A car passed by, its engine approaching and retreating. She could yell for help, in some form, throw herself from the motorcycle and run as best she could toward whoever had just crossed her path. She could throw herself from the motorcycle at any moment; what kept her tied there? She would come out a bit banged up, true, but it wouldn’t be the first accident in her life. The man kept on driving, impassively. Annie yelled one last time, “Why?” And without reply they continued through the forest, deeper and deeper, the lampposts were becoming farther apart and the darkness of the trees, once so welcoming, was now only the darkness in which no one could see, speak, or investigate anything. The curves came one after the other and the roadway disappeared behind them in seconds, until they rounded one that suddenly ended in a small square. In the square was a car with its headlights off and some people inside who were surely having sex.
Unable to resist, the man braked, turned off the motor, and peeked in. Annie peeked as well and would never forget the two pairs of eyes suddenly staring through the glass, observing them in return, planning their defense. The woman’s breasts, very large and sagging for her young age, swung lightly while the man, still in his shirt, kicked open the door and, holding an iron bar, came toward them. The old, toothless man was lost: he had to fight. With tears in her eyes, petrified, the woman opened the rear window to scream for help and gestured to the man who had been fucking her to let it go, get in the car, and flee. Because the stranger on the motorcycle could be armed, and was. Old, yes, but his criminal appearance left no doubt. The man who had been fucking the woman nevertheless advanced, and before seeing the old man take out his gun, Annie realized she wouldn’t have another chance to get away. She ran into the woods before hearing the first shot.
* * *
The woods became thicker and opened briefly, only to close again. Annie tripped over a root, got up, and continued onward. Go on, she repeated to herself, advancing little by little. Faster at first to be sure she wouldn’t be found, then more slowly because she had been walking for such a long time with no sign of the man after her, almost an hour, perhaps, moving aimlessly wherever it seemed easiest to walk, tripping again, getting scratched here and there, but what did it matter because it was what would continue to save her. It was obvious, she told herself, it was the dense woods that would welcome her once again, hide her and let her stay there, silent and covered with scratches, for as long as she wished. The treetops closed off the sky and cut her off from all sound, from the motorcycle and the footsteps of the man, yes, the trees shielded her from the two gunshots she had heard when still near the square; she had tripped over a rock and tumbled down a ravine, until a tree trunk stopped the weight of her body and she suspected that she had a broken arm. But no, she could still move it, along with her legs and all her bones. Only her forehead and shoulders were bleeding, and the rest ached. She rose carefully and saw she was in an area the man could get to quickly if he was crazy enough to jump. And if she knew a little about men, she knew this one wasn’t the kind to plunge headlong into impenetrable woods. Even so, she walked faster and faster, without the courage to turn on the flashlight of her cell phone for fear it would give her away.
She only turned it on much later, having walked for a good length of time and wondering how long she would stay there, whether for a few hours more or for days or for the rest of her life, for the forest was the size of a forest, even if it was in the middle of a city, and she was the size of a person even if she wished at that moment to be the size of an ant or a coati digging its lair. The cell phone couldn’t get a signal and the battery was almost dead, but its light helped a little, especially to tell the time: approximately three fifteen. Soon it would be dawn, and if the man didn’t suddenly appear, she would have a better idea of where she was and what to do.
She stopped for a moment, sat on a rock, took a deep breath. If she only knew about Jonas. If she only had more coke. She needed to pull herself together. An opening in the canopy of trees admitted the sky and a few stars. A little bit of coke, just a sniff. It was tough thinking about it. She would get home and Jonas wouldn’t be in the neighboring house, waiting for her with the lines already laid out. Jonas had to appear, and the thought that he might be dead or at least missing a finger impelled her to stand up and resume the trek.
* * *
It was beginning to dawn and her phone had died some time ago. Maybe she was exaggerating things. Jonas might already have texted her, might be waiting at home for her. But she might take days to locate him, even if she found a clearing soon, some open space in the vegetation. She quickened her pace, she was getting close. She almost didn’t believe it. If she could get back to the park she was almost certain she would know how to get to her house. She knew the area well enough, every belvedere, every square, every nook. True, she could be a long way from the entrance, but it didn’t matter. She walked farther and farther, almost ran, and finally spotted the square with the stone knee wall with its drawings of balloons, facing the city. It had to be the Excelsior belvedere, one of those she had visited most during the last several weeks. It was her territory and only a forty-minute walk to where she lived.
It had been a long time since Annie felt like crying. She did so at that moment, but controlled herself. She went to the wall and caught sight of the city from above; a light mist covered the peaks of Tijuca Mountain and the smaller Tijuca Mirim. Below, the start of morning merged with the lights of night, dotting the bay and the bridge to Niterói. The favelas were sparsely lit and Maracanã Stadium was visible. The streets were filling little by little with cars that would not come through those remote roadways in the heights of the forest, and the city began to revive, distant from the gringa covered with dirt and blood, her arm twisted and her skin gashed, the arrogant gringa who now wanted to speak Portuguese, understand what had happened, and, for the love of God, snort a little coke.
