The End

by Fernanda Torres

  I don’t read the newspaper, I don’t read magazines. I don’t read. I can’t see properly either. All I do is watch TV. Football, all day long. I like the after-game commentary.

  I stopped at the VCR. No, that’s a lie, I have a DVD player that came with the forty–inch TV, but I never did get the hang of the remote. Before that, I used to rent the odd film on the way back from Mattos’s practice, but the rental shop closed. I don’t miss it.

  I’ve been fortunate enough to grow old smoking.

  I don’t separate my trash, I don’t recycle, I throw cigarette butts in the toilet, I use aerosols, I take long hot showers, and I brush my teeth with the water running. Screw mankind. I won’t be around to see what happens.

  I haven’t voted in thirteen years, I’m not responsible for the tragedy around me.

  Detour due to road works. They love their road works. The dirty cones in the middle of the lane, cars speeding past, narrowly missing me. Don’t they see me here? Jackhammer. Jackhammer. Jackhammer. How does that poor guy stand it? He’s going to die young. He won’t be missing anything. Well, he’ll probably miss something. I don’t know what, but he probably will. I’ve never seen death as a possibility. Not that I’m really attached to anything special in life—it’s just that death doesn’t exist. Death is a chronic illness.

  I remember seeing Sílvio’s hands shake and thinking it was a hangover. We were still young. But his son Inácio told Ribeiro at his funeral that it was Parkinson’s. He said his dad had continued screwing around, and had suffered in the hands of the gaúchas, but he’d started mixing up names, the number of his apartment, the time he was supposed to take his medicine. Sílvio was slim, elegant, and bad. Real bad. Nasty. He committed suicide that Carnival. There’s many a way to do it.

  Women didn’t give Sílvio a second glance. But all they had to do was exchange two words with him and they’d be head over heels. And he played them—he’d call lots, then stop, pretend to be seeing someone else, treat them badly on their birthdays. Women love to be treated badly.

  That was in the beginning. At thirty-two, Sílvio married Norma and slowed down. But then came the kids; Norma had post-natal depression after the second and became a pain in the neck. To make things worse, Sílvio’s mother-in-law moved in with them. The house became a Wailing Wall. There was bellyaching, the nightly soaps, and kids underfoot all day long, with kiddy baths, baby food, toys, runny noses, school, poop. He lost his patience, packed the oldest off to boarding school in Petrópolis, which the boy only left at Christmas, enlisted his mother-in-law to look after the youngest, said goodbye to Norma, and went to live in the bachelor’s pad he kept in Glória. Sílvio wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t poor either. He hadn’t even unpacked and he’d already arranged to meet up with three hookers, all on the day of the move. Sílvio enjoyed an orgy.

  He fell hard for the gaúchas and went to live down south. We toasted his departure. We drank a lot at a party in Leme and popped some pills that he gave us. He wanted to teach us how to live. At daybreak, we were kicked out: me, Ribeiro, Neto, Ciro, and Sílvio. Five zombies and a troupe of easy women. Sílvio proposed we take the party to his bat cave. We applauded the suggestion. He started taking off his clothes the minute he walked in, saying he was hot. Ciro locked himself in the bedroom with the Argentinean—he always was a class act. I think Neto left, and I don’t know where Ribeiro got to. That left me and Sílvio, in his underpants, in the lounge room; plus the chick I’d brought with me, who’d been with Neto; and Sílvio’s brunette, who before I knew it was going at it with him on the armchair with tapered legs. The other two launched themselves at me without asking if I wanted to, Ciro started moaning on the other side of the wall, and the Argentinean yelled, “Faster, faster!” I was a spectacular flop. One of the chicks, a blond from the countryside, tried to help me along, but I gave her some money and sent her on her way. Sílvio fell off the armchair with the brunette and didn’t get up again. Ciro must have fallen asleep too, because I didn’t hear anything from him in the bedroom. I left at eleven with a throbbing migraine. I had a black coffee at the bakery and collapsed on the rug in the hallway. I was out of it for twenty-one hours.

