“The animal was there before man.”
“So what?” I objected.
“So, before men, there was no such district.”
“Who mentioned a district?”
“If it’s not a district, what is it?”
“It’s the word.”
At that moment an expert in common sense intervened.
“First jacaré. Then Jacarepaguá.”
“How do you know?”
“Everybody knows.”
“Everybody who?”
“Everybody.”
At the neighboring table a German linguist overheard everything. She said: “Excuse me for brreaking in, but jacarré came firrst. Jacarrepaguá was what the Tupi Indians called a lake of jacarrés. Jacarré means alligatorr. Paguá means lake. Consequently—”
A clamor erupted at the table: my friends were commemorating my failure.
It happens that the German woman was mistaken. Jacarepaguá came before jacaré. And, moreover, it could have come before, as befits the deductive method.
I drained my glass of beer with a slice of lemon in it and looked directly at the Teuton, who had hips the size of the bar.
“Frau, your explanation is illogical. There is no evidence that the Tupis named the lake before naming the alligator.”
The German woman, who was pink, turned a deep red. “Senhorr, even if the lake was designated paguá before the jacarré was designated jacarré, jacarré only went into the lake after the existence of the two worrds sep-a-rrate-ly. So, jacarré-worrd already existed when Indian saw jacarré-animal go into paguá-lake. Only afterr, paguá-worrd joined jacarré-worrd in a new worrd.”
Silence came over the audience, in criminological suspense.
“I could say, frau, in a philosophical sense, that the phenomenon may have existed before the word, therefore the word was already there, waiting for the fact. The nature of time is controversial.”
“That is absurrd, irrrational, because—”
“And I could raise another long, endless series of hypotheses, frau. As it happens, that’s not the issue.”
The woman, who had turned purple, widened her eyes. “And what is the issue, senhorr?”
I filled my glass. The lemon disappeared into the foam. “The issue is that there’s a story that’s not the story of biological, chronological, topographical, or etymological cases.”
The German’s eyes bulged out of their sockets. “And what storry is that, senhorr?”
“My story.”
2
The verses, wrapped in a dance rhythm, came from a Victrola that I never saw, only heard. Other verses came from it, from other records my mother bought in a store in Laranjeiras, including other verses from that same song, but lying in bed at the age of five, I focused on the floundering of the singer. Focused also on the word neurasthenic, accented on the last syllable to rhyme with sick.
And I focused, to the point of obsession, on that place: Jacarepaguá.
I didn’t know it was a district. And to this day I still don’t. I didn’t even know what a jacaré was. And although my parents had taken me to the well-known Lagoa lake, the existence of paguá was beyond my contemplation.
But I guessed that the place, that place, Jacarepaguá, if you were to go there it wouldn’t be anything good, which immediately aroused in me the desire to be there.
And that came to be the foundation of any future concern, plan, or action.
3
It was the time for learning words, of asking what’s-that, what’s-this, what’s-whatever. Away from the Victrola (which I never saw), I asked my mother what neur-as-then-ic was and she answered that it was a man who was nervous, and I asked what nervous was, and she floundered like the man’s voice did on the Victrola.
“Loony,” she finally said.
The explanation was convincing. Loony, about whose meaning I had no idea, clarified everything, sounded like something I had already understood about the song and matched everything else.
There was still the question of what Jacarepaguá was. But I would never dare ask. Jacarepaguá should be conquered without help, without explanations that weren’t naturaclass="underline" any fact, word, map, or proof should spring from the days, like the word itself sprang from the Victrola that I never saw.
However, to move on, it was necessary for the jacaré to come. It came. The process of learning to read began, conducted by a teacher who not coincidentally was my aunt.
In my aunt’s alphabet set, of her own design, the a stood for ant, a convenient thing, as it’s easy to make the drawing of an ant fit inside of an a or even to draw the a as if it were the ant itself.
And so forth. The d was a strange set of dice, and the e was an elephant (don’t ask me how), the f was a flamingo, and the j, the jacaré.
“What’s a jacaré?” I inquired, and everyone laughed, as if they knew what a jacaré was. My aunt called on a cross-eyed boy everyone thought was a genius. It happens that, in addition to being cross-eyed, he also had a speech defect.
“Jacalé is an animal with a gleeeeeeat big mouth and shaaalp teeth who stays in the lake lying in the sun.”
It was the genius’s turn to be the object of laughter. My aunt got pissed and ended the class less than halfway through the alphabet, which later earned her a warning from the principal.
I went home looking through the school bus window at the leafy trees in Laranjeiras, which gave off a hot breath of late afternoon, and the sound of cicadas filled me with a brutal sadness and the wish to die, especially since the sidewalks emanated a bouquet of shit that battled with the blossoms from every flower bed in the city.
At home, I dashed to bed in hopes of sleeping before dinner, but it was impossible. My mother had put on the Victrola a song with hysterical syllables.
I went to sleep and dreamed about my aunt turning into a giant ant who emerged from a tree and exploded into alphabetic gas, leaving a stench of letters in the air. When the smoke dissipated, Jacarepaguá materialized in a large gray swamp where monsters with enormous teeth were eating one another, forming a viscous mass that filled everything and went up their noses, mouths, and ears until embedding itself in the world’s most godforsaken places.