A Cup of Rage

The Arrival

In Bed

The Rising

The Shower

The Breakfast

The Explosion

The Arrival

Notes

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RADUAN NASSAR
was born in 1935, in Pindorama, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Like his Lebanese immigrant family, the author's life has been bound in agriculture and writing.
Ancient Tillage
(1975) and
A Cup of Rage
(1978), a novella, are his two major literary works. He was raised mainly in small rural towns, then went on to study Law at the University of São Paulo. He also worked as a journalist and editor for the newspaper
Jornal do Bairro
, jointly founded with his brothers. Although an acclaimed literary author, since 1985 Raduan Nassar has led a private existence dedicated to farming and livestock production. He retired to a smaller farm in 2011, having donated his entire commercial property to the agricultural departments of the Federal University of São Carlos for the creation of a new campus.

STEFAN TOBLER
is the publisher at And Other Stories, a young publishing house whose titles include the Booker Prize-shortlisted
Swimming Home
by Deborah Levy and much literature in translation. He is a literary translator from Portuguese and German. Recent translations include the 2015 Oxford–Weidenfeld Translation Prize-shortlisted
Água Viva
by Clarice Lispector,
All Dogs are Blue
by Rodrigo de Souza Leão and the poetry collection
Silence River
by Antônio Moura. He is also on Twitter
@stefantobler
.

‘Nobody guides the one
whom God has led astray'
‘Hosannah! behold the man!
Narcissus! always remote and fragile,
anarchy's offspring'

And when that afternoon I arrived home at kilometre 27 on the
road from town, she was walking around, already waiting for me on the lawn, and came and
opened the gate so that I could drive right in, and as soon as I came out of the garage
we climbed the stairs together to the conservatory, and no sooner were we there than I
opened the middle curtains and we sat down in the wicker chairs, our eyes fixed on the
hilltop opposite, where the sun was setting, and the two of us sat in silence until she
asked me ‘what's the matter?', but I, somewhere else entirely,
remained distant and still, my thoughts lost in the red sunset, and it was because she
repeated the question that I replied ‘have you eaten yet?' and as she said
‘later' I got up and wandered over to the kitchen (she followed me), took a
tomato from the fridge, went over to the sink and washed it, then went to get the
salt-shaker from the cupboard and sat down at the table (she followed all my movements
from across the room, while I, to annoy her, pretended not to notice), and it was under
her constant gaze that I began to eat the tomato, sprinkling more salt on what remained
in my hand, making a show of biting into it with relish in order to reveal my teeth,
strong as a horse's, knowing that she couldn't tear her eyes off my mouth,
knowing that beneath her silence she was writhing with impatience, knowing above all
that the more indifferent I seemed to be, the more attractive she found me, I only know
that when I
finished eating the tomato I left her there in the kitchen
and went to get the radio that was on the shelf in the living room, and without going
back to the kitchen we met again in the hall, and without a word and almost together we
entered the half-light of the bedroom.

