Ch - Ch - Ch - Changes!

Galera, estou fazendo uma alteração drástica e colocando restrições para acesso ao meu blog pessoal. Queria pedir a todos que ainda estiverem interessados em acessar a página que me mandem seus endereços de e-mail por mensagem privada no Facebook ou no meu e-mail para que eu possa liberar o acesso. 

Grato pela compreensão

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Guys, I`m making a radical change and setting restrictions on the access to my personal blog. I`d like to ask anyone who is still interested in accessing the page to send me their e-mail addresses by private message on Facebook or on my e-mail so that I can grant you access to it. 

Thank you for your understanding

"I curse the day you were born"

A cena ontem não foi muito bem essa. Mas essa não me saia da cabeça. Porque embora Lexy não fosse normalmente ligada à Carrie Bradshaw e nem eu ao Mr. Big, na minha cabeça a Luciana sempre havia sido de uma forma ou outra a pequena Charlotte.  Não, a cena tinha sido bem diferente. E me surpreendeu, porque embora no começo ela de fato quisesse amaldiçoar o dia em que eu nasci, ela preferiu lidar com as coisas de uma forma mais adulta. Depois de um almoço com Lexy, encontrou-me em sua casa, conversando com seu namorado, e sentou-se calmamente para ouvir o outro lado da história.  No final das contas, aconselhou que eu e Lexy não nos falássemos naquela noite. 

A Timeless Place: Oblivion

Previously: [•][•]

I came to visit this place with Lexy, knowing that perhaps this would be one of the last times that Utinga would be there. At least the Utinga of my childhood, which was inherently tied to the family's ownership of the sugar plant. But the current generation of the family lacked any interest whatsoever in managing the factory. We watched the family's great wealth dwindle over the years, even though Utinga itself remained fairly unchanged - except, as noted on a previous post, for those who died and those who were born within the family and its servants... the city had been founded to house the factory workers and the family of owners and managers. When the factory was sold to foreign buyers a little over a couple of years ago, we naturally assumed that was the end of that. At least for the family. As for the workers and the sugar plant, there was talk of it being dismantled, scrapped. It still stands there as I write, churning the machinery and spewing out pure, refined sugar. It even keeps the family name on its front. But should it ever truly end, I believe Utinga will go with it.

Today, after lunch, I went down to aunt Suzy's place. It was a large manor sitting on the side of the hill that overlooked Utinga's train station. Lexy seemed surprised at the sheer size of the house and it dawned on me that i had never considered it to be a mansion, having spent so many summers there and knowing every nook and cranny of the place. The house itself had remained stagnant like most of the city. The large trees beside it overgrown with parasitic vines drooping from them, white and ghostly like cobwebs, which had always been there. Our room - the one me and my brother had spent our childhood sleeping in - was still unchanged as well: the wooden ceiling with that aluminum ceiling fan threatening to fall on us while we slept and even our old, worn bodyboards with their incoherent neon hues resting atop the closet like they probably had been for years. The floor tiles in the bathroom, in candy-hued yellow and pink still contrasted with the black tiles on the walls. The two pianos in the dinning hall still managed to play my brother's Debussy. I didn't check, but I was sure the porches and balconies would still have that assortment of perfectly kept deck furniture from sometime around the 1930s and the yard would still be in regal order despite the aggressiveness of the surrounding flora. The train still went past the house at around 5pm. Time was kept by a set of wall clocks placed around the house, and you could hear their ticking if things were silent enough.

