Love in His Heart and a Gun in His Suitcase

By Marshall Shord

In his book On Late Style, Edward Said notes a tendency towards baroque complexity in the late works of certain artists. To Said, this tendency is, among other things, a defiant gesture against impending mortality. Such defiance, however, is not exclusive to artists, and the futile ways in which individuals try to bar the door against the inevitable populate an extensive gallery of human experience. The unnamed narrator of João Almino’s The Last Twist of the Knife presents another approach. From the hopelessly fraught and disappointing reality of his old age, he beats a retreat to the golden-hued, meticulously reproduced memories of his childhood in the arid backlands of northeastern Brazil.

Almino has pulled off a rather stunning sleight of hand with this book. Despite its brevity and plainspoken style, it manages to encompass the race and class politics of 20th-century Brazil, a revenge plot, a romance, a back-to-the-land narrative, a rich childhood memoir, and competing paternity claims. Yet The Last Twist of the Knife never feels less than personal. Like rain falling onto the parched earth of the backlands, Almino’s story absorbs the memories of a wounded man and the history of a wounded place and gives forth from it a bloom of great and lasting vibrancy.

The poor Black son of a single mother (his father was murdered when he was two), the narrator has beat the odds and built a modestly remarkable life for himself. After a successful career practicing the law, he is now retired and living in the Brazilian capital of Brasilía. Over the course of a long marriage, he and his wife Patricía have raised three sons to adulthood. But, as the novel opens, Patricía has kicked the narrator out of the house after a vicious fight. His sons, now scattered about the country, barely speak to him. None of this matters, though, because Clarice, the daughter of his godfather and his first love, has sent him a message on Facebook: a part of the ranch he grew up on is for sale. With her assistance, he will purchase what remains of her father’s formerly sprawling property, and thus return to a land—and a past—he has idealized after many decades away from it. He has idealized Clarice, too, and intends on taking advantage of their new proximity to each other.

“I’ve done many things through the years,” the narrator writes, “but they would have been wasted years, spent without purpose, if I hadn’t come back to avenge my father and find true love.” By going home, the narrator will re-enter what he calls “the very contradictions of the backlands, dry or wet.” Old, young; Black, White; rich, poor; love, hate; life, death: these pairings recur throughout the novel. But they are not so much contradictions as they are polarities, and the Brazilian backcountry, in the narrator’s conjuring of it, is life stripped to its extremes. Such an environment leaves no room for ambiguity. Feelings, good or bad, are always known. It is here, he thinks, that he will rediscover the simplicity that his ambition forced him to leave behind.

Besides love and revenge, the narrator brings with him a third, complicating intention, one which ultimately sinks his whole enterprise. He further wants “to prove that some place or other on earth wouldn’t be the same because I had lived.” At seventy, with a lifetime’s experience to draw from, he intends to make his mark upon the very same land that has marked him so indelibly—a desire that would be familiar to the artists Said profiles. But in doing so, the narrator violates a fundamental rule of time travel: tread lightly for fear of how even the slightest change might reverberate through the timeline.

The romance the narrator is so eager to rekindle with Clarice was forbidden by her father before it could even get started. In the narrator’s recounting, his godfather’s reasoning, although unjust, is at least clear, so that even the subtext of his refusal speaks audibly: she is rich (and White); he is poor (and Black). A brief quasi-sexual encounter in a barn when they were both adolescents is all the narrator has to show for what he has built into a life-defining sentiment. But he is certain that all they needed was the right time. Now, with his godfather long dead, Clarice a widow, and he on his way to divorce, seems like that time.

Thus the narrator arrives at the ranch with love in his heart and a gun in his suitcase. The gun is for the man who gutted his father with a fishing knife over some paltry dispute. After serving his prison sentence, the murderer has been released and lives in the town near the ranch. The narrator plans to track him down and shoot him dead upon sight: “I’ll kill him. I have to kill him.” He says he does not care about going to jail, but this might complicate his romantic future with Clarice—and his planting season.

To sustain himself, the narrator has decided he will grow cotton, the very same crop he picked as a child. He has researched the latest methods—like all good urban farmers—and is confident he will produce a good yield. With his savings sunk into the ranch, this will be his only source of income.

Of love, revenge, and agriculture: at least the cotton grows. The man who killed his father (“a disgusting little guy, a son of a bitch”) is now ninety years old. When the narrator confronts him in his leather goods shop, they struggle. The man hits his head and falls unconscious. He is taken to the hospital where he will remain in a coma until he dies. As revenge goes, it is rather deflating. Fortunately for the narrator, a witness backs up his dubious claim of self-defense.

Shortly thereafter, a notorious gunman (a not uncommon job on the large landholdings in the region) confesses to the narrator that he had been ordered by his godfather to murder his father. Upon learning this, the narrator writes in his diary: “The clusterfuck had reached a new level.”

Indeed. Because at this point all the scenes in the narrator’s past align themselves in his mind to convince him that his godfather was his biological father. Although he becomes obsessed with proving this, it is clear from the start that his pursuit will be futile. It won’t transform the poverty of his childhood into the privileged upbringing afforded Clarice and her brother Miguel. It won’t bring back the dead. Rather than setting him free, the truth in this case further enmeshes him in a past now rendered off-kilter. It seems the narrator will be walking through that past forever, gleaning pieces of evidence to prove a point that, while it will change nothing substantial, will irreparably harm the few relationships he has left in his life.

So Clarice ends up estranged from him, bitter and hurt. They have a final phone conversation when the narrator decides to sell the ranch to Miguel and move back to Brasilía. He presses her to admit what she knew all along. She refuses, only telling him:

“I like you as a sister.”
“You know we’re more than just brother and sister.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that. It would be best if we ended this conversation.”

So much for the romance.

The narrator, in rooting out his past while simultaneously trying to mold it to a truth only he can perceive, is really asking himself a simple question (albeit badly). How did I get here? But by filtering the complexity of life through the lens of his childhood, he has effectively blinded himself to his role in shaping the world of his experience, thus erasing the path behind him the deeper into his past he goes. He is left having learned lessons he can do nothing with and, tragically, more alone now than when he set out. Worse, he’s carelessly trod upon the lives of innocent bystanders. Whether or not Clarice is his sister, he has rather pointlessly upended her settled existence with his frenzied digging. That is to say nothing of the death of the shopkeeper.

For all his blind spots, rashness, and self-serving justifications, it’s hard to fault the narrator for most of his actions. Nostalgia is a powerful narcotic against the fear of death. In the end, of course, its effects wear off. Like Said’s men of genius, it is what the narrator creates out of this struggle against mortality that endures. Although he professes at several points to having composed his diary entries in haste and with no pretensions to literary style, he ought to receive the share of immortality due to one who fights so energetically, if not always effectively, against the dying of the light.

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Marshall Shord lives in Maryland. He is currently at work on a novel about the formation of the CIA.