* * *
“Want some more, Annie?”
It was almost ready when she arrived. Jonas was putting the finishing touches on the lines on the glass table and was rolling a ten-dollar bill to offer to the girl. Happy at the coincidence—“You always show up when I’m ready to take a hit,” said Jonas, “you sense it”—Annie placed the finger on the other end of the table to avoid getting powder on it. She positioned the bill to snort the first line at the same time that Jonas noticed that finger in the napkin and wondered what the hell he was doing fucking and providing cocaine to a crazy gringa like her.
Deep in concentration, it was only after the second line that Annie perceived the puzzled gaze of the man before her. She smiled slightly, kissed him, and took the finger from him.
“I found it this morning on my walk,” she said, while caressing the bloodstains on the dry skin and then Jonas’s still-cool skin. “It was in a trash can.”
The man listened to the rest of the story with a degree of skepticism. It was inconceivable that she actually wanted to keep the finger in the refrigerator. “Annie, that’s part of someone’s body.”
She didn’t seem very shocked. She wanted to find out whose finger it was, that was all. A nut job. Jonas hugged her tightly because after all she was sexy, though crazy, and he asked her to wash her hands before taking hold of his dick.
Annie agreed to this request, but she couldn’t accept throwing the finger away. She preferred to find a plastic container for it and place it in the freezer. Then she commented that Jonas was a good person.
“I was very lucky to run into someone like you for this.”
He felt it better not to ask whether “this” was primarily the amount of cocaine he had been supplying her in recent weeks, or the sex, or something else that he would never discover. In any case, Annie was well supplied with coke for the day, and with the finger comfortably in the freezer she felt at ease to pay with what might be the best blow job in Jonas’s life. They learn quickly, he thought, and know how to use it to their advantage. Because Annie, seeing the right moment to repeat the question of half an hour earlier, swallowed the rest of the cum and began to speak as serenely as her state of lethargy would allow.
“You really don’t know anyone who might know where the finger came from?” she asked craftily as if she were going to suck it again, and he had no way out but to sigh, stroke her hair, and reply: “There’s a guy missing a finger who sells me blow. But it’s his pinky, and yours is an index finger.”
Even so, she seemed sufficiently interested, and before Jonas knew it he had promised to take her with him to the favela on his next buy.
* * *
He usually went up the hillside a few times a week. He tried to organize orders so he could go less often, but new orders could appear suddenly and he never wanted to miss the chance to make a quick deal. Especially now that Annie, having come into his life out of nowhere, consumed nearly as much as the powder ought to be generating.
But Annie was worth it. A bit weird with that talk about always recovering, true, but goddamn, what a body, and she knew how to use what she had, knew how to rub her hard nipples against him until he said, “Of course, sweetheart, we’ll go up the hill together so you can see a man missing a finger while you hide your pet finger in your pocket.”
It was a house like any other. As if at any moment a kindly grandmother would appear in the living room with a bowl of beans and chicken. Instead of that, two powerfully built men with all their fingers offered Jonas a taste of the new shipment. If he had been a gentleman and ceded the offer to Annie, she would have accepted. But he was the one who had to judge what he was about to buy, and she made an effort to keep quiet and concentrate on the fingers of the men in front of her while grasping the finger in her pocket. Smiling, one of the men came over and asked Annie if she loved Jonas. Because she didn’t understand a word he said, she just smiled back as if she in fact did love him. Jonas, even with his back turned at the moment, was surprised by the question, and the sudden reminder of the blow jobs in recent weeks lightly stiffened his cock. The man then asked if she was afraid of losing him. Annie smiled again in her easy ignorance, but Jonas, distracted, didn’t hear the question.
In the final analysis, it wasn’t a good idea to stay in that country without speaking a single word of the language, and that was why Jonas brought up the subject when they were back at home and she was sucking him again.
“Are you sure you don’t want to learn to speak Portuguese?”