But as much as I would like to believe that this place would remain like this forever, it was already changing very noticeably. The changes felt like little flaws in the composition, little things that were out of place. It was the way the new locomotives on the trains were silent enough so that I could only hear them when they blew their whistle going past the station, instead of hearing that chugging of machinery a couple of minutes before, coming from afar. It was in the way three of the wall clocks had stopped, probably wanting in vain for time to actually stop there. It was in the increasing number of defective keys in the pianos my brother played.
But other things made de passage of time more terrifyingly obvious. For starters, there had been no Christmas celebration there that year. Aunt Suzy hadn`t even ordered for the Christmas tree to be set up. There wasn`t a trace of Christmas anywhere.
The servants were getting really old. Nita, someone I had always regarded as a plump girl who was an amazing cook and sometimes watched over me and my brother, was now showing clear signs of old age. Thin, a bit slower on the gestures, a bit more wrinkled.
But the final blow to my heart was finding aunt Suzy herself, sitting on the living room chairs watching TV. Nothing special about her watching TV, it was the way I had always remembered her (though the TV kept getting louder over the years...). What was startling was her figure. Withered and thin, so thin she found it difficult to move at all. Her hair had finally turned grey and there seemed to be more skin than the bones to support it. People mentioned she wasn`t eating properly, barely drank anything, just smoked her cigarettes and drank coffee. My visit had to do with her arrival back from the hospital, after she had to be nurtured back to some measure of health there. She appeared to us all like someone who was giving up. On everything: the house, the sugar plant, even her own body. It was understandable. She was one of the last survivors of her generation, apart from one of her sisters who still lived in Maceió. There had been four girls and two boys (one of them my grandfather). The years had taken most of them away, including aunt Margot, who had always appeared to me as the head of the family ("matriarch" would have been the wrong term: she never had any children), and who sat with aunt Suzy in that living room. It felt like her story had ended and all that was left was the existence in that house, defying time and oblivion.

As we left the house, going back to my cousin`s house further up on the hill, my mind wandered through all the melancholy poetry of what was happening there. I thought of that place, and how the remaining wall clocks would stop, halting time so that the next Christmas and New Year`s Eve would forever be kept at bay. The house would freeze in time in the year 2013. No 5pm train would ever be heard again, silent engines or not. The thriving aggressive nature surrounding the house would break through the defences, coming to sunbathe on the deck chairs, to silence my brother`s pianos for good, to make its own makeshift Christmas trees all over the house and to take back the seashell collection that the aunts had stolen from the beaches years ago. Possibly to finally be hit by the fall of that aluminium ceiling fan.
In the living room, the TV would be silent. Those small and comfortable rocking chairs would be motionless. Aunt Suzy would still be sitting on the big chair in front of the TV, her skin turned into the bark of a thriving tree that would preserve her placid and somewhat apathetic eyes.

Outside of the spell that locked the house in time, the rest of the family would go on with their lives. Possibly leaving Utinga once that house was sold and going to live in Maceió. The city was growing and becoming a place of opportunity and my cousins (some of them who I remembered as toddlers until just recently) were finding their ways to make their own wealth in due time. Nothing to do with sugar. Time kept going, faster and faster. Into the future.

Away from oblivion.

=====================

Anteriormente: [•][•]

Eu vim visitar este lugar com a Lexy, sabendo que talvez esta fosse uma das últimas vezes que Utinga estaria lá. Pelo menos a Utinga da minha infância, que era inerentemente ligada ao controle que a família tinha da usina de açúcar. Mas a geração atual da família não tinha o menor interesse em gerenciar a usina. Assistimos enquanto a grande fortuna da família minguava com os anos, embora Utinga em si permanecesse relativamente inalterada - exceto, como comentado em um post anterior, por aqueles que morriam e aqueles que nasciam entre a família e seus empregados... A cidade fora fundada para abrigar os trabalhadores da usina e as famílias de donos e gerentes. Quando a usina foi vendida para compradores estrangeiros pouco mais de dois anos atrás, nós naturalmente assumimos que era o fim daquilo. Pelo menos para a família. Quanto aos trabalhadores e à usina, havia rumores de que ela seria desmontada. Ela ainda está de pé por lá, enquanto eu escrevo, girando o maquinário e cuspindo açúcar puro e refinado. Ela até mantém o nome da família na sua fachada. Mas se algum dia terminasse de vez, acredito que Utinga em si sucumbiria junto. 

