The End

by Fernanda Torres

  I close the windows, check to see if I’ve left the door open, the fridge, the gas—I’m methodical. I turn off the lights and lock myself in the bedroom. I try to read, I can’t. I’ve always liked reading, but I can’t anymore. I’ve become impervious to other people’s dramas.

  How can anyone go on without plans? At the age of twenty, people assassinate loves, friendships, they move on like a sharp arrow; it is only later that they discover how rare real affection is. I don’t believe in passion late in life; people don’t love after forty. It’s a lie. At the most, they make a formal pact, pretend to miss and to appreciate one another, but biology doesn’t need the juvenile outbursts of an old man.

  My friends never understood my connection with Célia. And she didn’t exactly help matters. She hated them all, especially Sílvio. The day Suzana smoked pot in Ciro’s garden, she started in the minute we got home, saying we needed to talk. She said she didn’t want her son to be around that pack, she was afraid Sílvio might abuse Murilo, she’d heard of millions of cases of molestation by people close to the family. She brought up Irene’s effeminate nephew, initiated by an uncle in the garage—that poor mother. I flew off the handle, saying that Murilo wasn’t even a year old and that no pedophile disguised as a friend was going to attack our baby, much less Álvaro, Ciro, Sílvio, or Ribeiro, because they liked me. Ciro wanted to celebrate the fact that I’d become a father, and you had to feel sorry for Ribeiro, always chasing after younger women.

  “Everyone smokes dope these days, Célia, and the one thing you can’t do is stop me teaching Murilo to be a man. He really might become a fag if his mother points out a deviant on every corner. I’m not going to keep my son away from my friends because of a first-time mother’s paranoia.”

  She put her head down, offended. Murilo started to cry and Célia, her eyes full of tears, said it was time to nurse him. We never touched on the subject again.

  That was our routine: quibbles, arguments, hurt feelings, and making up. I became addicted to it, I didn’t know how to live without it. Disagreeing with Célia kept me going. And we knew how to sweep it all under the rug, which is fundamental to the health of any relationship. You have to turn the page, forget, wipe the slate clean, forgive, let go of things. Women refuse to understand and insist on trotting out their stupid reasons. They want to change their men, make them into princes. Men just watch, hoping they’ll get tired of it, and go on repeating the same old mistakes. Women scold, curse, shout, cry, and then they go fix dinner. Even feminists go fix dinner. And we stay together until one of us goes and leaves the other one here, in the grave.

  I’m sitting on the armchair in the living room. I was about to go to bed, but then I did an about-face and ended up here. The apartment is the same, I haven’t rearranged the furniture or given her clothes away. But I feel different. I woke up different today: a morbid peace came over me, a distance I’d never felt before. That was when I heard her voice. It happened to me once before, in the foyer, but never again. Today it’s back. It’s more like a breath, a gust, a whiff of her. It was in the morning, when I went to the chest of drawers to get some money for the bakery. That’s why I’m sitting here, thinking about it, about the breeze that ran through me.

  Célia was white, or considered white, because she had delicate features, but she was half-black, like me, and used to straighten her hair, which was kinky, like mine. My four best friends were white. They didn’t know the pressure of being a different color, of not looking like any of your peers or the people in your building, your neighborhood, of looking more like the cleaners, street sweepers, and construction workers who serve white people like themselves. When the sexual revolution arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Ciro, Sílvio, and Ribeiro—and even Álvaro, because of Irene, who’d started analysis—all became lost in that rampant debauchery. Babylon. Divorce became an obligation. I saw the scorn with which they looked at me, as they tossed away their marriages, one after another, in a rash of unchecked greed. It was suicidal, solitary, sterile. But not me. Frivolity isn’t me. I got the best grades, passed the worst tests, boiled my brains studying, worked like a dog, and never cheated. I was honest to a fault.

  Enough.

