David Arioch – Jornalismo Cultural

O anúncio foi feito por dois cães mestiços (Pintura: Jonelle Summerfield)

Uma senhora que morava na minha rua morreu. O anúncio foi feito por dois cães mestiços que tentavam invadir a casa. Eles uivaram e deixaram marcas de garras na porta da cozinha. Em poucos minutos, esculpiram um emaranhado de riscos, sincretismo de tristeza e desespero. Sentiram sua ausência antes de testemunhá-la morta, caída na cozinha, vítima de AVC.

Juntos, cavaram um buraco no quintal, na ingênua tentativa de chegar até ela. Não se deixaram abater. Só abandonaram o buraco quando ouviram alguém abrindo o portão. Era o filho. “Mãe…mãe…cheguei!” Lorenzo e Matino se aproximaram do rapaz. Com os focinhos cheios de terra, latiram simultaneamente.

Contribuição

Este é um blog independente, caso queira contribuir com o meu trabalho, você pode fazer uma doação clicando no botão doar:

He made unusual noises, contorting his mouth, frowning and craning his neck

He ran two kilometers on foot without knowing that they’d never let him go (Photo: Cultural Foundation of Paranavaí)

In 1949, on a cold and especially dark morning, Nicanor woke up scared and struggling to move. He felt the rust smell of his own dried blood that covered part of his cheekbones and chin. The nauseating odor numbed him, and made him weep to the point of the thick parched blood turned into balls that crashed against the dirt floor. In sandy soil, they were joining and forming a larger and opaque sphere as a ground ball, like children shape to throw in friends and neighbors.

Hoarse, feverish and with only one feebly eye open, the boy had no strength to articulate a word without stammering and feeling a tremor that began on his heels and ended at his neck. When he shook his legs in vain, he felt his blackened fingers, thick-skinned, sprung out of the white sandals tatters. Unintentionally, he touched a fetid paste that was formed from his feces, urine and blood. He suffered so much in recent days that he unlearned to cry.

He made unusual noises, contorting his mouth, frowning and craning his neck. With the strength that remained, he strove, trying to see something by an elongated spacious crack. Nicanor lusted after a little sunshine, but the only occasional visitor was a random blast of glacial and searing wind that touched his skin with the delicacy of the blade knife.

Sometimes, he shook his head and gazed at the ceiling, watching the holes where rainwater invaded the old ranch which was previously used for coffee storage. After all, he saw some beauty in chance and he was grateful because of it. If it were not for the invasion of nature, he would complete 23 days without feeling the water anointing his lips. Each drop was sucked with the satisfaction of who drank water from a robust and overflowing mug.

However, his mood oscillated with the hours. In early night without rain, only the song of the cicadas and the treble shrieks of owls soothed him. The silence scared Nicanor because it brought the indescribable void of absence and the mourning of that was not died. Yes, it was less frightening, much less than the synchronous sound of boots approaching the old dark cottage. With his ears made anomalous by despair, Nicanor recognized by far the rinkle of a machete in friction with the parabellum shaking on a loose holster.

At such times, his eyes moistened sharply, focusing on oxytone pain on the edges, making boiling tears. The palate was so inflamed that the boy could not keep his mouth shut, like the door where four men of abyssal eyes entered once a day smiling. Sardonic, they always came by surprise. They clapped their hands and said the same words: “Hello! Is there anyone there? We are coming and we are entering, my fella.” They closed the door with an ax handle and witnessed the Nicanor agony as if they were watching a festive show.

Making a startling effort to prevent urinary incontinence, the boy invariably recognized the defeat. He was embarrassed and feeling worse than a maggot. Nicanor defecated, dirtying his legs and feet even more from rubbing on the ground and touching the soil with yellowed nails. The mockery from torturers followed interleaved quince rod blows on the inner portion of purplish thighs. When Nicanor closed his eyes and leaned his chin on his chest, one of the executioners swung the chain that bound his crossed and bloodied wrists. He woke up scared, with some faltered and narrowed muscles, especially the sphincter.

