Have you ever finished something, only to begin it all over again? Have you ever stared death in the face, only to realize it was actually life? Follow our protean Hero's epic, but no less comical, Adventure of being human to the ends of the earth in Book VI of the BEGINNER'S LUKE Series in whose conclusion nothing is really concluded--which is precisely the point.
(from Book VI, Morphametosis)
Life as an imaginary author named Sol Luckman carried on much the same as when I was an imaginary character named Luke Soloman—with a handful of noteworthy exceptions. First, as a native of South America, I developed an instinctual craving for tapioca. Second, I noticed my Portuguese sounded more clipped, more “Spanish,” an equatorial
sotaque with subtle Amazonian intonations. Third, I remarked my posture improved, that I tended to hold myself more erect as my overall bearing became more—for lack of a better word—
noble. Fourth and finally, I began to pick up on a marked difference in people’s attitudes toward me.
No longer “white,” I came to realize I wasn’t just dispossessed in the first impressions of the ruling class, wasn’t just another human being temporarily out of luck maybe but a fellow
Homo sapiens all the same. I was another species entirely, a distant genetic cousin, one measurably lower on the evolutionary ladder—an inequality not even money, which I now had enough of to last me a while, could erase.
But fortunately,
dinheiro did have a way of opening closed doors. I was able to move into a furnished penthouse (third-floor) apartment in a quaint little building in Gávea with picturesque views of the jungle out my bedroom and study windows and a landlord willing to overlook the fact I was indigenous (as opposed to indigent)—for three months’ rent in advance plus my security deposit.
And so it was with Luke Soloman steadily becoming a figment of the past that I, Sol Luckman, a figment of the present, took up independent residence for the first time. Like any pseudonym worth his salt, I focused my new existence on writing. I bought a used laptop with a printer and picked up where I’d left off when
distrações got the best of me: Chapter Three of Book IV, “Le Dépanneur,” for now writing as Sol writing about Luke, though knowing I’d eventually be writing as Sol writing about Sol, even though I’d still be author and protagonist of the
Beginner’s Luke Series ...
It may sound confusing, but in reality it was childishly simple: as author of my authorial self, I was merely drawing a circle.
•
If I could have designed my ideal workspace, it would have been my study. The natural lighting, the white stucco walls, the gentle whirring of the ceiling fan, the antique roller chair, the little brazil-wood desk facing the large French window opening outward onto the
mata from where I could peer out over my laptop at diminutive furry-faced monkeys called
micos playing, where for a refresher I could drift away from the digitized screen and admire the rolling and frothing in swell after swell of dense tropical vegetation complete with enormous humanoid sunflowers bowing and swaying. I often fancied myself a latter-day Hemingway scribbling stories on safari, and was always a little
dépaysé emerging from my remote African bungalow into the chic hustle and bustle of Rio.
I soon began to entertain hopes of a more sustained, more focused life in letters. Not counting
Carnaval week and, later, several days when I was ill, I entered a period of unparalleled productivity that lasted through April during which I finished Book IV, capping it off with “The Last Métro,” and forged ahead into Book V,
The Accidental Gringo—transitioning Luke from France to Brazil, staging his farce in emigration, then landing him in the Sasquema household with its multiple layers of intrigue. Initially, I wasn’t sure how to extract him from such a fix. But I had faith if I just kept writing, I’d figure out a way to construct an appropriate dénouement.
Speaking of the Sasquema household, Rita found me before January was out, showing up early one morning as I was slicing a pineapple for breakfast, clutching a tattered suitcase in one bony hand and the boom-box I’d given her for Christmas in the other.
“
Meu filho, you’ve changed!” she said tearfully as we embraced.
“How do I look?”
“Better.”
“Your timing, Rita, if not your tact, is
impecavel.
Por favor, won’t you join me for breakfast?”
“I couldn’t possibly do that, Senhor Luckman.”
“Por favor, call me Sol.”
“I couldn’t possibly do that, Sol.”
I finally prevailed on her to be my guest, which didn’t stop her from trying to wait on me hand and foot. But I’d already made up my mind Rita’s indentured servant days were over. She was getting frail and, though she never complained, you could tell she had a bad back by the way she held her hand over her hip as if her sacrum would fold like an accordion otherwise.
