The Dark Side of Skin

By Jeferson Tenório

Life under Brazil’s brutal “cordial racism” comes painfully alive in this novel of fathers and sons.

How do you become the protagonist of your own life? For Pedro, it means searching for himself in the objects his father left behind: the layers that make up his life, and that of his parents, and the circumstances, geographies, and wounds that shaped them all. It’s an archaeology of affections, but also of life in southern Brazil, where being black on the streets of Porto Alegre manifests violences large and small. Where being a young woman, raised by a single mother, may find you seeking security in the untrustworthy arms of men. 

In Dark Side of Skin , Jeferson Tenório takes on fathers and sons, Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the inescapable bonds and burdens of family and history in one delicately rendered, painfully precise account of loved ones lost and found.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charco Press
• Release date: Feb 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781913867744

Jeferson Tenório

Jeferson Tenório was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1977. Based in Porto Alegre, he is a doctoral student in Literary Theory at PUCRS and a lecturer in literature. His literary debut was the nove_l O beijo na parede_ (Kiss on the Wall, 2013), chosen as book of the year by the Rio Grande do Sul Writers’ Association. His writing has been adapted for the theatre and translated into English and Spanish. He’s also the author of Estela sem Deus (Godless Star, 2018). The Dark Side of Skin won the PEN Translates Award in the UK and the 2021 Jabuti Prize for the Best Novel published in Brazil.

Book preview

THE SKIN

1.

Sometimes you’d have a thought and go to live inside it. Push everyone away. Build a house that way. Somewhere far. Deep inside yourself. That was how you dealt with things. These days, I choose to think you left so you could come back to me. I didn’t want your absence to be your only legacy. I wanted your presence, some form of it, even if it was painful and sad. And despite everything, here in this house, in this apartment, you’ll always be a body, dying over and over. You’ll always be a father who refuses to leave. You were never that good at leaving. Until the end, you believed books could make a difference. You stepped in and out of life, and it remained bitter. Objects still hold memories of you, but it seems whatever’s left of them can either only hurt or comfort me, because they’re remnants of affection. Silently, these objects speak of you. It’s through them that I imagine and recover you. Through them that I try to find out how many tragedies a person can take. Maybe I’m reaching for some truth. Not as a destination. But as a journey that will sweep through these rooms and give me the first piece of a puzzle. A puzzle that begins behind the front door, where I find an orange terracotta bowl and, inside it, a stone, a sacred ocutá, wrapped in red, green, and white ribbons. I study it with care. That’s how you enter a life that’s already left this earth. I take the ocutá out of the bowl. I remember the day you told me your head was Ogun’s and that this was very lucky, because Ogun was the only orisha who could handle the void. I remember it was from your mouth I first heard the word void. There are words we hold on to when we’re children because they bring us comfort. I remember now what my aunt Luara told me to do when I met her Ogun. Wrap it in a cloth, hold it in your hands, and take it to the river, she said. Before leaving, I head to your room and look in from the doorway. There are clothes scattered on the floor, some more tossed in the wardrobe. On the table are inkless pens, unmatched socks under receipts from the grocery, notebooks and sheets of paper, folders filled with your students’ tests and essays. Your chaos moves me. I look at all this and realise these are the objects that will help me narrate who you were before you left. The same tools that defeated you now speak to me about you. These objects will appear to me like your ghost.

2.

