“Why this book? Why this excerpt? Why now?” I can practically hear, dear BOOK SA reader, your quizzical, ahm – what’s the word? um, -ness maybe? – as you squint at the screen over your Sunday morning coffee.
It’s free association, really, the critical prompt in this case being: Parreira. Parreira. Pah-ra-AY-rah. the reappointment of Parreira, Carlos Alberto Parreira, the Brazilian, the coach, the football coach from Brazil whose name we will now hear a million more times, Parreira, the millionaire Parreira, the crimson-coloured Parreira in his dumpy jacket, who will be waiving his arms in our green fields again, earning R27 for every minute that he breathes in and out – that’s almost half a rand per second – waking and sleeping, between now and the middle of July next year.
Parreira, the manifestation of failure, SAFA’s failure, the failure of the monsignors of SA football, coining it when he blinks, when he sneezes, when he dribbles his water down the front of his shirt, when he sits all alone in his furnished rental and thinks about 4-4-2 or 4-5-1, when he rides in the shuttle, when he looks at a cloud, maybe he stares at the cloud, waiting for the shuttle ride to end, for twenty minutes, his thoughts are wandering lonely as a cloud, then the ride ends and that’s R540 invested by SAFA in the cloud, it’s a darker shade of grey now, it’s a raincloud, heavy with blessings, scudding across the Atlantic. It’s a crime, really.
Crime. Hey, crime writing is doing pretty well in South Africa. I wonder how it’s doing in Brazil? What Brazilian crime writing is out there? Goodness, there’s quite a lot. But it’s all in Portuguese. Hang on, here’s a mess of it translated into English and – ah, perfect, the perfect crime, crime novel rather, crime novel title I mean: Borges, yes, one has observed that the word “Borgesian” applies to sport as much as it applies to politics, and – oh! funny, too funny – the Eternal Orangutans, you can picture it now, a roomful of orangutans wearing baggy suits and dumpy jackets and expensive watches that rattle up and down the length of their hairy forearms – it’s like that scene in Animal Farm, except with non-farm animals – assembled from all walks, some arrived with their chauffeurs, some not, talking about soccer, eternally, eternally talking.
So that’s why.
Excerpt from Borges and the Eternal Orangutans [a Brazilian crime novel] by Luis Fernando Verissimo
I will try to be your eyes, Jorge. I am following the advice you gave me when we said goodbye: “Write, and you will remember.” I will try to remember, with more exactitude this time, so that you can see what I saw, so that you can unveil the mystery and arrive at the truth. We always write in order to remember the truth. When we invent, it is only in order to remember the truth more exactly.
Geography is destiny. If Buenos Aires were not so close to Porto Alegre, none of this would have happened, but I did not see that I was being subtly summoned or that this story needed me in order to be written. I did not see that I was being plunged headfirst into the plot, like a pen into an inkwell.
The circumstances of my visit to Buenos Aires were, as I now know, planned with all the care of someone setting a trap for a particular animal. At the time, however, enthusiasm blinded me to this. I did not realise that I had been chosen as an accessory to a crime, as neutral and innocent as the mirrors in a room.
The 1985 Israfel Society Conference, the first meeting of Edgar Allan Poe specialists to be held outside the northern hemisphere, was to take place in Buenos Aires, less than a thousand kilometres from my apartment in Bonfim, and was, therefore, within the budget of a poor translator and teacher of English (which, as you know, is what I am). One of the invited speakers was to be Joachim Rotkopf, who was to lecture on the origins of European surrealism to be found in Poe’s work, precisely the topic that had provoked the controversy with Professor Xavier Urquiza from Mendoza, and that had kept me so amused in the pages of The Gold-Bug, the Society journal. All this seemed to me a mere accumulation of happy and irresistible coincidences. I decided not to resist. At least, I thought I decided.
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