The blue flower of Novalis
I carry you as my own:
Mutant dorsum, death.
For millennia I have known of you Never have I met you.
We, time's consorts Beloved death
I kiss you on your flank Your teeth,
Incandescent I walk by your chance and mine.
I ride you horseback. I try.
You will lose All the hours from me
For you will take me At one given hour only.
And perhaps you will come At a hollow, Insipid instant.
Just imagine what you will lose,
I who lived in the red Being a poet,
and walked down Blazing paths
I crossed the sun
I touched the inner walls of friends
My mouth on all feelings
And I was taken, wounded by haunts, by thrills
Just imagine that, death.
I have a huge vitamin D deficiency.
So I have to sunbathe, which I hate,
but I do it every single day.
Ten minutes on the tongue, ten on the hands and ten in the asshole.
The coffee!
You know I'm nobody without coffee.
What are you doing so far away? I don't like that.
Come closer. Come!
What I really like is Italian espresso.
If I could, I'd have one of those machines at home,
But then I'd spend even more time at home than I usually do.
But hand drip coffee reminds me of my grandma, dona Leoneta.
Well, everything reminds me of something, I'm Pisces with Cancer rising.
Pisces with Cancer rising... It's like
Dory from “Finding Nemo” dying of lymphoma.
We cry a lot.
Do you want some coffee?
No, thank you.
Well, if anybody wants some,
just help yourselves.
What is your earliest memory?
Before that...
You've noticed I had a job done because of the film, right?
A job?
On my face, Gustavo, don't be a hypocrite.
A plastic job?
It's plastic all right. It's called methacrylate,
they're acrylic microspheres, which enhance facial volume.
- You did it for the film? - For life, rather.
But I didn't think it was appropriate to be immortalized with that face I had...
- What face? - That miserable... mournful...
wretched face.
- A miserable face. - Why?
Because I took AZT in the early 2000s, when I found out I had HIV,
and then I had some lipodystrophy, which has gotten worse in recent years.
I don't know if my friends were too nice and didn't say anything
or people just didn't notice it as I do, because I look at myself every day.
And do you think it's better now?
I do! I think it's better.
I have Venus in Taurus, I need aesthetic comfort.
And when did you get infected?
I must have been around 22,
I must have been 22 because...
that's what my right hand line indicates,
which is completely different from the left hand.
- How so?
- The left is the hand of your potentialities.
The right hand shows what you've done with your life.
And on my right hand there's a break that isn't on my left hand.
And it's a break that, by the calculations that Indians make,
falls exactly on the year 2002, which was when I got infected with HIV.
Do you think that HIV is so important as to leave a mark on your life line?
Isn't it important to you?
Maybe it's not important to people on the outside.
But it's important to someone who was born in 1980
and saw that atrocious cover of Veja magazine with Cazuza
and his family and all the homosexuals
who had HIV.
Maybe not from a practical point of view,
I know I won't actually die of HIV.
But from a symbolic point of view, think it's still a huge burden.
Not HIV, but... all that's been built around it.
So yeah, I think it's enough for a break in the hand line.
There was a damaging aspect, which was
having fulfilled a prediction of the most homophobic people in my family,
who associate HIV with homosexuality.
This is still a little troublesome to me...
Thinking that I've done almost everything they imagine homosexuals will do.
Doing drugs,
Doing drag at least once in life.
But in the end, these things that some homosexuals do
aren't as terrible as my grandmother would like me to think they are.
So maybe the only thing that bothers me is people being like,
“Oh but you've become the stereotypical homosexual
your grandma was afraid you would become.”
Today I even pride myself on having become the very person my grandma
tried so hard for me not to be.
I guess that HIV adds a certain calculated tragedy to my life.
I mean, I know I'm not going to die...
I'm not Camille, see?
But there's this Camille-like mystique.
There's something deeply Christian about me.
I guess it's got to do with having
grown up in a Catholic home filled with images of saints
and bibles with pictures by Rembrandt and Caravaggio.
And I'm Pisces, so there's this idea of calculated... martyrdom.
It's as if I could die a thousand times. HIV in 2018 adds this mystique.
Can I tell the story of a saint?
There's this saint, I think it was Saint Barth-No, Saint Bartholomew was...
They skinned him.
There's this saint who was a converted Roman patrician and
he was sentenced to the grill.
A grill, really.
People used to place a grill over a charcoal fire and
the convict was burned alive.
After I read the story of this saint, I thought a lot about the role of humor
for people who suffer a lot or who are really dense.
