Ribamar

"This boy suffers from nerves," he is a Sampaku, "someone incapable of reacting appropriately to danger," his eyes are averted, they point upward; the boy José has eyes like those of a dead fish, but the eye doctor says everything is fine, and yes, everything is fine and everything is wrong; the resemblance to his father's eyes is this: the only curse we desire, the wish we curse most. The hypnotist does not straighten the boy's eyes, does not take away his nervous suffering; the blade does not make his nose more discreet, the thing does not work with the knife --- but there is this: the feeling that his nose is not right, that his eyes are wandering, that his position in the world is not correct --- it is the timid chess piece lost on the board of another game. Letter to his father that accompanies the letter to Kafka's father. Kafka, the worm writer; writes as if crawling, and we might think that part of it is this: it's about seeing if the traces our crawling left behind can be deciphered, if they have been transformed into a book or if they are, after all, like the illegible scribbles of Ribamar's demented old man, who is blind and therefore doesn't need to write anything understandable. In Ribamar, a fall is taken advantage of to move forward; crawling isn't so bad after all: it's the forward movement of someone who has fallen and doesn't want, or can't, get up. The blow that knocked him down was too strong --- and being born is a bit like this: a blow from which we sometimes only recover many decades later. And then there's the visit to the crazy aunt who imitates chickens and perhaps writes on the ground yes; yes, which is, despite everything, one of the most beautiful words, even if it has no recipient or subject, even if there's no prior question. And that's it: from a distance, from where we can see, what Castello seems to be writing on the ground is a yes, and this yes is perhaps addressed to his father, a yes that also appears after no question. In Ribamar, Castello writes, it's about "taking possession of my father," as if the father were "a public office or a piece of land." It's not about understanding, reclaiming, or rebuilding "the ruins that hurt but don't frighten," it's simply about saying a yes, which isn't out of obedience, a yes that doesn't come from anywhere but remains there. When the boy José sat among the plants, so as not to be seen—that sitting was also a way of saying yes. Reading is exposing oneself—as one writes in Kafka's chapters—even in the most private reading. Ribamar is, therefore, something that interprets us. This book, which insists on wanting to read us, thus alters the natural order of things. The one who writes is entering our intimacy; how does he know so much about ours? And perhaps that's why we get emotional. And yes, we crawl, but in Ribamar we also advance, step by step, many meters above the ground. This too, therefore: serenity in the journey. Like a tightrope walker who is certain he will reach the end, and is able to withstand the temptation of wanting to descend; a tightrope walker who advances, calm, knowing where he is and how much further to go (12/18, 13/18, 14/18). This, therefore: the maximum points above the ground (crawling) and the minimum support on the ground (the tightrope walker's advance). Between the two moments, before or after --- the fall, always. It's not enough to do, it's necessary to save what was done --- someone wrote. And, in a way, this is what all of us who have been read by this book demand --- the impossible, of course: that he who made us save us. Gonçalo Tavares