Cláudia Andrade and us, tragically human
After three novels, Cláudia Andrade returns to short stories with A Ressurreição de Maria . The book is the second of the writer’s short stories published by Elsinore. The first, Quartos de Final e Outras Histórias , came out in 2019. A collection of nine short stories that reveal “the whole truth about life, that thunderous nothing”, A Ressurreição de Maria addresses themes that are dear to Cláudia Andrade — life in opposition to death; the boredom of existence; human vulgarity; senseless violence; obsessive love — and presents a cast of characters, almost all male, who are as tragic as they are absurd.
The first three stories are perhaps the strongest in the book. In Eucaristia , an unexpected love story is cut short by a terminal illness, which causes the man to inactive in the face of his wife's physical decline. Unable to visit her in the hospital, he walks among cypress trees and decorates the house with bouquets of flowers, which he buys daily in a supermarket so as not to "go bankrupt", but which he never gives to her. When the story and his life come to an end, the sudden realization of death awakens in him an obsessive desire to do what he was unable to do in life: save his wife from the clutches of her manipulative mother, resorting to a poorly orchestrated plan, a clumsy escape from the hospital morgue and a carving knife.
The misery that characterizes the days of the man of the Eucharist as he awaits the tragic outcome is the daily bread of the character in the second story, The Mistake . The nameless man lives in a small rented room, which he shares with ugly and smelly strangers who are chosen by the landlord. Like Raskolnikov, he is an intellectual on the brink of disgrace, who reads books and thinks a lot, showing himself to be awkward and embarrassed in social situations and completely unaware of the art of winning over a beautiful woman. But despite his clumsiness, he seeks love. What is more, he yearns for it with a burning and envious desire, which leads him to commit a crime he did not plan. But the tragedy of some is the joy of others: while his victim lies six feet under the ground, the murderer lives happily and imprisoned. Grateful for the peace of prison, he is now a married man, with a woman he met through an exchange of letters. When they meet, they talk about a future happiness that will never be more than a possibility. For him, that's fine.
The third story, which gives the book its title, is based on the miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus performed by Christ. In Cláudia Andrade’s version, the initial joy caused by the return of Lazarus, who walks clumsily out of his tomb, wrapped in bandages, gradually gives way to discomfort for his family. The resurrected Lazarus is not the same one who left life behind — he has no smell, he does not bump into the flower beds, his steps do not leave footprints and his body does not weigh down the bed on which he lies every sleepless night. He has become “clean, correct and appropriate”, incapable of touching the vulgarity and filth that constitute human nature, and this is the great tragedy of his new existence.
If most of the texts in The Resurrection of Mary are disturbing because of their filthy humanity, the story about Lazarus is disturbing because of its lack thereof. Living a life floating above the world brings no joy to the resurrected man (or his family), who lives life after death with the same joy that he lived before it — none. The sisters, Martha and Mary, do not feel blessed by the divine, but cursed by the ghostly existence of their brother, who has even stopped using the latrine like a normal person. The conclusion is obvious: humanity cannot be immaculate, because it ceases to be humanity (purity belongs to the divine plan). The stain, the frailties and the foolishness that constitute existence are what make humans, human.
The last texts in the book, Ter sorte and Ermenegildo Olimpianino , are distinguished from the others by their theme and narrative structure. The violent and absurd male voices of the previous stories disappear, giving way to a broader experience. Ter sorte describes the tragedies that befall a family after the end of a war, but without focusing on a specific figure; the second has a female voice as narrator, who talks about the decision not to have a son named Ermenegildo Olimpianino, the most absurd name she could think of in order to “more broadly” “congratulate” herself for not having to carry him.
Different in form and content, the two stories refer to distinct universes of Cláudia Andrade's writing: Being Lucky is reminiscent of the novel A Little Bit of Ash and Glory , about a village that lives haunted by the imminent danger of war and the impact this has on its inhabitants; Ermenegildo Olimpianino , based on a quote from Danii Kharms, an avant-garde and absurd Russian writer, describes in detail the non-existence of a child who will never be born. A metaphor for the writing itself, this “non-child” is loved by the mother who raised him only in her thoughts, and his absence motivates an inner conversation that becomes a “kind of prayer” about the non-limits of creation.
Cláudia Andrade has the gift of making us look at our own humanity, confronting us with the most negative characteristics, which are perhaps the most defining. We can turn our backs and see only what is “sunny” (something the writer decided not to do, as she explained in an interview with Observador), but is there anything truly revealing in that? With incisive writing, but which does not fail to have its moments of great delicacy, and the dark humor that is so characteristic of her, in this new set of short stories, Cláudia Andrade makes us reflect and look head on at what makes us tragically and ridiculously human.
observador