His expression was too serious for Annie to simply smile and go wash the cum out of her mouth as if she didn’t have to speak anything, not even Portuguese. So she became serious too and, a bit tired of so many blow jobs, replied: “I’m not going to take any classes.”
And that was all. She could learn by immersion, of course. After years living in a country, even Hungarian can be learned, and Jonas hadn’t needed to live in an English-speaking country to master the language and make himself understood so well with Annie. But it was an effort even for him. At that pace, in several months she wouldn’t learn more than half a dozen key words which, if the necessity arose, wouldn’t be enough for her to get by.
* * *
But Annie needed no rescue. What she needed was rest and the forgetfulness she found in those daily walks in Tijuca Forest. She needed to walk a lot, as much as possible, and take different trails every time, as if each one could neutralize, if only for a few hours, the wear and tear of that city, of the cocaine, of Jonas, and all the rest. Which is why she was anxious as she walked, because deep down nothing could any longer provide the initial relief and restore the feeling that, despite everything, she was recovering. Neither coatis nor severed fingers—even though that finger specifically had achieved its effect, like the rush the powder had afforded her weeks before when she met Jonas, and which had less and less effect after that first time. She walked faster and faster, aware of the animals and the trash cans, curious to return to the Borel favela, so near to the edge of the park, determined to find out how the hell that finger had ended up in the trash can. That was when she bumped into the park ranger.
He was a tall black man, and he was nervous when he came up to Annie to ask her not to walk by herself on those trails, it could be dangerous. Annie thought about smiling but remained serious. The man, not knowing what to do with the foreign woman, improvised with sign language while he went on explaining that she was a woman by herself, attractive, and the forest was large, too large—we do what we can to keep everything safe, but there are areas that can’t be monitored, and if a man with bad intentions shows up (and here his pantomime was especially direct), he couldn’t promise she would come out of the episode unscathed. After all, she was young and pretty and attractive, and Annie, seeing the man making those gestures, wondered whether she should take off her clothes right there and hope, when it was over, that maybe he had a bit of coke.
But no. She needed the solitude that one more random screw wouldn’t give her. She approached him and, touching his arm, explained in English that she hadn’t understood anything he’d said but that she didn’t want sex. The man wouldn’t have had to understand her words for his work responsibility to prevent him from grabbing the beautiful woman who, ignoring all his warnings, was approaching him. Even if it was difficult to contain himself. If they had met in some other setting, of course he would have taken advantage of the situation; and if she had the courage to let him see the severed finger, perhaps he could have even indicated to her where to look for its former owner. For there were many things in that apparently docile and cozy park of which Annie was unaware. And one of them was still the danger of walking alone on those trails during hours when few people were around, repeated the ranger dejectedly, until she grew tired and left.
* * *
At least it was Friday night and the weekend awaited them. Not that this dramatically changed Annie’s situation, as she had nothing to do anyway, but it was pleasant to t
hink that Jonas would be free the next day.
“I’m going to make a quick run up there for a last-minute order,” he had said, “and then we can do a line and leave. Maybe we can go see those gringo friends from the bar we met a couple of weeks ago.”
Annie wasn’t good at meeting people in random situations and Jonas’s friends didn’t amuse her. Considering the few chances she had to speak with strangers, it was almost surprising that she had managed to even meet those gringos. It’s worthwhile to invest in friendships, her mother had said a day earlier via Skype, concerned, and it was with that spirit that Annie decided to send them a message asking if they were up for a beer.
Jonas had left about fifty minutes before. According to what he said, he wouldn’t be more than half an hour—his missions usually took about that long. Something unforeseen, maybe; it happens. I don’t want to have to worry about anything, she said when they first met. Worry exhausted her, and she wasn’t willing to be exhausted, never again.
“I’ve already exhausted everything I had, understand?”
Jonas didn’t have to understand. He gave her what she wanted, in exchange for what he wanted, and things were fine. With her, he spoke the English she was accustomed to hearing. With others, he spoke the Portuguese that she would never speak. Annie continued to be amazed at her luck in finding this available neighbor right after arriving in Rio, when she still hadn’t known how to adapt to the city—but knew she was unwilling to do so.