Hoje, depois do almoço, desci para a casa de tia Suzy. Era uma grande mansão sentada em um dos lados da colina que se erguia atrás da estação de trem de Utinga. Lexy pareceu surpresa com o tamanho enorme da casa e me ocorreu que eu nunca havia considerado ela uma mansão, tendo passado tantos verões lá e conhecido cada dobra e rachadura do lugar. A casa em si permanecia estagnada como a maior parte da cidade. As árvores grandes ao seu lado infestadas de trepadeiras parasíticas, brancas e fantasmagóricas como teias de aranha, que sempre estiveram lá. Nosso quarto - no qual eu e meu irmão passamos nossa infância dormindo - ainda não havia sido mudado: o teto de madeira com aquele ventilador de alumínio ameaçando cair sobre nós enquanto dormíamos e até as nossas antigas e gastas pranchas de bodyboard, com seus tons de neón incoerentes descansavam sobre o armário como haviam permanecido há anos. Os azulejos no chão do banheiro ainda tinham seus tons de amarelo e rosa parecendo bala de goma e contrastando com os azulejos pretos nas paredes. Os dois pianos na sala de jantar ainda conseguiam tocar o Debussy do meu irmão. Eu não olhei, mas tinha certeza de que as varandas ainda tinham aquele ajuntamento de móveis de varanda mais ou menos da década de 1930, mantidos em perfeito estado, e que os jardins ainda estariam em perfeita ordem apesar da agressividade da flora local. O trem ainda passava pela casa por volta das 5 da tarde. O tempo era informado por uma coleção de relógios de parede colocados pela casa, e era possível ouvir seu tique-taque se tudo estivesse silencioso o suficiente. 

Porém por mais que eu quisesse acreditar que este lugar permaneceria assim para sempre, ele já estava mudando perceptivelmente. As mudanças eram sentidas como falhas na composição, pequenas coisas que estavam fora de lugar. Era o modo como as novas locomotivas nos trens eram silenciosas o suficiente para que eu só conseguisse ouví-las quando elas apitavam perto da estação, em vez de ouvir aquele ruído grave de máquinas vindo de longe alguns minutos antes. Era o jeito como três dos relógios de parede tinham parado, provavelmente querendo em vão que o tempo de fato parasse lá. Era o número cada vez maior de teclas defeituosas no piano que meu irmão tocava. 

Mas outras coisas deixavam a passagem do tempo ainda mais terrivelmente óbvia. Para começar, não houve comemoração de natal este ano. Tia Suzy nem sequer havia ordenado que montassem a árvore de natal. Não havia traço algum de natal em lugar nenhum.
Os empregados estavam ficando velhos. Nita, alguém que eu sempre reconhecera como uma garota curvilínea que cozinhava muito bem e às vezes cuidava de mim e do meu irmão, estava agora demonstrando sinais claros da idade. Fina, um pouco mais lenta nos gestos, um pouco mais enrugada. 

Porém o golpe final no meu coração foi encontrar a própria tia Suzy, sentada nas poltronas da sala de estar, assistindo TV. Nada especial sobre ela assistir TV, era como eu sempre me lembrava dela (embora o volume da TV ficasse mais alto com o passar dos anos...). O que era surpreendente era sua figura. Esmaecida e magra, tão magra que tinha dificuldade de fazer o mínimo movimento. Seu cabelo finalmente tornara-se acinzentado e parecia haver mais pele do que os ossos para suportá-la. Pessoas diziam que ela não estava comendo direito, mal bebia nada, apenas fumava cigarros e bebia café. Minha visita tinha a ver com sua chegada do hospital, onde ela tinha sido alimentada para que voltasse a alguma medida de saúde. Ela parecia para todos nós como alguém que estava desistindo. De tudo: da casa, da usina de açúcar, até de seu próprio corpo. Era compreensível. Ela era uma das últimas sobreviventes da sua geração da família, fora uma de suas irmãs que ainda morava em Maceió. Tinham sido quatro garotas e dois garotos (um deles o meu avô). Os anos haviam levado a maioria deles, incluíndo a tia Margô, que sempre me parecera como a líder da família ("matriarca"seria o termo errado: ela nunca tivera filhos), e que se sentava com tia Suzy naquela sala de estar. Parecia que sua história tinha acabado e tudo que sobrara era a existência naquela casa, desafiando o tempo e o esquecimento.     

