Red Parrot, Wooden Leg

Gregorio Kohon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429918438
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

This book describes the adventures of two young writers, set in the midst of political repression, anti-Semitism and violence during the Latin American dictatorships of Brazil and Argentina in the 60s.

1966

Part I

1

Cockroaches. Those indestructible creatures.

They had defeated time, the Ice Age, powerful poisons and professional hunters. The unconquerable bastards. Rio de Janeiro was full of them.

He quickly learned to love the city, its avenues running parallel to the sea, the mountains, the way people smiled, the way they walked. And those women: their hips set the world on fire.

A poet and friend who worked for the Brazilian Cultural Attaché had helped him get on a military flight that carried the artists, the diplomatic parcels, the poor, and the deportees. There were no seats on the plane; instead, people perched like parachutists on two rows of metal benches set along its length. The contraption rattled and shook; the cold seeping through the cracks in the walls was unbearable. He and a black woman, holding a small child on her lap, were the only passengers. Sitting opposite him, she seemed frightened and might have been praying. He smiled. The woman, with an absent look in her eyes, didn’t respond. This was his first trip on a plane. Without a God to protect him, Daniel not only felt afraid but forsaken.

He rented a room in a flat near the sea, in Copacabana. It had a bed which was too short, a table with a broken lamp, an old wardrobe, and it smelt of damp. There was just enough space to open the door. The landlady was a woman in her thirties who lived in the flat with her adolescent daughter; they took in laundry for a living. In order to get to his room, he had to make his way through a patio full of sheets, underwear, jeans, T-shirts, socks and towels. As they worked, the mother and daughter sang romantic songs:

Good-bye, my love,
The sea is waiting for me…

They giggled, talked about him and teased him. They made him feel wanted.

At night, life changed. The repugnant visitors with their flattened oval bodies swarmed through his dreams. Cockroaches were everywhere. Falling asleep, he would feel their antennae tickling his skin under the sheet, hear their legs scratching against the newspapers on the floor. He lay in bed every night, listening, tensely anticipating their inevitable visits, inventing strategies to resist the invasion. He decided not to give in. He would train himself to catch the bastards, convinced that he could win. Damned blattella germanica.

Every night he lit a couple of candles, and awaited their arrival. Books, tennis balls, old pieces of bread, and shoes weren’t very effective. A small but firm pillow was his best weapon: it stunned the monsters enough to make them easy prey. His nightly catch started with five specimens; the more he developed his technique, the more cockroaches he caught. One exceptional night he scored thirty-six. He placed each night’s catch in small opaque plastic bags and, while the two women were asleep, stored them at the back of the landlady’s freezer, behind the packages of meat. The next night he would place a new bag of cockroaches in the freezer, throwing away the frozen ones, now definitely dead.

This trip to Rio was meant to be a short jaunt but, unable to decide what to do with his life, he simply didn’t show up for the return flight. Only a few weeks earlier, the publication of his first book of poems in Buenos Aires had been celebrated with a party at an art gallery in calle Florida; to the raucous jamming of local rock bands, people danced till dawn. It had ended in a stampede provoked by two drunken policemen. The following day the headlines of a morning paper lied: “COMMUNIST WRITER’S PARTY ENDS IN SHOOT-OUT”. That morning, his friend Damián helped him hide politically sensitive books and papers. He stayed in different places for a while until the whole business blew over. Meanwhile, the book sold out.

Soon after his arrival in Rio, he recited his poetry at the Catholic University, talked on the radio, was interviewed on television and even wrote theatre reviews for a literary magazine. Anything was possible: Rio was there for the taking. And he had been lucky: through friends and literary contacts, he was offered a grant by the Brazilian government for foreign artists and writers. One of those contradictions of Latin American governments: on the one hand, repression; on the other, support for literature and the arts. Given the exchange rate, four hundred dollars amounted to a small fortune. He immediately rang Luigi and invited him to join him.