An hour and twenty minutes waiting for him. The last line had been on Thursday, and all day Friday she’d been clean. She had tried calling, and nothing, not even a text message—even their friends hadn’t answered. Should she go out looking for him? Brazilian men are fickle, she had heard someone say when she chose Rio. It wasn’t enough. Not that he loved her and needed to keep her close at all times; he just wasn’t the type of person to abandon her, especially after having agreed to a snort and her spending all day waiting for him to complete the routine.
Her cell phone chimed, announcing a message, and Annie jumped to open it. The friends: they couldn’t make it that night, maybe tomorrow. The idea of the next night was still somewhat cloudy for Annie, who, without Jonas’s arrival with more blow, couldn’t visualize much beyond the next twenty minutes. The old house where she rented a room was empty, and if there were anyone to complain about the noise, Annie surely wouldn’t listen to The Killers at such a high volume as she was doing right now. Running out, running out was an old song. She had now been waiting an hour and forty minutes, perhaps in vain, because Jonas might not be coming back. Our time, she repeated, imitating many others besides the vocalist, and how many others must have left the comfort of their beds to look for someone who, bearing something of value, doesn’t come?
She waited another fifteen minutes before deciding. She got her purse, took the finger from the freezer and put it in her skirt pocket, slammed the door behind her, and walked to the mototaxi stand. It couldn’t be all that difficult to find him, and maybe she would discover the ex-owner of the finger as a bonus. The driver there wasn’t one of the guys recommended by Jonas. She approached him nevertheless—she still remembered the name of the luncheonette at the top of the favela and with luck would recognize the spot. The driver left her at the exact spot she requested, but she didn’t know which alleyway to take. Many people passed by, among them mothers bringing their children from school and bricklayers returning from work, and it was sheer luck that she recognized the man who days before had asked her if she loved Jonas and was afraid of losing him. The man seemed surprised at being approached by the gringa with her sign language and the few key words she knew in Portuguese: cocaine and Jonas. Guffawing at something, the man took her arm and led her to the house where she had been before.
* * *
There were lots of people. The guys from the previous visit and some others, women who seemed to be girlfriends, random visitors. If he was still there, Jonas was nowhere visible. The man Annie had met led her to a corner of the room and asked what she wanted. This time, she didn’t have the strength to smile. The man spoke more slowly and she remained impassive, murmuring, Jonas, cocaína, Jonas, cocaína, enough for the man to at least imagine what she was after. He asked her to stay there and left for a moment. Even without understanding, Annie stayed. Her right hand in her pocket brushed against the loose finger. After a few minutes, the man brought another, precisely the one who, as Jonas had said, was missing his pinky. Surprised, she squeezed the finger in her pocket, and squeezed it more when asked something that she didn’t understand, and went on with her sequence of cocaine, Jonas, and so on.
The man smiled at length. She wanted cocaine. The other told him that she was Jonas’s girlfriend, and Annie didn’t realize that this was the cause of the man suddenly raising his eyebrows, as if he smelled something wrong, and sending the other one away. Facing her, he gently took her two arms and asked her something incomprehensible. Immobile and still peering at him, she could feel, in place of his missing finger, the stump of skin caressing her. She would give a great deal to know how he had lost his finger, and even more to know to whom the finger she had found belonged. She almost took it from her pocket, to show it to the trafficker and wait for him to draw his own conclusions. Instead, she simply stared at him and repeated cocaine, cocaine, cocaine. There was no way he couldn’t understand, and who knows why he decided to humor her.
