Final del Juego

Julio Cortázar
Final del Juego (1956)

Final del Juego foi editado pela primeira vez na Cidade do México em 1956, como uma colecção de nove contos. A segunda edição data de 1964, em Buenos Aires, com um acréscimo de outros nove contos, apresentando a obra na sua forma definitiva. São textos curtos, alguns mesmo muito curtos, dos quais se desprende uma estranheza e uma inquietação algo inesperadas. O excerto escolhido pertence a "La Puerta Condenada", um dos textos que já fazia parte da edição original.

Por la mañana Petrone lo pensó un rato mientras tomaba el desayuno y fumaba un cigarrillo. Dormir mal no le convenía para su trabajo del día. Dos veces se había despertado en plena noche, y las dos veces a causa del llanto. La segunda vez fue peor, porque a más del llanto se oía la voz de la mujer que trataba de calmar al niño. La voz era muy baja pero tenía un tono ansioso que le daba una calidad teatral, un susurro que atravesaba la puerta con tanta fuerza como si hablara a gritos. El niño cedía por momentos al arrullo, a las instancias; después volvía a empezar con un leve quejido entrecortado, una inconsolable congoja. Y de nuevo la mujer murmuraba palabras incomprensibles, el encantamiento de la madre para acallar al hijo atormentado por su cuerpo o su alma, por estar vivo o amenazado de muerte.
«Todo es muy bonito, pero el gerente me macaneó» pensaba Petrone al salir de su cuarto. Lo fastidiaba la mentira y no lo disimuló. El gerente se quedó mirándolo.
—¿Un chico? Usted se habrá confundido. No hay chicos pequeños en este piso. Al lado de su pieza vive una señora sola, creo que ya se lo dije.
Petrone vaciló antes de hablar. O el otro mentía estúpidamente, o la acústica del hotel le jugaba una mala pasada. El gerente lo estaba mirando un poco de soslayo, como si a su vez lo irritara la protesta. «A lo mejor me cree tímido y que ando buscando un pretexto para mandarme mudar», pensó. Era difícil, vagamente absurdo insistir frente a una negativa tan rotunda. Se encogió de hombros y pidió el diario.
—Habré soñado —dijo, molesto por tener que decir eso, o cualquier otra cosa.

Li anteriormente:
Bestiario (1951)

The Lost City of Z

David Grann
The Lost City of Z (2009)

Este livro, editado em português sob o título A Cidade Perdida de Z, é, de certa forma, a biografia de Percy Harrison Fawcett, um incansável explorador da Amazónia, onde acabou por desaparecer em circunstâncias misteriosas, em 1925, faz agora 100 anos. Também refere outras explorações na mesma área geográfica, como a anterior expedição de Fawcett em 1921, a brasileira liderada por James Lynch em 1996, a que o próprio David Grann efectuou para a documentação desta obra, ou a expedição de salvamento de 1928, por George Miller Dyott, entre várias outras, ao longo dos anos, à medida que os contos e os boatos acerca de Fawcett inflamavam a imaginação dos que procuravam seguir nas suas pegadas.
Fawcett, que não era propriamente um excêntrico, antes um homem das ciências, geógrafo e arqueólogo, acreditava existir algures no Amazonas os restos de uma fabulosa civilização, que designava como "Z", conseguindo o financiamento de sociedades geográficas para o cumprimento da exploração. Tinha chegado à conclusão que essa antiga cultura ainda existia e a sua descoberta alteraria a visão que então existia sobre as Américas, um optimismo que encontrava eco nos jornais da época. A sua experiência levava-o a preferir pequenos grupos e, em 1925, fez-se acompanhar do filho, com 21 anos, e um amigo deste, que lhe mereciam a maior confiança apesar de nunca terem participado em quaisquer explorações. O desaparecimento, na região do rio Xingu no Mato Grosso, deveu-se provavelmente à morte por índios hostis, apesar de Fawcett já ter passado incólume por esse tipo de encontros.
As fabulosas cidades, descritas desde o séc. XVI, não passavam de miragens. Brian Fawcett, outro filho do explorador, ao sobrevoar a zona, descreveu como umas formações rochosas em erosão, ao longe, pareciam uma cidade com torres, pirâmides e estradas. No entanto, a convicção de Percy Harrison Fawcett não era de todo descabida. A descoberta de áreas de "terra preta", artificialmente criadas, bem como centenas de grandes geoglifos por toda a Amazonia, divulgados por arqueólogos como Michael Heckenberger, e a confirmação de vestígios de assentamentos urbanos, com o recurso a novas técnicas de mapeamento aéreo, por Heiko Purer, obrigam a reconsiderar a história da América pré-colombiana.

