BOLEROS
STORYLINE
STORYLINE
In the 90’s, in
the country side of the State of Bahia, a movie theater manager is in charge of
cutting hot sex and nude scenes that abounds in American movies. After a while
in the job, he develops a rare vascular disease known as "priapism": a
penile intumescence with intermittent episodes of continuous erection, which
leads him to be abused by local rich women.
PLOT
1st PART – The Comedy
The story takes place in the beginning of the 70's. In the town of
Itambé, Bahia, TV broadcasting is but a vague promise; the town’s cultural life
orbits around Cine Fox Movie Theater. This theater, one of a chain of
movie theaters spread throughout the Southwest region, can show a new movie
every day and its employees take the town streets to plaster color posters of
the "day's" movie.
The 60’s sexual revolution invades the screens and starts to deeply
upset the town’s more conservative segments Walter Ives, Cine Fox’s
manager, spends its afternoons in the projection booth cutting hot nude and sex
scenes on the movies sent from the capital, so he can show them without having
to bother with protest screams from the audience. With the cut frames,
he would assemble an incoherent film sequence of passionate kisses, rapes and
sexually explicit scenes, which, for being stripped of any plots, would lend
its doubtful eroticism to the rites of most unrestrained pornography.
For having seen too many repetitions of such porn pics in squatting
positon – or perhaps because of the curses uttered by the audience disgusted
with the cuts – Walter Ives develops a circulatory disease with marked
psychological features known as priapism, an intumescence of the penis with
intermittent episodes of erection that can last an average of four hours.
Walter Ives – a blond and blue-eyed man,
prematurely weary due to that disgraceful illness, suffers an outbreak that
erases his personality and charisma, as if his entire being would stiffen. He
becomes expressively unexpressive. In the movie, he behaves as the incarnation
of the very censorship he would practise. Society would conceal him as a taboo,
but at the same time would choose him as the totem of an orgiastic burst of repressed
sexuality.
In order to seek cure and hide such shameful illness etiology, Walter
Ives resigns his post as manager and retires form social life, and sequestered
himself at Lubiana Borges's house, his sister-in-law. This is when,
the situation being set up, the action goes on until a new situation is
established [1]. At 3 pm, at Linda Len's brothel, police chief
Jorge Querido is taken from the arms of the brothel keeper to an emergency
meeting with the mayor, the justice and the priest. The first
sun rays would see the street where Walter Ives lives on surrounded by police
barriers and the neighbours being removed from their homes until a vet would
arrive at the place. Walter Ives’ mother and sister-in-law tries to calm
down the panicked people by stating that it wasn’t any risks of contagious
diseases, but at the same time hesitating in giving any explanations about what
was going on because...
...they have
promised to the patient not to disclose the nature of the illness that shamed
him so much, Locked up in his bedroom, Walter Ives would observe the curious
onlookers through a slit on the window pane. From that angle, he could see the
excitement of the boys when discovering in his garbage bin the collection of
frames he took years to amass. The boys would hold the frames against the
sunlight close an eye and take pleasure with the parade of female nude stars
(…) a procession of breasts and butts that the town had never seen before
thanks to the scissors of the zealous guardian of public morals. A crowd at the
corner look the frames and make spicy comments… (Eros Curiates. Unpublished
novel by the same author, 2004)
The unexpected shutdown of the movie theater, apart from protests,
raised a wave of rumours about the manager’s mysterious disease; people mention
epidemics, possession, alchemy… Such rumours are fuelled by the participation
of many secondary characters:
Edgar Dênia – a radio broadcaster operating a
loudspeaker system at the market plaza in the church garden, who digs into the
bizarre and funny side of the disease on his “daily reports”. Among his
gullible listeners are:
Carlos Carnaval - a rude door-to-door milk
salesman, who rode the back of an old ass. He believes that
the manager is transforming into a donkey. He is waiting for the opportunity to
make an offer to the patient's family. He wants to retire and travel with
a talking-donkey in a great circus of the capital!
Elso Costureiro – A homosexual who came out of the
closet, collector of movie posters, and fashion stylist who gets his
inspiration from those posters to tailor clothes for Itambé's high-society
He is an enemy to the manager for stealing the posters from the
street walls and for feeling deprived of the torrid scenes the manager's scissors
cut from the movies. Elso proudly claims that the manager disease is due
to a curse he casted on Walter Ives and that would only be removed if the
police gives him back all the posters of his collection they have seized.
