Spilt Milk

A Novel

Chico Buarque, Alison Entrekin

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780802194855
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Brazilian Literature
• Index: Literature

The revered Brazilian songwriter and novelist "has breathed the story of a whole country into a single, unforgettable man with a soul as big as Brazil" (Nicole Krauss, author of Forest Dark ). As Eulálio d'Assumpção lies dying in a Brazilian public hospital, his daughter and the attending nurses are treated—whether they like it or not—to his last, rambling monologue. Ribald, hectoring, and occasionally delusional, Eulálio reflects on his past, present, and future—on his privileged, plantation-owning family; his father's philandering with beautiful French whores; his own half-hearted career as a weapons dealer; the eventual decline of the family fortune; and his passionate courtship of the wife who would later abandon him. Through Eulálio's journey across the twists and turns of his own fragmented memories, Buarque conjures an evocative portrait of a man's life and love, while bringing to life the broad sweep of Brazilian history. At once jubilant and painfully nostalgic, playful and devastatingly urgent, readers of the award-winning Spilt Milk will find themselves "in the hands of a master storyteller" ( The Plain Dealer ). "In Spilt Milk [Buarque] confronts the themes that make Brazil squirm, from the stain of slavery to the inferiority complex the country has historically felt when it compares itself to Europe." —The New York Times "Lovely details and a fine sense of place... Echoing Sebald's Rings of Saturn.. . There's plenty to like." —Publishers Weekly "One of the saddest love stories, and one of the truest." — Nicole Krauss

1

When I get out of here, we’ll get married on the farm where I spent my happy childhood, over at the foot of the mountains. You’ll wear my mother’s dress and veil, and I’m not saying this because I’m feeling sentimental, it’s not the morphine speaking. You’ll have my family’s lace, crystal, silver, jewels and name at your disposal. You’ll give orders to the servants, ride my late wife’s horse. And if there’s still no electricity on the farm, I’ll have a generator installed so you can watch TV. There’ll also be air conditioning in every room of the farmhouse, because it’s very hot on the coastal flats these days. I don’t know if it’s always been, if my ancestors sweated under all those clothes. My wife sweated a lot, but she was of a new generation and hadn’t my mother’s austerity. My wife liked the sun and always came back glowing from afternoons on the sands of Copacabana. But our chalet there has been knocked down, and in any case I wouldn’t live with you in a house from a previous marriage. We’ll live on the farm at the foot of the mountains. We’ll marry in the chapel that was consecrated by the Cardinal Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro in eighteen hundred and something. On the farm you’ll look after me and no one else, so that I’ll make a complete recovery. And we’ll plant trees, and write books, and, God willing, raise children on my grandfather’s land. But if you don’t like the foot of the mountains because of the tree toads and the insects, or the distance, or anything else, we could live in Botafogo, in the mansion my father built. It has huge bedrooms, marble bathrooms with bidets, several drawing rooms with Venetian mirrors and statues, monumentally high ceilings and, on the roof, slate tiles imported from France. There are palm, avocado and almond trees in the garden, which became a parking lot after the Danish Embassy moved to Brasilia. The Danes bought the mansion from me for a song because of the mess my son-in-law made of things. But if I decide to sell the farm, with its two thousand acres of crops and pastures, divided by a stream whose water is safe to drink, perhaps I could buy back the mansion in Botafogo, restore the mahogany furniture, have my mother’s Pleyel piano tuned. I’ll have things to tinker with for years on end, and if you wish to continue working, you’ll be able to walk to work, as there are plenty of hospitals and private practices in the neighbourhood. In fact, they built an eighteen-story medical centre on our land, which reminds me, the mansion isn’t there anymore. And come to think of it, I think they expropriated the farm at the foot of the mountains in 1947, for the highway. I’m thinking out loud so you can hear me. And I’m speaking slowly, as if I were writing, so you can transcribe it for me without having to be a stenographer. Are you there? The soap opera, the news and the film are all over; I don’t know why they leave the TV on after the broadcast has finished. It must be so the static will drown out my voice and I won’t bother the other patients with my rambling. But there are only grown men here, almost all of them rather deaf. If there were elderly ladies nearby I’d be more discreet. For example, I’d never mention the little whores hunkering down in hysterics, as my father tossed five-franc coins onto the floor of his suite at the Ritz. There he’d be, concentrating deeply, while the naked cocottes squatted there like frogs, trying to pick the coins off the rug without using their fingers. He’d send the winner down to my room with me, and back in Brazil he’d assure my mother I was making good progress with the language. At home, as in all good homes, family affairs were dealt with in French when in the presence of servants, though, for Mother, even asking me to pass the salt was a family affair. And what’s more, she spoke in metaphors, because in those days even your average nurse spoke a little French. But the girl’s not in the mood for chitchat today, she’s in a mood, she’s going to give me my injection. The sedative doesn’t kick in right away any more, and I know the road to sleep is like a corridor full of thoughts. I hear the noises of people, of viscera, a guy with tubes in him making rasping sounds; perhaps he’s trying to tell me something. The doctor on duty will hurry in, take my pulse, perhaps say something to me. A priest will arrive to visit the sick; he’ll murmur words in Latin, but I don’t think they’ll be for me. Sirens outside, telephone, footsteps, there’s always an expectation that stops me from falling asleep. It’s the hand that holds me by my thinning hair. Until I stumble upon a door to a hollow thought, which will suck me down into the depths, where I tend to dream in black and white.

