The Collector of Leftover Souls Read online

  THE COLLECTOR

  OF LEFTOVER

  SOULS

  Copyright © 2019 by Eliane Brum

  Translation from the Portuguese copyright © 2019 by Diane Grosklaus Whitty

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published with the support of the Ministry of Citizenship of Brazil | National Library Foundation. Obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cidadania do Brasil | Fundação Biblioteca Nacional.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-64445-005-5

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-104-5

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2019

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931352

  Cover design: Kapo Ng

  Cover photo: Lilo Clareto, Portrait of Raimunda Gomes da Silva

  For Maíra, who grew into a woman,

  living with me between Brazils

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Between Worłds

  Forest of Midwives

  Burial of the Poor

  Crazy

  The Noise

  A Country Called Brasilândia

  Eva against the Deformed Souls

  In Demon Zé’s Brazil

  Adail Wants to Fly

  The Man Who Eats Glass

  Old Folks Home

  The Collector of Leftover Souls

  Living Mothers of a Dead Generation

  The Middle People

  The Voice

  João Asks Raimunda to Die with Him in Sacrifice

  Captivity

  The Woman Who Nourished

  Acknowledgments

  Translator’s Note

  Publication Acknowledgments

  THE COLLECTOR

  OF LEFTOVER

  SOULS

  INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN WORŁDS

  Being a journalist, or being the journalist I am, means putting on the skin of the Other. And the Other’s skin is language, the first world we each inhabit. Everyone who lives in the words of this book lives in the Brazilian language, in the Portuguese that came along with the colonizers but was invaded by the tongues of the indigenous peoples who were already living here, in Brazil’s before, and by the tongues of the various African peoples who reached this land enslaved. Among the many ways they rose up was to contaminate the masters’ vowels and consonants. They infected the body’s language, placing curves where the Portuguese colonizers had threatened right angles, acute and cutting. They made music where earlier the whip had cracked. What I call the Brazilian language—or Brazilian Portuguese—is a language of insurrections. My language and that of all the inhabitants of these pages.

  These real stories told in an insubordinate tongue have for the first time been rendered in English. That this encounter will not be an act of violence but of possibility is the dream contained within this book. Its publication comes at a time when part of the world is endeavoring to build ever higher walls to keep insurgent languages from invading those who deem themselves pure, those who fear contagion from other experiences in being. In this sense, this book, which carries the insurrections of my language into English, is also what books should be, a sledgehammer for demolishing barriers. If you have opened it, this book by a Brazilian journalist, it is because you don’t like walls either.

  Whenever I visit an English-speaking country, I notice Brazil doesn’t exist for most of you. Or exists only in the stereotype of Carnival and soccer. Favelas, butts, and violence. Lots of corruption, in recent years. In the first decade of this century, Brazil sparked global interest when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a metalworker who became president, performed a bit of magic, reducing poverty without touching the privileges of the wealthiest. What is called the First World really liked this magic, because it blurred the inequality explicit in the geopolitics of our planet, an inequity with deep historical roots. And it also made everyone happy without anybody having to lose anything in order to achieve a minimum level of social justice. As the following years proved, there is no magic. Since Brazil couldn’t perform magic, it returned to its place in the background of the “wealthy” world’s imagination. Nobody gets popular by saying wealth has to be distributed so that the expendables will stop dying from hunger and bullets.

  And then, in 2018, Brazil returned to the world spotlight because it elected Jair Bolsonaro, a man who defends torture and torturers; insults black people, women, and gays; and declares that minorities must vanish and that his opponents are destined for exile or jail. At the close of the 2010s, Brazil thus joined the ranks of countries that committed the contradictory act of voting down democracy by electing a defender of dictatorship. Once again, that which is unique or singular must resist between the lines, and small everyday insurrections are what make life hold steadfast in the face of a culture of death.

  Brazil is a country that exists only in the plural. The Brazils. In the singular, it’s an impossibility. Since we are the Brazils, and not Brazil, there are also many Brazilian tongues. My challenge as a reporter is reaching these diverse tongues and converting them into written words without reducing them or the world of their telling. This is a challenge I fail at while trying.

  The Brazils hold the largest part of the world’s largest tropical forest, strategic wealth in a world haunted by human-made climate change. The forest is a power at this moment when humans have quit fearing catastrophe to become the catastrophe they feared. Since 1998, I have been roaming the Amazons, listening to the stories of peoples, trees, and animals. As I write this introduction, I have been living in Altamira, a city in the Amazon forest, on the banks of the Xingu River, for a year.

