by Natalia Borges Polesso
It is said of someone who strives not to exclude any detail in what they do; meticulous. The word in the riddle was thorough, but the word that described him was methodical, almost intransigent. He thought that being this way made him an artist. He had been working with the same materials for years. Old grammar and crossword puzzles. Glue, a paintbrush, a pair of sharp scissors, pins. He kept the clippings in transparent organizers with tiny categorized compartments. Then he’d pin exemplary and obsolete phrases, riddles and gaps in the game onto pieces of cardboard. The effect was truly impressive. The landscape, the setting, the narrative, the gesture and the character’s intention, the meaning became complete in a very particular way; established by the frame, driven, in the mind of the observer. In a small abyss of language, the image revealed itself. It was as if it were manufacturing ghosts that were there, but were not.
Sitting in his studio, Leonardo thought with some unease about the paintings of an artist he had seen a few days before. A man holding his own head, pairs groping their own bodies, mystical and magnificently human figures, thick and yet very subtle brushstrokes.
— Obscure and fascinating, a technique that was widely used in the academist painting of the 19th century, but updated through the theme of depicting trans bodies, the poetics of the self and distortions in iconographic references, allegories in the history of art – he said aloud, while eating, as if he were still in the classroom. – That’s what art has to do – he squeezed his eyes shut and sighed as he licked his lips – one of the things art has to do – he pondered, but didn’t finish.
His eyelids lifted and the image of a woman appeared before him. He was startled. He dragged his chair aside.
— Who are you?
— Hi, Leonardo, I’m Morgana.
— Morgana?
Leonardo recognized that name in her voice and, little by little, also her face, her hair, her pallor which contrasted with her flushed mouth. The woman wasn’t smiling. She didn’t look hostile either. Leonardo remembered how many times in his childhood he had worn a woolen jumper over his head to imitate Morgana’s hair, how many times he had wrapped himself in a sheet and run around hiding in the yard behind the house, imitating the woman who had appeared in his dreams. And how many notebooks he’d kept under his mattress without ever showing anyone, full of his adventures. At that moment, he was unable to say anything. He got up and went to the sink to wash the pot of food. He splashed some water on his face. When he turned around again, the woman was no longer there. Leonardo let out the breath he had held in at the moment of fright, released it heavily, and like the good hypochondriac he was, sentenced himself:
— I’m crazy. Really mad. Far too tired.
He grabbed his cell phone and looked up the number of the very expensive psychiatrist he had been recommended to see when the phantasmagoria episodes first started. He looked at the paintings hanging in the studio and considered paying the psychiatrist with one of them.
— Would she like them? It would cover a few sessions and maybe some medication, if I’m not doomed already – he shook his head and laughed. – Nothing… an hour costs a fortune!
Leonardo made himself a coffee, opened up his computer and started answering emails. How many hours did he spend without earning a single penny, answering emails, doing paperwork, issuing invoices, writing reviews and critiques. None of that was making art, but all of it was being an artist. He picked up a small clipping from the floor. A line of action from a fictional work, it said. He stopped when, turning his face once more towards the computer, he read the word INVITATION and then: Congress of Melancholy. Confused, he opened it: “Dear Professor Doctor.” He thought it was a joke or an invitation to talk about his book, which had exactly that title, but it wasn’t. It really was an invitation to a congress.
— Are you going?
He looked to his side and there was another woman.
— Who are you now?
— What do you mean ‘who’? Heloísa – she touched her chest with her fingertips and turned her palms upwards. – And I’m not going to that shit, I mean, if it was the congress of shit, I’d go.
Leonardo’s mouth opened a little, but no words emerged. Now he was sure, it was his characters coming to haunt him. He didn’t move. He didn’t want her to disappear like Morgana, the marquise of his dreams, his adolescent creation.
— Would you like a coffee? – He tried a different approach.
— How could I, if I’m a figment of your imagination? You tell me if I want one.
— But you’re so real. I feel that if I stretched out my hand, I could touch you.
— That depends on your capacity for hallucination.
Leonardo didn’t want to try. But he didn’t stop looking at her for a second.
— Are you going? – She asked again.
— According to the logic of my own book, I couldn’t go even if I wanted to.
— That’s true.
— Besides, I’m very busy, working on a new exhibition. Would you like to help me?
— Of course, I’m an artist too.
— I know.
— I’m an artist with sad eyes.
— I know.
— I’m an indigenous artist, did you know that?
— No, I didn’t know that.
The woman remained silent.
— What are you working on?
— The idea for the novel.
— I love it when artists say they’re working on an idea. It’s so impossible.
— I’m composing something with the idea of the novel, let’s say.
— As a form?
— Also. – The woman remained silent and Leonardo, after waiting in vain for a comment, continued. – I’m testing new formats too. As well as paper, I have pieces of wood, metal hinges, fabric and pins.
— Of course, always pins.
— They’re like little anchors on words, they sink their meanings.
— Sink them where? You don’t actually have a text.
— Of course I do. – Leonardo felt offended. – I have fragments of fabric which, ultimately, are texts, plots, they are a way – he stopped. He felt a bit stupid. What if he was talking to himself?
— I don’t understand wood – she looked at one of the small pieces – the hinges are a good idea, it’s like showing the folds of the narrative, exposing them.
— I hadn’t thought of that.
— Of course you’d thought of that, do you really think I’m someone else?
— Don’t be so obvious, I hate it.
— Alright.
— And the wood?
— Density. I don’t know. I’m experimenting. They’re new openings for imaginative associations, that sort of thing.
— And love? You can’t speak of the romantic genre, without the love, the passion, the thrill. You like old words, don’t you? A shudder, an oscillating or vibrating movement that produces a slight noise. The thrill.
