All Dogs are Blue Read online

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  First published in 2013 by And Other Stories

  www.andotherstories.org

  London – New York

  Copyright © the heirs of Rodrigo de Souza Leão 2008, 2010

  English language translation copyright © Zoë Perry & Stefan Tobler 2013

  Introduction copyright © Deborah Levy 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

  The right of Rodrigo de Souza Leão to be identified as Author of All Dogs are Blue (original title Todos os cachorros são azuis) has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 9781908276209

  eBook ISBN 9781908276216

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cultura do Brasil / Fundação Biblioteca Nacional. This work was published with the support of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture / National Library Foundation.

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  Contents

  Introduction by Deborah Levy

  It all went Van Gogh

  Not God: gods

  Humphrey Bogart versus Charles Laughton

  [From Greek epilogos]

  Publisher’s preface to the second Brazilian edition of All Dogs are Blue

  Notes

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  For Leonardo Gandolfi, Franklin Alves Dassie, Silvana Guimarães and Iosif Landau

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  ‌Introduction

  ‘She’d fallen in love with the craziness in me.

  Sometimes lunatics are very seductive.’

  All Dogs are Blue is a comic modernist novel about being messed up – and then being messed up even more by numbing doses of pharmaceuticals. Rodrigo de Souza Leão is very clear about what has happened to his thirty-six-year-old narrator. He has swallowed ‘a chip’, and the chip makes him do things he doesn’t want to do. Set in a mental asylum in Rio de Janeiro, Souza Leão’s autobiographical last novel is about a whole lot of other things too: the drunken street sweepers from the favelas who somehow also end up in the asylum; the narrator’s teenage years growing up bookish and paranoid; his kindly parents who are pushed to the limits of their empathy and endurance; a blue toy dog which is both childhood companion and the colour of the narrator’s medication. It may also refer to the better-known black dog of melancholia – but your everyday black dog is just a mutt, whereas Souza Leão’s blue dog is a rare breed.

  Rest assured that we are in the hands of the most reliable of narrators, despite his illness – which is diagnosed as belonging to the family of schizophrenias. Whatever, he totally knows the score: ‘Why do all crazy people have the same paranoias?’ That’s a reliably interesting question. Reliable? Doesn’t he turn himself into a plant? Yes, he is reliably crazy. But he is also reliably lucid, astute and witty. He doesn’t attempt to delude his readers so much as try to get a grip on his own delusions. If he is coshed into silence by the high doses of medication ‘bayoneted’ into his veins, he is also reliably vocal about the experience – about what it’s all for: ‘all this to keep a state of order. We’re the minority, but at least I say what I want.’ He is sad about his situation (it’s no joke), yet he is intellectually switched on and reliably spirited.

  Souza Leão is a mind-blowing poet; his attitude seems to be something like: Why not flaunt the language(s) that madness has taught me? If I’m tri-lingual and didn’t even have to pay a tutor or travel agent to pick up the lingo, that’s the pay-off for all this suffering. He was aware that he had to use everything his illness had given him in order to write – and everything it had taken away from him too. To help him get through his day in the asylum, our narrator hallucinates two friends: one is called Rimbaud and, when he’s not riding an elephant to Africa, he is on-side and loyal; the other is Baudelaire, but he’s more of a fair-weather friend and can be unsociable.

  In May 1871, aged sixteen, Rimbaud wrote a letter to his teacher, Georges Izambard, explaining his teenage poetic philosophy:

  I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working at turning myself into a seer. You won’t understand any of this, and I’m almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It’s really not my fault. (trans Graham Robb, 2000)

  Rodrigo de Souza Leão would have been aware of this letter – it might have helped him figure that the (involuntary) derangement of his own senses was not useless material. His narrator tells us of his own teenage years, in which he sounds a little like Rimbaud: ‘I was possessed by a fertile spirit of modern madness, one that has helped twentieth-century poetry many times.’