They say that a Roman soldier who was torturing this saint
whose name I don't remember
said something to tease him and he replied like,
“Nah, I'm fine,
it's just that I'm done on this side, could you turn me over?”
When I read this story I felt so close to this saint,
because the role that humor has acquired for me,
being such a dense person...
Well, I'm rambling...
Are you sure you don't want some coffee?
Later.
The definition of cinéma vérité should be
“how to torture the objects of your film,” right?
Last night
I had a terrible earache,
and as we're talking about memories,
I remembered that my chronic earache
may have its origin in my childhood.
My father was an amateur race car driver.
But as he's not from a millionaire family,
he had to quit when he got married to my mother.
And to replace the thrill he got from car racing,
he went to the Interlagos track every week.
And he took me along as a baby.
That noise is insufferable.
It's one reason why I don't drive.
I think it somehow determined
my hearing weakness.
When my brother was born,
I think it inaugurated the ambiguous relationship
I would have with everything.
Because I felt rejected
and at the same time I felt relieved
for having someone who would receive that heritage...
which I never really wanted to receive.
But as much as I hated those manly, aggressive games,
which meant nothing to me,
I kind of envied the relationship they had.
Did you predict your brother's death?
I did.
I was around 11 years old, he was 9.
I picked up his hand and saw a very short life line,
and I said, “You'll die before you turn 19 years old.”
And how did he die?
It seems obvious.
He died in a car crash.
He drove out of my father's farm that day.
My father told him, “Drive safely on the highway.”
And he said, “Why? I'll die of it.”
And he died... of it.
I was the first person to know,
and I was put in charge of all the red tape.
I went to the morgue,
I told them how to place him in the coffin so as to hide his wounds.
I opened his wallet and found two pregnancy tests
from two different women.
He fulfilled his heterosexual role to the end.
I left the place with the body.
I, who until then was considered so fragile,
incapable of handling great events...
I couldn't even stand a car's noise,
but it was I who had to take care of everything.
Even of a severed earlobe.
I arrived at the wake with the body,
where people were already waiting for my brother.
My mother hugged me with the...
... cold arms of someone who'd never been hugged,
and said,
“Son, I thought you were going to die first.”
He, like Christ, on my mother's right side
and on the left
an endless line of women.
Countless women.
What they didn't know,
nor did my mother, who hardly fucked in her life,
nor did those women he must have fucked once, twice, three times at the most,
was that I had been the first.
And you must think that he came into my room at night,
because he was the heterosexual male predator...
But it was I who went to him every night for 6 months
and touched his hard cock under his underwear.
Then one day he stopped pretending to be asleep,
woke up
and fucked me.
And I really liked it, so much that we fucked for another 8 months.
It's hot stuff.
In fact,
when I told mom what had happened between us,
for the first time she expressed concern for me
and asked, - “Did he hurt you?”
Do you think it's good to get inside my head?
I'm pretty complicated, eh?
And today is Sunday.
I hate Sundays.
Why?
Do you think this is my first job as an actress?
I don't know if I'm very convincing,
but I played a very convincing role from the age of 5 to 10.
I can say that I was a child actress.
How so?
One fine day my father ran into an ex-girlfriend from his teenage years,
and they started having an affair.
And every Sunday my father would take me and my brother
to spend the day with his lover.
We did everything that our mother didn't let us do,
either because it was too expensive or because it was too energy-consuming.
It was fun, like, we went to the amusement park
much more often than any of our schoolmates.
We went on helicopter rides...
But always in the space of a Sunday.
Then I remember I felt an unprecedented and unbearable feeling of anguish
for the first time.
It was 1985.
Because when we were getting ready to go back home
and my father said goodbye to his lover,
he began pulling his strings
on me and my brother in the car, trying to get us...
to lie to my mother.
In a way, I was relieved at my brother's death,
but I miss having an accomplice of sorts.
I'd like to forget... There are but few things I'd like to forget...
But I'd like to forget...
And I find it really hard to forget.
I've told you I have memories of other lives, right?
I've never believed in other lives. I thought it was
intellectually insulting to believe in other lives.
Then I started going to Candomblé and I did my karmic birth chart,
and I started having memories.
One of them was really clear...
It explains a little my passion for violence... A passion that I try to control
and that I only give free rein to in sex.
I was a general.
If I was a really vain person,
I guess I'd say I was Genghis Khan, but I don't think I was Genghis Khan.
But I was a man in Asia in the Middle Ages,
a huge heavy-set man
leading an army.
I remember the rush
of sending around 2,000 men to slaughter the enemy army
or some village they had invaded.
I saw nothing but those men...
And the other one?
The most recent one...
was in Germany.
