Translated by Christine Fernandes

Edited by Margaret Jull Costa

That was a long time ago. Even then everything had become very old and tired. Walking down the street, you’d hear nothing but platitudes: everything’s going to be fine, humanity this and humanity that, but of course, everything’s going to be fine, it’s just a matter of surviving. Even if we die, everything will be fine. Sure, there’s fear and all that. But, good grief, surely fear is evidence of emotional intelligence! Sorry, don’t write that down, why don’t we start again at the beginning? I worked in the lab, and rarely saw the sun. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t stop for Sunday, because if it wasn’t a virus, it would be something else, there was always something nasty doing the rounds and keeping us all occupied. I rarely saw daylight, I rarely saw the dark, I rarely saw people. We spoke very little and always in short sentences. Anything more than that was deemed mere verbiage.  Nobody had time for long sentences, short-and-sweet reigned supreme! The women became very intelligent, very demanding, very fanciful, God, they gave me such a hard time! In the end, I just got fed up… no, don’t write that down, forget it, it might sound bad… And as for the outlandish, Brazilianised idea of dancing in the street and singing together, p-lease, since when did we sing together and dance in the street, downing jugs of red wine, except in the days when people still went to hoedowns?  And hugs? I don’t remember kisses and hugs after turning fifty! People in labs don’t kiss and hug, let alone have it away on benches full of dangerous chemicals! You can fantasise all you want, but safety and protection above all and over all – lab coats, hairnets, eyeglasses, masks, visors! Naturally, I worked day and night, like everyone else back then, the ones who had work. No, that’s not at all what I meant, what I meant is that we were full of enthusiasm, we had a mission, you see?  But don’t write that down either! Shall we start again? Oh, you think we should leave it in? Look, I’m perfectly fine here. I don’t lack for anything. You want to hear the story again? But it all happened such a long time ago! So, the pandemic came, the first wave followed by the second wave of the first wave, and so on and so forth and it never stopped. It was relentless. Death by drip-feed. Then along came Cacilda with her joke of a machine, which was about on the same level as injecting bleach or soaking up UV rays … Don’t you remember? We even tested out those therapies and they worked, with mixed results, as usual. By the time we’d moved into the Cave, we realised there would be no cure, no palliative treatment, no vaccine.  Everyone dealt with the terror as best they could, as described elsewhere. For some the panacea was Freedom, for others Hope, for others Sex, Love, love with sex, sex without love and every possible variation on that enigma… But, by then, I was already sixty-five years old, you understand, and was classified as elderly. They found me a little corner at the entrance to the Cave, with lots of light and good air-conditioning and I settled in well. The Teresas in the thirty-to-forty group took control. The Reboredos were left in the marginal world of the ageless. That’s where they drew the line – the over-sixty-fives and the under-sixty-fives.  Whenever there was any discussion in the Cave, that was the instant collective response: “Have you suddenly turned sixty-five or something?” In the early days, everything went swimmingly, then, about six months in, there was a general uprising among the “seniors”, many of whom were exterminated for their own good and so as not to contaminate the younger ones with their “age”. I was no longer Professor Ricardo, but ex-Professor, ex-Ricardo, Ricardo Senior. The first three years were the hardest.  All analogies with prisons and incarceration also wore pretty thin in the end. There was a silence, a pause, a blank that lasted for years. There were endless debates about whether everything would go back to being as it was before, if it ever did go back. What can I say? I don’t think I even know how to open the door from the inside anymore. I have my collection of lovers, and sometimes I take the most annoying one out of the wardrobe and allow myself the luxury of submitting to her diatribes. I put on Brahms, very loudly, so as not to hear her. That’s what Art’s for, isn’t it? That’s the “humanity” everyone’s always on about. I have my collection of building kits and so I make things: viruses, ships in bottles, boats and planets. I have no problem filling my time.  I rarely feel the need for conversation. If I do want to speak, I say a few words out loud first to check that my larynx is still working. And sometimes if an urge to communicate does come upon me, I summon a woman writer and tell her again the story of how I surrendered to the viruses and settled down in the comfort of the cave.

THE END

Read the original chapter in Portuguese

Luísa Costa Gomes (Lisbon, 1954) graduated in philosophy and was a school teacher until 2010. She is a storyteller, playwright, dramaturge, screenwriter, chronicler and translator. She taught a post-graduate degree in creative writing at the Universidade Lusófona in the 1990s, and has given numerous short story writing, scriptwriting and literary translation workshops. She has also given theatre and short fiction workshops as part of an Art of Writing post-graduate course at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Since 2010, she has done what likes and, occasionally, tops this off with things that she doesn’t.

Christine Fernandes has worked as a journalist and as a book editor for a higher education institute.  An MA graduate in Area Studies from the University of London, she studied the politics of Portugal, particularly of the First Republic.  She has a Diploma in Portuguese Studies from the University of Lisbon.

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Escape Goat is the twin page of Bode Inspiratório

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Translated by Mark Sabine

Edited by Kim Olson

Entity, narrator … Why do I keep my distance from myself, like someone who, turning aside and whistling, thinks they can pass unnoticed through a suspicious crowd? What do I want, ultimately, when I write, when I divide myself up into characters and voices, if not to be God? We live between modesty and vanity: the modesty of discovering how large we are, and the vanity of not fitting within ourselves. We are dichotomous beings, oscillating, from the dawn of consciousness, between the fear of death and the fantasy of eternity. And so lacking in affection and sense that we need to invent gods to protect us from the fear we have of them.

This is what I do, when in creative mode: I imitate divinities. Entity, narrator … what does it matter? My name is Ivy. I will turn forty in two days’ time, I suffer from a rare heart condition, I’m a translator, and have, as well as the dream of writing a book, a five-year-old son who asks me, every day,

“When you finish writing the book is everything going to be OK again, Mummy?”

Because I, I lack the courage to tell him anything other than yes, it’s just the time it takes to write the book and then … everything will be OK again. How can I tell him the truth of which I myself am ignorant? How can I tell him that the world lies in the hands of overgrown children, and that it might be necessary to keep writing for months and months before everything can be OK again? How can I tell him that the world that I had promised him might never return?

