When we got home, Daddy turned on the Transglobe radio that picked up stations from around the world and we listened to the Maré Mansa comedy group. The next day he brought corn on a stick from Guinle Park and we listened to Chacrinha’s show.
The headaches got better and the glasses disappeared, along with the ill-smelling hen swinging over my head. As a consequence I came to like the chicken stew the maid, a woman who rooted for Flamengo, prepared on Saturdays and which I had found nauseating before.
At that time, fate revealed the first threads of a happiness that, if not possible, was at least visible. In the middle of the city rose a crooked architecture, and I always found odd that bus line with a sign saying, Jacaré.
I was relieved to discover that Jacaré was another place and not that one, and that there was even a neighboring district, Jacarezinho. In a book of native languages I found out that, in one definition, jacaré comes from yacaré, “that which is twisted, sinuous,” like the Jacaré district, the destination of the bus that didn’t go there.
The existential nausea, however, persisted, and the sight of my father sucked down into a muddy tomb comprised the worst moments of my night terrors even two decades later, when that stadium finally lit up, when Botafogo won for the first time in twenty-one years, and I clutched my striped shirt at my heart.
Jacarepaguá thus remained suspended over the territory of doubt, made up of vestiges, songs, and symbols.
The day I departed, Jacarepaguá would be ready. And I would be ready for Jacarepaguá.
5.
While I waited, bones, joints, skull, and nose grew. My dick, not so much. When soft, it resembled a mushroom attached to a blond sword. If I stretched the foreskin, it looked like it had arms. The nanny watched out of the corner of her eye. My little sister thought it looked like the Christ statue we saw from the window and wanted me to do it again.
“Do the Christ.”
“No.”
“Aw, do it.”
I brought out the small organ and stretched the skin, and my sister laughed like mad. Once, when my sister wasn’t there, the nanny, at the foot of the bed, came closer and suddenly rubbed her nose against the mushroom. I felt a sharp sting, different from the usual phenomenon that now and then overcame me.
That way, my dick even had a certain majesty, recalling a monk or an astronaut, and itched like the devil. With the help of a beige-colored soap that smelled of bleach, one day I had my first creamy, watery ejaculation, which had the same smell as the soap because the skin must have absorbed the acids listed on the wrapper. It was time to go to Copacabana, according to my uncle, who also arranged the address where there awaited me a woman who repeatedly washed her mouth in a basin located in a bedroom smelling of Chihuahua.
I was anxious for the great journey and in college I crossed paths with the loonies from the Pinel colony and greeted them intimately. They treated me like a longtime friend. I also learned that in a neighborhood in the West Zone, whose name I don’t remember, there was a famous insane asylum that inspired an inane song at the start of the 1970s.
At the university there were people from all over—Copacabana, Méier, Sulacap, Quito, Leblon. There was a small lake where you smoked grass and an academic center where you smoked grass and a football field where you smoked grass and a dark parking lot where you smoked grass.
It was during a rainy night that I spotted, in that parking lot, her car; the key had fallen to the ground, the girl was groping on the pavement, the slit in her miniskirt was half open, her thighs marked from leaning against a low, jagged wall—I think there were even leaves with oily grime covering her skin.
Her hair was the color of vanilla ice cream, and she wore green high-heel shoes without stockings, tight, dying to come off. She owned a dingy white Beetle nicknamed Roach. I wanted to accompany her, but I lived a long way from there. When she told me where her house was, the blood rushed to my head.
“Where? You swear?”
“Yes.”
“Will you take me there?”
“One day. But it’s still early.”
“Want to go for a ride?”
At the top of the Vista Chinesa I tested the soles of her feet to see what she was like, and her soles were bloody and covered with talcum. I coughed and came on the sole and made the talcum into a holy paste with which I anointed my mouth and I think the paste never came off.
The next Saturday we went to the Reserve, a beach area, deserted, taking a bottle of coconut cocktail from Oswaldo’s bar. From the sand we returned to the smooth leather of the Beetle and she steadied her ass in the space between the front seats and asked me, in the backseat, to stick it in her pink aureole under the weak light.
Afterward we continued, with her at the wheel, along the Bandeirantes highway. Groggy from the drink, I saw an unknown city go past: a dirt road that in the dark seemed like an Indian village, half inhabited; a winding mountain range; and a long-deserted avenue. The next thing I realized, we were there.
6.
Bbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm!
I’m so loving
Bbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm!
Whoever tried me liked me
Bbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm!
I gotta take care of myself
Otherwise
I’ll end up in Jacarepaguá
I sampled all her fruits, including the ability to look at the sky through a telescope, and the art of screwing on a roof, fucking in the woods, fornicating on the ground where ten dogs roamed loose.
From time to time some of them would kill each other and we heard their doleful yelps there inside, in the spacious semiabandoned house on a vacant lot. But on the following day it would seem like there was an extra bevy of dogs, adult offspring that death added instead of subtracted.