I was Novalis, have you ever heard of Novalis?
He's a German poet from the Romantic Era.
An awfully sensitive...
straight man.
I was straight once.
He had an obsession, this absurd idea... of finding a blue flower.
All his poetry was a kind of priesthood,
a praise of the night. But not a morbid night,
a revealing night.
And what does the blue flower mean?
The blue flower...
I feel vulgar just trying to define what the blue flower meant
to a man who died searching for it.
What is the blue flower?
I don't know...
It's the love he saw die, or God,
or transcendence, or death,
or catharsis. I don't know what the blue flower is.
It's this thing that doesn't exist,
only... it does exist.
Do you see all this in your head?
I don't know if it's possible...
for someone to stay inside it for long.
Even I've tried to escape sometimes.
I think that's why my love relationships haven't been very successful.
How I love myself!
Funny how anyone could question what you believe in...
If I claim to have been Novalis, how can anyone say I was not Novalis?
Like in these sex apps...
You can be a daddy, a son, an otter, a bear...
As you've spent the whole day with me, I have a lot of unanswered messages.
It's that...
I don't know, I spend hours here and...
nothing.
Then when I'm busy, guys start messaging me.
Plus, it's Sunday.
I think people get a little anxious about being idle.
And fucking is a way to quell anxieties.
Idleness is dangerous for most people.
Ah, this one is fun...
- He's into pet play, you know? - No, what's that?
Oh, it's pretending you're a pet, usually a dog, right?
I don't know, he's a switch, he plays both ways.
He's either the dog or the owner.
I've already done it, not with him, but I really want to.
He's so young... A real cutie.
- And what do you do? - Oh, you keep barking...
There is sexual intercourse, but the guy is turned on by watching you act like a dog.
And there's this absolute loyalty on the dog's part.
You stay there, on all fours, sucking his foot while he watches TV.
It may or may not lead to sex.
Oh, this is one is hilarious, because he says he's discreet,
we've argued several times because
he said that I was too open about sexuality...
But the other day I saw him at the bakery around the corner
and he's such a queen. I thought it was funny.
This guy has horrendous feet, when I told him I had a foot fetish,
the guy thought I had to fuck him because he's into feet, too,
but his feet are not my kind of feet.
This is a married jerk who also lives nearby.
He's never sent me his face pic, I've even sent him my endoscopy results.
Oh, this is a yummy one that sometimes comes to piss on me...
Like Blanche Dubois, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
I love it that this guy loves filming his fucks, from what he told me.
He's sent me some of his videos.
And I have a morbid relationship with exposing myself.
I feel objectified, like,
when a guy is a top, a dominant, and on top of all he likes to film the fuck.
For a long time I entertained a rather perverse idea
of filming my fucks and sending them to my father.
Why?
I think it'd be a really sophisticated porn revenge.
I even had a daddy some time ago,
and he liked it that I was into exhibitionism.
We filmed our fucks, we had a blog where we posted this kind of stuff.
And I even gave him my father's e-mail address.
I had this fantasy that one day,
out of the blue, my father would call me to say that he'd got
some videos of me being fucked in the ass by a guy his age.
It seemed such a perverse, sadistic idea for me
to want to make my father suffer.
It was also a kind of masochistic idea, putting myself in a situation
that my father must find abject.
But... parents should be afraid of their kids being drug dealers, or drug addicts
or psychopaths, or a conservative, corrupt congressman or of them starving.
And what my father cringed at was that I should like to be fucked in the ass.
And what do you do, Marcelo?
What do you mean, what do I do?
I am myself. I'm this thing that you've been looking at.
That you came over to film, for some reason
that should explain why I am interesting.
Do I have to be useful?
Is that what you're implying?
I am a little stray fox with crepuscular habits.
I am useless, as is everything that matters.
I am here.
I am this person who is right here.
Will the despotism of the earthly never cease?
Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night.
Will the time never come when Love's hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally?
To the Light a season was set;
but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night.
Endless is the duration of sleep.
Holy Sleep,
the devoted servant of the Night.
gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labor.
Fuck me, fuck me, you little slut, fuck me! What a cock, oh what a cock!
I love making them think they are something they are not.
Fuck me, you little slut. What a stud! I've never been fucked by a guy like this!
But what I really like is how they're deflated after they come.
Lying helpless on my bed.
Fuck me, fuck me!
This hot, semi-famous guy moved into my apartment building
and we had a kind of BDSM relationship.
I was submissive, he was dominant.
Then one day he texts me, “Come on up to serve me.”
Then I went upstairs, of course, the guy was delicious.