2

I don’t know why you don’t try to lessen my pain, miss. Every day you open the blinds brutishly and the sun strikes me in the face. I don’t know what you find so amusing about my grimaces; I feel a twinge every time I breathe. Sometimes I inhale deeply and fill my lungs with an unbearable air, just to have a few seconds of comfort as I exhale the pain. But long before my illness and old age, I suppose my life was already quite like this, a niggling little pain jabbing away at me, then suddenly an excruciating jolt. When I lost my wife, it was excruciating. And anything I remember now is going to hurt; memory is a vast wound. But you still won’t give me my meds, you meanie. I don’t even think you’re on the nursing staff, I’ve never seen your face around here before. Of course, it’s my daughter standing with her back to the light. Give me a kiss. I was actually going to call you to come keep me company, read me newspapers, Russian novels. This TV stays on all day long and the people here aren’t very sociable. Not that I’m complaining; that would be a sign of ingratitude to you and your son. But if the lad’s so rich, I don’t know why on earth you don’t have me admitted to a traditional care home, run by nuns. I would’ve been able to pay for travel and treatment abroad myself if your husband hadn’t ruined me. I could have taken up residence abroad, spent the rest of my days in Paris. If the urge were to take me, I could die in the same bed at the Ritz that I’d slept in as a boy. Because in the summer holidays your grandfather, my father, always took me to Europe by steamer. Later, every time I saw one in the distance, on the Argentine route, I’d call your mother and point: there goes the Arlanza!, the Cap Polonio!, the Lutétia!, and I’d wax lyrical about what an ocean liner was like on the inside. Your mother had never seen a ship close up; after we married she rarely left Copacabana. And when I announced that we’d soon have to go to the docks to meet the French engineer, she got all coy. Because you were a newborn, she couldn’t just leave the baby and so on, but then she took the tram into town and cut her hair à la garçonne. When the day came, she dressed as she thought appropriate, in an orange satin dress and an even more orange felt turban. I’d already suggested she save the finery for the following month, for the Frenchman’s departure, when we could board the ship for a drinks reception. But she was so anxious that she was ready before me and stood waiting by the door. She looked like she were on tiptoe in her high-heeled shoes, and she was either blushing a lot or wearing too much rouge. And when I saw your mother in that state I said, you’re not going. Why, she asked in a tiny voice, but I didn’t give her a reason, I took my hat and left. I didn’t even stop to think about where my sudden anger had come from, all I knew was that the blind anger her cheerfulness provoked in me felt orange. And that’s enough talking from me, because the pain’s just getting worse.