  This book begins with a birth in the forest and ends with a death on the periphery of Greater São Paulo, the largest urban conglomeration in Brazil and one of the world’s ten largest. At more than twenty million, its population surpasses that of countries like Portugal and the Netherlands. When I’m not in the Amazons, I’m in this desert of buildings where rivers are interred and covered by concrete tombs, over which we walk, always in a rush. I make my body a bridge between such diverse Brazils.

  The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections brings together stories from two distinct moments in my life as a reporter. The shorter feature reports were written in 1999. I was working that year at Zero Hora, a newspaper in far southern Brazil, the region where I was born. Every Saturday, I had a column called “The Life No One Sees.” In this one-page space, I wrote stories about what we usually define as “ordinary people.” Those who don’t make the news in the paper. Or whose lives—and deaths—are reduced to a footnote so tiny it almost slides off the page. I wrote precisely to show there are no ordinary lives, only domesticated eyes. Eyes incapable of seeing
that every life is spun from the thread of the extraordinary.

  Resisting the domestication of our eyes by reaching for the singularity of each person’s life is what allowed me to stitch each small report together. The political content of these “unhappenings”—a word I invented to convey the journalism I do—is that no one is replaceable. So the lives of some cannot be worth more than the lives of others. Years later, this collection of stories became a book, and this book was awarded Brazil’s top literary prize in the journalism category.

  The eight short reports chosen for inclusion in the present book express what drives me as a journalist. How each person invents a life, naked and with so little, is what fascinates me. This is also what carries me through so many worlds and so many languages. I want to learn from these stubborn people how they lend meaning to what has none and create a human existence. Our life is our first fiction. This fiction, which we call reality, is the substance of my stories.

  Short reports, much investigating. I believe in news stories as documents of everyday history, as life told, as witness. I practice journalism with rigor, seeking precision and respecting the exact word. But also with the conviction that reality is an intricate fabric, sewn not only from words but also from textures, smells, colors, gestures. Marks. From voids, excesses, nuances, and silences. Ruins.

  My personal conception of reportage was constructed over the last thirty years, in which nearly every day of my life was devoted to reaching a world foreign to me—and a world that thought I was foreign. A news story is not only found out on the street, by getting your shoes dirty, as so often said. A news story also demands an initial radical movement: crossing the wide street of yourself. This is perhaps the most profound and also the hardest act. It demands that you uninhabit yourself to inhabit the Other, the world that is the Other. We become capable of accomplishing this only by listening with all of our senses, the kind of listening that palpates what is said as much as what goes unsaid, what sounds and resounds as much as what is silent. The texture of furniture as much as the choice of pictures on a wall. Smells and absences. Denials, frights, and hesitations. The incompleteness of bitten fingernails, the polish chosen or forgotten. The gaps. And the leftovers.

  A news story means stripping off the clothes of ourselves to don the Other. Stripping ourselves of biases, judgments, worldviews, in order to don another experience in being and existing on this planet. And then undertaking the long path back and giving birth to the words, which is the story told, crossed by the body of the one who has returned to share news from there. From a there that through the movement of the story becomes there and here.

  It is through this gesture that I also reach those for whom the word is not written. As a reporter, I have often found myself before illiterates who produce literature with their mouths. They have made me who I am, as much as the celebrated writers I’ve met on library shelves. Men and women who rest their hoes against a rock or lay their fishing rods down in the canoe to tell of their lives in a poetic prose born from a unique experience of the world. They tell their story generously, not realizing they create universes as they tell it. All of these people, now a multitude after thirty years, inhabit and infect me. There’s no asepsis in a real encounter with the Other.

  Seven of the nine longer feature stories in the present book were written in the first decade of this century, when I was working for a weekly newsmagazine called Época, in São Paulo, from 2000 to 2008. They are part of another book, entitled Olho da Rua—uma repórter em busca da literatura da vida real (Eye of the street: a reporter in search of the literature of real life). Many of these essays show what is nonnegotiable in the journalism I practice. In “Forest of Midwives,” I try to leave clear my absolute conviction, woven from experience, that listening is the main tool in reportage.

  As a reporter (and as a person), I’ve always thought that more important than knowing how to ask a question is knowing how to listen to the answer. When possible, I don’t even ask the first question. I think the first question says more about me than about the person I want to reach. The first question also hints to the interviewee about the reporter’s wishes. The first question is a form of control. And to be a good listener, I need to relinquish control. So I just say: “Tell me …” And it’s surprising where people begin telling their story.

  The richness of the midwives’ language and the way each of them expressed herself is the heart of the first chapter. They spoke with such beauty, with such amazing variety and profundity, that my work was minimal. It sufficed just to listen and write down every sigh to miss nothing. Not even if I’d wanted to, not even if I were writing fiction and had permission to make things up, would I have come close to the beauty with which they spoke. Especially in this story, my work as a reporter was to listen to each gesture, emphasis, facial expression, and put it all down on paper. It was almost like channeling living persons.

