‘Don’t you see there are some things we don’t talk about?’

  The girl walking stops, stumbles a hand steadies her steps where did this hand come from and the other, it can’t be happenstance, whose are these teeth, dammit, who are all these people tripping over teeth in her flesh who are all these people they’re not from around here. All of us sniff soothe draw near, hands outstretched, mouths salivating, slide our hands onto the edges sniff out try and find, but it’s many hands so many hands so little edge and many hands many hands market’s over all the leavings. We all get there the body is unsteady closer in deeper in, there’s hardly an edge, it’s not enough, the edge is hardly there the hunger’s torture, the yards gaping ears mouth, did you know if you sink your teeth in bite down and pull the skin will rip, my God, what is the skin hiding?

  ‘Is it just you or is your whole family like this?’

  ‘Like what — fat, you mean?’

  ‘No, I’m talking about… Chiquinha, you know exactly what I’m talking about.’

  ‘No I don’t know, Cida, for God’s sake I really don’t.’

  ‘Goddamnit, yes you do, oh yes… there’s no need to make me say it…’

  ‘Well if you want to know, you can find a way to say it.’

  ‘But Chiquinha…’

  ‘There are things it’s good for us to say, so we can take a good hard look at what’s being said.’

  We all want a piece of the girl, even if it’s just a crumb a tiny slice really small tiny piece, all of us want it even if it’s just a piece, this little piece, fine, this arm will do. Eyes, fingers, lips, drop that, drop that arm, that piece is mine, drop it, girl, drop that cornea, it won’t come off, that way the eye will explode the mouth is sucking the nerves juddering, drop it, girl, let go, this way the stubborn flesh will fray, goddamn, let go girl let go your fingers girl drop the veins the nerves the hair, let it all go, girl, let go of all that and let us eat you all up, go on, girl, piece by piece.

  ‘But your, this… hump… can I call it your hump?’

  ‘Oxe, Aparecida, don’t you know me at all? It ain’t what it ain’t, and as for whatever it is, let it be.’

  ‘Sorry, Zefinha. I didn’t want to upset you.’

  ‘Then spit it out, girl, I’ve still to get home after all this.’

  ‘This hump of yours… it… was it you who… or it…’

  ‘We’re in it together. I’m its hump too.’

  All of us are hungry, sinking our milk teeth in, hold tight tear out the bite, none of us know we just feel that hunger that damn hunger, we set our fingers on the edge of where the bite begins, we pull out the fibres the skin one piece but not the hunger no, the hunger stays, hidden, the hunger can’t be torn out. Skin, fuzz, clumps, hair, the flesh takes it all the teeth take it all, splinters, ears, trodden mud, mouths take it all out except for the hunger, the hunger stays, deep in there.

  The earth within blood bone flesh, beneath the folds the fats hidden organs, beneath the flab everything nestles in flesh hot blood wounds, juice, dogs’ bones, empty mugs, splinters, rafters a whole house my God a village of living flesh. And the veins and the arteries go up and down stairs and same for the vertebrae, in such a serious pose, allowing that way of coming out around the edges, so many hands and the tactile longing, it takes everything takes it all only hunger is left, hunger is still here.

  Strips of bamboo, sections of vine, trodden mud, pan handles, the stump of a pitcher. Straw, mud hand-beaten, wattle and daub, and nameless things we tear out, a hell-bent task trodden blood, bringing down the broken things, reaching the earth. A hell-bent task this famished people tearing up plants, roots, slats, digging, unearthing, finding ways of bringing everything up til on the other side of the girl they find the hunger, a tubercle she will not let go.

  All of us starving, scraping at the girl’s bones like the unlucky bits of a chicken, hunting for the hunger hidden among the organs, sucking on bones diving into blood and juice, leaving nothing for dogs or gods. This isn’t a part that’s easy to find, not an organ that can be ripped out by teeth or fingers or by dissection. This is no limb that all of us starving people dig into, pick out, it’s something that with hunger born of desire taking over the body, it’s something that can be devoured.