After a signal to a third man, Annie within minutes had in front of her three lines of the best cocaine she had ever done. The boss was generous—he could only want something in return. At her first snort Annie saw it was a fine, very white powder, and it had an unusually good smell. So different from what Jonas normally supplied her with day to day, though a little more like what she snorted on the nights they had sex. Feeling her body move as if responding involuntarily, it was as if she were reconstituted to return to a situation now very far away in her life, the situation before everything happened. As if she no longer needed to recover, as if her life in Rio had magically worked out, as if the past could be expunged to make way for a present both solid and very fleeting, a present over which she would have the control she’d never had: she felt her bones restoring themselves, the world regaining its colors, people moving about, and the extremely dark eyes of the man without a finger staring at her. What do you want? he seemed to ask and perhaps did ask. Annie would have so much to reply, but for now she thought of Jonas. Where was he? You understand me, her eyes said, I know you understand me, and he seemed undecided whether to take her at that moment, whether she was worth all the trouble she seemed to bring with her.
But no, perhaps he wasn’t pondering anything, and Annie for the first time paid attention to her surroundings. On a bureau in the corner a forgotten cell phone was vibrating, announcing a message, a cell phone exactly like Jonas’s. Whether or not it would be suicide for Annie to break through the blockade of the man’s eyes and go to check who was sending the message, it no longer mattered to her—after all, she could do anything now. Determined, she went over and picked up the phone and opened it. The screen was scratched like Jonas’s, and there were new messages. Since some of them could be the very ones she had sent hours before, she opened the first one: it was in Portuguese and therefore said nothing. She didn’t have time to see the second one because the man with the dark eyes and missing finger grabbed the device and angrily shouted something that certainly wasn’t an authorization for her to keep snooping. At that moment, Annie realized that nothing would be as easy as giving up for good. As calmly as if she had done this before, she took the finger from her pocket and almost rubbed it in the man’s face. “Whose is it?”
His reaction only indicated that she had gone too far. He yanked the finger out of her hands and stared at it, looking a bit sad. He glanced at the finger in one hand, the cell phone in the other, at Annie’s face, then back at the finger, mulling over his next steps. He wasn’t furious but a little melancholy, and above all, startled: how th
e fuck had that finger ended up in the hands of that goddamn gringa who couldn’t speak and didn’t know anything about anything? Or maybe she knew and was trying to threaten him? Just let her try.
Grumbling, the man called one of the others. He was older, very skinny, and slightly bent over. Upon hearing the orders of the boss without a finger, he began smiling and Annie saw he was missing two front teeth. Still smiling, he took her by the hand, and she asked for the first time what she should have tried to discover from the beginning: “Doesn’t anybody here speak English?” But those there who spoke at least at a basic level weren’t the ones who heard Annie before she was taken to another alleyway and placed without resistance on the passenger seat of a motorcycle by the old man, who a few minutes later started the engine.
* * *
“Where’s Jonas?” she shouted again. It was as if he were deaf. He drove at high speed through the forest and the sound of the engine drowned out the words, “Where is Jonas? Where are you taking me? Why?”
Without answers, they rode deeper into the forest. Little by little Annie could feel the air grow cooler, humid, like in the carefree mornings when she wandered the trails. The houses gave way to trees and finally to dense vegetation on both sides of the asphalt. She knew that many of the roads in the forest were outside the limits of the park itself and therefore remained open after visiting hours, even though it was all the same woods. The question was where the man was taking her. They could emerge in another favela on the other side of the city. They could stop right there, or in some other spot, God knows where. Annie tried to keep calm. She might never find out what had happened to Jonas or to the owner of the finger. Things of the past, like all the rest. She would have to recover from them like from everything else, like from herself if she were spared that night.
“Are you going to spare me?” she asked. The man grunted; it was useless.
If they could at least communicate. The park ranger had warned her. If she at least spoke Portuguese, she could find out what was going on, could have a history, cause and effect. If she had listened to Jonas, to the ranger, and later to the traffickers. If she listened. The bike’s engine didn’t completely drown out the crickets, a few night fowl that she had never heard before. In the Kansas fields so long ago she would know how to listen to them. In New York she hadn’t heard anything, but that had been a long time ago. She could understand; if she spoke, if she listened, she might take off the blindfold.
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