[the
"fixation-fiction"
writer]

The following excerpts were taken from Foster, Butterman, and Mattoso
himself, focusing on: (a) "Marginal Narrative: A Postmodern Novel;" and
(b) "Short Story: Real 'Treatments.'"




(a) MARGINAL NARRATIVE: A POSTMODERN NOVEL

As Steven Butterman points out in his thesis [1],

[The issue of the fine line between obscene pornography and legitimate
artistic expression is a very complex one. It is explored, in all its
rich and disturbing ambiguity, in Linda Williams' essay on the
pornography and the performance art of Annie Sprinkle (see
[BIBLIOGRAPHY]). In this article, Williams also discusses the origins of
modern sex manuals, alluding to Classicist Holt N. Parker's observation
that "pornographos" was merely a subcategory of biography. However, he
also points to another literary genre known as "anaiskhunto-graphoi –
literally "shameless things" – which, Williams contends, "corresponds
to our contemporary sex manuals. They were putatively based on the
writer's personal experience describing various methods of heterosexual
intercourse" (368). Such an analysis would make for an interesting study
on Mattoso's MANUAL DO PEDÓLATRA AMADOR which purports to be a sexual
fictional autobiography.]


In 2000, Glauco Mattoso sent his work to Chris Daniels, an American
translator who was collaborating with the famous poet Michael Palmer in
a historical anthology of Brazilian poetry. In return, Daniels wrote:

[I'm reading MANUAL DO PEDÓLATRA. In spite of some difficulties with
slang, acronyms, details of Brazilian culture and especially the
geography of your city, and one or two citations from earlier Brazilian
authors that are very difficult for me to understand because of style,
I'm thoroughly enjoying the MANUAL, especially the wonderful mixture of
"high" and "low", "obscenity" and "erudition" – which is something I've
always loved in all the arts.]


According to Foster's bio-critical sourcebook [1],

[Mattoso's most ambitious work brings together his analysis of so-called
dirty sex and the judicious use of bibliographic sources. MANUAL DO
PEDÓLATRA AMADOR: AVENTURAS & LEITURAS DE UM TARADO POR PÉS
(Manual of the Amateur Foot Fetishist: Adventures and Readings of Someone Really
into Feet; 1986) is loosely structured as the autobiography of the
narrator, who describes his discovery, through the initiation rites of
an academic fraternity, that he is a foot fetishist. His sexual
explorations and development, both heterosexual and homosexual, turn on
the increasingly metonymic displacement of sexual possibilities,
especially those of the allegedly dirty variety, toward the foot –
dirty or clean, shod or bare – and include the establishment of a
professional practice based on the manipulation of the foot to cure
illness and disease, with the added dimension of the erotic
possibilities of that manipulation (at least for the attending
professional). In part a send-up of Western-style sex manuals and
first-person "sentimental education" narratives, Mattoso's work is most
productively read as part of his larger literary project of naturalizing
the supposedly outer fringes of erotic experience and, in the process,
underscoring the hypocrisies and ideological slippages of heterosexism.
Thus, one of the virtues attributed to foot fetishes is a range of
intensely erotic experiences that all fall within the range of safe sex,
since the MANUAL poses the rhetorical question of how many people have
contracted AIDS through pedal manipulation. With the graphic artist
Marcatti, Mattoso has produced a comic book version of the MANUAL, AS
AVENTURAS DE GLAUCOMIX, O PEDÓLATRA (The Adventures of Glaucomix, the
Foot Lover; 1990).] [2]

A more detailed analysis of the MANUAL DO PEDÓLATRA AMADOR can be found
in Foster's essay "Some Proposals for the Study of Latin American Gay
Culture," in his book CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE.
[1] In Foster's words,

