MOLDY STRAWBERRIES, Queer short stories translated from Portuguese for lucky Anglophone readers

MOLDY STRAWBERRIES
CAIO FERNANDO ABREU (tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato)
Archipelago Books
$20.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In eighteen exhilarating stories, Caio Fernando Abreu navigates a Brazil transformed by the AIDS epidemic and stifling military dictatorship of the ’80s. Suspended between fear and longing, Abreu’s characters grasp for connection. A man speckled with Carnival glitter crosses a crowded dance floor and seeks the warmth and beauty of another body. A budding office friendship between two young men grows into a “strange and secret harmony.” One man desires another but fears that their complot might crumble with one clumsy word or gesture. Junkies, failed revolutionaries, poets, and conflicted artists face threats at every turn. But, inwardly ferocious and resilient, they heal. For Abreu there is beauty on the horizon, mingled with the light of memory and decay.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The author of this collection, dead from AIDS this quarter century past, was a Bright Young Thing when the stories collected here appeared forty years ago. He was thirty-four at the time...hardly a stripling, but still in the early stages of Becoming A Writer. The world of 1982 didn't have a lot of openly gay Brazilians, and the specter of AIDS was sending most who might've come out back in to the closet. Not Abreu. Reading this collection, I understand why he started something with these stories, he ignited a kind of votary's flame that burns to light the path for those to come.

But believe you me, there are stories in here that he would've either suppressed or revised heavily were he around to consult on the publication. Things that rang the bell of the 1982 queer world (ask yourself if you even know what "Strawberry Fields" is, still less what it means to the people in 1982) are flat, or worse flat-out bad in the harsher glare of 2022's light. To be expected, of course, since Time is the arbiter of taste in all arts. Not an infallible one either. Structurally there are rules that survive and ones that are flouted so often that the flouting becomes a rule of its own. More often than not, Orthodoxy reasserts itself; the rebels who become pooh-bahs in the New Order resist the next big thing. How many Gertrude Stein imitators are there, versus how many Virginia Woolf wannabes? Time has ruled, Stein is the oddity and Woolf the innovator, both lesbian, neither conventionally inclined. Only one is Canon, though.

So this collection strikes me, at forty years' remove from its birth, as more a Steinian moment than a Woolfesque one.

I shall hereafter use the Bryce Method to elucidate my opinion of each piece within the whole.

Moldy
Dialogue isn't, really; it's one person insistently pounding the other with their deep, intense, insecure demand for the other's attention, the other's focus; it devolves into the single, unignorable demand: "I want it."

No prizes for guessing what "it" is. 3.5 stars, a bit too hommage à Beckett for this old man.

The Survivors is an ironic title for a story of the vaguely pretentious, arty sorts who persist in the perpetual student lifestyle long past the time it's cute. These are the overeducated, the underemployed, the solipsistic folk who trade references and quotes thinking it's wit not self-defense against the cloudbanks of ignorance we grope our way through.

“I’ve read everything, man, I’ve tried macrobiotics psychoanalysis drugs acupuncture suicide yoga dance swimming jogging astrology roller-skating Marxism Candomblé gay clubs ecology, all that’s left is this knot in my chest, so now what do I do?”

It was easy, no doubt, to feel the urgency of this in a Brazil under repressive dictatorship, the specter of AIDS, and the global economic crisis that bit Latin America so hard. Now it feels a bit like the drama is overstated, the stakes weren't what you thought they were, and isn't everything so much worse today...exactly what these types were thinking, in other words. 4 stars

The Day Uranus Entered Scorpio (Old Story with Benefits) doesn't pull its focus properly...unsurprising, given the author's youth when crafting it...to bring into the frame more than a suggestion of background. I suppose one could argue that youth, that most fleeting of moments, is timeless because it's got such a foreshortened perspective. There is only the narrator, MEMEME, in the City! At last, you older readers will hear, even though he never says it...this is It, The Place, Central Spot of All Things!

