o mundo das maçãs

Conto genial é “The World of Apples”, de John Cheever. É da sua fase mais madura, dos anos 70, fase da qual ele não se envergonha, ao contrário dos primeiros contos, que lhe parecem – só a ele – ingênuos e provincianos. Como Cheever diz no prefácio da sua coletânea de contos, “a writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork.”

“O mundo das maçãs” é o título da obra principal do protagonista, um velho poeta norte-americano de renome que vive numa villa em Monte Carbone, ao sul de Roma. O conto começa de forma irreverente e irônica, sem fazer justiça, como se verá ao longo da história, à dignidade e à grandeza do poeta: “Asa Bascomb, the old laureate, wandered around his work house or study – he had never been able to settle on a name for a house where one wrote poetry – swatting hornets with a copy of La Stampa and wondering why he had never been given the Nobel Prize.”

Cheever nos mostra primeiro a vida de Bascomb, em especial sua solidão, longe da mulher e dos amigos mortos, perto dos fãs que o visitam. “Of the four poetas with whom Bascomb was costumarily grouped one had shot himself, one had drowned himself, one had hanged himself, and the fourth had died of delirium tremens. (...) He had seen in Z – the closest of the four – some inalienable link between his prodigious imagination and his prodigious gifts for self-destruction, but Bascomb in his stubborn, countrified way was determined to break or ignore this link, (...)” Depois, nos conta o drama que Bascomb viverá. Durante um passeio por colinas e catedrais, na companhia de um admirador escandinavo, o poeta, ao aliviar-se num bosque, tropeça num casal fazendo amor e não consegue desfazer-se da imagem do casal, das costas peludas do fornicador e da repentina obsessão da obscenidade: “when he rejoined the Scandinavian he was uneasy. The struggling couple seemed to have dimmed his memories of the cathedrals”.

Acompanharemos Bascomb em seu drama, em sua incapacidade de livrar-se de pensamentos luxuriosos e de voltar à grandeza da sua poesia e dos seus temas (“obscenity – gross obscenity – seemed to be the only factor of life that possessed color and cheer”). Primeiro, procura consolar-se com sua empregada: “he thought he knew what he needed and he spoke to Maria after dinner. She was always happy to accommodate with him, although he always insisted that she take a bath. This, with the dishes, involved some delays but when she left him he definitely felt better but he definitely was not cured.” Logo Bascomb estará escrevendo poemas pornográficos que queima ao meio dia, fará uma viagem curta a Roma para mudar de ares, mas nada parece resolver seu dilema, restaurar sua dignidade serena.

A redenção virá por acaso e milagre, como uma travessia, um reencontro. Bascomb resolve fazer uma pequena peregrinação à imagem do anjo na igreja de Monte Giordano. No caminho, espiará o fascínio de uma família ante o poder de um revólver, deitará na grama, recordando o passado, caminhará ao lado de um cachorro com medo de raios (“he had never known an animal to be afraid of nature”), encontrará um velho satisfeito e abrigado da chuva (“he did not ask his soul to clap hands and sing, and yet he seemed to have reached an organic peace of mind that Bascomb coveted”), pegará carona em um carro, “hoping that this would not put a crimp in his cure”. Na igreja, encontrará o padre, depositará seu presente para o santo – uma medalha dada pelo governo soviético no aniversário de Lermontov – e pedirá a bênção divina a seus ídolos (Whitman, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, “and specially Hemingway”). Na volta, terá seu banho, sua purificação, diante de uma cachoeira: “It was a natural fall, a shelf of rock and a curtain of green water, and it reminded him of a fall at the edge of the farm in Vermont where he had been raised. He had gone there one Sunday afternoon when he was a boy and sat on a hill above the pool. While he was there he saw an old man, with hair as thick and white as was his now, come through the woods. He had watched the old man unlace his shoes and undress himself with the haste of a lover. First he had wet his hands and arms and shoulders and then he had stepped into the torrent, bellowing with joy. He had then dried himself with his underpants, dressed, and gone back into the woods and it was not until he disappeared that Bacomb realized that the old man was his father.”

Naturalmente, Bascomb fez o que seu pai fizera anos antes – despiu-se e banhou-se na cachoeira. “His return to Monte Carbone was triumphant and in the morning he began a long poem on the inalienable dignity of light and air that, while it would not get him the Nobel Prize, would grace the last months of his life.”

O conto é magnífico pela beleza da prosa e das reflexões de Cheever e, sobretudo, pela sua capacidade de criar, no espaço de um conto, um personagem complexo, vivo, que que nos emociona e nos faz desejar acompanhá-lo em outras histórias.