After much lobbying over the course of several days, I succeeded in persuading her to move out of the little
dependência (where she’d already set up her shrine to Juscelino, which stayed put) into the spare bedroom. I even offered to hire a maid, a maid for the maid, but that was where Rita drew the line. I think I actually hurt her pride.
“This old bird can still pull her weight, Senhor Luckman.”
“
Por favor, call me Sol.”
“This old bird can still pull her weight, Sol.”
In the end we settled on a compromise: I would do the bulk of the shopping and help her clean the apartment every other week, and she would do the cooking, washing and laundry. “But no excessive ironing,” I insisted. “I don’t need my underwear or socks ironed,
entendeu?”
“
Entendi, Senhor Luckman.”
“
Por favor, Rita, call me Sol.”
“
Entendi, Sol.”
•
Not counting the inherent debauchery of
Carnaval week with its institutionalized strategies for decadence, which I must say I enjoyed firsthand (even though in more sober moments I agree with those who contend
Carnaval is just a big smokescreen designed to hide Brazil’s misery behind a drunken, orgiastic haze of “
alegria”)—I say, the mayhem of
Carnaval aside, while making major strides on my novel I also came to feel more “balanced” as Sol Luckman than I ever had as Luke Soloman.
I purchased a membership to the Clube do Flamengo with its complex of outdoor Olympic pools and started exercising again, stroking back and forth under the crisp azure sky, emerging from the meditative waters to behold the
Cristo Redentor atop Corcovado above the
amendoeiras, arms outstretched poised for a spectacular high dive, then reclining exhausted and remade all chiseled and tan on the bleachers in the sunshine admiring the occasional toffee-colored
Brasileira dripping wet fresh from her own swim.
When I didn’t feel like swimming, I went running around Lagoa, nearly ten kilometers in a circle door-to-door from my building over the course of which I often traveled back in my mind’s eye to Pulpit Hill, to all the times I, or rather Luke, went running from himself that fall when he was just beginning to connect with his lonely calling, crunching the dry leaves as he zipped around the Gargoyle Castle Loop in the chill fall afternoons ...
But filled with bittersweet nostalgia, delicious
saudade as such memories were, I liked it better when it rained and washed away Luke’s past, when I, Sol, became temporarily immersed in my own vibrant present—braving the lightning, cool rain feathering down on my hot skin, running with mounting excitement through an exotic landscape peopled with thousands of strangers I longed to befriend.
Rain, even the facsimile thereof, always had that kind of energizing effect on me. I could be sitting on my bed reading, for instance, as a hard rain came pelting down outside on the
mata, and suddenly, inexplicably, I’d feel breathtakingly
alive. Or I could be woken up in the middle of the night by the rain and experience a massive adrenaline rush of that same wild, lyrical, hedonistic, nose-following energy characteristic of my imaginary life from the outset—only to realize it wasn’t rain but merely the sound of wind in the palms or newspapers blowing across someone’s tile balcony ... It never ceased to amaze me how many things can sound for all the world just like rain.
But back to balance. My newfound sense of equilibrium had something to do with my unfolding relationship with time. Before, as Luke, it had always seemed there was never enough time. Time was a sore spot with me, I was always running out of it.
But now, as Sol—I guess this was another difference between us—I seemed to have an abundance of time, a plethora, enough to do all the things I wanted and more: sleep late, eat well, do my chores, write, exercise, take walks, pay strict attention to ritual by slipping on my Speedo and heading to the beach. I usually grabbed a book and walked down to Posto 9 in Ipanema, a beach that sizzled with enough well-oiled flesh to fulfill even the hungriest carnivore.
Not that I was feeling particularly carnivorous. I typically had more pressing things than chasing tail on my mind. Still, lounging on the soft sand under the hot sun, the world comfortably spinning, I occasionally put down my book and spent the afternoon daydreaming sex—pushed over the edge of desire by a magnificent set of
seios, one fine brown
bunda too many. I always wished I could bottle the essence of a few of those beauties to take back home and enjoy at my leisure, without all the trouble and interruption of having a real woman in the house.
Most evenings I went out for a nightcap, sometimes in my neighborhood to a placed called the Skipper, sometimes walking back down to Ipanema or even occasionally as far as Copacabana before settling in somewhere and unwinding over a few
chopps. Usually, I kept to myself. But every now and then, I’d strike up a conversation with someone. It was easy to tell when a Carioca was making moves on you. The way her words cut simultaneously in both directions, the way her generalizations suggested the particular Moment.