It was Saturday night, almost summer, and there were so many concerts and plays and full bars and parties and movie premieres at midnight and people meeting and motorcycles zooming by around the city, and it was so hard to give all that up to stay in the apartment reading, watching other people’s joy through the window, or trying to find some sliver of meat on the bones of the cold chicken left over from lunch.

People appear, disappear, say or do something, or don't–very pointedly...very Nouvelle Vague without the structural chops to carry it off effectively. And yet, there that quoted passage is, the other side of the coin, the happiest things are underpinned or undercut depending on the day, by the loneliest darkest nights you'll ever spend. It was a good iteration of the oft-told tale. Not enough to get more than 3.5 stars, though

Passing Through a Great Sorrow starts deeply unpromisingly with an instructional epigraph: To be read to the soundtrack of Erik Satie. Oh gawd. What early-20s arty-queer-boy bilge will now overwhelm my desire to continue reading, nay breathing. But the scene Abreu sets, the self-contained world of Home invaded and colonized, made over by the irrevocably lost world of the ignorable landline ringing ("I was out/asleep, sorry I missed your call" isn't believable today the way it was then) and being answered.

The light from the streetlamp filtered in through the lace of the curtains, bluish, mixing with the washed-out color of the film. Before the phone rang a third time, he decided to get up—to check the name of the piece, he told himself, then headed to the other room, through the narrow hallway where his pants brushed against the striated leaf of a plant, as they always did. I need to find a new place for it, he thought, as he always did. And before reaching for the phone on the bookcase, he bent down over the records scattered across the floor, between an overflowing ashtray and a ceramic mug, nearly empty except for some residue at the bottom that formed a green paste. "Désespoir Agréable", he confirmed. Standing there, he grabbed the white sleeve and put it on the table while repeating in his head: either way, despair. And pleasant.

Apart from the ashtray, I've lived that scene of inconsolable grief. (And my soundtrack was different, too.) But this phone conversation is so perfect in its everything-and-nothing intimacy as friend reaches out, grieving friend wonders how to reach back, and they explain their love to each other in the quiet ways of real, connected, found-family friends. 4.5 stars

Beyond the Point runs at the frantic pace of the narrator, trying to get to a much-desired tryst.

It was raining, raining, raining, and I was going into the rain to meet him, no umbrella or anything, I was always losing them in bars, I was holding just a bottle of cheap cognac tight against my chest, hard to believe it said this way, but that was how I was going through the rain, a bottle of cognac in hand and a wet pack of cigarettes in my pocket.

Like Chekhov's gun, that bottle goes off...shatters...and with it the hopes of the narrator for some surcease of lust, scintilla of a connection. Effective, fast-paced, very strongly restrained unlike other equally lust-based pieces. 4.5 stars

Companheiros strips identities to labels, communication to reports, and meaning to flat, affectless surfaces.

Like moral intercourse, or an ethical or ethereal fuck, who knows to what exquisite levels of abstraction, perversity, or evasion certain fucks can get to. He considered his wounds, while totally submerged in the slow blues, strong tobacco, and bitter coffee, which was sometimes replaced by cognac (dense) or wine (dry). Between one word or another, he was capable of stopping himself so he could take some objective measures, like emptying the ashtrays changing the records serving the drinks opening the wiindows then shutting them right after, quickly, to keep out the bats.

It's not a surprise that Abreu went to these parties...these were his people, his tribe, and he knew them so well that he couldn't stand them, couldn't stand loving them another second. So he painted their portraits in words. 4 stars, barely.

Fat Tuesday pulses and pounds with the energy of Carnaval, the lust that springs to life out of freeing yourself from the quotidian pettifoggery of life under a dictatorship. It was one of those that explicitly rejects your personal right to be (not just "yourself" but "AT ALL"). This story does, and does it with such astonishing economy and beauty from the first words:

Suddenly, he started to dance beautifully and walk toward me. He looked me in the eye with a discreet smile, a tense wrinkle between his brows, asking for reciprocity. I gave it to him, with a discreet smile as well, my mouth sticky from all the warm beer, vodka with coke, cheap whiskey, tastes I couldn't even discern anymore, going from hand to hand in plastic cups.