  And now we are made of hunger more than anything, vast hunger, the girl’s hunger, hunger to devour a part, hunger to stare into the wind and, Heavenly Father, see much more than the wind. Right now we catch the hunger we are caught vast hunger we eat the pieces, we find the blood draining out through the cracks flooding everything, we’re licking the blood taking over everything that’s street alley or lane, we’re catching everything the blood brings saint drunk dog rock, we’re chewing the girl swallowing her living flesh, this is why the girl lives entirely inside us, the starving.

  The girl, another convoy.

  Inside us the girl stares at the wind we stare at the wind and, heavenly Father, we see much more than the wind. We are devouring the girl, tearing out ripping out chewing on the girl her limbs, the succulent parts of her foresightful eyes, of her seeing beyond things, we don’t notice while we’re devouring the girl, while we’re tearing out ploughing ripping up the girl, while we pull off pieces debone the girl, I, you, none of us even sees that the girl is also devouring a piece of us, a small and simple piece: the girl is devouring our name.

  At long last, this is how she sates her hunger. As do we, girl.

  Reading: devouring the hunger of others.

  Every day the girl used to watch the wind and, Lord Almighty, she saw much more than the wind. She saw hunchbacks, dwarves, she saw bearded ladies. She saw men with antlers or fingers on their foreheads, and she tried not to see us all, her eyes two parties, hidden as best she could. Hidden so as to see the girl she saw ears lying on shoulders, three legs, she saw arms left behind, split up, maggot-filled, sloughed, she saw decayed faces, full of worms, wart-covered bald heads; the girl saw two faces — could she have seen us? But we, as I well know, we couldn’t see anything any more. Only the girl’s gaze.

  Goddamn, she’d see one face and the other one well behind it, and conversely, eyes torn in the skin, mouth a fold in the hide, the nose a great leftover. One face and the other well behind the first, the two faces relentlessly staring, staring, the girl would watch them both there far away she didn’t see us no way course she didn’t see us, she only saw the faces, just the two faces. She didn’t see us wanting to know what she was seeing, she didn’t see us dead wanting to know what this seeing thing was the far side of death what was this creature with her eyes wrenched out-of-earth, restless paws, bone skin inside out, what was this girl.

  She was watching the pattern she was tracing with her foot, so she was looking into the wind and, Lord Almighty, she saw two faces on a single neck tired of turning. Did she also see us turning back time? Perhaps. The girl was hauling earth onto the floor, you see, if she’d had a different face and didn’t know it, imagine, having two faces shouldn’t seal your fate. She just had two faces and so everyone was saying this girl doesn’t see straight, everyone saying but if she had two faces she would know it: it’s not just something that’s all inside her head, us, this starving convoy.

  Her other face saw us too.

  ‘But the other face, it…’

  ‘It talks, it never stops talking.’

  ‘But what does it keep talking about?’

  ‘All kinds of things, Cida, it just keeps on talking.’

  ‘You can’t get it to be quiet?’

  ‘It talks the way you breathe, it doesn’t stop talking like you never stop breathing. When it stops talking, it’ll all be over.’

  Afterword

  Sightlines: on weighted seeing, irreversible recognition and intrusions

  by Tice Cin

  Do you know that weight? The weight of our elders, standing too long, pressing themselves against the kitchen sink while scraping the pot. A grandma asks after a sign sighted on her grandchild’s body. ‘“What’s that, Maria de Fátima?” “I bumped into the corner of the sink, Grandma…”’ They know the weight. A sink and a body. They hold up under the pressure, as though the paraphernalia of their lives weren’t constantly being wrested from shards: ‘the mud won’t let go. They take photos and shake the photos, blowing off the flakes, but it’s no use, no use. The excavators carry on regardless.’