[This chapter has examined three narrative texts under the rubric of gay
culture. It would be inappropriate for me to assert that they have a
unitary stance toward this rather general concept, particularly as I
have characterized Reinaldo Arenas's novel [EL PALACIO DE LAS
BLANQUÍSIMAS MOFETAS] as marked less by a homosexual thematics than by a
gay sensibility, Sara Levi Calderón's novel [DOS MUJERES] as a
specifically lesbian liberationist consciousness, and Mattoso's
autobiography as a commitment to something like a pansexuality in which
gender-based identities and acts seem trivial in the wake of strong
assertions regarding transgressive sexual experimentation. Perhaps the
best way of seeing this texts as contributions toward a Latin American
discourse of sexuality is in terms of their variegated challenges to
compulsory heterosexuality. The challenge to the latter is not so much a
defense of a specific form of male or female homosexuality (pace the
grim psychomedical connotations of that phrase) as it is a defiance of,
to use Peter Fry's marvelous evocation of a colloquial Brazilian trope,
sex PRA INGLÊS VER – the face of sex presented to the (missionary)
Englishman, which means, to be sure, not only heterosexuality, but
heterosexuality within the confines of passionless, functional creation.
The image of the bourgeoisie in both Arenas's and Levi Calderón's novels
– society in the throes of decay from within in the case of the former;
society as all-too-efficiently and frighteningly functioning in the case
of the latter – afford the authors with carefully articulated backdrops
against which to project individuals whose personal imperatives, only
synechdocally sexual, are radically deviant: the result, because a queer
sensibility, is fundamentally socially deconstructive. It is for this
reason that Mattoso's sexual handbook, although clearly promoting
modalities of male homoeroticism, goes beyond the specifically gay, to
the extent that the fetish it promotes is almost allegorically
non-gender specific. Where treatises on the joys of lesbian or gay sex
highlight erogenous zones and erotic activities that privilege what is
either characteristically feminine or characteristically masculine, foot
fetishism in Mattoso's MANUAL, aside from the possibility of associating
it with a form of enslavement in the paradigmatic case of Chinese foot
binding, reaches toward a gay sensibility precisely in its degendering
of erotic pleasure, in its rejection of sex as masculine or feminine
role playing. Much remains to be explored in these realms of Latin
American cultural production, and I have chosen to content myself here
with something like the act of criticism as itself metonymic or
synechdocal: less the representation of particularly eloquent examples
(although I think that they are) than a proposition regarding the types
of material that must be looked at if we are to go beyond the merely
thematic, the merely (auto)biographical in characterizing how a truly
comprehensive range of erotic experiences are encoded in Latin American
writing.]

[...]

[If, then, there is to be in a sector of the world like Latin America an
alternative technology of sexuality, other than cultural production in
the narrow sense of the term, it must assume radically different
dimensions than either those of science-as-usual or those of a
confrontational repudiation of science. What I would like to explore
here is one such effort, Glauco Mattoso's MANUAL DO PEDÓLATRA AMADOR;
AVENTURAS & LEITURAS DE UM TARADO POR PÉS
(MANUAL OF THE AMATEUR FOOT
LOVER; ADVENTURES AND READINGS OF SOMEONE WILD ABOUT FEET;
1986), the first volume in a series entitled BOCA DO INFERNO and supplemented by a
comic-book version, with illustrations by Marcatti, AS AVENTURAS DE
GLAUCOMIX O PEDÓLATRA (THE ADVENTURES OF GLAUCOMIX
THE FOOT LOVER;
1990). To begin with, one might well argue that Mattoso's "treatise" is
merely a notable example of marginal narrative, a postmodern novel
passing as the author's first-person erotic biography passing, in turn,
as a sex manual. Such a characterization of "manual" is a legitimate
one, and, were libraries to own it (it seems only to exist in the United
States in the Library of Congress), it might as well be classified under
Brazilian fiction (PQ) as under sexual treatises (HQ), or perhaps even
under facetiae (PN). But what I would like to do here is to examine the
ideological implications of reading Mattoso's MANUAL as a valid, albeit
especially outrageous, entry in a bibliography of alternate technologies
of sex.

Let us begin with an initial characterization of MANUAL as outrageous.
Having proposed such a qualifier, I hasten to add that I mean it in no
way to be taken as pejorative. Indeed, in the context of a postmodernist
aesthetic, any deviation – sexual or rhetorical or the two combined –
that may be judged to be outrageous can, in fact, constitute
considerable praise. Rather than insinuate a dismissive attitude toward
the text because of its failure to abide by the conventions of
common-ground discourse – an adherence to a balanced objectivity having
the goal of not alienating the timorous reader – the outrageous text
establishes in an aggressive manner its credentials as a transgressive
voice whose "authority" (the scare quotes serve here to remind us of the
oxymoronic nature of a conjugation of the sort "transgressive
authority") the reader is willing to accept for the moment. For the
purposes of the argument, toward seeing where it might lead, reasonably
or otherwise, the reader sees the authority not as inherent (as in the
case of established authority) but as an apophantic.

