sábado, 17 de maio de 2014

Abre aspas

Eu nem sei o que eu daria para escrever assim

(algumas coisas ficam soltas sem o contexto, mas considerando que outras ficam soltas mesmo com o contexto eu vou deixar assim mesmo, sem legendas para entendimento dos detalhes. O principal é a música, mesmo)
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"The years were never an element, because my parents didn't age, they simply sickened. My father was mean and cocky like Cagney all the way to the dump. Flat on his back, his bones poking this way and that like the corpses in the camps, he still had a fiery eye, as though, but for those two coals, the grate held ash. There's no easy way out of this life, and I do not look forward to the day they put those tubes up my nose, and a catheter shows my pee the way out like some well-trained servant. I saw how my father's body broke his spirit like a match; and I saw how my mother's broken spirit took her body under the way a ship sinks after being disemboweled by an errant berg of ice.
My father suffered thirty years of pain. A continent could call it a war. It was an unjust fate. It was undeserved. And my mother drank for nearly the same, although she beat my father to the grave by a good five, having decayed for a decade before they lowered her away - a leftover spoiling in the light. Fare thee well, I say, now that the words have no designation.
My father taught me how to be a failure. He taught me bigotry and bitterness. I never acquired his courage, because I caught a case of cowardice from my mother - soft as cotton - and I was born with her desperate orality, her slow insistent cruelty - like quicksand - her engulfing love.
My mother drank to fill her life with the warmth which had long ago leaked out of it; and my father hurt like hell because his mother had, because he had inherited the wrong proclivities, his arthrities an arch between two sagging generations.
My mother drank to let down her guard and allow her dreams to flood her like the cheap enamel basin they would later furnish her to puke in; while the aspirin my father fed on put a hole in his stomach like the one I have, having inherited the wrong proclivities, too - passivity like pavement over a storm.
My mother drank because, at menopause, she missed the turn and struck a wall, her hormones went out of balance like the weights of a clock, and she couldn't tell time anymore; while my father held two jobs, one at his architect's office and another at the store, because the Depression practically wiped out his practice, and Feeney's, also desperate, took him in at a family rate to let two others starve, and changed its name at the same time to FEENEY'S FAMILY FURNITURE, not so much to honor my father's presence as to justify the junk the store now stocked; and there he worked long heartless hours, a foot backward in its shoe, filling the blank side of unused bills of sale with plans for gingerbread houses, garages too grand for their cars, gas stations designed as castles, banks like forts, stores in the cute shape of their specialty (often shoes), bars which were made entirely of glass brick, churches which were all spire, and little neighborhoods which were nothing but wall; then, as the world began to recover, my father's wasted efforts having bled his strength, he began to decline, and soon couldn't draw anymore, and soon couldn't sell sofas either, only sit in them, until they became too low and soft and mortal for him, his cane like a tree towering over him, his strength only in the grit of his jaws, in a mean streak now grown green and brave.
My mother had no steel. All puff - though sensitive - she was a cotton wad, and powdered her nose instead of washing it, and painted her nails instead of cleaning and cutting them, though when her hand shook, color crossed the cuticle, and sometimes the tips of her fingers were red. So she drank to the point of suicide, because a life which not only lacked love, but couldn't even catch a little indifference, like a net to contain air, was intolerable, because she hadn't a single god, or goddamned thing to do, or anything she could look back on as done - completed or accomplished - only one pleasureless screw which produced an ingrate and a monster upon which she nevertheless pinned her hopes with exactly the same chance for success as anyone would who tried to drive a nail into a passing cloud - a son to whom she threw her soul and considerable peril, like a stone into a paper boat"
(The tunnel, William H Gass)

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