The End

by Fernanda Torres

  Praise for

  The End

  “With fast-paced language and a comedic spin, Brazilian author Fernanda Torres transforms the process of aging into a thrilling read in this story of five debaucherous male friends who, drawing near their respective ends, are looking back on their best and worst moments as we revel in their decadent amorality.”

  Emma Ramadan, Riffraff (Providence, RI)

  “The End is the perfect summer release. Torres creates an aging, male Carioca friend group that is a mess of cynicism, nostalgia, frustration, and a seemingly unending appetite for sex. This book is raunchy, sophisticated, and so wonderfully Brazilian. I devoured this book in one sitting. Parabéns Fernanda!!!”

  Daniela Roger, Books & Books (Coral Gables, FL)

  “You think you see The End coming—or the ending coming—but Fernanda Torres has other plans for you on this journey. Torres presents five friends—fairly flawed, tragic clowns—and their views on life and those around them as they try to navigate their lives and deaths. This novel is a funny, smart, well-conceived, and perfectly executed playful look at mortality.”

  Nick Buzanski, Book Culture (New York, NY)

  “The vibrant writing of Fernanda Torres had me completely enthralled by the lives of five self-indulgent characters, and then even more enthralled by their deaths. The End is an ultra-compelling dark comedy.”

  Katie Eelman, Papercuts J.P. (Boston, MA)

  “Fernanda Torres animates the lives of ‘five middle-class men with mediocre jobs and no artistic or economic achievements’ with remarkable artistry and economy. Morbid and life filled, sobering and ecstatic, The End has much to show its reader about the forces that make a single life, and the community of people and places that supports that life, worth living. Come for the company (wisecracking cranks, impolitic priests, characters who have to ask, ‘Who cared about boring eternity? Everyone in it would have traded a thousand years of the Lord’s peace for five minutes more of earthly torture’), and stay for The End.”

  John Francisconi, Savoy Bookshop (Westerly, RI)

  “Torres’ writing [has] flair and wit… [an] unforgiving portrait of men at their worst.”

  Kirkus

  “The End is an impressive and dizzying narrative that gathers meaning around the many misfortunes, climaxes, offenses, triumphs, and disappointments that constitute a life or, in this case, lives. Five friends in Rio recount their stories as they grapple with the uncertainty of their imminent deaths. As readers, we get the unique pleasure of seeing the many watershed moments that change the course of a friendship from an array of perspectives. For the life of me, I can’t understand how Fernanda Torres keeps this rich cast of characters and buffet of absorbing action straight. One can merely delight in the complexity of life presented in these pages, understood all the better through the lens of death.”

  John Gibbs, Green Apple Books on the Park

  (San Francisco, CA)

  “This book reveals a writer in full command of her art. In it are smells, sounds, objects, situations, reasoning, emotion, humor, complexity… . The author gives herself over to the mean, dirty world of her characters. Their voices are distinct… . The plot flows without feeling contrived, without seeking to teach lessons. The language is colorful, lively, molds itself around the characters, surges forward. This is a serious book in which humor is important: there is crudeness, the confrontation of problems, the pursuit of expression. It is through a group of old friends that Copacabana is revealed. And what one sees is the failure of a middle class who believed in the hedonism that has historically been associated with this part of Rio de Janeiro… . Breathtaking, a stunning debut.”

  Mario Sergio Conti

  For my old men,

  João Ubaldo Ribeiro

  Domingos de Oliveira

  Mario Sérgio Conti

  Luiz Schwarcz

  My brother and my father

  Contents

  The end

  Álvaro

  Sílvio

  Ribeiro

  Neto

  Ciro

  Epilogue

  Next

  ‌Álvaro

  * September 26, 1929

  † April 30, 2014

  May the bastard who invented the Portuguese pavement rot in hell. God damn Dom Manuel I and his lieutenants. Irregular stone squares beaten into place by hand. By hand! Of course they were going to work loose. Wasn’t it obvious they were going to work loose? White, black, white, black, the waves of Copacabana. What good are the waves of Copacabana to me? Give me a smooth surface free of calcareous protuberances. Stupid mosaics. They’re everywhere. Pour some concrete over the top and send on the steamrollers! Holes, craters, loose rocks, exploding manholes. After seventy, life is an endless obstacle course.

