SNAKE STORIES

4. The snake stories

Saturday, February 2

 

The "rolinha" dove made a nest and layed eggs inside the trellis in the veranda where Ginny had tended to the blue flowered morning glory vine. Niece, nephew, grand-nephews and grand-niece were overjoyed. They checked on the progress of the eggs, fed them grapes and loaves of bread, appreciated the daily visits of the "rolinho", the he-dove.  In the last day of their stay at the beach the eggs hatched. Isn't life great!? 

Family left the next morning and we were overjoyed with the silent time to cook a little shrimp, a little rice, a sprinkling of some lemon on hearts of palm, cold, cold beer.  We had been there for a week now, still one week to go before we had to stand in line once again!

Then there came the snake, a meter long, gray, round headed, thin tailed.

"No problem", says I. "Don't kill it, it is not poisonous, I KNOW!"

I had to convince them all. They all wanted to kill that snake, poisonous or not, because to their eyes, it deserved to be killed.  To my eyes, it had round eyes, a tail rounded at the end, no sharpness to its demeanor. I was sure of it, it was not a poisonous snake.

We went to check on the status of the newborn. We were just about to place a mirror near the nest to see the birds.  I had just removed a bunch of offending grapes and a huge stale bun from the nest. 

The snake met us eye to eye.

She snatched the birds right there.  
No broom would stop her, she was seriously committed. She had waited for two days hidden in the yard, at the corner of that trellis, biding her time, waiting for the children to leave.

So we went to the beach to tell the story. Business was very slow, we the only customers sitting outside the Italian restaurant by the water. Chatting away with Monica and Renata.  Gordon had baked some ciabatta and with some of the leftover dough, he had baked some bread sticks.

Fernando, the roofer, came by and told us these thin gray snakes are the very, very dangerous "preguicosa", the lazy one, and so we should proceed very carefully around her.

"Oh, great!" I think, "and I though it was just a garden snake!" 

Vilma, the cook joined us to tell us that this snake is "the very, very dangerous "cipó" snake. For sure, it is the infamous ‘'vine" snake!"

She tells us an uncle of hers died suffocated by a "cipó" snake, right inside his house. They make themselves very, very thin like a pencil and then wrap themselves around your neck and suffocate you while you sleep, "while you're not even paying attention."

According to Vilma, all snakes are to be killed. All snakes are very dangerous. Most will jump at you. Like scorpions, they will kill on contact. We were not talking about scorpions, but out of the blue Vilma tells us she had a brother who was married to a woman who died from the bite of a scorpion. 

"But", I said, "scorpions, yes, but not all snakes are dangerous?! You mean to say all snakes will kill you? "

"Yes", said Vilma with absolute faith. "I have no doubt, whatsoever!"

Then she did something extraordinary.  She went to the kitchen for a while and came back with one of the bread sticks carefully painted as a snake. Perfect scales, eyes, fangs, this adorable and dangerous blue and tan magic marker painted bread stick snake. 

She fondled her stick.  "I named this one "Augustostrictor", after my boyfriend!"

She had no doubts.  All snakes needed to be killed.

 

Meaipe, 2006

 

 

 

PHERONOMES

3. Mais+

Meaipe, Sunday, January 28

 

All around, bandits assault busses along the mountain roads.

So we travel by car, we travel fast and we break through the bandido’s mountain highway barrier. They cannot catch us anymore as we land in the wild lowlands, in the state of the Holy Ghost.

Sandwiched between the high granite of the gray green mountains on our right and the hard yellow sandy dunes, the endless beaches to the left, softly flotsam and jetsam, reflections of gray green azure of water, possible swimming all the way to Africa, possible walking south all the way to Patagonia.

SURPRISE! We thought we were going to the quaint fishing village, quasi vacation spot for the summer. We land instead in the land of glitz and sexy semi naked sensual people. 

"MAIS+". The new nightclub of Meaipe! Appropriate for the mood of the local people, coming from nearby, from faraway and everywhere, lining the streets to gain access to more and more and more. The fishing village has changed with the arrival of MAIS+ and MORE.

Women are buying new glitzy bras and shimmering gowns to shine inside "Mais+". The red brown dust of the village roads kisses the delicate golden red brown skin of these babes.  Dressed to dance and to be seen (or to kill), they know right away they have ruined their high heeled shiny bare sandals, as soon as they smell the fishy muck of this backed up sewage of this fishing village set on more.

But for MORE we will do just about anything! Even ruin make-up and high heeled sandals in sewage. 

I am told "The first world has finally come to visit. We have made it! And we will show you! You the imaginary folk of the first world! We will show you how it is done!!"

And so they stand in line, females in barely covered fronts and very bare backs. No big breasts, they all belong to the female species of small tits. The males, more subdued, busy counting notes and buying tickets.  A serious female mutation happening here. These dames are on a hunt and in full plumage. These female cats are showing off.  The escorts, the males may take on an occasional silk, an occasional soft cloth, but overall they look gray.  Barely out of puberty, they strike me as mimicking confidence. 

