rimbaud wants to marry me
by Douglas Messerli
Rodrigo de Souza Leäo All Dogs Are Blue, translated by Zoë
Perry and Stefan Tobler from Todos os
cachorros são azuis) (High Wycombe, Bucks, United Kingdom: And Other
Stories, 2013)
Let me just begin this review by
stating the obvious: Brazilian writer Rodrigo de Souza Leão’s All Dogs Are Blue is like no other book
in the world. That is not to say it is entirely original; one of its charms is
its many literary and social references, including the author’s own
re-summarization of the commonplaces (if you can describe any such experience
has having something in common with anything or anyone else) of living in a
lunatic asylum. Although the author may not have read Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or seen
the Hollywood social-shocker, Anatole Litvak’s 1948 film The Snake Pit, these works, at moments, have a kinship with Souza
Leão’s exuberant depiction of his life in hell.
But then again, this young author, who died, at the age of 43, just as
this book was published, may have known both of those works. For a man who
spent so many years locked away in an asylum, his mind and body interminably
altered by drugs, Souza Leão relies on a huge body of international film,
Brazilian, South American and European poetry, music, television, and popular
events that might put many authors free from any of these strictures to shame.
Indeed, two major poets of the 19th century, Baudelaire and Rimbaud,
regularly visit him in his cage in the little room to which he has been
consigned in the favela-adjacent
institution along with not only numerous other mad men and women, but
criminals, and the elderly who have nowhere else to go. Although there are
evidently beautiful plants and trees surrounding his building, all day long his
fellow prisoners cry out, bang their heads against the wall, and listen to loud
television, while at night the endless music and screams of the slums washes
over his troubled dreams.
Night came and along with it
came the worst thing of all: the soundtrack.
Our asylum was next to a favela.
Rio funk played all night long and all
day too. Go Lacraia, go
Lacraia, go Lacraia! Go Serginho, go Serginho.
Sleeping with the rubbish
playing…blaring!
Our hero’s entire world turns different colors depending upon which drug
has just been injected into his veins: Benzetacil, Haldol (blue, like the color
of his stuffed dog at home), and numerous other concoctions that force the
patients to hallucinate and vegetate through what they have left of their
lives. Part of the problem, lucidly argues the author, is that clinics mix up
their types of patients, trying to medicate them as if they were all suffering
from the same problems.
It’s little wonder that in such an interruptive world, Souza Leão has
created a work that is not only raw in its vocabulary, filled with descriptions
of and events that refer to bodily functions—spit, vomit, urine, shit, etc.—but
linguistically lurches from association to association, radically moving from
passages of description, to narrative events past and present, moving from the
external to the internal in mid-sentence. “Real” visits from his mother and father
are confused with his magical camaraderie with Rimbaud and his more casual
friendship with Baudelaire. A discussion of electroshock therapy quickly grows
into a serious consideration of why women are not allowed to cohabit with men,
which, in turn, brings up the subject of sex, which the narrator associates
with his own loneliness and his ultimate sense of nothingness. The lunatics’
performances on a karaoke machine are quickly interrupted by the appearance of
B agents, searching for the killer of the clinic’s former locked-away criminal,
Fearsome Madman, who previously killed many people but was afraid of the
narrator because he sounded like his father. Some associations function through
a sort of psychological undercurrent, while others seem to come out of nowhere.
Readers who seek for coherent and an authorially controlled narrative, will
certainly be frustrated in reading All
Dogs Are Blue. Stylists will find the work rough-going, and logicians will
quickly abandon it with despair.
Yet this short fiction, in its subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle
repetitions of names, events, slang and cultural experiences, in the end, makes
sense in a way that those whom we might describe as sane might never perceive:
Finally they gave me some
glasses. But with the glasses I could
only look inside people.
And there are moments when Souza
Leäo and his narrator philosophize in a manner that reaches near profundity:
Violence is so fascinating,
and our lives, so normal. I’m talking
about a specific kind of
violence. Everything can be violent. Even
God.
Clearly the narrator of this
sometimes maddening work is mad throughout, but he recognizes that in that
madness he can at least say what he wants. And in his recognition of his own
madness, our hero recognizes his own condition in a way that few us do. He is
aware not only that someday he will die, but just how he might die:
I take Haldol* to be under no
illusions that I’ll die mad one day,
somewhere dirty, without any
food. It’s the way every madman
ends.
His friend Rimbaud falls in love
with him, contacts AIDS, and even asks the narrator to marry him, but Souza
Leão and his persona doesn’t lose sight of his own reality, the fact that he,
himself, is not gay. And, in the end, both Rimbaud and Baudelaire disappear,
only to be replaced by other hallucinations of a vast supportive society of
peace-loving Todogs, who, despite the narrator’s imprisonment, grow to include
millions of members, altering the reality of the planet. Aren’t all such
dreamers described as mad? Even if one’s dream and the whole of one’s past ends
up in the rubbish like the narrator’s blue dog, it can always be restored
through the imagination, no matter how troubled and sick it has become.
All Dogs Are Blue is no book
for literary purists, but is a great read for anyone who can embrace the human
spirit behind any written text.
*Haloperidol, used in the treatment
of schizophrenia, acute psychosis, mania, delirium and other serious
psychological illnesses.
Los Angeles, June 15, 2014
Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Fall 2014) [on-line edition]
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