  Falls are the biggest menace to the elderly. “Elderly,” what an awful word. The only thing worse is “senior citizen.” Falls are what separate old age from extreme senility. The jolt destroys the connection between head and feet. Bye-bye, body. At home, I go from grab bar to grab bar, groping furniture and walls, and I shower sitting down. Armchair to window, window to bed, bed to armchair, armchair to window.

  There, another treacherous little stone out to get me. One day I’m going to take a tumble. Not today.

  One day. “One day” used to be so far away. I ran into Ribeiro on Rua Francisco Sá. We hadn’t seen each other in a while. He said we should get together “one of these days.” The next he was dead. São Francisco Xavier Cemetery was horrific, an Auschwitz oven. The tombs looked like they were melting. I felt sick in the crematorium. People thought it was the emotion. They weren’t entirely wrong. Ribeiro had been in great shape. He played volleyball until his last sunset, left the beach, and checked out in the shower: heart attack. I don’t have a single friend left alive now. Ribeiro was the last. I was sure he was going to bury me. He jogged, swam, stopped smoking at forty, and refused to go limp. His sister thinks it was Viagra. Ribeiro fucked around; it was a big deal to him.

  Before him it was Sílvio. Or was it Ciro? No, Ciro was the first to go, of cancer, then Neto and Neto’s wife. Neto couldn’t stand Célia, but he died a year after she did. Go figure. She was a pain in the ass to begin with, but when she got older, Jesus Christ… she was bitter, cranky, and ugly. Neto couldn’t take the peace and quiet.

  And to think that Célia had been such a foxy bride. She should have died back then, in her prime. If Neto had only known, he wouldn’t have cried so much at the altar. Men are fools.

  Sílvio departed one February, during Carnival. He started partying on the Friday and went for ten days straight. The following Sunday, he left three whores in his apartment and went out to buy more blow, mixed it with everything imaginable, and his heart gave out. They found him face-down in Lapa, near Avenida Mem de Sá, with a bottle of poppers in his hand and five Gs of coke in his pocket. Sílvio used to drink, which is no big deal, but when menopause came… I know, it’s “andropause,” but I don’t like “andropause.” It’s like “jill off”—it’s repulsive. “Jack off” is better, regardless of gender… Anyway, when menopause came Sílvio lost it. He met a pair of sex kittens from down south, dealers, and became their slave. We stopped seeing each other because of the gaúchas. They took him out of circulation. God sent two heartless bitches to finish him off. It was punishment. What year was that? I don’t even know, so many have gone: years and friends.

  Not all that long ago, it used to take me ten minutes to get from my place to Dr. Mattos’s practice on foot. Mattos is my GP. Now it takes me forty. Walking isn’t an unconscious act any more. I watch my step, my knees, and focus on the route. Everything hurts, for a whole list of reasons, all of which have to do with old age. Mattos has sent me to more than ten specialists. One wants to oper
ate on my cataracts, another, my gallbladder, and they all stuff me full of pills. Dr. Rudolf doesn’t think my veins can take the pressure and is planning to put stents in my femoral artery and my aorta. I stay quiet and pretend they’re not talking to me. They’re a neurotic bunch, doctors. They’re vain, and brutal. I’d like to see one of them go under the knife.

  Whoa! Dog poop. The icing on the cake. There’s a woman in my building who breeds hysterical minihounds with high-pitched barks. She goes away every weekend and leaves them locked in the laundry room. They get lonely and yelp. I’m going to report the witch from 704 for cruelty to animals. It must be humiliating to pick up dog poop with little baggies, and I understand the people who can’t be bothered, but I just don’t agree with keeping dogs cooped up in apartments.

  I regret every pet I’ve ever had. Unhappy, needy, dirty. Four dogs and a cat. The first one died of old age: blind, lame, and smelly. The cat was ripped to shreds by its father—it had a huge Oedipus complex and was obsessed with its mother. The other dogs expired for different reasons, all horrific: distemper, a tumor, poisoning. My mother had scattered rat pellets around the garden and forgot to lock Bóris up. I never trusted her again. Poor thing, she made sure he had clean newspaper, fresh water, took him to the vet, and cried as if she’d lost a child. Even so, I never forgave her.

