NOTHING
(Note: this story was originally published in Portuguese; if you find any problems with the translation, please let me know)
I am some other version of it all, an internal unfinished version. I am moving, everything is passing. If I knew better and if I knew how to create words, I would’ve written Grande Sertão myself, but this is not who I am, this is someone else, called João, if I was called Raimundo there wouldn’t be rhyme nor solution.
I have nothing but one face, but this one face of mine can be so, so much. Look at my forehead, filled with expression marks, I’m not even thirty yet and my face has tons of scars. If I had seven faces this would be seven times so, so much, one face only is enough to make me go crazy. I am not who you think I am, I am something else, some other man, some other woman, some other beast, a dark beast who lives in the mud and feeds through its ears and expresses through its claws and screams through its eyes. I almost never talk, I just hear, and if I don’t talk it is not because I am too ashamed to do so, but because I don’t think it’s worth, what is the point? Opening and closing your mouth to say a bunch of emptiness, what is the point? I find it better to just listen, which no one seems to agree with, so I just make things a little more equal.
I am not who you think I am because for you to create my image in your own head you need to go over your past, over every single word you ever heard, every single word you ever read, every single word you ever imagined, then you make an alphabet soup out of your own experience, but this alphabet soup is not who I am, because I am not who you are, your past is not my past and we heard a lot of different words in this life.
The question of dialogism.
You looked at me and you said This is who you are, but you can only say as much as This is who you are to me. A two-plus on the sentence that goes on infinity ways. I am not what you think of me, because I am not a finished retail product, a product that is good to go, a product that just got out of the production line after being hammered and screwed and crushed a thousand times. I have been hammered, I have been screwed, I have been crushed, yes. I have been attacked. I have been destroyed and reconstructed. I am simply not done.
I ask myself if I ever will be.
I know that I won’t.
(Deep down, I hope that I won’t)
This is a crossword puzzle, pick up the letters and fill in the words, you see, here we have a man, you look at me. Each word you make right, another one hundred, one thousand, one million of black spaces pop up, this crossword has no finish line, unless I finish myself sooner, then the crossword can be my epitaph, but even so, I find it unlikely that you can fill all the blank spaces: look, here are the letters that I swallowed up, here are the letters I never spitted out, here are the letters I keep deep down on me, out of existence in this world. Some blank spaces will just blank.
I will always be an undone construction site. You can peak through the window to see what this is all about, but you can’t see it all. I don’t think I will ever be done, not in this life. After this life, it really doesn’t matter, and the construction itself becomes irrelevant.
I am not who you think I am, because I am nothing. I am being. Playing it as it lays. It is necessary to comprehend the movement and alternation. What kind of person am I? I write and make up stories, I am an idiot. I sit down on the darkness and, in the material that are given to me, in the sand, in the concrete, in the foundation of the literature ever made in this world, in all of that I put my bare hands to make something new from something old, so someone else can take it and make it own, and there it goes, from one hand to another, we rely on each other to keep moving forward.
I am not even who I think I am because I can only think of myself as I was, in the past, and when I think time just advanced. I wrote a new sentence and a new phrase. I snapped my fingers. I felt rigid fear. I cracked my neck. Crack, crack, crack, down my spine. My body is not done, it is readjusting, evolving, growing, falling, dying. I am not done. You think you know it all, you think you got everything solved out, and when you try to call to your mother on a Saturday morning you realize that she is dead in the hospital. This changes it all. This changes what you thought you once knew.
Who I was I am no longer.
The certainty has its own way of imploding itself, but without some amount of certainty we can’t go on even for a step: we need to believe that the floor is still ahead of us, so we can step on it, on a solid area. One certainty. One simple certainty. That when we take a deep breath, our lungs will be filled with air. One simple certainty. That our hearts will keep on beating. One simple certainty. That the ground is solid and it is not going to crack under our feet.
But, sometimes, it cracks.
You call your mother on a Saturday morning.
Crack, crack, crack, cracks your neck and your back, they say this can’t be healthy. They talk way too much.
I am not who you think I am, but I am happy that you still think about me and fantasizes about me and idealize me and imagine me. That you took your own words to figure me out, like a puzzle. As a crossword. There will always be one blank space. You just don’t have all the words to finish up this dictionary. You don’t know the meaning of all the words you took in your hands. At least listening to what I say:
Tomorrow is going to be a cold day, take a jacket.
This has nothing to do with the matter itself, but I checked out the weather forecast and I don’t want you to get sick.
You don’t know, but it is important that you make up in your head a version of me. I am not who you think I am, solely. I am also who you think I am. And so much more. Not João, nor Raimundo.
Unbreakable passing.
