Selected Cronicas

BELONGING

A friend of mine who is a doctor has assured me that right from the cradle, children sense their surroundings, and want things. Right from the cradle the human being has started to exist.

I am certain that right from the cradle my first desire was to belong. For reasons of no importance here, I must have somehow felt that I did not belong to anything or anyone. That my birth was superfluous.

If I first experienced this human hunger in the cradle, it continues to accompany me throughout life, as if predestined. So that I feel pangs of envy and desire whenever I see a nun: for she belongs to God.

Precisely because of this deep longing to give myself to something or someone, I have become rather aloof: I am afraid of revealing how much I need and how poor I am. Yes, poor. Very poor. All I possess is a body and a soul. And I need something more. Perhaps I started writing so early in life because, at least by writing, I belonged to myself to some extent. Which is a pale imitation.

Over the years, especially of late, I have lost the knack of being like other people. I no longer know how it is done. And a whole new kind of ‘solitude through not belonging’ has started to smother me like ivy on a wall.

If I have always wanted to belong, why then have I never joined any club or association? Because that is not what I mean by belonging. What I want and cannot achieve, is to be able to give the best of myself to whomever or whatever I might belong. Even my moments of happiness can be so solitary at times. And solitary moments of happiness can be so moving. It is like holding a gift in your hands, beautifully wrapped, but with no one to whom you can say: Here, this is for you, open it! Not wishing to find myself in moving situations and somewhat inhibited and reluctant to strike a tragic note, I rarely parcel up my feelings in gift wrapping.

Belonging does not simply come from being weak and needing to unite oneself to something or someone stronger. An intense desire to belong often comes from my own inner strength — I wish to belong so that my strength will not be useless and may serve to strengthen some other person or thing.

But I do get some satisfaction out of life: for example, I belong to my country and, like millions of others, I belong to Brazil in the sense that I am Brazilian. And I, who in all sincerity have never desired or could desire fame — I am far too much the individualist to tolerate any invasion of my privacy — I, who do not seek fame, nevertheless enjoy being associated with Brazilian literature. No, no, not out of pride or ambition. I am happy to be associated with Brazilian literature for reasons which have nothing to do with literature, for I am not even what might be called a bluestocking or intellectual. I am happy simply ‘to participate’.

I can almost visualize myself in the cradle, I can almost recreate inside me that vague yet pressing need to belong. For reasons which not even my father or mother could control, I was born and remain: simply born.

Yet my birth was planned in such a pleasing way. My mother was in poor health and there was a well-known superstition which claimed that a woman could be cured of illness if she gave birth to a son. So I was deliberately conceived: with love and hope. Only I failed to cure my mother. And to this day I carry this burden of guilt: my parents conceived me for a specific mission and I failed them. As if they had been relying on me to defend the trenches in time of war and I had deserted my post. I know my parents forgave me my useless birth and forgot that I had frustrated their great hopes. But I have not forgiven myself or forgotten. I wanted to work a miracle: to be born and cure my mother. Then I should truly have belonged to my father and mother. I could not even confide my solitude of not belonging because, as a deserter, I kept the secret of my escape which shame forbade me to reveal.

Life has allowed me to belong now and then, as if to give me the measure of what I am losing by not belonging. And then I discovered that: to belong is to live. I experienced it with the thirst of someone in the desert who avidly drinks the last drops of water from a flask. And then my thirst returns and I find myself walking that same desert.