By EDUARDO SINKEVISQUE*
“What was there in the Great Sea where Guedes sailed the whale? Beasts of the cruelty of men and unheard-of types of life and buffoonery, of the kind of their chief”
Two banks of a river flowing and bleeding, the city. A third bank. Master Jonas who tells the story, but also Luciano, the polygraph of Samosata.
Paris hadn't been a party for a long time.
In the kitchen sink, the stuffed whale was a toy for the dog, a Waimaraner with gray fur and blue eyes. Anita, Anazinha, Aninha, her name was.
Anita was friends with Baleinha. They both floated, swimming belly up, in a country adrift.
One day, a zoo bear spat some crazy honey into the waters of the River Seine. The unsuspecting Beluga ingested the substance and went crazy. She got high and got high.
It was at the end of humanism, at the time of the loss of delicacy.
Deli Bal, the crazy honey, from Türkiye to France.
In fantastic waters, the Beluga drank the substance from the waters of the River Seine, from the waters of the basin where the Little Whale played.
When the Beluga entered the river, the honey swirled inside, expelling Master Jonas, expelling Luciano who lived inside the Beluga.
By expelling the two, he sheltered Guedes, the one who comes from Galicia.
The Beluga gave shelter to the Galician Guedes even though he stepped on it with dirty shoes.
The whale was merciful. Guedes was merciless. The whale was just. Guedes was unjust. What Guedes did was insufficient, insignificant, but threatening and destructive. Guedes was not suitable. He knew nothing for sure, he was of bad character. He did not love violently, on the contrary, he hated violently. He had a mean spirit, he was cowardly, cruel, cold; Guedes was selfish. He had a small spirit.
Guedes was calculating, a slave to his profits. He was arrogant, proud, affected, rude. Guedes was spoiled, badly dressed. Guedes was ugly. There's no way around it. There's no sugarcoating it. There's no way to fix it. He was ugly, period.
So, he was ugly. He had been an ugly child, an ugly youth, an ugly adult. It wasn't going to be when he was old that he wouldn't be ugly. It wasn't going to be during the time he was subordinate to a president that he wouldn't be ugly.
As a fetus it had been ugly. Are there beautiful fetuses? Maybe every fetus is ugly.
Guedes was a poorly born child. As an adult, he still had hair, but his hair was sparse and ugly. He always had a large forehead. When he lost his hair, he only had a forehead. He became uglier. And his nose was disproportionate and crooked. And his lips were large and peeling.
As an old man, Guedes went bald. He became uglier than he had ever been. The ugliest of all the ugliest people in the world. The ugliest of all the people in France, in Portugal, in the country where the president was his boss, where the dog Anita played with Baleinha.
When the plague arrived, the one that made all the cities sweat, have fevers and people started reciting flat-earther poems, declaiming anti-science poems, speaking anti-vaccine poems, Guedes became clumsy, horrible. He became an imitation of the worst. He became a false fiction. He became a phantasmagoria. He became a liar.
But as all ugly people are ugly, he remained ugly. With just one aggravating factor: devoid of ethics, all effect of passion, he became Aristotle's ugly man. He liked everyone to kiss his ass.
Guedes was ambitious. He took care of his power diligently. The whale became his home, his city.
He said his name was Guedes. Inside the whale, Guedes kept nonsense, vulgar adjectives, always dressed in poorly cut suits and dirty shoes. The whale was safer than a large ship.
And he said his name was Guedes, he said his name was Guedes and his boss said he was an Ipiranga gas station. And he said his name was Guedes. He was a neoliberal man.
What was there in the Great Sea where Guedes sailed the whale? Beasts of the cruelty of men and unheard-of types of life and buffoonery, of the ilk of their chief.
Guedes enslaved the winds with the One-Eyed Monster who was led by the Monstromínio, the Monster of the Condominium, the president who ate raw meat, condensed milk and sliced bread and signed documents with a cheap ballpoint pen.
The president had a retinue of angry vulture servants, real animals with several heads and no brains who were always in a little pen and kept shouting:
– Myth, myth, myth…
On the River Seine, the Beluga regurgitates what Guedes carried on it during many years of navigation: enough fresh water, many weapons from shooting clubs, farms, large estates, and cronies.
The Beluga sailed to a place where no other Beluga had ever reached, a place where wine flowed in a strong and abundant stream. After traveling many years and many places, the Beluga spotted an entrance to Paris on the River Seine.
Morning star awakens, not inhabited within it, the mount with a fetid smell, a very stinky smell, a huge stench the smell of Guedes, devastated his country with fire.
