Gonçalo Tavares: The Neighborhood

Later, Mister Valéry began to ponder about the fact that, if tall people were also to jump, he would never match them on a vertical level. And this thought dampened his spirits a bit. One fine day, Mister Valéry ceased to jump. Definitively. However, it was more due to tiredness than for any other reason.

A few days later, he went out into the street with a stool.

He stood on top of it and stayed there, completely still, watching.

“This way, I am just like tall people for a good while. Except I’m immobile.”

But he still wasn’t satisfied.

“It’s just as though tall people were standing on top of a stool and they still manage to move,” grumbled Mister Valéry, full of envy, when he returned home shortly thereafter, deeply disappointed, with the stool under his arm.

Mister Valéry then did several calculations and produced some sketches. He first thought about a stool with wheels, and proceeded to draw it.

He then thought of freezing a jump. As though it were possible to suspend the force of gravity, if only for an hour (he did not ask for any more than that), during his perambulations through the city.

And Mister Valéry drew his recurrent dream.

But none of these ideas was either comfortable or possible, and thus Mister Valéry decided to be tall in his mind.

Now, whenever he met people in the street, he looked at them as though he were looking at them from a point that was twenty centimeters higher. By concentrating, Mister Valéry even managed to see the tops of the heads of people who were much taller than he.

Mister Valéry never thought about the hypotheses of the stool or his jumps again, now considering them to be, when viewed from a certain distance, rather ridiculous. However, by concentrating upon his new view of people in this manner, as though from above, he found it hard to recall the faces of the people he met.

Essentially, with his newfound height, Mister Valéry lost friends.

The Pet

Mister Valéry had a pet, but nobody had ever seen it.

Mister Valéry used to keep the animal locked up in a box and never took it out. He fed it through a hole on top of the box and cleaned its droppings via a hole in the bottom of the box.

Mister Valéry explained, “It’s better to avoid getting attached to pets, they frequently die, and then one gets very sad.”

And Mister Valéry drew a box with two holes: one on top of the box and the other on the bottom.

And he said, “Who could get attached to a box?”

Unfettered by any sort of anguish, Mister Valéry thus continued to be very content with the pet he had chosen.

The Hat

Mister Valéry was very absentminded. He did not confuse his wife with his hat, as happened with some people, but did confuse his hat with his hair.

Mister Valéry was under the impression that he always had his hat on, but this wasn’t true.

Thinking his hair was his hat, Mister Valéry, whenever he passed a lady, had the habit of slightly raising the hair on his brow, out of courtesy. Inwardly, the women would smile broadly at his absentmindedness, but appreciated the gallantry of the gesture.

Fearing ridicule, Mister Valéry began to be on his guard and, before leaving the house, would jam his bowler hat down to his chin to be absolutely sure that he was wearing it.

Mister Valéry even drew a sketch of his hat and head when viewed from behind

and when viewed from the front.

Mister Valéry jammed his hat onto his head so hard that he could remove it only with great difficulty.

Whenever Mister Valéry met a lady in the street, he tried to raise his hat with both hands, but was unable to do so.

The women continued on their way and, out of the corner of their eyes, could see Mister Valéry sweating away, red in the face with impatience and with one hand on each side of his hat, trying to pull it off his head, rather as one does with the corks of hard-to-open bottles. As they could not wait until Mister Valéry finished his struggle, a performance that sometimes lasted many interminable minutes, the ladies went away before seeing the outcome of the situation.

Thus, Mister Valéry was sometimes deemed to be impolite, which was rather unfair.

The Two Sides

Mister Valéry was a perfectionist.

He only touched things that were on his left with his left hand, and things that were on his right with his right hand.

He said, “The world has two sides: the right side and the left side, just like the human body; and things go wrong when someone touches the right side of the World with the left side of the body, or vice versa.”

Scrupulously sticking to this theory, Mister Valéry explained, “I have divided my house into two, with a line.”

And drew

“I have delineated a right side and a left side.”

“Thus, I reserve my right hand for the objects on the right side, and vice versa.”

At this moment, responding to a question posed by a friend, Mister Valéry explained, “I place any heavy objects with their centers exactly on the line.”

And drew

“Thus,” explained Mister Valéry, “I can carry them using both my left and right hands, as long as I take care to move them with their centers exactly on the dividing line. In the case of light objects,” continued Mister Valéry, “I don’t need to worry so much: I change their positions with only one hand. The correct hand, of course.”

“But how can you maintain this rigor all the time?” the same friend asked him. “When you are facing the other way, for example, how do you know which is the left and right part of the house?”

Mister Valéry appeared almost offended by this query, as he did not like to be questioned, and replied, brusquely, “I never turn my back on things.”

(This was what Mister Valéry used to say, but in truth, so as never to make a mistake, he had painted the entire right side of his house, including all the objects there, red, and the entire left side, blue. Thus, one can better understand the real reason why Mister Valéry had painted his right hand red and his left hand blue. It was not due to aesthetic reasons, as he claimed. It was much more than that.)