  It’s not all about art though. The always-horny narrator often makes his father cry. His mother brings him tuna sandwiches to the hospital but she doesn’t want him to come home. If life in an insane asylum is actually very dull, Souza Leão’s subtle achievement is that he evokes the dull and deadening days without ever being boring or making them more exotic than they are. Everything that is interesting about the novel can be found in its light, laconic tone. Above all, this is a novel driven by tone. In this sense it reminds me of Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte, or Whatever.

  Souza Leão’s narrator doesn’t know which is more of a nightmare, waking or sleeping – but when he is awake he always gives cigarettes to the lunatic who bangs his head against the wall. He wonders what would happen if the lunatic were a footballer: ‘His headers would be unstoppable. After all that banging his head against walls, he’d slam in headers from anywhere. Maybe he’d get called up to play for Brazil.’

  The narrator wakes up one day ‘wanting to say beautiful things’. He picks a flower in the garden and takes it back to his room. The nurse asks him if he’s ‘gone gay’. The asylum gardens are full of butterflies. Slums surround the asylum and he can hear music playing day and night. In All Dogs are Blue, the lives of the poor and the insane are knotted together. The father figure is knotted together too. From his bed, he can see the Christ statue on the hill. Maybe it’s the sun setting, maybe it’s the injections, but Christ seems to be always golden. When he kisses his own father’s face, he wonders, ‘Is it the kiss of Judas? Will I betray my father in my madness?’ A feral murderer is admitted to the asylum. He terrifies everyone and shits wherever he likes. Yet this murderer is scared of the fragile shape-shifting narrator (medication has made him fat and bloated) because his voice reminds him of his own father who beat him.

  All Dogs are Blue knows that it is telling us about the layers of language at play in both poetry and psychosis. In this sense, the spare, poetic prose won from the original Portuguese in this translation by Stefan Tobler and Zoë Perry is a breathtaking achievement. Thanks to their skill, we hear Souza Leão’s multiple associations building, and if we want to, we will find a network of signifiers linking words with other words. Or we can just go with the story and enjoy its exuberance.

  The first chapter of the novel is ironically titled ‘It all went Van Gogh’. Perhaps Leão had read the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud’s luminous essay titled ‘Van Gogh: the man suicided by society’. Here is what Artaud said about th
e psychiatry of his generation:

  In comparison with the lucidity of Van Gogh, which is a dynamic force, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology,

  worthy product of their damaged brains.(trans Helen Weaver, 1976)

  In this essay, Artaud (who had also spent time in mental institutions) found a startling poetic image to describe Van Gogh’s state of mind – and perhaps his own. Artaud believed that the bullet that killed Van Gogh was in his stomach before he shot himself, that it was already there while he was painting black crows smashing against the purple sky of Arles. In other words, Van Gogh was already committed to death before it happened. Artaud’s subversive notion of this bending of existential time leads to the kind of sorrow that can be too painful to accept unless the writer is calmly onside with the reader. All Dogs are Blue never deals out this sort of sorrow. Life is lived intensely and with gusto at the asylum in Rio. All Dogs are Blue kept me curious and it kept me laughing, especially when the evangelicals recruiting patients to the cause leave a leaflet near the narrator’s bed: ‘My God! Fundamentalists are taking over the world. They’re even coming here to recruit the utterly fucked.’

  When Souza Leão was completing this book, he deleted words and paragraphs, structured the pages, pasted and copied and redrafted. Like all writers, he read his manuscript through and made decisions. He knew what he had to do to craft this unforgettable novel. His title suggests that we will encounter a stretch of writing in which reality slips and slides, yet always returns to something recognisable. As for the magnificent last line in this most valuable book (but don’t look now) – I’m still thinking about it.

  Deborah Levy

  London 2013

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  ‌All Dogs are Blue

  ‌It all went Van Gogh

  I swallowed a chip yesterday. I forced myself to talk about the system that surrounds me. There was an electrode on my forehead. I don’t know if I swallowed the electrode with the chip. The horses were galloping. Except for the seahorse, who was swimming around in the aquarium.

  He has mental problems, you know. Will there be any after-effects? Deep inside this world of mine, in my room darkened by doses of Litrisan, a psychiatrist came and bayoneted some chemical into my left eyebrow. Another, meanwhile, grabbed a lump of flesh, stretching it more and more so that I wouldn’t feel the Benzetacil injection.