  I want to write a note. Where’s the pen? On the shelf. And the paper? In the drawer. Nothing out of place. Except me. I’m going to sit down and write. What was it I wanted to write? A note. I take the lid off the Bic, place it beside the blank page, rest the tip of the ballpoint pen on the smooth surface, and write, “Don’t tell anyone.” Why did I write that? It’s for my kids, I think. I fold the paper and put it in my pocket. Now I can go to bed. I walk down the long corridor of closed doors. I don’t like this narrow funnel—it reminds me of the mess, the towels on the ground, the panties hanging from the faucet, and the lack of them, the lack of her. I turn right into the bathroom next to the bedroom. When we moved into this apartment, there was no talk of en suites, balconies, play areas, or covered parking. The rooms were large and that was enough. We lived with each other’s smells, vapors, strands of hair, and puddles.

  Her toothbrush looks at me from the cup by the sink. It’s still there. I open the cupboard behind the mirror and stop with the door half-open. The mirror is the same as the day we set foot in here for the first time. It’s cracked. I look for my old face, it’s me, there, and it’s not; I don’t remember what I looked like anyway. I open it. Ritalin, Lexapro, Frontal, Valium, Haldol, Seroquel, the rest of the Pondera from last year, and the Aropax that Dr. Péricles plans to try on me in the next few months. The labels stare at me from the hole in the wall. Murilo insisted that I get help. For a whole year I answered endless questions about the effects of the benzodiazepines on my system. Dr. Péricles wanted to know about my urges, anxiety, low spirits in the morning, and then, according to my answers, he would change the dosage, which would lead to new sets of questions. “This one works better, that one worse,” I would answer, like a well-behaved pupil, until I suddenly became an uncooperative guinea pig. I decided not to collaborate with the labs anymore and avenged myself systematically, messing with their precious research. I gave them fraudulent data and complained of dizziness, chest pains that didn’t exist. I proved to be a dangerous, anarchical rat, out to undermine the scientific megalomania of mood regulators, frustrate those who thought they could control my misery. I felt considerably better during that period—I enjoyed seeing the doctor’s surprise at the symptoms I described. It was obvious that Péricles was lost. He was lost even before I started faking symptoms. A medical doctor would be able to diagnose fake pancreatitis, but the psych Péricles went strictly by American statistics, the behavioral tables put out by Pfizer, by Roche, without realizing that I was doing what man has done from day one: lying and having fun. There is no remedy for that. I actually felt a little sorry for him. I was grateful to Péricles. He was the one who talked Murilo out of having me go through psychoanalysis. I went to a few sessions but I didn’t make it past the first month. The analyst was a bore who charged a fortune to sit there with his mouth shut, me with my back to him, giving voice to my neuroses. A pathetic scene. Who invented that crap? Old regrets should be left well alone. Célia and I are the best example of that.

  Pulling the rug on Péricles’ certainties lost its appeal recently, two appointments ago. He handed me the prescription, I stopped by the pharmacy and brought home the collection of little bottles. I put them in the bathroom cupboard with the cracked mirror without even opening them. I stopped taking them. For the last three weeks my moods have been free to roam. And now they’ve taken over.

  I take the bottles with the black-label warnings and put them in my pocket, then I fill a glass with water straight from the faucet. Why filter? I glance at the darkened living room, then turn on the light in the corridor and head for the bedroom. I lock the door purely out of habit, as no one is going to come barging in, sit on the bed, and deposit the bottles and glass on the bedside table. I take off my blazer, shirt, and pants and hang them on the hat rack. I si
t down again.

  “The difference between black-label and red-label warnings,” the pharmacy assistant told me, “is that if you take the whole bottle of black ones you croak; not so with the red ones.” He said it and laughed, placing the three bottles in the basket. What’s so funny? I thought.

  “Yes, what’s so funny?”

  The air becomes heavy all of a sudden. I realize I’m not alone. There is someone besides me, there, on the bed. I can hear them breathing. I don’t dare turn to see who it is. I slide my fingers over the sheet, fumbling in the dark, until a familiar hand grasps mine.

  “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

  The voice echoes clearly in the empty room. I take a moment to answer, fearing the illusion will unravel.

  “I’m coming.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Late,” I say.

  “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

  I close my eyes and lean over slowly, holding her hand so that it can’t leave mine. Staring at the ceiling, without the courage to move, I feel the volume of a body snuggle up to mine. Hers.