Museums, libraries, universities, unions, civil organizations were burned:
– Was it COVID?
This became the question. Whoever didn't sleep, whoever didn't eat, whoever got sick, whoever died, the question came to mind:
– Was it COVID?
And it could all be due to COVID. And some deaths were due to COVID. But, overall, it was due to negligence. Overall, it was due to genocide.
And on the country's borders, signs: it was genocide.
And COVID was a party.
The lyrics of the national anthem became: Our dead are more dead and in greater numbers. Our lives are worthless. A country of insults has become an eternal pariah in the world. To the children of those who worship them, only death and the actions of the genocidal maniac who produces corpses. Die, die!
There were so many corpses that no more people were born. The country was populated by armadillos. They fed in the graves and reproduced there. Tatupeba was no longer the tree that gave it its name. No longer the tree with a fiery color. The country began to be called the land of armadillos.
Guedes' boss planted phalluses, weapons, bullets, and ammunition where others had planted school vacancies and jobs. He planted graves and rejoiced in the deaths and the sepulchral silence without carnival. He rode around in a speedboat, had barbecues, and drank condensed milk while he piled more and more people below the poverty line. He laughed to the sound of a clumsy accordion, in the language of figures, in the language of signs. He fattened militias, caressed the police, and fattened the armed forces.
Was there no sin below the equator?
– There he is.
There was a time when the Central Bank became autonomous in relation to state policy. Bankers became stronger than ever. The country became the country of bankers. There were no more jobs, except for bankers.
Almost the entire population died.
There was no more carnival.
The pandemic, which was previously a virus, has become monetary.
The president of the country became the president of the Central Bank. Everything was controlled in dollars.
They were groups of people extremely concerned about the country's misgovernment, about the genocide. And they did nothing. All they did was worry and post about it in clippings on social media.
They were superior groups. And they were groups of distracted people, of scattered and dispersive people. And groups of fun-loving people and of worried people who were also having fun. And there were groups of people who were breathing, even though the population was dying of asphyxiation. And it wasn't just a lack of oxygen. It was asphyxiation of fixed ideas. Paralysis.
Before sailing down the Seine, the Beluga was in this country, before being in this country it was on the Moon where the inhabitants are not born of women, but of men, born from the calf of the leg. When the fetus is generated the calf of the leg swells, the calf thickens. Other natives of the Moon are born by cutting off the man's right testicle and this testicle is planted in the ground and becomes a huge tree like a big lollipop that procreates.
The Beluga, about two hundred and seventy kilometers in size, advanced along the Seine with its mouth open, stirring up the waters of the river and bathing everything around it in foam.
She displayed teeth much larger than the large lollipops of the inhabitants of the Moon.
– What did the whale do? What did it eat?
Time asked.
In addition to eating Master Jonas, Guedes, the Whale ate krill, crustaceans measuring 6 centimeters in length, in industrial quantities.
When eating, the whale opens its mouth and swallows a mass of six million krill. It closes its mouth and squeezes out the water with its baleen and whale tongue. The plankton settles on the edge of its baleen and is swallowed.
The Beluga embroidered a new year again nothing new under the sun.
– And did the Whale have any tricks?
Time doubted.
I had the skills, the threads and the needles.
The whale had the needles that the government of Guedes' country did not buy. The whale had the tricks. The government did not. The country was one without syringes, needles, or vaccines.
Guedes' boss playing football and talking nonsense and insults. And the country was left with the genocidal man lying on the pitch.
On the day when more than a thousand people died on the same day, he once again made fun of those being tortured
And the country became a pariah on the planet.
Women being murdered all the time, all the time.
The country became a country of jokes.
And there were even people on the left who made homophobic jokes about the president's bizarre pose on the lawn.
The country of jokes. The country of memes. The subject of satire, from the height of his presumption, still preferred to see Jânio Quadros in office when they saw a faggot. Better mismatched feet, better a populist staging than a homophobic joke.
To the madman what belongs to the madman.
At least the suggestion of resignation.
In that country, little by little, everything became a joke. A meme. More and more. Every day, every hour, every minute, every second. Even the moment was already assaulted by jokes. The birds sang jokes, the engines of cars and motorcycles roared jokes. The cats and dogs meowed and barked jokes. Even the precarious told jokes.
Everyone was hit by jokes. And by false jokes. Of false content. Things continued to be serious, but not serious.
The underlying disease, the lack of interpretation skills. No one knew how to interpret texts anymore. And it wasn't just the ironies that were difficult to understand. The country found itself mired in fake news. And in jokes read as true news. All of this with the added complication of the strains reproducing.
