Nudity and Wandering

in the Short Story “Punishment” (1963), by Sérgio Porto

Abstract

The short story “Punishment” (1963), by Sérgio Porto, features a narrator-protagonist, whose identity is presented in two chronotopes: boy (student in school days) and adult (narrator-protagonist). Recalling his school lessons, he mentions the figure of the teacher, Dame Margarida, and some classmates. Starting from a nostalgic narrative, the narrator-protagonist uses language connected to the symbolic, to the point that the story resignifies passages from the life of Jesus Christ. Following the symbolic language, the image of the teacher imprints the identity of the Messiah (Master of teachers) before the class (Jews and Romans), in which an anonymous student (vocative – boy) highlights the nudity, in the seriousness of teaching, and in himself, in the face of attempts at disorder. In this article, we hope, in light of the story, to measure how passages from the ministry of Jesus Christ bring nudity and possible methods of wandering, as a bias towards the resignification of identities of the Myth of the Wandering Jew.