She said she had a mother and no father, but I never saw her mother, although there was a bedroom whose door never opened. The area around that place had roads with strange names that multiplied like parasites, ironwood, arroyo, tindiba, gerenguê, cafundá, boiuna, curumaú, catonho, and marshal miguel salazar mendes de moraes.
Another road was said to lead to Grajaú, but how can you go from an improbable place like that to an established, famous, treelined district?
At the top of the hill was a cabin that might function as an establishment, but I never saw anything around there, although there was an indistinct movement of bodies to which the girl referred and which I glimpsed in flashes.
One day, the girl had a dream. That from the hillside, instead of all of Rio de Janeiro in view, there was only a foggy swamp, and on an especially dark night she went looking for me, descended to the swamp, and after searching through it pulled out like a root my still-fresh hand, ejected bleeding from some random spot.
I thought the dream was a summons, that I should take a stand by acting or making a pact. I heeded the summons at once.
“Tomorrow I’m going up there. The place in the dream.”
“Because of me?” she asked, rubbing her heel between my iliac and sacrum.
“Tomorrow,” I promised.
I have no idea how I got there. I know that up at the top I felt like releasing the steering wheel of the Passat 1.8T and letting the fragments from the collision with the rock scatter into the fog, and that my hand was the only whole, intact form to repose in the swamp and later disappear under one final bubble of air.
However, things didn’t happen that way. The truth is that I skidded, flipped, was blinded by the fog until, lacking hope, I ended up at the foot of the quarry, in its arms, and the dog pack howled at the moonless sky and the Victrola was playing Pink Floyd and in the darkness of the bedroom that had a phosphorescent vault on its ceiling we made love.
7.
I was in Jacarepaguá. The sky, the quarry, the roads, the cabin, the fog, the swamp: city-word. One night I think I actually found myself amid a group of humans, at the counter of a bar in a Scandinavian restaurant. We had a strong drink made of Nordic herbs.
&nb
sp; A gentleman, thin like an umbrella, tall as the ceiling, bent down to give an urgent warning.
“The airplane. Be careful with the plane,” he said, displaying his infinitely long finger. He bowed and left the bar.
That night we made love for a long time and without protection, as we always did five days before or after her period.
On a foggy Sunday she said she was leaving and would be back the next day.
“I’m going by bus,” she emphasized, without my having asked and without her saying where she was going.
I waited for her in the same place, covered in the smoke of four packs of filterless cigarettes. When she returned, we went into the quarry and rubbed ourselves against the walls of a cavern, hearing distant drops of water.
Her belly began growing three months later.
She loved dogs. The animated creatures.
I wanted nothing of any kind that might take me back to life in the city, to pin me down, nothing—a child, a saint, an envoy—that would remove me from here.
“I’ll get rid of it,” she said, impassive, but there was a shadow.
So, I returned to Copacabana and settled there. I didn’t go back to the university. For a time Jacarepaguá became a forbidden word. By phone I learned that she dreamed about the fetus as an angel, the ectoplasm pursued her, stuck its fist in her navel, and abraded her breasts.
One day, in my sleep, the umbrella-shaped man returned to me. I woke up and called her.
“The airplane.”
“What airplane?”
“You didn’t go by bus.”
“Yes I did.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“You went by plane.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Planes are pipettes of uteruses, centrifuges of ovaries, graters of placental walls.
She left. And took the city with her.
8.
I know they love me,
but for marrying
and I tell them to wait for me
because after the party ta-ra-ta-ta
Bbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm!
One day six or seven years later, I had taken every kind of drug known to man, got my father’s Maverick, and drove up the sierra, down the other side, and stopped in front of the house there, still intact. I saw the Beetle, but by now it was decomposing and ready for the junkyard.
The surrounding region was becoming a favela and the house was already part of the complex. It looked like no one was there anymore, except for a dog, the patriarch, who in earlier days almost spoke, shouted my name. He recognized me and tried to shout and speak but only succeeded in emitting a weak and screechy whistle.
From the house a fat woman soon emerged, dragging herself.
One hand pulled a boy who looked a lot like me in the time when I listened to records on the unseen Victrola. The other hand carried a box, supported at the waist. The fat woman had crooked teeth and a neck covered with pockmarks.
The boy looked at me, opening his eyes wide and covering his mouth as if about to vomit.
I felt my throat convulse and my intestines tighten.
The woman stared deeply into my eyes as far as my throat, and in her eyes I recognized a glimmer. A voice of gales whirled through the mountain range of her teeth. “You took a long time to come back,” said the voice.
Everything spun.
The boy ran into the house. I thought I heard the hoarse growl of the dog and a tearing sound of lacerated viscera, an echo.
The next instant, she was no longer there. In my hand, the box she had brought moments before.
There was no house, quarry, or valley. Only fog. The ground was mud, like the mud where the body of my father was almost lost.
I opened the box. In it, the hand was still fresh and smelled of sulfur.
9.
