Quiet Creature on the Corner

by João Gilberto Noll

  I was wiping snot on the sleeve of my shirt when I heard a voice from behind me calling: the jailor, telling me to come with him.

  The metal bars half opened and I went out, the jailor steering me by the arm down the corridor, I heard the murmur of the sheriff’s room, but when I got to the door they all fell silent, two flashes exploded, I noticed a huddle of reporters in a corner taking notes, and then suddenly the huddle broke open and they too went quiet, and in the middle of the reporters Mariana’s scared expression appeared: she looked panicked, regretting that she’d reported me to the police, and from the looks of it she would have asked me for help if she could—she was so young and was so flagrantly scared, there, in the middle of those reporters asking her questions—I went toward her, but when I got close various arms detained me. Mariana took three steps in my direction, slightly lifted her arm as if to reach out to me, maybe to undo her denunciation, but she knew it was already too late.

  They pulled her away and took her through a door beside the sheriff’s desk. Strangely, I didn’t see the sheriff. I felt a touch on my shoulder, looked back, it was a man wearing a hat and a black overcoat—he reminded me of a photo I’d seen of a street in Vienna in the thirties—and he didn’t take his hand off my shoulder, just told me I was coming with him, I was leaving this place, I was going to a clinic in São Leopoldo, and he handed me a package, telling me that inside were some books of poetry and some paper for me to write on.

  Wow, I sighed to myself, my entire life looks like it’s about to change. More flashes exploded, and I said that yeah, I was ready, we could go.

  The reporters and photographers stopped at the door to the sheriff’s office, the man opened the car door, I got in, and he said, softly: and now São Leopoldo.

  The clinic was a two-story building: we walked in through a garden full of arbors, with a white statue of a reclining woman pouring water from an amphora resting in her hands—the amphora was the source of a stream that ran beneath a little bridge we were crossing. On a plaque over the door was written ALMANOVA CLINIC.

  I looked at the man, he seemed imperturbable, like someone whose sole mission was to install me in that clinic. We went up the steps, walked down a long hallway, he stopped in front of a door, opened it, asked me to enter.

  I sat on the first thing I saw, a bed. A bed with a white sheet, a flattened pillow. The man asked me to lie down. I thought it was a good idea to try to sleep at last.

  I dreamed I was writing a poem in which two horses were whinnying. When I woke up, there they were, still whinnying, only this time outside the poem, a few steps away, and I could mount them if I wanted.

  I gave a few good pats to their haunches, and guided them, with waving movements of my outstretched arms, into a fenced pasture.

  About a hundred yards away, on the top of a low hill, was a wooden house, yellow, puffing smoke from the chimney.

  I went into the house and saw Mariana. She doesn’t have teenage breasts anymore, I muttered to myself.

  We sat down to have some coffee, on opposite sides of the table. Mariana spread grape jelly on some bread, then handed me the slice.

  I touched Mariana’s leg under the table. She trembled softly. I kneeled on the floor, crawled under the table on all fours, and started to lick her thighs.

  The bedroom was dark, beside the bed a lit candle. On the wall, shadows. The wind was blowing outside. Mariana was lying down admiring the shadows—I got on top of her, calmly, very calmly, as if some unknown plan were guiding my instincts.

  I woke up at the crack of dawn to get some milk from the corral, now that I was doing the milking in the mornings.

  As I made my way to the corral with a pail in my hand, the sun was starting to rise: roosters were crowing, birds flocking. I went along a path through fields of low crops.

  When I got to the corral, it was still a bit shadowy, but it didn’t take long to brighten up. Before sitting down on a stool next to the cow, I liked to make a few preparations for my daily chores—obsessively inspect the hay, make sure everything was tidy—I needed to straighten up in the morning, remind myself that Mariana and I liked to fuck in the hay. The first few times we got up feeling all itchy, but later we got used to it, to the point where one day we realized we no longer remembered to scratch.

