Hélder Gêmo Júnior’s Reviews > The Wall of the Plague > Status Update

“But love is indestructible, all the more so if it is a man's love of the earth, his Azania, his Africa, more immense and eternal than he or I or we. He was hurt too deeply, he'd suffered too much, he'd seen others suffer too much, ever to risk having a child. In a few days his own last seed will be washed from me by my futile blood. But the love can never be destroyed.”

“Mercy itself becomes cruel when it must expose everything. Offering you, perhaps, your only chance of recovery. So rip off my rags, strip me naked, drag your nails through what lies hidden under my body hair, tear open my most secret flesh, make me bleed, let the thick black blood come from my body, hurt me: and heal me, for God's sake, try to heal me, save me, for I can't go on like this any more.”

I thought: this is how it is, so self-evident and complex: the truth of the body, which is flesh and bone, which can be hurt, which bleeds, which suffers from hunger and thirst, and from the desire to know, which affirms its ineluctable humanity: this was our reality, this the knowledge we had, could have, of world and existence, a knowledge unto death.

“That’s hell for you: but it’s beautiful in its own way; it’s mine?”
In these shacks and shanties we're born. In impossible places in this smoky dark we make love, we make children. In these holes and hovels we laugh and cry, we bind up our wounds, we get drunk, we learn our lessons. All of us.
My people. Here we die countless forms of death, none of them strange to us.

“he still realizes that one does not die in a dream, that one will continue to function to the point of absurdity, to the negation of the possible, to a transmutation of the lie from which truth can be refashioned.”

“Even then it was past! Or did one's early loves remain latent in one's blood, incubating, biding their time to erupt in a deadly boil? And not only one's loves, but everything one had had; everything one had dared to be.
For how could one really tell when a thing was over? One might firmly believe it to be finished while it was still going on, or assume it was going on when it had already ended.”