He forgot even the shabby clothes he wore for more than a month, enough time to stick onto his body as a second skin. He wished death upon hearing the crackling sound of a piece of wood on ember. He only calmed down when he saw the ominous stocky bald man, with dark teeth, get away from him carrying an orange bat. While Nicanor perished a little more, the four executioners ate corn bread with butter, and also drank a mate so hot that steam wet the flagellated hands of the boy. After the break, the four stood up, withdrew their horsewhips attached to the belt of their trousers. Then, they started the scourge that lasted more than an hour.

In a reflection of effort so dedicated that he felt something was pressing inside his skull, Nicanor remembered that a month before he explained to the boss, someone for whom he worked since 1944 on a farm, that he would change service. The boy would open his own business in the city. The man then agreed and suggested that the boy go to a ranch in the woods in the late afternoon to do the reckoning. Easygoing, he ran two kilometers on foot without knowing that they’d never let him go. Overcome by uncontrollable grief, he stammered and begged God to take him away. Then beseeched which allowed him to smell the perfume of wet grass.

At the end of the night, Nicanor had a seizure and fainted. Prostrate, with a weak pulse and beginning his end, he was dragged, like a piece of carrion, by two gunmen outside the ranch. They threw his body in the vicinity of a stream and ran, fearing for their lives, reminiscing about the old folk legend of Tabarel From Candlesticks, a mystic figure known to charge double the deaths on a fog day.

The next morning, the young man woke rubbing his hands on his body. It was hard to believe that he was still alive and that some of the injuries disappeared, as well as his severe pain. Perplexed, Nicanor looked around and put his hands on his face, free of dried up blood. He rolled over and cried like a child rediscovering the world, after intensely aspiring the scent of mellowy dewy grass that wrapped his body in a romanesque morning.

Achei melhor começar pelo aparelho de gêmeos (Foto: Reprodução)

Aconteceu um fato inusitado na academia quando eu estava terminando o treino. Enquanto eu desmontava o leg press, notei um senhor me olhando. Acredito que ele mirava especificamente meu rosto. Talvez a minha barba. Simplesmente fingi que não percebi. Tirei uma grande quantidade de anilhas do leg press e decidi treinar panturrilhas.

Achei melhor começar pelo aparelho de gêmeos. Como a última pessoa a usá-lo foi justamente aquele senhor, atravessei até o outro lado da academia, onde ele fazia abdominais num canto, para perguntar se já tinha terminado de usar o tal aparelho, também chamado carinhosamente de “burrinho sentado”.

Depois de uma série de abdominais, o homem continuou deitado, com as mãos na testa e mirando o teto. Então me aproximei e perguntei: “O senhor terminou de usar o aparelho para panturrilha?” Acho que a minha presença era tudo que ele não esperava naquele momento. Levou um susto tão grande que seu corpo chegou a ficar suspenso no ar por um segundo, não sei ao certo. Só lembro da resposta e das balançadas de cabeça: “Terminei sim! Sim! Terminei sim!” Agradeci e caminhei em direção ao “burrinho sentado”.

Vaquejada não pode ser considerada esporte (Junot Lacet Filho – Jornal da Paraíba)

A Rede Globo de Televisão ontem abordando a controvérsia envolvendo a vaquejada. Apelando às formas mais baratas de sentimentalismo, apresentou uma “reportagem” com uma família que ao longo de cinco gerações está envolvida com a vaquejada. E o mais curioso, se referindo a isso várias vezes como “esporte”. Desde quando a vaquejada tem o aval da vaca?

Mostraram inclusive pecuaristas falando sobre como os animais são bem tratados nesse “esporte” que consiste em puxar o rabo da vaca, submetendo o animal a traumas regulares. A estupidez humana me surpreende um pouco mais a cada dia. Apareceu inclusive um sujeito simulando uma expressão chorosa e ridícula. A apelação não tem limites.

