RAT SEMINAR (Seminário dos ratos)
by Lygia Fagundes Telles, 1977

Lygia Fagundes Telles published 4 novels and 14 books of short stories in four decades. In all of these works Telles discusses love, hatred, and life in the immediacy of death. The stories are usually set in several regions of Brazil. Tigrela and Other Stories, her only collection of short stories in English, has a sample of some of Telles's main themes.

"Rat Seminar" ("Seminário dos ratos"), the title story of a 1977 collection, is set in the politically repressive Brazil of the mid-1970s. The working metaphor here is rats, functioning both as a source of danger and as a reminder that the silent, repressed masses can at any moment explode into revenge and political activity. In another short story, "The 'X' of the Problem," Telles also comments on a specific historical phenomenon, the enslavement of the people to a (malfunctioning) TV set. Here, however, the people are alienated, narcotized by the media, and will not take measures to change their situation.

In "Rat Seminar" the theme is corruption, involvement of foreigners—Americans—in internal affairs, and the fear the powerful feel of the repressed. In the beginning of the story the narrator informs us that there have been problems with the rodent population in the country; they are multiplying by the millions, despite all efforts to destroy them. A special office, RATESP, has been formed to coordinate the war against the rodents. Now in its seventh seminar, the RATESP members are gathered in an isolated country house especially restored for this purpose. Among the authorities gathered for the seminar is an American from Massachusetts, guest of the director of the Armed and Unarmed Forces. In the conversation that opens the story, the chief of Public Relations informs the secretary of Public and Private Welfare that the American is a specialist in rats and in electronic journalism. The secretary protests, "The rats are ours, the solutions have to be ours. Why demonstrate our flaws to everybody else?" The American, he says, will "go tooting his horn all over."

Foreign interference in internal affairs is but one of the problems, and even the secretary is afraid that his telephone has been bugged. Of course, the American is the first suspect: "Wherever these people are, there's always a cursed tape recorder." They drop the subject, exactly because they are afraid that somebody is listening to them.

At one point in the conversation the secretary asks the chief if he has heard something, a sound that gets "louder and softer …in waves, like the sea." The chief says that he has not heard anything. The secretary remarks that he hears too well and then relates an episode during the Revolution of '32, when he was the first one in his group to sense the approach of enemies.

The noise disappears, and the conversation continues with the chief commiserating with the secretary about his gout. The chief says, "It could be a drop of water! It could be a drop of water!" Here Telles is playing with two levels of signification. On one level there is the play between the Portuguese word gota, which means both "drop" and "gout." But it also refers to Chico Buarque de Holanda's protest song "Gota d'água," which was very popular in Brazil in the mid-1970s. When the chief excuses himself by saying that this is merely a song people sing, the secretary retorts that "the people are nothing but an abstraction."

The contrast between the living conditions of the starving population and those of the people in power is immediate. For the authorities gathered for the seminar, the dinner will be lobster and Chilean wine. Obviously, only a wine from a country under an even more repressive regime is above suspicion. Pinochet's name is mentioned affectionately.

Things now begin to happen quickly. The rats, which have chewed the wires of telephones and cars, invade the whole house. The chief escapes death only because he barricades himself inside the refrigerator. When he finally leaves it, the house is completely destroyed, the food eaten, the furniture broken. Not an abstraction or background noise anymore, the rats themselves are now holding their own seminar in the Conference Room. There are no other humans to be seen.

In this story Telles uses an element of the uncanny to represent other tensions. Death is a common theme in her stories, in this case the death of a political regime: the corrupt old order is replaced with another, now composed of those who were previously threatened with extermination.

—Eva Paulino Bueno