  No one is more selfish than a child. I can’t stand my grandkids. They live far away—better for them. They’re noisy and self-interested. I loved my daughter until she was five. After that I couldn’t bear her hysteria, my wife’s hysteria with her, hers with the maids. I used to do anything to avoid going home. I think the only reason I had an affair with Marília was so I’d have somewhere to go after work. I loved Marília’s house. I’d kill time there until about ten, drinking and listening inattentively to her jabbering.

  I didn’t care if we had sex or not, but I made the effort for her sake. What I really liked was her small, but very pleasant, house in Jardim Botânico, with an outside area where she kept a few tortoises.

  I’ve never been big on sex. I enjoyed it while it was happening, but couldn’t be bothered to make the first move. And women invariably transfer to men the obligation to be in the mood. Since I never was, my lovers only stuck around as long as it took me to seduce them.

  Marriage is the marital status most suited to men who, like me, don’t enjoy the company of others. There’s nothing more exhausting than managing dates and expectations. A bad marriage can be great for both parties, and mine was. Irene turned her back on temptation, and so did I. We lived comfortably in two bedrooms, all very sad and civilized. One day, she realized she was getting old and that it was her last chance to fuck, have orgasms, and be passionately in love, those things women believe in. I figure it was Rita’s adolescence that pushed Irene over the edge. She started group analysis and did it with Jairo, the club manager. It was awkward. No man deals well with his wife’s cheating. I had to stop swimming at the club. I really liked that pool, but the membership was in her name.

  Irene regretted it, but it was too late. I found myself alone and guilt-free, because she was the one who’d left me. I even took an interest in two other women, unlike Irene, who was unlucky and never had another partner after the rower at the club. He was married and stopped answering her calls after a month. Women are all naive. We haven’t seen each other in thirty years; we were together for fifteen. I started having problems getting it up with Aurora, my second girlfriend after Irene. I lie, things weren’t going so well back when I was with Irene, but with Aurora it was definitive. I suffered for a good few years then let it go. Bye-bye, hormones, bye-bye, ladies, bye-bye, heavy silence in the room, bye-bye, eyes full of pity. I would be Franciscan. A satyr and a friar.

  My dad was just like Ribeiro; he couldn’t accept the fact that he couldn’t get it up. I remember seeing him and my mother looking radiant one Easter, and I asked what the secret was. Dad clapped his hand down on Mom’s thigh and claimed that his elixir was “this woman here.” I was proud of them. On Mom’s seventy-fifth birthday, she took me aside and said she was sick of trying to get Dad’s dick up. It was too much work. She felt it was her duty, but she was tired and didn’t want to anymore. She had even urged him to take a lover and said she didn’t mind, but it made him angry. That conversation made me really uncomfortable. Irene was at the peak of her crisis, and I’ve always been against parents talking about sex with their kids. Mom wanted me to convince Dad to leave her in peace.

  I opened the door of the room, which was all shut up, and found him in bed in a foul mood. I asked how things were going and he said, “Bad, real bad.” He told me Mom was having an affair with their insurance broker. My father’s dementia had made him paranoid, jealous, and delirious. He’d gone off the deep end. He accused his wife of having cheated on him with a long list of men they’d known for the entire time they’d been married. She, of all people—a virgin when they married who had never dared lust after anyone. He owned a pistol and said something about shooting her and then killing himself. I threw the pistol into the sea.

  I brought her to live with me, which only deepened Irene’s dissatisfaction. I became a lightning rod for family problems. Rita was held back in school that year, the cook quit, the last dog bit the dust, we had a leak in the bathroom—it was all stacked against me. We put Dad in a home in Maricá, where he died, convinced he’d spent fifty-nine years with a compulsive adulteress. Irene should have married him. They’d be going at it to this day.

  And here comes a bike! Cyclists are all assassins—suicides and assassins.

