Lord

by João Gilberto Noll

  Just before I reached the top of the stairs, I fell. I clung to his shoes, dirt was stuck to them by London’s humidity. I clung to them as a wounded soldier would cling to the trunk of a tree so he might rise again and continue to rage in battle. This Englishman had definitely changed my life, and I would make that clear to him with every minute I still had left. I would completely dedicate myself to his plan. We were in the same battalion, and it didn’t matter how much the invading army pressed me to negate everything I had tried to be. Name, nationality, race, religion. It was numbing trying to make sense of the new elements of my citizenship. I was that classic character with nothing left to lose. With nearly nothing, I could be a king. For me, someone was sleeping in the Bloomsbury hospital. At this point, I didn’t know if I would wake up. I could only count on myself, here, clutching the Englishman’s dirty shoes. He pulled away. I drooled more and more, as if weeping from my mouth. My eyes still resisted clarity. They were my two sentinels, seeing only fog. I crawled into bed. I dragged myself up onto the blankets and laid on my belly with great difficulty. Lying on my stomach, I stayed. My eyes didn’t want to close. They stared at the lilac wall as if wanting to retain that color for all eternity. I felt a warm weight descending over my body. It lulled me down, hot and comfortable, until I fell asleep…

  I could say I fell asleep because I definitely lost consciousness. It was as if a factory of ideas, memories, and dreams collapsed upon me in bed. Surely I could not call that sleep. The weight of that clash of images pushed itself onto me, tossing my body and mind around at its whim, and I sensed that when I woke up I would be reincarnated as a result of this weight, whose appearance I couldn’t discern without risk of interrupting the transformation.

  Bewildered, I woke and sat up. The covers and sheets seemed to have barely survived a hurricane. Why had I accepted this suffering? Why didn’t I rejoice in noticing that my hard cock had come back to life? My chest, my arms…of a modest gymnast. Would I know how to stay awake? I walked naked around the house to see if I would run into anyone. There was no sign of any presence. I opened the refrigerator. I drank water from a bottle. I leaned against the kitchen sink. Showing off my cock. It was the first time in so long that I had felt uncontrollably horny. Right there I relieved myself in three, four strokes. I fell on the floor with my sperm spilled on the tile. Another damned police car drove by with its loud siren… From now on, I would have all the sex I wanted in London. I would have fun, I would pass the time, while I waited for the Englishman and his invisible cabal to decide what to do with me. Why couldn’t I be like any other Englishman? I would do anything for a British passport—I was sure that by now I would never find my Brazilian passport again, even if I searched all over the house. I had shoved it into some hole in my memory. I ran my finger through the thin semen and sang an old Carnival song. Wasn’t today, after all, Fat Tuesday?

  From the kitchen window, I watched my Turkish neighbor resting on his bed, watching TV in the early evening. My drunken companion at the pub had complained about his wife, but the Turk here seemed just to want to rest, surely feeling at home in this country for some time now. A feeling I didn’t have. I didn’t rest, didn’t stroll around with my weapons set aside, and didn’t work. Everything exerted itself indifferently, forcing me to prove myself. The Turk remained in his bed. I doubted he fully understood what the Brits were saying on the TV. I had seen him on the street with his countrymen speaking their language. Nothing else caught his attention beyond his memories of the fatherland and the images on the screen. I wanted to be him for a moment, there, devoted only to resting at home. I was beginning to realize that I had fled from a situation in Brazil. I was not sure which one—“where is my memory?” I had authored books; I had brought them here. I ran to the living room. There they were above the mantel. I didn’t regret them. But, yes, they had stolen time from me so that they could be standing there. Of course, it was because of them I was in England. It was for them that I no longer wanted to go back to where they had sprouted. I couldn’t be seen exactly as an amnesiac, but I was nothing but the discarded pulp of my books. Ah, I wish they could return wholly to my mind here in this distant country. And that they would add themselves up within me, so I could extract from them the eloquence I needed to earn my bread. I approached them, I ran my hand over each volume, but I realized I had become illiterate. Their titles didn’t tell me anything, their letters were frigid. I touched the dusty covers: yeah, not so long ago I was living for them, because of them.

