago.
She’s never stopped wearing high heels, whose clickety-clacks I heard move in the direction of the closet.
– Those are the keys to your apartment, I told her.
– And why did you keep these keys?
– I don’t know. It must be because I wanted to return.
– They wouldn’t work. I changed the locks several times.
– See what else is in there.
I heard her laugh. I felt the pleasure of someone who was rewarded for a lifetime of disciplined, persistent work.
– And you, you never remarried? I asked.
– No, never.
– I want you to know one thing: you are the woman of my life. Joana, I love you. I said the words with difficulty, they sounded like clichéd sentimentality. When you love someone you don’t have to say it, but I should. That desire to have sex with her I had never felt with such intensity for any other woman. I decided to call that intensity love.
– You loved any skirt that happened by just as much.
– No other woman is like you. I truly love only you. And I don’t put this in the past.
– You’re not convincing, Cadu. You never loved me. Yes, I loved you a lot, but you never returned my love. One day I grew tired.
– It’s never too late.
– If you could see me, you’d give up. I’m old and ugly.
– You’re the same woman as ever. You have the voice, the eyes, the smell, the skin, and the body you had when I met you.
– Only the eyes, but not as bright.
– Tell me something: what is Operation Amazonia?
– Operation what?
– Listen to this sentence I recorded on my laptop. The hospital was silent while I located it. “If there is any crime that humanity hasn’t committed yet, this new crime will be unveiled here. And so unsecret, so well suited to the plateau, that no one will ever know.” It was another passage of one of those stories by Clarice.
– Mauricio told me you wrote a book for me.
– His imagination. I meant to write, but . . .
– You gave up?
– The book was to seduce you.
– I promise to read it.
– Then I’ll give it to you the way it is, unfinished. The end will depend on you.
I’ll skip the crying because I prefer the joy that followed it and that I could sense from the way Joana clasped my hands as she left.
– Before I die, I’d like to have one of your hugs, a full body hug. I’d like you to lie here on top of me.
– Don’t worry. You’re not going to die so soon.
The book will be for her, a more-than-open book, wide open, in which I show my whole self, with the hope that she’ll take me back, even if it’s only in thought. But in order for the book to be for her and no one else, I’ll need to rewrite it. By persistently reworking the style, I can find a way to please her, to demonstrate all that she means to me and to eliminate the discrepancy between the love story I told Laura one day and what I’ve written up to now. I won’t stop being faithful to who I am, however. In fact, I couldn’t, because I carry with me everything I’ve seen and lived, everything I was unable to see or live, and I can’t avoid taking on the features of all that I’ve lived over time.
December 7, six months and one day since
I started writing this diary
I dreamed that Joana arrived at my funeral and something awkward and embarrassing occurred. I had been buried with a hard dick. People snickered, and the fact was commented here and there. Only Joana cried. I tried to move, to get up to hug her. I had been transformed into a statue displayed in a public square, my granite penis pointed upward. Passersby laughed. I also felt like laughing, and seeing Joana’s tears increased my desire to laugh. I wanted to laugh out loud, but my voice didn’t come out, and my lips in the shape of a burst of laughter wouldn’t move. Between the boredom and the suffering there were an orgasm and a laugh both sculpted in stone.
Then Joana was hugging me. Her wet body was as malleable as rubber, molded around the stone, and the stone that was merely a shell of my own body began to break apart. Joana hugged me more, and my skin became hypersensitive. I felt her embraces in my naked body as if for the first time.
I woke with the sensation that I won’t die so soon. When I get to one hundred, medical science will take me to two hundred and from there to three hundred. I will thus develop another quality of the Brasiliarians from Clarice’s story: I can live to three hundred years. The other characteristics I already have: I have no children, I’m blind, tall and, despite all the white hairs, I’m still blond.
If I could, I would photograph the end of that dream and print it on the walls of my mind.
December 8
No, it’s not necessary to take a photograph of that dream. The photo already exists. When I look for something that might give meaning to life, I think about a distant summer Sunday when I heard the noise of the water, looked at Joana, so beautiful, and that mere look gathered everything around me, touching me in a profound way. At that instant my ardent skin inflamed Joana, and the pieces of the chaos fit together perfectly, giving meaning to the universe. I kissed Joana’s wet lips and felt a shiver of tenderness and desire. My heart was a dream of futures among embraces and stars.
Every photograph is proof of a meeting, sometimes planned, other times fortuitous. It’s a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera. It’s no more than an instrument, an invisible window through which we see the object of our emotion. I have a photograph of that instant which could well substitute for # 62. More than passing through time, it’s time that repeatedly passes through it, successively revealing new details, new meanings for an expression, a look, or a gesture of Joana’s.
Meaning is conferred by love and also by its absence; by that instant and by the distance that separates me from it; by the joyful moments, the shared laughter, a stroll holding hands along the seaside, and the doubts, the never-ending search, the nostalgia, the missed encounters, and even the incomprehension. My portrait is made up of the fragments of this scattered material. No single body is like any other, and Joana’s has left its indelible writing in me for all time.
Without the instant, time doesn’t exist, and without eternity the instant would be disfigured; it would cease being itself and would not be able to display always its unique, exclusive side. Photography has the ability to outlast its perishable materials as it reproduces itself, aspiring to eternity. I have the sense that when the world comes to an end its photographic images will survive.
December 9
I printed The Book of Emotions to deliver to Joana. I made no changes except for the substitution of the last photograph and the addition of the final paragraph.
About the Authors
JOÃO ALMINO is the acclaimed author of The
Five Seasons of Love. He has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Chicago, the Autonomous National University of Mexico, and the University of Brasília.
ELIZABETH JACKSON is Visiting Assistant Professor of Portuguese at Wesleyan University. She is the translator of João Almino’s The Five Seasons of Love, as well as co-translator of Patricia Galvão’s 1933 novel Industrial Park.
Copyright
Originally published in Portuguese as O livro das Emoções by Editora Record,
Rio de Janeiro, 2008
Copyright © 2008 by João Almino
Translation copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Jackson
First edition, 2011
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Almino, João.
[Livro das emoções. English]
The book of emotions / João Almino ; translated by Elizabeth Jackson. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56478-681-4 (acid-free paper)
I. Jackson, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Anne), 1955- II. Title.
PQ9698.1.L58L5813 2011
869.3’42--dc23
2011028548
Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and by the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cultura do Brasil / Fundação Biblioteca
Nacional / Coordenadoria Geral do Livro e da Leitura
This work published with the support of Brazil’s Ministry of Culture / National Library
Foundation / Coordinator General of the Book and Reading
www.dalkeyarchive.com
Cover: design and composition by Danielle Dutton, illustration by Nicholas Motte
Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America