  After returning with the full pail it was already what you might call morning: the rooster had already shut up, and if the birds were still singing it wasn’t really noticeable.

  I remember the morning when, returning from the corral, still in the middle of the path, I heard my son crying from afar for the first time. He’s getting to be strong, a real man, I thought. I opened the door—Mariana was breastfeeding the boy.

  One night in bed, I brought my hand to rest in the wetness between Mariana’s legs, and said I wanted another son. It was a cold night.

  It was freezing when I woke up, and I grabbed the pail and went out across the gravel with my coat collar turned up, thinking that now that it was winter the nights would be getting longer, and when I got to the corral I’d have to wait for a while before it got bright enough to do the milking.

  I opened the gate, there was some light in the corral, I looked back and saw it was the moon, dim as it was, that dimly lit the spaces between animals. The cows started to moo. I walked toward the back of the corral, to the haystack.

  I stopped, a few steps away from me was a dark shape.

  I had a flashlight in my pocket, I shone it on the dark features: it was the man who had picked me up from the sheriff’s and brought me to Almanova Clinic. Even though I hadn’t thought about that slice of my life in a long time, the memory of this man occurred to me naturally, without any effort.

  There I was, with the flashlight shining right in his face, but I forgot to say something, and by the looks of it he had, too.

  “You need to go back,” the man said finally.

  “And Mariana? And my son?” I asked.

  The man came closer, shook me lightly, telling me the day to leave the clinic had come, and now I’d be going back home.

  I took a few steps back, recoiling—I didn’t want to return.

  The man came and touched me on the face, and made me look around a room with gray walls that it took me a moment to recognize.

  He was beside my bed, wearing a dark suit, hatless: he had very white hair, seemed much older than before.

  He showed me some new clothes folded on a chair. The wool shirt was too big, the velvet pants fit like a glove, the shoes too—I remembered my busted old sneaker, at the moment the only thing from my past that would come to the surface—and I felt forgotten, foolish, dumbstruck.

  I didn’t see a mirror in the room, I pushed a button, they opened the door, I asked for a mirror. The only mirror was in the bathroom, shared by everyone on that floor. In the bathroom there was a man in a white smock, seated, discreetly watching how close the patients got to the mirror.

  I had long hair, a full beard—I’d never let it grow before. Some time had passed, I could now see, and not a little: those long hairs and that thick beard were signs of its passing.

  When I returned to the room it was empty. On the dresser were some books, all of them hardcover—I took one with a red cover, opened it: on one side poems in German, the other side translated to Portuguese. Various poets…Hölderlin—the name was pleasing to me.

  Then I picked up some of the loose-leaf paper from under the stack of books, on them were poems written in my hand, all with my signature, a bit shaky, but I could tell it was my writing, they weren’t forgeries.

  I liked one of them as soon as it caught my eye; it spoke of some lucid drops.

  The man opened the door, now dressed like he was the first day I saw him—black overcoat and hat. He said that I’d be accompanying him to a religious ceremony right there in the clinic.

  We went into the room for religious functions, people were standing around talking in groups, it seemed more like a party. There were no chairs, the walls were s
mooth, nothing that recalled an altar. I didn’t understand what was about to happen, everybody was speaking German.

  I heard them call the man Kurt. Sometimes Kurt would turn to me and say something in Portuguese. He told me that these were all the latecomers. Yes, latecomers, I heard the words distinctly. And that they were getting together for a very special moment. With every new piece of information I nodded my head, trying to demonstrate respectful interest.

  When I was about to ask what this moment would be, they tugged Kurt by the arm and everyone began to sing. By the sound of it, a German religious hymn.

  The pastor, dressed in something that looked like a nightgown, black, over his suit, was in front of everybody else—young, very blond—except he wasn’t singing, he seemed to be awaiting the end of the hymn so he could speak.

  Obviously, the pastor’s speech was in German. At the beginning it gave me the impression of a mild homily. However, he slowly elevated his voice until he reached a hard vehemence.

