A boatload of exotic adventures, dazzling art and significant people, and we’re just getting started. Are you coming along for the ride?
Let me put down this drink and I’ll tell you how it began. In Lake Forest a woman from São João del-Rei lamented that Brazilian authors were not better known in this country. Fortunately, I’d read a smattering of Amado, Andrade’s Macunaíma, and what is possibly the best novel to have emerged from Brazil, Avalovara, by Osman Lins. Anyway, I sort of pledged, aurally or otherwise, I can’t remember, to help rectify this carnage of ignorance. That was, ahem, a quarter of a century ago and more, but soon afterwards I started to chisel at some invisible block of stone that one might arrogantly call a novel. To this day it simmers like a pot of feijoada with new ingredients still being added.
The official term for these things is “a work in progress,” but in this case it’s an excursion, a Romantic odyssey (or certainly a paean to the genre) that meanders from room to room like a sleepwalker. Or, as the Captain might say, We’re in no big hurry to reach port.
I’ve named this thing Through the Jungle and to the Moon: My Travels in Brazil with Caspar David Friedrich, and its cast of thousands includes characters both real and imaginary, who sometimes congregate afterhours in coffeehouses or bars and amuse one another with their ideas for stories or novels they boast about writing one day – big talkers that we all are, huh? – but probably won’t. There are dozens of these vignettes, or literary scampers, bobbing in our wake from Manaus to São Paulo, and the following excerpt gives a whiff (bitter or pleasant, your call) of what it’s like if we listen in on their conversations. Some of the interconnecting banter has been deleted, for better or worse.
The manuscript in toto aspires to a higher pantheon, to lock fingers with Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier or Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, for example, not to mention Wagner and Proust and even Bobby Darin’s “Beyond The Sea.” Impossible perhaps; certainly audacious. I’ll just shrug and say that if we don’t aim for the stars we’ll never make it to the moon. – Bondo Wyszpolski
The camel
Emeric rose to his feet and began to describe a group of Bedouins who were gathered around their campfire late at night, talking quietly among themselves while their camels lay resting in the nearby cucumber field. Khaled and Mansur were discussing some of the one hundred words that desert people have for sand, while Mehemet and Hadji were planning how to deter the marauding jackals, when a lone figure atop his dromedary emerged from the sheer blackness of the night and silently approached. The men at the campfire reached for their scimitars, but the man on the camel remained calm. He displayed no sign of fear, and this in itself gave pause to the men with their weapons now drawn and glowing with menace in the firelight.
The stranger seemingly urged his camel even closer. To judge from his headscarf, or kafiyeh, not to mention his soft red boots of hippopotamus hide, it was evident that he was a person of wealth and prominence, related, perhaps, to the Caliph of Baghdad. And when he began to speak it was clear that Aouadallah Fido, for this was how he introduced himself, was also a man of culture and refinement. He eloquently described his pilgrimage from Basra to Petra and Timbuktu, where his camels were so tired and so hot that when they stopped to piss the sand at their feet melted into glass. He then spoke quietly of pharaonic passageways that tunneled below the Nile, bypassed untouched royal tombs, and was praising the late autumn sunsets from the upper terrace of the Babylonian gardens, when one of the goat-herding dogs, trotting back to camp from the cucumber fields, brushed up against the visitor’s camel and startled it. The beast jerked slightly to one side and then – to the astonishment of all – the rider, who had remained calm and unconcerned, began to slump to one side and then slowly slid to the ground with a thud. The camel, its eyes open wide and its nostrils flaring, awkwardly stepped back, paused, turned sharply, and took off at a gallop. Speechless, the men at the campfire stared at one another. One of them at last approached the fallen visitor and bent over him, Senhor! Senhor – suddenly recoiling as if he’d been bitten. What is it! the others demanded, again unsheathing their long knives, and Mansur, his voice trembling, turned to them and stammered: This man’s been dead for two weeks.
No one at the table said a word for maybe ten seconds, and that’s a long time, Vera, especially in Brazil. Finally Luiz Alfredo could restrain himself no longer: “Dead for two weeks you said?”
Emeric, looking straight at the Professor, grinned and explained: “Simply this. It had been the camel that did all the talking.”
“The camel! Well, that’s some story,” Márcio Souza admitted. “Too bad you won’t ever write it down. Now it’s lost for all eternity.”
The mermaid
There was laughter and feigned protestations, and when it subsided the very earnest Emeric began to recount another fable, tale, vignette or vinaigrette that he said had been told to him by a girl he’d met one afternoon nine years ago when he was vacationing with his parents in Fortaleza.
