Ana Paula Maia and that strange sense of justice

There's a character who enters the action with a name and surname from the start. It's Edgar Wilson, who lights his first cigarette and puts on his boots, grabbing his wallet and the keys to his truck before slamming the door and leaving the house. Across a territory of roads, mountains, and gas stations, Edgar, a solitary, reserved man, the only one who pays in cash, runs into an acquaintance named Espartacus. In passing, the latter tells him that the family of Milo, another acquaintance who died in a recent epidemic, wants to sell their slaughterhouse. "Would you agree to return to the slaughterhouse, Edgar?" he asks, knowing of his past in that place "with the stench of death" and converted into a human crematorium during the fatal epidemic. Espartacus wants to raise buffalo, but first warns him of a problem: there's a circus set up in the slaughterhouse; Milo's widow had rented part of the premises to them.

Wild Buffalo is one of those novels about tough, fearful, and imperturbable men, who look at each other sideways and spit on the ground while serious fires and other health catastrophes besiege small towns, written by Ana Paula Maia (Nova Iguaçu, 1977), one of the most recognized voices in contemporary Brazilian literature, with novels such as Bury Their Dead (2019) and Of Cattle and Men (2015), both with Edgar Wilson as the protagonist.

The animal intertwined with the human, flesh, blood, the masculine, the brutal, women as a threat and the fetish of the dead body reappear in a dry, direct and unfloral narrative, with short and disturbing paragraphs, as much as its characters, who wander between mysterious dialogues and a life that begins to be rebuilt between disappeared bridges and devastated regions.

In Wild Buffalo , Spartacus wants to restart his life and explains his business: “Buffalo are much better than cattle. Less cholesterol, less fat and calories. It's the future.” Edgar Wilson seems to be one of those who knows what he sees and what cannot be explained. Spartacus's proposal is in his head as he drives his truck along the roads, collecting the animals that have repopulated the region after the epidemic and are dying due to the increase in traffic on the highways.

There is confusion before certainty, a certain patina of poise and a sense of justice that circulates silently between a clown who appears dead and the circus characters who bring about an unwanted disturbance. It's impossible to think of the dead without thinking of the living, with dismembered animals along the way—"better dead than having to sacrifice them," one character tells Edgar—and the crusher that grinds and jams, but can never stop, with the background sound of quarry explosions.

“The terror that ravaged the earth for days still follows its path. Like the death that reverberates from the earth and the sky, like the mouth of the depths that forsakes men who walk beneath the sun,” reads like a synthesis of the ominous climate that stalks Edgar, Tomás—a former priest—a ghostly character named Bronco Gil, and a series of men and women who swarm between moments that seem to stretch out in the downtime of poisonous work.

Edgar Wilson, a simple man who does things amid harsh silences, cigarette butts, and coffee cups everywhere. “But there is no hell beneath our feet, nor a protective heaven above our heads. What exists is the emptiness that fills our thoughts. Above and below, the interval of the spectrum takes on shapes and contours to make us believe we are not governed by emptiness and loneliness,” writes the narrator, perhaps in a voice too lucid above the pale existence of her characters, but without ever being above them or failing to understand their tribulations.

In the midst of this desolate landscape, on the verge of being engulfed by a cataclysm, the days continue and a circus opens its doors to "travelers hungry for revelations."

Wild Buffalo , Ana Paula Maia. Trans. Mario Cámara. Eternal Cadence , 128 pages.