I told Sebastião I was getting tired. He said he was, too. He told me he’d stolen some syringes and a few vials of sedative from the hospital in case I had trouble sleeping.
Sebastião said goodnight and turned out the light. I wondered what would become of me if Sebastião were to disappear. The beds were close enough for me to catch his scent. I listened as he began to breathe deeply.
“Sebastião,” I called out. I asked him to give me an injection to sleep.
Sebastião asked me to sit up as he held up the vial and shook it in the light.
I fumbled a bit from fatigue as I tried to prop myself against the wall. Sebastião lifted me by the underarms to help.
When he pulled the needle from my arm I was staring straight ahead, coveting the smoothness of the blue wall, without a single picture on it, without anything on it at all.
The injection was strong, I could tell. It wasn’t long before I lay down again—I didn’t want sleep to overtake me in an awkward position. I curled up in the way I like to sleep, said to Sebastião that one day I hoped I would understand why all this had happened.
The next morning when we woke, Sebastião told me that I’d stayed awake talking for a long time, resisting sleep, my voice coming out syrupy, and finally just babbling.
“What was I saying?” I asked.
“As far as I could understand, you were going to go back for a blue shirt.”
Sebastião got up, then opened a window to let in the sun. It was still early, a rooster crowing. From the bed I could see two hens on top of the woodpile.
Sebastião took a shower.
I stretched out sharply. The bed swayed and knocked over the crutches I’d left leaning against the wall next to the bed.
From the bathroom, Sebastião asked what had happened. I told him the crutches had slid down the wall.
“Ah,” he replied.
And he started to sing a song I’d never heard before.
It sounded like music from the country. Slow, and the words spoke of longing for home.
Sebastião had a nice voice. It made me want to get out of bed with my single leg, go over to the door of the bathroom, and watch him. I had the sensation he was the last person I’d ever see.
When I managed to make it to the bathroom, after going through the complicated maneuvers I used when I wasn’t on crutches, I saw Sebastião shaving.
I watched Sebastião. He was shaving and saw me in the mirror. It looked like he was wearing new clothes—khakis and a green shirt.
“How’s it going, my friend?” he said to me in the mirror.
“Sebastião…” I said.
“It’s a great day for me to see the sea for the first time, did you look outside?” he asked, drying his face with a towel.
“Like the first day of creation,” I replied.
That was when I began sliding down the door frame, without being able to stop myself. All my remaining strength was crumbling, like when a building implodes—that was how I was falling, and as I was collapsing the first thing I noticed was that I was losing my hearing—and by the time my body shattered against the slab floor of the bathroom, I was already completely deaf.
I could still see very well—I saw perfectly Sebastião’s expression as he leaned over me, moving his mouth, saying things I could no longer hear.
I tried to speak, but it only produced a spasm.
Then Sebastião picked me up in his arms, one arm on my back, the other holding my leg. I felt the veins in my forehead, my neck, the shooting pulses. I didn’t need to touch them to feel the uncontrolled beating.
When Sebastião left the room with me in his arms, my eyes couldn’t stand the brightness of the sun and shut. After the shock I reopened them and realized that I was seeing everything upside down because my head was hanging backward.
I knew Sebastião was walking—I had all my normal senses, but could no longer hear.
The world had become mute. Only silence. But I saw everything well, even with my head hanging back I could see the black calf grazing in an open field, I could see a dog running behind the hooves of a horse pulling a cart, I could see the immensity of the white sands.
Sebastião sat me down in the sand. He stayed at my side, one of his hands firm on my neck.
Sebastião looked at the sea. So did I. The dark sea of the South.
Then he turned his head to the side and looked at me. In the movement of his lips I could read only the word sea.
Then I was blind: I could no longer see the sea or Sebastião.
I could only breathe deep breaths.
And I found I was ready to take, little by little, all the air into my lungs.
In those seconds, as I filled my lungs with air, I felt Sebastião’s hand press mine.
Sebastião is strong, I thought. And I began to release the air, slowly, very slowly, until the end.
JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL is the author of nearly twenty books. His work has appeared in Brazil’s leading periodicals, and he has been a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, King’s College London, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. A five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, he lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
ADAM MORRIS was the recipient of the 2012 Susan Sontag Foundation Prize in literary translation. He is the translator of João Gilberto Noll’s Quiet Creature on the Corner, also from Two Lines Press, and Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes (Melville House Books, 2014). His writing and translations have been published widely. He lives in San Francisco.
Atlantic Hotel Page 8