And, because the magical thoughts of children are the superstitions of adults, I keep writing, without an end in sight, shuttling between the hope that this too shall pass and the fear that it might not. I gaze at Gi, on the floor, playing with his superhero action figures, and think: if I can finish this story by tomorrow, everything will be OK again. I’m like God, with neither power nor glory, writing non-stop in mysterious ways. In the end, someone has to create the stories that get told.

***

“Do you reckon everything’s going to be OK again?” asked Gahell, staring at his father.

“When was everything ever all OK, Gahell?” smiled Reboredo, tossing a stone into the lake.

“Before the Great Pandemic … Wasn’t it?”

Reboredo smiled again, looking at his teenage son.

“The Great Pandemic wasn’t the beginning of the end, Gahell. No empire ever falls if it’s not already rotten within. Humankind had reached the limit of its own folly. Image and appearance were everything. Even in the poorest countries, the aim of the fight for survival was to imitate the seeming happiness that they’d got wind of from the ‘First World’. In all fields, the competition was fierce. Science and technology were no exception. The ruling powers had replaced the deafening threat of the bomb with the silent terror of viruses, both biological and electronic. Thus, wars came to be waged in a gloomy underworld. All over the world, scientists and programmers worked on new viruses. And because those who try to imitate God end up being as power-mad as He … things ended up the way they did.”

“But did the virus really come out of a lab?”

“The virus came from the arrogance and folly of men, Gahell,” Reboredo replied, flinging another pebble into the lake.

Gahell watched the water settling. And, after a lengthy silence, he asked, “Was my mum to blame as well?”

Reboredo placed his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Your mum’s heart was in the right place.”

Gahell smiled.

“And you’ve inherited that from her!”

“A heart in the right place?”

“Humanity.”

“Do you think it’s possible to be human and machine at the same time?”

“Isn’t that what we are?” shot back Reboredo, with a wink of his bionic eye.

“At times I feel like we’re nothing. Still not humans but no longer machines.”

“We’re an evolutionary stage, just like the humans, between the great apes and the algorithmic consciousness of times to come.”

“Is that why we’re always turning back, to the past, to the land, to our roots, our feelings?”

“What do you mean?”

“So that we don’t lose our humanity?”

Reboredo saw Teresa’s features shining out in his son. His every biological component beamed with pride. There was no doubt about it: he’d got his mother’s heart; a heart in the right place.

***

Night fallen, a deserted city square, a cloistral silence, like the end of the world… And here I am, made God, orbiting the universe of myself. What shall I do with the cave? What shall I do with Ricardo, with Cacilda, with Lúcia, with Teresa, with Reboredo and – now – with Gahell? I’m tired. The vaccine against the virus will come, sooner or later. But the cure for fear… That has to be made up here, line by line, that ancient potion that has been with us since the earliest times, whenever night would fall, and out of the dark would loom ghosts and phenomena then still to be explained.

We are dichotomous beings, oscillating, since the dawning of consciousness, between the fear of death and the fantasy of eternity. Beings that, one day, gathered in a circle around a fire to listen to the first story, without knowing that fear runs from fantasy the way that ghosts shrink from light.

I need an end to this story, an end to this torture, an end that can be a new beginning, an end so that tomorrow, when Gi asks me,

“When you finish writing the book, is everything going to be OK again, Mummy?”

I won’t be afraid to say,

“Yes, my love. Everything is going to be OK again.”

Read the original chapter in Portuguese

Norberto Morais was born in Germany. He graduated from the ISPA and worked as a volunteer psychologist at the Associação Portuguesa de Apoio à Vítima. He also attended the Hot Club jazz school, in Lisbon, and was a vocalist, lyricist, composer and musician in a band. He is author of the novels Vícios de Amor and O Sítio de Lugar Nenhum (2008), O Pecado de Porto Negro (2014) and A Balada do Medo (2019). He lives in Lisbon and is a full-time writer.

Mark Sabine is Associate Professor in Lusophone Studies at the University of Nottingham. He has written and published widely on Portuguese and Lusophone African authors, from Eça de Queirós and Fernando Pessoa to Luís Berndardo Honwana and, in particular, José Saramago, and also on the cinema and cultural history of the Portuguese-speaking world, focusing on the representation and remembrance of dictatorship and the anti-colonial struggle, and on issues of gender and sexuality. He teaches translation from Portuguese at the University of Nottingham, and recently published translations of poetry by Prémio Camões laureate Hélia Correia in Journal of Romance Studies.

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Escape Goat is the twin page of Bode Inspiratório

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Translated by Sally Bolton

Edited by Sarah Jacobs

The exhausted protagonist smiled in fear and relief at the memory of her birthday. Then she began:

Ladies and gentlemen of the scientific community,

I am speaking to you today of your past, which is my present, and which is my grandfather’s future. My grandfather died because he wanted to help a neighbour who had passed out on his doorstep, riddled with the virus. I never got to know him, but my mother’s stories mean I remember him as if I did. My grandfather still recognised the taste of a beef tomato, my grandfather, you must understand, still recognised the cow from where the beef came. A real cow, free to roam the sunny fields. My grandfather knew what it was not to be afraid of the sun. My grandfather knew packed beaches, with no sections taped off. My grandfather grew up in the sea, with his friends around him, crowded around, unhurriedly enjoying themselves for no reason other than because they could. My grandfather belonged to the time when you would only wash your hands after using the bathroom, or before meals where freshly picked fruit would be eaten with bare hands. My grandfather could recognise a fruit by its smell. My grandfather died many years ago. It’s been many years since we’ve actually smelt something. After all, even fear is liquid. Fear is white and it smells like bleach and ethanol.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am speaking to you of a future which my grandfather never knew but for which he asked me to find some sort of solution. This was the reason I became a scientist. So that, my dear colleagues, I could try to save your grandparents. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded. If we’ve succeeded. The great human problem is our aversion to group work. I succeed, you succeed, but on your own. We still haven’t reached a hypothesis that goes from singular to plural. We still don’t believe that we can succeed. Narcissism is not just a characteristic befitting of artists. These viruses were the great challenge of the egocentric. When the whole world falls ill at the same time, one lamentation isn’t greater than another, nor is one person more in need of compassion than another. My neighbour’s pandemic is no less significant than mine. My neighbour’s panic is no less than mine. Those people who once made such a meal of every universal loss to get some attention; those for whom the death of an eighty-something-year-old artist in another continent called for mourning and suffering; those who used everyone else’s pain to pity themselves; those people must now feel they’ve lost their tongue. To all of those people, today I say: it could have been your grandfather.