  The phone rang. A man named Mark, a professor of Latin American Studies at Empire University, asking me for an interview. I looked at the editions lined up on the mantel and said, “Okay.” He invited me to pay him a visit and have dinner afterward. When he gave me his address, a street that goes from London Bridge toward the south side of the city, I realized I was excited again. I’ll make a pact with the mirror, I murmured, hanging up the phone. I won’t look at my image anymore, and in return, I’ll keep wanting more. I ran into the bathroom, picked up the mirror, and flipped it over. I would be faceless; I would avoid any reflection of my features. Blind to my own image, I would reinvent myself through those who had no investment in my face. That would become my task in London since I had a bus pass for another five days and could travel around the city. In any case, the mirror was still there, hanging backwards but there; and if I had to run away tomorrow or the next day, I could still take a last look at myself to remember whom I was carrying with me.

  I left to visit the professor well before it was time. I went down to the city center. I crossed London Bridge on foot, the Thames rippling in the cold wind. I didn’t know this part of the city so I walked around. I found an old market. Rabbits, lambs, fish hanging upside down. Cheese, vegetables. I went into a cathedral they said Shakespeare frequented. I walked down its center aisle. In the second row, an old man was blowing his nose. I heard someone call, Sir, sir. I turned around, and it was the man, gesturing for me to take my cap off. I turned away from him with my hat still on my head, I was not going to take it off, no, no. The old man came running after me. I hurried on. Just as I felt I’d escaped from his chase, once again on the outskirts of the market, a few sudden drops began to fall, something common in the city at this time of year. I felt it necessary to be there, catching the drizzle that didn’t really get me wet. I felt it necessary to kill time—in fact, I didn’t care if I had been killing time during my entire stay in London, I had come to this edge of the world for that, to occupy an intermission without end. To some degree meeting Professor Mark would create a situation I could embrace with open arms, without thinking about how the winter afternoon was fading quickly and if I stayed away from the house on Mare Street for too long I would not be able to work the lock when I returned home. Ah, there was still an hour left before my meeting with Professor Mark. I tried to smile at the passersby, trying to give a general sense that I was well and happy. Many people responded. They smiled, too. Especially the elderly. Some even showed their yellow teeth, their delusions of teeth.

  If everything went as I hoped, Professor Mark would become someone that supported me in the city. He would speak of his sleepless night, of his little health problems. And I of mine. If he was counting on me having something to say about my books, of course, he would be disappointed to the extent that he would then try to avoid me. But if we were to become friends, if he were to show me the ins and outs of London as if I were dear to him, I could wait more comfortably for the Englishman’s decisions. I would have fun with Professor Mark; we would exchange our impressions about this stage of our lives, because I’d bet he was around my age, although he was a man with more direction in life. I’d bet he was already thinking about retiring, while I doubted I would ever reach a situation like the retirement that Professor Mark was preparing himself for. The main thing is—I told myself—I am innocent and should not be penalized. Why did I say this at this moment, waiting to cross a street where I needed to look left while in Brazil I was suppo
sed to look right in the same place? Sometimes, absurd ideas came into my mind, and they were the ones that nurtured me the most, that gave me nourishment for three or four days. I am innocent, I repeat, innocent, and Professor Mark will shake my hand warmly and we will talk for the whole afternoon.

