A Cup of Rage (6 page)

raises another house in which to beget children, and his
children more children, and this was nature's spontaneous course –
procreation and providing for the family through work (‘love is the only meaning
in life'), and from that I passed straight to the old photo, mother and father
sitting down, she's resting her hands in her lap and has a pious look in her eyes,
one foot crossed behind the other, he looks solemn, his chest thrust out, a kernel of
silver holds his collar closed without a tie, and then there's his angular face,
befitting a tough farmhand, his thick moustache, his iron gaze, and the small crowd of
their children standing around them, mineral, well-behaved, the odd mouth twisted in a
rictus, an unsuccessful attempt to meet the photographer's frivolous demand, and
there I lingered among the foundations and the supports and the unshakeable beams of our
greenhouse, we had short legs back then, but under that roof every step we took was
safe, the soft hand that guided us seemed always to be lucid, and without a doubt there
was something gratifying about the solidity of the chain, the joined hands, the simply
laid table, the washed clothes, the measured words, the cut nails, everything within its
limits, everything occurring in a circle of light, in strict opposition – no
patches of half-light – to the dark place of sins, yes-yes, no-no, the stain of
imprecision was of the devil, it was in childhood (in mine), no doubt about it, that the
world of ideas was found, complete, perfect, undebatable ideas, which I now – in
my turmoil – barely glimpsed in memory (even though the reverse side of each one
was inscribed with ‘guilt improves man, guilt is one of the world's driving
forces'), while at the same time I believed piously that words – impregnated
with values – each of them carried, yes, in its core, an original sin (just as a
passion is always concealed behind every gesture), it occurred to me that not even the
tub of the Pacific would have enough water to wash (and calm) such vocabulary, and
there, empty-handed in the middle
of that devastation, with nothing to
lean on, not even a cliché, I only know that I suddenly let myself drop like a
load, I literally ended up prostrate there in the courtyard, my head buried in my hands,
my eyes an itching swarm of ants, shaking all over from a terrible explosion of sobbing
(hoarse moans pulled from deep inside), until my arms were lifted by heavy
peasant's hands, Dona Mariana on the one side and Antônio on the other, he
clumsy and silent, she casually at ease in spite of her bulk, straight away trying to
distract me with what she was saying, cajoling me gently that I couldn't not pass
by the hutches before ‘running off to São Paulo', saying she was
‘perplexed' with Quitéria's young, ‘the girl had thirteen
in her first litter, thirteen! who'd have thought?', and reminding me that
‘Pituca sired them, that naughty old rabbit, still at it at his age',
‘perplexed!' repeated Dona Mariana in her lullaby, only altering her tone to
give a half-whispered scolding to her husband, who wasn't pulling his weight, the
two of them trying to lift me off the ground as if they were lifting a boy.

And when I arrived at his house, at kilometre 27 on the road
from town, I was surprised the gate was still open, since the late afternoon had almost
turned to night, whose atmosphere, I noticed getting out of the car, had gathered early
in the bushes, the black, erect gravitas of the cypresses impressing me a little, and
there at the foot of the stairs I also noticed that the door to the conservatory was
wide open, which could be construed as another sign, redundant and almost too obvious in
fact, that he was waiting for me, although the device was more likely there to remind me
that I, even if late, would always go and see him, that I was unable to dispense with
the rewards a visit would bring, and indeed I went pensively up to the landing, and
stopped there for just a moment before going into the conservatory, where I saw myself
watched by Bingo, an angry mongrel who fitted his role as the monastery dog perfectly,
he was sitting rigidly immobile on a cushioned chair, the blade of his eyes slicing
through the dull hour, but I ignored him, not only because I was used to him, but also
because I'd spied the piece of paper on the table, on which I could read when I
got closer, without picking it up, or even bending over, ‘I'm in the
bedroom', typical of his messages – brief, a calculation stripped down to
the bone, and even written in a forged schoolboy's scrawl – but then I
immediately forgot the simulated casualness of the message and entered the living room,
unhurriedly taking stock of what
he'd left scattered across the
floor, the two cushions that a little earlier would have served as his pillow, the
wrought-iron lamp beside them, the thermos flask on the stool, an ashtray within
arm's reach, and another reference work splayed open on the floor, with its spine
facing upwards and clearly stating the contents of the tome, not to forget his beaten-up
sandals of raw leather, carelessly discarded like those of a child, shards isolated from
each other which I was reluctantly piecing together into a mosaic as I stood there for a
moment, weighing the density of the quiet house, ‘my cell', according to the
curt comment he had made one day, mixing in this stoicism both monastic and worldly
things, until I moved through these fragments to the other side of the room and now I
only had to cross the hall to reach his bedroom, which floated lazily in the calm light
of a candle: lying on his side with his head almost touching his tucked-up knees, he
slept, and it wasn't the first time that he had faked sleeping like a little boy,
and nor would it be the first time that I would attend to his whims, because a virulent,
vertiginous tenderness took hold of me, so sudden and unexpected that I could barely
contain the impulse to open myself completely and prematurely to welcome back that
enormous foetus.

1
.
An allusion to a Fernando Pessoa poem, well known in the
Portuguese-speaking world and much translated into English. In Richard Zenith's
translation
Autopsychography
(Penguin Classics), the referenced stanza
reads:

2
.
The section from ‘let cities fall' to ‘dying
in the distance' quotes a poem Fernando Pessoa wrote as Ricardo Reis, an ode about
chess players whose first-line title in Portuguese is ‘
Ouvi contar que
outrora, quando a Pérsia
'. The narrator of
A Cup of Rage
starts quoting in the seventh stanza of the poem, then jumps back to the start and end
of the fifth stanza for the lines from ‘when the ivory king's in
danger' to ‘dying in the distance'.

In Nassar's Portuguese, the narrator quotes the poem
word for word, except for the lack of initial capitals and line breaks, until he says
‘
nada pesa
' (it doesn't at all weigh on you) instead of
the poem's ‘
pouca pesa
' (it hardly weighs on you), perhaps a
natural alteration for a narrator who has none of Pessoa's understatement.

3
.
Brazilian football crowds shout ‘
bicha
',
i.e. ‘queer', at referees they don't like.

Let the conversation begin …

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First published as
Um Copo de Cólera
in
1978
First published in this translation by Penguin Classics 2015

Text copyright © Raduan Nassar, 1978
Translation
copyright © Stefan Tobler, 2015

The moral rights of the author and translator have been
asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-39681-1