In the future she would understand. For now, she allowed the city to follow its routine after admiring it and grasping it as the city that would never be hers in its beauty and its small monstrosities, but no, Annie was exhausted and needed to sleep. Turning her back on the belvedere, she began slowly walking home. She ignored the calls from the guard at the entrance gate to the woman with blotted makeup and wearing a miniskirt who looked as if she had been raped by tree roots, who eventually climbed the steps of her own porch, opened the door, dragged herself to her bedroom, collapsed onto the bed, and closed her eyes.
* * *
She couldn’t sleep, however. With her phone turned on and charging, there was no message from Jonas, no message of any kind. She thought of going to his house and ringing the doorbell, but he lived with his parents and she didn’t have the strength to take a shower, tend to her wounds, and make herself minimally presentable for a possible encounter with his mother.
Instead, she telephoned. One call, two, nothing. On the third, someone answered and hung up immediately. That was suspicious, but Annie lacked the energy to try to do anything about it. She just sent him a message, U alright? At home already? Pls tell me everything is okay, and closed her eyes. She must have dozed, for she awoke with a small start to see a recently arrived message: is good. i arrive my house. i love you.
Annie refused to investigate. She could have wondered why Jonas had sent a message instead of answering the phone. She could have wondered why his almost native English had become transformed into that grammatical horror show. And why would he speak to her of something as alien to the two of them as love? But Annie didn’t want to, couldn’t investigate. She was spent. Satisfied with the rough draft of a reply, she ignored the scratches burning her aching arm. She couldn’t do anything more, she could only ignore them just as she ignored everything else about Jonas, as she ignored the fate of the old man and the finger kept by the man without a pinky, the couple screwing in the car and her next snort, ignored everything because her body wouldn’t let her anymore, and calm like the fields of Kansas after a snow, she closed her eye
s and slept.
The Enigma of the Victrola
by Arnaldo Bloch
Jacarepaguá
1.
Which came first, jacaré (the alligator) or Jacarepaguá (the place)?
In the bar where I was celebrating my fiftieth birthday, after extensive planning, I introduced the mystery that had engaged me since childhood, and whose solution I had found at last. All that was missing was to test the solution.
The first guest to enter the discussion was an ardent biologist, an experienced tender of turtles.
“The animal was there before man.”
“So what?” I objected.
“So, before men, there was no such district.”
“Who mentioned a district?”
“If it’s not a district, what is it?”
“It’s the word.”
At that moment an expert in common sense intervened.
“First jacaré. Then Jacarepaguá.”
“How do you know?”
“Everybody knows.”
“Everybody who?”
“Everybody.”
At the neighboring table a German linguist overheard everything. She said: “Excuse me for brreaking in, but jacarré came firrst. Jacarrepaguá was what the Tupi Indians called a lake of jacarrés. Jacarré means alligatorr. Paguá means lake. Consequently—”
A clamor erupted at the table: my friends were commemorating my failure.
It happens that the German woman was mistaken. Jacarepaguá came before jacaré. And, moreover, it could have come before, as befits the deductive method.
I drained my glass of beer with a slice of lemon in it and looked directly at the Teuton, who had hips the size of the bar.
“Frau, your explanation is illogical. There is no evidence that the Tupis named the lake before naming the alligator.”
The German woman, who was pink, turned a deep red. “Senhorr, even if the lake was designated paguá before the jacarré was designated jacarré, jacarré only went into the lake after the existence of the two worrds sep-a-rrate-ly. So, jacarré-worrd already existed when Indian saw jacarré-animal go into paguá-lake. Only afterr, paguá-worrd joined jacarré-worrd in a new worrd.”
Silence came over the audience, in criminological suspense.
“I could say, frau, in a philosophical sense, that the phenomenon may have existed before the word, therefore the word was already there, waiting for the fact. The nature of time is controversial.”
“That is absurrd, irrrational, because—”
“And I could raise another long, endless series of hypotheses, frau. As it happens, that’s not the issue.”
The woman, who had turned purple, widened her eyes. “And what is the issue, senhorr?”
I filled my glass. The lemon disappeared into the foam. “The issue is that there’s a story that’s not the story of biological, chronological, topographical, or etymological cases.”
The German’s eyes bulged out of their sockets. “And what storry is that, senhorr?”
“My story.”
2.
Bbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm!
I’m so sick
Bbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm!
I’m neurasthenic
Bbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm!
I need to get help
Otherwise
I’m going to Jacarepaguá
The verses, wrapped in a dance rhythm, came from a Victrola that I never saw, only heard. Other verses came from it, from other records my mother bought in a store in Laranjeiras, including other verses from that same song, but lying in bed at the age of five, I focused on the floundering of the singer. Focused also on the word neurasthenic, accented on the last syllable to rhyme with sick.
And I focused, to the point of obsession, on that place: Jacarepaguá.