  When I look at myself in the mirror I see Aunt Suzel. “It’s the estrogen,” Mattos once told me. It makes old men look like old women and old women look like old men. Aunt Suzel died a spinster and a virgin, at the age of eighty-six. She’d spent the last twenty-six years pushing around the stuffy air of Andaraí with a hand-held fan, repeating that she wanted to die. It made you want to give her a helping hand. One afternoon, she fell down the stairs—the fall—and they couldn’t put Aunt Suzel together again. She lived with her niece in a three-story building with no elevator. Now she visits me in the mirror.

  Red light. There are no cars coming, but I don’t want to risk stumbling. I wait for the green light like a law-abiding German. It’s stinking hot. Rio has always been hot; it’s nothing new, nothing to do with all this Greenpeace nonsense. I fried many an egg on the cobblestones of Penha when I was a kid. The world’s been ending for as long as I’ve been in it.

  I’ve only a vague memory of what testosterone is like. I don’t know what it is to be young anymore; it’s like talking about someone else. I never was very active. Ribeiro and I used to go out a lot, and boy, did we drink—too much. I traded day for night, put on weight, developed a solid belly supported by two broomstick legs and topped with a short neck that holds up my shiny bald head.

  Not Ribeiro. He’d go straight from the nightclub to the beach. He’d only sleep after jogging from Lifeguard Post One to Six, there and back, nonstop. He kept his hair for a long time, which gave him a few extra years as the Don Juan of the beach promenade. Ribeiro never married; he taught PE and had a thing for seventeen-year-old female students. He once got a working over from one of their dads. Nowadays, he’d be behind bars. I always thought Ribeiro was immortal. But no one is.

  Who will come to my funeral?

  I got married after Ciro and was one of the last to get divorced. In the space of ten years, we all did the same thing. But not Neto. Neto endured Célia to the end. Poor thing, he never knew what it is to use the bathroom with the door open, fall asleep with the TV on, smoke in the bedroom, eat in bed, and not have to talk to anyone or watch the nightly soap.

  I think Neto stayed married because he was half-black. I hesitate to say anything about the color of people’s skin. Even Monteiro Lobato, the legendary Monteiro Lobato, was labeled a racist. But Neto, because he was half-black—go ahead and burn me at the stake together with Lobato—always went out of his wa
y to come across as respectable. He thought marriage gave him status. I don’t blame him, I get it. Is it racism? Whatever, to hell with Zumbi dos Palmares, Martin Luther King, et cetera. Sílvio, who was fair-skinned and blond with a receding hairline, didn’t give a damn what others thought of him. There must be something to that.

  I got used to single life quickly and moved to an apartment at the back of a run-down, old building on Rua Hilário de Gouveia. Irene got the house and I got the car. I screwed Aurora and the other one in the metallic blue Chevette. Over in Barra da Tijuca, when it was still all sand. On the way back, we’d stop at a motel and watch a porn flick. When I was able to, I’d repeat the deed. I was still into sex in those days, even though I had a hard time getting it up.

  It was women who made me lose interest. Nagging, sniveling, needy. Women love to blame their own unhappiness on the next person. I never let them drag me in. The minute they get one sign of life from you, they shoot off a three-page monologue in your ear. Boy, can they talk; they never get sick of yakety-yakking. Then they turn on the waterworks so we suckers will feel sorry for them. I don’t like women. Truth be told, I don’t like anyone.

  I did like Neto, Ciro, Sílvio, and Ribeiro, though. Men don’t talk. We each say something idiotic, we laugh, we drink, and there you have it: a great night. Women are always trying to make an event out of things.

  Green. This light takes forever to change and then it only stays green for two seconds. Off I go, as sprightly as Marília’s tortoises. I don’t believe it. It’s blinking already? It’s red! What did I tell you? There’s still a third of the crossing in front of me and the wretched thing turns red! Who did they base their calculations on—Speedy Gonzales? What’s your problem, mister? Gonna run me down? Go on, smartass, split my knee in half with your headlights. I know you want to pass, sonny boy! One day you’re going to be old (with any luck, you’re going to be old) and a young guy in a hurry is going to shatter your leg and you’ll spend the rest of your days in an adult diaper, terrified of crossing the street. Manholes, high curbs, the stench, Argentineans.