  “I thought it was morning already,” she says.

  “No, it’s still dark out, you were in a deep sleep.”

  We lie there quietly in each other’s arms.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Is it work?”

  “No, Célia, it has nothing to do with work. It’s me.”

  I close my eyes tighter and push her away from me. I touch her hair, her chest, her waist, belly, hips, I wish so badly for it to be real. I move my eyelids gingerly, light invades my retinas and shows me Célia’s face. She is neutral. She isn’t young, but she doesn’t have the lines of her later testiness either. She is a beautiful woman. My woman. My wife.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, with a slight smile. “Nothing,” I reply.

  I always envied Ciro’s love for Ruth. He came to the beach the day after Juliano’s party and invited me to go for a swim. He was more handsome than ever. We passed the wave-break and Ciro confessed that he was in love with the singer from the night before. Ruth was her name. They had spent the night together and Cupid had pierced him with his arrow.

  “I didn’t think this existed, Neto, you know what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Love is much more violent than I thought. Fucking someone with this intensity, screwing a woman who belongs to you, who’s yours by destiny, by birthright, past lives, who knows. I didn’t expect it to happen to me, I thought it was all bullshit. Now I can’t live without her, Neto. I want to marry her, have kids with her, fuck, die, kill for her.”

  I felt sorry for myself. The waves rose up behind us and he caught the next one, the biggest, body-surfing it all the way to the sand, letting out a Tarzan cry.

  There really was an aura around them. It wasn’t like that with Célia and me. I loved her, but it wasn’t like that. Ruth and Ciro extinguished themselves in a fire. They were joined at the hip, at the shoulder; but even though Ciro was head over heels in love with Ruth, he kept looking for that poetic, romantic flame, that yearning that he revealed to me on the beach at the beginning of their life together. Ciro would fight with her and come back, just to create the expectation that Ruth might leave him. He knew she was incapable of it. But he needed her to, so he could win her over again, fuck her as if for the first time. Ruth never got it. She suffered, a slave to his eroticism. Passion is a serious illness. Ciro needed her to be stronger than him, but she wasted away like the most ordinary of women. He became so desperate that he tried to seduce the door, the skirting board. The tragedy was that he never found another Ruth, the Ruth from the early days, the one who still didn’t belong to him, even though she did. The staidness of my marriage was always frustrating, but now, looking at Célia lying beside me, I am gripped by Ciro and Ruth’s ardor. The commotion of belonging to someone. This discovery didn’t come in a flash, in the dawn of my life—I have only just become aware of it, after her death. Here, in our mahogany bed, I understand what Ciro wanted to tell me that afternoon, when we passed the wave-break.

  “Aren’t you going to sleep?” she insists.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you take something to help you?”

  I am silent, considering the possibility.

  “Do you dream, Célia?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you miss dreaming?”

  “No.”

  “What about you, do you dream?”

  “Sometimes, about you.”

  “Take something, it’ll do you good. Want me to get it for you?” she asks.

  “Yes, please,” I say.

  Célia gets up, as she always used to, the day dawning outside, puts on her slippers, walks around the bed, chooses one of the bottles on the bedside table and sits beside me.

  “How many are you supposed to take?”

  “I don’t know, how many do you think I should take? Did you read the instructions?”

  She unfolds the paper and puts on my glasses to read the fine print.

  “Who prescribed this?”

  “Dr. Péricles, the psychiatrist.”

  “Did you read the side effects?”

  “I did… Scary.”

  “Constipation, sweating, panic attacks, allergic reactions, liver damage… Who referred you to this guy?”

  “Murilo.”

  “Oh… how is he?”

  “He’s well. We brought up one fine kid. Two—him and Dalva.”

  She gives a satisfied smile.

  “How many do you want to take?”

  “I don’t know, I just want to sleep.”

  “A whole bottle?”

  “I guess so, if it doesn’t do the job I can take another one. There’s water in the glass.”

  “Best leave the note where it can be seen,” she suggests.

  “It’s in my blazer.”

  She goes over to the hat rack, takes the piece of folded paper out of my pocket, and doesn’t know where to put it.

