The Volunteers     by Moacyr Scliar Original title: Os Voluntários Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Available Pr Pub. Date: September 1988 Format: Paperback ISBN: 0345357531 List Price: $5.95 Not available for ordering Published by Ballantine Pub. Date: 1988 Pub. Place: USA Format: Paperback, 152 pages Not available for ordering Published by Available P: NY Pub. Date: 1988 Pub. Place: USA Format: 151 pages Not available for ordering

Moacyr Scliar is a native of Porto Alegre in the Southern ‘Gaucho’ state of Rio Grande do Sul. The city gets an affectionate salute in this book, particular the world of small shops and their keepers, here shown as very much an immigrant band of Portuguese, Polish-Jewish and Arab immigrants.

The central character of the novel is Benjamin, hopeless and heroic at the same time; a classic Diaspora Jewish figure. Part of his heroism is his struggle against his own real or imagined inadequacies. Like the somewhat parallel character of Meyer Guinzburg in Scliar’s One-Man Army Benjamin is not really interested in inhabiting the limited possibilities of the reality that surrounds him; ‘He was one of those people who yearn to live in a city they’ve never seen, to marry a woman they’ve never met, to read a book that has never been written’. Benjamin is a collision between Thurber’s Walter Mitty, the henpecked suburban ‘warrior’ and that millennial Jewish figure the messianic dreamer. Benjamin draws breath only from the long-held vision of ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, the Jewish capital lost thousands of years ago but longed for every day. He is the embodiment of a kind of Jewish ‘displacedness’ that belies the success story of assimilation.

Dreaming of Jerusalem Benjamin rots away working in a clothes store but Scliar amuses himself by opening another clothes store next to Benjamin, whose proprietor is an Arab, a Palestinian, from.... Jerusalem. The two exiled proprietors of the Holy City face each other in the street...

Other characters here are equally tragi-comic, particularly perhaps the hooker Elvira, who has escaped from a stifling Italian agricultural colony to make a living in the only way she can on the Rua Voluntários and whose tawdry dream is to work in a high class brothel and not the run-down Maipu club on this sad street of immigrant shopkeepers, and Orígenes the ex-travelling salesman and would-be spiritual leader who represents a rather sad sect in Porto Alegre that echoes the Evangelicals currently setting the poor on fire in Brazil, by promising a kind of escape from generations of poverty and unease.

A work of sustained sympathetic humour that at the same time is about everyday despair, very Brazilian, very Jewish?

She disliked Rua Voluntarios: it had no class. She would rather work at a place like Mônica’s, in the district of Cristal. Mônica, now that was a magical name, aristocratic even in the way it was pronounced. Elvira had never met Mônica. She imagined her as a tall, elegant lady, her blond hair carefully done, with diamond studded hoop earrings hanging from her earlobes, a genuine pearl necklace with an antique cameo adorning her lightly powdered bosom, an aura of French perfume enveloping her figure.

And what about Mônica’s Place? Elvira visualized what it must be like: a mansion in the middle of a park. High walls, a wrought-iron game, armed guards. A driveway. A marquee. A doorman in livery opening the door. A lobby done in Roman marble. A receptionist stepping forward, eager to receive the hats, the fur-trimmed overcoats, the silver headed walking sticks (and rapiers?), the white silk scarves. Distinguished habitués: senators of the republic, well known professionals, financiers, representatives from the productive classes: captains of industry, big wheels of the business world, prosperous ranchers. Courteous, educated men. In a soft voice, they would chat with Mônica’s girls (refined girls, many of them former normal school students, who wore silk and satin), as the girls languidly reclined on chaise tongues, puffing at their cigarettes with amber holders.

And the bedrooms. Ah, the bedrooms Elvira had heard wonders about those bedrooms, magnificently decorated (fur rugs, crystal chandeliers, hardwood furniture, fireplaces, bathrooms done in marble), each room in a different style. There was one in particular that roused her curiosity and envy. The Mirror Room, all of it — ceiling, walls, floor covered with crystal mirrors. At any given moment and from every possible angle, a couple could watch themselves making love. In the Mirror Room the lovers were, so to speak, suspended in an atmosphere of eyes and mouths, of thighs and buttocks... When a couple reached an orgasm in the Mirror Room, it was many couples that reached an orgasm. It would be impossible for a man to lose his erection in that room, impossible for a woman to remain frigid. That room was a temple to love. Thanks to — stated the advertising brochure of Mônica’s Place — the magic of the mirrors.

Such magic Elvira had tried to reproduce in her room. She had placed mirrors, six of them, on the walls and ceiling. But the reflecting surface was too small. The largest mirror probably measured no more than twenty by fifty centimeters. They would capture half a boob; or three toes; or a hairy rump; or one nut. An atmosphere conducive to love? None whatsoever, not in her place. Her clients found the presence of all those mirrors odd (in order to comb one’s hair, one mirror is enough), and never for a moment did they suspect that the mirrors were there as traps to capture the fleeting bird of love. Anyway, they weren’t the type of men who would enjoy looking at themselves while screwing; they’d think it was something for men who couldn’t get it up, or for fairies. Rua Voluntários will always remain Rua Voluntários, Elvira would say with a sigh, and the Maipu will always be the Maipu, and I’ll always be in this shitty Iife. 52-53