She walked up to me while I was building a sandcastle; my sister had gone in search of a vendor because we were both parched in all that tropical heat and wanted to slack our thirst with coconut milk. She sat down next to me, which was disconcerting for this adolescent, and I pretended for a while not to notice her. But then she gestured vaguely towards the sea and said how one morning at dawn a pretty mermaid had been washed ashore, the way that dolphins sometimes lose their inner compass and end up on the beach. Is that so, I replied, not yet looking up. Yes, she said, and so this mermaid, dragging herself up to the tide line, lay helpless and gasping, and had the unfortunate luck to be spotted by a trio of friends who’d come down to the water’s edge to pee and drink beer.
Different people see different things, the girl said, and these young men saw fun and opportunity in the guise of a young woman who could offer no resistance. One squatted behind her and roughly pulled back her hair, rubbing it between his legs, and certainly each of them took turns fondling her breasts. I’m sure they taunted her a little, Have a beer with us, fish lady; Suck my rock lobster, fish lady; and there’s no doubt that if she’d been easier to decode, anatomically speaking, they’d have gagged her and pinioned her and much else, which I leave to each of you to imagine in your own way.
Men like this keep a wary eye, however, and one of them noticed a distant figure at the shoreline, possibly someone out for his or her early morning jog before a day at the office. He alerted his buddies, but when they all turned back towards that distant figure what they saw was that it wasn’t so distant anymore, and that it was approaching at something closer to a gallop.
“Maybe it was your running, talking camel,” said Jô Soares, but no one laughed.
Now, the math is easy enough, Emeric continued, and one would think that three young men would have nothing to fear from a single, lone jogger, but the senses are a peculiar thing, and each of them felt in his guts now turning to water that something much larger than one man was bearing down upon them. And yet the figure was definitely human, an older man, in fact, but thickset, burly, weather-worn and perhaps entirely nude.
The three young men, now thoroughly sober, backed away from the mermaid, hoping against hope that the man on the run would see nothing unusual in the situation at the tide line and would ignore it altogether. He would smile, nice morning, amigos, and saunter past. But no, they could tell that his jaw was firmly set and that his eyes were locked in, fiercely locked in on them. There was resolve in every taut muscle and, arms flung wide, he barreled full-speed into two of the men at once and at the very same moment the mermaid lunged forward and sank her sharp teeth into the thigh of the other. His blood spurted high into the air.
This is the kind of humiliation that begets retribution, Emeric said, and retribution can be swift, if God wills it so. The girl who told me this story finished it before my sister returned, gestured again towards the swells, and started to walk away. I asked her what became of the mermaid and the old man. She brushed the hair from her face and said that he scooped her up and carried her straight into the water, where they both disappeared. I looked at the ocean. It was the answer I knew she’d give me. Needless to say, when I turned back towards her the girl herself had vanished.
The phone call
“I’m sitting at my desk in the alcove where I write, here in Rio,” Luis Fernando said, “and the woman I love telephones from Santiago, Chile, and needs a lift home. The week before she’d called me from Caracas, and the month before that she’d dialed collect from Quito. Perhaps she has traveled to these distant places for the sole purpose of being able to cradle the receiver, and to say: I’m stranded! Luis Fernando, can you help me, please! And each time I power down the word processor, I lock up the house and take a taxi to the airport. I always go, without a word, and I never question her motives. Of course, I never tell other people because I know what they would advise: Don’t go. A few of you might also jump to the conclusion that all of this is some kind of peculiar game, very large and unhealthy, and that I should openly question it. After all, I have spent enormous sums of money, which I have never mentioned to her, nor has she ever broached with me. The people at Varig know my name, my face, my novels of course, but that doesn’t mean they’re handing out free tickets!”
Luis Fernando took a deep breath. “This has been going on, not for five years, or ten years, but for sixteen years. Sometimes, when the telephone rings and it’s her, I learn that she’s not even in South America, but perhaps in Beijing or Saint Petersburg or Singapore. As I’ve said, I don’t question her motives, why she even went to these godforsaken cities in the first place, but I settle my affairs and promptly leave so that I can find her quickly and bring her home safe. And will you believe me, my friends, I still rush to her as eagerly as I did the very first time this happened.”
“You must spend more time writing in the air than you do at home,” quipped Luiz Alfredo.
“A most unusual love story,” said José Saramago, stroking his chin.
“What about visas?”
“This is Brazil,” Luis Fernando calmly replied. “I have friends.”
The prince’s valet
“Tieck had wanted to write this,” Friedrich said, and of course no one present imagined that this was the very same Ludwig Tieck who’d collaborated with Wackenroder, the Schlegels, and all the rest. “Not surprisingly, his enchanting tale was to be set during the Middle Ages.