Doctor Carneiro – a Veterinarian who, in the
absence of a doctor - a fairly common fact at that time in small towns of the
Brazilian Northeastern region – would diagnose and prescribe medications to
patients, wearing his apron stained with ox manure.
Jorge Querido - The Police Chief investigating the fact with his truculent methods, and Linda Len – his mistress, the brothel keeper at the “Gimba Jardim" and that tries to solve the manager's problems by offering him her loving "professional services".
A VW beetle with tinted windows that runs around the town the whole day long, equipped with a “Rodstar” tape-player, which plays boleros sung by Núbia Lafaiete, Waldick Soriano and Agostinho dos Santos at top volume. At the ending, the car is found out to belong to a thug hired by Representative Agenor Geraldo, which has a decisive role in the final resolution of the story.
Jorge Querido - The Police Chief investigating the fact with his truculent methods, and Linda Len – his mistress, the brothel keeper at the “Gimba Jardim" and that tries to solve the manager's problems by offering him her loving "professional services".
A VW beetle with tinted windows that runs around the town the whole day long, equipped with a “Rodstar” tape-player, which plays boleros sung by Núbia Lafaiete, Waldick Soriano and Agostinho dos Santos at top volume. At the ending, the car is found out to belong to a thug hired by Representative Agenor Geraldo, which has a decisive role in the final resolution of the story.
Lubiana Borges’ home, where in a backroom Walter Ives hides, without
talking to anybody, where now there is a continual coming and going of curious
onlookers and women that can barely hold back the hellish excitement that the
patient’s condition arouses on them. One of them, a bolder woman, when alone
with Lubiana in the kitchen when the first was making some coffee, takes a bill
from her purse and asks the friend to take a peep at the
"aberration".
Reluctantly, with the eyes stared at the bill, Lubiana takes the friend
to the backroom, picks up a lantern, ask the friend to remove her shoes and,
after she is assured that her brother-in-law is snoring in deep sleep, sneaks
into the room.
Covered by a long checked eiderdown, which looked like a tent supported
by a rigid pole, Walter Ives sleeps, with his mouth open, shown by the light of
the lantern. Lubiana slowly removes the eiderdown. The camera focuses on
the reddened and dumbfounded face of the fearless onlooker.
A sequence of
astonished and lustful female faces confirms that such “visits” have become a
routine and illegitimate trade. Visible changes in the set, in the
clothes and ways of Lubiana Borges insinuate that the family started to profit
with the latent phallocracy of the people of that town.
Lubiana Borges – Left behind by Walter Ives's
brother, with two little children, a mother-in-law and an ill brother-in-law to
take care of, Lubiana creates a sordid scheme to “earn some change” and,
secretly take a revenge on the society that is always demanding the chastity
and the decency that her “lustful” temperament cannot deliver. Her gestures are artificial and her nervous
“twitches” reveal a neurotic soul. She is a municipal librarian and
secretly reads Cassandra Rios's* novels and the Carlos Zéfiro’s “catechisms”**.
Walter Ives's condition worsens with every passing
day. His sleep is riddled with grotesquely animalistic nightmares. The interval
between the priapic crises is shorter and shorter and he spends more and more
time in the bedroom, in bed, under a catatonic listlessness. Lack of exposure
to sunlight makes his skin greenish, a color similar to that of a tree bark. In
a reference to the years of censorship, all the nude scenes of the manager will
have a convenient light black ball covering his private parts. He complains to
Doctor Carneiro of frequent erotic dreams which cannot make him have an orgasm
to relieve him, even momentarily.
...In one of
those dreams, Walter Ives is an ass mounted by an unknown rider during the
Brazilian Independence Day parade on September 7. The revolting pain of
his swollen genitalia is translated, in the dream, as the tip of a huge
donkey's penis dragging on the cobblestones of the street. Besides Walter
Ives, an elegant and brushed donkey, rode by Dom Pedro I, shows its teeth and
is booed by the crowd. Walter Ives is deeply embarrassed. The
donkey on his side tells him: Take it easy, cousin! Do like I do…
always go ahead… marching, shitting and being applauded! (ibid)
Doctor Carneiro
indicates an emergency transfer of the patient to a urology clinic in the
capital, but the family contends that it cannot afford it, in spite of the
perverse sister-in-law’s ostentation.