  I whispered in Kurt’s ear that I had a headache, I was going out to the garden to see if that would help.

  I walked down a narrow path, listening to my steps on the flagstones.

  Inside they’d started singing in German again.

  I’d arrived at the gate to the clinic, slightly ajar. I didn’t see anybody guarding the entrance.

  Why not escape? No…it didn’t seem like by going it alone I’d be able to facilitate the unfolding of things.

  I asked a guy who was passing on the sidewalk for a cigarette. I took two drags and threw the cigarette on the ground. The German hymn was going strong. The guy who’d given me the cigarette turned around and looked at me like he was wondering what my deal was.

  What’s up? I muttered, and turned back down the path. Everything was very quiet, the singing had stopped, as I got closer to the clinic building, I began to hear the pastor’s speech once more, this time less exalted.

  Suddenly I was very dizzy. I steadied myself on a tree, managed to estimate the distance between myself and the building, and decided to sit on a bench in the garden instead.

  The murmur of water coming from the amphora… The participants in the ceremony began to say a collective prayer. O Father—it came to me involuntarily, like a poem—O Father, when will I be with you, at last? I looked at my new shoe stepping onto the wet earth—it made me want to laugh. I swallowed the laugh, but the mere thought of laughter caused the vertigo to recede. I remained seated there a while longer, breathing deeply, staring at my new black shoes.

  Kurt was now driving his car, I at his side, on the tape deck a German chorale—Bach, as I read on the tape case—Kurt seemed to follow along, moving his lips almost imperceptibly. At the moment the car was passing through the streets of Porto Alegre, finding its way out of the city—for a while a highway with half-potholed asphalt, countryside all around, few trees, until we turned onto a dirt road with more vegetation. It wasn’t long before a large estate appeared at the end of the road.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “It’s our house,” as he was parking the car.

  On the porch was a man, a relative a few years younger than Kurt.

  This is the boy, Kurt said to the man, and then he introduced me to him—Kurt said rapidly: Otávio.

  We went down a hallway, Kurt opened a door.

  “This is your room.”

  The room was spacious, the walls nude, I thought later about filling them up with posters, and the image came to me: a man in black and white with a dangerous scar on his temple, his face enraged, covered in sweat.

  I saw a desk, knocked on the wood to make sure it was real, thought that here I’d write my poems…maybe it would be nice to move the desk closer to the window, so I could write while looking outside. Out front was a row of eucalyptus trees.

  I opened the drawer, there were blank sheets, I sat down.

  I began writing a letter to my mother. The first idea that crossed my mind when I picked up the paper was that I wouldn’t let her know where I was. If this house where I was staying was offering me, as they say, a new home, then fine, I’d stick with it as long as they didn’t give me a hard time, and I was sending a letter only to inform her that I was doing fine and that she wouldn’t hear from me any time soon, since the time I had would now be devoted to writing my poems, and writing letters would rob me of my time for poetry, and I was doing well, much, much better than she could ever have imagined.

  In another drawer there were envelopes, and as I folded the letter and stuffed it in an envelope I felt the pleasure that I usually felt when I told a fat lie, the feeling of completely pulling the wool over somebody’s eyes—a thing I knew how to do in writing but not speaking—into which would creep the compulsion to be caught lying: I guess I’d get a cunning glint in my eye, look askance, I guess my face burned with a fire I could extinguish if I really wanted to, but this time, since I was writing someone a lie that I had the feeling they were ready to believe, I got swept up in euphoria, as if I were close, very close, to a state that would represent for me, just maybe, a kind of emancipation.

  At the lunch table there were three people besides me: Kurt at one end, Otávio at the other, and a woman with blue-rinsed white hair across from me. Kurt introduced me: Gerda, his wife, silent most of the time. She asked me my age then drank a sip of white wine from her glass.

