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  • The Statue of Carlos Drummond de Andrade by the Sea:A Sequence
  • Peter LaSalle (bio)

The poetry is necessary, but is the poet?

carlos drummond de andrade

i. a little-known fact

A person I often argued with once claimed that bills for the Brazilian currency of reais all contained—for a while, ten or twenty-five years ago—several quoted lines from a Carlos Drummond de Andrade poem; I thought it was simply some sort of exaggeration, airy myth and certainly not true.

I mean, this person Hennigan was prone to exaggeration, sometimes even full of gentle though annoyingly boastful lies, which is why I disliked him, often argued with him. However, I later looked it up, and, in fact, what he said is true, that there was a period of several years when all bills of all denominations of currency in Brazil did contain quoted lines from the poet, and I almost wish I hadn’t confirmed it.

To be honest, it bothered me for days, how I had argued about it for no other reason than I disliked this person, right from the start challenging him on this, which later made me feel very small and petty.

ii. street boy

The one who the others have taken to calling Red Shorts is a Rio street boy.

He has been sleeping under a sheet of corrugated cardboard in a nook of trees behind the ornate fountain, vandalized, in the scruffy little park of sorts flat up against the steep rise of the green mountains there in residential Barrio Peixito, a few streets in from the beach at Copacabana.

Who knows where his night-imaginings have taken him, and his first thought at dawn—the sun tinting the old Art Deco apartment buildings there a faint melon, and then, the warming rays stronger, a deeper melon—is that it has been five days. Yes, the first thought he wakes with this [End Page 64] morning in this spot he has found away from the pack of other orphaned boys is the same thought that he fell asleep with the night before—he assures himself it has been a full five days. He flips the cardboard sheet off his body, rubs his hand over his eyes, then ruffles his tuft of uncut hair, feeling for lumps of lice, satisfied that he finds nothing; he sits up. Bony, naked except for the filthy and ragged red gym shorts with a white stripe on the side, he stands, looks around; he leans over to step into one of the worn green flip-flop sandals and then the other. He shuffles over to the marble, three-dished fountain covered with graffiti and splashes his face with water, which is cold but refreshing in the building warmth of January’s summer. He could be nine or ten, even eleven, and with Rio street boys there is never really any age, even to themselves, as there sometimes are never any real names for them, except for maybe an acquired appellation like his, Red Shorts. It was originally given to him because he once wore for almost a year a pair of salvaged very red shorts and because now he always tries to find shorts or discarded swim trunks among the clothes that people leave out behind the apartment buildings, shorts that are, indeed, red, because he is Red Shorts. He walks back to the trees, relieves himself, then picks up the sheet of cardboard, a disassembled and flattened corrugated box softened with use; he stashes it behind the tall, mop-topped palms with their gray trunks whitewashed lower down, so nobody will toss it away and it will be there when he comes back to this nook at the edge of the scruffy little park, a spot he definitely likes, when night comes again.

He will have to think about food, pawing through trash cans and dumpsters in the alleys between the sleek high-rise hotels facing the beach. And of course he will also have to think about how he must be very careful of some of the other boys now that he has split off on his own, especially the two older ones...

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