You walk to the back of the classroom, towards the boy who raised his hand. As you draw close to him, he asks if he can leave. You can see he doesn’t look well. He’s pale and his eyes are bloodshot. The students are quiet, a few watching to see what the teacher’s going to do. But before you even have time to speak, the boy lurches forwards and throws up on you. Now the whole class turns around to stare. Some of them laugh. The boy coughs and throws up a little more. It’s your second year at that school, and despite all your experience, it was there, that day, that you learned that when a pale student with bloodshot eyes raises their hand and asks to be excused during a test, you should take a step back. Just let them go. After the boy is taken care of, you go to the bathroom, trying not to look down at your own shirt, because you don’t want to see what he had for breakfast, even though something in the nauseating smell reminds you of milky coffee. In that moment, you think of all the times you wanted to puke at school. And there were many times. Your stomach had always been the most sensitive part of your body. You were twelve when you first experienced what you’d later learn to call anxiety. It was just a mild discomfort at first, then your hands got clammy, you shook, shivered, and finally you were nauseous. In sixth year you had your first panic attack because of a small hole in the floorboards, but also because the science teacher had said that the sun was going to explode in a few billion years. Your whole body shuddered as you realised the end of the world was real. For weeks you mourned the end of humanity, of the stars, the planets, the solar system. You mourned those yet to come, all the future generations. Death took on a cosmic, horrifying shape you weren’t prepared for. At twenty-one, you saw yourself in the mirror and suddenly understood life was chaos and it made very little sense. You turn around. Your students aren’t working on their tests any longer. And that sour smell of vomit still hangs in the air. You’ve called for a cleaner, but you know it’ll be a while, because this is a public school in the outskirts of Porto Alegre, understaffed and underfunded. The students are restless and all they want is for you to cancel the test. But you have to be strict. You’re thirty years old and need to prove you’re tough and experienced. Suck it up and finish the test. If this were the army, you’d see what’s good for you. Although you’ve never served in the army and don’t know how to be tough. At eighteen, you had a stomach ulcer that exempted you from serving. You remember when the sergeant told you and the other boys to take off your clothes and get on all fours, how you looked at one another, and some of you even said you should all get down on the floor like the sergeant said, but then he laughed and said it was just a joke, put your clothes back on, it’s time to pledge allegiance to the flag. The army needed strong men, not skinny faggots like you, he said. Back then, the lesion in your stomach was half a centimetre. Someone who’s never had a lesion that size inside them might think it’s no big deal. But you knew what having a lesion that size was like, with no money or health insurance. You were eighteen and weighed forty-three kilos. You think of your first endoscopy without anaesthesia at a public hospital in Porto Alegre. They gave you a pill that did nothing but numb half of your tongue. Then they stuck a tube down your throat, a little thicker than a straw and about ten centimetres long. You thought you’d suffocate to death. While your oesophagus was displayed on the monitor, you remembered the twelve hours you’d fasted before they put you on a hospital trolley and made you wait another two hours in the hall. You were about to pass out and you couldn’t tell if it was from hunger or pain. You couldn’t eat, drink, or sleep, because of the ulcer. You were only eighteen and still a virgin. During the pledge ceremony, you had to raise your right arm and hold it up for the entire duration of the anthem. And you felt weaker that day, more than usual. The sergeant walked past you and yelled at you to raise your fucking arm, that pledging allegiance was a serious business, anyone who didn’t do it right would spend the night in a cell. When you heard that, you remembered how you’d been handcuffed before, treated like a criminal. You were only fourteen years old at the time, waiting for your stepfather at a bus stop in Copacabana. A bus stopped and a group of boys got out, then pointed at you and yelled: it was him, it was him. You had no idea what was happening, and on impulse you ran. You looked back and saw all these people running after you. Your survival instinct had kicked in, and it led you to a commercial area on Rua Barata Ribeiro. You ran into the first open door you saw: an Assemblies of God evangelical church. At thirty, you even considered becoming a pastor as thanks for being saved that day. You hid behind one of the benches. The church was empty. You stayed there, in silence, waiting, listening to your own breathing. But then you heard shouts: he’s here, he’s here. And suddenly the church was filled with god knows how many kids, thirsty for revenge. One of them pointed at you. In an instant they were all on top of you. Punches and kicks to your head, stomach, face, until you tasted your own blood. You didn’t resist it, just curled up in foetal position and tried to say: I didn’t