Raduan Nassar: A Cup of Rage

And when I arrived at his house, at kilometre 27 on the road from town, I was surprised the gate was still open, since the late afternoon had almost turned to night, whose atmosphere, I noticed getting out of the car, had gathered early in the bushes, the black, erect gravitas of the cypresses impressing me a little, and there at the foot of the stairs I also noticed that the door to the conservatory was wide open, which could be construed as another sign, redundant and almost too obvious in fact, that he was waiting for me, although the device was more likely there to remind me that I, even if late, would always go and see him, that I was unable to dispense with the rewards a visit would bring, and indeed I went pensively up to the landing, and stopped there for just a moment before going into the conservatory, where I saw myself watched by Bingo, an angry mongrel who fitted his role as the monastery dog perfectly, he was sitting rigidly immobile on a cushioned chair, the blade of his eyes slicing through the dull hour, but I ignored him, not only because I was used to him, but also because I’d spied the piece of paper on the table, on which I could read when I got closer, without picking it up, or even bending over, ‘I’m in the bedroom’, typical of his messages — brief, a calculation stripped down to the bone, and even written in a forged schoolboy’s scrawl — but then I immediately forgot the simulated casualness of the message and entered the living room, unhurriedly taking stock of what he’d left scattered across the floor, the two cushions that a little earlier would have served as his pillow, the wrought-iron lamp beside them, the thermos flask on the stool, an ashtray within arm’s reach, and another reference work splayed open on the floor, with its spine facing upwards and clearly stating the contents of the tome, not to forget his beaten-up sandals of raw leather, carelessly discarded like those of a child, shards isolated from each other which I was reluctantly piecing together into a mosaic as I stood there for a moment, weighing the density of the quiet house, ‘my cell’, according to the curt comment he had made one day, mixing in this stoicism both monastic and worldly things, until I moved through these fragments to the other side of the room and now I only had to cross the hall to reach his bedroom, which floated lazily in the calm light of a candle: lying on his side with his head almost touching his tucked-up knees, he slept, and it wasn’t the first time that he had faked sleeping like a little boy, and nor would it be the first time that I would attend to his whims, because a virulent, vertiginous tenderness took hold of me, so sudden and unexpected that I could barely contain the impulse to open myself completely and prematurely to welcome back that enormous foetus.

1. An allusion to a Fernando Pessoa poem, well known in the Portuguese-speaking world and much translated into English. In Richard Zenith’s translation Autopsychography (Penguin Classics), the referenced stanza reads:

The poet is a faker

Who’s so good at his act

He even fakes the pain

Of pain he feels in fact.

2. The section from ‘let cities fall’ to ‘dying in the distance’ quotes a poem Fernando Pessoa wrote as Ricardo Reis, an ode about chess players whose first-line title in Portuguese is ‘ Ouvi contar que outrora, quando a Pérsia ’. The narrator of A Cup of Rage starts quoting in the seventh stanza of the poem, then jumps back to the start and end of the fifth stanza for the lines from ‘when the ivory king’s in danger’ to ‘dying in the distance’.

In Nassar’s Portuguese, the narrator quotes the poem word for word, except for the lack of initial capitals and line breaks, until he says ‘ nada pesa ’ (it doesn’t at all weigh on you) instead of the poem’s ‘ pouca pesa ’ (it hardly weighs on you), perhaps a natural alteration for a narrator who has none of Pessoa’s understatement.

3. Brazilian football crowds shout ‘ bicha ’, i.e. ‘queer’, at referees they don’t like.