Dragons     by Caio Fernando Abreu, Translated by David Treece Original title: Os Dragões não conhecem o Paraíso Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Publisher Unknown Pub. Place: UK Not available for ordering

There’s a strange familiarity about the stories of Dragons... Not the familiarity of something we feel we’ve read or heard spoken before — although the sensation of déjà-vu, the bittersweet memory or echo of emotions felt in some other time, somewhere else, by someone else, is experienced on many occasions in the pages of this book, by the characters — and by the reader. Nor am I simply talking about the ‘punks, beggars, neon lights, prostitutes and moaning synthesizers’ that float about in the night fog of the story entitled ‘The Saddest Boy in the World’, the health freaks and wind surfers of ‘Blues Without Ana’, the unfulfilled, slightly ageing professional couple looking for romance second time around in a phoney tropical holiday resort, in ‘Honey and Sunflowers’. Of course all these social types help remind us that not only the physical landscapes, but the human landscapes, too, of London, New York, Tokyo and São Paulo are growing more alike as we enter the last decade of the twentieth century.

But more than these things, it’s the familiarity of recognition, the recognition of experiences that have been or at least could be our own: a young boy’s struggle to come to terms with his awakening adolescent sexuality; the joyful discovery of shared emotions and sensations; the pain and the anger of separation; the exhilaration and danger of freedom; the panic and grief of loneliness. They are experiences which have been moulded, made theirs and ours, by the common conditions of our global culture in the 1990s, a culture of uncertainty, decay and alienation, in which the traditional models of social, economic and family life have failed to provide happiness and security for the majority, while at the same time repressing or excluding those who have discovered alternative sexual identities and lifestyles. It’s a culture, too, which continually sells us a thousand ready-made mass-produced roles and masks, offering us instant identity in an anonymous world, the identity of the cliché, the stereotype, allowing us to forget who we really are, if we ever knew. These are the lost souls who inhabit the pages of Dragons;

‘The Totally Liberated But Profoundly Misunderstood Woman Who Accepted Her Inevitable Solitude, the Independent Man Who Can Do Without That Nonsense Called Love, the Psychoanalyst At Odds with the Elitism of Her Own Profession, or the Basketball Player Looking for a More Natural Life.’

This sense of familiarity or recognition, even if it is the recognition of our shared anonymity, alienation and marginalisation, is extremely important, particularly when our perceptions of Latin America and Latin Americans have been largely shaped by a literature which emphasizes their difference from us, their uniqueness and the impossibility of understanding their world. With one or two exceptions, European and North American publishers have until recently preferred to publish those Latin American (and occasionally Brazilian) authors whose work confirms the image of an exotic, alien, incomprehensible culture, whose essence lies in its magical ‘primitiveness’, its pre-industrial, pre-capitalist backwardness, its ‘Third-Worldness’. The publication of this book in English contributes towards a new understanding of the experience of those living in Latin America, and Brazil in particular.

In that sense, for all the familiarity of the dramas told to us by Caio, they are also profoundly Latin American. The emotions of self-discovery, loss, bewilderment and despair have an extra intensity that has something to do with the special impact of our global crisis on the cities of Buenos Aires, Lima, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The lateness, swiftness and brutality of modernisation in these places, their lack of any control over the process, and their fragility and weakness in the face of the world’s major economic powers, all these things have made the lives of the newly urbanised Latin American masses especially traumatic and alienated. How many of Caio’s characters are found drifting in a limbo between the provincial towns of their childhood and the faceless metropolis? Like the narrator of A Little White Sandy Beach, Down by the Gully who says:

‘...that’s what happens when you leave a little town that’s stopped being yours and go and live in another town that hasn’t started being yours yet. You always start feeling a bit weird when you think you don’t really want to stay but you don’t want to — or can’t — go back either. You feel just like one of those guys in the circus who walks the tightrope and suddenly the wire breaks, snap! and you’re just hanging there, suspended in mid-air, empty space below your feet. With nowhere in the world to go, do you know what I mean?’

If the masks and roles we take on are already borrowed ready-made from the fictional world of advertising or the soap opera, then the illusion becomes a double-deception for a culture whose role models are imported from Dallas or Hollywood. How much more difficult it is to sustain the dream of True Love in one of the biggest AIDS capitals of the world, where state health care is virtually non-existent, and, as the young kid in ‘The Queen of the Night’ hears, the telly tells you ‘love kills love kills love kills’?

It’s all the more moving and inspiring, then, to witness Caio’s characters struggling, against all these odds, to find love, to peer through the fog, reach out and touch, and even, occasionally to celebrate the innocence of a shared moment of warmth and communication recovered from a filthy, corrupted world. Sometimes all that is possible in a fragmented, atomised society such as this, is the continuity and meaning offered by the mystical language of astral coincidences, Chinese horoscopes or the symbolism of candomblé. At other times, the characters have nothing to cling to but the dependable, eternal image of a matinée idol, or the dream of an invisible dragon. It is these courageous struggles that we have the privilege of witnessing when we read the stories of Caio Fernando Abreu, stories which invite, not just sympathy or comprehension but recognition and solidarity.

When Ana left me, I stood for a long time in the living room of the apartment with her note in my hands. It was around eight o’clock in the evening. The clocks were on summer time and through the open living-room window it was still possible to make out, in that eight o’clock in the evening light, a few traces of gold and red left by the sun going down behind the buildings over towards Pinheiros. I stood there a long time, in the middle of the living room, Ana’s last note in my hands, looking out of the window at the reds and golds in the sky. And I remember thinking, ‘now the phone’s going to ring’: it might have been Lucinha ringing from the agency or Paulo from the film club or Nelson from Paris or my mother from the South, inviting me to dinner, to snort some coke, to see Nastassia Kinski in the nude, asking what the weather was like or something like that, but it didn’t ring so after some time in which it hadn’t rung I thought, ‘now someone’s going to ring the doorbell’. It might be the janitor delivering some mail, the neighbour from upstairs looking for her Persian cat that liked to escape down the stairs... But the doorbell didn’t ring either, and I stood there for a good while longer without any means of salvation, in the middle of the room which was beginning to turn a bluish colour as the evening drew on, like the inside of a fish tank, Ana’s note in my hands, doing absolutely nothing except breathe. 30-31