Mattoso's text is outrageous along several axes. In the first place, it
is frankly autobiographic, with nary an apology for its scandalous
nature or the fact that the sexual deviations it describes are recounted
without any trace of mediating rhetoric of moral exculpation ("this is
gruesome stuff, but it is, regrettably, human nature as it really is").
Mattoso's account of a sexual education, autobiographical or otherwise,
is not framed by the naturalistic conventions of pseudoscientific
writing, which serves to posit a vivid dividing line between the moral
superiority of the pact shared by reader and narrator (who has
transcended the moral abyss of what is narrated) and a stoutly
contemplated human corruption. Rather, the suspension of moral
distancing accomplished by an unrepentant first-person narrator and the
unmediated (at least by implied or explicit authoritarian judgments)
chronical of the sexual facts of life is what provides the basically
outrageous coloration of Mattoso's joyful personal memoir.

That this memoir is that of a foot fetishist, and not an abstract
fetishist, but one grounded, so to speak, in the grit and grime of the
individual's fundamental physical contact with the dirt of the earth, is
yet another dimension of the MANUAL's outrageous texture. Mattoso might
well have in some metaphorical fashion poeticized his fetish. But by
anchoring his discourse in the colloquial Brazilian word "chulé"
(something like an omnibus word centered on the English trope "toe
jam"), Mattoso means for his reader never to lose sight of the fact that
he is dealing, literally, with the slime of history. Indeed, the
repudiation of the civilized practice of foot-washing and supplementary
fragrances, along with an underscoring of the foot as it comes enclosed
in its most proletarian guises, maintains a materiality for the
narrator's fetish that effectively blocks any desire of the reader to
slip into allegory or any sort of metonymic process that will detour the
discourse into means other than the primally literal: multiple
attentions devoted to the unadorned foot as an erotic locus in its own
right. It is one thing to subscribe to the cheerful notion that the
entire body, in every single one of its folds and protuberances, is a
unified erogenous zone, and it is quite something else to accord
egalitarian attention to each one of those details in an unprejudiced
sexual practice that frees one from hypostatized territories and
attendant regulating hygienes.

Finally, Mattoso's conjugation of pediphilia and homosexuality is
outrageous. To be sure, the regulating notion of homosexuality holds it
as inherently outrageous, while hypostatizing such a corporeal
intercourse in terms of a presumed dominant anality; such a territorial
prejudice, of course, merely accommodates homosexuality within a
preexisting, reductionary hypostasis of heterosexual acts as a commerce
of the penetrating and the penetrated. By first inscribing his fetish
within a homosexual matrix and then defying presumed anal-dominant
conventions of homosexuality by relocating primary erogeny to the foot,
Mattoso's narrator adds exponential increments to the outrageous quality
of his text. Such strategies are accompanied by derivations of the
decision to locate the text in the lexical realm of the "chulé" – that
is, by an unrelenting stylistic commitment to a colloquial register of
Brazilian Portuguese that, if it only makes reading arduous for the
nonnative speaker, renders the MANUAL quite offensive for all but the
most indulgent of native speakers. Indeed, native speakers, because they
appreciate the nuances of the language, have greater reason for
separating themselves from the text than do nonnative speakers, who may
simply find it at times incomprehensible.

Let us analyze for a moment Mattoso's first-person narrative. Certainly,
the function of such an ostensibly "direct" voice cannot serve merely to
legitimize the text, as the content of the adventures described therein
are sufficiently deviant from the social norm as to render superfluous
any appeal to narrator/reader identity. Yet in a converse and perverse
way, the first-person narrator of the MANUAL does, in fact, encourage an
identity between narrator and narratee in a dimension the latter may not
have hitherto dared to contemplate: Mattoso speaks in his own voice –
again, deftly juggling variations and dimensions of an outrageous
discourse – in order to establish and confirm an allegiance between
that voice and those individuals who may not previously have had at
their disposal a sexual discourse suitable to their needs, suspected or
otherwise.