You have to understand. When I could glean no more answers from science, I turned to the works of the great philosophers. They also contradict each other. I inherited, courtesy of my grandfather, a very strange library. Very strange. It’s a secret which I’ll share with you. The books had been shut up and sealed off for decades because I feared they’d spread the infection. A while ago, I decided to free them, one by one. My grandfather only read printed books. He would underline sections, fold over corners of pages. I discovered several authors who referred to masks, but different types to those we use. One such author was George Steiner who had a title which interested me: “Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought” and which maintained that “the mask is worn underneath the skin.” Is this the definitive solution? Afterwards I found in a 1966 magazine (beautiful cover with two classic cars) an interview with one Saul Bellow in which he quoted this Jewish proverb: “A fool can throw a stone into the water which ten wise men cannot recover.”

Ladies and gentlemen, scientists of the future, if you’re watching this video, then our world is not over. Perhaps you still have a chance to recover the stone.

Teresa stood up, turned off her phone camera, and immediately posted the video online. Glancing at the pale carrots, the only ones that had been left at the market, which sat drooping on the kitchen countertop alongside a jumbled pile of handwritten letters, she took hold of the knife.

Read the original chapter in Portuguese

Filipa Leal (Porto, 1979) published her first book, lua-polaroid, in 2003, followed by nine works of poetry. Her work has been available in Spain since 2010. She graduated in journalism from Westminster University, London, and completed an MA in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at the Faculdade de Letras do Porto. She has worked in radio, print media and television. Her screenplay for JOGO DE DAMAS, directed by Patrícia Sequeira, was awarded the Golden Aphrodite Prize for best script at the Cyprus Cinema Festival (2016) and the prize for best script at the International Monthly Film Festival of Copenhagen (2017). She is the author and scriptwriter of the television series MULHERES ASSIM (RTP1, 2016-2017) and of the children’s musical A VOLTA AO MUNDO EM 60 MINUTOS (Elenco productions, 2014). Currently, she contributes to the weekly TV programme NADA SERÁ COMO DANTE on RTP2, and has just released her first play: O Quadrado de F. (não, March 2020).

©Alfredo Cunha

Sally Bolton grew up in East Yorkshire and went on to study Spanish and Portuguese at Merton College, Oxford, graduating in 2017. She has collaborated on translation projects with Margaret Jull Costa, including the Take Six collection of short stories by Portuguese Women Writers. Sally continues to further her interest in languages, and has recently started learning Arabic.

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Escape Goat is the twin page of Bode Inspiratório

All content subject to copyright. All rights reserved

Translated by Felix Macpherson

Edited by Sarah Jacobs

“Fuck, I hate being forced between a rock and a hard place.”

(Teresa hardly ever swore aloud, but she did so profusely in her head)

Man, I can’t do it, it’s too much responsibility. And that speech of yours didn’t even make sense. I loved my grandfather to bits – God rest his soul – but it’s the professor who pays my salary. Secondly, and while I love samba, Chico and Caetano and drinking caipirinhas on Ipanema beach when I go to Rio as much as the next person, I don’t see why I alone should have to take responsibility for cleaning up someone else’s mess. Look, can’t we come up with some sort of compromise?

“I’m sorry, Teresa, but I’m structurally binary, I’m programmed to make unequivocal decisions.”

“Hold on, hold on.”

Teresa chuntered to herself:

“This guy’s trying to con me with that speech about – “

“Teresa, you have five seconds to make your decision.”

“Hold on though, wasn’t that the time it would take for you to self-destruct after opening the box? I haven’t even touched the box!”

“Five”

“Look, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, this isn’t the time for – “

“Four”

“For Christ’s sake, there’s no need to be so stubborn – “

“Three”

“Wait! Wait! What happens if I don’t choose?”

“Two”

“Tell me what happens, for fuck’s sake!”

“One”

A quantum silence, time stretching out like cheese on a slice of pizza wrenched suddenly from its mother, etc.

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Nothing happens – nothing at all!”

“I don’t get it, Reboredo, what kind of shit joke is this?”

“I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you swear in public”, commented the professor.

“Are you alright, Professor? What’s going on? I’m totally lost!”

“Never better, my dear.”

SURPRISE!

Dangling from the ceiling of the cave like seventh-dan yoga students, the choir of bats echoed:

SURPRISE!

“Do you like it?” asked Reboredo. “It took us almost four years to teach them to do it that many times. The idea was for them to say ‘surprise’ three times, but all the shortages meant we could only get enough food for two, and the bats’ union – which, between you and me, is much stronger than many of your own – didn’t like the look of the rations we were going to offer them – and scarcely had any of this got back on track, when – ”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut your mouth this second or I’ll smash your face in with my own head.”

(Teresa pointing at Roberto, her index finger jabbing in his face, as they often do in the theatre but here, real.

The android, although comparatively sturdier than a human being, could not help but shut his trap and shrink back a couple of steps. Teresa, before discovering her immense gift for epidemiological virology, was European mixed martial arts champion).

“Professor, where’s this all going?”

“Look, my dear Teresa, the truth is that we wanted to give you a little surprise for your birthday, and you’ve been so busy jumping from chapter to chapter, trying to make some sense of all this that you haven’t given a moment’s thought to yourself. What you need – at least just for one day – is to forget about your duties as protagonist. Too much work does no-one good, you’ll waste away before this is even over – and the producers really don’t want that storyline.

“It’s my birthday?”

“It is, my dear.”