Enquanto partíamos da casa, voltando para a casa das minhas primas mais para cima da colina, minha mente passeava pela poesia melancólica do que estava acontecendo lá. Eu imaginava aquele lugar, e como os relógios restantes parariam de funcionar, parando o tempo de forma que o próximo natal e reveillon seriam para sempre mantidos à distância. A casa pararia no tempo no ano de 2013. Nenhum trem das 5 seria ouvido novamente, com ou sem motores silenciosos. A natureza agressiva e verdejante ao redor da casa atravessaria as defesas, vindo tomar sol nas cadeiras da varanda, ou silenciar os pianos do meu irmão para sempre, ou fazer suas próprias árvores de natal mambembes pela casa e levar de volta a coleção de conchas que as tias tinham roubado das praias há muitos anos. Possivelmente finalmente seria acertada pela queda daquele ventilador de alumínio.
Na sala de estar, a TV estaria quieta. Aquelas pequenas e confortáveis cadeiras de balanço estariam paradas. Tia Suzy ainda estaria sentada na poltrona em frente à TV, sua pele transformada na casca de uma árvore frondosa que preservaria seus olhos plácidos e consideravelmente apáticos.


Fora do feitiço que trancaria a casa no tempo, o resto da família continuaria com suas vidas. Possivelmente deixando Utinga uma vez que a casa fosse vendida e indo morar em Maceió. A cidade estava crescendo e virando um lugar de oportunidade e meus primos (alguns que eu ainda considerava crianças até pouco tempo), estava encontrando seus jeitos de fazer suas próprias fortunas no tempo certo. Nada relacionado ao açúcar. O tempo continuava avançando, mais e mais rápido.  Em direção ao futuro.

Para longe do esquecimento.

Closing a cycle (sayonara, imouto-chan)

Despite the advice of psychoanalyst readers of this blog, I really need to begin this post by apologizing in advance. It will render me a lot of discussion with a lot of people involved. But I can't avoid being minimally committed to what little art I still do and I do consider this blog as a form of art, in a loose sense. That said, I need to close a cycle here that is being closed in my life, to explain a few things to myself, put all the anger away and move on. Otherwise this blog and the things in my head will remain incomplete. This might have dire consequences to the blog, given the long pauses that have happened.

Please notice that it took me something around nine months to write this post. The feelings included in it are no longer current, but I felt it would be important to write them down here anyway.

While I was getting another bunch of things to move from my parents' apartment to my own, I came across my collection of Video Girl Ai manga. It was such a pleasant time in my life. I'm constantly searching for other manga that touch my soul like that one. But I decided not to bring these magazines home yet. There was a metaphor contained in that whole story and taking them home would worsen my current withdrawal symptoms and the sadness. At that time, I had a childish tendency to compare the characters in that romance to people in my own. The main character, Ai Amano, a VideoGirl, was initially compared to Lee, but after a short time (and for a long time after that) that character was transferred to Nana. 

The VideoGirl came into the life (literally - from a video tape, she crossed the TV screen into the real world) of a pure-hearted boy who was having sentimental problems. She would serve him as a guide, as a companion while the boy healed, as an advisor in matters of the heart. And theoretically, she would never fall in love. In the case of Ai Amano, whose tape had been executed in a faulty VCR, she appeared with a few glitches. Among those, the ability to fall in love.

