Those Things - Part I

This is an article I wrote for a book about "life stories and books", a friend (www.maluvargas.com) and I edited some time ago. This is actually the translation I made and it was posted at Redroom before. Since I´m among friends, I´ll post it here, too:

Those things

“You´re past the age of suffering

for those things.”

Oh, so there´s a right age to suffer or not to suffer any longer for those, those things?

Things should only happen to make us suffer at the right age of suffering?

Or we shouldn´t suffer for things that make us suffer because they came in late, and this is a quiet time ?

And if I´m past the age of suffering, is it because I´m dead, and dead is the age of not feeling things, those things?

Carlos Drummond de Andrade Those Things (my translation)

I learned to read when I was five years old. My earliest memories are being read at and having around me storybooks, comic books, and a record player, where I could listen to recorded stories. I´m the youngest child of three, and the only girl. My parents and my brothers , who were teenagers when I was a little kid, were always trying to find things to keep me entertained in my own company: I was also the only little kid in the neighborhood . Oddly enough, I never felt lonely. My maternal grandfather, Edmundo, was also a regular in our house. He would come in with a pack of candy and a comic book, just for me – with sugar and love.

Despite being given the appropriate reading material for my age, I was often drawn to what wasn´t so obviously available to me, what was in other people´s shelves or drawers: my brothers´, more specifically.

I don´t remember which was the first book I read that I wasn´t supposed to, or it wasn´t expected of me to be interested in, but I do remember the time I found Tarzan. That was my father´s ‘fault’

Mozart Lhullier was born in the Lhullier family´s Summer house in Pelotas, Southern Brazil, in 1925. My grandfather Alfredo was a businessman, and my grandmother Antonia, just like every other well-to-do woman in the beginning of the twentieth century, was a housewife. The fondest memories my father has ever mentioned were feeling the freedom of the countryside and his mother´s cheerfulness. From his childhood, he always felt that the only way to be himself was to be close to what formed his essence: trees, animals and streams. Thousands of stories about adventures in faraway lands as well as in our own backyard were part of my childhood . Thanks to my father, for years I believed there was a wild cat behind a leafy bush in our country home. A black jaguar or onça, as we say in Brazil, would guard our kitchen at night, and an albino gorilla would come to my rescue if I ever needed some help with my conflicts at school. Maybe those were the reasons why, when my mother passed away, and I was 7 years old, I turned to a book I found in my brothers´ bedroom: Tarzan of the Apes. The possibility of affection within a seemingly hostile environment was an idea that attracted me very much. Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his adventure story of an orphaned boy raised by apes, and that boy growing up to be strong and confident, provided me with the consolation I needed at that time…

But of course there was also Pollyanna which my oldest cousin highly recommended to me. I used to observe her reading it and found it the coolest thing when she sighed and sometimes cried because of the story. My top goals then , at that time, became the possibility of meeting a wild cat , and also reading Pollyanna and shedding some tears. I never met a wild cat in our backyard, and I confess that Pollyanna irritated me to the point that I wanted her to die. I didn´t shed a single tear, but somehow I saw a little bit of myself there, and it made me think, despite being so young, that I would have to be in charge of my own life from then on. Maybe there I learned my first big lesson from reading : that other one I meet in the pages of books is also a part of myself.

TO BE CONTINUED.