do anything. You started to lose consciousness. Someone pulled out a gun and pointed it at your head. You could still hear one of them shouting: you’re a goner, neguim, this is when you die, neguim. But before they killed you, because this wasn’t when you would die, a miracle: one of the pastors showed up. He intervened, saying, for the love of God, in Jesus’ name, respect the Lord’s house, nobody’s killing anybody here. And by some other miracle, the boys stopped hitting you and ran away. The church emptied out. You didn’t cry because you didn’t have time to. All you felt was a sharp pain in your head, and you noticed that one of your teeth had come loose, so you ran the tip of your tongue over it to keep it falling out. You were taken to the police station in handcuffs. That was the first time you felt the touch of cold metal on your wrists. All around you, people were cursing you and calling you a thief and saying you wouldn’t get out of it this time. Only at the police station you found out what had happened: someone had mistaken you for a criminal. (They’d thought you’d swiped one of the boys’ baseball caps.) And being mistaken for a criminal would continue to be a part of your journey. And you’d have a hard time understanding why that kept happening. The national anthem ended, and you could finally put your arm down. You couldn’t wait to get home. The problem was you didn’t have money to take the bus home. You knew you’d have to jump the turnstile. But no, you wouldn’t do that. You were eighteen years old, weighed forty-three kilos, and had a stomach ulcer, but you still had your dignity. You’d get on the bus and sit at the back. And as the bus approached your house, you’d get up and run off without paying. The bell rings. The students get up and hand you their tests. You don’t feel well. After teaching all morning and getting thrown up on, all you want is to go home, take a shower, and get some rest. But you can’t do that, because you still have ten fifty-minute classes to go. You’ve turned into a teaching machine. Into an explaining machine. Into a quiet, please machine. Into a pay attention, please machine. Into a no, you can’t go to the bathroom right now machine. Into a patience machine, so you don’t smack the students who don’t care about subordinate clauses. You don’t care about subordinate clauses either. But that’s what school is for. To bore students. And you know you’re part of that boredom. With each incoming class, with each hour of your life that you waste, you feel more and more like you’re in the wrong place. You need to be honest with yourself: you don’t know how you came to be a teacher. Most important things in your life seemed to have happened despite what you wanted. You barely remember the entrance exam you had to take to study literature at the only university you could afford. And you only went to college because you worked as a courier for a year at a law firm in the Moinhos de Vento neighbourhood in Porto Alegre. You remember the day one of the partners interviewed you for the position, you were nineteen. He was called Bruno Fragoso. He was forty-two. A short, balding man with an angular face, who didn’t smoke but had the hoarse voice of a smoker. He made you wait for forty-two minutes, because he wanted to look busy and important, and only years later, you’d find out he just sat on his computer playing solitaire or watching porn. After the wait, Bruno came in, shook your hand, sat down in front of you, and watched you. You were nineteen years old but didn’t know much about self-esteem, about self-worth and all those things you’d need to stay sane, that’s why you couldn’t look him in the eye for long. Bruno noticed this. You were exactly what he needed. An easy prey. So, in complete control of the situation, very naturally, Bruno said that he didn’t like black people. You looked up. Bruno was not intimidated and repeated the words: I don’t like black people. Maybe he expected some reaction from you. But nothing happened. You didn’t move. Bruno shifted in his chair and explained: I don’t like them because a couple of black people who worked at my house in Garibaldi as caretakers stole from me. They took everything I had there. Since then, I’ve stopped trusting black people. Until that moment, you’d never suffered any racism, at least never so blatantly as this, not that you remember. But you weren’t shocked, because a kind of inertia took over your body, you didn’t know how to react. You didn’t even know what it meant to be black yet. You hadn’t talked to anyone about racism, about Blackness, about anything yet. In that moment you were just a black body. Deep down you knew you were sitting before a jerk. Still, you didn’t react. Bruno went on with the interview, said he was going to give you a chance, because he thought he could save you from drugs, though you’d never tried drugs. He wanted to save you from guns and violence. Brazil would be in better shape if every businessman did their part, Bruno believed. If someone asked how you’d managed to survive up until that point, what with all the chances life had had to kill you, you’d probably say it had been nothing more than mere chance, the same chance that had made your mother, a supermarket cashier, in 1970, in Bangu, Rio de Janeiro, fall in love with your father, a supervisor at the same shop. Your mother once told you that she fell in love with him because he looked like the footballer Rivelino. That thick, black,