Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes, P.'s Three Women, Trans. by Margaret A. Neves, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012
In a picaresque journey from youth to old age, P., a wealthy businessman who abhors his real name, tells the stories of his three greatest passions, his three greatest affairs, his three most erotic encounters: a married woman, a demanding mistress, and a childlike bride. But each of these three women hides a secret, and soon P. finds that he's caught between his fantasies and a truth that might be just as inconvenient as the name he's forbidden his lovers to speak. With no proper antecedent save perhaps the works of Vladimir Nabokov, Machado de Assis, and the early Philip Roth, this short novel—the only one published by the author during his lifetime—is a miracle of style, subtlety, wit, and grace, all employed by the mischievous P. to mask his collusion in his own amorous catastrophes.
A hidden classic of Brazilian literature, P.'s Three Women is a bonbon laced with slow-acting poison—but delicious nonetheless.
A little may well go a long way – and, of the trio of narrative sequences here, all told by the same man, the first is by far the most satisfying. That conceded, a spiralling sharpness, suggestive of the way a mind ages, prevails, and this short, elegant, stylised novella by a major Brazilian film scholar could as easily be titled The Changing Faces of Love.
P, the narrator, does not like his name, with good reason, as it is Polydoro, given in honour of his great-grandfather. The narrator is sufficiently headstrong to insist that no one use it. Interestingly, later in life he meets up with a troubled woman who pleads for an aspirated “H” to preface any utterance of her name. Eccentricity emerges as a minor theme in a work concerned with the communal quest for happiness in the form of love.
P is wealthy and, in addition to his obvious self-absorption, is also interested in politics. Set in São Paulo in the early 1970s, the action might well take place a century earlier. The huge influence of the Brazilian master Machado de Assis (1839-1908) presides over the narrative and, with it, his quasi-European tone. P lives in an old- money neighbourhood reminiscent of that in de Assis’s classic Dom Casmurro (1899).
From the witty, poignant opening sentences of the first sequence, Twice With Helena, Gomes, by his use of tone, pays obvious homage to de Assis. “If it hadn’t been for my arthritis I would never have met Helena again. I realise it’s inappropriate to begin a story of youth by alluding to arthritis, my own or hers, but the truth is that without this malady, our meeting in São Pedro 30 years later would never have occurred.”
Hints of a doomed romance surface and inspire an instant sympathy for the narrator, who refers to the “ardent supplications” directed heavenwards in the hope that he may be reunited with the love of his life. His attitude appears ironic and sophisticated, yet there is also a winning trace of pain: “if one stops to think about it, a man and a woman who are both over 50, arthritic, affluent, and living in São Paulo would sooner or later be bound to turn up at the same time in . . . the spa village where bourgeois and middle-class rheumatics reserve rooms in two or three principal hotels.”
Gomes is generous with detail. The narrator once had a friendly mentor, the professor, a bachelor, who caused much surprise when he married a younger woman. P returns from Europe to meet his friend. Plans are made to visit the older man and his new wife, Helena, at their home, with the intention of celebrating the narrator’s birthday.
On arriving at the professor’s country house the narrator is met by the respectful bride, who informs him that the professor has gone away but will return “within four or five days”. She has been appointed host in his absence, a task she undertakes with resigned and ritual formality.
Sexual tension is quickly introduced as Gomes allows the narrator to speak with an appealing candour. He is besotted. The professor’s wife prepares a lavish meal and appears intent on maintaining her distance.
Barriers then fall with a wild abandon. The sexual encounters are passionate, if impersonal. P is left bewildered and must promise to walk out of the professor’s life.
More than 30 years pass. The now middle-aged narrator listens as the calculations that underpinned the birthday celebration of long ago are explained with brutal clarity. It is here that Gomes achieves a level of emotional intelligence and regret that ensures P’s engagement with Helena lives on in the reader’s mind.
Early love leaves P scarred, if still optimistic. His relationship with Ermengarda is fraught. Although he is single, he cannot marry her because she is separated from her husband, not divorced. This sequence fails to fully convince. Ermengarda, despite her complicated history, never develops as a character.