“What day is it?”

“It’s the day you were born.”

Read the original chapter in Portuguese

Valério Romão (France, 1974) has released three novels with the publisher Abysmo: Autismo (2012), O da Joana (2013) and Cair para dentro (2018); three collections of short stories, Facas (Companhia das Ilhas, 2013), Da Família (Abysmo, 2014), Dez razões para aspirar a ser gato (Mariposa Azul, 2015); and two plays, A Mala (Guilhotina, 2015), and Irina, Macha, Olga (não, 2016). His books have been published in Brazil, Italy and France. In 2016, Autismo was shortlisted for the Femina Prize in France. He is also a translator and a playwright..

Felix Macpherson studied Spanish and Portuguese at university, and has a master’s in translation studies. He first became interested in Portuguese when trying to translate the lyrics to Brazilian funk songs as a teenager, and is still passionate about Brazilian music. Felix now works primarily in online suicide prevention technology but still loves to translate when the opportunity arises. He has lived in Colombia, Portugal, and Mozambique, and is now settled in London.

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Escape Goat is the twin page of Bode Inspiratório

All content subject to copyright. All rights reserved

Translated by Sarah Jacobs

Edited by Paul Crick

“Don’t you see, Reboredo? It’s clear now. I hate how long it’s taken me to understand this. Ricardo’s presence in this story was as a seemingly elusive character. He was important to begin with and then he withered away, or rather, he seemed to. I sometimes felt he was superficial, but I wasn’t looking at him carefully enough. It was all so obvious. That’s the danger of ignoring what we don’t want to understand, of treating people who are different to us with disdain, or even of laughing when we think something seems too ridiculous to be true. These mountains of nothingness, wretched and gloomy, pile up in every nook and cranny because we colluded in their growth by not giving them any credit or attention. Ricardo is himself the personification of this type of malign behaviour that spreads when we stop asking questions: a dangerous distraction. We’ve reached a crucial moment, my dear Reboredo: the virus might just be an allegory planted in every one of us via those boxes of fear that you delivered. The pieces of the puzzle are finally falling into place, Reboredo. The problem was that we didn’t realise that, while we were searching for a cure in order not to die, we were actually living.”

Teresa shook as she saw Ricardo getting smaller with every dry cough. She remembered what her mother had told her, a story that always scared her when she was little and which now made terrifying sense. Almost a thousand years ago, a great pandemic occurred and an extremely dangerous virus quickly spread like a tsunami to all four corners of the Earth. It was a plague that got inside aeroplanes, cruise ships, beachside houses, trains, metros, buses. There was one part of the world where the pestilent and monstrous virus spread at such a rate that it didn’t just kill people, but the humanity inside them too. The leader of that country spread the infection meticulously. To the unquestioning among the population, he said that the propagation was an invention and that it was nothing but a flu, a common cold.

“My mother said that the story was a never-before-seen tragedy. Fearful of running out of money, instead of being cautious, people went outside, went to work, used public transport, always worrying about having enough money to eat and to live. But what started to happen was that, as time passed and the virus spread through this guy, some knock-off Ricardo, there came a point where there were more jobs than there were people to do them, because the dead can’t work. This was the clearest consequence of the virus to most of us. But the plague continued to spread and ended up decimating the country that was once the country of the future. Artists were no longer anywhere to be seen. Writers, actors, dancers, musicians, journalists, anyone with any knowledge and talent went to Portugal, leaving the heart of South America without even the faintest of heartbeats. Without the arts, the land turned dry, hostile, infertile. The tropical forests, once so sumptuous and abundant, were transformed into desert. The plague generated three types of indestructible virus, thanks to a macabre mutation. Zero 1, Zero 2 and Zero 3. They contaminated a whole country and this marked the end of a large part of South America, a part of the world that no longer exists. Didn’t we learn, Reboredo? Look how well it fitted, that beautiful clue from earlier in the story: ‘Look back and you will see the future.’ But we failed, Reboredo. Instead of writing books, putting on plays, composing music, inventing choreographies, painting pictures, we built caves underground, a subterranean city where we run around like mice, without art, without kisses, without sex, without sun. A virus that spreads via people, naturally, but that also benefits from countless connections and wide-ranging networks. If it were just a physical illness, we would already have a vaccine, a medicine. The virus that spread in many forms through Professor Ricardo was not a virus; it was the fear of feeling alive, of daring to be happy, that unbearable feeling. I need you to die, Reboredo. My duty, now, is to make your role completely useless. Your packets of fear should not be going anywhere. You need to be destroyed.”

The cyborg, completely overwhelmed by feelings of passion and generosity towards Teresa, heard her speak with complete attention, before making a surprising revelation.

“Teresa, the time has come for me to contribute to the extermination of the virus. Up until now you have been exempt from most of the collective fear. I have been keeping your box this whole time, but I can no longer delay this process. You are about to embark on the true path of understanding this virus. This path doesn’t involve Cacilda’s machine or Lúcia’s hacks. Here is your box. It contains love letters: from your grandfather to your grandmother, for you, for your mother. There are family objects, extracts from diaries, books, drawings, pieces of music, cake recipes. How long has it been since you ate a freshly cooked corn cake, Teresa? The cause of much of your unhappiness could lie in your excessive slenderness that comes from taking medicines and pills. Nothing inside this box requires technology to exist. The box only contains the things that humans are still able to make: love and art.”

Teresa’s trembling hands were grasping for a bottle of wine. She needed courage to face what she once was. She was scared of not needing all this cyber reality, of finally having to live naively. As her desire to open the box intensified, Professor Ricardo was wasting away.

“When you open the box, Teresa, you will understand the only way to fight the darkness that we’ve been buried under. Your duty will be to spread this knowledge as quickly and as widely as possible. Make your discovery reach Latin America and the heart of that part of the world. It’s possible that there’s still a tiny bit of light hidden in its arid, dirty core. But before you open the box, I need to tell you that you have two choices: the first choice is not to open it, continue with the routine that you’re familiar with and save the professor from wasting away. The second, more risky option, is to open the box and dive into uncharted waters. If you choose the second option, I will self-destruct in five seconds and no more fear packets will be delivered. The choice is yours.”