I’m not being vain—just honest. You’d be amazed how many women are tired of the standard macho fare and will practically throw themselves at someone with a little sensitivity. I rarely responded in kind to such advances, but I did come up with many interesting observations on my nights out. I often noticed, for example, how the average Brazilian man was constantly playing with his crotch in public. Did he mean to call attention to it, I wondered, or was he reaching for it like a wallet he feared had been stolen?
I always looked forward to the walk back along the beach, illuminated at intervals by floodlights, making the ocean appear green and unfathomable, liquid emerald. In many ways this was the best part of my day, better even than the morning spent writing, the part where I reconnected with the other half of myself, the half born not of words but of motion.
Even at midnight the beach was packed—a sensory overload of cars, taxis, pedestrians, joggers, bikers, Rollerbladers, tourists, whores, pimps, vendors, dealers, soccer jocks and, of course, your occasional wayward mariner. Feasting on the sights, sounds and smells, catching glimpses of the
Redentor floating on a magic carpet of underlit clouds high overhead, listening to snippets of distant pagode as the waves crashed close by, enjoying the mingled scents of
caramelo,
cigarro and
cerveja, I plugged back into the part of me that was and would always be a wanderer, a drifter, a stranger in a strange land, a
flâneur strolling through life’s crowded cities.
“
Meu coração vagabundo ...” Caetano Veloso’s lyrics often found their way into my thoughts during those pleasantly buzzed strolls. I did have a vagabondish heart, a heart filled with wanderlust—and also just plain lust. My signature desire for Experience, to be a pilgrim on the Experience Trail, to follow the twisted, mapless, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet path my soul had called me to, had never been greater. Becoming Sol had revived my passionate inner explorer, reawoken the Bunyanesque traveler in me, injected my spirit again with dreams both wet and dry.
Even after so many changes and challenges, I still longed for the Adventure, I still yearned to play in the Magic. That was the romantic in me. I was twenty-seven and it was almost too easy to get caught up in romance with oneself in Rio.
There were times, hardly rare, when it seemed I’d never grow old, never tire, never die. And though romance be illusory, a construct that has nothing to do with reality per se, I vowed to maintain it alive and well in me, vowed to preserve that one fragment of wholeness even as wholeness, in a world falling apart at the seams, was itself fragmented. This was my Keatsian project for my new incarnation, my own Negative Capability. Amid the slings and arrows of the steady decline of Western “civilization,” I would insist on dreaming myself whole until, like Adam, I awoke to find my dream come true.
•
But to be fair, my dreams (sometimes cleverly disguised as nightmares) had always had a way of coming true—mostly because I was stubborn enough to keep dreaming, but at least in part because the universe was generally willing to lend a hand. Thus it was that yet another dream of mine came true when I least expected it.
Starting around
Carnaval, I began running into this one particular fellow on a regular basis. In most ways he was utterly nondescript—so nondescript, in fact, he was altogether remarkable.
He was probably, I don’t know, in his forties, though he could have been decades older or decades younger. His build was somewhere between average and—depending on the lighting—slightly stout or somewhat slight. His hair wasn’t especially short or long. His facial features were both highly distinctive and belonging to no one. In fact, he didn’t seem to possess the defining characteristics of any race and stood out in my mind as a sort of unique
gray.
There was something of the chameleon in his nature with which I identified when I thought about it—which I didn’t until I started encountering him
everywhere: dancing in the Sambódromo during one of
Carnaval’s big desfiles when he handed me a handkerchief dipped in a mild hallucinogen for sniffing called
lança perfume ... coming to my senses on the beach in Leme the following sunrise beside a buxom mulatta to find him, whoever he was, asleep beside another mulatta nearby ... hanging out drinking a chilled
coco recharging my dead batteries in preparation for another evening of fun that Fat Tuesday at a
barraca in Arpoador when life had temporarily grown calm again like a wave that had crashed and fantailed out across the sand ... at the appetizer table during a ritzy post-
Carnaval birthday party in Botafogo I’d been invited to by a stranger when I spent the evening chatting with a female veterinarian with an ugly face but a killer body, about dogs ... dining alone a couple weeks later on a Candomblé night (when Rita didn’t cook) at my favorite restaurant, Bozo, in Leblon, when I discovered him (also by himself) seated at an adjacent table having exactly the same meal I was having: baked
badejo,
quiabo casserole and ice-cold
chopp.