  I rang the bell. A few seconds later, he opened the door. We smiled as if we had been waiting for this meeting for a long time. He seemed, yes, to be my age. My first impression: a vital man; not like me, given to melancholy. He brought me into the kitchen, he had just returned from the old market I had discovered while killing time before our visit. He wanted to organize the vegetables he had bought. Then he opened several tins of tea, asked me to smell them and choose the best to drink while we talked. Oh, I sighed, this one, it comes from those fields we never step on. He asked me if I wanted to go to India with him…there were cheap flights. I could leave it all behind if I wanted to: Palermo, why not? Sicily… With him, I would even want to go to hell, because, together, we could extract a sweet taste from everything—like the tea that was promising with its aroma. How have people like the two of us—ripe in extremis, almost to the point of falling off the branch—met here in paradise? We sat in the living room drinking tea. We could hardly control ourselves in our contentment. I unbuttoned my coat, took off my scarf, my hat. If he let me, I’d get naked. The temperature was perfect, not denying us the sensation of paradise. I saw my books lined up in a handy place. I cooled off. Mark said he had heard of my visit to London from an acquaintance, but right now he needed to take a shower. He asked me to come to the bathroom with him to continue our conversation. Mark was not merely a benevolent man. He was going to take a shower and I would watch his demonstration of cleanliness or whatever while sitting on the toilet, verifying that he was still in shape. As he began undressing I noticed—somewhat euphorically, as if I was, at last, allowing myself to see my new self in a mirror—I noticed the firmness of his ass, and his belly, not flaccid, only vaguely prominent. His sack, though a little enlarged as it is the case for men our age, seemed to shrink as I looked at it, as if it were giving a very private performance. I would bring the vegetables from the kitchen into the bathroom, to compose the scene of that endless undressing by a man my age. I would photograph him surrounded by vegetables before he got in the bathtub, as he bathed, and then as he dried himself off, surrounded by beets and carrots; bay leaves for his crown as the emperor of London; the afternoon was cloudy and icy outside. I was beginning to think that staying in London and watching this man undressing would keep me from my suffering. Suddenly, I thought that keeping my clothes on was a waste. It was necessary to pay homage to the situation. Mark was singing British songs from the ’40s and ’50s. At the end of each song he would name the artist and the date.

  He stopped singing at last. He fixed his gaze on me and invited me to join him in the bathtub. Oh, I’ve never known how to share my nakedness with anyone. That’s what I said. I shrank almost to the fetal position. And after so many years (that I remembered)…I cried. Yes, I couldn’t help it. With my face tucked between my legs I felt my pants get wet with tears. There, sitting on Professor Mark’s toilet, whom I had just met and who showed me his nakedness in the soapy bath, I couldn’t help but create a ridiculous scene with my crying. I stopped before I entered the sobbing phase. Professor Mark wore a towel over his shoulders like a cloak and seemed perplexed by my behavior. I raised my head, dried my eyes with my hands, and tried a yellow smile. I felt like an eight-year-old boy in front of an authority on genetics…I don’t know. It didn’t feel like this man was a scholar of my work asking me for an interview for his research. In front of him, I felt like a useless man, a miserable scribbler of dead hours. He offered me his hand to lift me from the toilet. He felt I was receding into some distant point and that it would be harder to catch me later. It was necessary to revive myself here, now. Little did he know that the tears I shed were a good sign. Of what exactly, I had no idea. But something crystalline in me had softened and flowed, it was gone. All ridiculous, I know, why repeat it? He pulled me by the hand and kissed me. It was a prolonged kiss between his mouth and my cheek—and in those seconds I felt, slowly, the temperature of human flesh again, after such a long time. The mucus on his lips nearly burned as his tongue licked the remains of the salty moisture from my face. We felt there would not be much more than that kiss—if we could call it a kiss—which those two ripened men had shared. Professor Mark, I thought… And he might have thought: Ah, this Latin American writer…

  There could be no dinner with Professor Mark now. I’d make some excuse—I don’t like being out at night, something like that. My tearful sentimentality had been too much for one day. Why do people visit each other? I wondered. If they stayed home embroidering like in the past, doing some handiwork, they would gain more. Professor Mark hugged me at the front door. I had met someone peculiarly different than the normal Englishman. Later, I learned he was brought up in Italy. Was that the difference which made him hug me like that? I hugged him too, willingly. Since I would have to become more than I’d ever been before, I let it happen. Professor Mark had gotten dressed; under our clothes, our genitals touched. An intimacy that was lost in time: it would not have occurred to me any other time; I had never cultivated such an idyll, given in to such simple seduction. My mind tingled and the sensation trickled down to the nape of my neck, everywhere. Would he be the person to defend me if I needed it? And would I need it? Then allow me to ask for help, here, now. Bye, Professor, I stammered, and he stammered, bye. And he opened the door onto the windy street for me.