In my life, the character meant someone with whom I could have a relationship of complete trust and intimacy, being able to speak of all the subjects I would normally consider taboo when talking to girlfriends (the promiscuity, perversions, gender ambiguity, loyalty, etc...). Because after all, we weren't in any commitment, so there was no implied contract of any sort of loyalty between us, and each had their own affairs. This person was a best friend, and that friendship came before any love relationship, and that allowed for this unconditional freedom. There was however that delicious tension of something between the two.

Nana had been my VideoGirl for a while. We had total access to each other, through blogs, late night chatter on Skype or MSN, the short period we were in the same college class. At any moment, we knew quite well what was going on in each other's lives. We gave each other advice regarding relationships, regarding life. But contrary to a VideoGirl, a normal boy like me had the ability to fall in love. And so, in 2007, when she broke up her 7-year relationship with her boyfriend, I mustered enough courage to tell her. I caught her by surprise, and sweetly and tenderly, she dismissed me. She told me I was like a brother to her (something that would later provide me with the nickname of "Nii-san" - "older brother" in Japanese). Placed in the farthest reaches of the "familyzone" (further away even than the "friendzone"), I accepted the situation and buried any feeling I had. If I was more propper, I would have done what most people do and would have disappeared from her life. Cut off any contact. Sometime later, that would be the final lesson she would teach me.

The fact is I didn't want to be like most people. I wanted to be different, I wanted to be me. More than anything, I wanted to keep this person with whom I could open up, completely unafraid of being judged. After an initial moment's discomfort, life continued normally for both of us. She went back to her boyfriend. And I watched from the rafters while she took that downward spiral through depression, while she got pregnant from the unwanted daughter that would heal her from it, while she broke apart the relationship with the child's father that had lasted for as long as we knew each other.

Five years later. I was spending the year in London for my Masters' degree and our talks had gone back to what they were before I was exiled into the "familyzone". And they were good talks. Talks that were worth burying my feelings like I had done. VideoGirl talks. While I shaved my hair, while I faced my teenage traumas, while I reviewed sexuality, my native culture and my place in the world, she was someone who listened without judging. More than that, she was someone who even applauded and encouraged my attitudes, instead of just tolerating my strangeness. I never heard a single word of censorship from her. And I was someone who, when she found herself a single unemployed post-depressive mother, had been there to tell her she was still worth it. She had always been worth it and would always be. We were each giving the other what the other needed at that time. Falling in love was an obvious thing to happen. And when we talked openly about it, everything I had buried for five years burst up from the ground again and flourished. Neither of us had any control over it. And I must admit: it was beautiful. Writing anything about it would only cheapen what happened, but I can say it was beautiful.

Of course, my being in London was convenient. It gave us the possibility of sleeping on that and thinking it over. Because it wouldn't be that simple. She had ditched me in 2007 and, ever since then, I had started another good relationship that was full of understanding with Lexy. Five years. My longest relationship to date. With someone who went out on a limb to please me, to win my family over and chase her own dreams. Someone whom I'd come to respect as I had never respected any of the previous girlfriends. Someone who also listened to me throughout all the process of change that I had gone through in London and was also going through her own changes in life. 

Nana was never a big challenge for Lexy. Because Lexy was someone who would fight for things, for life, someone who liked achieving things. Lexy was an overachiever. Nana, on the other hand, just wanted some peace. She was concerned with her own happiness, and in a certain way, she wanted to be left alone. She didn't care about challenges. Challenges had lost any meaning to her after she recovered from depression (and these illnesses do have a way of putting things in perspective...). She didn't want to fight for anything, the only thing that mattered to her was happiness: pure, simple, limitless and with no concessions. And therefore, when I became a challenge, when I became something to fight for, she had no second thoughts about disconnecting from me and giving up the fight.