I hope you've had that experience. It is a huge rush. It also, all too often and in far too many places, ends as horribly as this night does for our lovers. Separated and separately made to pay for their crimes and sins against "what *I* think is right for everyone." 4.5 stars

I, You, He is absolutely the most boldly, bodily sexual of these stories. I can imagine that it cost Abreu a bit of his social capital to bring it out. The mingling implicit in the title of the story goes throughout tthe experience of sex, remembered or conjured or fantasized, but very honestly chronicled until it comes up to the pleasure of satiation. There, it leaves off.

I listen attentively to the water running through the tap, the brush grating against his teeth, the water in the toilet taking to the sewer the crap rejected by his intestines, the water washing the signs of sleep from the corners of his eyes, the cold water from the shower invigorating his muscles, the hot water for his coffee, I listen to it all. And water, water, water, and water, I repeat to myself each morning, and even if I spend the rest of the day under the sheets, my hand inventing hidden pleasures between my legs, there's always a part of me that goes with him on the busy streets, on the dirty path catching the metallic sparks from the cars, as he doles out his first fake smiles of the day, out and about, following his well-plotted script without any hesitation. He knows what he wants, that pig. And he knows exactly how to get it.

He...you...or "me"? In this story, you'll never entirely know who addresses and who's addressing what to whom. It leaves its body-ness to the realms of words, without the sensations that accompany piloting a body through space in this life.

But this face of mine, newly awakened, slowly refreshed and without a single sigh, because there's nothing to mourn, it crudely thinks, this barefaced face: so let's not part ways, the three of us. When I believe I'm out, I'm in. And when I guess I'm in, I'm out. Of you or him, of me in me, embedded triplicity, though it might seem confusing I think about it this way, and it is nearly clear as the city roars in the background and I lean this body of ours over the seven overpasses: embedded triplicity, strange triplicity, intertwined triplicity.

Repetitive, chant-like, as real as internal monologue can ever be outside the monologuist's head and heart. 4.5 stars

Light and Shadow just...no.

There must be some sort of meaning, or what would come after? This is the kind of stuff I’m thinking about this afternoon, standing here by the window, facing the endless zinc rooms where doves sometimes land, cooing. They’re gray, the doves, and the sound they make is sinister like the sound of bat wings. I know bats really well, their sharp shrieks, screeches. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I think that if I manage to make some sense out of what I’m saying, I will also, therefore, make some meaning. At the same time, or maybe right after, I think that I don’t know for sure that after this sense and meaning comes anything else.

He was over thirty when he wrote that. It sounds like he was channeling his inner thirteen-year-old, and that it isn't meant ironically (in this case I'd plump for "facetiously" if it were). Whatever else I say, let me acknowledge here how much I admire the translator's passionate commitment to this writer's work. 3 stars

Strawberries
Transformations destabilized me...it's an effective piece about a man, not young, trying to contextualize the disoriented, disorienting onset and submergence into mental illness. "The Great Absence" as he terms it is a very apt name for an indescribable...void, a not-there-ness where there has always before been there there. It's imagistic, seems to me to describe something like dissociative identity disorder, and will live in my dreams for the rest of my life. 5 stars

Sergeant Garcia explicates the nature of a man's drive to dominate, expressly in training raw recruits for military service, turning into the more complete lust to possess another man's body. Explicit enough to surprise me as a product of Brazil's 1980s, most especially the explicitness of using a military man as the seducer of innocent youth. (The violated young man, as he leaves the motel where Sergeant Garcia has half-raped, half-awakened him: Tomorrow, I finally decided, tomorrow I’ll start to smoke. Because, well, it's all over anyway.) The risks taken here are, I think, mitigated by the verve of Abreu's pornographic setting (very 1980s porn-film aesthetic, let's say). 4 stars but easily, with a lighter touch of the dirty brush, been five.