This leads me to what I consider to be the most salient point to be made
about Mattoso's textual practice, one that is confirmed in the
alternation between first-person confessions, quotations from literary
and paraliterary sources (approximately 160 pages of text are
complemented by 98 footnotes), and sundry pseudorealia (letters from
friends, responses to personal ads, and the transcript of a closing
dialogue with Sylvia). The point is the way in which a discourse like
that of the MANUAL, by contrast to (pseudo)scientific writing and
literary fabulation, involves processes designed to provoke the
liberalization or the carnivalization of sexual signifiers. That is to
say, the MANUAL represents a radical break with a "sensible" analysis of
sexuality (with all of the legislative meanings attached to this term)
in order to range over various dimensions of the sexual experience
toward, essentially, placing every form of behavior under analytical
scrutiny. If normative homosexuality is defied when the narrator
experiences his only "heterosexual" act with a woman who latter turns
out to be a lesbian, a woman with whom he subsequently establishes a
stable interpersonal relationship, the very coming together of Mattoso
and Sylvia, first as a "straight" couple and then as two individuals
each with an assumed homosexual identity, does little to reconfirm the
social primacy of heterosexual marriage. And if pediphilia has as its
most eloquent endorsement the possibility of "continuar transando numa
boa sem risco de AIDS" (back cover), it can only function as a powerful
turn-on for the narrator in its most strident dimension of "sexo sujo"
(dirty sex). By recontextualizing sexual experience in terms of an
erogenous zone that defies all of the Western culturemes of cleanliness,
the MANUAL jejunely defies its readers to exceed limits that they might
not even have imagined to exist. All of these textual strategies are
moves in a process of turning sexual signifiers into a free-floating
process of meanings that have little to do with standard sex manuals,
whether hetero- or homosexual (cf. 35-36, 68-69).

This sort of analytical assessment of options, founded on an appeal to
concrete personal experience, with the latter being reinforced by a
colloquial register complemented by circumstantial word plays, is what
distances Mattoso's exposition from a First World sexual treatise,
anchoring it the specific sociocultural context of the Rio de Janeiro
and São Paulo sexual underworld of the 1970s and early 1980s (underworld
not just because it is marginal sexuality, but because Brazil was still
under dictatorship, a fact to which Mattoso makes reference when he
speaks of the censorship of "immoral" gay publications with which he was
associated). This appeal to a grounding in personal experience is
especially evident when the narrator interfaces details of his desires
and erotic undertakings with the written record, frequently drawn from
American sources (and quoted in the original English):

[Como o leitor terá notado, tais contos nada mais eram que uma
transposição de minhas experiências reais PARA UM PLANO LIGEIRAMENTE
MAIS FANTÁSTICO. Coisa que agora até se afigura supérflua, em face deste
livro onde estou relatando tudo em suas proporções exatas.] (120;
emphasis added) [As the reader will have noticed, stories like these
were nothing more than a transposition of my real experiences onto a
slightly more fantastic plane. This is something that now might seem to
be somewhat superfluous, in view of this book where I am describing
everything in exact terms.]

It should be noted here that the above statement refers to one of
Mattoso's own texts, which he quotes in the original Portuguese and then
in the English translation in which it circulated internationally in the
Leyland anthology. [see (b) below]

On another occasion, the narrator complains of the annoying reticence of
texts in the reporting of the actual facts of physical suffering, a
suffering that for him constitutes a crucial erotic dimension:

[De fato, o que há muito me irritava era a enxurrada de livros de
"memórias" de vítimas da repressão, que pretendiam denunciar as
violências sofridas, mas que, por pudores moralistas ou escrúpulos
ideológicos, se auto-censuravam justamente no momento de descrever as
cenas de tortura, sobretudo os lances sexuais implícitos ou explícitos,
os quais acabavam sistematicamente omitidos ou eufemizados.] (123) [In
fact, what most bothered me was the abundance of books containing
"memoirs" of the victims of repression that sought to denounce the
violence they suffered but that, out of moral shame or ideological
scruples, practiced self-censorship precisely when it came time to
describing the scenes of torture, particularly ones involving implicit
or explicit sexual acts, which end up being systematically omitted or
euphemized.]