Gave me the impression that they wanted to break through the roof and hit the skies

I stopped bothering them until the evening I met the tale “Jack and the Beanstalk”, by the english writer Benjamin Tabart (Art: Lindsey Bell)

One day, when I was six years old, me and my brother Douglas were at home, in the living room, flanked by colossal ornamental tassels of my mother. They were stained and so beautiful that we were around them, watching and touching: “It looks like hair corn, but much more colorful!”, I said.

The way they struggled to touch the ceiling, when the breeze invaded the living room, gave me the impression that they wanted to break through the roof and hit the skies. Their slender profiled shapes invited our tiny hands to tickle each other with their fringes. In a short time, and redder than one of the tassels, we rolled on the floor laughing, scratching our heads, faces and arms. The nudges on my ears intensified the guffaws.

The Shambles were so big that the parquet floor, freshly polished by my mother, vibrated and earned fingerprints and marks of elbows and foot soles. The truth is that the tassels served us up to play hide and seek. They suffered in our presence, and sometimes I suspected that they fluttered more by fear than by fortuitous incidence of light air.

“Here come these crazy little boys,” perhaps they thought, twitching timidly. It looked like they cowered with our arrival, as a girl committed to not be noticed. Often, when I came home from school, I threw my backpack on the bed and went to the living room. I ran around the tassels, imitating an indian warrior apprentice. Occasionally, I stuck my head between them, observing the absence of lamp’s light. I closed my eyes and I felt a chimeric and auspicious perfume.

I imagined a raging river, where I could flow like its waters, if I threw myself without fear. With the coloring pens, I made some scratches on my face. I howled with a fake voice and continued to bother the tassels until it was time to go to school. One day, I dragged the tassel to change its position and I felt a force pushing me almost to exhaustion. While people say that the tassels had no life, I was surprised to see a little water on the parquet floor, around and below the tassels.

I thought the tassels had been crying for me and I stopped bothering them until the evening I met the tale “Jack and the Beanstalk”, by the english writer Benjamin Tabart. In the evening, at home, I lay down on the bunk with swollen eyes. I digressed by the story told by teacher Agnes, and considered: “If they have no life, why do they look bigger? Strange… very strange… ”

The next day, my doubts increased exponentially when I saw that they were bigger than ever. I told my brother Douglas what happened and he also came to confirm my suspicion. The tassels were pretending they were a beanstalk.

A few minutes before lunch, came the certainty that something needed to be done. There were beans around the tassels. We smiled, we scratch our hands and looked at each other, mechanically moving the head up and down in agreement. “You mean, you can not pretend anymore? Uh-huh …”, I concluded.

The next day, while my mother and my uncle talked on the porch, my brother and I went to the living room. Before that we looked at the surroundings to make sure we would not be surprised by anyone. Douglas took out a lighter and I took another. Face to face, we nodded our heads, and lit the two – touching the tassels that burned like silent giant squib, who could not whistle.

Soon they became an incandescent nothing. The fire went up so fast that I fell back, feeling my body warm and my vision slightly blurred. Tilting my head back, I saw the ceiling glowing. The fire, alive as we had never seen, earned transfigured forms until the moment that Uncle Lu, with the help of my mother, came to prevent it from spreading.

We watched everything in our inertia. The rapid intervention did not prevent the liner from staying black. And so we earned our own mourner sky without moon or stars, just a static darkness that overshadowed the fortuitous glimmer trying to illuminate the tassels remained.

We were grounded for a long time. Nevertheless, we felt like heroes, believing that we avoided the giant people eater to ever come down the beanstalk transformed into tassels. “It would not be long until he comes. We did well”, we agreed. After a beating belt and a week without going out to play, my mother discovered the reason why we put fire in tassels.

On the day of revelation, I learned that before the fire, the vase of the tassels was replaced by another equal, but with shallow background, giving the impression that they were larger. And the water around the tassels was poured in the morning when my mother went to our bedroom with a bucket of water to clean the floor.

