Читать книгу Vita - João Biehl - Страница 13

Life of the Mind

As we passed through the gate of the infirmary, my eyes immediately turned to a woman seated in a wheelchair in the shade. She was writing. “It’s Catarina,” I told my wife, Adriana. This time, Catarina was no longer riding her bicycle. Death was coming upon her, I thought.

With her head down, Catarina held a pen and scribbled with much effort. We greeted her by name, and she looked up, recognizing us. “João and Adriana,” she said.

Catarina seemed dazed; she spoke slowly and with great difficulty, as if she had suffered a stroke. We asked how she was doing. “My legs don’t help anymore,” she replied, adding that this problem was a result of “rheumatism,” although she was not taking any medication for it. “Sometimes the volunteers give me pills, but I don’t know what they are.”

What are you writing?

“This is my dictionary,” she said. “I write so that I don’t forget the words. I write all the illnesses I have now, and the illnesses I had as a child.”

Catarina handed me her book. Her handwriting was uneven. The words were composed in block letters, with no cursive writing, and with few verbs or full sentences. I was amazed by the force of the words, by her ragged poetry:

Divorce

Dictionary

Discipline

Diagnostics

Marriage for free

Paid marriage

Operation

Reality

To give an injection

To get a spasm

In the body

A cerebral spasm

Why do you call it a dictionary?

“Because it does not require anything from me, nothing. If it were mathematics, I would have to find a solution, an answer. Here, there is only one subject matter, from beginning till the end. . . . I write it and read it.”

I perused the dictionary, as Adriana spoke with Catarina. “In the womb of pain,” she had written. “I offer you my life.” “The present meaning.” Amid recurring references to medical consultations, hospitals, and public notaries, she wrote of a working woman and wanderer, of sexual emotion and mental disturbance, of medication and food for a baby, of poverty and abundance, of officers and indebtedness, and of things being “out of justice.”

Blended with allusions to spasms, menstruation, paralysis, rheumatism, paranoia, and the listing of all possible diseases from measles to ulcers to AIDS were names such as Ademir, Nilson, Armando, Anderson, Alessandra, Ana. Here and there, she wrote of motherhood; of divorce; of a rustic life with sows and insects, veterinarians and a Rural Workers Association; and of desire. Striking statements from a world that was no more.

Question, answer, problem to solve, the head

Who contradicts is convicted

The division of bodies

Then there were expressions of longing:

Recovery of my lost movements

A cure that finds the soul

The needy moon guards me

With L I write Love

With R I write Remembrance

Catarina writes to remain alive, I told myself.³³ These are the words that form her from within. What are the ways of these words? How to tell it all, and what are we to do with it?

Dictionary