  Benzeta.

  Benzeta.

  A searing pain in my bum. Everything around me spinning and I’m spinning, too. I pick my nose and wipe the bogey on the table in the corner, far from the darkness in the room. The darkness is clinical. Only the people in white can visit that impure line. They hold me down again. I receive a kiss from my mother. It must be visiting day. I wake up and eat a sliver of guava jelly with the tuna sandwich Mum brought me. I’m listening to a song so loud that I can’t get into my thoughts, I’m on the outside, now the cocaine can’t get in. The connection’s been broken.

  Mum’s just come and she’s off again.

  He still thinks he’s swallowed a chip.

  She says it all started about ten years ago, when I thought I’d swallowed a cricket.

  The things I’ve had to swallow because of you, my son.

  My mum stroked my lips and gave me a kiss on the cheek as she said this. For a few seconds I remembered something that had happened the day before. I had wrecked the whole house in a massive rage. I’ll never take Haldol again.

  You only got like that because you didn’t take your Haldol in the first place, says the chip. And I start to say: It’s only Tupi in Anhembi. ‌It’s only Tupi in Anhembi1.

  A sword swallower downs a flame all in one gulp. Everybody is swallowing something at this very moment. It’s dinnertime. Mum’s gone. The music sends me out of myself again.

  I go into my room. I pull out my dick and start to have a wank. Funk me, funk me, you’re my motorbike. Funk me, funk me, you’re my motorbike. I swallowed a cricket when I was fifteen years old. It was the first time I’d managed to live more intensely with myself. I saved a house from the wicked termites that wanted to destroy it. They were giant termites. I’m sure I saved that house. I’m sure that for a few seconds I was Jesus Christ.

  I’m still in the cage. My mouth has been gagged shut. My feet are tied.

  The music leaves me and returns, I can’t do any harm, except to myself. Everything started with a cricket. There was a cricket that first day. There was also a gene. Not in the same way, but in a different way. I’m swallowing everything, all the time. In the dark corner of my room, where only the rats go. I’m rotten. A pig. Filthy. I’m wild.

  The things I’ve had to swallow because of you, my son.

  I look at the newspaper and I can’t read any of it. They must have put me on some high dosage. Because I’ve not even turned forty yet and even close up, I can’t read it. I roll up my sleeves and go play snooker with a street cleaner committed for drinking too much on the clock; the asylum’s answer to national champion Rui Chapéu. But first, a born-again Christian asks us to form a circle and says someone should pray. No one here knows how to fucking pray. They’re all souls with no heaven in sight. I start: Our Father, who art in heaven. At least I know how to pray. The Christian says hallelujah. She takes my hand. I take out my dick and can’t play snooker. I go back to my nine-by-twelve cubicle, where they put me to smile bayoneting my veins. Grab the flesh, stretch the flesh, shove another injection in.

  It all started when I swallowed a cricket in São João da Barra. I was fifteen years old. I was coming or going. I was always coming or going. I only stopped to fly. That’s what it was like when I was fifteen, and how it all started. No woman ever came out of me. Ever. It was always me entering my mother. There she was, pretty as you like, having sex with Dad. And I saw, and it was only 1970. It wasn’t traumatic. I used to go around with my blue dog, my cuddly toy. Just because he was blue doesn’t mean he was gay. Just blue. Anyway, it’s not like I had thoughts on what was feminine or masculine at that age now did I? The truth is I had already started masturbating, and Dad would ask me very delicately to take my hand off my willy. I remember a psychiatrist I went to at that tender age of fifteen. She told me that I was a man because I masturbated, that there was no reason for me to have an identity crisis. I didn’t have an identity crisis, because I spent all my time in our sessions chasing after that woman. She went as far as threatening me, telling my dad that if I carried on trying to grab her, I would have to quit analysis. She said that I was too much for her and complained that I wouldn’t draw or make anything with the playdough. I pretended I was a dolphin, lying on the couch. My dick went hard and I rubbed and rubbed while the dolphin swam inside me.