I get there and I start sucking the guy, this huge cock.
After some time, I found out that, in fact, he isn't a dominant. He's a lazy ass,
he can't keep up a good performance for long,
so he overdoes the abuse,
and that makes him seem more interesting than he is.
I was there on all fours, in panties, sucking him off
with my eyes closed, as he'd told me to.
Then he goes, “I'm giving you a little gift,”
and I hear him spit,
and then he shoves a little something up my ass.
And he says, “Get up and go away.”
I went downstairs, not knowing what to make of it.
I got into my place, that stupid Jack Bauer show, 24, was on,
with that dam little clock on the screen.
And sure enough, I pulled that thing out of my ass.
I'd never seen such a thing,
it had a USB end and a litlle display with changing digits...
The digits kept changing
there was that Jack Bauer clock on the TV screen.
I'd never seen such a thing, and to me that couldn't be anything other than a bomb.
Why would anybody stick a bomb up someone else's ass?
Why would anybody have a bomb at home
with a USB end?
Then I looked at my dog, I looked at my records by Maria Callas, by Bach
by Glenn Gould...
I looked at the family pictures, of the few people that I like in my family,
I looked at my books...
and I said, “Damn, am I going to die like this, with a bomb up my ass?”
Then I put my robe on top of my panties, I ran down to the building's trash can
and threw out the bomb.
And as I was coming back up, I thought, “Well, now everybody's gonna blow up.”
How absurd is it for someone to stick a bomb up your ass,
and then you throw it into a place that's going to kill a bunch of people.
Then that was that...
I was left absolutely clueless. It was the most nonsense thing in my life.
The next day I'm talking to a friend, he asks, “Will we go to the bank with me?”
and he pulls out that fucking token!
I felt like the most ridiculous person in the world,
till I was finally able to tell this story like I just did...
- So the thing was a token? - It was a bank security token.
I mean, I think not even Freud would understand this guy,
this relationship between shit and money, and cock, and sex, I don't know.
The next day he texts me, “Come up and bring me back that little gift.”
Of course I couldn't take the gift back,
and since then this guy doesn't look me in the face.
It's all this crazy stuff... about my ass.
Like what I'm doing now, sitting in a bowlful of almond milk,
thinking that the life of 19th-century French courtesans
shouldn't be that different...
- What kind of milk is it? - It's almond milk.
It's good for someone who has a sexual frequency like I do.
It's funny, I wonder if active men have a sex-related routine...
like we do.
But I enjoy it... It seemed humiliating at first...
But now I see it as a kind of liturgy, you know?
A kind of ritual, of sacrifice that we do
to have some pleasure that only we can enjoy.
This almond milk was ridiculously cheap at the grocery store.
This is beginning to sound like “Story of the Eye”.
I wonder if Bataille would be appalled at how I banalize his images?
I've improvised this little mirror here.
Then I remembered my grandmother Leoneta's dressing table.
It was from the 1930s, when she married.
It was beautiful, untouched.
She kept some perfumes there from the time of her wedding, imagine that!
They'd all gone bad.
She never let anyone open them, nor did she ever wear them.
She was the most original woman I've ever met.
And frigid.
She told me herself that she was frigid.
I think she married in 1930, 31...
And a few months later, she came up to my grandfather,
who controlled the finances, the length of her petticoat and even her schedule
and asked, “Will you make a woman's doctor's appointment for me?”
He asked her why and she said,
“Oh, because I want to feel what you feel every night
when you climb onto me and moan like a dog.”
Then he said, “I won't make any doctor's appointment,
women who feel pleasure end up betraying the husband.”
Fifty years later, as they were planning their 50th wedding anniversary party,
my grandma is at the beauty salon on a Saturday with my aunt,
someone phones in to say my grandfather had died.
He died in a ridiculous way.
He was at the local market, after closing his shop for the day, he was a barber.
And they say he died with a salami under his arm.
He had a massive heart attack while waiting in line.
Well, when the hairdresser said that to my grandmother,
my grandma let out a shriek as southern Italian women do in such cases,
she looked at my aunt and said,
“Darn, right on the day when I have these long red nails!”
Her nails always looked like Alcione's, the singer.
They went to the wake, I was 5 years old.
After a while of my family crying over
the death of the man everybody said had been a saint,
two women, a mother and daughter, walk in.
The woman looked a little like my grandmother
and her daughter looked just like my oldest aunt.
Then the next day at home we found out that
that was my grandfather's second family.
My grandpa had been married to that woman for 40 years,
and to my grandma for 50.
He closed the shop, went to that woman's place,
had dinner with her and the daughter,
and left on the last streetcar to my grandmother's, the official home.