Leonardo wished he had that phrase in a ready-made clipping. He wanted to use it. But he had no memory of ever coming across such a construction.
— I like it, but I don’t believe that words age.
— And the artwork?
— That one does. – Leonardo opens his eyes a little wider. – Now I understand why I need Morgana, she’s a romantic. I mean, Romanesque, you know?
— Dramatic? Do you think so? Then why am I here?
— Because you’re skeptical and sarcastic, but haunted. And right now, it’s hauntedness that I need, that’s what I’m experiencing.
— But I can also be haunting.
Leonardo turned around and there was Morgana. She was wearing a long white satin nightgown, almost like a ghostly sheet. Heloísa was wearing baggy jeans and a thick cotton apron, stained with paint and dirt. Leonardo wore a black button-down shirt, shorts of the same color, beige socks halfway down his shins and black vinyl shoes with an orange rubber strip on top. Three strange visions.
— We all can – Heloísa said.
— I want you both to stay.
— That depends on you more than on us, – they said together, looking at the man.
He picked up the scissors and cut out words. On a piece of wood he pasted a picture of a white man in a striped swimsuit, with neatly styled hair, and above that he pasted a cut-out of the words: nobody knows. He opened a pot of blue gouache and mixed it with white until he obtained the color of the wall of his childhood home. An old blue, Tiffany blue, he liked that name and smiled. He opened a box in which there were multiple small dividers and retrieved a tiny cut-out that read: light reflected by the moon. And then, from another small square, he took out another clipping. Now an image. A boat with two fishermen in the front and fishing gear in the back. One of them was pulling a fish out of the choppy water. He left the two pieces of paper separate, they were smaller than a stamp.
— Minuscule novels, – Morgana said.
— Indeed they are – he went to the studio window and lit a cigarette.
— Do you still smoke?
— No.
He let the cigarette burn in an ashtray.
— That’s how long it takes for the paint to dry.
— It’s not.
— Yes it is.
— Were you about to smoke that cigarette and you’re not because the question bothered you?
— What question? – Leonardo sneered.
— It’s true that it wasn’t a question, Heloísa.
They both nodded in agreement.
— What are you talking about? – he asked once again.
— Your novels, Leonardo. Small, minuscule. Look at that. This whole exhibition – she pointed to the small pieces.
— But it’s a big plot of small fantasies. It’s about the bourgeois form of the novel and the elucidation of its details. It’s about borders and tensions.
— Oh yes, it’s about hybridity, about reading and seeing, it’s about a displacement of the traditional involvement of the spectator in art blah blah blah, Leonardo. I don’t believe it. I think it’s about you. It’s always about the artist.
— Oh, give me a break. People think it’s always about ourselves, but it’s not.
— Everything is autobiography, even the most straightforward of deconstructions, Leonardo.
— I don’t agree. – He paused for a moment, chewed a few words and then spat them out – well, yes, of course we get involved. That’s part of the job. These are our questions for the world.
— The world is huge, Leonardo. Are you going to the congress?
— What congress?
— Of melancholy.
— No, I’m in a more euphoric phase of my composition.
The two looked at each other. They looked at the fragments of what the artist had called a novel. They looked at each other again and raised their eyebrows at the same time as they pursed their lips.
— I’m in a more euphoric phase of my production. – He looked at the pieces and sighed – It is melancholic, yes, I’ve never denied that. Perhaps that’s why I was so tormented by the paintings, there’s a very genuine look at oneself there, faced with an…
— Abyss – Morgana said smiling and almost touching his face. – You’re a tormented artist, dear, and you don’t want to call your analyst.
— Nonsense! This end-of-the-century vibe has come and gone twice, no one has time to be tormented like that nowadays, my child, we’re simply tormented by the sadness of precariousness, by capitalism, by neoliberalism, by Elon Musk – and he stopped – as a figure, as a metaphor for great folly. Heloísa understands. It’s not that I don’t want to make the call.
Leonardo went to the window and lit another cigarette.
— Of course we understand. But an artist has a greater sensibility, it’s not just anyone who gathers scraps and makes something out of them.
— Everyone who is alive is gathering scraps and producing life, whether they’re an artist or not. It’s inevitable. But that’s one perspective.
— It’s contradictory – Morgana said.
— Of course it’s contradictory – he said irritably.
— Well, I think the idea of the novel is precisely that, to produce life in a small world. Life, desire, happiness and suffering.
— And pleasure.
The women said.
Leonardo was fascinated by his projections, and he thought that perhaps he didn’t need the psychiatrist-analyst anymore. He thought about surrendering to the absurd, surrendering to the products of his imagination. He looked out of the window and admired the golden color of Brasilia’s dry climate. The impossible sky. The exasperated colors. On the table, the shattered novel, the character ready for the gesture. He went back to work. Morgana and Heloísa were always watchful, like ghostly shadows.
— If only I were a painter – he said to himself, not believing a word of what was to follow.
Leonardo positioned the photograph of a man with his thumbs over the eyes of the person sitting in front of him. He gathered a few scraps and began to rehearse shapes, without a definite plan. He took a fortuitous clipping from the organizer. Can’t you see yourself? He smiled. The computer screen went blank, he wasn’t going to the congress.
About the author
Natalia Borges Polesso is a writer and translator. She has published the books Amora (2015), Controle (2019), Corpos Secos (2020), A Extinção das Abelhas (2021), Foi um Péssimo Dia (2023), Condições Ideais de Navegação para Iniciantes (2024), among others. She has won and been a finalist for various literary awards, including the Jabuti, São Paulo, Açorianos, and Minuano awards. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at PUC-RS.