The late Victor Heringer authored the following crônica, a literary hybrid form of personal essay and cultural criticism popular in Brazil, four years before his death in 2018. Here it is available in English for the first time, translated by James Young.
1. The poet Fabiano Calixto recently launched his new collection here in São Paulo. It’s called Nominata Morfina. The cover is a photo of a wall with the book’s title stylishly graffitied across it (the graffiti is by Calixto’s friend, also a poet). The wall, as they told me over beers and bar snacks, is from the Consolação Cemetery.
That’s when it all made sense to me.
Since moving to São Paulo, I’ve found all my journeys (from home to work, from Avenida Paulista to home, etc.) are bordered by cemeteries. I discovered too that there’s a custom here of writing on the walls of graveyards. In my first days in the city, I saw written, beside the gates of one of the cemeteries on Avenida Doutor Arnaldo: I DEFEATED DEATH.
2. When I lived in Rio de Janeiro, the only graveyards I saw were the giant Caju cemetery complex from the heights of the elevated Perimetral highway, on my way back from university, and the São Joao Batista Cemetery when I caught the wrong bus when leaving the beach. I rarely read anything on their walls, not even the usual territory-marking names and hieroglyphic symbols. I love the Latin phrase engraved above the gates of São Joao Batista, Revertere ad locum tuum (flee thou to thy place), out of simple linguistic instinct: the beginning of the phrase has the dreadful sound of a spade digging into the earth, and the echo in locum and tuum suggests the last things of this world, the lid of a coffin closing. I liked to look at the bare walls and think about death (that’s what cemeteries are for), a passing contemplation, blank and whitewashed and silent. Nothing compared to the babel of the cemeteries here.
3. The clearly visible, upper case letters of “I defeated death” (which, ironically, were erased a few days later) stayed with me. If at first I considered the gesture (all graffiti is a gesture, and Duchampian) a little inelegant, today I find it inelegant but a little fascinating (above all because it was defeated, erased). Why such a strident proclamation of a desire for transcendence? After all, who defeated death? The person who graffitied the wall? Or was the person who graffitied the wall embodying a character? Did one of the dead graffiti the wall? A terminally ill person? An ex-terminally ill person? Did God graffiti the wall? Will God, in the end, have defeated death? No. No one defeats death: the phrase was erased by the living. The living are “the postponed corpse that procreates,” from the poem by Pessoa (and perhaps a little more). The graffiti on Avenida Doutor Arnaldo is, like life, a blind alley.
4. But it’s this (perhaps a little more) of which the messages graffitied on the cemeteries speak, because they’re all Sebastianist, all messianic. The desire not to die is not, properly speaking, the desire to live forever as flesh and bone. This, we can imagine, would be unbearable. It’s something else. It’s what the question graffitied on São Paulo Cemetery, on Rua Cardeal Arcoverde, asks: Can they die, who do not live? And it’s what the posters glued to the cemetery on Avenida Doutor Arnaldo (perhaps it’s called Araçá?), near the flower stands, say: Give flowers to the living (the posters are well-intentioned, but also a little inelegant). The cemetery doesn’t belong to the dead, the flowers don’t belong to the dead, not even death belongs to the dead. It all belongs to us. As the cemetery in Évora says: “We bones that are here, for yours await.” That phrase too belongs to us. And the bones.
5. There’s graffiti at the Rua Cardeal Arcoverde cemetery that I admire a great deal. It’s raw and loud, there are two lines of verse, and a single cry: AWAKEN DEAD! I like it because there’s no comma, only an exclamation point (though the true gesture doesn’t require an exclamation point…!). I read this commandment every morning: awakendead, awakendead, awakenlove*; awaken, love; awaken, dead; awaken dead. I like it because it’s a call to resurrection and because, without the comma, it appears to be speaking not to the dead, but to the passers-by, those who peek from the bus window on their way to work: You awaken dead, You’re awake, but you’re not alive. I like this involuntary curse on joyless employment, the grind of an outmoded world, jobs. Awaken, love. Defeat death.
25 August 2014
*Translator’s note: the transition from ‘awakendead’ (acordamorto) to ‘awakenlove’ (acordamor) is considerably smoother in Portuguese than in English.
Photo of Victor Heringer by Renato Parada.
Victor Heringer was born in Rio Janeiro in 1988. In his lifetime, he published a collection of poetry, two novels, and a conceptual book of photographs, among other writing. James Young‘s translation of The Love of Singular Men, Heringer’s first novel available in English, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award John Leonard Prize.