I didn’t know it was a district. And to this day I still don’t. I didn’t even know what a jacaré was. And although my parents had taken me to the well-known Lagoa lake, the existence of paguá was beyond my contemplation.
But I guessed that the place, that place, Jacarepaguá, if you were to go there it wouldn’t be anything good, which immediately aroused in me the desire to be there.
And that came to be the foundation of any future concern, plan, or action.
3.
It was the time for learning words, of asking what’s-that, what’s-this, what’s-whatever. Away from the Victrola (which I never saw), I asked my mother what neur-as-then-ic was and she answered that it was a man who was nervous, and I asked what nervous was, and she floundered like the man’s voice did on the Victrola.
“Loony,” she finally said.
The explanation was convincing. Loony, about whose meaning I had no idea, clarified everything, sounded like something I had already understood about the song and matched everything else.
There was still the question of what Jacarepaguá was. But I would never dare ask. Jacarepaguá should be conquered without help, without explanations that weren’t natural: any fact, word, map, or proof should spring from the days, like the word itself sprang from the Victrola that I never saw.
However, to move on, it was necessary for the jacaré to come. It came. The process of learning to read began, conducted by a teacher who not coincidentally was my aunt.
In my aunt’s alphabet set, of her own design, the a stood for ant, a convenient thing, as it’s easy to make the drawing of an ant fit inside of an a or even to draw the a as if it were the ant itself.
And so forth. The d was a strange set of dice, and the e was an elephant (don’t ask me how), the f was a flamingo, and the j, the jacaré.
“What’s a jacaré?” I inquired, and everyone laughed, as if they knew what a jacaré was. My aunt called on a cross-eyed boy everyone thought was a genius. It happens that, in addition to being cross-eyed, he also had a speech defect.
“Jacalé is an animal with a gleeeeeeat big mouth and shaaalp teeth who stays in the lake lying in the sun.”
It was the genius’s turn to be the object of laughter. My aunt got pissed and ended the class less than halfway through the alphabet, which later earned her a warning from the principal.
I went home looking through the school bus window at the leafy trees in Laranjeiras, which gave off a hot breath of late afternoon, and the sound of cicadas filled me with a brutal sadness and the wish to die, especially since the sidewalks emanated a bouquet of shit that battled with the blossoms from every flower bed in the city.
At home, I dashed to bed in hopes of sleeping before dinner, but it was impossible. My mother had put on the Victrola a song with hysterical syllables.
Mahna mahna
(ba dee bedebe)
Mahna mahna
(ba debe dee)
Mahna mahna
(ba dee bedebe badebe badebe dee dee de-de de-de-de)
Mah mama na mahna namwomp mwomp
Ma mo mo mana mo
I went to sleep and dreamed about my aunt turning into a giant ant who emerged from a tree and exploded into alphabetic gas, leaving a stench of letters in the air. When the smoke dissipated, Jacarepaguá materialized in a large gray swamp where monsters with enormous teeth were eating one another, forming a viscous mass that filled everything and went up their noses, mouths, and ears until embedding itself in the world’s most godforsaken places.
I woke up and ran to my parents’ bed in tears. Daddy was listening to the radio and Mom—where was Mom? I shouted for her but she didn’t appear. It was only when I awoke the second time that my mother was at the foot of the bed with a plate of angel hair pasta and grated cheese.
4.
It took time, maybe months, for me to recover from that phonetic improvisation that, according to my mother, was an Italian tongue twister. I even came to forget the song of the neurasthenic.
I started having agonizing pains in my head and eyes. I cried and screamed. Mom dragged me to a macumba terreiro, I remember a dark room leading to another room separated by a beaded curtain.
An
old man rocked me back and forth and gave me two punches on the ear that still ring today. Afterward, at home, my mother swung a chicken over my head.
But the bad luck, and the pains, won out, which made my mother resort to an extreme measure: to look for an optometrist. The man was shocked and, instead of recommending I see a psychiatrist, prescribed window-pane glasses, thinking it was an imaginary crisis.
The bad luck only lessened when Mom put two sambas on the Victrola. A samba-rock and a samba-samba. The samba-rock was luminous and lofty.
I live in a tropical country
blessed by God
and beautiful by nature
but what beauty
in February (in February)
there’s Carnival (there’s Carnival)
I’ve got a Beetle and a guitar
root for Flamengo and my girl’s called Teresa
The samba-samba, on the other hand, tempered its haughtiness with the sun of a suburban and moderate Sunday.
Rio de Janeiro is still beautiful
Rio de Janeiro is still beautiful
Rio de Janeiro, February and March
hello hello Realengo
a really big hug!
hello Flamengo fans
a really big hug!
Both sambas had in common pleasant words like February and Carnival, but there was one uncomfortable word, Flamengo, our team’s archrival, which I had learned when my father dragged me to a large stadium; I had a balloon filled with urine thrown on my black-and-white-striped Botafogo shirt. At the exit, Daddy tripped on a hole and fell into some mud. An older man helped him up.
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