for/pq
Ingmar Bergman,
Martin Amis,
Michael Ondaatje,
Yara Rodrigues Fowler,
Lucia Berlin,
Elia Kazan,
Merritt Tierce,
Italo Calvino,
Karen Tei Yamashita
Sônia there are things I regret, that I think about at night. Can I tell you? Yes? We were at a congress, in the South at a university in the Southeast. There were three hundred or four hundred of us there. It was right before the amnesty, right when we were thinking Meu Deus we have finally done it. We are this close to democracy. I was just out of – prison. The dictatorship is this close to finished – and we have finished it. We were asking for amnesty. You know the slogan. We were asking for amnesty. Ampla. Geral. Irrestrita. We were asking for amnesty. Recíproca. We were discussing this three hundred or four hundred of us at the meeting. Many students and I was there because I had been in the South during that time, it was before the amnesty before I came home to you Sônia. And there was one man who made a presentation. He was so anxious to speak in front of us you could see it in his hands. He had to wait several hours because the meeting was all day and for hours he was there he was so anxious to speak in front of us. He had dark skin. He was older, he was shaking in his hands as he waited to speak. He wore a brown suit, a white shirt although no one else was wearing smart clothes. And then he said to us, I am from the movement of people in prison. Not political prisoners. Common prisoners. They torture us there too, they beat us, they abuse us, they starve us, they make us work, they kill us in there too. There are thousands of us. I speak on behalf of the common prisoners to ask that we are included also in the amnesty. That was what he said. That was what he asked of us. And Sônia we voted no. We voted no because common prisoners were in prison for common reasons, not political reasons, and this was a political amnesty, that would complicate things and we wanted to keep things simple because we were this close to democracy and oh his hands were shaking when he spoke
Sônia there are things I regret
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Maria and Ana go to the meeting where Edivânia who used to be a union leader speaks about conditions at the iron ore mine where they work and then they go to another meeting about conditions at the factory that processes the iron where Jorge works. They print pamphlets for the meetings on a mimeograph at night in the local school which Diana who is a teacher gives them access to. The pamphlet has a list of the names of the workers who have died at the factory and the names of the workers who have died in the mine. It is also true that wages have not increased in six years while profit and productivity have doubled though they do not write this. It is also true that there are military police on the factory floor and even a room where they take people. They do not write this either. Maria knows how to work a mimeograph. Maria and Ana sit in the school together at night. They hope there are no boots outside, no knock on the door. The mimeograph makes this sound: plec plec plec. They hold a meeting in the room of their house. Edivânia who used to be a union leader is speaking. Dust in the air. Sweat on their foreheads. When the police come the first time Maria and Ana say they do not know what the police are talking about. It was a birthday party, see here are the leftover brigadeiros, would you like one senhor? When the police come the second time, they are gone and so is Edivânia and so is the blue beetle car.
A communist who arrived recently to the forest says to Clitemnestra killer of kings –
The truth is that everyone is gone. All of our comrades are in prison or exile or dead. When I joined the revolution there were a hundred of us in a room and now there are ten. The new leader is a twenty-three-year-old boy who cannot grow a moustache. Young, like you. No one else is left. Even before Marighella died. The urban guerrilla is tired. In prison or the torturer’s basement. In the cities they are disarming. The unions are dead. The fight is here. Without the support of the masses there will never be liberation or a liberated zone. And the fight of Brazil has always been the fight of the masses against the powerful, in Canudos, in Contestado, of the slaves against slave masters to create quilombos, in Canudos, in Contestado
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Clitemnestra killer of kings I must tell you now why I am running. Something happened to me, it was two months before we met. For years I had been in the same working cell in Recife. With my friend Paulinho, he was also younger than me. We were working together since the beginning. Sixty-four to sixty-nine. When we started we thought that it might all be over soon and by the end we thought these are the worst years the heaviest years, years like hands and feet of lead. I had just finished studying at the university, I was studying history but by that time I did not care about the diploma. Even before the coup I did not care about the diploma; I was a communist, a revolutionary, I thought my father was a liberal for believing that elections could change anything, I believed that the duty of every good revolutionary was to make revolution. The library was for revolution and revolutionary knowledge. The classroom was for revolutionary teaching! The campus was for revolutionary organising! I was not a big reader but my mother had said to me, Read Marx, read José Martí, Rosa Luxembourg, and so I did read, because it was a revolutionary thing, do you understand? It must have happened to you when you were recruited – you had to read the books. So I read the books. I had been reading them already, books from all over, books from Europe, novels from Russia. [...]
ahhhhh
[...] My brothers did not dream of leaving and neither did my father although maybe my mother did. We used to go to meetings in the small town and everybody knew I was the policeman’s daughter with the policemen brothers and so I had to be twice as militant twice as always ready to show them that I was a revolutionary. So I read all the books. I said train me, give me a gun, I’ll do anything. I was afraid of nothing but also I was always afraid of my father and my brothers and sometimes I could not sleep in the nights (I still do not sleep always in the nights). When I left I wrote my family a letter saying forget my name, do not look for me, I have no regrets, and this is the life that I have chosen because I believe that the people should own the fruits of their labour, that the factory worker should not toil for the capitalist to profit, that the Brazilian gold and iron and coffee and sugar and wood from the forest and oil must not be extracted for the profit of the North American imperialists and the landowners in their pockets when there are children without shoes without food or art or books, I believe that no one should be poor, I believe that no one should be unfree or unloved or shackled, I believe you know I believe in the armed struggle. If they are armed then are we to lie on the floor? Like kittens. Let ourselves be shot in the face. [...]