When all the best artists, singers, actors, and authors of songs, theater, prose and verse, composers, painters, actors, and best artists, singers, actresses, and authors, and similar gender-fluid and non-binary people died, and art no longer existed in the country, only stones remained. Not the geological ones that, although slow, undergo profound transformations. Only the blunt, curved, stuck, inert stones remained. Stones like kidney stones, gallbladder stones, stones in the middle of paths. Zombie beings made of stones with fixed ideas of stones.
No static between needle and record.
Buzzing, noise, feedback.
When the country was left completely without theater, without cinema, without literature, without various paintings, nor music, and the dead were the ones who dominated the entire Earth, Guedes' country was seen as a pariah, as a planet that floats in the Cosmos, not like the Moon that floats, dances and has light, even if artificial, but as a desert that indicates it once was.
When all and any form of intelligence was banned, the country was not left adrift. The country was forgotten. However, it still received the label of a great unimportant homeland, a great homeland of good men.
The common people, the defeated, were arrested and tied up and punished even more. This was the War of the Dead Heroes, led by the Portuguese Sailor because the country that Guedes destroyed had been a Portuguese mistake, a badly told joke.
When the Portuguese Sailor passed by, the Portuguese sailor did not walk, he would dance, as if at the whim of the tides. When he swung, he did so with such a bow that just so that no one could tell whether it was a human body or a canoe, he would jump from boat to boat. In one leap, he would stop at Madragoa or Bairro Alto. He would enter Alfama and turn Alfama into a deck. He would always say that there was Vasco da Gama in him, as there is always a Vasco da Gama in any Portuguese sailor. When he passed by with his showy reach, he always had salt stones in his mischievous eyes.
The Sailor defeated Guedes, even though everyone had died.
The Portuguese Sailor mischievously put on his seaman's cap, but if he invented a caress, there was no woman who could escape him. A strand of disheveled hair could even be the grapnel that a fishwife liked.
He passed, the Portuguese Sailor passed. He passed the sea, the Seine River, France, the country commanded by Guedes' leader in more than one threat that were not of affectionate tides.
There were many others inside the Beluga, inhospitable and strange, in the heat, xenophobic, chauvinistic, endogenous besides the ugly and fetid Guedes.
The Beluga drained like the caves.
Guedes burned the forest inside the Beluga so that it would die and he could get out. He burned it, starting with the tail, for seven days and seven nights. It fell ill on the seventh day.
Between the eighth and ninth night the whale died, not before regurgitating Guedes, the neoliberal.
Clothes made of spider webs without bodies, impalpable disembodied beings in Guedes chattered so much that they even said that the wife of the president of France was ugly. And that his people would no longer need France, leaving it behind.
Guedes only had the right side of his body and soul. One half of Guedes was made up of poop, pee and snot. The other half was made up of his boss's spit, which, when he spoke, was a fountain where his followers bathed.
His passions were anger, enmity, fear, shame, envy.
Guedes practiced necrophilia. He was part of necropolitics, part of the necroacademy.
From inside the Whale when Guedes came out, there came a horrible smell of sulfur, bitumen, and fish, in addition to a lot of smoke as if men were burning the air, which became dark and cloudy.
For the remaining population, it was recommended to use medications such as Busonid twice a day, Belladona four times a day, saline solution or boric acid water.
There was a sound of whips and groans. After leaving the River Seine, the whale had become stranded in the Port of Sono, which was a forest with tall dormouse trees and mandrakes.
The Port of Sleep was a place where there was a river called Night Passage and there were springs called Desacordadas and Pernoites. Nearby there was a plain called Indolência. Those who stayed there or visited there had frightening dreams about being there and the pitiful sound of the place.
What happened after Guedes was regurgitated will be told in later stories. The deep sea, the bones and skulls of many men killed in the Araguaia will tell the story.
Since Guedes was a foreigner, he was eaten by women sailors. However, before he died he declared:
– The country could become Argentina in six months and Venezuela in a year and a half. If you do it wrong, it will go quickly. Now, do you want to become Germany or the United States? It will take ten or fifteen years in the other direction. You will miss me and my boss. Look, I could have been fired in 30 seconds if my boss no longer believed in my work.
And since they were one and the same, Guedes neither resigned nor was fired.
– And his boss?
Since no one lights a candle for a bad deceased, he was left in the dark during the country's blackouts caused by the privatization of electricity. There was no crying, no candle, no yellow ribbon for his end.
– And the Portuguese Sailor?
– He bought a wicker mat and stopped sailing.
*Eduardo Sinkevisque is a postdoctoral fellow in literary theory at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL) at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp).
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