But the women, ah the women they are out on a hunt - preening and plucking their plumage - serious business of pheromones on display! Pheromones in training? What is this? Pro-life, pro-creation? What motivates them?

I intuit decadence, in the keen sense that seeds and other vegetable creatures concoct in order to assure the perpetuation of a species in danger. Unconscious behavior?!

Something is dying, and these young women, these young men know it! Something has gone amuck, and so these babes of procreation must spread the seed and stand in line to MAIS and to more. 

Meaipe, State of the Holy Ghost, 2006

 

 

BOLEROS, TANGOS E FLAMENCOS

Querido D.

Os boleros chegaram pra mim loguinho depois de você. E o tango e o flamenco.  E depois dêles veio o forró que aliás dancei muito nos terreiros arenosos da praia de Meaipe, no quintal das escolas quando de visita de passagem.  Até tinha o meu professor de dança, que depois descobri era também o traficante local – rapaz de corpo forte e de olhos muito fundos que gostava de dançar com a gringa brasileira e que vendia loteria e jôgo do bicho.  Sempre que eu visitava a sala do forró, uma vez por ano, nas férias, êle me procurava logo e pedia pra dançar.  Já dava pra saber bailar quase que flutuando como aqueles casais do forró fazem, patinando pela poeira do terreiro.

A minha herança germânica aliás não acho que foi o que me conteve. Me deu a força séria de me manter em foco e me deu uma paixão muito grande pela filosofia.  Até hoje.  Creio que a gente (em geral) seja um amálgama de tudo que vai a ser.  Não somos parte do passado, nem em memória, pois no recontar e relembrar já viramos a página e escrevemos com tinta nova. Essa é a beleza da coisa.

Algum filósofo pos-moderno disse recentemente que o pensamento existe no lugar onde existe lugar e espaço.  E que pensar é esquecer. “Thinking is forgetting. Only in forgetting can thought be born. We think because we forget. Thinking generalizes, synthesizes, eliminates peculiarities, but only as forgetting enables it. Forgetting traverses thought with the same intensity as memory. Neither forgetting nor memory is absolute; the capacity for thinking rests upon this notion. “

O relembrar e a memória, o recordar, recontando é ato definitivo do ser no futuro, digo eu. 

 

Acabo de voltar lá do Botânico, onde trabalho, de uma noite de “Magic in the Meadow”, – uma festa enorme de beneficiência nossa, debaixo de uma tenda enorme e iluminada com pontas agudas que nem o aeroporto de Paris ou seria o de Denver? Pôr do sol com nuvens mágicas de outono e mucho dinheiro. Mágico itinerante, leilão silencioso e ao vivo, música, comida gostosa, muita bebida.  E até telescópios pra gente ver Jupiter de muito perto no plano ilusório do visual com todas as luas de sobremesa. O presidente do Conselho deu um milhão de dólares para a nossa campanha.  E pra minha surprêsa, mencionou o meu nome e o meu trabalho com os voluntários no seu discurso.

Sua carta me comoveu. Me lembrei de uma vez quando você me mandou uma dúzia de rosas vermelhas (porque as amarelas e minhas preferidas não tem muito gôsto) com um cartãozinho dentro, com sua letra de tinta azul elegante caidínha pra direita e pequena “para você comer e fartar-se”.  Isso depois de você ter descompassado o meu sentido do sexo, chegando em casa, como você chegou, de Uberaba ou de Uberlândia, cheio do cheiro das mulheres com quem você acordou ou adormeceu. 

(All my Princes are dead…)

Já naquela época, tinhamos “issues”, questões quanto a minha necessidade tão poderosa de fartura, de excessos, de paixões, de quebra e de extrapolação dos limites.  Hoje, depois de tanto tempo, continuo trabalhando essa e as outras duas ou três idéias primeiras, aqueles temas maiores da nossa juventude, quando o mundo éramos nós, quando ríamos dos limites – (pelo menos eu ria e chorava) e empurrava e batalhava para que a enormidade do meu entendimento também fôsse o seu.  E o do mundo. 

Você, de mais comedido, queria mais calma e mais ordem e queria trabalhar dentro da realidade do dia.  Paz a tranquilidade. Você sempre dizia que eu devia aprender a trabalhar dentro do sistema. E hoje eu trabalho bem dentro de algum sistema.  (Com muita dificuldade…, mas isso é papo para outra estória)

Hoje sei que aquele entendimento meu, aquele comportamento ainda é meu e me define.  E continuo empurrando e me ajustando e inventando e criando e escrevendo até que alguma centelha de gênio transparece.  Alguma poesia.

Me encanta saber, que pra você também, o eterno ficou.

Aí, como eu conto a estória para amigos meus, você, de poeta que eu amava, se tornou advogado. E tudo foi por água abaixo pra mim. (:”)

O mundo é o mesmo, as palavras as mesmas, os sentimentos bastante os mesmos, nesse território, o amor.