The older P, now more experienced in life, is more remote. The end, when it comes, is expected, while the narrative appendix of sorts, in the form of a journal, appears hasty and forced.
Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes (1916-1977) is best known to film buffs as the biographer of the French poetic-realist film director Jean Vigo, who died in 1934, aged 29. Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite (1933) and L’Atalante (1934) influenced the French new wave during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Gomes was a film historian and critic, and P’s 3 Women, his only work of fiction, is written as a series of close-ups. A dramatic act dominates each sequence. The dimly lit sexual frenzy of the first unfolds in a mysterious languor of hopelessness. It is the most cinematic story, and the best.
A further two core actions feature in the subsequent narratives. These are blunter: a suicide and, finally, most spectacularly, a sudden blow prompted by a vulgar insult. “My reaction was so instantaneous that I only realised what I had done when I saw, covering more than half her face, the reddish mark left by my hand. A thread of blood was oozing out of her left nostril and a stronger flow from her mouth.”
In the middle sequence the narrator muses: “As in films, my mental images are not continuous. One scene cuts to another as though they have been spliced in the editing rooms of memory.”
This is an interesting little book: the first story is both bizarre and true, whereas the subsequent narratives read as raw literary exercises caught between genres. Still, P’s 3 Women, with its palpably European tone, is far more than a creative footnote to the work of a cinema scholar beguiled by eloquent images. -Eileen Battersby
The Brazilian film critic Paulo Emilio Sales Gomes' only novel was originally published in Portuguese (Tres Mulheres De Tres Pppes) in 1977, the year he died, at the age of 61. Living at leisure amidst a São Paulo haute bourgeoisie milieu, the somewhat neurotic P recalls his decidedly odd relationships with three different women. He is known as P because he hates his full name, Polydoro, which he forbids his lovers to say in full.
P has been a wealthy businessman, who now, in the autumn of his life, reflects on his extraordinary amours. Indeed, we really only get to know him through the prism of his relationships with the three women, whom he courted at various stages in his life.
The first story, Twice with Helena, is easily the best of the three tales, and it was adapted for television in Brazil over a decade ago. The story concerns the married Helena, who P meets through his old professor. When the professor discovers that he and Helena cannot have children, the couple arrange an emotionally costly plan of seduction involving the young P, whom the professor idolises. One could imagine Neil Jordan making a great new film from this story.
The second story, Ermengarda with an H, tells of Ermengarda, who is separated from her husband - not divorced - so P cannot marry her. The relationship is a disaster, with her family continually haunting the house. Meanwhile, the lady in question keeps two diaries, one blue, one purple-covered, in which she painstakingly writes two different versions of her relationship to P.
P's 3 Women is acutely perceptive in its psychological insights, exploring different perspectives of the same events with great narrative skill. "I was always sensitive to the charge of selfishness," P reflects in the second story. "My sense of guilt is sufficiently broad for me to comprehend that the fact of an accusation being unjust doesn't mean that it is undeserved; it is only a matter of collecting by other means the secret debts one owes the world."
In the final story, Her Times Two, the elderly P is married to a young woman in her teens, only known as Her. He fears hospitals and plans to move out of the neighbourhood if a hospital is built. He avoids doctors, and respects the manner in which his young wife manages to hide her doctor's visits and medicines from him. This final story seems overly-convoluted and a bit too enamoured with its own narrative games.
You will not race through the 136 pages of P's 3 Women, as P's reflections and observations are compacted and dense in this work, ably translated by Margaret E Neves. Those reflections make you pause and think, intrigued by the gamut of strange human behaviour on show. There is a slight touch of Borges, and also the feel of a book that might have been published in 1777, rather than 200 years later. Sales Gomes has been compared to Vladimir Nabokov, to the early Philip Roth and to the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis (1839-1908), whose celebrated short stories will shortly be published by Dalkey Archive. - Paddy Kehoe
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