Indeed, the dimension of Mattoso's personal record that underscores his
interest in sadomasochism points to one of the most ideologically
problematic aspects of his texts – that is, an instance in which it
becomes most specifically outrageous in the context of objective sexual
treatises. It is not just that Mattoso defends sadomasochism's
legitimate appeal as an erotic impulse. This is a position that has
produced serious rifts in gay writing, and one can compare the negative
images provided, from a male point of view, in John Rechy's novel RUSHES
with the positive ones, from a female point of view in Pat Califia's
stories in MACHO SLUTS. Califia's collection contains an important essay
in defense of lesbian sadomasochism: sadomasochism is frequently viewed
as problematical because it, among other things, ritualizes the
homosexual's position as victim and outcast, with lesbian sadomasochism
adding the dimension of women's generalized experience as the object of
sexual violence (see Dworkin). Yet Mattoso makes it clear that he is
defending sadomasochism, not from a "Nazi" perspective of the
appropriate domination of the weak by the strong, but as a form of
sexual theatrics where rituals of symbolic humiliation, not actual
physical torment, are at issue (145; this is also the sense of the
quote, "Sim, porque tortura de verdade, na própria pele, nem morta!"
[36]). [Yes, because real torture, on my own hid – not on your life!]

Mattoso's distinction between actual torture and sadomasochism as a form
of sexual theatrics (although he does recognize, as many commentators on
official torture have, that the former inevitably involves a dimension
of the latter, at least for the torturer; see Liliana Cavani's 1974 film
THE NIGHT PORTER) does not, however, exhaust this one highly problematic
dimension of his outrageous defense of pediphilia. Mattoso proceeds to
defend not so much the erotic resonances of actual political torture as
the use of such accounts as ingredients in his own erotic psychodrama,
in which the descriptions of the torments inflicted on others in the
name of a political economy can properly be recorded to serve as stimuli
in an arena of personal sexual pleasure. Rather than questioning the
validity of such a transcoding and eschewing a consideration of how
politically correct readers might find such an operation cynical, to the
extent that it becomes complicitous with the legitimation of political
torture, Mattoso's autobiographical narrator segues into a consideration
of such texts as erotically inadequate because they stop short of
providing the sort of explicit details about eroticized suffering his
personal interests require. Rather than addressing the question as to
why such silences and euphemisms are present in the texts of the memoirs
of survival – a discursive analysis of such writing (which Mattoso has
no obligation to engage in) might begin with what can and what cannot be
spoken, given the inaugural abyss between the knowledge of the narrator
and the "outsiderness" of the narratee – the narrator as writer
contemplates the need, which is, after all, the starting point of the
MANUAL, to create his own erotic discourse (124).

Just as Mattoso concerns himself with defending his pediphilic
interpretation of literary texts that foreground the foot, he equally
eschews theorizing his desire to read erotically the memoirs of the
survivors of political torture, failing even to recognize the
substantive, real-life differences between the two categories of
discourse. The indiscriminate conjugation of the two constitutes one of
the most outrageous, if not ideologically troublesome, aspects of the
MANUAL. But the fact is that Mattoso dispenses with both forms of
writing as inadequate to his own expressive needs, and it is in the
space cleared by the furlough given both literature and prison memoirs
that the MANUAL is able to emerge, grounded in a highlighted personal
experience that validates itself, NOT by the confirmation of images in
other sources but by its putative singularity. Indeed, Mattoso's
principal autoconfirmation will come from the reader response he records
to earlier versions of experiences, all sustained by varieties of the
same topos.

The transgressive panerotics of sexual desire that Mattoso's narrative
puts in motion on the basis of the multiple dimensions of outrageousness
I have described, ranging from the narrator's basic erotic postulates to
the ideologically problematic dimensions of his exposition, deviate
significantly from the sexual hygienics on which scientific sexual
treatises and erotic manuals emanating from the First World, and widely
available in translation in Latin American bookstores, are grounded. One
can venture to say that the difficulty the reader might experience in
attempting to "normalize" Mattoso's discourse, in either its general
erotic terms or as a declaration of personal experiences, within the
context of socially respectable writing about sex is a function of the
way in which the MANUAL engages in various strategies to subvert current
standardized sexual practices, hetero- as well as homosexual. And by
appealing to a principle of sexual health – Mattoso describes in his
chronicles his experiences as a sexual podiatrist who offers his clients
shiatsu – the MANUAL reinscribes a joyfully deviant "sexo sujo" into
the dominant social code of healthy sex: sex as healthful and health as
a component of institutionalized sexual behavior.