Sometimes I think that much of my sexuality has to do with
these women's repressed desires.
These successive generations spent in tending the house, making polenta,
caring for children,
tolerating husbands and being thankful for having one.
Well, now I think we should take a break, because I need to leave this to dry.
And after all this verbiage I think it's interesting...
I think it's interesting to have a little silence.
A cigar can be a phallic symbol,
but often it's just a cigar.
This place is as chaotic as my mind,
but I think it's the only place in the world where I feel I am among friends.
Have you ever thought about using
your knowledge for some kind of work?
You have now exasperated me with that persistent question.
You sound like my grandmother, or my father.
I think the only thing I could have been is an actor.
I only realized that after we started making this film.
I remember going to the bakery for bread,
at 8 or 10 years old, when we start running errands for our parents...
for our parents.
I remember the clerks at the bakery saying,
“Yikes, what a sissy voice,”
and complaining to my father, and him saying,
“Yeah, you have to sound more manly.”
When you're 8 and every boy is still a soprano.
So I thought,
“What kind of actor am I going to be with this voice?”
“What kind of universality will I achieve, how will people identify with me?”
I only realized now how my voice isolated and marginalized me.
What kind of Hamlet was I going to play?
A fagot Hamlet, right?
But today I think that, after so many Hamlets,
the world could really use a super gay Hamlet.
You know what intrigues me?
Every day there's some new technology...
In theory, I no longer need these CDs,
with that cloud thing and gadgets and apps...
Every week there's something new out there.
But the other day
I got to thinking, what about the umbrella?
Have you noticed that an umbrella is the same since forever?
Take the umbrellas in those Chinese illustrations,
the structure is the same!
Not much has been done to protect us from rain,
nothing as efficient as an umbrella.
Well, everyone goes to these big chain supermarkets.
And they all have a small flower shop at the entrance.
I love flowers, but I despair when I walk into these supermarkets,
I walk past them with my eyes half closed.
Have you seen those colors?
It's true that in nature there are flowers that are orange, for example,
Louis XIV had a huge bed of orange roses built in Versailles.
But at those chain supermarkets
the orange in the flowers
looks more like Romero Britto than Louis XIV.
And then they had the brilliant idea
of displaying some blue flowers.
But it's not the blue close to a violet's violet.
It's not the blue that we only rarely find in nature.
It's a gouache blue, it's a fake blue,
it's aniline-like!
It's not even genetically modified - that would be a triumph of science.
No! It's a tacky blue, the color of a thrift-store couch.
Now, just think:
an early 19th-century poet
devotes his life
to the search for this symbol...
I don't know if Novalis...
I don't know if I actually believed in the existence of this blue flower,
but as a metaphor it's brilliant...
There is not much left to dream about in this world...
Do you think you are superior to the world?
Superior? What nonsense!
I can be quite narcissistic,
but there is no pretense of superiority when I say that.
There is a great story about the actress Lucélia Santos.
They asked her, “Why do you do so many period soap operas?”
And she replied,
“Because the authors know I like to ride a buggy.”
That's it, I guess.
It's the reason I live my life the way I do:
I like old things,
and I like dead things.
The other day I was watching the documentary about Nina Simone.
She suffered domestic violence, she was a very difficult mother...
Then when she dies
she triumphs as an idea.
No matter what vicissitudes,
what beatings she took, or what lousy mother she was,
or what record deals she lost because she was fighting for rights in the USA...
When you die, after having a life like she had, you triumph as an idea.
It was the same thing with Maria Callas,
Novalis, who died so young...
the poet Hilda Hilst...
Dead people comfort me.
When I look at my life, although I have many friends,
I think I spend a lot more time with these dead people...
than the living.
In the end,
I think that what defines me
is the fact that
I'm really a necrophiliac.
I seek this catharsis and I never find it.
It is a transcendence necessity
a desire for the divine.
And my body is my faith.
Only the church,
the morals
say that we are only the head,
what's at the top, what's light.
When in their complete nature the human being is a whole,
top and bottom,
near and far,
open and closed,
light and dark.
Like peristalsis...
The cock, which hardens and softens.
Human beings are these paradoxes,
and I only feel close to God
when I accept these so-called “dirty” lower parts.
When I accept that I am my foot.
My foot is also me.
I am my foot,
I am my shoulder.
I am my cock,
I am my asshole.
And God...
...is my asshole,
God is this black hole
where we all want to get lost.
Come fill up my God, who is dead,
come recreate the universe in my rectum.
This film is too vanilla!
We need catharsis…
We need…
…God.