O Estrangeiro

The painter Paul Gauguin loved the light in Guanabara Bay
The composer Cole Porter adored the lights in her night
Guanabara Bay
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss detested Guanabara Bay
It seemed toothless to him
And had I known her less, would I have loved her more?
I'm blind from seeing her so much, from having her as a star
What is a beautiful thing?

Love is blind
Ray Charles is blind
Stevie Wonder is blind
And the albino Hermeto doesn't see very well

A whale, a soap opera, a lute, a train?
A macaw?
But Guanabara was both beautiful and toothless
Where the rare nightmare happened, happens, will happen
That I begin to build always seeking the beautiful and the bitter
I didn't dream: Botafogo beach
Was a treadmill of white sand and diesel oil
Under my sneakers
And Sugarloaf as unobvious as possible
In front of me
A Sugarloaf with unsuspected edges
In the rough orange light against the almost no light almost not purple
Of the white sands and foams
Which was all that was then of dawn

Behind me are an old man with hair in his nostrils
And a still teenage and very beautiful girl
I don't look back but I know everything
Blind in reverse, as in dreams, I see what I desire
But I don't want to see the old man's black suit
Nor the almost not purple teeth of the girl
(Think Seurat and think impressionist
This thing of light on white teeth and wave
But don't think surrealist, that's another wave)

And I hear the voices
Both tell me
In a double sound
As if sampled on a Synclavier

The time has come for someone's reeducation
Of the Father of the Son of the Holy Spirit amen
The right thing is for the crazy to have electroshock therapy
The right thing is to know that the right thing is right
The white adult male always in charge
And the rest is the rest, sex is the cut, sex
Recognize the necessary value of the hypocritical act
Cross out the Indians, expect nothing from the blacks
And I, less foreign in the place than at the moment
I walk more alone against the wind
And I understand the core of what they're saying
That guy and that girl

It's a masquerade
Simple shout
The king is naked
But I wake up because everything falls silent in the face of the fact that the king is more beautiful naked

And I go and love the blue, the purple, and the yellow
And between my going and the Sun's, a hoop, a link
Some may like a soft Brazilian singer
But I've given up all attempts at perfection