3

No one believes me, but the woman who came to see me is my daughter. She ended up all skew-whiff like that and missing a few screws because of her son. Or grandson; now I’m not sure if the lad’s my grandson or great-great-grandson or what. As the future narrows, younger people have to pile up any which way in some corner of my mind. For the past, however, I have an increasingly spacious drawing room where there is more than enough space for my parents, grandparents, distant cousins and friends from university that I’d already forgotten, with each of their drawing rooms full of relatives and in-laws and gatecrashers with their lovers, plus all of their memories, all the way back to Napoleon’s time. For instance, right now I’m looking at you, so loving with me every night, and I’m embarrassed to ask you your name again. On the other hand, I can recall every hair of my grandfather’s beard even though I only knew him from an oil painting. And from that little book that must be over there on the dresser, or upstairs on my mother’s bedside table; ask the housemaid. It’s a small book with a sequence of almost identical photos, which, when you flick through them, give the illusion of movement, like in the cinema. They show my grandfather walking in London, and when I was a child I liked to flick through them backwards, to make the old boy walk in reverse. It’s of these old-fashioned people that I dream, when you tuck me in. If I had my way I’d dream of you in technicolor, but my dreams are like silent films, and the actors died a long time ago. The other day I went to fetch my parents from the playground, because in my dream they were my children. I went to call them with the news that my newborn grandfather was going to be circumcised; he’d become a Jew just like that. From Botafogo, my dream cut to the farm at the foot of the mountains, where we found my grandfather with a white beard and whiskers, walking in his coattails past the British Parliament. He was going at a fast, hard pace, as if he had mechanical legs, thirty feet forward, thirty feet backward, just like in the little book. My grandfather was a prominent figure under the Empire, a Grand Master and a radical abolitionist. He wanted to send all Brazil’s blacks back to Africa, but it didn’t work out that way. His own slaves, after they’d been freed, chose to remain living on his properties. He owned cacao plantations in Bahia, coffee plantations in São Paulo, made a fortune, died in exile and is buried in the family cemetery on the farm at the foot of the mountains with a chapel blessed by the Cardinal Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro. His closest freed slave, Balbino, faithful as a dog, sat on his grave forever. If you call a taxi, I can show you the farm, the chapel and the mausoleum.

