Black, the night. The straight, falling hair, Black. Black, the instants that followed. And I… I, blackly seated upon my supernatural silence in the living room of my house. Watched by her Machiavellian eyes (and so alone). LOOking intO her deep eyes of black emOtions. Defiant. Diabolically black. Castaway of a dream. Of an affair with time. Black times. I see her now, hour after hour; she stares at me, throws down the gauntlet and I accept the challenge, I take the risks. I remember her curves and I bow to the danger that she is. Still. She says nothing. Speaks nothing. Doesn’t even blink. Behind the glass, she persists in her black smile, in her artist’s poses. Mona Lisa. Torturing black eyes. Sadistic eyes. I, masochist. I sense an uncertain feralness in her Ginsbergian smile. i lie to myself as I ignore her beauty. I can’t resist. I surrender to reality. Razor. Serpent with a treacherous tongue. Wanton malignant one. Her venom. Her truthful remarks.
black, the memory of her. The straight, falling hair. Faint dark cloud. The instants… black. I flee down morbid streets that dwell in my mind. i scatter myself across mental highways. Her eyes, high beams on. Rendingly, they pour out whirlwinds of memories. Still. She says nothing. Speaks nothing. doesn’t even blink. I wage battles against beings strange to me. i fight dada dragons: mutant, enigmatic. i kiss her cold eyes. I fall to my knees. i kiss her feet, her hairs, while you savour my fear. Iceberg. Indifference torments me. There is no ointment to disguise or soothe it. It sets my fear loose; I curse. I insist on running madly through the labyrinth of my intellect. Exhausted. Bound, the senses. Fallen into the cloister of your selfishness. I search my eyes for some guardian to untie me from this psychogothic tower in which I am a slave. Prisoner. And at every step, a trapdoor opens. Passages more than secret in my castles of horror. Wanderer.
Sculpturally sculpted, the symmetrical pleonasms of your fingers, your arms, your eyes. Shelter, I seek. I find none. I tremble. Lost in the cyclones of the inconsistent unconscious. Lost in tears on which I sail without a compass. Alone. Only me and black memories. Your voice still echoing through the glass of the picture frame. Once more, for one more daydream. I throw myself off psychobridges. Accidental suicide in oneiric existences.
I kill myself, once more, with every electrical impulse of my brain, with every smudged letter on a sheet of paper. Executed by the hand of my own illusions with a full-stop shot.
[‘Free Flight’, in: ARANHA, Glaucio. A sensação de não estar no todo [The feeling of not being in the whole]. Rio de Janeiro: Ciências e Cognição, 2025.]
Translated from the Brazilian Portuguese; reviewed by the author.
Translator’s notes
- “LOOking intO her deep eyes of black emOtions”: the original, OlhandO seus OlhOs, capitalizes the letter O at the edges of the words, drawing eyes into the text itself. The translation imitates the effect with the letters available in English.
- The lowercase letters at the beginning of some sentences follow the original.
- “It sets my fear loose; I curse”: the original, Liberta meu medo impreco, is deliberately elliptical; impreco means “I curse” or “I call down imprecations”.
- A sensação de não estar no todo: title of the book in which the text was published, kept in Portuguese; literally, “The feeling of not being in the whole”.
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