Lord

by João Gilberto Noll

  Wiping my eyes with a handkerchief, I apologized, looking primarily at my English benefactor by my side. I apologized again, this time to the whole audience (I realized there were many young people among them) and I slowly walked out of the auditorium. I walked the streets with a mixture of shame and the pride of duty accomplished. I had said things to the public that I might use again in future lectures. Perhaps everything was just simple repetition, which people vehemently accepted because I knew how to stun them with my poetic rhetoric. The problem this time—if there was really a problem besides my not knowing how to renew myself—was that I didn’t remember anymore. What I knew was that I was here in England, in its capital, having been called upon by an Englishman who seemed to need my services badly enough that without them his own endeavors could not progress. This I would never forget, because I still had the hope that if I carefully guarded the nucleus around which my story formed at that moment, I might one day recover the memory of what sustained that nucleus, its entanglements and consequences, its rhymes even.

  I walked by a unisex beauty salon and decided to go in. The girl offered me a magazine. I was pondering the light brown color I wanted for my thinning hair: a few tufts here and there topped with a bald spot. I sat down and the Malaysian hairdresser asked me if I wanted a short cut. I said I needed to color my hair. And I pointed to the picture of a young man on the wall. He had the hair color I dreamed about.

  I could take the barber’s cape from around my neck and get out of there, give up on the idea of making myself more artificial. But no, I repeated to her: That’s the tone I want, please…

  The dye trickled down my temples and mixed with my makeup, making a damned mess. The dye continued to trickle; crusts of foundation crumbled from my face, falling onto the fabric she had put on me for protection. Was it humiliating? I didn’t know the meaning of that word anymore. Things no longer offended me enough. Protecting my self-esteem was no longer necessary because I had serious suspicions that I was no longer the same man inside.

  Now I could see. I was a light brown-haired fellow, just like that handsome young man on the wall, and I was so rejuvenated that I felt I had been fully absolved at last for any damage I might have caused. I looked like so many men walking the streets of London—I could pass as one of them. My lack of definition was already greater than me, although I had lost myself and begun to suspect that even my English boss couldn’t do anything to bring me back to me. I needed to keep up this task of being everyone somehow, because without it I wouldn’t even make it as far as the corner: without asking anyone, I happened to have overcome being the individual whom I had mechanically created for other people. I had to find a new source for my new formation, even now in my fifties, and that fountain would come from him, that light brown-haired man with makeup on, who lived in London for the time being without exactly remembering why.

  The crowd on the street sported that unrestrained energy people have when they leave the office, unless the London winter’s early darkness was deceiving me and it was not yet time for their workdays to be over. Suggestible or not, I walked with more agility in their midst, listening to bits of stories, foolishnesses, quiet aspirations, confessions that my ears aborted in my eagerness to keep walking in the same direction. If I could be this man who pulsed stronger inside me, I would try with all my strength to stay here in London; now, yes, and I would write another story—I would publish in English the transformation of myself into an alien, but the transformation that would end up being morbid if I didn’t steer it along a straight course. I would live in Bloomsbury. The very man who had summoned me to London would not recognize me, and I would lose all ties to him. I would become one of those immigrant authors without a precise nationality, without a flag to unfurl at their lectures or conferences. Everything was melting in my head, like the hair color and makeup trickling down my pathetic face in the mirror. I felt that my steps were more graceful now, in strange unison with the swift rhythm of the crowd.

  Oh, I was mistaken again. The fact was that I was losing direction. I rambled along until I reached the banks of the Thames, my first sighting of it. There were not many people along its edges, and the cold froze me to the bone. I had already become a person who a police officer might find sleeping frozen in the streets; a man who, when responding to the questions of some authorities, would have no documents, language, or memory. Punished in a solitary cell for years and years. Or, rather, released without any trouble by a young, inexperienced policeman on his first rounds, and from whom would pour rays of sympathy for this heap of flesh without a name, destiny, or home.

  Although today I was closer to becoming that man than ever before—I only had the slight guarantee that I wouldn’t fall to the gutter of the Englishman sparsely financing me—a gentleman was simultaneously rising inside me, certainly the dandy I had never succeeded in becoming in Brazil. Yes, I was suffering from deep amnesia, especially about certain occasions, but I hadn’t forgotten that this new gentleman had the wits of the boy who had walked into the cold lake, thus he wouldn’t drown despite the shadow clouding his mind. I would not drown either. I would rise as another, whole and triumphant. I didn’t care that people on the sidewalk didn’t notice me, that to them I blended with everything else: it was from being separate from the crowd that I was constructing my new face, my new memories. For now, yes, I was nobody. But soon I would approach everyone with my new face and a story I could tell from the first verse. Yes, it would be written in verses, and I would recite them for my new audiences.

  The Englishman knocked on my door the next morning. I woke up. He told me not to worry, and that he would take me to the hospital to see if everything was all right. I asked for a moment to change clothes. We took the 55 and got off at Bloomsbury. I could hear our steps; the silence was brutal. We passed a sign for the British Museum. I wanted to make a comment, for example, that Rimbaud used to visit the Museum’s library. My voice didn’t come out because I was sure that anything I said would sound alien—the man at my side was worried and he couldn’t hide it.