An evening,
after having a "peep" at the sleeping sick man, Dona Dinorah, wife of
the Banco do Brasil manager, removes all the jewels from her body,
necklace, earrings, bracelets... puts almost one hundred grams of gold in
Lubiana’s hands and implores to stay just half an hour alone with Walter Ives. What
takes places in there is not shot, but the image of Dinorah sneakily leaving
the bedroom is suggestive of everything. Soon, a sinister scheme is set
up at the back of the house.
From then on, we can see long night queues of women hidden in the bush
that threatens to engulf the back portion of the house, as if Nature also
claims the satyr incarnate there. With a suitable slingshot, Walter
Ives's sister-in-law keeps some post lights unlit, organise the schedules and
deploy the queues behind strategic bushes and trees, thus avoiding that the
women can recognize one another and the embarrassment that would follow. In
full-moon nights she can be seen leading by her hands a furtive and masked lady
through the backdoor, on her neck the shining key of a safe full of gold and
silver, her reprehensible fees.
The orgy could last forever, since such visits to the catatonic patient,
besides exciting him to a paroxysm of erection and blockage would also keep him
passive and mute under the under the rage of the witches; nevertheless, one of
the chosen ones grew weak and broke the code of silence governing the sordid
trade. In a night in April, the entire town was awakened by the hysterical
screams of Dona Solange, a millionaire Portuguese widow, owner of a countless
herd of cattle. OH, I’M COMING! MAY SAINT IGNATIUS HELP ME! THEY ARE
TEARING THE SEAMS OF MY SOUL! Walter Ives’s mother entered the bedroom and saw
the widow shaking her hips and delighting on what was left of her son, her
flaccid flesh still vibrating with the billionth and uncontrollable orgasm
(ibid)
* * *
2nd PART – The Tragedy
After the scandal, Lubiana and her family hastily moved to the capital,
taking with her the money she had earned. Walter Ives is left to the care
of an old maid and a lawyer was hired to take care of the case. The
narrative then gains a confessional nature, since that lawyer, Cassi Aguiar,
when feeling sorry for the abandoned patient, takes on the task of taking care
of him, and takes him along with the old maid to his home and becomes the
narrator of the development and ending of the story.
CASSI AGUIAR – Besides the legal profession, his
livelihood, this character is an intellectual torn between his conservative
profession and his unfulfilled passion, psychology – at the time, the most
liberal of sciences – and he has a certificate of Forensic Psychology from Berkley
University, a course taken by mail. He is fat and bald, his skin brunet and
lively eyes. His temperament is phlegmatic, his gestures and attitudes show his
accurate moral sense.
One day someone wants to see him, Suzette Magalhães, a former mistress
of a representative of the region and the alleged father of her daughter.
She hires him for a paternity suit. That lady was a classmate of
Walter Ives’s, who had fallen deeply in love with her. Suzette shows him a
notebook full of passionate declarations of love. Cassi Aguiar starts to
compare pictures and dates on his desk, without knowing for sure what he wanted
to find. He believes that the patient’s priapism crises are symptoms of
an erotomania acquired by excessive exposure to pornographic scenes. By the
pictures taken in high school, he sees a deep physical similarity between
12-year-old Suzette and her daughter, Camila. He is taken by a singular and
seemingly absurd idea: To promote the visual contact between the girl and the
“pervert”. Would she be able to make him recall his first love?
Could that deep spiritual and asexual feeling cure the genital lack [beánce] that his libido
was trapped into? Those reflections are made by him in the letters
he writes (and reads aloud) to a psychologist in São Paulo, while flash-backs
reconstitute the idyllic adolescence of the manager and his loved one, Suzette
(the same actress that plays the role of Camila, at the current time of the
narrative), to the sound of the boleros played by the car that goes round the
house.
...I was not so interested
in the child beside me but in the effect that the sight of her would cause in
the ill man under my custody. Would he have experienced his first love as
I have experienced mine? Would it be possible that the sight of Camila
would cause him a paramnesia that could carry him back to the past, when making
him relive an inborn and asexual way of desiring? Would that
sensation suffice for making the eroticism under which his body and soul were
subdued outflow? It was obvious that promoting the meeting of a
child with a pervert would be, if expressed in such terms, a height of
perversity, but I was sure that he was not a true maniac, even when having his
spirit assaulted by lascivious ghosts. Of course, I would try to be
extremely prudent and dissimulated (…) I would expect that Camila could be seen
in all her graceful naturalness (…) (ibid).
