Raduan Nassar: A Cup of Rage

RADUAN NASSAR was born in 1935, in Pindorama, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Like his Lebanese immigrant family, the author’s life has been bound in agriculture and writing. Ancient Tillage (1975) and A Cup of Rage (1978), a novella, are his two major literary works. He was raised mainly in small rural towns, then went on to study Law at the University of São Paulo. He also worked as a journalist and editor for the newspaper Jornal do Bairro , jointly founded with his brothers. Although an acclaimed literary author, since 1985 Raduan Nassar has led a private existence dedicated to farming and livestock production. He retired to a smaller farm in 2011, having donated his entire commercial property to the agricultural departments of the Federal University of São Carlos for the creation of a new campus.

STEFAN TOBLER is the publisher at And Other Stories, a young publishing house whose titles include the Booker Prize-shortlisted Swimming Home by Deborah Levy and much literature in translation. He is a literary translator from Portuguese and German. Recent translations include the 2015 Oxford — Weidenfeld Translation Prize-shortlisted Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, All Dogs are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão and the poetry collection Silence River by Antônio Moura. He is also on Twitter @stefantobler.

And when that afternoon I arrived home at kilometre 27 on the road from town, she was walking around, already waiting for me on the lawn, and came and opened the gate so that I could drive right in, and as soon as I came out of the garage we climbed the stairs together to the conservatory, and no sooner were we there than I opened the middle curtains and we sat down in the wicker chairs, our eyes fixed on the hilltop opposite, where the sun was setting, and the two of us sat in silence until she asked me ‘what’s the matter?’, but I, somewhere else entirely, remained distant and still, my thoughts lost in the red sunset, and it was because she repeated the question that I replied ‘have you eaten yet?’ and as she said ‘later’ I got up and wandered over to the kitchen (she followed me), took a tomato from the fridge, went over to the sink and washed it, then went to get the salt-shaker from the cupboard and sat down at the table (she followed all my movements from across the room, while I, to annoy her, pretended not to notice), and it was under her constant gaze that I began to eat the tomato, sprinkling more salt on what remained in my hand, making a show of biting into it with relish in order to reveal my teeth, strong as a horse’s, knowing that she couldn’t tear her eyes off my mouth, knowing that beneath her silence she was writhing with impatience, knowing above all that the more indifferent I seemed to be, the more attractive she found me, I only know that when I finished eating the tomato I left her there in the kitchen and went to get the radio that was on the shelf in the living room, and without going back to the kitchen we met again in the hall, and without a word and almost together we entered the half-light of the bedroom.

For a few moments in the room we seemed to be two strangers observed by somebody, and that somebody was always her and me, the two had to watch what I was doing and not what she was doing, so I sat on the edge of the bed and calmly started taking off my shoes and socks, holding my bare feet in my hands and feeling how lovely and moist they were, as if pulled out of the earth that very minute, and then I, with fixed purpose, started to walk around, feigning little reasons for my movements, letting the hems of my trouser-legs brush the floor, at the same time as they partially covered my feet, lending them mystery, knowing that they, bare and very white, powerfully embodied my coming nakedness, and soon I heard her breathing in deeply, over by the chair, where she had perhaps already given in to her desperation, struggling to take off her clothes, getting her fingers caught in the strap slipping down her arm, and I, still faking, knew that all of that was real, oh how I knew her nightmarish obsession for feet, and for my feet in particular, their firm step and well-shaped form, a little bony around the toes perhaps and nervously marked with veins and tendons on the instep, though they hadn’t lost the shy manner of a tender root, and I went to and fro with my calculated steps, lengthening the wait more and more with minimal pretexts, but as soon as she left the room and went briefly to the bathroom, I quickly took off my trousers and shirt and throwing myself onto the bed, I waited for her, stiff and ready, enjoying in silence the cotton of the sheet that covered me, and right then I closed my eyes thinking of the stratagems I would use (of all the many I knew), and in this way I went over alone in my head the things that we did, how she quivered at the first twitches of my mouth and at the shine I forged in my eyes, where I brought into plain view what was most vile and sordid in me, knowing that carried away by my other side she would always shout ‘so this is the bastard I love’, and I went over in my head that other trifling move in our game, a preamble nonetheless to unexpected later twists and turns, just as necessary a start as pushing a simple pawn up the board, in which I closed my hand over hers and straightened out her fingers, instilling courage in them, guiding them under my control to the hair on my chest, until they, from the example of my fingers under the sheet, developed their own masterful clandestine activities, or at a more advanced stage, after having carefully pored over our hairs, swellings and many smells, when the two of us on our knees measured the longest path for a single kiss, the palms of our hands pressed together, our arms open in an almost Christian exercise, our teeth biting each other’s mouths as if biting into the soft flesh of the heart, our eyes closed and our imaginations surrendered to the curves of our circlings, I also saw myself involved in certain practices, such as when, in a trance and already haughtily raised above the saddle of her stomach, I would prematurely fulfil one of her (of my) strangest whims, shooting sudden violent jets of milky birdlime which stuck to the skin of her face and the skin of her breasts, or such as that other, less impulsive one, slower to ripen, its fruit developing in a silent and patient crescendo of firm contractions, in which, me inside her, without our moving, with exasperated cries we reached those death-rattles of the height of exaltation, and I thought about the dangerous backwards leap, when she on her stomach would generously offer me another pasture, and in which my arms and hands symmetrically and almost mechanically gripped her below the shoulders, pressing and adjusting, part by part, our anointed bodies, and all the time I was thinking of my hands, and the broad backs of them, they were much used in this passionate geometry, so well devised by me, and which invariably led her to say in her perdition ‘magnificent, magnificent, you’re something else’, and from there my thoughts drifted to the restorative moments, the cigarettes we smoked following each poisoned bubble of silence, or during our conversations over a cup of coffee from the thermos (we would escape from bed naked and desecrate the kitchen table), when she would try to describe to me the confused experience she had when she came,