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217 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
Sitting in the cabin of a truck beside the driver, cap pulled low over my eyes, an endless cigarette vibrating in my hand, I began my painful apprenticeship in dying.
Confined in dilapidated wards, wearing the uniform of the ill, we walked our incommunicable dreams, our formless angst, around the sandy parade ground of the barracks, viewing our past through the inverted binoculars of letters from home and photos kept at the bottoms of suitcases beneath the bed, prehistoric remains from which we could reconstruct, like biologists examining a single bone, the monstrous skeleton of our grief.
You, for example, with your aseptic, competent, dandruff-free air of an executive secretary, would you be able to breathe inside a painting by Bosch, overwhelmed by demons, lizards, gnomes hatching from eggshells, and staring gelatinous eyeballs?
“…una muerte en la que nada había de común con la muerte aséptica de los hospitales, agonía de desconocidos que solo aumentaba y reforzaba mi certeza de estar vivo… y me ofrecieron el vértigo de mi propio fin en el fin de los que comían conmigo, dormían conmigo, hablaban conmigo…”Noches como esta en la que, presumimos que una vez más, le cuenta su vida a una mujer cualquiera encontrada en un bar en un monólogo que bien pudiera haber sido transcrito sin capítulos ni puntos y aparte a la manera de un derrotado Thomas Bernhard con el que comparte el sentimiento de amor y odio hacia su propio país.
“Tal vez me descubra unicornio, la abrace, y usted agite los brazos espantados de mariposa clavada en un alfiler, empalagosa de ternura”Una poética diatriba de alguien al que obligaron a ir donde no le correspondía y que volvió lleno de culpa y vergüenza a un país que ya no reconocía, al que ya nunca podría volver a sentir como suyo. Un grito de socorro por la soledad del que no se siente partícipe de la vida, del que no comprende como todo y todos pueden seguir con la suya como si nada hubiera pasado.
“Lo que los demás exigen de nosotros, ¿entiende?, es que no los cuestionemos, no sacudamos sus vidas en miniatura selladas contra la desesperación y la esperanza, no rompamos sus acuarios de peces sordos flotando en el agua fangosa del día a día, aclarada al bies por la lámpara soñolienta de lo que llamamos virtud y que sólo consiste, si se la observa de cerca, en la ausencia tibia de ambiciones.”Aunque de vez en cuando se encuentran perlitas de ingenio en forma de metáfora, como cuando asemeja a las cacatúas de cabezas ladeadas con contempladores de cuadros o cuando señala el puro de gestor como el complemento perfecto de los camellos y sus caras de aburrimiento, o cuando nos habla de la máquina de coser que tosía hilos y botones o los ascensores que subían y bajaban por los edificios como nueces de adán, la verdad es que el humor no abunda en la literatura de Lobo, a no ser que queramos ver un humor de cara de palo a lo Buster Keaton cuando se refiere a aquel árbol inesperado que surgió del bosque para explicar cómo unos compañeros estrellaron su coche, o cuando revela el macabro juego de descubrir en los rostros de los compañeros los futuros habitantes de los féretros que transportaban.
“Porque siempre he estado aislado, durante la escuela, el instituto, la facultad, el hospital, el matrimonio, aislado, aislado con mis libros demasiado leídos y mis poemas pretenciosos y vulgares, el ansia de escribir y el tormento de no ser capaz, de no lograr traducir en palabras lo que deseaba gritar al oído de los otros y que era Estoy aquí, Miradme que estoy aquí, Oídme hasta en mi silencio y comprended”
"E só compreendi isso quando vi os prisioneiros no quartel da Pide, a resignada espera dos seus gestos, as barrigas gigantescas de fome das crianças, a ausência de lágrimas no pavor dos olhos. É preciso que entenda, percebe, que no meio em que nasci a definição de preto era «criatura amorosa em pequenino», como quem se refere a cães ou a cavalos (...)"