“A young prince has journeyed with his valet or retainer to a neighboring kingdom to vie with one hundred other fair-headed youths for the hand of the King and Queen’s beautiful daughter. Their tents were pitched just beyond the moat and the walls of the castle. Naturally, there were many competitions in store that would test the mettle and acumen of each participant.
“The men were feasted daily in the great banquet hall where the royal family, its ministers, councilors, and endless retinue were able to appraise the suitors. Our young prince was quite sure of himself, as he boasted to his valet, and indeed – when the eyes of the King and Queen and their daughter chanced to fall upon him – one could say that they harbored tender and hopeful feelings for this handsome, blue-eyed nobleman. But after gazing approvingly upon his countenance, the princess let her glance fall upon the lowly valet, who stood motionless behind his master. She looked at the older man, and she smiled. Perhaps she was thinking to herself, How happy I am that it is not this ancient creature who’ll be jousting and tossing the javelin in hopes of having me for his bride! But the older man, and let me assure my listeners that he was not yet a doddering old fool but still sprightly at forty or forty-five years of age. Even so, at an age that doesn’t yet seem antiquated to some of us, well, maybe to Emeric, he was by far the eldest man present, for all of the other young princes had brought with them their valets or retainers who were more or less their same age.
“It will not surprise anyone here to learn that the smile of the princess, carelessly dispensed, went straight to the heart of the prince’s valet, and that at sunset he left the tent and walked along the river to be alone with his thoughts. We do not know what he was like in his youth, what dreams of glory he may have harbored when younger, but when he returned to the tent he’d made up his mind: He was going to compete for the hand of the fair princess.
“His prince was surprised, you’re going to do what, he said, but offered no objection because the valet had served him well for as long as he could remember and had been an excellent teacher and a faithful companion. It was quite different when the other suitors were informed; they called the valet ‘grandfather’ and sniggered at him behind his back. If only they’d laughed at him to his face this tale would be much shorter, and the outcome more predictable.
“The princess was also astonished and her handmaidens horrified, or so they claimed, it being their duty to mirror their lady’s own shock and disbelief. Meanwhile, the King was on edge; the idea of someone the same age as himself, and not even of royal blood, vying for the hand of his only daughter was of grave concern. One would expect his sentiments to be shared by the Queen, and yet she began to bestow kindnesses and smiles upon the valet that were noticed and frowned upon by others. Meanwhile, the days of competition grew near.”
“There are similarities in your story to when Odysseus returned to Ithaca, to find his wife besieged by suitors and his wealth drained by idle men, each hoping to be chosen by Penelope as her new husband.”
“That’s quite true,” said Friedrich, “and the similarities do not end there. The valet excelled in archery and fencing, he’d learned well from his own prince, and threw the javelin with greater accuracy, if not more brute strength, than any of the others. They began to worry, and to resent the possibility that a man as old as their fathers could ride off with the girl of their dreams. Some of them, in fact, after poor showings in the earlier competitions, quietly folded their tents and returned home. And still the games continued, but the Queen, at least, had the foresight to send spies into the encampment, and soon enough half a dozen young men were detained and charged with plotting to harm the valet and his prince. On the following day, and prior to the jousting tournament, the valet nodded appropriately to the Queen and then gazed into the stunned, disbelieving eyes of her daughter the princess. What did he see? A pretty, fresh face, certainly, but what he felt was a surge of pride and confidence and it is here – I believe – that the tale diverges from that of Odysseus and Penelope. Odysseus, you see, had always been a hero, a David and Goliath rolled into one, but this valet had seen much of his life vanish with himself only a spectator of it, not a participant. He’d never had anything, or anyone, who had so engaged him that he could confront and surmount any obstacle. He was an old, or at least a middle-aged man, but he’d fallen in love with a princess and he rose valiantly to the occasion.”
Jô Soares laughed. “I can imagine the prince’s father when the young man returned home without his valet. I’d give fifty reais to learn how he explained that!”
“An old guy like me enjoys these kinds of kitten and mangy dog stories,” said a grinning João Ubaldo. “It’s true, they give us hope, but they also reassure us about the power of love. What man, young or old, doesn’t wish to carry the banner of his lady fair when riding into battle?”
“Friedrich,” I whispered, grabbing his heavy wool cloak, “what if the valet had failed? What if determination and joy simply weren’t enough? What if he really was too old?”
“I don’t know if he succeeded,” Friedrich replied. “The tale isn’t really about that. But let’s say that the valet won her hand and they married. Shall we revisit the kingdom twenty years later and see what they’re up to? Are you ready?”
Bondo Wyszpolski will read from his work at Beach magazine’s Live at the Lounge event, Nov. 17, doors open at 5:30, readings at 6:30. Free. 1018 Hermosa Ave. Hermosa Beach.