The last time I ran into him, and the only time we ever actually spoke, was at a strip joint in my old stomping ground, Avenida Prado Júnior in Copacabana. This was in late April a good two months after
Carnaval. That very day I’d completed the final chapter of Book V, “The Vendetta,” and begun this the first chapter of Book VI, tentatively entitled
Morphametosis.
There was some kind of kinky black-leather orgy thing happening onstage that had me gripped with a morbid fascination. All of a sudden, this same nondescript guy shows up, sits down at my table grinning like he could be anybody and we could be any old friends, and introduces himself as none other than the author-protagonist, the eponymous Ralfo, of my all-time favorite novel,
As Confissões de Ralfo.
“Or if you like, ‘Sol,’ you can call me Sérgio.”
“Sérgio? As in
Sant’Anna?”
“As in.”
“Are you for
real?” I blurted out, somewhere between incredulous and star-struck like a teenage boy whose life revolves around basketball watching Michael Jordan casually stroll through the door.
“No. That’s precisely the point.”
I admit it was strange—but then what about my imaginary life isn’t strange? Strange and filled with impossible Magic, with absurdly profound stories taking place in the written world true as only fiction can be.
“You’re, like, my
hero!” I gushed.
“No, Sol, you’re, like,
mine.”
This was almost too much. My hero was actually calling me
his hero. For an aspiring writer, it was like having Jack Kerouac come up and awkwardly beg for your autograph. I pinched myself to verify it was really happening. It wasn’t, of course, but its impact on me was no less validating.
“Or should I call you Luke?”
“It doesn’t matter. Call me whatever you like. It’s all the same.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Yes, I imagine you do.”
“I just wanted to give you my personal
parabéns on your masterpiece-in-progress before you move on.”
“Before I—move on?”
“As you’re going to be doing any day now.”
“I see.”
“And please forgive me for kibitzing in the middle of your narrative, but I especially enjoyed ‘
Doutor Soloman Enters Brazil.’ I was quite flattered, in fact. It was so obviously a takeoff of that chapter in my novel where Ralfo is interrogated by the Goddamn City police. No one has ever paid me homage like that.”
“Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.”
“Well said.”
“Really, when it comes right down to it, there are only copies.”
“Indeed.”
We ordered the first of many rounds of
coqueteis and spent the rest of the evening talking literature, or rather lamenting the sorry state of it, commiserating the way realism had bedded down with capitalism and pseudo-science to relegate the likes of fictitious entities such as ourselves to the status (or lack thereof) of marginal figures, curiosities at best.
“But the times are changing, Sol. Mark my words. The day will soon come when people wake up to the fact that the only true reality lies in the imagination.”
“I sure hope you’re right.”
“I am. Trust me.”
We were both bombed when, hours later, we parted with a hug and a fraternal “
Boa sorte” on the sidewalk. It must have been four in the morning. I watched him wobble into a taxi headed for his home in Laranjeiras, then turned and strolled up Prado Júnior, hanging a right onto Nossa Senhora de Copacabana with the heat lightning flickering silently in the reddish sky in a way that struck me as—somehow—already a poignant reminder of itself, a mnemonic device with which someday to recall my time in Rio.
No, it didn’t make sense—but the feeling things were about to change was almost palpable. I imagined I could hear the Voice of the Road calling my name as I crossed a strangely deserted Avenida Atlântica and, removing my shoes, walked close along the empty shoreline contemplating, in the wake of my tête-à-tête with Sérgio/Ralfo, my own dual career as a writer and fictional human being.
I realized there was actually precious little that separated the two, that as a human being I was learning to be a writer, and as a writer I was learning to be a human being ... And then it occurred to me, approaching Ponta de Arpoador, I’d spent my entire imaginary life learning how to take a walk.
This is a metaphor, of course. The beauty of a metaphor, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, is it doesn’t have to be real to ring true. When I say I’d spent my whole life learning how to take a walk, I’m aiming at something a little larger than putting the leash on Fido and taking him out for his daily spin. I really mean
I’d been learning how to take a walk. I still wasn’t very good at it. As Luke I’d become such an expert at
doing I’d never truly learned how to go about
being.