I suffered. I suffered a lot with the break-up of a friendship that had lasted for over 10 years. And however, she did teach me a lot. First of all, she opened my eyes regarding several of my little personal illusions. As I had mentioned in Laerte's post, she made me see how I had a tendency to "blame or demand certain things of others (and fate) that were in fact senseless demands". I had a rather vague idea that the world was fair. And in a fair world, those 10+ years I spent getting through her hard times, even if from afar, would be worth something. In a fair world, the fact that I had placed friendship over feelings would have been worth something, perhaps the continuation of that friendship. It would be worth reciprocity from her behalf in this recent situation. But of course, all of that was an illusion: we do not live in a fair world and those who really believe that have a lot of growing up to do. I had a lot of growing up to do.
No. We live in a cynical world, as a friend in London once said. A world that will laugh at you if you believe this sort of thing. I'm not saying Nana was laughing at me. She was simply trying to prove a fact of life: that she had no obligation whatsoever to deal with the likes of me.

She also opened my eyes as to a sort of pride that I had regarding my role in this story. Come to think of it, she had spent the greater part of those 10 years of our friendship dating someone else with whom she had shared a house and with whom she had eventually conceived a child. And then I watched her isolate that same person from her life and only failed to do it completely because their daughter still bonded them together for practical reasons (though, if she could, she would indeed completely ignore the existence of that person after that).
What right did I have to think I could be any more valuable than that person if I hadn't even shared my life with her that way? What right did I have to think that I was deserving of any more special treatment than the one dispensed on him, and that she would think twice or have any remorse in excluding me from her life in the same way? What's more: I didn't have "practical bonds" with her, so she could savor our complete and utter disconnection.

I decided to write this when I noticed a few months back that I had been excluded from her list of friends on Facebook. An apparently trivial, almost childish fact. A fact that might mean the world to people of my students' ages, and that an adult was supposed to ignore. But to me, it meant something. Because without Facebook or access to her blog and Tumblr, she was shutting down any form of contact I could have with her. Any whatsoever. Blocking any possibility that I may know what was going on with my alleged friend. The only way of contacting her again would be to call or write an e-mail (direct contact), which is something I promised her I wouldn't do on our last squabble ("don't worry, I will not bother you again"). And anyhow, I presume that even this sort of contact will soon be cut off as well.
On what little contact we had after that, she became colder and more aggressive. Until the final e-mail came in November, telling me not to contact her again. Ever. As she signed off, she called me by my real name and signed it with hers. It was a very symbolic and violent gesture. We had NEVER used our real names.

Before finishing this post, I need to make it clear that, despite it all, it isn't my intention to turn Nana into a sort of villain. It would be unfair to do it merely because I am the losing side of this story. It is actually quite the opposite, I believe she deserves some sort of recognition for reaching a sort of consciousness about herself that very few people have. I would have said "very few women", but the fact is I believe even very few men have it nowadays. A consciousness of placing her own happiness above everything. Rigorously everything: above matters of equivalence (that which is "fair"), above matters or morality, above friendships of over a decade. Quite the contrary, her happiness is worth A LOT. And she won't allow ANYTHING to threaten it. The careless would label her dangerously selfish. Feminists would call her a free woman.

I'll start simply calling her Mariana. Or even Anonymous. If I have reasons to call her anything at all.

Finally, I mentioned of the dire consequences for this blog. It was created vaguely around the same time I met her (a little more than a year later) and completed its 10th year in April, exactly on the day before she started her new relationship and began cutting all ties with me [1st post]. And since I just love coincidences like that with an almost religious fervor, I gave serious thought to closing down the blog. It would be a perfect cycle.

But alas, we're still here, I just felt I couldn`t give in to this. This cycle needed this closure and I needed to keep going on. Taking her advice on that final e-mail, I had to learn to put the past behind.
I believe I won`t be writing as often on this blog. I came to realise I wrote a great deal of things because I knew she was reading. I must learn again to write for myself. And as this post gets closer to the bottom of the page and can no longer be easily retrieved by readers (since the blog`s archive settings are busted...), so too will I put this whole story and pain aside.

Resumo do ano

Ando tão bodiado deste blog e das reviravoltas emocionais do ano passado que este vai ser o meu tradicional resumo do ano para o ano de 2012:

[Resumo]

That is all.