Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"Rital" and "Raton"

1984; The MIT Press; Volume: 31; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/778355

1536-013X

Pier Paolo Pasolini, John Shepley,

Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies

He said: J'aifa'. In a country voice rather shrill: for an Arab, to learn French means to repeat a rustic condition with thoughts of the city in a house crumbling in the sun, the fetid sheep, the hens on the roost, the neighbors dressed in rags, their shrewd old ideas, the dreamlike gestures at the end of the cultivated horizon, the destiny that combines sex and death: and since the peasant universe is petit-bourgeois, an Arab's French has that shrill sound, high in tone and weak, plaintive, bad, like a postal clerk in a bad mood due to bad digestion or wounded pride, dry, sterile, immature, like certain little shoots of tender winter saplings. The emission of this little vocal shoot comes from the head. Oddly enough, it doesn't pass through the male glands. Sensuality appears bitter and sharp as in a barnyard animaltreacherous and aggressive. That vocal emission, light, feeble, scourgingthe voice of the motherconceals a sensuality that attacks like a snake, first coiling, then straight, then coiling again on its desert road. Brahin is like a Sicilian boy, but without that soft fecundating will that goes back more to the mother than to the father. Tallish, with narrow shoulders, broad hips, the magical gaze of a girl: the two eyes set close above the slightly hooked nose, the thumbprint of beauty of another race, which appears alien, with a faintly repellent aura. As though the presence of other destinies were a threat to our own. Or rendered them vain by suggesting other ways of being in the sun, amid the houses, along the dry rivers, between the walls, etc. The water of a river that you see after showing your passport. To sip that water as an unnatural act of baptism, to accept its taste like a nonexistent beast that at its contact comes into existence and cries, screaming for everything it has lost by watering at other springs. The fact that Brahin is walking through the heart of Paris is thus the beginning of a story. I'll go further and say: the fact that Brahin is walking through Pigalle.