  Sightlines become intrusions in the weight of living. In Out of Earth, a photographer becomes haunted by the future he suspects, the death that he sees in his subject Fátima’s skin. The photographer is compelled to steal the portrait he has taken, and so he disappears. A little girl, Penha’s granddaughter, ‘sees everything, every little thing. Even things she shouldn’t.’ What should not be seen is omnipresent. A girl turned canine sees excavators kicking dogs in Vila Marta. Dogs bark because they see that someone is coming.

  Sometimes we are able to feel our way around these sites, slipping around backstreets. Other times, we are lost in the streets, along with the elements – ‘that’s always the way in the streets of Vilaboinha: any strong wind and they tangle up like string. And then only the devil can comb it out.’ Parts of the dead appear as bones, which may reunite in the features of a newborn child. The role of the excavator at a site of unyielding truths is never to stop seeking.

  A sightline in a dream makes us rub our eyes. We wonder if we are really seeing this. The sexual space of a dream is more of a puzzle piece when it invokes those who lived before us. An inheritance of sexuality. Zefinha dreams of a goat that is her husband. The goat’s back is in her line of view, freckled, like her husband’s. Fátima sees a gorilla in her first dreams, desire poking a curtain through clothes. She replaces what she sees with lucid motions; an erection becomes, instead, ripening plantain.

  To me, Cida dreams as if she is visited by the Pisadeira, the stomping-woman who steps on people’s stomachs during the night, making them breathless and confined. Sleep paralysis forces Cida to partake, never to look away:

  the dogs climbing Cida’s legs, mounting her arms, the dogs looking for any gap in her body, the dogs humping Cida in packs, and Cida frozen, as if she were asleep.

  This distress intrudes on the voyeurism that forms the backbone of the other sexual dreams in Out of Earth. The dreams transmute and characters inherit the roles of both fearful witness and sexual assault victim. Being forced to watch sexual assault is a particular trope in portrayals of rape; in order to take this imagery into her dreamspace, Smanioto expresses another kind of helplessness. In dreams, our sightlines are almost closer to the surface, a type of immersion that has the inescapability of a Pisadeira stomping on a belly. When Cida gazes at her dreaming body, at dogs ‘looking for any gap in her body’ while frozen in sleep paralysis, we are dragged deeper into the world of Out of Earth – a world deformed with the pain of knowing.

  Later, when Cida’s dreams become a sadness for a baby she cannot find in her stomach, the summoning of dreams takes on a new weight:

  You could almost say that the sac was the dream, even say the child burst out of the dream, was born from the waters of the dream to live on this side, nobody believes it when we say, but you could. Because Cida died dreaming of giving birth and there was the girl, quiet as could be between her mother’s cold legs, tiny, tiny, confused flesh like guts.

  For a child to burst out of a dream vision, there is a heavy price. An amniotic sac breaks open and a baby is on the far side of the visioner’s imagination.

  In Out of Earth, to see is to incur risk. To look away and not see the truth is a rejection of living:

  In Vilaboinha the sun didn’t go away, it was our eyes that didn’t stick around to see. All of us suddenly struck by blindness we couldn’t see the sky, couldn’t see a living thing, couldn’t see the time to see again, even Cida’s daughter born of the shock. All of us blind we didn’t see death sniffing around Cida, licking at her name, calling to her wounds. All of us blind and the girl was born. When we could see again, we thought our eyes had tricked us.

  Each ramble of speech feels a way towards illumination, an understanding. Cida’s daughter is born but not seen or humanised – reduced to a trick in a sac: ‘All of us blind and the girl was born. When we could see again, we thought our eyes had tricked us.’ Tonho vomits up Fátima’s gaze (‘it doesn’t agree with him’). Youngsters are told to shut their eyes before they are knocked to the floor. Characters see a dead person in a living child and refuse to look again, instead demanding they bury themselves, drop out of sight. This turning from a gaze and rejection of sight form an overture to the abuse the characters suffer, especially at the hands of Tonho:

  He beats he sees no body, he beats, beats, beats he sees no body, he beats beats beats not a single dog he beats. He doesn’t see any body at all he doesn’t see anything until he stumbles across Fátima he doesn’t see any Fátima in the midst of so much Tonho until he comes across Fátima at death’s door.

