61. Ler Brokeback Mountain antes do filme

Heath Ledger e Jake Gyllenhaal no filme "Brokeback Mountain"

Tenciono ver o filme, apesar de todo o estardalhaço à sua volta ser um indicador desfavorável e de preventiva desconfiança. Como motivação extra estou a ler, no original, o conto "Brokeback Mountain", de Annie Proulx, com apenas 35 páginas, entre algumas outras histórias passadas na paisagem agreste do Wyoming. "Brokeback Mountain" fecha o conjunto dessas histórias e parece que o filme está a aumentar o turismo por aquelas bandas. Annie Proulx é ainda autora do famoso livro "The Shipping News", que lhe valeu um prémio.

Partilho uns excertos de "Brokeback Mountain" (nota: é uma história sem muitos diálogos, em que os silêncios e o contexto paisagístico do Wyoming são sugestivos e falam por si):

Like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable - admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears - rose around them. Ennis stood as if heart-shot, face grey and deep-lined, grimacing, eyes screwed shut, fists clenched, legs caving, hit the ground on his knees.

"Jesus," said Jack. "Ennis?" But before he was out of the truck, trying to guess if it was heart attack or the overflow of an incendiary rage, Ennis was back on his feet and somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where they had been, for what they'd said was no news. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.

What Jack remembered and craved in a way he cold neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.

......

Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives.

......

"I didn't want none of either kind," said Jack. "But fuck-all has worked the way I wanted. Nothing never come to my hand the right way." Without getting up he threw deadwood on the fire, the sparks flying up with their truths and lies, a few hot points of fire landing on their hands and faces, not for the first time, and they rolled down into the dirt. One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.

.......

"Jack, I swear -" he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear anything and was himself not the swearing kind.

Around that time Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had first seen him, curly-headed and smiling and bucktoothed, talking about getting up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic obscenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron. And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.