“The grain fell to the ground as I ran around the room with an open package of beans to answer the phone”, she told us. We listened in silence, we undersood and we acknowledged our guilt. Back to the bedroom, we smiled at each other. I threw a grain of raw beans at my brother and he did the same. It was not necessary to articulate words. “True innocence is ashamed of nothing”, said Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Presente que recebi de uma aluna na saída

Hoje, a convite da professora Rosana De Carvalho Martineli Dos Santos e da pedagoga Laiz Leite Ribeiro, passei a manhã no Colégio Estadual Flauzina Dias Viegas, falando sobre algumas histórias de Paranavaí que vão integrar o meu livro “Areia Branca”.

Também me perguntaram sobre os meus contos veganos e conversamos a respeito da minha relação de amor e respeito em relação os animais, iniciada na infância. Estive em três turmas diferentes – de 6ª e 7ª série.

Assim que deixei a última turma, por volta das 11h20, uma garotinha, com a mais tenra expressão de alegria, correu em minha direção na saída da sala e me entregou o presente que aparece na foto. Dei-lhe um abraço e ela voltou para a sala sorrindo. Simplicidade e doçura foram as palavras que me vieram à mente.

How could it be gloomy if there are plants growing around the graves?

I didn’t consider a graveyard as a dark place. Quite the opposite (Photo: Copy)

In my childhood, I liked to go to the cemetery. I didn’t go there very often, but the experience quite pleased me, because it gave me the impression that I was entering another world, where the living meets the dead. I didn’t consider a graveyard as a dark place. Quite the opposite. How could it be gloomy if there are plants growing around the graves? If dogs and cats frequent the place?

It wasn’t hard to understand why. The calm, the preeminent silence on most days, allowed the most attentive beings hear the sounds of the earth, besides harmony and dissonance of the species in their insightful relationships with nature. I still remember a couple of chalk-browed mockingbirds singing a short distance from the grave of my great-grandmother, a few steps from the necropolis entrance.

The soft chirping accompanied the solemn breeze that came as a breath. It protruded from the top of a tree, where cotton, grass and dry twigs were a nest-shaped basket. “Hmm … one will be born”, I thought. Suddenly, a thrush leaned next to the white wall, renovated with lime, and started scratching the ground in search of food. He watched me without worry and continued scratching the soil, perhaps confident in his shrewdness, as he was at home, where the stranger was me.

I turned away and walked to the left to read the inscriptions and epitaphs written extemporaneously in concrete or engraved on bronze plates. “Why are the graves so different? They couldn’t be equals?”, I asked my parents. They explained that the greatest normally belong to the rich. Some people believe that the bigger the grave, the higher the level of importance of the deceased. Based on this pharaonic belief, it is assumed that even strangers will be attracted by the mausoleums. The impressiveness always helped them stand out among the rest, as a flourish that naively romanticize the inevitable fate of all beings.

In my reflections, tombs, however different they were, reminded me of product packaging or gift packages. I mean, no matter how sumptuous the grave was, the truth is that they are regarded with the same matter. Some mausoleums I saw as strongholds created to protect or ensure the fragile human transience. Doors, windows and large rings made me suspect that perhaps the family believed in the possibility of a return of the deceased loved one. “Do they think that one day the dead will get up and walk out the door?”, I asked.

I also learned that sometimes a homeric tomb may reveal a material form of affection, or delayed compensation to the dead for some misunderstanding or meager participation in your life. I heard stories of people moved by flagellant remorse spent small fortunes in the construction of tombs. Some works cost more expensive than a house. The materials were brought from other parts of Brazil and other countries, thus ensuring the catacomb a sui generis privilege.

“Did you know that Orlando’s family hired a mannerist artist to create the project of the grave?” I heard this one morning. Perhaps there was an intrinsic relationship with the memorial or human absurdity before the finitude, an exercise in symbolic perpetuation. “Let’s create something so that he is never forgotten. For centuries after his death he is still remembered. Even though none of us live long, others, even strangers, will be here to see him”, someone thinks, refusing to believe that the death of our always changes something within us, but the world will continue following his natural course, confirming our smallness, regardless of our pain.

