João Almino | The Last Twist of the Knife / 2021

diary of an unintentional suicide

by Douglas Messerli

 

João Almino The Last Twist of the Knife, translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Lowe (Dallas/Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2021)

 

In his 2017 fiction, now translated by Elizabeth Lowe into English as The Last Twist of the Knife, Brazilian writer João Almino established a series of difficult hurdles for himself, almost as if purposely creating near-impossible Oulipo-like challenges. The form of his work is a journal kept by a 70-some year-old narrator whose memory is slowly slipping away and who suddenly, for no  evident reason other than the couple has grown bored of one another, decides to leave his wife Clarice and—despite the long-ago warnings of writers such as Thomas Wolfe—to attempt to “go home” again, in this case the Brazilian backlands of the northwestern plateau where he grew up, where he purchases his old family homestead near the isolated town of Fortaleza.

 

        Our “hero,” who mistakenly still perceives himself as a kind of agèd Don Juan, imagines that he still might fit back into a community in which he and his family were always perceived as outsiders. He makes the purchase through his childhood girlfriend Patrícia, the daughter of the formerly wealthy landowner of the region who is also, somewhat inexplicably, our narrator’s “godfather,” who when the narrator’s own father was killed took him into his home with Patrícia and her brother Miguel to raise him. How, after all these years of absence, he might imagine the two could reignite his one-sided childhood passion, is never explained. Even on the airplane on his way back to his childhood world, our “hero” flirts with the female passenger who is seated next to him and religiously takes her cellphone number as if she might be another female conquest. We realize almost immediately that our narrator has lost all sense of himself in time and space.

       In many respects it is appropriate that the narrator is returning home, for, as Almino reveals, he himself is regressing to the mental capabilities of a child. Although he recalls some incidents in full, most of his narrative is abstractly presented without details, the story consisting primarily of names and vague events. Moreover, we are forced to read his fragmented journal entries in which he often forgets what he has previously written and which are highly contradictory with a strong sense of skepticism and actual distrust. He is the very definition of an unreliable narrator.

      As we slowly build up these entries scattered through a brief period we begin also to perceive truths which he has not yet unraveled, accordingly taking even some of the energy away from what also becomes a kind of slow detective tale, as the narrator attempts to piece back together the fragments he remembers from the past to make sense of his current behavior.

      Although, he was close friends with Miguel as a child—despite their social disparity in a society in which wealth and race determine nearly everything—he now finds the grown businessman, who continues to run his father’s estate, more interested in his married sister Zuleide than in him. The woman he imagined he might resume his childhood love communicates with our “hero” throughout the narrative only by letter, will later not even return his phone calls, and never actually comes into contact with him until a final abbreviated telephone message.

      The “hero’s” own son, Teodoro runs a hotel in Fortaleza; but the son, who is gay and in the narrative about to celebrate a civil marriage ceremony with his lover, seems distant from his obviously womanizing father, and our narrator’s two other sons, living in São Paulo, seem even more estranged, rarely communicating with either with their father or Teodoro.

      The central figure’s plans to farm the old estate which he has purchased with his last remaining funds are vague to say to the least, and he leaves the care of the house and land mostly his closest childhood friend, a black man Arnaldo.

       The narrative, accordingly, is filled with repetitions, gaps of information, clues that are rather obvious to us but seemingly incomprehensible to the narrator, and very little of the rich detail that so enlivens the great South American fictions of the 1960s and 70s. A typical passage reads like this one from May 22:

 

            Arnaldo lives on a little ranch very close to the one I bought; I can’t

            remember if I already mentioned this. It’s been years since I last

            saw him, but now we frequently communicate on WhatsApp. I still

            think of him as my childhood friend, a better companion than

            Miguel, Clarice’s brother, because he used to go everywhere with

            me, and I was always ready to tag along when he his farm chores

            or when he went hunting for tiús and preás. 

 

Yet when he finally arrives at his newly purchased ranch we hardly get another glimpse of Arnaldo, despite the fact that our narrator depends on him to farm his land.

       In short, on the surface the narrative actually says little since the narrator cannot make sense of his own experiences; yet given the clues he strews throughout his confused memories we learn a very great deal; and we ourselves are accordingly required to fill in the details with a far richer narrative that the fictional author himself might be able to provide.

      And slowly we do perceive even before the narrator does that his beloved “godfather” is also his father, having killed his “daddy” when the man demanded more money to keep quiet about the godfather’s relationship with his wife, the narrator’s seemingly saintly mother.

      Almost the moment our foolish narrator blunders back into his childhood territory, he attempts to sue both his “beloved” childhood friends, Miguel and Patrícia, demanding they provide blood samples so that through DNA testing he can prove whether or not he was also the godfather’s son, and therefore an heir to the estate.

      Despite the fact that our narrator has made his living as a lawyer, he quickly loses all of his legal pleas. This is, after all, a region where the local wealthy still maintain power over both social and civil matters. And obviously his legal challenges make any further communication with either of the people whom he thought he loved impossible. But even then our narrator won’t give up, imagining that someday he might be able to communicate fully once more with the beautiful Patrícia, who by this time must be a rather elderly dame.

       Even more disastrously, the narrator’s wife, Clarice, discovering that she has breast cancer, grows ill, is hospitalized, and dies, the narrator returning to Brasília to nurse her and recall the true adventures of his life were with her, not back in Fortaleza.

      By fiction’s end he resells his property to Miguel, who himself has just lost his family business, suggesting that the past which the narrator imagined at the beginning has now entirely collapsed.

      When our not so very bright storyteller finally realizes, as he puts it, “I must admit, it [the past] does not substitute for the present, the inherent difficulties of the unknown or the uncertain promises of the future,” the poor hero has no present and very little future left. 

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2021

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Fall 2021).