  I filled out a form at reception. We entered the medical unit. The Englishman looked like a hospital employee, such was his ease in the halls. He asked me to sit on a vacant bed. I sat down. Someone who appeared to be a doctor arrived. He began to examine me. “Yeah,” he said with some harshness, then he asked me to lie down. He called a nurse. She handed him some instruments. And the doctor stuck a needle in my vein. I can’t remember feeling such bliss in my whole life. The medication flowing into me had the numbing effect of pulling me out of the air. For the next few hours I wouldn’t have to do anything to try and create continuity with things. What’s more, I would have no fear of my destiny from that moment forward, which would be expected, boring, as it is in any patient under medical care in the ward of any hospital. I didn’t believe anything worse could happen…this was it! I trusted, on the contrary, that during my stay the man throbbing inside me, whom I still didn’t know, would have better conditions under which to come out. That when I awoke from the anesthetic, I would start living within another hypothesis of myself, and that I would work on it in secret, without my English friend noticing any change in my character or on the surfaces of my body. They had me hospitalized for some reason I didn’t understand. I would use it to be born.

  I died during the time I was sedated. When I woke up, I saw a nurse with an unfriendly face. She just said everything was fine and I could go. They had identified something about my health. I asked what kind of exam they had done. She didn’t understand me, or she preferred to stay quiet. I left the hospital, out into Bloomsbury Square. That was the neighborhood I would want to live in…there, where they had doused me in it for a period of time I couldn’t figure, perhaps to verify whether I had any signs of a health problem that might keep me from fulfilling my obligations to their official program. Or was the program less than official, just a byproduct of minds with some shadow power? I was involved in the plot of some lowbrow spy novel, an
d was now inoculated with some substance that would make me even more submissive—I, especially because of my clouded mind, would give them the key to discovering whatever it was I could not foresee. I was the fool of a global citadel. I would serve them in some task whose meaning I couldn’t understand. But I was not going to cry or feel regret. And taking a plane back to Brazil was out of the question.

  The vein where they had stuck in the needle was sore when I folded my arm. I was on a corner, wondering what to do. If I went back home to Hackney, would it still be mine? Would the key I had still open the door? The wind cut into my neck; I raised my collar. If I called the Englishman it’d just go to his damned voicemail. In my mind, I had always belonged to London, there was no other city, no other country. When I returned to that lone image from my childhood in Brazil, I used my own hands to finish drowning that child who was always counting the days until he drowned. My childhood had been in these very streets where I now shivered with cold. Adolescence, youth, adulthood, always here. Not that I had a special love for all this that was always the same. It rained and I drooled. I could not contain the saliva in my mouth, perhaps because of some side effect of the procedure to which I was subjected at the hospital. I was like a child who didn’t have the strength to express himself, drooling. If I felt hungry, cold, thirsty, in pain, none of that required me to bare myself to another person, because in this country I only had the Englishman to expose myself to, and I now had serious doubts he was still available to me. Maybe I was very sick and they no longer had any use for me. Who knows. But that hypothesis seemed a little remote to me now.

  That’s when I walked into the British Museum. Tourists from all over. I went to the Egyptian exhibit. I admired their distant gods. And I was enchanted by the smallest image in the museum, tiny: Apis, the god who was a bull. Exactly what I was for all those English people who wanted to make me sick. Yes, I was now seeing myself in a true mirror, and they would not mess with me. I didn’t need mirrors in public bathrooms anymore, or even my own mirror at home; I was Apis, I could walk all over London if I felt like it—through every alley, through the parks, and I could even fast, like they no longer knew how to do.

  What if I went to a pub then? Not to get a drink or to eat something, though I hadn’t put anything in my mouth for days, besides one or two glasses of water to keep the bull standing. I went into a pub called The Bloomsbury. Let others look at me, let them see the other person within me. Perhaps the fact that I didn’t drink or eat but just stood there staring at nothing might call somebody’s attention to me. The waiter would come, I’d say I just wanted to rest, I just left the hospital and need to rest. Okay, maybe order some mineral water so the waiter will leave me alone. But I would stand there, not wanting to sit down. That would kindle the curiosity of one or another of the pub’s patrons. That’s what I needed in London. The attention of someone other than the Englishman who had been missing for I don’t know how many days now as I had lain unconscious for that undetermined amount of time at the hospital. A drunk came up to speak with me. He complained about his wife. I took sips of my mineral water as if to savor the voice that addressed me, even if he did not distinguish me from anybody else… after all, he was a drunk. I felt his alcoholic breath as if it were the only shower I felt like taking. I didn’t interrupt his speech, expressed no opinion, though I thought his wife was a lost cause. The atmosphere gave me the impression of a medieval tavern: a sourness in the air, bodies smelling badly, especially mine, which hadn’t changed its clothes in a long time. Everything itched, my genitals, my chest, my scalp that still stubbornly burned by the dye. Oh, I had forgotten to check my appearance in the mirror, to see if I were still the man who had already changed so much, if I had already become someone else completely or if the hospital had at last been able to reconstitute the old features I’d left behind in Brazil. Where had I lost the power of recollection? I was only concerned with what I had gotten myself into, the city of London in winter, and in that moment, in the pub with the drunkard telling me about the extramarital achievements of his youth, then his daughter suddenly dead in the arms of his crying wife; a convulsion made him grab my neck as if he were going to strangle me, his fingers tightening on my jugular, suddenly my heart in flames—I drop the glass of water, it breaks, everyone looks—this is my only reaction; I am saved, hopelessly saved again.