  Even as the abuser cries out amidst a fit of dogs, we overhear his unravelling. We are forced to see the weight of his impact, his presence. The dogs outside try to kill the dogs inside Tonho. Tonho talks and he is a sigil of force. With this to and fro between looking and looking away, power pools in a cheese cloth. Eventually, even Tonho can be turned away from: ‘We sometimes look away so’s not to see that mound of dogs high on life ripping up a man’s loneliness among them.’ We turn from the frenzy, from the reality of that divvying, the chunking of us.

  The pain of seeing struck me too:

  Fátima getting a beating, submitting, the crocheted cloth pressing into her face, she was watching the girl and her daughter, watching the pair of them and wondering what flesh is the eye made of, that hurts when beaten from afar.

  The phantom pains of the witness are a torment also for the person who is witnessed. During her beatings, Fátima tries to shield the child from her pain, her flesh hardening even as she survives. Eventually the child wonders ‘if she was learning like this, watching her mother’s beatings, if she was watching like somebody learning’. The watching does not seem to be a way of learning, but there is fear in the knowledge of being known. Pain is measured more easily when gathered by two sets of hands.

  There is redemption in seeing too, though; in the ability to be far away: ‘Away is a far-off place, inside the eyes, and the eyes are holes so the world can be born in us’. What is fixed can also be freed. Even if that far-off place feels like nothingness, it is another weightless flight, another place to turn towards.

  Author acknowledgements

  I would like to thank all those who made this book possible. I’m particularly grateful to my forebears and to my partner, Raphael. I also want to thank Laura and Sophie who, in translating Desesterro, have created another body to hold the life of this story. And you too, readers, who continue to keep it alive.

  Translators’ acknowledgements

  We would like to thank Eric Becker, who first led us to discover Sheyla Smanioto’s writing through the short story ‘Woman Creature’, published by Words Without Borders. And then Kathleen Moura McCaul, who helped us to see her work in the wider context of Brazil’s literatura marginal and who first published excerpts from this book in her anthology Megacity (2017, Boiler House Press).

  Glossary

  baile — a local dance event.

  centavo — the smallest currency denomination in Brazil, equivalent to 0.01 Brazilian real.

  farofa — a common side dish in Brazil made with ground cassava flour.

  feijão — traditional black bean stew, a Brazilian staple.

  Oxe — a colloquial interjection expressing surprise, frustration, amazement or indignation, common to the Northeast of Brazil.

  pinga — poor quality cachaça, the ubiquitous Brazilian white rum distilled from sugarcane.

  pitanga / pitangueira — tree bearing sweet, succulent fruit like small plums or mirabelles, also known as the Brazilian cherry. The name ‘pitanga’ originates from the Tupi word ‘ybápytanga’, meaning ‘reddish fruit’.

  polvilho — tapioca flour used to make popular plain biscuits, among other things.

  retirante(s) — rural migrants from the Northeast to wealthier urban and/or Southern regions.

  sertão — the ‘backlands’ or ‘scrub’ referring to the arid, interior regions of Brazil. The sertão has been influential in Brazilian literary history, notably in João Guimarães Rosa’s magnum opus Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands). It has no real equivalent in English, as it relates to the Brazilian topography.

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PENís Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writersí freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.

  Each year, a dedicated committee of professionals selects books that are translated into English from a wide variety of foreign languages. We award grants to UK publishers to help translate, promote, market and champion these titles. Our aim is to celebrate books of outstanding literary quality, which have a clear link to the PEN charter and promote free speech and intercultural understanding.

  In 2011, Writers in Translationís outstanding work and contribution to diversity in the UK literary scene was recognised by Arts Council England. English PEN was awarded a threefold increase in funding to develop its support for world writing in translation.