  Maybe Ciro and Sílvio did that all the time, but not me. That was the first and last time I came close to taking part in an orgy with friends. There’s something a little queer in every male friendship. Fucking the same women is a roundabout way of fucking each other. And in the same physical space, it’s a fine line. But there’s no way—not as a joke, not when I’m off my face, not anytime—that I’d kiss Neto, Sílvio, Ribeiro or Ciro. Well, maybe Ciro. Definitely Ciro. After forty, your turn-ons shift.

  Ciro used to rake them in. Women would all but sit on his face. Ciro met Ruth at Juliano’s party and decided he was going to marry her in a church, do the whole big white wedding thing. He was mad about Ruth. She was really beautiful, and intelligent, and sexy. Ciro thought the love of his life would open the doors of monogamy for him.

  It took about ten years of marriage to deflate Ciro’s hard-on. And Ciro without a hard-on wasn’t Ciro. He agonized and talked about it all the time. He didn’t want to cheat on Ruth because he knew it was a slippery slope, but Ruth had become a mother, a wife, a companion, a sister, everything but a lover.

  He started picking fights with her, ugly fights, for no reason. I don’t know if he planned it or if it was desperation, but overnight he started getting irritated at little things she said, a glass here, a deodorant there. He’d pack his bags and leave over something insignificant, slamming the door behind him. Ruth would go crazy, miss work, lose weight, and so would he. After a week, he’d come home and they’d fuck as if they’d just met. It worked for a few years, and he even got his color back, until their arguments became more destructive than the previous same-old same-old. First he took a shine to Marta, or was it Cinira? I can’t remember. He fucked one of the two, or both at the same time, anyway, all I know is that once the floodgates were open, Ciro laid half of Rio de Janeiro in little under a year. Ruth wasted away. Women nourish the fantasy that true love is capable of transforming men. When it doesn’t happen, and it never does, they lose their self-respect and become sorry-looking shadows of their former selves.

  Ciro actually managed to be worse than Sílvio, because Sílvio had never loved anyone, but Ciro loved Ruth a lot. She was so shocked by her husband’s erratic behavior, his disrespect for her, and lack of patience with the family that she developed a strange kind of apathy. It all started the day she caught Ciro at Sílvio’s apartment with Milena, the wife of a client of his. After that, the residents’ committee forbade Sílvio to lend the apartment to his friends. That afternoon, Ruth burst through the door, shouting, Milena hid under the sheets, and Ciro scrambled for his trousers. Ciro kept his head, got dressed, and left without explaining a thing. Ruth continued yelling in the corridor as the elevator went down. Ciro took the first cab he saw and hurried home. It was amazing how cold that man could be. When he got there, he showered, put on his pajamas, and sat down to watch TV. It took Ruth about twenty minutes to arrive, possessed, frozen on the doorstep, ready to brawl. But Ciro, the genius—a bastard, but a genius—was all lovey-dovey. Ruth started on about the apartment, the whore, and, with a straight face, Ciro said he didn’t know what she was talking about and swore that he’d come home, wondered where she was, and sat down to watch TV. Little by little, he began to feign restrained indignation at her having set the dogs on a couple she didn’t even know and, what’s more, in Sílvio’s apartment! And he pretended to be worried about his wife’s mental health. Less than a week later, Ruth was admitted to a clinic. Ciro never forgave himself, but he didn’t do anything to change the situation either. He moved into a tiny apartment in Santa Clara, where there was no room for anything but himself. And he continued ticking off names in his little black book. He was averaging three a week, sometimes four, depending on how needy he was feeling.

  I’d never thought Ciro could be so brutal. I expected anyth
ing from Sílvio, but the cold-blooded way that Ciro acted with Ruth was shocking. I had envied Ciro my whole life. He was very good-looking and one of those guys who could play pool, soccer, badminton, poker, and win at them all without any effort. And even in the most vulgar of situations, like that almost-orgy at Sílvio’s place, Ciro knew how to be courteous. He took the Argentinean off to the bedroom like a gentleman.

  I got married because of him. Since I was single, I started being left out of Sunday lunches. Neto and Sílvio would go with their wives and Ribeiro and I weren’t invited. Irene was Ruth’s friend and they introduced us. I thought it couldn’t get any better than that. Afterwards, they spent years dragging us through the mud.