Beijo,

Erica

 

BORDERLINES

Travels through the frontiers

0. Travel today

1. Travel as aphrodisiac

same as travel while standing in line.

In a chronicle of long ago, Gabriel Garcia Marques equated travel and travel logs to powerful known aphrodisiacs. For many years, my keenest sensual fantasy was to mate while flying. As old as I get, the deed is never accomplished, the glamour of flying dimmed by countless hours.  Yet when I cross time zones, travel retains the exquisite possibility of mutiny in time and in space, that deep shift inside where I land in a different culture, a different in vitro, a different landscape and the possibility of mutation.

I have just returned from a month long trip to my homeland of Brazil, way down toward the south from this northern here where I live year round. Climate zone classified between temperate, jungle, rain forest and I never know what else. Warm home of soul and of young memory.

I traveled fast and by airplane and these are my traveling notes, my precious first impressions:

My legs are jumpy and do not want to go to sleep. The free wine I never seem able to refuse in airplane rides is once again semi sweet and California cheap.

This time I imagine to gather up the courage and pack that nice airline grey and elegant wool blanket and take it home. This time I imagine buying a cozy duty free afghan made out of silk to match my stolen grey blanket.  Buy it  from the shadowy, well made-up free zone woman who visits us after the brandy, way in the middle of the night, when breathing is difficult and we would do just about anything to survive inside.  I imagine asking for all the playing cards and all the airline games I heard they only give to children. 

Another unfulfilled fantasy.

We endure ten hours inside the tin box and land safely in São Paulo. 

Brasil at last!  Brisk endless walk through endless steel corridors, a need to pee and to stop!  Like cows and bulls we are arraigned into snaky lines. In solidarity to my American traveling partner, I stay in the long line designated for the "Others".

We know we could actually have some fun over there. Spend a month traipsing around, hopping and experimenting.

I already taste the forbidden high calorie savories at the street stands, lingering toward the deli and the cheese puffs. Freshly squeezed juices from nutritious tropical fruit, the philosophy shared with bus riders, the laughter, all the dance that await us, we know. 

We also know that success is connected to staying connected to the standing in this long line.

It is hot, it is summer, the air conditioner does not work, the airport is being renovated!

Winter coats, heavy lined boots, weary travelers in line,

once again, saying not a word

when the cute police woman dressed in a tight short black skirt, tight skimpy white t-shirt, deep tan, long black hair
tells us to open our passports to our photo pages! I am quite sure she may have had a gun.

"You mean to say, Border Police Woman, you mean to imply we are not who we are? We look different than our passport photo?"  

Foreigners made to wait and to answer the essential questions.

"Why do you want to be here? What is it that you bring that can harm us? Show me your papers and prove to me who you are! "

How many times in my life did I not cross these borders to watch the border patrol express that exact same doubt?

"You do not look like your passport photos and your real intentions must be very different from your written understatements! (What statements? What under statements?)

Once in Bombay, I was told in a very accented stern language y this tall handsome dark Indian man to "Stand behind the rope, or else!"  I will forever remember that when I stand in line and when I try to jump rope.

Once in Guinea, I was told by this handsome guerilla green uniformed machine gunned French speaking African man that I needed an entry visa into the country so as to transit through the airport and get to the departure lounge, toward the north to my connecting flight, or else!

Or else? 

We stood there for sure and not one of us said a word.

Eventually we, the foreigners and I, the native, got in and attempted to belong.  We spent considerable time and effort trying to blend in.  Blend in and not draw the attention of all the "bandidos", guerilla people who eventually would get us and rob us of something essential that belonged to us only, and not to them. Or so we thought.

Fact is we looked different anyway!  So why bother to make us stand in line? Why not just let us get in and meet our fate?

Little did we know we would be doing the same now, here, only barefooted?

 

ASCLEPIAS SEED IN FLIGHT

SEMENTE DE ASCLEPIAS VOANDO NO VENTO

BIRD ON THE WIRE 2

LIKE A BIRD ON A WIRE

Like a bird on a wire

like a drunk in a midnight fire

I have tried in my way
to be free...



Like a bird on the wire, 
Like a drunk in a midnight choir 
I have tried in my way to be free. 
Like a worm on a hook, 
Like a knight from some old fashioned book 
I have saved all my ribbons for thee. 
If I, if I have been unkind, 
I hope that you can just let it go by. 
If I, if I have been untrue 
I hope you know it was never to you. 

Like a baby, stillborn, 
Like a beast with his horn 
I have torn everyone who reached out for me. 
But I swear by this song 
And by all that I have done wrong 
I will make it all up to thee. 
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch, 
He said to me, "You must not ask for so much." 
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door, 
She cried to me, "Hey, why not ask for more?" 

Oh like a bird on the wire, 
Like a drunk in a midnight choir 
I have tried in my way to be free.

(Leonard Cohen)