Luigi had already made up his mind to do so, even before hearing about the grant. He gave notice to his employers, said goodbye to his two girlfriends (Monday, Wednesday and Friday, it was Iris; Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, Hortensia; Saturday, religiously free). On the plane, Luigi met the leader of an obscure sect of spiritualists; they disembarked drunk, embracing each other while weaving across the landing strip. Daniel watched them from a distance: the two men embraced again, talked some more, shook hands and finally went their separate ways.

Luigi had brought a letter from Daniel’s parents, small presents from his two sisters, and lots of cigarettes – black tobacco, their favourite. The spiritualist leader had offered him the name and address of someone who might put them up for free. Given Daniel’s secret war against the germánicas, he readily agreed to accompany Luigi and try the place out.

The address was near the University cafeteria, which the students called o calabozo – the jail. They strolled down Avenida Presidente Vargas, past the small shops selling clothes and cheap jewellery, the noisy square, the police station. Daniel wanted to know the latest news in Argentina. Meanwhile, Luigi bombarded him with questions. Where was he living? Had he met any Brazilian women? Had he shagged any? What were the beaches like?

A young, tall, skinny black man opened the door. “Who are you?”he said, looking them over. “How did you get in? The front door is locked at all times.”

“It wasn’t.”Luigi responded, handing over the spiritualist’s letter of introduction. The man had a long, thin, white animal bone hanging from his right ear, an amulet against the evil eye. From his left ear hung a small and delicate pendant: a wooden thumb inserted between the first and second fingers of a clenched fist. After reading the letter somewhat disdainfully, the man invited them in.

The room was large and dark. There were no pictures on the walls and a curtain of cheap blue velvet hid the window. On one side of the room was a round table, covered by a plastic cloth patterned in big red and white flowers. The place needed cleaning and was starved of fresh air. Two black men sat at the table manicuring their nails. The man who had opened the door, now more relaxed, took charge of the introductions.

“I’m Socrates. These are my friends Amadeu and Fulvio, our pommes de terre en robe de chambre.”

“Potatoes in dressing gowns?” Was it a pun, or some private joke?

“Mais oui, messieurs, we are hot,”added Fulvio. The three smiled at one another suggestively. Amadeu, the ugly one, asked whether the visitors were spiritualists. Luigi said they were writers, they just wanted a room. For free. After another exchange of significant looks, Socrates asked:

“Do you believe in spirits?”No time for them to reply. “Nothing is more important in life, the spirit is our most essential part; it is what makes relations possible between the living and the dead. Without spirit, life has no meaning.”

“The spirit is the only thing that survives our bodies once we die, and we all die, sooner or later,”added Fulvio. “The spirit, once disembodied, lives forever in another world.”

“Yes!”the others agreed.

Maybe life with the germánicas was not that bad after all.

“Nobody in their right mind could deny the existence of immaterial reality,”said Luigi. They hadn’t been invited to sit down yet. “Nevertheless,”he continued, “I’m opposed to spiritualism. I support Giovanni Gentile, for whom the pure activity of self-consciousness is the sole reality.”

The three Brazilians looked lost and tried to recover. According to Socrates, evidence of materialisation went back a long way, to Biblical times: “The spirit of the prophet Samuel appeared to Saul while the King was visiting the witch of Endor. Doesn’t that have any meaning for you? It’s in the Old Testament!’

“So? Poor King Saul was completely out of his mind,”Luigi argued, “so scared of the coming battle that he lost his marbles. Anyway, from Spinoza we know that there is nothing in the Bible that says the soul is immortal.”

Daniel felt it was time to make a move: he stepped forward and grabbed two chairs, positioning them in front of Socrates. They sat down and remained silent. After a while, they were offered tea and Socrates disappeared into the kitchen; Fulvio and Amadeo went back to their manicures. Luigi tore open another packet of cigarettes. Then, they all drank sweetened iced tea with lemon, and ate coconut biscuits and pupunha, a fruit from the Amazon. Inevitably, they ended up talking about soccer. Pelé. Garrincha. No more spiritual things. A while later, Daniel asked: “What about the room, then?”

“You can move in tonight, if you wish,”said Socrates.

In the streets, people from offices and shops nearby were out for lunch. The heat was stifling. For some, to interrupt their work was just an excuse to have another coffee, another beer in the bars. People talked and shouted and seemed to argue fanatically just about everything, from soccer to politics.