Now, as Sol, I was working on—or playing at—just being. The next morning, undoubtedly, I would return to doing—but when I did, I hoped I wouldn’t forget how to be, hoped I might find a way to marry the doing with the being, transcend dialectics, combine Art and Life in the singular act of
existing.
I lit a cigarette, a clove I happened to have in my pocket, and walked in the water smoking it, thinking how I was indeed extremely happy with this person I’d become, thinking how if I died right then and there, if thieves murdered me in cold blood and my body bobbed trailing red ink out to sea, it had been a terrific imaginary life. Call me crazy, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing.
A waning gibbous was sailing in and out of sparse clouds, a swollen ruby banana of a moon like a strobe in the heat lightning radiating the limitless possibilities of the Moment, a coagulated spheroid like a living cell under a microscope teeming with enzymes, ribosomes and DNA hovering above the dark brooding ocean. Every time I gazed up at it, my own blood coursed faster through my veins, as if I’d just stuck my finger into the socket of the world, into the Magic of it all. Electric Luke. Rather: electric Sol.
I seemed to have lost none of my receptive powers, not even an inch off the old internal antennae that had so many times before put me in contact with the Adventure, the sparkling effervescent stuff of life itself: in a word, in my dear dead friend Malcolm’s word, with It.
If anything, It now played a larger role than It ever had—if only because I’d allowed myself to experience It’s underside, the dark subterranean complement to the shiny happy semisphere above. Again, to borrow a Malcolmism, I’d permitted myself to
C the Big Picture. For better or for worse, for better
and for worse, I’d been C-ing the Big Picture through a combination of self-motivated eye-opening and seemingly random events spawned by chaos itself that had slapped me into consciousness like a newborn receiving his first cruel whack across the bottom.
Of course, the biggest slap had been Malcolm himself. No whimpers there—he’d gone out with a bang. I was just glad I could remember him now without so much pain, though every now and then I got to thinking, for one reason or another, he’d never died, that it was getting time I should visit him again in the Funhouse ... Then all of a sudden it was as if he’d fallen off that ledge only yesterday ... Then I realized he actually lived on in me, that I’d not only internalized but
externalized him, emulating not only his attitudes but his very person.
And what would Malcolm have done on such a glorious night but precisely what I did? What would he have done, feeling It enter him like one of Zeus’s thunderbolts, suddenly feeling at one with It, feeling so far out there, so in the middle of nowhere, yet at the same time so at the center of It all, so
now here—I say, what would Malcolm have done but spontaneously strip off his clothes, streak naked across the cool night sand, and jump like a madman into the unseen ocean?
Resurfacing, I stood lit up like a Christmas tree in the middle of the surging waves, gazing up at that miracle of a moon, vowing to take some of It with me, inside, so I could nibble on It whenever I was especially in need of an upper, whenever I found myself drowning like Davie Jones in the seaweed of monotony and tedium.
Inspired, I breathed in the Moment and was breathed by it, by It,
Tonight, tonight on my lips, a wayward mariner on the wave-washed prow of my little life’s ship navigating the cosmos ... Feeling something like sandpaper brush against my thigh, I instinctively reached down and fished up a huge curling starfish out of the sea.
When I finally struggled up onto the beach with my starfish, I discovered the current had taken me down a ways from where I’d abandoned my clothes. I was standing in my birthday suit beside the hump of a makeshift sand altar to Iemanjá—flowers, shells, extinguished candles and burnt incense precisely arranged on a manmade dune. Having no other offering, there with the moon flickering down showering the scene with mystical dust, I knelt beside the altar and, with a simple prayer of thanks, placed the starfish exactly in the middle.
•
The following afternoon, having slept late and written little, I ventured down to Posto 9. While I was there, a giant stingray came swimming along close to shore, an enormous silent shadow gliding by just beneath the water’s surface, and everybody stood up to watch.
At first people thought it was a shark or maybe a whale. But then up and down the beach you could hear the shouting: “
Raia! Raia!” All the surfers and
favela kids went crazy and started swimming after it and throwing empty coconuts at it.
But I just stood there at the crossroads of the Moment, conscious It was about to propel me back into motion and onto the road again—conscious that the dark figure wasn’t a shark or a whale or really even, truth be known, a stingray. It was Iemanjá showing up to wish her protégé a
boa viagem. And
até logo.
Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
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July 2009 
Sol
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