4

Before you show anyone what I’m dictating to you, do me a favour and have a grammarian look over the text so your spelling mistakes won’t be imputed to me. And don’t forget that my surname is Assumpção, and not Assunção, as it is usually written, as it is probably even written on my chart there. Assunção, the more pedestrian version, was the surname that the slave Balbino adopted, as if asking permission to come into the family barefoot. Interestingly, his son, also Balbino, was my father’s stableman. And his son, Balbino Assunção III, a rather chubby black boy, was my childhood friend. He taught me to fly kites, to make traps for hunting birds and the way he used to juggle an orange with his feet fascinated me back when most people hadn’t even heard of football. But after I started high school, my trips to the farm grew more infrequent, he grew up without schooling and our affinities dwindled. I’d only see him during the July holidays, when from time to time I’d ask him the odd favour, more to make him feel good, as it was his nature to be solicitous. Sometimes I’d also ask him to be there on standby, because the farm’s calm bored me; in those days we were fast and time dawdled. Hence our endless impatience, and I love watching your young girl’s eyes roaming the ward: me, the clock, the TV, your mobile phone, me, the quadriplegic’s bed, the drip, the catheter, the old guy with Alzheimer’s, your mobile phone, the TV, me, the clock again, and it hasn’t even been a minute. I also relish it when you forget your eyes on mine, while you think about the leading man in the soap opera, the messages on your mobile phone, your period that’s late. You look at me just as I used to look at a toad on the farm, hours and hours unmoving, staring at the old toad, so as to let my thoughts roam. At one point, for instance, I got it into my head that I needed to take Balbino up the arse. I was seventeen, maybe eighteen, and I’d definitely already been with women, including French ones. So I had no need for it, but right out of the blue I decided I was going to have Balbino. So I’d ask him to go pick a mango, but it had to be a very specific mango, at the top of the tree, one that wasn’t even ripe. Balbino would quickly obey, and his long strides from branch to branch began to arouse me for real. No sooner had he reached the particular mango than I’d shout a counter order, not that one, the one over there, right at the end. I started to develop a taste for it and not a day went by that I didn’t order Balbino to climb the mango trees any number of times. And I began to suspect that the way he was moving about up there wasn’t so innocent either, and he had a kind of feminine way of crouching down with his knees together to pick up the mangos that I dropped on the ground. It was clear to me that Balbino wanted me to take him up the arse. I just lacked the courage to make the final move, and went so far as to rehearse some spiel about feudal tradition, droit de seigneur, deliberations so far over his head that he’d give himself to me without a fuss. But as it turned out, fortunately, around this time I met Matilde and got all that nonsense out of my head. I assure you, though, that this association with Balbino left me an adult without prejudice against colour. In that I did not take after my father, who only appreciated blondes and redheads, preferably with freckles. Nor after my mother, who, when she became aware that I had a crush on Matilde, asked me straight off if by any chance the girl had a body odour. Just because Matilde’s skin was almost cinnamon. She was the darkest of the Marian congregants that sang at my father’s memorial service. I had already glimpsed her on a few occasions, leaving eleven o’clock mass there at the Church of the Candelária. To be honest, I’d never been able to get a proper look at her because she wouldn’t hold still, talking, twirling and disappearing among her friends, her black curls bouncing. She’d leave the church as one would the Pathé cinema, where they showed American serials at the time. But now, just as the organ played the introduction to the offertory, I accidentally let my gaze come to rest on her, glanced away, looked back again and couldn’t take my eyes off her after that. Because when she wasn’t moving, with her hair up in a bun like that, she was herself even more intensely with her swaying hidden from sight, her interior agitation, her inward gestures and laughter, forever, oh. Then, I don’t know why, in the middle of the church I felt a great urge to know her warmth. I imagined embracing her by surprise, so she’d pulse and writhe against my chest, like smothering in my hands the little bird I’d caught as a boy. There I was, having these profane fantasies, when my mother took my by the arm to take communion. I hesitated, holding back a little, not feeling worthy of the sacrament, but refusing it in front of everyone would have been discourteous. Feeling a certain fear of hell, I finally went up to kneel at the altar and closed my eyes to receive Holy Communion. When I opened them again, Matilde was facing me, smiling, sitting at the organ that was no longer an organ, but my mother’s grand piano. Her hair was wet against her naked back, but now I think I’m dreaming already.

