Gonçalo Tavares - The Neighborhood

Mister Henri had brought along an enormous pair of binoculars.

“If my binoculars were long enough to span the distance between the Earth and the sun, then yes, I would see things from far closer,” said Mister Henri.

“In Chinese, they use the same word for an eclipse and the verb ‘to eat.’ An eclipse is something dark that eats a star. It’s a lovely image.”

In the meanwhile, Mister Henri put his binoculars down and extracted a bottle of absinthe from his knapsack. After gulping down a few large drafts, Mister Henri said, “What a beautiful eclipse!” And proceeded to quaff a few more gulps of absinthe.

Lying down on the ground waiting for something to happen in the sky, Mister Henri ended up closing his eyes and falling asleep. When he woke up, he grabbed his knapsack and his bottle of absinthe and left.

“I had a private eclipse,” said Mister Henri to himself, extremely content with the stars that he had seen in his own private sky. “An eclipse that depends only on me, that is what I have here in this bottle,” said Mister Henri.

Earthquakes

Mister Henri said, “If you wish to dig a well, it would be better to first find an anthill.

“Another glass of absinthe,” he said.

“Everyone knows that there is always a lot of water under anthills. Ants are therefore plants that are half intelligent and half morons, while plants are animals without any intelligence whatsoever. Ants need water to constitute a family. And in this regard they are just like men.

“Below the Earth’s surface there are movements of energy that are symmetrical to the movements that can be seen within an anthill. And earthquakes happen precisely due to a vast quantity of these movements. I read the encyclopedia every day in order to glean these indispensable bits of information,” said Mister Henri.

“A man cannot live without information. It’s impossible. Information,” said Mister Henri, already slurring his words slightly, “information is the other face of absinthe.”

Poetry

After drinking a glass of absinthe that he was holding in his right hand in one straight gulp, Mister Henri said, “Another glass of absinthe. It’s for both sides of my body,” he said. “This glass is for my left hand.”

And, holding it in his left hand, he drank the contents of the second glass.

“It’s something that is fundamental for a man’s equilibrium,” said Mister Henri.

“Two is a balanced number. Along with its multiples. Another glass of absinthe, please, let us progress to the multiples!

“In ancient times there existed two forms of mathematics and now only one form exists,” added Mister Henri.

“This happened just as it always happens when two peoples go to war against each other and one side wins and the other loses. If people A, who won, are evil, they chop off the heads of all the elements of people B, and then people B disappear forever from the face of the Earth. This was what happened with one of the forms of mathematics. The question is whether the defeated form of mathematics was perhaps more intelligent than this form,” said Mister Henri.

“It so happens that very often the losers are more intelligent. One definitely knows that the losers are weaker, as a matter of fact, this is precisely why they are defeated. But just imagine that the people with mathematics A, this mathematics that now complicates our lives … imagine that the people with mathematics A used longer spears than the people who studied mathematics B. Thus, as the tips of the spears of the people with mathematics A pierced the hearts of the people with mathematics B earlier, mathematics A was imposed upon all the peoples of the world. Hence, could one not affirm that the mathematics we use today won by the force of brawn and arms? I believe that the second mathematics, which was lost in the mists of time, gave rise, in many subtle ways, to poetry,” said Mister Henri. “However, this is not an absolute certainty. It’s a poetic calculation.

“Another glass of absinthe, please. And be quick about it.

“Would you like me to tell you about the fateful years of 1348 to ’50?” asked Mister Henri, already perfectly unbalanced.

“Let us then progress to the first multiple,” he said.

Anatomy

Mister Henri said, “Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a distinguished professor of anatomy, invented the guillotine. Dr. Guillotin, the anatomist, said that the guillotine was much quicker than the axe and therefore caused less suffering. With the axe, in the case of some thick-necked assassins, it sometimes took twenty minutes to separate their heads from their bodies. It is necessary to study the human body with a great deal of attention in order to be able to kill people quickly,” said Mister Henri.

“Some idiots, like Father Time, take seventy years to kill a person. But it requires a great deal of science to be able to kill in a millisecond. One must therefore conclude that Father Time is not a specialist in human anatomy. Come to think of it, a huge rock smashing down on a skull … there are doctors in the most unlikely places, that’s what it is.”

Bad Luck

Mister Henri said, “Curses are mathematical calculations that happen in the future and wait for us.”

Mister Henri bent down to tie a shoelace and, at that precise moment, a huge rock whizzed past his head and smashed on the ground.

“Once again, my luck was timely,” said Mister Henri after getting up. “Or rather: my good luck is always synchronized with my bad luck. If a rock were to smash my head, it would be bad luck,” said Mister Henri. “But fortunately I was lucky enough to have bent down at the precise moment in which the rock was about to hit my head. People who are unlucky do not cease to be lucky. It’s just that they are lucky at the wrong moments,” he said. “It’s as though they were to find a sack full of sand in the middle of the desert,” said Mister Henri.

Infinity

Mister Henri asked for a glass of absinthe.

Mister Henri said, “I haven’t drunk a drop for two days now.

“I’ve been measuring an old building,” said Mister Henri,” and if I drink absinthe the measurements of the inside of the house turn out to be almost twice the measurements of the house’s exterior. Is it possible for a house to have a wall that measures ten meters internally and only five meters externally? My notion of infinity is this: a box that measures 20x10x10 on the inside and 10x5x5 on the outside.

“Infinity is contained in absinthe,” he said. And, raising his forefinger, Mister Henri added, “One more infinity please. And make it a large one!”