Looking around, and seeing both assortment of colors, types, sizes and decorations, I remembered a lesson from teacher Babeto. He showed us photos of a graveyard in France, where death reaffirms the indistinctness of humans. On the green lawn was just white crosses in concrete. Everything seemed so uniform, harmonious, fair and consistent. After all, there is nothing to be proved when life fades, as we are what we do in life.

Perhaps some are too passionate to accept that their loved ones were also overcome by passing, like so many others. So, I don’t doubt that for some, the grave is now seen as an address, where the end is to be postponed until the time that the last brick or marble was wrapping the coffin.

Anyway, I never felt as intrigued by mausoleums, like how I felt for old graves, helpless, relegated to ostracism – which rarely receive visits from family and friends of the deceased. Curious and inquisitive, I found vaults abandoned for decades, built by families that no longer exist, with stories and surnames lost in time – obsolete and extinct as rare specimens. Some graves have vanished because they were not perpetual, mostly of peasants or humble people.

In the 1990s, for example, I visited the grave of two little girls that were ten years old, childhood friends of my mother. On a rainy day in the 1960s, they were struck by lightning while they washed dishes in the back of the house. They died in agony on a dirt floor that darkened the light hair that covered their faces.

The tragedy touched many ranchers who walked on foot for long distances to pray for the children, helpless, in the most allegorical of weaknesses, surrounded by coffee plantations that soon would cease to bloom and bear fruit. Mistress Mary visited her daughter and niece until the day that no perpetual tomb was destroyed to make way for another deceased child, who did not run the risk of having his remains relocated because they paid enough for that privilege. I received that news three years ago, after searching the vault in vain.

I have memories of how small the two tombs were. No bronze plates, photos, names or any information. Over time, and without fanfare, they continued to exist for a few to the full and figured fading material. “They were good girls. But the cycle of them in this place is over. Maybe it was better that way. The mother suffered too much”, said an old lady with a plaintive smile.

I walked to another grave, watching this old lady who introduced herself as Tania. Her glittering and vernal eyes contrasted with her skin and slender face pied by the action of the time. She had a sweet voice, from who accepts what life offers, and no matter how small the gift, she still grateful. Tania visited her husband once a month since 1957, which is when he died as a result of malaria.

He worked building roads in my town, until one day he became ill and could not get up anymore. He did not receive the last two months of work. “I went to the boss’s house to get the unpaid wages. Hence the man shouted: ‘I have nothing for you, woman! My business was with your husband. Get out of here!’ I was not angry because of it. I just left”, she told me. Years later, Tania learned that the man was shot to death because he sold a farm with two houses, and he tried to bring down one of those to resell the wood.

After her husband’s death, Tania never had another relationship with men. She still wears on her finger the wedding ring purchased in 1951. When I asked if she did not feel very alone, Tania argued that loneliness does not live in a heart in communion with the life. Also, I questioned why she kept visiting her husband after so long.

While she cleaned the grave with a piece of flannel, one of the simple ones of the graveyard, dedusting as if making caresses, she watched me with a candid smile and replied: “The human being who is not faithful to his promises can not be true to yourself. So how I do every month, I am here fulfilling my promise, not out of obligation, but because it invigorates my heart. Life is everywhere, in the earth entrails and in the uncertainties of the sky, and the cemetery is no different. I also see here the east, as well as the west. “

Parece que a fome é capaz de deixar as pessoas um pouco mais agressivas. Por volta das 11h50, trafegando pela Avenida Parigot de Souza, vi logo mais a frente um senhor com a porta do carro aberta, então reduzi a velocidade até dar tempo dele fechá-la. Um motorista abespinhado passou do meu lado em alta velocidade, quase rasurando a lataria do meu carro. Sentindo-se o dono da razão, seguiu buzinando, como se eu tivesse feito algo de errado. Não é um relato incomum. É rotina numa cidade fleumática de motoristas famintos.

Escapei da morte duas vezes hoje. Fui para a casa do meu irmão em Cianorte hoje de manhã, conhecer a minha terceira sobrinha que nasceu esta semana. No caminho, perto de Rondon, uma caminhonete ultrapassou em local proibido e veio em minha direção. Só consegui evitar o choque porque joguei meu carro fora da pista, num descampado. E depois disso, o motorista seguiu seu caminho, sem se importar com o acidente que poderia ter custado a morte de várias pessoas.

