The second death is Heringer’s. Heringer was a Brazilian artist and writer who moved energetically from medium to medium: poetry, prose, sound art, web art, photography, film. Many of his works combined his interests, like his debut novel, Glória (2012), which was accompanied by a book trailer Heringer filmed. Glória was shortlisted for the Prêmio Jabuti, a prominent Brazilian literary prize. His second novel, The Love of Singular Men (2016), was shortlisted for three more: the São Paulo Prize for Literature, the Rio Prize for Literature, and the Oceanos Prize. This was also his last novel; Heringer took his own life in 2018, a few weeks before his thirtieth birthday.
The disparate mediums of Heringer’s practice come together in The Love of Singular Men, translated into English by James Young, the winner of the 2022 Peirene Stevns Translation Prize. The novel unfolds through a series of numbered fragments, some as short as a paragraph, interrupted with line drawings and photographs. More traditionally narrated fragments are interspersed with formally experimental ones. The style is avant-garde but not unapproachable, since the novel quickly cultivates an intense emotional investment in the two young lovers. Fragments 1 through 66 slowly reveal how the two become close. Cosme’s death unravels us, and unravels the novel’s enumerations: successive fragments count down again, 65, 64, 63 . . . as we see how Camilo lives after the loss of his love.
These brief, energetic fragments recall Heringer’s years writing crônicas for the magazine Pessoa. Crônicas are a distinctively Brazilian genre of short pieces that are partly literary and partly journalistic, usually published as newspaper columns. Clarice Lispector, initially wary of the form, was eventually won over by the audience she attained as a cronista. “[C]olumnists, at least in Rio,” she wrote to a friend, “are very loved.” She later incorporated some of her columns into her novel Água Viva. Heringer published sixty-eight crônicas between 2013 to 2017, using the form to experiment with language, structure, and narrative. In one crônica, “My Father’s Shoes,” Heringer includes a list of just two items. In the first item, Heringer explicates his affection for a particular Robert Bringhurst poem, before using the enumerated form to leap into a meditation on his father’s death and wearing his father’s attire. In another crônica, Heringer assembles a small collection of anonymous comments posted on news websites and draws out insights about Brazilian society. The form (short, varied passages) and the content (participatory internet writing, the lingering material melancholy that remains after death) seem to have worked their way into Heringer’s novels as well.
The Love of Singular Men opens with a creation myth of a young planet: “hot, sickly yellow,” the traffic “coating the world with dirt.” In this unsentimental, swelteringly hot world, Camilo comes of age and observes those around him. In fragment 20, Camilo uses the forty other children at his school to establish a typology of humanity in vivid character sketches. A boy “[a]dored by his father, was never embarrassed to say he loved his friends.” A girl who “[d]reamed of living in America and marrying an American.” The descriptions are efficient and brutal: the “I. de A.C.” archetype is a person who is “[p]oor but driven. Bettered herself in order to defend the powers that let her.” There’s only one person who defies Camilo’s system and becomes singular: Cosme.
Fragmentation favors striking, pithy observations. It also favors juxtaposition, with its clearly delineated, swift transitions from one scene to the next. The Love of Singular Men is a study in contrasts: in his old age, Camilo is cynical and bitter (“almost Bernhardian,” as the critic Garth Greenwell has suggested); but Camilo at thirteen is openhearted and vulnerable. Certain fragments blaze with exuberance, as Heringer takes off running with a particular conceit (a myth, a list of objects, a conversation in the form of a script) and pushes it to the limit. This approach reflects Heringer’s admiration for César Aira, the feverishly productive Argentinian writer whose stories revel in extending a whimsical premise as far as it can go. Through these fragments, we see Camilo’s initial resentment of Cosme—an unfamiliar, older boy intruding into his life—transform into affection.
The novel beautifully depicts the raw, unrepentant sexuality of a young boy trying to understand his desires. In an early scene, Cosme tries to draw an imagined superhero, without success:
I had a problem with Captain Bras’s calves. A boy doesn’t draw another boy’s butt, a boy doesn’t even look at, doesn’t even think about the front of another boy’s pants. I felt an anxiousness I couldn’t put my finger on and looked for something else to read.He fumbles his way towards masturbation, towards an indistinct recognition of his desires (“I hadn’t developed the butcher’s craft,” he says, “of picturing only the parts of the body that would make me cum”) when Cosme enters the room. They speak; Cosme is calm, Camilo embarrassed. When Cosme leaves the room, Camilo watches him go, “his buttocks two engine pistons.”
We already know the boys will fall in love, but that doesn’t lessen the joy of seeing it happen. A first kiss becomes an initiation into the “helplessness” of adult life:
Then he gave me a kiss. He grabbed my two arms and tugged (gently, so as to not knock me down), and I went, Bettishly, Davishly . . . it was as though we’d had this desire forever.
I would never feel safe again. I discovered it right then. My heart started to cough freezing air into my veins . . . A helplessness. During our first serious illness, helplessness. On our important birthdays every ten years, especially the first, helplessness. Then you get used to it. Nowadays, I go to the bakery, helpless, I buy bread, helpless, processed ham, helpless, cheese, which is more expensive, only every now and again.