After filing for the paternity suit and under the pretext of the threats
made by the representative against his client and her daughter, Cassi Aguiar
suggests that both of them move to a safer address, at the town centre.
That was a house for rent located next to the lawyer’s home, whose
backyard could be seen from the widow of the bedroom the abandoned patient was
in. The “psychodrama” setting was established. The amateurish Psychologist's
strategy is becoming increasingly sophisticated:
...My plot had a second
thread. Even when a memory is deeply buried by decades of accumulated
forgetfulness, I believe that the songs that have rocked it, the soundtrack of
those lost scenes can make it resurface with the same vigour and freshness
(...) How many times can an old ballad make us relieve
the magical feelings of a past we thought was colourless?
In order to
evoke Walter Ives's past, Cassi travels to a neighbouring town, to the Radio
Clube Guarani radio station where he spends a whole afternoon doing research on
the songs that were the most played on the radio in that distant year when Walter
Ives would share the school desk with Suzette, Cassi’s current client, who in
the past was the high school girl the manager had a crush on. There he records
songs of Trini Lopez, Lupicínio Rodrigues, Pat Boone, Chico Alves, Ansiedad in
the voice of Nat King Cole, Mário Lago’s Nada Além, Al di la and Dinah
Washington singing Manhattan. when he comes back, he asks Suzette to keep her
daughter at home as much as she could and Camila, a little bored, spends the
long sunny mornings in the backyard, reading fotonovelas*** and writing what
seems to be a secret diary … (ibid)
The fact that
the patient was left behind by the family, which would only send some money for
expenses and procrastinate his transfer to a clinic in the capital would work
in favour of his plan. The girl is very talkative and this works as an
outstanding bait for Walter, who soon starts to sit up on the bed and research
the new neighbour's backyard during many minutes, as a boy who is observing
birds (the soundtrack of birds singing works as sign of hope). In less than a
week, he is spending almost the entire morning sat on a rocking chair by the
window. He pretends to read a newspaper and at any moment would peep
between the slats of the venetian blinds to observe the interior of Suzette's
new home; through the other window, the one in the Lawyer's bedroom, a flow of
oldies invades the space and creates an island of nostalgia and evokes a dense
past of melancholic ghosts. The Lawyer's thoughts are now
free from the act of writing and punctuate the images, however, without
describing them:
...I would like to know the
effect to that double apparition in Walter Ives’s spirit: The mother and
the daughter… Who would his heart choose? The hope of a possible and
eventually carnal love with his first love or for the idealized realm of
nostalgia, for the immaculate and spiritual love that necessarily inhabits the
intangible past of which Camila was the sacred image? How true would be
the legend that the Portuguese are a melancholic race, whose melomania makes
them tend to nostalgia and fascination for the past?
(...) The kind of emotion I would expect to create in
Walter Ives’s heart when contemplating his first love's clone was definitively
a childish sentiment. History tells us about an intense form of
love, christened as “troubadours’ love” or “Eros Curiates”: As they could
not possess the bodies of their loved ones, who were generally virtuous and
married ladies, those lovers would wield their lutes and sing the happiness caused
by a mere smile or furtive stare of their loved ones. An
immanent love, without any faults, without any needs besides singing the
beatitude of such way of loving! (...) I myself was convinced that the immanent
love would correspond to a different disposition of the body where the
excitation of the sexual organs would give way to a vibration, a fever, a
pleasure consummated and spread for all body and soul parts, but the tragic
outcome of this case has aborted my learning (ibidem)
The
highfaluting style of his arguments, recorded in letters, helps to reconstitute
the spirit of the time. At the same time that the amateurish psychologist
develops, the lawyer gets involved in a complicated situation. Many women in
town, regretting what they’ve done, pressured Walter Ives's family for the
jewels and money spent, alleging that they were extorted. Many husbands
want the manager to disappear, either for jalousie, revenge or witness
elimination. Walter Ives’s sister-in-law sends him a cheque for him to protest.
