The Centaur in the Garden     by Moacyr Scliar, Translated by Margaret A. Neves Original title: O Centauro no jardim Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 1985 Format: Mass Market Paperback, 216 pages ISBN: 034531669X Edition: 1st Edition List Price: $5.95, £3.78 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £3.78 Published by Ballantine Pub. Date: 1988 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback Not available for ordering Published by Available Press Pub. Date: 1984 Pub. Place: USA Format: 216 pages Not available for ordering

Moacyr Scliar is a Brazilian Jew, and says that the spirit of his writing lies in his early background: he went to a Yiddish High School in Porto Alegre. ‘As much as possible I live in peace with my Jewishness’, he says. ‘I have extracted from it what it has of the best: fantasy, ethical substance, and above all, humour... melancholy, bittersweet, the humour of the persecuted fighting against desperation’. All this is much in evidence in Centaur in the Garden which contains perhaps Scliar’s most adventurous metaphor for the difficulty or complexity of being Jewish in Brazil, a country that has not found much cultural space for its minorities.

A centaur is a mythological creature, it appears no where else but in Greek mythology, but the centaur in this book is Jewish, and lives in Brazil. This is upsetting for the poor centaur, Guedali, who is indisputably real, so shockingly real, that when he came into the world his mother entered a catatonic state... He is of course a mixture of things, with several natures dictating his behaviour. Desperate for answers, he can never find them in any one camp alone: reality, fantasy; being a man, a horse; an intellectual, instinctive; Brazilian, Jewish....

Guedali’s parents are Jewish immigrants from Russia, who have come to Brazil to escape the pogroms; ‘A pogrom: drunken Cossacks would invade the village, charging on their crazed horses against children and old citizenry, loot and burn the village, and then disappear, leaving the echoes of screams and neighing behind them in the tormented night.’ However, Guedali himself is born in Brazil, but raised in the Jewish tradition. This does not make things easier for his parents, who, respecting the faith, have to convince the mohel to come and circumcise the half-boy half-horse.

Luckily his parents are farmers, living isolated from any neighbours so Guedali can run free in the woods. He is able to gallop about satisfactorily, but he is never able to shake off his anxiety about being different despite the love and acceptance of his family. And what’s more, he is forced to follow his animal impulses, which at times are at variance with his human reasoning: very alienating for him, as he cannot explain to his family his irrational horse’s instincts. Add to this the complication that he is an intellectual beast, encouraged by his Jewish parents to read, cultivate his mind: ‘Read, my son, read,’ my mother would say. ‘The things you learn no one can take away from you. It doesn’t matter that you have a handicap, the important thing is to educate yourself.’ He reads voraciously, looking for signs everywhere that he is somehow to be explained. He reads everything, from the history of his people, to Marx and Freud. But he finds nothing. No text comes anywhere near to solving the riddle for him; nor can they attempt to satisfy him with their questions so far from his own.

Finally, he decides to leave the comfort of being loved and accepted and search for answers. He meets a centauress, Tita, surprisingly, but this still brings no answers. Now they are two to struggle for the answer to the riddle of their existence. Together — in denial of their equine nature — they successfully undergo an operation by a Moroccan doctor who normally performs sex-change operations. Eventually they become fully human and live the normal life they had always yearned for.

They slowly come to the realisation that ‘normal’ life can be quite boring, lacking in the fantasy it once had when they were different, when they were beings belonging to mythology. Being fully human only leaves them thirsting for the freedom associated with being an animal. The book, written in the 1980s, presents them and their friends as dull young yuppies, with unadventurous tastes. But Guedali describes himself at this point as ‘a crippled centaur, deprived of its equine body’, ‘a human being trying to liberate himself from his fantasies’.

Scliar combines the problematic of Jewish identity in Brazil with a vivid exploration of society’s sexual mores and contradictions through the cipher of Guedali’s animality and animal lack of inhibition. A book full of humour and surprising beauty as in Guedali’s encounter with another legendary and sexually potent creature, the Sphinx named ‘Lolah’, half-woman, half-lioness...

Once more I hesitated. But I couldn’t see her body: it was an amorphous mass hidden in shadow. Besides, I was already here. Why not? I asked myself. Why not?

I went closer. She seemed unaware of my presence; she was lying down, and remained very still. With trembling fingers I opened the door of the cage and went in. I lay down beside her, stroked her face, her breasts. And her body. Her lioness’s body. My God, my God, my God!

I had already seen great felines at close quarters when I was in the circus. I had of course held cats on my lap. But I had never touched a lioness.... what voluptuous opulence, the soft fur stood up at my touch, powerful masses of muscle rippled beneath the skin like startled little rabbits under a rug. Her tail rolled up, tense and vibrating.

She turned to face me. The desire that rose from that powerful body engulfed her, one could see; she could barely tolerate it. There was anguish in her eyes, passion of course, but anguish too, in her dilated nostrils and glistening teeth.

‘Come,’ she whispered.

I was trembling so hard I could barely get my clothes off. There was a terrible moment of hesitation. She was still lying down: how should I go about it? But I knew, something inside me knew. I mounted her from behind, stroking her breasts, kissing her neck hungrily, and penetrating her as a lion would have. She bit my arms as lionesses do lions. And moaned, and cried out so much that I had to put my hand over her mouth for fear of the doctor hearing us.

The copulation was short, the orgasm, colossal. Mountains of Tunisia! What an orgasm that was! You know nothing, oh mountains, if you have never known an orgasm like that!

When it was over we lay on the floor of the cage, gasping.

Little by little I got myself together, began to emerge from the depths of that dark and turbulent sea. Only then did I realize that something was pinning me down by the neck.

It was her left paw. Cautiously, I lifted it off me with a disagreeable thought: if Lolah were to have one of her temper tantrums just now...

‘Guedali’, she murmured. ‘Guedali, my love. Thank you, Guedali.’

I kissed her, went out of the cage, dressed and sneaked back to my room as stealthily as I had come. 173-174