I thought that all my friends, or whatever they were, would enter into logical considerations and rationalizations, led by the plot, avoiding the truth. That they were going to ask whether the fat woman was really her, whether that boy was my son, or whether the son was me myself on the wrong side of a dream. Whether the hand was mine (and whether it was the right or the left) and whether upon receiving it in the box I had both of mine intact or was missing one. If there were a psychoanalyst in the bar, perhaps he would want to know if the fat woman was my pregnant mother. Or if that man (me) was the son of another man (me), a policeman killed by a drug trafficker (me) found at the foot of the sierra with a hand cut off, being that my hand of his ended up in the hand of her, that I had received the double hand as a trophy, that I was the perpetrator of those happenings, assassin of the fetus, son of Jacarepaguá, and that it would therefore be the son I never had, properly or improperly, the incarnation of an angel. Maybe someone versed in the lines and history of the city might argue that, in the ultimate analysis, Jacarepaguá isn’t a district, since with the growth of the West Zone it transformed into a collection of districts, a region, a city.
But no.
Instead of that, a solemn and moving silence filled the bar. It was no longer a silence of criminological suspense but a silence of empathy, compassion, and even submission. The waiter bringing the birthday cake retreated, took it back to the kitchen, and, I think, never returned.
The German linguist, in turn, was holding her head low in such penitence that one could say the entire weight of the world was resting on her shoulders, which would be, deep down, the dream, or the reality, of every German, every Frenchman, every European, all of us on their backs, on our neighbor’s back, and the neighbor on the back of the dog.
I left money on the table (just my part) and got up, heading out into the empty streets.
When I was about to reach the foothill, behind me there was some kind of procession. I think I even saw a candle.
I went on walking, at the head of the line. Sometimes I’d risk a sideward glance, but I grew tired of checking to see if there was still a cortege.
Frequently I felt, at such times, that I was walking in circles, or spinning like a record around a tree, following a curve, an axis, in a lighted courtyard redolent of bygone rose apples, at the hour of a sunbath, and afterward everything vanished for a time; I’d feel a sharp pinch in the wrist and fall into a sleep as deep and as cloudy as death, in a sterile bedroom.
When I awoke, the story would begin again, and I’d await, attentive, for the next intermission.
PART IV
Rio Babylon
Tangerine Tango
by Marcelo Ferroni
Barra da Tijuca
I could have called it a premonition, but I don’t believe in that, or in luck; in fact I believed in few things other than some money at the end of the month and a decent place to sleep, maybe someone beside me and a bit of happiness. I believed in what I didn’t have and laughed at myself at the counter of that hotel made of plaster and granite, of plywood with a veneer imitating hardwood, plastic plants in cement pots, lustless leather sofas. A steady bureaucratic rain was falling; I leaned against the counter and observed the curtain of thick drops that descended the narrow roof of glass a few feet beyond the automatic door. This city sucked up my air, this city of false appearances and low ceilings, this city whose buildings were neoclassical aberrations under a leaden gray sky, a São Paulo simulacrum of hell, while the receptionist—braces, the face of a kid—waited on the phone for my author to answer. I didn’t hate just the city, I hated my job, and before I could go back to cursing myself she passed slowly by outside. The automatic door opened and closed while she moved along the sidewalk without coming into the lobby. She had yellowish-beige skin, and her slightly flaccid arms emerged from a modest black dress that descended a little below the knee. Black shoes with medium heels, discreet legs. She rested her cheek on the phone in her left hand and in the right balanced an umbrella, which suddenly swept my senses into a celestial premonition (but I don’t believe in that), each of the umbrella’s colorful segments a portrait
of Rio de Janeiro—Christ the Redeemer, Sugar Loaf, another showing Maracanã, still another the beach and the wave-patterned sidewalks—and I thought I could be in a better place, warmer, where people smiled like that girl with large white teeth. She continued to the edge of my field of vision and disappeared into a service entrance.
“What did you say your name is?” the receptionist asked me.
“Mariconda. Humberto Mariconda.”
I waited a bit more. My author sent word that he’d be down any moment, but the moment didn’t come. Behind the receptionist hung a panel with the name of the hotel, and farther back, in the rear, where the office must be, she reappeared, without the umbrella or the phone, but still displaying her teeth in a half-smile, and only then did I notice how round her eyes were, and she raised them and looked at me. She was plump and diminutive at the same time, her dark hair tied in a bun, bare shoulders with small variations in color, and my God I smiled at her and her entire face opened up. She was about to say something but saw that her colleague was already taking care of me, then lowered her eyes to the computer monitor and started typing.
I could have said so many things to her. If she were alone. If the guy beside her weren’t looking at me the way I was looking at her. If the elevator bell hadn’t dinged and a man as shapeless as melted Camembert hadn’t emerged, accompanied by a blond woman who seemed like a collage of several faces, new and old, put together by a child in an art class. They didn’t notice me when I stepped forward with my best smile to escort them to the taxi waiting in the street. I started to help him, but he grunted, pulling his cane away.
That was what I was doing lately, greeting authors who didn’t want to be greeted by me, who would like to be successful with another publishing house, lionized by more relevant people, selling out entire printings of their tired novels, but who one way or another had fallen into the well and felt it was our fault, always our fault.
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