5

It’s always the way, you people drag me out of bed, transfer me to a stretcher; no one wants to hear of my inconveniences. I’m barely awake, no one has brushed my teeth, my face is still crumpled and unshaven, and with this wretched appearance you parade me under the cold light of the corridor, which is a true purgatory, the maimed strewn about the floor, not to mention the loafers who come to gawk at misfortune. That’s why I pull the sheet over my once handsome face, which you quickly expose again so it won’t look as if I’m dead, because it gives a bad impression or it’s demeaning for stretcher-bearers to be transporting dead bodies. Then there’s the lift, where everyone stares unceremoniously at my face, instead of looking at the floor, the ceiling, the floor indicator, because, after all, why not look at a piece of dirt? Upstairs is another corridor full of zigzags and wailing and howling, and finally the old CAT-scan room, and I don’t know who benefits from all this trouble. I’ve already had goodness knows how many X-rays, you’ve turned me inside out, and in the end you don’t say anything; I haven’t been shown even a single lung X-ray. Speaking of which, I’d love to take a look at my private photos, and you, doctor, you look well bred, if you don’t mind, please nip over to my house. Ask my mother to show you the baroque jacaranda desk, whose middle drawer is overflowing with photographs. Look carefully and bring me a photo the size of a post card, with January 1929 handwritten on the back, showing a small crowd at the quayside with a three-funnel liner in the background. Of the crowd one can only see the backs of their clothes and the tops of their hats, because everyone is facing the Lutétia in the bay. But don’t forget also to bring me the magnifying glass, which is always in the smallest drawer, and I’ll show you something. If you look carefully, you can see in the photo a single face, of a single man facing the lens, and I assure you that the man in the black suit and bowler hat is me. There’s no point in getting a more powerful magnifying glass, because my physiognomy becomes deformed when overly enlarged, you can’t see mouth or nose or eyes; it would look like a rubber mask with a dark moustache. And even if the image were sharp, my elegant facial features, when I wasn’t yet twenty-two, might strike you as less true to life than a rubber mask. But there I was, and I remember well the people all spellbound by the appearance of the Lutétia, which happened rather theatrically, as it suddenly emerged from dense fog. At that moment I looked behind me and saw a photographer with his equipment standing some twenty metres away. It wasn’t anything new; for some time now such dilettantes and professional photographers could be found everywhere, taking snapshots for posterity’s sake, as they used to say. So I presumed, not without vanity, that when the snapshot was developed, I’d be the only one recorded for posterity looking face-on. And after many, many years, after the barrage of time, even then, in some way mine would be a face that survived, because instinct told me to look at the camera at that instant. To accompany this image, I bought another, similar, photograph at a second-hand bookshop, the same size, taken a few hours after the first, from the same angle and with the same lens, obviously by the same photographer. By then the Lutétia had already berthed, and the passengers are walking across the quay, surrounded by friends and family, towards the customs warehouse. I’m down there on the left, next to a taller fellow in a grey or beige suit, with a straw hat slightly crooked on his head. I’m facing the camera again, but this time annoyed at looking almost like a lackey, carrying someone else’s overcoat and leather briefcase. The name of the monsieur beside me was Dubosc, and if photographs weren’t silent, a very deep voice could be heard rising above all the others enquiring after the French delegation. He probably still hadn’t recognised me at that point because, after dumping his overcoat and briefcase on me, he looked over my head and wouldn’t stop saying, l’ambassadeur? l’ambassadeur? It had already been arranged that the ambassador would welcome him with a gala on the Saturday night, with the diplomatic corps, authorities and illustrious members of local society all present, but Dubosc wasn’t satisfied. In good French I told him I was enchanted to see him again, after our unforgettable rendezvous in Paris in the company of my late father, Senator Assumpção. But not even the mention of my father had any effect, he insisted on asking after the consul, the military attaché, and protested in a loud voice about the time it was taking to clear his baggage. It’s a known fact that some people don’t travel well, just as certain wines are upset in transport, which is why I thought it wise to take him to the Palace Hotel in silence, leaving him to his own devices until the following day to recover. I was also keen to get home, where perhaps my wife would thank me for having spared her a tiresome journey. And in the foyer the man already hated the Palace, which, naturally, couldn’t compare to the Paris Ritz, but it was the best hotel on Avenida Central, a street that also bored him on account of its European airs. This Dubosc, I’ll tell you what, I don’t know what became of him, but if he was around forty at the time, by my calculations he died more than twenty years ago. I hope he died in peace among loved ones, of some sudden collapse, so he wouldn’t have been in pain his whole life as I have, as my bones and bedsores pain me now as I’m returned to the stretcher. I can just imagine how, in my shoes, he would have blasphemed about the icy temperature in this room and the muggy heat outside. I truly hope he never entered stinking lifts, saw cockroaches like those ones crawling up the walls, tasted the slops of a hospital like this one, or continued to repeat merde alors until the hour of his death. Because everything really is a crock of shit, but then it gets a little better, when at night my girlfriend visits.

6

When I get out of here, we’ll start our new life in an old city, where everyone greets everyone else and no one knows us. I’ll teach you to speak properly, to use the different types of cutlery and wine glass, I’ll carefully choose your wardrobe and serious books for you to read. I sense you have potential because you’re hardworking, you have gentle hands and you don’t make faces even when you bathe me, in short, you seem like a worthy young lady despite your humble origins. My other wife had a strict upbringing, but even so Mother never understood why I’d chosen her, exactly, when there were so many girls from distinguished families to choose from. My mother was from another century, on one occasion she actually asked me if Matilde had body odour. Just because Matilde’s skin was almost cinnamon in colour. She was the darkest of her seven sisters, daughters of a federal deputy of the same political party as my father. I don’t know if I ever told you that I’d already seen Matilde in passing, in the entrance to the Church of the Candelária. But I hadn’t been able to study her as I did that day, when my eyes settled on her in the pause before the offertory. She was in the choir that was singing the Req...