  It’s only a joy to be a reporter when we surrender to the story and let it turn us inside out. If I ever come back the same from a trip to the forest of Amapá or the periphery of São Paulo, I’ll give up journalism. Being a reporter is being reborn and re-creating oneself with each story. Preferably, through natural childbirth.

  If you’re a reader who reads as if you’re listening to music, you’ll notice that each story in The Collector of Leftover Souls has its own words, rhythms, and arrangements. If this were not the case, something fateful would have happened to me. I would have traversed the Brazils, and the Brazils inside each Brazil, but I would not really have left my own house. Without recognizing the Other’s language and the rhythm at which life is told within each different geography, I would be condemned to write only about myself and my restricted universe of language. Even if there were other names and supposedly other stories, I’d be the author of one single news report, with the same character: me.

  For “Old Folks Home,” I spent a week living in an institution that houses people from all social classes, reproducing inside the inequality from the outside. And I was soon overcome by the weight of those walls. I immediately felt cut off from the outer world. I adapt easily to the places I go—be it a tent in a mining region, a lean-to in a favela, or a room in a nursing home. I like knowing I have a home to return to, but I feel profoundly in my place out of place. And when I return, I have trouble adapting because of the intensity with which I surrendered. When I get home, I feel my body has been elongated, stretched between two worlds. I have one foot left there, an elbow, sometimes an eye. I have to pull myself back slowly, sometimes by the hair.

  For me, writing is a physical, carnal act. Those who know me know the literalness of how I live. And primarily the literalness of how I write. I am what I write. This is not a rhetorical image. I feel as if every word, written inside my body with blood, fluids, and nerves, were really made of blood, fluids, and nerves. When the text becomes written word, a code on the computer screen, it is still my flesh. I feel physical pain, real and concrete, during this birth. I am overtaken by this experience.

  Sometimes people ask me: Do you get involved with your sources? Of course I do. We don’t enter someone else’s life with impunity. Sometimes I feel too insufficient. I know that no life fits completely into words. But some experiences are even more rebellious, refusing to become subject, verb, and predicate. They escape, slip away into language without converting into writing. This is what happened in “The Middle People.” I was the first journalist to reach the Amazon forest community whose story is told in this chapter. I was immediately overcome by angst. How could I witness the struggle of a handful of forgotten Brazilians, invisible and so fragile, living well beyond the (readers’) ends of the earth, and tell this in a few paragraphs or pages?

  The journey to Middle Land was one of those moments that can’t be reduced to writing. Just like my love for the Amazon, which is well beyond any destination anywhere in the world, and my gratitude for the assignment that led me to this region, an improbable place even for the Amazo
n. When this happens, this inability to transform what is lived into writing, all that is left us is to humbly accept these limits. And to feel a secret joy over the privilege of living something that can’t be said.

  My report, so insufficient given the size of the reality, was decisive in stopping the Middle People from dying by bullet. After the story, the leaders—Herculano, Raimundo, and Manchinha—were fished out of the forest, put on a plane, and taken to the official Brazil, that of Brasilia, to tell ministers of state what they were living through. They came to exist for the other Brazils. Little River became an extractive reserve protected by federal law. And today I am spoken of in the history that the elders verbally pass down to the younger ones. We have grown old together, I and they, and we have witnessed the youth who have begun fighting for the forest with which they merge. This is one of those moments when the joy of being a reporter doesn’t fit into words. It is worth a life.

  I believe the best news stories are the result of an assignment that got complicated. If a colleague asks me for advice, I begin by saying, “Complicate your assignment.” The idea that comes easily is always the most obvious, the one that’s in your head because it was already somewhere else before. For years, I had tried to convince various bosses of mine that journalism had the ethical obligation to show it can’t be “normal” for a generation of Brazilian youth, most of them black, to have a life expectancy of twenty. But since newsrooms had been overrun in recent decades by middle-class journalists, most of them white, it was hard to convince them. These journalists grew up and became adults in a country where the death of young black people is a daily unhappening as “natural” as a traffic jam in São Paulo.

  I was able to start my report on “Living Mothers of a Dead Generation” only when I complicated my assignment. There was something that ran through the tension between races and social classes, something I had fought on other fronts but that could form a bridge between worlds: the myth of motherhood. So I decided to tell of the children’s deaths through their mothers’ pain. The pain for which, yet again, there is no word in my language. Nor in yours. The mother who loses a child is not an orphan, not a widow. This pain has been left out of language.