LRB on Rubem Fonseca

[ish mailian]

If you want to write about violence – if you want to tell it like it
is – then you’re advised to keep it plain. We’re conditioned to think
that real horror should be described as succinctly as possible, since
superfluous words only distract from the act itself. Words are so
often digressive that inserting them where they’re not wanted can be
seen as evidence of a lack of moral seriousness, a bourgeois leavening
of what can’t be stomached. Accounts of violence, in fiction and in
life, tend to the flat, the controlled, the unflinching. Crime novels
and police reports and news bulletins have their conventions too, and
they all borrow their rhetoric from each other: the who, where, when,
what; the calibre of the weapon and the dimensions of the wound. They
make up for the slipperiness of words with a superabundance of detail.
In these respects, the documentary idiom is very close to lying:
terseness is a strategy to avoid inadvertently saying what might not
seem true, and a barrage of facts makes a story difficult to contest.
But then liars and reporters both have a vested interest in making
their account believable.

In Brazil, which since the 1970s has seen more urban violence than any
other country in the world, no writer has dealt with the subject more
plainly than Rubem Fonseca. In 1976 his bestselling short story
collection Feliz Ano Novo (‘Happy New Year’) was censored by a court
acting for the military government. Five of the stories were banned,
and the ban on the title story wasn’t revoked until 1989. ‘Feliz Ano
Novo’ describes an attack on a houseful of rich, white New Year’s Eve
revellers by three armed slum-dwellers. One woman is raped and
strangled. Shit is smeared on bedsheets. The narrator tries to get the
ring off a dead woman’s finger but it won’t budge so he bites off the
finger and throws the whole thing into a sack. A man who tries to
negotiate is made to stand with his back to a wall, a little distance
away from it, so that the blast from the shotgun lifts him off his
feet and sends him smack against the plaster. The effect isn’t quite
what the killers hoped for, so they get another man to stand against a
door: this time, the body is satisfyingly pinned to the woodwork by
the lead of the shot, before sliding slowly to the floor. It’s a form
of experimentation.

The judges in the censorship case argued that the story might lead the
average Brazilian astray. That would be a wholly ludicrous statement
if applied to a piece of fiction written, say, in France, but ‘Feliz
Ano Novo’ is precisely about what it claims is the average Brazilian;
and it’s this claim that’s subversive, not the violence. The
protagonists are ‘fucked and underpaid’, like everybody else they come
across, apart from the super-wealthy whose party they’ve crashed. What
makes them angry is how trivial the partygoers’ possessions are to
them: ‘The drinks, the food, the jewels, the money, all that was just
crumbs to them. They had lots more in the bank. To them we were
nothing more than three flies in the sugar bowl.’ And what’s on their
mind is what they don’t have. As convention demands, the story appears
to be very precise in its arsenal of weapons-related terminology –
they’re using a 12-gauge Thompson – and equally interested in its
details, but when you look closely at the way those details are
described you find that the language keeps heading in a particular
direction: ‘There was a hole in his chest that was big enough for a
loaf of bread.’ ‘Bread’, ‘sugar’, ‘crumbs’: this is a story about
food, not blood. The people are starving, and what riled the censors
was their hunger.

Fonseca’s stories – which are what made his reputation in Brazil –
haven’t until now been collected in English translation. Most of the
entries in ‘The Taker’ and Other Stories, a selection from Feliz Ano
Novo and his 1979 collection, O Cobrador, are nasty, brutish, short.
But they all play tricks with the form, and they’re never quite what
they seem. ‘Account of the Incident’ appears, at first, to be just
what its title suggests: a sober, factual report – of a traffic
accident. The specifics are recorded in full: the where (‘the bridge
over the Coroado River, at marker 53, in the direction of Rio de
Janeiro’); the what (‘a passenger bus of the Unica Auto Onibus firm,
licence plates RF-80-07-83 and JR-81-12-27’); the who. Five people
have been killed, and their bodies recovered from the river; their
names are listed – where they can be known – along with their ages and
marital status. It’s all very dry and routine, as if lifted from the
pages of a policeman’s notebook.