  Kurt had the same solemn air as his wife, Otávio did not. Otávio seemed like the plebeian of the household, besides the maid, obviously, who served lunch and stared at me curiously, lowering her eyes theatrically when they encountered mine.

  Otávio was the one spinning the yarn, even though at times he obeyed the long silences I’d say were almost tense, if it wasn’t for the sound of dishes and silverware slightly diluting the exposition of those pauses.

  I’d never eaten so well and was hoping the wine would be at all future lunches. Everything led me to believe that my time had arrived, and I’d cling tooth and nail to this unique opportunity that had come out of nowhere and was heading who-knows-where—that’s right, I’d never let it escape, even if I had to do exactly what they wanted, this was mine, and the best thing would be for me to forget my shitty past.

  Seated at the desk in my room each day I tried to fill the blank pages in the drawer, writing my lines as I looked out the window at the eucalyptus, and as I wrote, the image of the eucalyptus overflowed and occupied my entire field of vision until it became something I could no longer distinguish, until I suddenly returned to the things that surrounded me inside that big house: those two men, Kurt and Otávio, and that woman, Gerda, who all seemed to want me there, without even asking for anything in exchange, as if they only wanted my negligent company as I wrote my verses, a silent shepherd guiding them to old age.

  A fog. I put my hands in my pockets and went out for a walk—a few swallows were eating the still-warm shit of a horse that was wandering away through the pasture—I saw a gymnastic bar, ran, did a few somersaults around the bar, hung by my arms, did some chin-ups, broke a sweat, swayed with my arms stretched out, finally jumped off, slipped, fell, clapped one hand against the other, got up, ran, went up a small hill, saw that on the other side two men were fighting at the foot of the hill, and those two men were Kurt and Otávio. Even in the fog I could tell they were wounded here and there, blood at the corner of Kurt’s mouth, on his shoulder, and down Otávio’s arm ran a thread that, from that distance thick with mist, looked more black than red. They were fighting in silence, sometimes falling and rolling together, hurting themselves even more.

  Suddenly they ceased fighting, stopped in front of one another, half staggering, then went their separate ways. From his shaky gait, Kurt looked to be the more afflicted.

  Kurt didn’t turn up at dinner that night, Gerda said he had the flu, Otávio was eating more than usual, talking with Gerda about the number of days that remained before he commemorated his return to Brazil from Italy as a grunt in the Brazilian Expeditionary Force.
/>   On my evening walks I usually avoided the shed where Amália, the maid, slept, at the edge of a black and muddy lake, but that night when I realized I was standing in front of the boards that formed the door of the shed, I got the urge to knock—Amália opened, asked if I wanted to come in, a little cold inside, in the roof of the shed were open slats, the half-moon.

  I sat on the bed, there was only the light of a candle on the nightstand, a radio I couldn’t see was playing some Paraguayan folk music, a harp, a man singing in Spanish of grinding rocks between his teeth, such was his passion for his absent love—in the darkness, smelling the heavy scent of the sheets I felt like playing dead or pretending I was a fag or something. I’d let Amália take all the initiative, even if I were on the edge of cumming I wouldn’t move a finger in her direction.

  Amália lifted up a corner of the mattress, brought out some newspaper clippings and showed them to me: it was the news from when they threw me in jail, but I didn’t look long enough to see, averting my eyes as if none of that had anything to do with me. Amália brought the candle closer, looked at the photos, then watched me look away, confessed that she found me different, very different, she didn’t know just how, she was kneeling on the floor between my legs, asking if she could sit beside me, but I didn’t say anything, closed my eyes, and with closed eyes I saw a tremble in the shadows provoked by the flame. I let Amália’s mouth kiss across my chest, nothing in me reacted, just intensified breathing, the sound of my zipper, the wet mouth, hot, descending, but I was quiet, not moving, Amália was sitting on my legs, she was getting there, now she was licking my closed eyelids, calling me lover, lover came out of my mouth without my meaning it to, lover, I repeated and I came—and I opened my eyes.