  Why was I a man running away? I asked myself, buttoning my coat, wrapping the scarf around my neck. I’ll leave Hackney, I mused. I will come here, make a nest with Mark; I still have an old car in Brazil to sell, almost nothing, I know, but with that money I could spend about three months here subsuming myself in kisses and hugs with the professor. Then I’d repack my bags, I don’t know, and die on my trip back to Brazil. Three months, three months, repeated like a litany I needed to hear to calm myself down. I sat in a family-owned Chinese restaurant. They worked incessantly, one could not imagine them during leisure hours. The restaurant was bubbling with customers. I had made a move to leave, but a staff member found me a lonely table in the far back, a single chair pressed between the wall and the tablecloth. And wouldn’t this be the solution for our ills? Throw ourselves into daily work like good ants… Have a good sleep as a reward… They spoke loudly with each other, surely exchanging information related to the service. The matriarch, seated near me, wouldn’t leave her royal post, giving orders, pointing out details that only a general would observe.

  I had lost a great deal of time taking in the scene, but I felt refreshed. The testimony, if there were any, was not in action—it was inscribed on pages forgotten on the grass, open to the wind, restless, before swirling sand buried them in the churlish heart of the earth.

  I went out into the night without wanting to take any sort of transportation. I would cross London Bridge, cover a portion of the city; if I crossed through to the north, northeast, I would hit Hackney. I thought of myself as a cowardly creature who, in the face of the enigma that was the Englishman who had brought me to London, could only be silent and wait. I was coming from a stupid bout of tears, sitting on Mark’s toilet watching him bathe. Yes, tears had rolled down my face when he invited me into the tub with him. Stupid, huh? How could I go back home after that? I would walk all over London, all over the United Kingdom, if it would wipe away that cowardice of my tears. I crossed London Bridge, bent against the wind and drizzle. I came upon the first avenues of the city center, passing by centuries-old churches squeezed in between modern buildings. Sometimes I would sit on the steps of a church, rehearsing with a cupped hand begging for alms in the cold night, or lying on the stone floor, pretending to be dying from exposure, suffering from acute malnutrition, being the most abandoned of beggars. I had been built for that life—I knew it since I was a child—and not for re
ceiving meager stipends from European institutions. That was my condition, to die, frozen on the streets of London, perhaps heaving a great sob in the end, losing consciousness in a way that would feel like an orgasm that traveled up to the dome of my brain before exiting through my mouth. Oh… through my mouth that smiled at my condition.

  Sometimes, somebody or other passed by, certainly thinking I was just a drunkard, since I was wearing my normal clothes. But I kept my cupped hands extended, without saying a word, secretly asking for nothing, or just for a little, for something that those walking along the sidewalks were accustomed to denying. If I ran to Mark’s house, threw myself into his arms, time would pass. But did I want to throw myself into Professor Mark’s arms and stay nested in them like a drenched goldfinch? Keep begging for one more chance in London? Gullible, I had come to London because of a salesman of illusions who, for some reason I still needed to discover, had chosen me as the heir to the British chimera. I coughed; I was indeed getting sick under that insistent drizzle, but I didn’t want to leave. If the police came to talk to me and took me to a shelter, I might bow my head gratefully. Like a citizen who had adopted Chinese ways of greeting from now on. Hands on my chest, my head bowed in reverence. I’d be a comrade to the English police. I’d become an informer on discreet drug dealers so they wouldn’t deport me. No, no, I didn’t want to leave London’s dampness. Let the Englishman who had called me to Great Britain’s atmosphere forget me, and Professor Mark, too. I was just going to stay here, fasting, on this step.

  Professor Mark told me during his bath that, during a certain summer of his youth in Bellagio, on the shores of Lake Como, he had experienced his first adventure in love. A village girl, religious in a daily mass kind of way, with whom, one afternoon, he went to a stable he knew to be abandoned. He promised the girl they would make a nest and make an exemplary family; they would live in London, and she would get to know the great city; she would learn a new language, and he would provide her with a fireplace, satin lingerie, parties in royal circles. But once the girl was lying in the hay, anxiously awaiting his advances, he retreated, he told me, buttoning himself up and turning away to follow a grateful, busy, single life, one with bountiful love affairs, as he was then already a boy who had long ago stopped wearing breeches, while I still hadn’t even thought of becoming the writer he wanted to get to know better. I would go on fasting, sitting on that step, detached from all the movement on the street, having unlearned how to react even if they touched me, beat me, gave me a hand…