Intimate Diary     by Ana Cristina César, Translated by David Treece Original title: various Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Boulevard Books Pub. Date: 1997 Pub. Place: UK Format: 128 pages ISBN: 1899460500 List Price: $14.95, £7.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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Ana Cristina César’s Intimate Diary is a compilation of writings by one of the most outstanding figures of Brazil’s ‘marginal generation’, whose life and career were cut short by suicide in 1983. The publication of A teus pés (At your feet) the year before her death marked the appearance of a highly original voice, offering with its teasing humour, its provocative blend of intimate self-concealment and self-exposure, a refreshing countercultural alternative to the prevailing language of those years: whether the chauvinistic propaganda of Brazil’s military dictatorship or the militant rhetoric of the orthodox left-wing opposition.

César’s playground is the artifice of autobiography, through which the reader is drawn into a compelling, but precariously ambivalent relationship with this elusive ‘unknown modern woman.’ The tease-within-a-tease of her fake letters and diaries seems to allow us privileged access to the most painfully intimate confidences, the minute, daily dramas of physical sensation, psychological mood and personal relations, only to hold us tantalisingly at arm’s length with an ironic disclaimer or a smart rebuff.

Intimate Diary demands to be read, and heard, as performance, reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave. Such as when Ana Cristina gets up on stage wearing her sensual kid gloves, and opens her suitcase crammed full of postcard images, the pretext for revealing to her curious, excited audience an endless succession of confessional stories that are made of both private and collective fantasy: ‘My friends, this is a suitcase, not a top-hat with rabbits. We have cards enough to last the whole night.’

In this sense, the stuff of Ana Cristina’s writing is the ever-shifting, fluid terrain of the sketch, whose language refuses to fix meaning or pronounce truths, but rather illuminates the vortex of modern life from a feminine and erotic perspective, one sensitive to its flux and ambiguity. The stability of language is here dissolved into an effervescence of clichés, allusions, cross-references and tricks. The word is above all the bearer, as well as the filter, of the myriad of cultural icons that bombard and threaten to depersonalise and absorb the individual in the mass industrial age. So the objects of her intimate poetic universe — ‘gadgets to amuse me, bedside TV, recording tapes, postcards, notebooks of various sizes, nail clippers, two Pyrex dishes and a lot more’ — share a space with the grander public icons of mass culture — West Side Story, the Pope in the shanty-towns of Rio de Janeiro, I-Ching, Vaseline [tm], Knorr [tm] soup, 50p coins — as well as the array of artists who weld together our individual and collective fantasies: Walt Whitman, Carmen Miranda, Tintoretto and Katherine Mansfield, to name but a few.

Ana Cristina invites us to explore this image-saturated universe through her ‘aestheticising gaze’, with all the risks that trust and fallibility entail: ‘I never know for sure how it will turn out. I play the detective.’ With her we may discover that, as she says of the Place des Vosges postcard, ‘it’s as if you can see and grasp it, or you’re completely inside it’ — this, for sure, defines the seductively bewildering power of Ana Cristina’s Intimate Diary and the challenge it poses to us, its readers, to live and die with her, ‘on the edge’.

I thought up a cheap trick that almost came off. I shall have correspondents in four capitals of the world. They’ll think of me intensely and we’ll exchange letters and news. When no letter arrives I plan to rip the calendar from the wall, in the session of pain. I’m drawing little snakes which are the offspring of rage — they’re little rages which mount the table in a cluster and cover the calendar on the wall, ceaselessly writhing. Those plans and tricks — it was me who invented them on the train. ‘Train passing through chaos?’ — nonsense. A letter arrives from the capital of Brazil which says: ‘Everything. Everything but the truth.’ ‘The characters wear disguises, capes, face masks; all lie and want to be deceived. They want desperately.’ On the contrary, the train was passing through civilised countryside. It was a slow train, a local, that stole into tunnels and in these hours I planned still further, planned to raise a smoke screen and abandon my correspondents one by one. Because I make these journeys propelled by hate. In other words, in search of bliss.

That’s why I catch trains a quarter of an hour before they leave. Sweetheart, kleptomaniac sweetheart. You know what lies are for. Sweet kleptomaniac heart. 13