  “You think it’s a bad idea to leave it in my pocket?”

  “I’m afraid they might not see it.”

  “What about on the bedside table?”

  “Move the glass so the paper doesn’t get wet.”

  She tips half the content of the bottle into the palm of my hand and waits with the lid open. I swallow the first round of pills.

  “Just one more and you’re done.”

  She gives me the rest and I wash them down with the last of the water, then I lie down to wait. Célia pulls the covers up to my neck, kisses me, and returns to her side of the bed. I just lie there looking at the ceiling.

  A sleepy drunkenness comes over me and I doze, wake, and snooze again. I don’t know how long I spend coming and going like this. Suddenly, a sharp pain in my stomach jolts me out of my trance. My stomach heaves, my intestines tighten, my heart speeds up, a twinge announces the horror to come. Cold sweat, cramps, uncontrollable vomiting. I stand quickly and drag myself to the toilet. I throw up on all fours and sit down on the cold floor to breathe. There’s more to come. Or isn’t there? I lean on the wall to stand, rinse my mouth out with toothpaste, and try to go back to the bedroom. I stop short in the doorway. My stomach heaves again and I drop to the floor. And again, and again. Bile. Nothing left to come out. I straighten up, breathe, settle. I go into the bedroom. The bed is empty. She should be here. She isn’t anymore. I call her name, there is no answer. I search under the sheets, open and close the doors of the built-in wardrobe, look under the bed. She’s gone. I forget the nausea, heartburn, and pain, and head down the corridor. I fling open the doors of Murilo’s and Dalva’s bedrooms, the study, I go into the kitchen, to the laundry room, I turn the living room upside down—no sign of her. I collapse in the armchair.

  Meanwhile, an insidious rancor, an aggressive impulse, small but concrete enough to be felt, grows in me until it reaches my head. I hate her for leaving me here on
my own without finishing what she came here to do.

  Go ahead and vanish, you sadistic bitch, disappear. Thirty years of quarreling and, now, the last dagger. I loved you a lot, Célia. After you disappeared I loved you like I never thought I’d love anyone. I thought you’d understood it there, in the bed, in the way I gazed at you, hugged you, and celebrated your presence. Is this revenge? Is that it? Thirty years of putting up with your scowl only to have you disappear again? Nice one, Célia, nice one.

  You didn’t even give me the pleasure of leaving you. Not even that. The morning I arrived home in a daze after Sílvio’s farewell, there, that day, I should have left you. I never told you what happened in the twelve hours leading up to that morning, nor did you want to know. I forgot about you that night, Célia, I swallowed everything that Sílvio gave me, I drank all I could, danced, sang, and hugged my badly-behaved friends; I was theirs, just theirs. I dragged a blond into the guest toilet and when she unzipped my fly, she was shocked at what she found. You should have seen how happy she was, how appreciative. You never mentioned it, not even in our fantasies, you never praised me the way she did. I’m not just any old guy, Célia, you know that. How can you not be grateful? Go ask Irene what it’s like being married to someone who can’t get it up. You pretended it wasn’t important your whole life. You pretended so much that I ended up forgetting. But at that fancy party in Leme, which Sílvio chose to say goodbye to us, with the blond kneeling in front of me, devout, incredulous, her mouth on my crotch, I remembered what I had between my legs. I tore off my clothes and headed for the dance floor. I wanted to show the world. I was removed forcefully. Outside, I was still raring to go and even took the last pill that Sílvio gave me. But when they all agreed to take the party to Glória, I realized I’d never be one of them. I was ashamed of what I’d done. I wanted to come home, sleep, switch off. The rest of my life—you, the kids, home, the office, the contracts—was all incompatible with the gutter, the whores, and the four pals I liked so much. I didn’t have their courage. I came home, Célia, and you hit me with a closed fist, you hit me in the face, on my back. I took it. I should have disappeared forever, but I only went as far as the elevator. I needed to sleep. And I didn’t come home because I loved you, Célia, I came back because I couldn’t be like my friends. No matter how badly I wanted to, or tried, I’d never be one of them.