  Saved and drooling. Maybe this uncontrolled slobbering doesn’t offer a solution. Yes, now I’m being watched by everyone in the pub, as I had hoped. Not because I knocked the glass over and was about to be strangled. But because I’m slobbering and still have the nerve to frequent a pub. I might ask: What makes me a man with such a lack of civic decorum for an evening drinking with friends? I could ask, but I don’t, for one reason: none of this will matter tomorrow, when I’ll be living the life of that man who is still lying in the hospital bed in Bloomsbury—that man stayed there while I was able to escape, thanks to the nurse’s bad intentions. There lies a petrified version of me, with no desire to control the world or what belongs to it, a waiting stone. I will return in the dead of night; I will lift the sheet and lie down. And when the Englishman returns, he will see that the experiment was successful. I’ll be that other one, ready to lecture in public squares about the issues that concern his fellow scholars, who still insist on hiding themselves.

  But let’s leave him there, in his well-deserved sleep at the hospital. The one slobbering here will try to find his house in Hackney. I take the 55—what would I do without this bus? I don’t need to force the lock. The key opens the door easily. The apartment is still mine. Fruit in the refrigerator. Offerings from my benefactor. Bananas, grapes, tangerines. A note on the kitchen counter asks for receipts for everything I buy from now on—they need to track my expenses. I walk dizzily around the house…certainly a result of the procedures at the hospital. How long will the side effects last? Ah, the mirror, there is always the mirror to keep me honest: I have the face of a beast. The remains of my hair are disheveled, a heavy frown…an angry Beethoven without deafness or music. What I feel inside does not correspond to my disturbed face. I float on dizziness while my expression burns with sweat, blood pumping from my nostrils. Something tells me that I won’t survive the wind outside, or London, or much less the trip back to Brazil. But they’ll call me to the big conference and I’ll tell them who they are. A knock on the door. It’s the owner of the apartment, the Vietnamese man. His father owns half of Hackney. He wants to measure my bedroom window, the Englishman asked him to install curtains. The Englishman wants to hide me from the neighbors. They’ll take away my view of that dry tree readying itself for spring. I ask him to come in. He is very young and doesn’t like to talk. I sit on the bed and he takes the window’s measurements. I’ll have him once more when he installs the curtains. He doesn’t look me in the eye. It occurs to me to grab the edge of the sheet and wipe my bleeding nose. I apologize to the Vietnamese man, the owner of the apartment. I tell him this has happened with my nose since I was a child. I say I’ll make some tea. He says that he can’t today. He’ll take some when he comes back with the curtain. He shuts the door behind him. Will he really come back and cover the window? I pick up some fruit: grapes, mandarins, cherries, strawberries, and wrap them in the tablecloth… People start coming in, I peer through the curtain, onto the scene where I’ll utter the words they expect from me… I don’t know what to do with that bundle of fruit in my lap. I’m waiting backstage for the conference to start. I lie in bed with the fruit on top of me. I see blood on the pear from my nasal stream. I fall into a heavy sleep. The Vietnamese man is not gone yet. Or has he come back? He looks at me from the bedroom doorway and asks if he can come in to measure the window. I murmur yes. He wears a pair of jeans and a blue hooded jacket. I see him from behind, his close haircut shining black. The Vietnamese man turns to me and says the curtain will be ready in three days. I try to get up and walk him to the door, though this etiquette is not necessary since this is his house. I sneak out,
hugging the walls; he descends the stairs at a fantastic speed. When I get to the door I see bright lights outside. The evening is shining crazily. I think everything is the result of the hospital procedures. I close the door. My shirt is stained with blood. Where’s the bull I had been carrying with me?

  I was a soldier, wounded by circumstance. But the war was not over, and I pressed forward. Even if climbing those steps back to bed ended up costing me my life. My vision was cloudy. At the top of the stairs, the Englishman looked at me. He could indeed show up at any moment—I had to live with that possibility… I knew I was not even a tenant in my own body any longer, a piece of me had stayed behind, lying in that hospital bed, and I was aware that I was no longer a tenant of my apartment either: here was the owner, suddenly knocking on the door to take the window’s measurements, here was the Englishman at the top of the stairs, before I had the time to clean myself up in what I had until now considered to be my home… My vision was cloudy, but I already knew his silhouette by heart. I scrambled up the steps, not knowing what action the Englishman would take when he got close. Would he take me back to the hospital, put me to bed, or throw it in my face that I was no longer part of his plans?