But Heringer ends the scene with a parenthetical that introduces a subtle note of dread:
(It’s unlikely the killer was nearby at the time. But in my memory this scene almost has the faint smell of cinnamon.)
A kiss always creates complications. But a kiss between two boys, in 1970s Brazil, can incite cruelty and violence. I was brittle with fear when I read the scene where Cosme leans in to kiss Camilo in front of their school friends. This flagrant act of affection places them both in danger, but after a moment of shock, the other boys shrug it off. “They had an obligation of anger, disgust and mockery,” Camilo realizes, “but no one wanted to start.” This quiet, moving acceptance is undercut by an awareness of what comes next for Cosme. “He’d had a test that morning,” Camilo tells us. “He never found out his grade.”
Fourteen days. That’s how long the two get to bask in their love. Their first kiss takes place on a Sunday in August. Cosme is murdered two weeks later. The extreme brevity of their relationship haunts Camilo as he tries to recall, decades later, what Cosme’s face looked like: “a worn-out image, buried under fourteen thousand re-rememberings.” Camilo copes by sinking into a categorizing, archiving frenzy. He holds onto small objects and ephemera Cosme gave him: pebbles in two colors, a box of matches, a red lotus flower, a napkin wrapped around a cream bun, long since devoured. He also hoards paperwork: Cosme’s birth certificate, vaccination records, report card. “He was terrible at math, but excellent at science, what’s that meant to tell me?” The material and administrative detritus of someone’s life never captures what makes us love them.
What does capture this love is a moving passage—formally striking and powerfully affecting—in which Heringer uses his interest in participatory web art to convey the strength of Camilo’s love. “I loved my Cosme,” Camilo tells us, “like you loved your first love, who was called Bruno or Pablo or Ilyich . . . Loved him like Lucas loved Sophia . . . like Thiago loved Diego.” The names, which continue on for four pages, were drawn from a website Heringer created to solicit the names of other people’s first loves. By including these names in the novel, Heringer captures something about the universal, all-encompassing nature of young love. “I’m less singular because of these names,” Heringer wrote. “They are my way back to tenderness . . . no one is left out of the story.”
How does Camilo make his way back to tenderness? When we meet present-day Camilo, he is three times older and still mourning Cosme. After decades away, he has returned to Queím. “I want to die right where I was born,” he tells us. “Everyone likes a little symmetry.” Shortly after he returns, he recognizes a young boy on the street: it’s Renato, the son of Cosme’s killer.
Camilo’s interest in Renato feels unsettling, especially when he takes in the boy and becomes his caretaker. It’s a strange thing to do, and the why is left unexplained. At one point, Camilo speaks to a friend about another young boy that has gone missing in the neighborhood. “People disappear easily,” Camilo observes, especially young orphans like Renato. The naïve Renato settles into Camilo’s apartment, eating bread-butter-mortadella sandwiches and watching TV. He’s afraid to leave and return to the street. We’re afraid of what will happen if he stays. In one of the most unnerving fragments, Camilo visualizes how he might kill Renato in such psychologically and materially vivid detail that death seems certain. It seems as if Camilo is pursuing a certain symmetry in death: the boy’s father killed Camilo’s love, and so Camilo must kill the boy. Camilo imagines what weapon to use (a bread knife), where (the ribs), and how to hide the body.
Camilo visualizes what to do, but he doesn’t do it. Instead he buys his favorite childhood books for the boy. Decides not to beat him, because that’s no way to discipline a kid. Takes him to the hospital when he has the flu. Buys him a computer. Begins to think of him as his son. Camilo’s love for Renato starts as mysteriously as his love for Cosme started. “Where love begins no one remembers,” he reflects. And similarly, “[h]ate never starts when it might.”
This suggests something about the obscurity of love—the obscurity, really, of the actions and encounters contained in a life. Love remains the great enigmatic mystery of our lives. Its originating logic can’t be disinterred: the reasons for loving this person, in this moment, disintegrate when we try to observe them. Heringer’s novel explains certain things—the brutal, horrifying circumstances of Cosme’s death—and leaves others vague. Later in life, Camilo learns that his father was complicit in the dictatorship’s torture program. Is this inherited guilt what allows Camilo to forgive Renato for his father’s sins? Or something else?
The late literary theorist Erich Auerbach contrasted works of literature that clearly explicate the motivations of their characters, and “leave nothing . . . half in darkness and unexternalized,” with works that privilege the unsaid and unknown. In the second kind of work, a character’s motivations might “remain unexpressed . . . only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches.” That obscurity draws the reader into a relationship to the story that is emotionally richer, Auerbach suggested, because the text is “permeated with the most unrelieved suspense.” The suspense in The Love of Singular Men comes from its movements forward and back and time, where information is revealed in a way that continually unsteadies us, inducing anticipation and fear. Why tell us that Cosme and Camilo fall in love before we see it happen? Why tell us that Cosme will die, almost as soon as we meet him? It is to Heringer’s credit that he gives the ending away, almost as soon as the story starts—and yet we read on, hoping to learn something about love, and about how to live after its loss.