  I thought he was losing weight because of the all-nighters and excesses. One sunny Tuesday, Ciro invited me out for a coffee and told me he had cancer of the pancreas and that there was nothing to be done. He’d just turned fifty. I was tongue-tied. I didn’t know what to say. I thought about the day he’d met Ruth at Juliano’s party and what a fine-looking couple they had made. Ciro was our Kennedy. He departed six months after that coffee. I avoided him. I was terrified. I didn’t want to see him like that. But I carried the coffin. Ruth didn’t attend.

  Here come some little thugs. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been mugged. At one point, I would only go out with the clothes on my body. Then, one stupid afternoon, on my way home from an MRI over in Botafogo, I was approached by two boys. When they realized I had no money on me, no cell phone, fuck all, they beat me up. Now I always carry some money for the thieves. They’re gone. Maybe they were honest kids after all. Black, in shorts, flip-flops, shirtless, but honest. Blame it on Monteiro Lobato.

  My dad gave me the entire collection of Lobato’s Yellow Woodpecker Farm one Christmas. I was twelve. The books survived and I gave them to my daughter, thinking I was introducing her to heaven, but she went into a sulk because she wanted a Barbie. I tried to teach Rita math with Viscount Corncob, history with Grandma Benta, and grammar with the rag doll Emília, but she complained that there were no pictures and developed an aversion to the collection. She grew up ignorant and futile. I prayed for her not to put on weight as a teenager, because with her IQ, the best she could do was marry well.

  She married so-so: a radiologist from Uberaba. His dad owned an x-ray clinic and the son followed him into the business. They met while she was on vacation in Ouro Preto. My son-in-law is a monumental fuckwit, the sort who blames everything on stress. Right, stress. A hypnotic drowsiness washes over me every time I talk to him. I could be standing, sitting, in the car, or at an insufferable end-of-year party. Felipe and Marcelo whinny loudly to wake me up and chant like retards that Grandpa’s not all there. Little do they know that I’m only protecting myself from their bore of a father. The same individual who gave them half their mediocre genes, seeing as how the other half came from their mother, who inherited my worst genes, the ones that don’t like Monteiro Lobato. The branches of this tree are rotten, dear Felipe and Marcelo. Your children are going to be fat like you, they’ll get beaten up at school, and they’ll be spoiled brats. Go on, laugh. You have no idea what awaits you—acne, small dicks, baldness, high blood pressure, cholesterol, a chronic cough, halitosis, hair in your ears, shortness of breath, urinary incontinence, a stroke—and I’ll have a front row seat. Any street urchin has better genes than you two. Now go to your room, because your father’s whining is making me doze off.

  Rita visits me in Rio twice a year. She wants me to move to Uberaba. As if. As if I could stand Uberaba, and she me, and I her children. Give me the home in Maricá any day. I try to be nice when she comes, her idiot husband always in tow. I arrange for them to come at night, when insomnia sets in, to see if all the griping will lull me off to sleep. It’s a powerful sedative, my son-in-law’s blather.

  My block! Another fifty-seven steps and I’m there. I love counting steps. I don’t get out much. I have nowhere to go, haven’t worked in eighteen years. The other day I realized I’m an employee of my health—it’s a full-time job. Every month I have my monthly exams, every year the annual ones, every six months the six-monthly ones. When one’s done, it’s time for another. And you have to make an appointment, take the doctor’s request with you, get it stamped, and get in line. Private plans are no different than the public system. Mattos’s practice is in an office building here in Copacabana that’s full of senile doctors. Every now and then one kicks the bucket. I go there every week, I know the distance, the time, the total number of footsteps to get there, the block-by-block breakdown, the rhythm of the traffic lights, the flower beds, the lampposts, and the stones along the way.

  Now that Ribeiro is dead, there isn’t anyone for me to meet up with, even if only by chance, at the intersection. The only people I visit are my doctors and I don’t like them. I don’t spend a thing. I rent out a shop in Copacabana that I inherited from my dad, and that pays for my health insurance. The rest comes from my pension. I eat sausages, bacon, chicken wings, and ribs, I drink water straight from the faucet, and I don’t need anyone.

