Let us begin, then, with the symbolism or metaphor of the gallows. This means of execution, by strangling the throat, can represent the instruments that prohibit or repress speech and, by extension, thought, and which can be represented by family, religion, school, in short, by all those forms of social control that end up imposing an ideology, almost always traumatically. Speech is the mark of the human and also of our existence. Through it, we exercise fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression and thought. In the short story, mechanisms of coercion prevent the character from speaking, from defending herself, as in the Third Station: "I sought at every moment to say a word, just one word, but the word did not come, did not come, did not come." The same impossibility of speech occurs in the Sixth Station: "You know more, that you can cry out your innocence. But you feel a lump in your throat and your tongue will stick to the roof of your mouth." Or in the Ninth: "and my voice sticks to my throat." "Lump" (travo) sends, by sound association, to the word "trava" (brake), which takes on the meaning of brake.
If the gallows are associated with the prohibition of speech, the cross, or crucifixion, refers to the ordeals of the flesh and, in this case, to the restraint of human passion. As a form of subjugation, the flagellum or whip was used by the Romans in the scourging of the flesh during the crucifixion ritual, including Christ's. The hair shirt was used by priests, especially (but not only) in the Middle Ages, to curb carnal desires. The act of crucifying can take on deeply symbolic dimensions: nails in the hands, feet, sword in the chest (or heart). Symbolically, the instruments of caress (hands), of going and coming (feet), and what is conventionally considered the seat of human sentiment (the heart) are manacled (or crucified).
In summary: the fiction writer has created a narrative that, on a superficial reading, seems to speak of a condemned man. But in its depth, it speaks of the existing being, of the castration process of his speech and the manacling of his feelings. Mind and body are subjugated throughout the history or biography of each of us. There is only, and this is also clear in the narrative, a paradisiacal moment in our lives: childhood. Numerous poets and even philosophers speak of this magical or Edenic moment. Miguel Jorge's tortured character tries to "machine-gun memory with successive scenes of good childhood." But this paradise, like the other, does not withstand transgression. "The leap to freedom" came. And this is usually the moment when almost all of us succumb. From here on, we bear the guilt. Avarmas carries, as a mark of human fall, this stigma throughout its pages, although the author is often visibly ironic about religion. Especially Christian-Catholicism, which imbues us with the bitterness of this feeling, so ancient that it is lost in the night of time.
Social control is necessary. A society where its members each exercise unlimited freedom cannot be conceived. It would be chaos. But there are societies, including some primitive ones, that achieve this control in a less traumatic way. They say that an indigenous person never hits a child or says no to a child. Little by little, the necessary limits are imposed on the members of the community and their own scale of values is created, in a more natural way, it seems. The character created by Miguel, at a certain point in the narrative, exclaims: "In the beginning, the beginning, the beginning." That is, in the beginning, the precept, the rule, the law. The repetition of the word may seem like mere wordplay. But those who think so are mistaken. This discourse has the force of poetry.
To understand this short story by Miguel Jorge, it will be necessary to look at man in our time. Far from the Theocentrism of the Middle Ages, the Anthropocentrism of the Modern Age, and closer to Rationalism, which comes from afar and enters the Contemporary Age with one foot, the man of Avarmas coincides with the Technologism of the Cybernetic Era. Similar to the machine, which de-centers him and makes him go "around within himself," this man, always searching for himself and the meaning of life, struggles in the "no sense" of a totally dehumanized existence. Hence hatred in place of fraternity: "the multitude in progressive anger (...) in an oscillation of bodies and teeth" (I); "all of them [the doors] harbored hatred, injustice, infamy (...) bloody insults" (II); "my torturers are always with me (...) lashes and insults (...) all involved in their own anger" (III); "and the words of insults and spitting returned" (V). Everything progresses in hatred and inhumanity, "insults (...) scourges" (XII), until the character is trampled, which precedes "the dry sound of the hammer hammering nails" in the Fourteenth Station, which closes the narrative. The short story suggests that there are other modern ways of crucifying the Other. And hatred, stemming from the emptying of fraternity, from the dehumanization of our historical time, is perhaps the cruelest and most effective of these forms.
Avarmas shows a flagrant inversion: man is a beast, wicked, devoid of human content; the animal, in turn, is anthropomorphized, humanized, good. The narrative "A vendedora de selos" (The stamp seller) illustrates this very well, if we compare it with "Décima Quarta Estação" and the one called "Avarmas," which open and close the book, respectively. In these two short stories, but not only in them, we have refinements of human malice. The view of the animal in "A Vendedora de Selos" is already much more generous than that of man in the aforementioned stories. Let's see: "The pairs demonstrate the most intense friendship and never part, in an endless exchange of caresses. When one dies, the other remains singing its useless plea, the mournful chirp of inconsolable birds."
Throughout the work, themes are reiterated, such as the massacre of the human in man; the process of liquidation of human freedom; human solitude; human emptiness; the millennial feeling of guilt that we inherit, via Christianity.
Miguel does not usually refuse themes. He even ventures into the underworld, reaching the extreme limits of human degradation with "Putein," where there are even indications of the desacralization of the sacred, with allusions to the Last Supper amidst a context involving human degradation. By capturing sordid human aspects, the author is in tune with Virginia Woolf's thought, who stated in an essay in 1929: "As long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and how centuries may pass, or hours, no one can say. But to sacrifice a hair of your opinion, a nuance of your colour, in deference to some God the Giver, or some Priest the Master, is to be so abjectly terrified of the Gods and the Priests that I can only think of it as a suicide."
Furthermore, Miguel Jorge freely moves across the boundaries that delimit the various species of short story, jumping, for example, from the allegorical in "Décima Quarta Estação" to the characteristic hesitation between the strange and the marvelous, or that hesitation between the real and the imaginary proper to the fantastic, about which Tzvetan Todorov speaks, present in "Véspera de Pânico" (Panic Eve) and "Vendedora de Selo" (Stamp Seller); from this to the absurd of "Numa Gota D'água" (In a Drop of Water), with total abolition of logic; from there to apparently fantastic narratives, created, for example, under the dreamlike or hallucinatory climate of a post-operative state still with the narrator character under the effect of anesthesia, as in "Jogo de argolas" (Ring Toss); or to others conducted by the stressed or shocked narrator's voice, "shackled between words," of a college entrance exam candidate, as can be seen in "Branco Sobre Branco" (White on White); or even by the voice of a woman with psychic disorders, searching for her dead son (in a visible atmosphere of the 1964 Revolution), as happens in the short story "Avarmas."