The only thing that makes the collision more than ordinary is the fact
that what the bus hit was a brown cow. Now, cows are intrinsically
absurd, especially when they’re brown, but the cow is only the
beginning. The accident was witnessed by ‘Elias Gentil dos Santos and
his wife Lucília, residents in the vicinity’. Elias asks Lucília to
run home and fetch a knife. Then Marcílio da Cunceição turns up, along
with Ivonildo de Moura Júnior. They’re all eyeing each other
suspiciously, and eyeing the dead cow. Elias jumps first, and starts
carving up the carcass, by which point Ivonildo’s mother-in-law
Aurélia has appeared, as have Erandir Medrado and his brother
Valfrido, and they’re all hopping around trying to get in on the
action. Sacks are brought, along with various sharp implements and, as
soon as local dignitaries start muscling in to demand their piece of
meat, we know that things have taken a Gogol-like turn. There’s
nothing left of the cow and, with this crazed escalation, the
‘account’ has become a fable. All the specificity with which the story
opens turns out to have been only a blind, a smokescreen: while an act
of prestidigitation keeps the eyes of the reportorial world on the
calamitous bus, the real action is taking place elsewhere, on the
bridge itself, where a cow is being chopped up by a succession of
loons. The truth isn’t in the facts, it’s in the fantasy.

Fonseca, who is now 83, has been one of those famously reticent
writers – he’s a friend of Thomas Pynchon – who chooses to say as
little as he can about what his fiction is meant to mean. One of the
distractions his biography throws up is that he worked for the Rio
police in the 1950s and 1960s: this is supposed to give him a licence
to write about violence, as if what he’s giving us is the documentary
dope, the news from the street. He doesn’t exactly dispel the
illusion. But the writing itself displays a suspicion of reported
fact. ‘The Taker’, which was inexplicably not banned by the censors,
relates the escalating exploits of a serial killer with an axe to
grind (or more precisely a machete, which he sharpens on a ‘special
stone’). As the Taker rapes and shoots his way through the streets of
Rio, there’s a distinct background hum from the media at large, which
distorts his actions and makes them loud. In the story’s logic, no one
notices the disappearance of yet another suburban banker until it’s
seen to be part of a pattern. ‘No More Safety in the Streets’: it’s
not until he dispatches a couple with serious connections that the
‘society columnists’ sit up and take note. He is known in the papers
as ‘o louco da Magnum’, or, in Clifford Landers’s clever rendering,
‘the Magnum maniac’. (Sometimes something is added in translation.)
But the papers he avidly reads don’t reflect what is revealed by his
first-person narration: he’s a poet, too, and he has a lot to give.

The Taker likes to share his verses with his potential victims. It
isn’t all good – ‘It wasn’t God or the Devil/who made me an avenger/it
was I myself/I am the Penis-Man/I am the Taker’ – and not everybody
knows how to respond to it. (‘Do you like movies?’ one nervous woman
interrupts him to ask.) But the poetry, which runs all the way through
the story, is a counterweight to those murmuring radios that
continuously babble about a madman on the loose: it’s an alternative
account, and it has its own narrative. It’s not only a self-justifying
means of expression for a man who has no other outlet, whose real
voice nobody otherwise will ever hear; it also has a notional
addressee: the rich, the fat, the smug. And it isn’t quite as
ingenuous as it sounds. As it builds to a climax, it comes over all
literary. ‘Eat caviar/your day is coming,’ he warns the soon to be
dead, in a curious echo of the Mayakovksy slogan that the sailors are
said to have chanted as they stormed the Winter Palace: ‘Eat
pineapples, chew on partridge/your last day is coming, bourgeois!’ It
rhymes in Russian, as a strict translation presumably can’t be made to
in any other language, which is why the Taker’s version – ‘Come
caviar/ teu dia vai chegar’ – is so euphoniously cunning.