  What’s that siren? It’s the fire truck. I thought it was an ambulance. The good thing about sirens is that they stop me from hearing the buzz, the swarm of bees that appeared about five years ago in my left ear and then moved to my right, in stereo, and is only getting worse. I’m going deaf. Tomorrow I have another hearing test. I think I left my glasses at home.

  What siren is that now? Ah! It’s a garage door. The garage of my building. I made it. I didn’t even count properly, I was so busy talking. To whom? Talking to whom? To myself, since I’m the one I like to talk to. There’s a car coming up the exit ramp, it’s coming fast, I’d better get a move on. It’s the heartless witch from 704. She’s fleeing the dogs, going away for the weekend, the coward. I don’t think she’s seen me. No, she hasn’t seen me. The car becomes airborne for a moment at the top of the ramp. She’s driving like a maniac, talking on her cell. She doesn’t realize I’m here. Drop the goddamn phone and pay attention to what’s in front of you! Me! I’m in front of you! Ah! Finally, she’s seen me, she’s going to brake, she missed the pedal. How did she miss it? She’s nervous. So she should be. How old is that crone? Did she pass a driving test? Can you even drive at that age? What about the dogs in her laundry room? She’s braking! She found the brake, I can hear the tires squealing. The car’s still moving. How is it still moving? Did it skid? Isn’t it going to stop? Is it out of control? She looks at me with pity and closes her eyes so she won’t see what she’s about to do to me. Open your eyes, you wretched woman, come see what you’ve done. Why didn’t I report you to Animal Welfare? I should’ve known that someone who treats her own dogs like that has no respect for human life. I can already feel the metal brushing my pant leg.

  A leap. How many years has it been since I last leapt? I bend my right leg, stretch out my left and throw my weight forward. Go! Metal on pant leg! Walking isn’t an unconscious act any more. I send the commands. Bend, stretch, I’m in the air, I prepare to land, my toes touch the pavement, I release my weight… the paving stone is loose? How can it be loose? I throw myself on it and it comes loose? Who was the dunce who beat it into place? Where’s the contractor? Where’s the mayor, who doesn’t come? It’s too late, my foot twists, I’m falling, the car scrapes past, but gravity is already pulling me towards the pavement. The fall. My fall, the one that will make me miss the days when I counted my steps to Mattos’s practice. From one moment to the next, I’ll be Aunt Suzel. My hand scrapes the ground, tries to break the fall—it can’t. The skin of my elbow tears, my hip pops out, and my head plummets towards the course granite of the curb, striking it like a church bell pealing.

  Black, black, black, black, black, where’s white? Where are the waves of Copacabana? The hag from 704 is a dyed blond, the sort who reeks of cologne and talc and wears matching skirt suits.

  My angel of death. Whoever would have thought?

  I once asked a Buddhist who believed in
reincarnation what actually reincarnates. He said it was something so very minute that there was no trace of the former individual in it. There’s blood coming out of my head. The battle-ax from 704 gets out of the car in a tizzy, the doorman comes running. I don’t feel a thing: no pain, no regret. I’m fine here. It was nice to remember my pals—nothing is a coincidence. If there were another life, it’d be nice to catch up with them, visit Ciro and Sílvio in hell, I’d like that. But there isn’t. Death doesn’t exist. Not even the reincarnationist Buddhist thinks he’s going to come back the same as he used to be. I’ll be on a plant, in the spittle of a lizard devouring a plant, in a fly licking the spittle of a lizard devouring a plant. I’ll be out there. It’s been long enough, and I’m tired. This indifference suits me.

  I’ve said bad things about women. They deserve it. Men are all worthless too. And they weren’t made for one another.

  I disintegrate in the air over Copacabana. I once read that death was the most significant moment in life, and it is. Mine has been good, so far, not for much longer.

  Irene was impassive when she heard that the man with whom she had spent fifteen years of her youth had died. Her daughter called from Uberaba in a panic. Rita was at the airport while her father was lying in a refrigerator at the morgue. She had left the kids with her husband and wouldn’t be able to make the connecting flight in São Paulo, stop by the police station, and talk to the funeral director in time to bury him that afternoon. Rita complained about her lack of siblings and asked her mother to go to the morgue to ID the body.

  “I know you hate him but I don’t have anyone else.”