Read the original chapter in Portuguese

Nara Vidal (Minas Gerais, Brazil) graduated in Literature from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and has an MA in Arts and Culture from London Met University. She has published children’s books and novels, including Sorte, which was awarded the Prémio Oceanos and will be published in the Netherlands this year. She is a columnist for Caderno Dois de Cultura, a supplement of the newspaper A Tribuna de Minas. She coordinates the Brazilian Translation Club, alongside the Latin-American Studies Department of UCL, and manages the online bookshop Capitolina Books. Her other awards include the Brazilian Press Award in Literature (three times) and the Maximiano de Campos award for short stories. She has lived in the United Kingdom since 2001.

Sarah Jacobs studied French and Portuguese at Oxford University and now works as an editor, currently at Bloomsbury Education. She also translates and writes, mostly for www.rioonwatch.org and www.soundsandcolours.com.

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Escape Goat is the twin page of Bode Inspiratório

All content subject to copyright. All rights reserved

Translated by Kim Olson

Edited by Paul Crick

“Thank goodness I found you.”

Teresa felt the beginnings of a howl in the back of her throat, but almost immediately, like dry fire, the burst of anger died in her mouth without producing a sound. 

It had been a long time since she’d last experienced such wild and intense emotion, clearly disrespectful of the international code of fear, and her body responded to the unwarranted freedom with an increase in adrenaline. 

She figured her audacity was fuelled by the forbidden and highly reprehensible desire to merge her flesh with the silicone and ligaments of the machine. Moreover, a machine she herself had designed. She felt like a young mother breathing in the suddenly eroticised body of her child. In another era, she could be tagged incestuous and even burned alive.   

“What are you doing here? At this hour, in broad daylight … Have you lost your mind?” 

“I need to talk to you.”

“And I need you to leave me alone. I’m tired of talking to zombies, one-armed robots and deferred corpses. The virus doesn’t get to take everything, you know.”

“Teresa … calm down.”

“Not another step further. Stay where you are! It’s time we put an end to this foolishness. I’ve had my suspicions about you for a long time. I’ve watched you, spied on you, dissected your every move. A lot has become clear to me in recent weeks. There is something very wrong with the way you have acted through all of this. You’ve so completely entrenched yourself among us that not even death was able to annihilate you.  Because in fact you’re not actually alive, right?

“Listen …”

“That’s one of your more perfidious traits: you’ve spent the last million years perfecting your ability to survive without really being alive. A zombie in constant mutation, dying and resuscitating before our very eyes. In the form of a minor fever, as inconspicuous as a ghost and more resilient than passion itself, you took over everything. How could I be so stupid? How could I let myself be fooled by your studies and complicated theories, by your sudden disappearances and strange resurrection?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I …”

“But I know who you are. I know now. How could I not have seen it earlier if it was so obvious … you plague-ridden Trojan horse!”

And, grabbing a light green file off the top of the lab bench, she opened it and began to read in a mechanical way, her voice quivering with rage yet also a hint of glee:

“This bundle of genetic material wrapped in a protein shell, one one-thousandth the size of an eyelash, exists much like a zombie; it is almost not considered a living organism. However, upon entering human airway passages, it hijacks cells in order to create millions of replicas. Before its first host even develops symptoms, it is already attacking new victims.”

Ricardo took a step backwards, without, however, appearing surprised. Or changed. On the contrary.

“I think you need to rest. Maria’s death was a shock. And a lack of vitamin D, as we all know, can give rise to mental confusion and even make one susceptible to hallucinations like … “

“Shut up! Haven’t you heard that it’s impossible to fool all of the people, all of the time?”

And shoving the file towards Ricardo, she forced him to pick it up, insisting:

“Start at the third paragraph. Read!”

“Outside the host, the virus remains dormant, without any form of metabolism, movement or reproductive ability. When it finds a host, it uses the host’s surface proteins to unlock and invade its cells. It then takes control of the molecular mechanisms of these cells to produce more virus. It is able to correct errors that occurred during the replication process. And this capacity for mutation helps it adapt to new environments, whether in the intestines of camels or the respiratory tract of humans. Once inside a cell, a single virus can make 10,000 copies of itself in a matter of hours. After just a few days, those infected will carry hundreds of millions of viral particles in each teaspoon of their blood.”

Teresa’s eyes threw off sparks, one second dimming in anger and the next burning with indignation.

“Now I understand how you were able to survive for such a long time, you miserable traitor!” 

And while Ricardo recoiled, with no comeback whatsoever, Reboredo, pale as the machine he had been in the beginning, spluttered from the back of the room

“So, he is the virus …?”

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Dulce Garcia was born in Alcochete in 1970. She studied Social Communication and was a journalist for 27 years. Between 2017 and 2019, she worked as a publisher and editor of Portuguese fiction for Planeta. Currently, she is a member of the Department of Communications for the Ministry of Justice. In 2017, she published her debut novel, Quando perdes tudo não tens pressa de ir a lado nenhum, which was selected to represent Portugal in the best newcomer category at the Budapest International Book Festival. Her latest book will be published in 2020 (virus allowing).

Kim Olson is a Portuguese and Spanish translator and editor, living in Fairfax, Virginia, outside Washington, DC. She has worked for over thirty years as a freelancer, specialising in international development, education and science journalism. Early on, she spent several years in Rio de Janeiro where she earned a degree in translation from the Pontifical Catholic University. She has spent the past few years dipping her toes into the pond of literary translation, which she finds to be quite delicious.  

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Escape Goat is the twin page of Bode Inspiratório

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Translated by Paul Castro

Edited by Andrew McDougall

“Love

Human love

Love that restores all that we might lose”

Mário Cesariny

Chest heaving, Teresa sank down on a bench at the side of the tunnelway. Before her a stream of metics clomped past, long used to the presence of citizens on their designated routes. The metics were descended from slaves forced to work outside in daylight at the time of the Second Great Pandemic, caused by the Sun virus. They had coal black skin, much darker than Lúcia’s African complexion, but were strictly marked off from citizens and could on no account share their food or dwellings.