One of the fundamental points to be made about the MANUAL, a dimension
of both its carnivalization of "legitimate" and "illegitimate" sex and
its outrageous discursive practices, is a fundamental contradiction
surrounding erotic specifics. Certainly, Mattoso's text bases its appeal
to a large extent on the added outrageousness of the nonresolution of
the contradictions perceived from the perspective of a "balanced"
sociological treatise. From one point of view, the reader might feel
compelled to go beyond the text's conjugation of pediphilia and
homosexuality (as well as a number of other facets of the narrator's
exercise of sex, such as its public announcement, its promiscuity, its
transgressive blend of the erotic and the politically oppressive, and
its transgressive blend of the erotic and the medical) and say that
Mattoso's MANUAL is simply synecdochic as regards the need to promote
alternative programs of sexuality, especially in the context of AIDS.
(For a scholarly defense of such a proposition, see Cohen's article on
Foucault, an appropriate reference point, as it was Foucault who
examined the concept of sexuality as a sociopolitical, institutionalized
construct. In his postface to the MANUAL, however, Perlongher
underscores how Mattoso subverts the medical discourse on AIDS
[175-76].) From this perspective, Mattoso liberates a series of sexual
signifiers as part of a program to challenge the reader to reconsider
sexual practices beyond the institutionalized, whether that
institutionalization concerns the hegemonic heterosexual program or
involves what he considers to be deleterious reifications of a dominant
but limited range of practices within homosexuality (112-16). Such a
reading, of course, will serve primarily to permit the reader to
reinsert Mattoso's discourse about alternate sexuality within
institutionalized practices because it sanctions the retuning of
discordant elements within a generalized, and therefore nonconcretely
material, concept of sexual liberation that allows one to ignore
unseemly details.

Yet there is a point beyond which such an allegorical reading of the
MANUAL breaks down and the novel's fundamentally outrageous nature
reasserts itself in the fact that, radical dispersion of sexual
signifiers aside, the narrator's discourse focuses over and over again
on one form of sexual activity, the erotic pleasure to be derived from
practices centered on the sucking of dirty feet (a fact that is
graphically inescapable in the Glaucomix version of the text). In the
process, the narrator provides a categorically accurate portrait of
actual sexual desire: "Porra, como tem cara louco nesta cidade..."
(154). ["Damn, this city sure has a lot of real crazies..."]





(b) SHORT STORY: REAL "TREATMENTS"

The following excerpt was taken from one of Leyland's anthologies [1],
with a footnote stating that "The short story translated here is from an
unpublished collection and is based on real incidents, treatments, and
places that figured in the most repressive phase of the Brazilian
military dictatorship, the 'presidency' of Emílio Garrastazu Médici
(1969-1974). The governor mentioned is Paulo Maluf, ex-mayor of São
Paulo."