The men were supposed to conserve their rations, but most broke down and consumed them quickly. By the ninth day of marching, the expedition had run out of food. It was now that Fawcett discovered what explorers since Orellana had learned and what would become the basis of the scientific theory of a counterfeit paradise: in the world’s thickest jungle, it was hard to find a morsel to eat.
Of all the Amazon’s tricks, this was perhaps the most diabolical. As Fawcett put it, “Starvation sounds almost unbelievable in forest country, and yet it is only too likely to happen.” Scrounging for food, Fawcett and his men could make out only buttressed tree trunks and cascades of vines. Chemical-laced fungi and billions of termites and ants had stripped bare much of the jungle floor. Fawcett had been taught to scavenge for dead animals, but there were none to be found: every corpse was instantly recycled back into the living. Trees drained even more nutrients from a soil already leached by rain and floods. Meanwhile, vines and trees stampeded over each other as they strove to reach the canopy, to absorb a ray of light. One kind of liana called the matador, or killer, seemed to crystallize this competition: it wrapped itself around a tree, as if offering a tender embrace, then began to strangle it, stealing both its life and its place amid the forest.
Although this death struggle for the light above created a permanent midnight below, few mammals roamed the jungle floor, where other creatures could attack them. Even those animals that Fawcett and his party should have been able to see remained invisible to their untutored eyes. Bats hid in tents of leaves. Armadillos burrowed in the ground. Moths looked like bark. Caimans became logs. One kind of caterpillar had a more frightening deception: it transformed its body into the shape of a deadly pit viper, with an enlarged, swaying triangular head and big gleaming eyes. As the writer Candice Millard explained in The River of Doubt, “The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”
On this battlefield, Fawcett and his men found themselves outmatched. For days, Fawcett, a world-class hunter, scoured the land with his party, only to turn up a handful of nuts and palm leaves. The men tried fishing, which they were sure, given how many piranhas and eels and dolphins were in other Amazonian rivers, would provide sustenance, but to the explorers’ amazement they could not catch a single fish. Fawcett speculated that something had polluted the waters, and indeed some trees and plants produce tannic acids that poison rivers in the Amazon, creating what the biologists Adrian Forsyth and Kenneth Miyata have called “the aquatic equivalents of desert.”
[...]
Another Indian, who was younger, appeared and said that he would show us the way. We got back in the car and drove down an overgrown path, the branches clapping against the windshield. When we couldn’t drive any farther, our guide hopped out, and we followed him through the forest as he slashed at the creepers and vines with a machete. Several times he paused, studied the tops of the trees, and took a few paces east or west. Finally, he stopped.
We looked around—there was nothing but a cocoon of trees. “Where’s Rio Novo?” Paolo asked.
Our guide lifted his machete over his head and slammed it into the ground. It hit something hard. “Right here,” he said.
We looked down and, to our disbelief, saw a row of cracked bricks.
“This is where the entrance to the manor used to be,” the guide said, adding, “It was very big.”
We began to fan out in the forest, as rain started to fall again, looking for signs of the great Galvão farm.
“Over here!” Paolo cried. He was a hundred feet away, standing by a crumbling brick wall nestled in vines. The farm had been consumed by jungle in just a few decades, and I wondered how actual ancient ruins could possibly survive in such a hostile environment. For the first time, I had some sense of how it might be possible for the remnants of a civilization simply to disappear.