*An anarcho-feminist, southern hemisphere, magical story of one woman, a Protectoress and the art of changing consciousness at will*

[Ceri Buck]

*An anarcho-feminist, southern hemisphere, magical story of one woman, a Protectoress and the art of changing consciousness at will*

An Indigenous Some

The pavement is cooling after the blaze of the afternoon. 10 centavo pieces become part of tarmac, dropped, left to reel down the street before being stamped by a passerby into the scorch-softened street. It’s Friday twilight, Rio de Janeiro, a few years into the new millennium, a bar in the centre, between Praca XV and the boats heading off for Niteroi, in the streets near where the white-tiled, home of Friday night samba, Mercado das flores used to be, not far from Teatro Rival. The grime of the avenidas and ruas becoming wetter as beer is spilled in increasing quantities.

There is a crowd of people around a table, all interested in the man with blue eyes on the right hand side of the table. He dominates the conversation, the jokes, the pull of attention, managing to drive each thread, manipulating it over and around subjects he has the vocabulary for. A talented talker, he thrives on the silence of others. He is unconcerned about the ethics of his prolixity, what it might mean, what it might cause in his listeners. He is popular, charming, a role model for something. All the sitters at the table are dark-skinned, modestly but smartly dressed. The women expose body parts, mango-shoulder-curves, strong thighs, flashes of stomachs. Beautiful brown skin which the men by their side hold on to, fed by the heat of blood pulsing warmth. The men place the fruit of their entrance into the order of commerce by placing any item of value they possess onto the table. Those who have cell phones place them on the table. Those who have cars, place keys attached to heavy keyrings, bulking up the metal they carry as a reminder of the heap of steel they laboured hard to achieve. These people are lower level administrators, clerks, plumbers, van drivers, shop workers. One man is due to take over the running of his father’s construction business, one man never discloses his occupation, one is studying law and one woman, wearing white, is studying pedagogy. They all live in Tijuca, Meier, Grajaú, in the hinterland beyond the wealthy zona sul beach neighbourhoods. Their neighbourhoods mark the entrance to the North Zone sprawl. They work in the centre; Avenida Presidente Vargas, Avenida Rio Branco, Avenida Presidente Wilson, Senador Dantas – roads with the names of men who have left their mark on the past centuries in Brazil. Military personnel, overseas presidents, embassadors, bureaucrats, dictators who force you to repeat their name on a daily basis, when indicating location, or asking for directions. More beer is ordered and the woman studying pedagogy is starting to feel bloated as her cup is filled one more time. She wasn’t excited about coming out tonight, she applied her make-up as if in a dream. Although young, her body was stiff, not soft, the rigidity of the hardworking, not the arrogant ease of the comfortably-off or the playfulness of the free. She could have stayed at home but could think of no excuse big enough to satisfy herself. Tiredness, migraine. Boredom was the most fitting. I’m too bored to come out. I’m too bored to find a nocturnal diversion that will animate me. The woman who studied pedagogy didn’t dislike the people she was sitting with but she found intensely disagreeable the resemblances of the dynamics of the table with the world she groped in the dark to change. She detested the patterns of conversation that were already fixed. Closed as maps. It itched away in various parts of her skin, the fact that men lead conversations and women respond. The lack of willingness to hold a conversation following the lead of the woman, always jumping in the driver’s seat, without sensing the relational permutations that were possible in that moment. Men who had no skill in observing when a conversational partner was needing a hook to hang some words on, or a silence to fill. She has no man-animal by her side. She is alone, masked, surrounded by a crowd. An indigenous some: River of January: On the cusp of a potent confusion of power.

And here I come as the dusk gathers, sprightly and silent, perfumed by the jasmine trees of the hill I have walked from, body warm and sticky to the touch as if time had been spent pressed up against another body. I want to quench my thirst with a beer or two and I rest at the counter looking out onto the tables on the pavement and the drinkers who are already sitting there. I hear laughter but it doesn’t come from the belly where beer has taken up residence. I see polite circles of young people. Dressed in their best but not using the potential of the bodies they have so meticulously, but unlovingly prepared. Some bodies are more unkempt, less pampered but these are tired after the working day and their shiny, sweaty bodies lack freedom and largesse of movement. The tiny eruptions of sweat on my skin excite me as I am aware of every movement my body, in this city, asks of me, stretching and contracting in each movement I make - a necessary pulling to avoid sloth & atrophy in the provocation of death that is night. I see women whose men-animals paw them in their seats as if afraid they would scarper off into the night given half the chance, women who add details and colour to the conversation of their men but refuse to strike up their own, without the patience to breathe contours of life into ideas and sensations and happenings. They are silent and waiting to add. I am silent and observing the scene.

I see a dark-haired woman in white, alone, without a man holding her in her seat. She looks bored and tense, shoulders slightly hunched, moving every minute in her seat as if subject to an incredibly uncomfortable conversation, twitching, a bird hopping around in the nest of air two centimetres around her body; but her face, on the surface, is blank, there is no emotion, there is no rage. Yet her twitches suggest the fire of anxiety of the unfulfilled. She spots me looking at her and returns my gaze, like a fox. I’m thinking of her accelerated breathing, soft mounds of screaming, velvet green tablecloths used for playing cards or lovemaking, discarded sweet wrappers assembled to reveal their beauty. I’m thinking of a conversation with her that expands like a tongue-teased dot, booming in grace. Her accelerated breathing as she talks excitedly. Tongue, one tongue, then another, then another. Playful, observant, aware, patient, mischievous, a conversation in which there is no male or female, just gentle breezes of words and touches and of dialogue in the air, unchained from all neurosis of power, hierarchy, time, monogamy, the patterns of familial converse, the domination of one, the timid silence of the other. She gazes back at me, I know she sees me, sees her power, sees our power.

Someone on her table gets up and blocks her view of me. A joke is being told. She listens in. I leave the beer that has warmed up in the glass, pay up and leave to move to a bar with better music, or just to prowl the streets. I do not yet know my destination. With the eyes I have grown in the back of my head, I see her table once more, the joke is over. My woman is talking to the others on the table. Soon I hear them laughing.