Fonseca’s short stories bury their literary references, in contrast to
his novels, which parade their learning through a heady mix of high
art and low. The 1998 Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos, for
instance (published in Britain as The Lost Manuscript), is a thriller
about diamond smugglers and carnival artistes that is narrated by a
filmmaker obsessed with Isaac Babel. The stories’ subtlety with their
sources allows them, unlike the novels, to be read as pure noir
entertainment: ‘Night Drive’, in Landers’s translation, was first
published in Ellery Queen’s Prime Crimes 5. It’s one of Fonseca’s
simplest stories, and it’s only two pages long, but even here a great
deal is happening. It purports to describe the nocturnal activities of
a wealthy office worker who, it turns out, likes to take his swanky
car for a spin after dinner, using his impressive driving skills to
run down and kill random pedestrians.

‘Night Drive’ is a comedy. It begins with the man arriving home after
a hard day at work, ‘my briefcase bulging with papers, reports,
studies, research, proposals, contracts’. There’s a pleasing note of
self-importance to this list: bigwig that he is, he recognises the
attitude he ought to have to all the significant stuff he has to do.
He’s a character already. But since paperwork isn’t really what
interests him, he’s in fact a character pretending to be a different
character, performing his part with word-perfect ease. Something
similar happens with his wife, who as the story opens is playing
patience in bed, with a glass of whisky at her side. She knows how to
make herself comfortable. And she knows how to be the good wife. ‘You
look tired,’ she says as her husband enters, without looking up from
her cards. She doesn’t look up because she doesn’t need to: important
husbands are always tired at the end of the day, and good wives always
say sympathetic things. Usually, however, they’re required to pretend
that their sympathy is genuine; her words, like his, are spoken from a
script for a play she isn’t really acting.

It’s not just the language: the whole story is slightly askew. For
something so short it places an unusual emphasis on the passage of
time. There are several stages. The wife begins in bed, then visits
the husband in his study, then tells the maid to serve dinner. Dinner
stretches: ‘My son asked for money during the coffee course; my
daughter asked for money during the liqueur.’ It’s after the liqueurs
that the man goes out for his drive, but not before inviting his wife
along, knowing she’ll refuse because ‘it was time for her soap opera.’
He finds that the children’s cars are blocking the garage door, so he
has to carry out a lengthy set of manoeuvres: ‘I moved both cars and
parked them in the street, moved my car from the garage and parked it
in the street, put the other two cars back in the garage, and closed
the door.’ After killing his pedestrian, he comes back home and finds
his wife on the sofa watching TV. He goes to bed. There’s horror in
all this yawning slowness. The sequence of events is hard to argue
with – surely a wife can sit in bed drinking whisky before dinner –
but it’s oddly unsettling, as if the order has been shuffled; the fact
that each step is described in such laborious detail makes it all the
more nightmarish. And this is what the story is about, a collection of
nightmares: an empty life, an empty wife, words that don’t quite make
sense, objects that can’t quite be manipulated.

But there’s still the murder. Fonseca’s stories contain their literal
collisions – between bus and cow, between a car and a woman’s legs –
but, more unavoidably, they describe collisions between the rich world
and the poor. The poor kill the rich and the rich kill the poor, and
there are more complex entanglements too. A rich woman falls in love
with a poor man who befriends another poor man who blackmails the rich
woman. A poor man terrorises a rich man until the rich man snaps and
kills the poor one. A poor man nurses a rich man. A rich man nurses
the poor. The permutations are so various that in the end all you can
see are the patterns, and you realise that Fonseca is playing
formalist games with social divisions. When other writers address the
gulf between rich and poor, they do so from some kind of vantage
point; they are motivated by a need, conscious or not. Some want to
narrow the gap, to campaign. Others are driven by something like fear:
in much British fiction of the 1980s and 1990s – in Ian McEwan or
Martin Amis, say – the poor or their representatives erupt like an
insistent dream into middle-class life as stalkers or thugs. Fonseca
also writes about stalkers and thugs, but from both worlds at once.
And all that can reliably be said about the two worlds as they appear
in his fiction – since how can we know what he thinks? – is that
they’re a very long way apart.