I am not much of a Carnival reveler, but I feel a complete affinity with the Carnival moment. I am the type you might call a “cerebral reveler.”
On the excellent website Todo Prosa, by award-winning writer Sergio Rodrigues, another cerebral reveler, I found an excellent anthology of Carnival stories.
There are six stories, and I still cannot decide which I liked best, though I lean toward the one by Clarice Lispector, an excerpt of which I read on Rádio USP, presented here for everyone’s enjoyment.
Remnants of Carnival
by Clarice Lispector (in Felicidade Clandestina)
No, not this last Carnival. But I don’t know why this one carried me back to my childhood and to Ash Wednesdays in dead streets where scraps of streamers and confetti fluttered. An occasional devout woman, a veil covering her head, would go to church, crossing the street so utterly empty after Carnival. Until the next year came. And when the festivities were approaching, how could I explain the excitement that seized me? As if the world, still a bud, were finally opening into a great scarlet rose. As if the streets and squares of Recife were finally explaining what they had been made for. As if human voices were finally singing of the capacity for pleasure that lay secret within me. Carnival was mine, mine.
Yet in reality I took very little part in it. I had never been to a children’s ball; no one had ever dressed me in costume. In compensation, they let me stay until about eleven at night at the foot of the stairs of the house where we lived, watching hungrily as others enjoyed themselves. I would receive two precious things, which I hoarded miserly to make them last all three days: a perfume spray and a bag of confetti. Ah, writing is becoming difficult. Because I can feel how dark my heart will become when I realize that, even joining so little in the joy, I was so thirsty for it that almost nothing was enough to make me a happy little girl.
And the masks? I was afraid, but it was a vital and necessary fear, because it met my deepest suspicion that the human face, too, might be a kind of mask. At the doorway at the foot of my stairs, if someone in a mask spoke to me, I would suddenly enter into indispensable contact with my inner world, which was made not only of elves and enchanted princes but of people with their mysteries. Even my fright at masked people was therefore essential to me.
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