Água Viva

An unnamed narrator, a painter who has turned to writing, addresses a sustained monologue to an unnamed former lover. The work has no conventional plot, characters, or story arc. Instead, it unfolds as a continuous stream of meditation, sensation, and imagery, moving through themes of time, art, identity, birth, death, nature, and the divine. The narrator's only stated aim is to capture each fleeting "instant-now" before it vanishes.

The monologue opens with an ecstatic declaration of happiness, a "hallelujah" that merges with pain and joy. The narrator announces her desire to seize what she calls the fourth dimension of each passing instant, insisting that the present is forbidden by its very nature because it perpetually slips into the past. She identifies love as the only experience capable of capturing the unknown moment. She explains why she has shifted from painting to writing: her "true word" has never been touched, and she now feels the need for language.

She describes a recently finished canvas of intersecting curves in fine black lines and connects her visual art to the act of writing, which she characterizes as rough and disorderly. She listens to music by resting her hand on a record player and feeling vibrations pass through her body, seeking the vibrating substratum of reality. This physical method of hearing becomes a metaphor for what she wants her prose to achieve: not meaning conveyed through narrative, but vibration transmitted through syllables. She declares: "This isn't a book because this isn't how anyone writes" (6), framing the work as something beyond conventional literary form.

She meditates on silence and disharmony, calling her unbalanced words the wealth of her silence. She expresses fear of leaving logic behind but recognizes that instinct demands it: "I deal in raw materials. I'm after whatever is lurking beyond thought" (7). She pins down what she calls instants of metamorphosis, finding a terrible beauty in transformation.

A dawn breaks with white mist. The narrator imposes on herself the severity of taut language and the nakedness of a white skeleton. She affirms that what she writes is "life seen by life," lacking conventional meaning but possessing the same purposelessness as a pulsing vein. A hot, hollow Sunday erupts. The narrator, who loathes Sundays for their emptiness, paints scenes of flies, torpid streets, and fruit-like days before retreating into a state of garden and shadow.

She enters the act of writing as she once entered painting, describing it as a descent into an ancestral cavern, the womb of the world. She catalogs the cave's inhabitants: hanging rats with bat wings, spiders, scorpions, crabs unchanged since prehistory. She declares: "All of this is me" (9). Outside the cave, wild horses stamp in darkness, their hoofs producing sparks. She calls herself a creature of echoing caverns who suffocates because she is "word and also its echo."

The narrator develops a metaphor of the instant as a firefly that sparks and goes out and announces a new era of freedom from the "you." She has come from the hell of love but is now free, wanting the vibration of happiness and the impartiality of Mozart. She hears rhythmic music from a neighboring house, and the drumming pushes her toward what she terms the other side of life. In a nightmarish passage, she falls face-down, heart pounding, and slowly recovers like a convalescent, realizing this happened not in real facts but in the domain of art.

She defines writing as using the word as bait for whatever is not word. The non-word exists between the lines, takes the bait, and incorporates the word itself. She refuses to live only from what can make sense, wanting instead an invented truth. She describes herself as a being who exists simultaneously across past, present, and future, needing new signs and articulations to interpret herself.

The narrator distinguishes her personal self from an impersonal force she calls "it," which is hard like a pebble. She recounts dripping lemon on a living oyster and eating it alive, equating the living "it" with the God. She describes watching a cat give birth: the kitten emerges wrapped in a sack of fluid, the mother licks it open, then bites the umbilical cord. The narrator enacts a symbolic giving of freedom to the reader: "First I rip the sack of fluid. Then I cut the umbilical cord. And you are alive on your own account" (28).

In a central passage, the narrator stages her own birth. She descends into total darkness, then gradually emerges: a luminescent shape, a milky belly with a navel. She declares herself born, eyes shut, blindly seeking the breast. She hears what she calls the hollow boom of time, the world forming deafly. She declares that what she writes is not for reading but for being. She then composes what she calls an adagio, a slow, broad passage: sunflowers turning toward the sun, wheat ripening, bread eaten with sweetness. She invokes African songs and confronts global hunger, acknowledging that all she can do is be born and paint a fresco in adagio.

She gives the God the name Simptar and herself the name Amptala, noting both belong to no known language. She reflects on mortality and announces readiness to speak of "he" or "she," to create characters from her impersonal meditation. A sustained meditation on animals follows. She describes animals as time that does not measure itself, fascinating yet horrifying because they share her instincts in a free and indomitable form. She tells of a man whose female cat threw herself from a roof when in heat, of holding a trembling bird, of a woman who raised an orphaned owl that eventually freed itself with a flight into the depth of the world. She tells the story of a rose that lasted an entire week without wilting, seemingly sustained by her admiration, and confesses: "Not having been born an animal is a secret nostalgia of mine" (45).

A botanical meditation follows, in which she characterizes individual flowers as personalities: the rose as feminine, the carnation as aggressive, the violet as introverted, the orchid as born as art. She calls this passage her study de natura florum, Latin for "on the nature of flowers." A stranger named João calls her on the phone; he grew up in the Amazon and tells her about the tajá, a legendary talking plant that once called his name at night. The narrator describes herself as born charged with the task of looking after the world: monitoring the beach from her terrace, watching almond trees, and attending to a malnourished nine-year-old boy.

She perceives what she calls a crooked reality: life seen through an oblique cut rather than straight lines. Full life is experienced indirectly, at a slight detachment, because a direct encounter would frighten away its delicate threads. She paints church portals and defends their symmetry, meditates on mirrors as born rather than created, and introduces what she calls "X," the unpronounceable mystery at the core of existence. She recounts looking a caged black panther in the eye: they transmuted, and she was left darkened inside. She reflects: "reality has no synonyms" (73).

On the morning of July 25th, the narrator falls into a state of grace, a sudden sensation in which "the luminosity was smiling in the air" (79). She distinguishes this from artistic inspiration: the state of grace exists so that one knows one truly exists and the world exists. She clarifies this is not the state of saints but "just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real" (80). She composes a passage she titles "On the edge of beatitude," arguing that real freedom has no form and that beatitude begins when thinking frees itself, reaching the grandeur of the nothing.

The narrator denounces the horror of dying and responds with purest joy. She addresses God directly, refusing to die, calling it a disgrace to be born only to die without knowing when or where. In the closing passages, she reflects that the improvisation never truly ends. After a night of despair, she wakes at three in the morning and meets herself: "Calm, joyful, fullness without fulmination. Simply I am I. And you are you. It is vast, and will endure" (88). The final line affirms: "What I'm writing to you goes on and I am bewitched" (88).