Há pouco, na volta para casa, perto de Paraíso do Norte, eu dirigia tranquilamente, quando de repente um cachorro grande e preto invadiu a pista. Desviei e o carro começou a ziguezaguear pelo asfalto. Não consegui deixar de pensar no pior. No mínimo, eu me chocaria contra uma árvore ou capotaria em direção ao acostamento.

Photo: Copy

Cherubim heard gunshots followed by meowing. Outside, on the sandy dirt road, Ranulph did not move, and was sprawled over a portion of sibipiruna’s fine sheets. His mouth was still hanging open, exposing the pain of death not even spared the most innocent beings.

The boy tried to stop crying because he was afraid to look too sentimental. Cherubim made so much effort that the hot tears, that threatened to drain the corners of the eyes, disappeared without gaining the principle of freedom.

Angry, Cherubim noted Matias on the mango tree, smiling and aiming the shotgun in his direction. “Do you want too? I give you, muggle!”, warned the boy. Cherubim said nothing. Only scratched his head, regardless of the dusty cloud that was forming around his head like orange mist.

Keeping his back in front of the killer, the boy crouched and made caresses on the cat’s belly. The kitten no longer felt Cherubim’s hands on his clear fur. Where there was a pair of blue eyes, it remained a small shapeless mass. Two bashful tears fell, moistening the cat’s dry mouth. It was too late.

The hours passed away, and the nature buried Ranulph, covering his body with sandy soil, gradually transported from the forest by south wind. “Cherubim! Take this animal here. It will start to stink”, they said. He just nodded his head in agreement, without even moving his legs that rested on the curb.

When the earth, dragged by gale, invaded the cat’s mouth, the boy approached and cleaned it using a washcloth moistened with water. In the late afternoon, he tried to bury Ranulph in his mother’s garden. He was reprimanded as he was digging the earth with his grandfather’s trowel. “Are you mad, boy?! This is no place to bury an animal!”, complained his grandfather.

The old man picked up the dead cat by the back skin and put him into a thick dark bag. It looked like a cadaver pouch in PVC. He hung the bag on the handlebars of the bike, and rode to a vacant lot used as a garbage dump in the nearest neighborhood. He returned without a word, walked into the kitchen, took a bitter sip of coffee and laid down on the hammock.

Cherubim was watching the old man, wondering what he did to Ranulph. Without the courage to ask, he recalled a law imposed in Paraná village in the 1970s, when three large dogs killed two babies. “No one can come here with animals. If someone kills an animal, nobody can cry or bury him, or they will have to deal with me”, said Mandino Counselor, whom the population resorted to whenever there was a problem in the neighborhood.

Under a papaya tree, Cherubim watched his grandfather sleep on the hammock. He cried and shouted with his hands in his mouth. The boy also lashed his own legs and back with the papaya branches. No one listened. The welts multiplied. He did not care. He lay on the ground and felt a bitter taste in his mouth, a mixture of dirt and blood.

He woke up at down, lying on his old mattress, wrapped in a dirty white sheet and full of holes. Through the orifice in the roof, the sun illuminated a dog food packet flanked by a water bowl. Cherubim got up and ran to the shack entrance, where he lived with his mother and his grandfather. The hovel threatened to fall for years, but resisted.

He sat on the floor and used a piece of stick to draw Ranulph. After he was finished, he dozed a little, with his back propped up on a wooden fence with barbed wire. In his dream, he heard a purr that prickled him. He opened his eyes and under his left hand, Ranulph was marking his territory again, rubbing his dirt and soft fur on him.

The smell of garbage went unnoticed, not the hunger meowing. Crying, Cherubim held the blind and overwrought cat in his arms. He took him into the house, and there they stayed the rest of the day. The Ranulph and Cherubim story changed Paraná Village in the late 1990s: “Who does not see love in an animal, does not see love itself,” said Mandino’s son.