For a few moments in the room we seemed to be two strangers
observed by somebody, and that somebody was always her and me, the two had to watch what
I was doing and not what she was doing, so I sat on the edge of the bed and calmly
started taking off my shoes and socks, holding my bare feet in my hands and feeling how
lovely and moist they were, as if pulled out of the earth that very minute, and then I,
with fixed purpose, started to walk around, feigning little reasons for my movements,
letting the hems of my trouser-legs brush the floor, at the same time as they partially
covered my feet, lending them mystery, knowing that they, bare and very white,
powerfully embodied my coming nakedness, and soon I heard her breathing in deeply, over
by the chair, where she had perhaps already given in to her desperation, struggling to
take off her clothes, getting her fingers caught in the strap slipping down her arm, and
I, still faking, knew that all of that was real, oh how I knew her nightmarish obsession
for feet, and for my feet in particular, their firm step and well-shaped form, a little
bony around the toes perhaps and nervously marked with veins and tendons on the instep,
though they hadn't lost the shy manner of a tender root, and I went to and fro
with my calculated steps, lengthening the wait more and more with minimal pretexts, but
as soon as she left the room and went briefly to the bathroom, I quickly took off my
trousers and shirt and throwing myself onto the
bed, I waited for her,
stiff and ready, enjoying in silence the cotton of the sheet that covered me, and right
then I closed my eyes thinking of the stratagems I would use (of all the many I knew),
and in this way I went over alone in my head the things that we did, how she quivered at
the first twitches of my mouth and at the shine I forged in my eyes, where I brought
into plain view what was most vile and sordid in me, knowing that carried away by my
other side she would always shout ‘so this is the bastard I love', and I
went over in my head that other trifling move in our game, a preamble nonetheless to
unexpected later twists and turns, just as necessary a start as pushing a simple pawn up
the board, in which I closed my hand over hers and straightened out her fingers,
instilling courage in them, guiding them under my control to the hair on my chest, until
they, from the example of my fingers under the sheet, developed their own masterful
clandestine activities, or at a more advanced stage, after having carefully pored over
our hairs, swellings and many smells, when the two of us on our knees measured the
longest path for a single kiss, the palms of our hands pressed together, our arms open
in an almost Christian exercise, our teeth biting each other's mouths as if biting
into the soft flesh of the heart, our eyes closed and our imaginations surrendered to
the curves of our circlings, I also saw myself involved in certain practices, such as
when, in a trance and already haughtily raised above the saddle of her stomach, I would
prematurely fulfil one of her (of my) strangest whims, shooting sudden violent jets of
milky birdlime which stuck to the skin of her face and the skin of her breasts, or such
as that other, less impulsive one, slower to ripen, its fruit developing in a silent and
patient crescendo of firm contractions, in which, me inside her, without our moving,
with exasperated cries we reached those death-rattles of the height of exaltation, and I
thought about the dangerous backwards leap, when she on her stomach would generously
offer me
another pasture, and in which my arms and hands symmetrically
and almost mechanically gripped her below the shoulders, pressing and adjusting, part by
part, our anointed bodies, and all the time I was thinking of my hands, and the broad
backs of them, they were much used in this passionate geometry, so well devised by me,
and which invariably led her to say in her perdition ‘magnificent, magnificent,
you're something else', and from there my thoughts drifted to the
restorative moments, the cigarettes we smoked following each poisoned bubble of silence,
or during our conversations over a cup of coffee from the thermos (we would escape from
bed naked and desecrate the kitchen table), when she would try to describe to me the
confused experience she had when she came, always mentioning my confidence and boldness
as I conducted the ritual, scarcely hiding her surprise at how I would repeatedly enlist
God's name in my obscenities, telling me above all how much I had taught her,
especially about an awareness of the act through our eyes that often followed, stone by
stone, each stretch of a convulsing road, and that was when I would mention her
intelligence, which I always praised as the best thing about her in bed, an agile and
active intelligence (even if only when I pricked her on), exceptionally open to all
incursions, and that would lead to me talking about myself too, fascinating her with the
intentional (and not so intentional) contradictions in my character, teaching her among
other lies that I, the bastard, was pure and chaste, and, there with my eyes closed all
this time, I was still thinking about many other things while she was out of the room,
since the imagination is very quick, or its time is different, and it uses and
simultaneously confuses separate and unexpected things, when I discerned her footsteps
returning in the hall and only had time to open my eyes and check that my feet were
positioned correctly, poking out of the bottom of the sheet, noticing as so many times
before that the brown hairs
that sprouted on my instep and longer toes
gave them both grace and gravitas, but I made sure I quickly closed my eyes again,
feeling that she was about to enter the room, and already sensing her fervent form
nearby, and knowing how things would start, which is: she would softly, ever so softly,
come up to my feet, which she had once compared to two white lilies.

It was already half past five when I said to her
‘I'm going to jump out of bed' but she wound herself around me like a
creeping vine, her claws closing where they could, and she had claws on her hands and
claws on her feet, and a thick, strongly smelling birdlime over her whole body, and
since we were almost grappling each other I said ‘let me go, little
bindweed', knowing that she liked it when I spoke that way, so in response she
said, feigning solemnity, ‘I won't let you go, my grave
Cypressus
erectus
', her eyes beaming with pride at her impressive repartee
(although there she wasn't well versed in botanical matters, even less so in the
geometry of conifers, and the little that she dared flaunt concerning plants she had
learnt from me and nobody else), and in the knowledge that there are no branches or
trunks, however strong the tree may be, that can resist the advances of a creeper, I
tore myself away from her while there was time and slipped quickly over to the window,
immediately raised the blind and felt on my still warm body the cold, damp air that
started to get in the room, but even so I leant on the sill and, deep in thought, saw
that outside the day was barely starting to stretch its limbs under the weight of a
thick fog, and I also noticed that, no more than sketches, the zinnias in the garden
below were struggling to push up through the smudges of smoke, and I was at the window
like this, my eyes on the top of the hill opposite, on the spot where the Seminary stood
dimly
in the fog, when she came up behind me and again wound herself
around me, slipping the rope of her arms brazenly around my neck, but with skill I,
using my elbows gently, kneading her firm breasts a little, was soon sharing the prison
I was in with her, and, side by side, entwined, the two of us gradually interlaced our
feet and that was how we went straight to the shower.