THE SADDEST THING IS THAT IT'S OVER

When I saw the governor on TV, saying that he missed those good old
days, I felt a chill run down my spine and even below my spine, one of
those chills that make a man wag his tail. People don't have tails to
wag, but I learned how to grow one and to go around with it between my
legs. Yes, my friends, I was a dog, indeed I was, and I've felt in my
own flesh how much nostalgia (spelled with "gia," not "CIA," and, after
all, "algia" is the Greek for "pain") can hurt. The governor is right:
the flesh is weak, but the memory isn't. I remember every detail,
especially because that song "Details," by Roberto Carlos, was on all
the charts (including our medical ones) when it was used as the
background music for my first torture session. From the door of the
Arena Theatre (*), where I was arrested, I was taken straight to the
barracks, and hung up in the "parrot's perch" (**) that very night.
Naked and sweating, I dangled upside down for nearly an hour. They put
headphones on my ears and turned the music up full volume. Every line of
the lyrics emphasized and sublimated a living memory. "If anyone touches
your body like I do" – electric shock in the balls – "don't say a
word" – a foot on my mouth – "don't go saying my name unthinkingly" –
a lighted cigarette-end rubbed against my cock-end – "to someone else"
– at that moment I felt something like a husked corncob being
introduced into my (until then) tiny cornhole: it actually WAS a husked
corncob, and, boy, did it husk me! The next day they sent me, along with
other "novices," to a concentration camp, one of those places that
everybody swears don't exist. And in fact it wasn't really a
concentration camp, it was a dog-pound. It was well camouflaged, on a
ranch in the valley of the Paraíba River, but even so it had all the
accustomed apparatus – prison yards, walls, wires, barbed-wire fences,
watch-towers and, of course, torture chambers. The Pound was the last
word in psychological annihilation of the regime's "enemies," and when I
say "the last word" I'm speaking literally. Once a prisoner was inside
there, he wasn't allowed to speak – he could only grunt, bark and howl,
especially howl. Naturally, it took some training to learn to do
everything in exactly the right tone of voice, but that's what we were
there for, to be taught. From the very first day the food was served on
the ground, in hunks, which the jailors threw as far as they could to
see how agile the new arrivals were at running on all fours and picking
up things in their mouths. As hunger began to get the better of our (let
us say) dignity, the guards were no longer satisfied with just watching
us crawl around. They began to step on the food every time a dog reached
it, thus obliging him to bite it and chew it right there on the ground.
And that wasn't all: they stepped harder on it each time, until it was
impossible to nibble it right under the sole of the boot, and very hard
to pull it out from under without using the hands, and so the poor hound
could only whine and lick away until the soldier decided to lift his
boot. Any sign of disobedience was punished with a whipping – for
example, any exchange of grunts among the prisoners. Those who showed
"ideological" resistance and didn't adapt immediately to animal
behavior were isolated and treated with more brutal methods. The only
ones among them who survived were the ones whose morale was broken by
torture. That sort of general conditioning was so effective that in no
time at all our dog pack was reacting mechanically. One snap of the
fingers was enough for any of the guards to have one of us at his feet,
slobbering over the dust that had accumulated on his boots, cleaning it
away. That's what happened to me – a peaceful choice between even
greater suffering and blind submission. When they took me from the Pound
to the state prison, it wasn't so tiring or so humiliating to be a dog
any longer. In prison I was to learn that that wasn't so unimportant a
lesson. The prison population was unbelievably mixed and not at all
homosexual. So-called common criminals mingled democratically with
political prisoners, and the treatment was quite egalitarian: everybody
got beaten up. Let me rectify that. When they realised that some of us
new arrivals were dogs which had returned to their human (or worse,
inhuman) condition, our cellmates themselves took the decision to
increase our dose of beating. Overcrowding obliged every prisoner to
share his cell with three others. I had the luck to get a cell where the
most recent entry had already done four-and-a-half years there. The
leader was a veteran pusher, one of those ones who go on peddling (drugs
and influences) right in stir. He was nicknamed "Freehead," "the master
of the mint." The minute I arrived he started using his professorial
jargon explaining things. "Fellah, you made the scene like a gift from
heaven, because we leading a dog's life heah. We know you was a dog,
right? Well now you gonna be a bitch, you understand how?" The two
younger prisoners laughed, flashing their canines, and all I could do
was "understand" how. The "how" was well illustrated that night. The
chief was no dummy: instead of continuing with the exhausting duty of
raping virgins, he preferred to make use of fellow-prisoners who were
already broken in, and there was nothing better for that than someone
from the famous Dog Pound, which they'd all heard about. But for anyone
who'd already made the acquaintance of the husked corncob, any size of
cob would be small potatoes...

(*) A counter-culture theater in São Paulo which served as a
meeting-place for intellectuals and leftists opposed to the government
in the sixties and seventies.

(**) A form of torture widely practised by police and military in Latin
America, in which the prisoner is suspended by his hands and legs from a
bar.


[NOTES]

[1] Click [SOURCES].

[2] Click [INFORMATIVE SADOMASOCHISM AND FETISHISM] and see Butterman's
analysis of the "Soneto Estudantil." Click [PERFORMATIVE SADOMASOCHISM
AND FETISHISM] and see his analysis of the "Soneto Linguopedal," among
other sonnets.

° ° °