XVII fragments

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By AIRTON PASCHOA*

five short pieces

disgust

He died of grief, my mother used to say. How could you die from it? Here is one of the greatest riddles of my childhood. By the way, what was that? Disgust… How could you feel it? Did it taste like heartbreak? I spent a long time gaping, I don't know if I was thinking but with that in my head spinning, respectable as was the contingent of living beings slaughtered by the scourge, — close to pandemic by my current calculations, since little counted what was officially recorded in the death… He had died of grief . But it wasn't by closing my mouth that I started to feel such an odd and so familiar taste, to intuit the surreptitious nature of evil. It was like that for nothing, closing my eyes one day, lowering my head naturally, slowly flattening my hands on the table, drumming them lightly with one and the other finger, a kind of signal, asking for water at the end of the day, just like that. and what my father did. Who died of heartbreak, said my mother.

 

The Tenement II

Married at fourteen, maiden and skinny. Her husband locked her in the house, truck driver and cavernous, sealing the door and hinge. She took advantage and played house. On the way back, at night, he filled her with delicacies, cocada, rapadura, paçoca, pé de moleque, jawbreaker, maria-mole, sigh, weirdo, the young man with easy talk. Not ten months later, she gave birth to the first of a bunch of perverts — addicts, debauchers, homicides, suicides, epileptics, artists, and the creator knows how many more perversions, material from a naturalist novel that I just don't write because it went out of fashion (and I don't even I don't want to know about trouble with loved ones).

 

afternoon sore

In the shabby, dark room, next to the son-who-is-to-be-of-this-sickly-boy, the afternoon session was dizzying. There, hidden from her husband, she kissed Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant; there she sang and was sung by Frank Sinatra; there she danced with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. I don't know if they had the same face, or even the same body, but it was the same gentleness, the same lightness with which they carried her. I also don't know if it was easier or more difficult to get up and choose beans for dinner, I had no choice, I had five children and a slight hope in the tomorrow of a beautiful movie, before reaching age, church and the end. Overkill? I hope so, from the bottom of my heart, from the bottom of dark and poor memory, from the bottom of this armchair where, no less sickly, but older and more experienced, I still change with the same musicals.

 

want-want

To Mari Almeida
(in thanks)

While the human jugglers avoid stepping on the board in horror, the lapwings, oblivious to the rite private, stroll gracefully across the lawn of tombstones.

What she wanted-she never told us. Maybe you didn't know... A better life, maybe, like most people. It didn't have it, just as the indigent majority won't.

What I want-I think I don't know either. Who knows what I always wanted... But another life in life, emulating the natural (or supernatural) sister, requires such faith that it usually does not survive time.

What I wanted-wanted now, at this point in the curve, is perhaps barely more than wanting-wanting. And that's as close as I can get.

 

[family romance]

I make it known, to anyone who may be interested, that he had nothing of fantasy, a unique case in the history of Psychoanalysis, our family romance. I was entrusted from swaddling to the wet nurse, white and scold, because I was confined, by express order, to the world of Literature. And so it was. I couldn't play in the street, I couldn't watch TV, I couldn't play ball, everything for a kid. It couldn't do anything, in short, and disappear soon! otherwise read and read and no comics! also a kid thing. So the boy prayed, for an hour and a half, enraptured by the lively parade of dashes and retorts and retorts and confessing and murmuring and whispering and feeling and nodding, he entered into the dialogue and, soon, into the cage. Today, in years and by the wayside, (the other mouth of the canon) awaits, I don't say the presence in a falling udder of the Baroness of Itararé, (oh mama, Mamãe, mama, ubi assunta?) who must have already passed from this to the most plebeian of republics, awaits at least the estate of Petrópolis... or of Parati — whose festivities, by the way, we will end immediately, in order to re-establish the primacy of historical gravity.

*Airton Paschoa is a writer, author, among other books, of see ships (e-galaxia, 2021, 2nd edition, magazine).

 

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