Metics were destined from birth for all unavoidably outdoor tasks and thus everyone was utterly dependant on them for food. They had evolved an uncanny resistance, not to the virus – which was another reason for their segregation – but to death; an as yet inexplicable resistance that had proven impossible to replicate in either citizens or androids. Kept at arm’s length in the beginning, bit by bit they had come to interact with the rest of the human population, though any actual physical contact with metics was strictly forbidden and punishable by a lethal dose of fear.

All the same, Teresa drew the odd curious glance as she sat there shivering to herself, all bundled up in fright.

‘How on earth?’, Teresa whispered again and again. ‘How on earth?’

The Reboredo she had taken such great pains to build, the Reboredo designed to ration out among citizens that precious stab of fear so vital to their survival sat abandoned in the corner of some cupboard. And all along it was that poor encyclopaedia salesman who had murdered Maria!

Teresa took a deep breath and made for one of the disinfection corridors, where metics were hosed down before reaching their workplaces. The guard frowned to see a citizen, but if metics were banned access to freemen’s tunnels, the latter often used metic routes, which served as shortcuts for all.

“Beware contamination,” mouthed the guard, blankly bureaucratic.

Stepping from the lift, she suddenly found herself face-to-face with Reboredo, just as she had dreaded. She froze before the door to the laboratory. Should she call the police? They were always too caught up with metics to get anywhere in time so Teresa, resorting to guile, addressed him instead with gentle affection:

“Fancy seeing you here, Reboredo” she said, cloaking her fear with sweetness.

The man was dumbstruck. The words crumbled to nothing in his throat, his eyes misted over with tenderness, a violent, desperate love flooded his voice. From the first day they met, he would have done anything for Teresa. To avoid losing her he had dumped his robot offshoot in the back of a storeroom and waited all these years to come and find the woman who had awoken him to love and to life.

Deep within her immense fear, now that she saw Reboredo in human form, Teresa felt the inexplicable stirrings of an absurd physical desire. It was as if a new voice had drowned out the endless duties and compromises that governed her life as a loyal agent of the Network and were now calling the shots. As if the burning desire for all the women she had ever loved had joined together in a single flame and, with an almighty flash, set life itself ablaze.

Moments like this really do happen. They’re not just the stuff of books. The force pulling Teresa and Reboredo towards one another could be felt in the air, in the light, in their very breath, in the gleam of every shining surface. They were both petrified. Both knew they couldn’t back out now.

That’s when Professor Ricardo loomed in the doorway.

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Luís Castro Mendes (1950) is a Portuguese poet, novelist and career diplomat. Between 1965 and 1967 he was a regular contributor to the newspaper Diário de Lisboa – Juvenil. In 1974, he completed a degree in Law at the Universidade de Lisboa. He was a political activist in the lead up to the Carnation Revolution (25^th of April, 1974) and carried on this work until 1977, the year he began his diplomatic career. He was consul general in Rio de Janeiro, Portuguese ambassador in Budapest, New Delhi, at UNESCO – Paris and the European Council in Strasbourg. He was Portugal’s Minister for Culture between 2016 and 2018. He published his first book, Recados, in 1983, followed by Areias Escuras (1984), Seis Elegias e Outros Poemas (1985), A Ilha dos Mortos (1991), O Jogo de Fazer Versos (1994), Viagem de inverno (1993), Correspondência Secreta (1995), Modos de música (1996), Outras Canções (1998), Os Dias Inventados (2001), Lendas da Índia (2011), A Misericórdia dos Mercados (2014)and Outro Ulisses regressa a casa (2016). In 2018, he published Poemas Reunidos, a collection of his poetry.

Paul Castro was born in London and lives in Edinburgh. He teaches Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow and has translated short stories from Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Macau and Goa. His latest translation is Monsoon by Vimala Devi (Seagull, 2020).

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Escape Goat is the twin page of Bode Inspiratório

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Translated by Hilary Owen

Edited by Andrew McDougall

Dear Grandfather,

I have some bad news for you. The march of darkness that had come to a halt in your day has resumed again in mine, and now it’s even darker. We have no vaccines, and yet every day, someone promptly invents one. We have become used to living like this, and a life dictated by precautions is the worst of all lives. There were some really spectacular conspiracy theories in your day, mother told me about them, but nothing like what is going on now. Only yesterday, a Nobel-nominated Australian doctor, broadcasting live to the whole world, announced that the lack of physical affection, sex and romance, because of people fearing death and helplessness, will eventually lead to men having no semen and women who can’t menstruate – can you imagine that? And you know what? The most astonishing thing was not what he actually said, but the fact that none of my colleagues even reacted to it. Some of them laughed, a couple of them shrugged, but none of them took the time to comment, and the next day it wasn’t even discussed on social media. It is incredible how two generations can belong to such profoundly different eras. Yours was the Great Age of Indignation, and mine is the Great Age of Resignation. So what does that leave us with? Poetry and imagination. But reciting poetry at a time like this feels rather dubious too, though I am not sure why.

People are walking around reciting poetry, nearly all of it by dead people. You could be forgiven for thinking no one is writing anything new, because the Muses are not immune to the virus either, or, to be precise, they can spread it but they don’t catch it.  Anyway. Transgression has died the death, so has Bohemianism, and even good old-fashioned sin is criminalized – it is difficult to be pure, grandfather. ‘If my demons abandon me’, as Rilke once said (and he was a distant cousin of Pessoa’s), ‘I fear that my angels will disappear too.’ But I don’t want you to think I have been totally contaminated by despair. That wouldn’t be true, but it is getting even harder than it was in your day to tell truth from lies – even for me, and I inherited your daughter’s gift of clairvoyance. I carry your words close to my heart like a religious relic. And they shield me in times of misfortune. I never forget them.