  Once I turned into a plant for one of our sessions. The woman thought I’d gone catatonic. She got upset. I did the same thing with a girlfriend once and she had the same reaction. I didn’t speak or move. As if I’d swallowed a whale. For an hour, the whale that was inside, was outside, and I was stuck inside an insane asylum. Insane asylums are really nice places, with lots of flowers and trees. I didn’t stay in a five-star place, but it wasn’t a dive either. I saw all sorts of things when Alfonso told me I was going ‌to Paracambi. This is Paracambi2.

  Mostly, they only wanted you to keep your mouth shut all the time, like no one deserved to hear you say anything noble or important.

  What did all those people in white have to do with the fact that I was throwing up blood? They took me to Miguel Couto. They thought I had TB. Miguel Couto was the hospital where they sent dengue patients. There was an outbreak of dengue in the city. There were a lot of hippos lying around. Some turtles on four wheels. I passed through the doors of the asylum. I wanted to get up and run away. But where would I run to? Who was going to believe I had a chip implanted inside me? There were so many people around that if I said it was like a home game fo
r Flamengo at Maracanã, I wouldn’t be exaggerating.

  They stuck tubes in me and started suctioning. I was abducted by aliens.

  I saw a light shining through my five-year-old body and held on tight to my blue dog. I passed out for a few seconds. Then Fronsky was there.

  We’ll be back to get you when you’re eighteen.

  A whole field of stretchers. People walking around with drips in their arms. Tubes coming out of the mouths of real wrecks. It was all Acneton there. They drew blood from my vein. Now I was going to get a chest X-ray. What kind of a problem can a fat guy like me have other than obesity? I should be at a fat camp, not at Miguel Couto with that dengue crisis. A fern sprouted up next to me, like a beanstalk. I climbed the stairs, held up by two doctors as strong and fat as me. There were all these poor people, really poor people: this was Brazil. A total mess. People lying on the floor. People dead on arrival. People dying. A row of bodies with tagged feet. All armed with their charts. And those spotty-faced doctors who don’t know much more about biology than I do, making fun of you.

  Look at fatface!

  What a fatty!

  What a whale!

  I did a triathlon once and I was one of the first to cross the finish line in my category. Now I’m fat and sleeping like I did on the day of the triathlon. Constantly sedated, my veins pumped full of meds. All this for a song to invade me; all this to keep a state of order. We’re the minority, but at least I say what I want.

  The good thing about the blue dog was that he didn’t grow old or die. The deal was that I’d take care of him, so that he wouldn’t grow old. In the year 2000, I’ll be thirty-five. I’ll be so old it’ll barely register. I used to comb his fur. I liked the blue dog’s company more than anyone else’s. And what if a blue dog really existed? It would be fucking amazing to have one. And if it had a puppy, would it be born blue, too? If it could bark and eat, what would a blue dog eat? Blue food? And if it got ill, would it take blue medicine? A lot of medicines are blue, including Haldol. I take Haldol to be under no illusions that I’ll die mad one day, somewhere dirty, without any food. It’s the way every madman ends. A feebleminded woman in her seventies, in a uniform, appears in front of me and kisses me on the mouth. I see pink stars. Elephants carrying Rimbaud across Africa. Verlaine screwing his wife, but thinking of Rimbaud. I’m thinking of Nastassja Kinski and her tiny budding breasts. I’m on the dark side and can barely move, just enough to masturbate really slowly. I come and my hand goes all white, covered by the semen. My hand turns into a white glove. I wake up at five in the morning with a nurse giving me the rough edge of his tongue. I don’t sleep well. I don’t wake up well. I don’t know which of the nightmares is worse: waking or sleeping. I come out of the cage. I’ve been in the cage for a long time. When will they take me out and let me stay with the others? I join the queue for breakfast. It’s watered-down coffee and a piece of bread with a single swipe of butter. I pay to be in this place, but that only covers the knife’s one-way journey. Today I woke up wanting to say beautiful things. I took advantage of the little time they left me alone outside and picked a flower in the garden. I took the flower to my little room. The nurse made a fuss about the flower. He gave me the rough edge of his tongue again.