"O que seria de nós, não é, se fôssemos de facto felizes? Já imaginou como isso nos deixaria perplexos, desarmados, mirando ansiosamente em volta em busca de uma desgraça reconfortadora, como as crianças procuram os sorrisos da família numa festa de colégio?"
"O medo de voltar ao meu país comprime-me o esófago, porque, entende, deixei de ter lugar fosse onde fosse, estive longe demais, tempo demais para tornar a pertencer aqui, a estes outonos de chuvas e de missas,estes demorados invernos despolidos como lâmpadas fundidas."
we weren't mad dogs when we arrived here, i said to the lieutenant, who was seething with anger and indignation, we weren't mad dogs before the censored letters, the attacks, the ambushes, the mines, the lack of food and tobacco and cold drinks and matches and water and coffins, before we were told that a berliet truck was worth more than a man and before we found out that the death of a solider merited just three lines in the newspaper, he died in combat in angola, we weren't mad dogs, it's simply that we meant nothing to the mealy-mouthed state, who shat on us and used us as laboratory rats and who now at least are afraid of us, so afraid of our presence, of our unpredictable reactions and the remorse we represent that they cross the road if they see us coming, they avoid us, they don't want to face a battalion destroyed in the name of a lot of cynical ideas no one believes in, a battalion destroyed merely to defend the wealth of the three or four families who shore up the regime, the giant lieutenant turned to me, touched my arm and begged in a voice that was suddenly a child's voice, doctor, fix me up with some illness before i explode right here in the street from all the shit inside me.
no, seriously, happiness, that vague state resulting from an impossible convergence of parallel lines in the form of a good digestion and a smug egotism untouched by regrets, still seems to me- for i belong to the glum category of the sad and restless, eternally waiting for an explosion or a miracle- something as abstract and strange as innocence, justice, honor, those profound, grandiloquent, and ultimately empty concepts that the family, school, the catechism, and the state solemnly imposed upon me so as to tame me more easily, to nip in the bud, if i may put it like that, any stirrings of protest and rebellion. what others demand of us, you understand, is that we don't cause them to doubt, that we don't disturb their teeny-tiny lives, which they have carefully insulated against despair and hope, that we don't shatter their aquariums of deaf fish floating in the slimy water of the day-to-day, lit obliquely by the sleepy lamp of what we call virtue, which, when looked at closely, turns out to be merely the lukewarm absence of ambition.
There are few things I still believe in, and, from three o’clock in the morning on, the future shrinks to the terrifying proportions of a tunnel through which I walk, bellowing out the ancient pain I haven’t yet managed to cure, as ancient as the death that has been growing its sticky, febrile moss inside us since infancy, inviting us to embrace the inertia of the moribund, but there’s also the diffuse, volatile, omnipresent, passionate clarity that you find in Matisse’s paintings and in Lisbon afternoons, which, like the African dust, gets in through every crack and crevice, through closed windows and the soft spaces between the buttons on a shirt, through the porous wall of the eyelids and through silences the texture of murdered glass, and it’s not impossible that the unexpected beauty of a young woman, who, oblivious to your presence, walks past you in the restaurant, where the head of the fish on your plate is gazing at you with imploring, orgasmic eyes, will suddenly awaken in you the fragile miracle of a pang of desire and happiness.
Because, you see, I was always alone, Sofia, during primary school, college, university, hospital, marriage, alone with the books I had read far too many times and with my own vulgar, pretentious poems, with longing to write and the tormenting fear that i couldn’t, that I wouldn’t be able to translate into words what I wanted to bellow into the ears of others: I am here, notice me, I am here, listen to me and understand me even when I’m silent, but you see, Sofia, what isn’t said can’t be understood, people look but don’t understand, they go away, they talk to each other at a distance from us, oblivious to us, and then we feel like a beach in autumn, empty of footprints, on which the sea advances and then retreats with the involuntary motion of a lifeless arm.