You once told me I should have a dream and that bursting with that dream, I should strive to improve the world – those were your very words. But I fear I shall disappoint you, since the only dream I have now is to actually have a dream at all, and who knows when that will be. Everything has become so confused, grandfather. We have replicants among us, programmed to look like people, and human beings who can think but who are acting like machines. Not even the Device can tell the difference, and when we are not sure, we use special electronic kits to do a quick check: if we are people it turns green and if we are not, it goes red – but why the colour green, I wonder? Only today I found out that the person who feeds my dog is actually one of these avatars. And time, yes even time, plays tricks on us.  I don’t know the real age of my friends, or if they exist or indeed if they have ever existed, and more importantly, I don’t know whether they are my friends or not. It is true, grandfather. The dead could, in fact, be living and vice versa, and no one would say anything. And this is how we have to live, in this orphaned, adult state and I am overwhelmed with grief that I never became a mother myself. In the 50s, when you were already in the great beyond, they came up with a drug that could cure insomnia, sadness and remorse with a single pill. Maybe that was what did it.

But there is a strong core to our humanity that no scourge can destroy, and I see that myself. When it rains you can still see the sun behind the clouds, waiting for its moment to return, the timid acts of kindness that men perform, and the looks of forgiveness dawning on women’s hardened faces – will that be enough? No, it won’t and I am glad it won’t, dear grandfather, who once addressed your daughter’s belly with the words you wrote as a blessing for me.

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Rita Ferro (Lisbon, 1955) studied interior design and specialised in marketing. She has taught print advertising and worked as a manager and consultant for several companies. For the past 30 years, she has written novels, letters, biographies, chronicles, children’s literature and plays. Her biographic novel, A Menina é Fillha de Quem? (2011), was awarded the Prémio PEN Clube Português de Narrativa. Um Amante no Porto (2018) is her most recent novel.

Hilary Owen is Emeritus Professor of Portuguese and Luso-African Studies at Manchester University and Research Fellow in Portuguese at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Mother Africa, Father Marx. Women’s Writing of Mozambique, 1948-1992 and the co-author with Cláudia Pazos Alonso of Antigone’s Daughters? Gender, Genealogy and the Politics of Authorship in 20^th-century Portuguese Women’s Writing. She is also the co-editor with Mariana Liz of Women’s Cinema in Contemporary Portugal, and with Claire Williams of Transnational Portuguese Studies. She has translated the poetry of Noémia de Sousa.

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Escape Goat is the twin page of Bode Inspiratório

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Translated by Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren

Edited by Cecile Berbesi

The narrator’s pause allowed Teresa to gather the ideas and questions that were swirling around untethered in her mind. She could feel the night descending outside and went to greet it.

The guard was standing at the gate to the cave.

Teresa finds the little dog that follows him everywhere endearing. The guard smiles at her every time she passes. It was no surprise, then, that he asked to speak with her. Teresa stopped, she couldn’t resist caressing the muzzle that looked at her in a happy commotion while the guard scolded him, “quiet, Kafka,” and she braced herself to hear what he had to say.

“This is serious business, girl.”

“Girl?” said Teresa, surprised.

“If you don’t mind me calling you that. That is how your grandfather taught me to view you, when he imagined the granddaughter that would be born. He would come here and talk to me for hours.”

“How do you expect me to believe that? Given your age…”

“But I have no age. I am the guard. And the guard has always been the same.”

Teresa was about to reply, when he interrupted her:

“I would like to ask you to join me. During the night, your colleagues become shadows and everything else ceases to exist. And that’s when I go wandering about. Come, come with me.”

Teresa couldn’t resist the pull of her curiosity, and, with the dog by her side, she and the guard walked into the cave. Opposite the entrance to one of the chambers, the guard stopped. He dialled the code and, before it opened, warned her:

“You’re in for a big shock, but you should know the truth.”

As the door opened, and the light flicked on, Teresa let out a cry:

“Reboredo!”

It was a tiny, square room. One chair took up almost the whole space. There he was, seated, with his head hanging down, his arms slumped. Teresa repeated:

“Reboredo?!”

The guard reassured her.

“Don’t worry. This is the programmed one. The one on the Network. And he is disconnected.”

“But, who did this, who…”

“I will tell you. It’s a long story.

It all started when Cacilda came into the cave with the box. Her goal was to develop the Network, to create and programme the prototype that would spread fear throughout the community. Fear would be, once again, the weapon of power. As her model, she brought a young man with her who she had recruited from among those selling encyclopaedias, which were very popular at the time. In the cave, they called him Reboredo, foreshadowing the robot’s name. Teresa took part in the decision and had a prominent role in his programming. Later on, when he visited her at home, he was still human, like us, but he already understood he had a mission to spread fear and pretend to be programmed while the Network put the finishing touches on the ‘2020 – EVILA-SI-RAEF’ series.”

“But he…” Teresa tried to interrupt.

“I know. It seemed like he was, didn’t it? But no. It was when the series was ready, when it was going to be launched for the first mission, that Reboredo, the encyclopaedia boy, found me, told me about you, and asked me to switch them. I was the one, girl, who hid Reboredo there, the version that had just been taken out of production. The Reboredo who walks around here and who everyone knows isn’t the one who was created in the cave. This is why he is defective, sometimes letting himself be betrayed by feelings, emotions, that old desire of his to be a real boy.”

Teresa listened, dumbfounded.

“Girl, you can’t imagine the lengths he goes to to seem like he’s programmed. The other day he spent a whole night laughing, just to give the impression he didn’t need air.”

The guard paused. He enjoyed Teresa’s astonishment. Then he finished:

“Your grandfather left me a copy of the letter. One day, I showed it to him. I saw a tear dancing in his eyes. He really cares for you, girl. Do you know what he said to me?”

“How could I?”

“He said that he would create a dream for you, and with that all-encompassing dream he would accompany you in your efforts to change the world.”

Teresa looked at the night out there, waiting. The ideas and questions started to get mixed up again. She wanted the narrator to pause once more, but it was no longer possible to slow the story down. She started walking. As she was about to pick up her pace, the guard asked her:

“So, what do I do with this guy? Do you want me to leave him here or switch him on? He’ll be charged in 12 hours. If that’s what you want, just say so, because Reboredo, my Reboredo, I will look after.”