“Where did you get all that shit about the spirit?”

“When I was younger, I was overwhelmed: permanent erections, dirty thoughts, wet dreams every night. Once I tried to screw my sister, who was two years older than me. I couldn’t stop masturbating, I was losing my mind, sex was such a problem. I thought that priesthood was the way to go.”

“And then, what happened?’

“Not much. Things didn’t work out for me. I left the seminary after a couple of years.”

They got to a small dingy beach in the centre of town.

“Is that the Sugar Loaf?”asked Luigi, pointing.

There was a cable car that took people to the top of the mountain.

“The view of the city is something else,”Daniel told him.

They sat on the sand. A gentle breeze had started to blow. This dirty beach wasn’t the best place to introduce Luigi to the carioca sea, but Daniel couldn’t be bothered to go any further.

Luigi was four years older. He had already published several short stories in literary magazines. The son of Italian immigrants, poor peasants from the mountains of Catanzaro, in Calabria, he was short and stocky; his small hands, hardened by the days he had spent as a carpenter on building sites, were always holding a cigarette. Luigi’s father – like so many Italian immigrants – had joined the anarchist movement as soon as he arrived in Buenos Aires. It was the time of the Sacco and Vanzetti scandal in the USA, of home-made bombs used against the police, of writing for the weekly Vita Libertaria. While his father spent most of his time organising strikes, the family lived on his mother’s meagre income from her job as a maid for wealthy families.

Luigi’s clear blue eyes shone out of his dark complexion. Shy and guarded at first, his caustic humour soon broke through; then he became talkative, funny and eloquent, an instant hit with women. At the beginning, Daniel found Luigi’s silences difficult to take. He came from a large, loud and extrovert family: more than talking, they barked and growled at each other. All this vocal activity was performed in Yiddish, it always sounded contentious.

Luigi pulled out a bottle of vodka from his backpack. “My mother gave it to me at the airport, she thought we would need it. It was a present from her Polish neighbour, who I suspect is in love with her.”

“How old is your mother?”

“Fifty-two, she dresses all in black like a traditional Mediterranean widow. She’s still very attractive, a lot of men chase after her.”

The liquid, a brownish colour, wasn’t the normal kind of vodka. The label said For Export. “Sixty fucking proof! This will kill us.”The first sip didn’t sit well on their empty stomachs; by the fourth, they couldn’t have cared less.

“This vodka is poison, we can’t go on drinking it.”Luigi happily proceeded to empty the rest of the liquid in the sand. He was drunk.

“You know, in our last encounter,”Daniel said, also definitely drunk, “she punched through a window and made a mess of her right arm, it was horrible.”

“Who?”

“Lola. I don’t know how many stitches she had to have, she fucked up one of her tendons.”

“Forget Lola, man, that’s finished, kaput! No room for melancholy today.”

Luigi got a pen out of his pocket and wrote a note on a piece of paper. It read: “I am so far away, so alone, so high”. He rolled it up and pushed it inside the bottle. He found a cork in the sand, and stopped up the bottle. He raced towards the sea and hurled the bottle with all his might; the few people on the beach ignored him. They heard the soft splash at some distance. Luigi came back and sat down again. “I hope it’ll get to Paris.”

“To Cortázar!”Daniel added with enthusiasm. And then, “Do you think we should move to the House of Spiritualism? We have some money, we can rent somewhere else.”

Luigi looked serious and remained silent. Daniel couldn’t understand what he had said wrong.

“We discovered that it was the priest. My mother wants to kill him…”

Daniel instantly understood. Luigi’s sister had given birth to a baby boy just before Daniel left the country.

“Is he the father of the baby?”

“Yes.”

Daniel exploded in laughter. He had to get up so he wouldn’t choke. He laughed until his stomach and jaw started to ache.

“You son of a bitch, you motherfucking asshole, you ignorant bastard.”And finally, “You fucking dirty Jew…”Luigi knew that would stop ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• About the Author
• Chapter 1 - 1966
• Chapter 2 - 1971
• Chapter 3 - 1986
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Translation