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Remember? You know what happens next. You’ve heard the story. In September 1974, Laura the famous revolutionary the infamous eldest daughter of the exiled governor of Pernambuco State, was taken into police custody to a building in the Zona Sul de São Paulo where she was tortured until she could not speak. The revolutionary student with the small moustache was disappeared by the military police and they never found his body despite the solidarity campaigns in London and in Berlin. There would be no more strikes or meetings and the union leaders were killed in so-called suicides or arrested and tortured or like Edivânia they were put on blacklists so that they had to move from state to state to find work taking new names everywhere they went not underground but alone so that they would not go hungry. And the communists in the forest were killed by government soldiers. The commander told them to fight. Every single one but the six who were imprisoned and the two who escaped 1000 kilometres through the forest. The commander with the grandsons in Salvador was killed and his son was killed. The commander who was 2m tall and had studied in Prague and whose parents had been born enslaved was killed and his body was hung from a helicopter and flown over the forest. [...]
Those were the darkest years, heavy like lead. The movement disarmed. The demands changed; amnesty, elections, democracy. And five years later, in 1979, the amnesty came, and the torturers were forgiven and all the people who had been communists were forgiven. And Laura the famous revolutionary went home, back to Recife, back to Sônia and Olga and Lúcia and Lamis and Lygia and the rest of her life. And she did not know if Clitemnestra killer of kings had been killed or disappeared or if she was alive. And she did not know how to find her because she did not know her real name. And it was a grief the size of the earth, as big as a life.
[...] By leafing through these magazines together we shared a mood of sweet latency, imagining the films we had in store, like provincials dreaming of life in the capital. Cinema was a wave originating elsewhere, which we waited to break over us. The waiting had something to do with the nature of adolescence itself; it also reflected the resurgence of European films at the time.
To be young and in love with films in the early 1960s was to participate in what felt like an international youth movement. We in New York were following and, in a sense, mimicking the cafe arguments in Paris, London and Rome, whee the cinema had moved, for a brief historical movement, to the center of intellectual discourse, in the twilight of existentialism and before the onslaught of structuralism.
He said, You know, I’m 67 years old and I’ve never stuck my pecker in a woman’s mouth. My wife wouldn’t let me. Not that I didn’t try. Jesus, I tried. You know something else? We haven’t had sex in eight years. I doubt we’ll ever have sex again. I envy you, buddy. You’ve got all the good stuff ahead of you.
[...]
I felt bad for the old man. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone over the age of about 40 still felt sexual desire. Trying to picture him acting on it made me think of some freak carnival act.
lol
When I eventually made it there a few years later, Carbone was exactly as advertised: an exercise in pure kitsch, a kind of theater restaurant offering the food, decor, and waiterly patter of an Italian American dining hall of the 1960s, only at many times the price and with none of the neighborly bonhomie. The restaurant existed as a riff on the Cockaignian theme of abundance: a long, leather-bound menu, carts carrying cocktails and condiments, shrimp and lobster and steak done “as you like it.” But it was all for show; transformed into culinary cabaret, these “moves” illustrated only the chasm between a true society of abundance and the reality of an American economy tailored to the whims of the rich. “What can I get for youse?” the waiter asked after my dining companion and I were seated, and for the two rote and underwhelming hours that followed it remained difficult to detect the line between reality and simulacrum. Was this guy really a crotchety Italian American wiseass, or just playing one? There was something joyless and cynical about Carbone’s evocation of the American restaurant’s—and by extension, America’s—bountiful history. Here stood a restaurant with the self-confidence to treat its patrons like idiots. Here was all the richness of the Land of Cockaigne, but only for those who could afford it. Here was America as a land of plenty, whose best and most generous days were firmly in the past.
Government officials come to the narrator’s workplace to warn his students of various sects operating contrary to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the most dangerous of which is the mysterious Picketists, whose secret sign is an extended hand with an insect in its palm. Through Caty, one of his fellow teachers and a Picketist convert, he learns of their nighttime meetings, where they dress in black and march on local hospitals, cemeteries, and morgues, carrying signs reading Down with Aging!, Down with Cancer, No to Eternal Disappearance! It is an ongoing, recurrent, futile protest against the realization that:
you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person you see coming out of the factory gates in a Méliès film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead.
jesus