Teresa didn’t respond. The Algorithm of Obedience and Loyalty was pounding in her head and she was running, running far from there. The guard shouted after her:

“Don’t you see it’s him, our Reboredo, who brings food every day to the little dog that you hid, girl?”

Teresa had already stopped listening.

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Álvaro Laborinho Lúcio was born in 1941. He is a retired judge of the Supreme Court of Justice, and, in February 2019, was presented with and honorary degree in Education Sciences by the Universidade do Minho. He is the author of Educação, Arte e Cidadania (2008) and O Julgamento – Uma Narrativa Crítica da Justiça (2012), as well as the novels O Chamador (2014), O Homem Que Escrevia Azulejos (2016) and O Beco da Liberdade (2019).

Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren is a poet, editor, and translator based in Montreal. Her honors include a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Her poetry, prose, and translations from Brazilian Portuguese have appeared in journals including Ploughshares, Narrative, Guernica, and Words Without Borders. She holds an MFA in poetry and literary translation from Columbia University and currently edits the Consulate section of Joyland Magazine.

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Escape Goat is the twin page of Bode Inspiratório

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Translated by Francisco Vilhena

Edited by Kim Olson

A small suspension is required. The narrator is also subjected to it, and suddenly lifts his arm as if ready to answer a non-existent question. The fact that he takes up very little space and that he is almost made of air, that he is removed from the concrete matter that are characters and walls, facilitates movements and discretion. He is simultaneously here and on the other side – just as the modest air circulating in a modest room. And before the first before and well after the last after, therein remains the narrator whenever he survives and brings himself to glance, from top to bottom, at the concocted misadventures left behind.

In fact, the head of the narrator does not have a fixed position, neither in space nor in time, as if it had been under threat by an enemy bomber which, from the first light of morning, has been trying to shatter it for good. And, for precisely that reason, the brain does not sleep on the same bed for two consecutive nights, nor does it use the same chair, or the same gestures, more than once. That change, even within the narrator’s character is, after all, a cunning animal instinct that knows it will only prevail through the learned art of misdirection, through hiding and disguising; never by the brute force of an arm or a cannon.

And that’s it: the narrator, as he pauses, stares at the sky and the floor of the narrative with the same perplexity; traps might be hiding in the present or in any other tense; and even a useless domestic object carries within itself the power to cut. And here the narrator halts and thinks: when, due to excessive oversight and velocity, a thinking subject cuts a finger in the immovable and unwilling blade of a kitchen knife, will it not be because the immovable and unwilling kitchen knife moves after all and, more than will, it contains greed and gluttony – perhaps it might even carry plans for the future? We know little about ourselves, even less so about objects; but this I know, thinks the narrator, after cutting himself in a simple and almost bureaucratic act of kitchen: these objects are still unpredictable animals, even when shipped straight from the factory.

A knife is clearly an untamed and anxious beast; it cuts and bruises fingers and palms of hands etc, catching us off guard whenever we find ourselves thinking about the many deaths and the daily numbers we’d rather not know about. Every object requires its human’s undivided attention, without it the object will either crash to the floor and splinter into four hundred insinuations with no chance of ever finding its way back into one piece, or it will attack, whenever possible and least expected; never underestimate the rage objects carry for us, the narrator thinks, while in his clumsy manual setting he makes up a crooked band-aid which, even for the swift human duration, is too fleeting.

Yes: the cave and the machine, the narrator oscillates between the two as he pauses – that mix between the very ancient and the very recent disturbs the days and the plains: we have lost watch and calendar and are now lost in a forest with no trees; all is machine and alike, with noise and monotony and without any need for touch, except for the one that starts it up.

It could easily be this way with humans, only two states, but on the skin and the less visible parts of the body, there are desires that exceed the state of simply being switched on and working. Besides being functional, I want a certain joy and the highest excitation, an abuse, that is; humans have always been excessive in their demands from life, while remaining switched on, not yet defunct – switched off for some, in transit for the believers. We ask too much and in turn receive whatever energy and luck allow.

The narrator then briefly pauses the pause and looks at the cards laid out somewhere before in the story and feels a certain call to work; a siren devoid of the sounds of the narrative, clamps, shall we say, the distracted narrator, in between walls and other futile materials that do not speak or suffer.

The narrator touches, for example, the walls and they shake; he thinks about whether it’s the cause or the effect of his hand; if the shaker is the one who begins or the one who ends it. To the narrator, the cave is made in part of made-up matter, but most of all it is made of fear. What is strong always shakes, before the known tremors, the fissures provoked by the tremors coming from very high up or down below. But there the shaking of the walls is not a response to a bombardment or a natural quaking of earth; the simple materials of the cave tremble because they are anxious. Thus are the materials: not all in them is physical. Without a brain to be looked up in anatomy books, objects and material things, like walls, will have somewhere distributed a central nervous system that, paradoxically, is at the same time in one place and everywhere – and which decidedly shakes and has a psychology, like an animal or a person.

Anxious are the walls, the floor and the ceiling. The material of the objects is in fact made of a mild startling that the silly human eye does not register, not even if it focuses for two entire months. The cards, for example, never are an objective physical thing – and that is why, yes, it is necessary to return to them. What is inside them moves, even if it limps.

dedicated to Mário de Carvalho, friend that I so admire

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Gonçalo M. Tavares (Luanda, 1970) teaches Theory of Science in Lisbon. He has surprised his readers with the variety of books he has published since 2001 and has been awarded an impressive amount of national and international literary prizes in a very short time. His work has been published in almost 50 countries.

Francisco Vilhena is senior editor at the White Review and serves on the advisory board of the Poetry Translation Centre. He writes short essays and translates from the Portuguese. His work has been published in Granta, Asymptote, Wasafiri, Modern Poetry in Translation and elsewhere, and his translation of Adelaide Ivánova’s the hammer and other poems, co-translated with Rachel Long, has been shortlisted for the 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. His cat is one of the first feline polyglots.

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Escape Goat is the twin page of Bode Inspiratório

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