It is a cheque of the representative's wife, supposedly paid by her for a
night spent with the succubus at the back of the house. In his turn, the
representative loses the paternity suit case and has to pay child support to
her natural daughter.
Now both Cassi
Aguiar and his client/patient, Walter Ives, have a reason to fear the
representative’s thug that rides around the house the entire day in his WV
beetle with tinted windows playing his sad boleros.
At the end of a
sunny morning, when going back home for a fast lunch, Cassi Aguiar goes to
Walter Ives’s bedroom and exchanges some words with him. He is quite
cheerful and, at the same time, deeply sentimental. The old checked
blanket around his body let the bulky renitence of his illness to be seen, but
his face seems at rest as if a ray of hope was shining thereon. Cassi
proceeds to his bedroom and turns on the tape player with the old ballads at
top volume. He waves to Camila, who, already dressed for school, is
hanging a wet towel on the clothesline. The Lawyer praises her rosebushes and
asks her to tell her mother about the promised good news. Everything points in
the direction that Camila’s father would have to take on a number of new
responsibilities. When he goes back to the hall, he sees Walter Ives
leaning against window in order to catch a rose that sweet Camila has picked up
and was trying to throw to him down from the backyard. That is when the
old lady that minds Walter Ives screams from the kitchen and swift steps are
heard in the room. Cassis Aguiar turns in time to see, at his back, the
representative’s thug with a huge sawn-off shotgun pointed to him.
He has barely had time to duck. A muffled shot is heard and a
cloud of lead flies over his head as a hot and hissing wind. Walter Ives
screams and puts his hand on his chest. Cassis hurries to the basement to
get his Winchester, but the sounds of the tires of a car fleeing away can
already be heard. He goes back to the manager’s bedroom and sees him
lying dead, with a blood-spattered rose on his chest. He hesitates and
squats down at the side of the body, without knowing whether the shot was meant
for him as a gift for the paternity suit or the representative would have
wanted to silence the man that supposedly has had so much pleasure to his wife.
Walter Ives’s blanket does not cover anything any longer. His penis
(now in close and without the black band) is small and shrunken like a peanut.
The entire town
and family go to the manager’s funeral. His sister-in-law
weeping, the representative and his wife, the town’s women who had abused him.
The fixed camera, behind a light post, follows the procession. On
the framed light post, a then subversive poster is plastered, with the famous photograph
in black and white of Che Guevara, with the caption: "Hay que
endurecer, pero sin perder la ternura jamais"! The last time we can hear
his voice in off, while Walter Ives’s coffin is taken to the graveyard, in what
seems to be his last letter about the case to his friend in São Paulo, Cassi
Aguiar asks in a tone that suggests the case has already been a long time
buried in the past:
Would the shot in the chest
be what had put an end to his monstrous intermittent erection that had already
lasted almost a year? In my brief course of forensic medicine, I learned
that death produces a quick hardening of the body and the corpse keeps until
decomposition the posture it had when dying, interlocked hands, open eyes..
Those who carry out an autopsy or prepares a funeral knows how difficult
it is to interlock the fingers of a corpse, sew the eyelids… I am almost sure
that just minutes before he died, when he received a rose thrown by Camila,
Walter Ives recalled his first love and to feel it again, in its original
sensation, made him recover, if it is true that eroticism is a modern man
specific disease. Whether his cure was final or would last
just as long as a revived feeling would, we will never know. As for
me, I would not remain there to know whether the shot was meant to me or it was
the service provided by a skilled and impeccable professional. I just arranged
the funeral, passed on the almost solved Suzette's case to another lawyer and
moved to the capital of the state, where I work today and seek not to get
involved with my clients’ lives, something that has given me the fame of being
a soulless pettifogger.
THE END
Notes:
[1] According to the SAS system (situation –
action – situation line). Cf. “A Imagem-Movimento”, p. 8-9,
Deleuze, Gilles. Ed. Brasiliense, 1996 – São Paulo.
Translator’s notes:
* Cassandra Rios = Cassandra Rios, a renowned
female writer whose essays often focused on female homoeroticism.
** Carlos Zéfiro = a famous Brazilian comic artist
who drew pornographic comics, born in Rio de Janeiro.
*** Fotonovelas = a romance or crime story
illustrated with photos.
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