Photographs: 18x24 : Gladys
–and–
Photographs: 3x4 : Liège
These are some of the most gentle, least sarcastic pieces of writing in the collection. It's telling that Abreu reserves his tenderest mien for the two transwomen whose searches for self-love, as well as love, barely interseect with the desired end. They are beautifully told tales, and given half the chance would've grown into a novel, or a novel-in-stories. There are such beauties in these brave souls. 4.5 stars

Pear, Grape, Apple made me cringe...I expect my own therapst feels like this poor, bored, overdemanded shrink. I felt so much pity for the problem of what to do about someone whose ability to cope with actual life is so severely compromised...running into a funeral procession to achieve self-knowledge sounds like someone hallucinating to me...but, oh how frustrating to be on the other side of the wall wondering whether to close the gate or not. Still, the incantatory language felt more like a trick than a spell, so 3.5 stars

Still Life is not very good, I fear. It's...overheated, a bit humid, in its fervency. While there's an undeniably intriguing energy in this paean to longing for Love while lovin' on the one you're with, knowing he's Mr. Right Now at best...the verve of the language is charming but is not used to bring something out of the material. It's all potential energy.

Behind all the artifice, the only thing you'll never grasp is that in this moment you possess the unbearable beauty of something entirely alive. Like a trapeze artist who only notices the absence of the net after the jump, you turn on the lamp in the corner after turning off the overhead light.

Jeez, son, dim down a notch, k? Pyrotechnics in search of a holiday! 3.5 stars because they're serious pyrotechnics

Music Box uses the titular object to reflect a sad, angry murder's inevitability, its disgusting and cruel and pointless violence the one and only consequence of Love unreturned, unrequited, yet too well satiated. 4 stars for the sudsy soapy goodness

The Day Jupiter Met Saturn (Another Colorful Story) reminds me of all the times I missed connections I wished I'd made. Predicting the suicide of someone famous (if you know who he is) to the sweet young thing you want to make some love with, well. Yeah. But it's a missed connection.

(Silence)

"How do you know?"

"What?"

"That guy will kill himself?"

"I know a lot of things. Some haven't even happened yet."

"I don't know anything."

"I can teach you how to know, though not how to feel. I don't feel anything, haven't for a long while."

"I only feel, but don't know what the feeling is. When I do, I don't understand it."

"No one understands it."

These are very young people; they're still playing at the full-strength love and passion that claim us in the end, though rarely to the point of suicide thank goodness. 4 stars

Those Two comes within an ace of perfection of pitch, of voice. Two men, Raul and Saul, not young and still unaware of getting older, meet at work and...something...happens. They discover a mutual artistic, musical passion in old-fashioned tango and bolero music.

Their desks stood next to each other. Nine hours a day, minus one for lunch. And lost in the middle of what Raul (or was it Saul?) would months later call "a desert of souls," so they wouldn't feel so cold, so thirsty, or simply because they were human, which didn't excuse them—or, rather, excused them fully and deeply, in the end: what else was there for these two but, little by little, to grow close, to really get to know one another, to get entangled? So that's what happened, so slowly they barely noticed it.

It becomes their love-language as shared delight always does. Songs (the translator made a playlist for us global-Northerners!) substitute for feeling unsayable, unreachable except through that medium, or sex. Of course, this is long before even Abreu could dream of safety in queerness so there's the obligatory downbeat ending, but...this is important to me...no death. Neither man dies...and really, is that a mercy after all? 5 stars, hands down the best story here

Moldy Strawberries brings a meditative close to the collection. It's a man of thirty-five with an undefined illness (a "cancer in {his} soul"} to be treated, per the doctor whose dentures and oral-sex habits we're enjoined to meditate upon as he signs "a good check," such a telling detail!, as his tranq prescription...five milligrams three times daily is all...leads him into the limbo of the libido.

It's a struggle to understand how Abreu found this in "Strawberry Fields." I guess, in the end, it's Lennon's death, the dawning of middle age, the not-fun side effects of so many helpful psych drugs, and so much anxiety larded on top of your own world by The World. It's...wearing down, it's shutting up shop, it's just like a naked, depressed Brazilian queer standing on an overpass thinking about ending up in a red splat down on the road. 4 stars, but it's less a bravura performance now than I expect it was in 1982.