* * *
Natsume, my editor, assigned me the unpleasant duties only because my behavior was more stable than that of Rose, the publicist—a lady as old as our dot matrix printer—and because I was the only one there who could manage more than three sentences in English.
Seven months later, there I was again, playing the same role in another city, imparting concrete form to my premonition (though I don’t believe in that), leaning against a slightly larger counter in a more spacious lobby, monumental without having anything to be proud of, the salmon-colored walls with high-relief plaster waves, uncomfortable sofas, old palms, and carpets that made an effort to instill a warmer atmosphere in that third-rate Persian temple. I could be in the outskirts of anywhere in the world, except for the strip of ultramarine blue beyond the avenue, which merged with the turquoise sky at the horizon whenever the smoked-glass double doors opened to admit the fitful service of the porters.
Hours earlier, from the window of the plane, I had seen that same sea, camouflaged by a diffuse fog, and the images of a distant umbrella: Christ the Redeemer, Sugar Loaf, the whitish Maracanã Stadium, and the circular shores of foam, sand, and buildings. All of that dissipated in the heat at the airport, the chaotic wait to get a cab, where the attendants laughed among themselves or spoke on cell phones while men in suits broke in line. I left in an old Santana with dark windows and damp seats, clutching my backpack, and we plunged into the other end of the city, in heat that would strip the bark off trees (the air-conditioning went out today, the driver said, without the slightest effort to sound convincing), stuck on the congested highway on the way to Barra, amid nightmarish hovels and prisonlike walls that reminded me of the stories of people from São Paulo who get lost upon arriving in Rio and end up in a favela where they’re robbed and ultimately shot.
* * *
I wasn’t shot; I didn’t go where I shouldn’t; I didn’t flee from gunfire or have a gun stuck in my face, and yet a day later there I was, with an enigmatic girl, sandwiched between sun and cement in an enormous parking lot in Barra, with our author still missing in some part of Rio, and her and me fleeing hand in hand from a police car, with her sweaty and leading the way, without listening to my pleas, until she stopped suddenly and let go of my hand, took three steps, and stopped again, as if in a trance, her straw-colored hair tousled around her freckled face, squinting against the brightness, she began to rock lightly, panting, more whirling than turning now, among the white stripes like ancient inscriptions on the scorched pavement. Then she opened her trinket-colored eyes that glowed against the sun, she moaned, and my heart almost burst. With quick steps I covered the distance that separated me from her and caught her before she could fall, near a concrete gutter. She held onto me as best she could—her thin arms had almost no strength—and stuck her face in the hollow of my shoulder and I ran my hands over her tangled hair, she made an effort not to faint and then whispered in my ear, I know what happened to him, I know.
* * *
It took me some time to identify the color of her eyes, and what they seemed to be saying when she stared at me with dry lips and an expression of discontent. She paid no attention to me, or pretended not to, the first time I saw her, coming out of the elevator in dark glasses, tapping disinterestedly on a cell phone. She came just behind the person I was really there to greet. She vanished, probably accustomed to his small displays, as soon as he stepped forward and occupied all the available space, agitating the air molecules around him. His name was Greg Nicholas, MD, and he was in every sense just who he appeared to be. Compact, tanned, with dark hair clinging to his scalp like a new doormat. He wore beige pants, hitched a little above the waist, and a blue shirt that emphasized his well-defined pecs. A small silver chain hugged his powerful neck. He had a square chin, hard professional eyes that shone mechanically when he saw me. He extended his hand, which I shook, but it was like grasping a stone, a stone that in turn shook back. He gave me a lingering look. “How are you?” he said, and took from his pocket a blue pen, which he presented to me as a gift. Greg Nicholas Institute of Positive Knowledge. I smiled, looked at the pen again, got confused a bit at the greeting, the sweat running down my back wetting the waistband of my loose-fitting jeans.
With the nervous muffling of my ears I didn’t notice that there were others with me: two onlookers, the manager, a very young journalist, and a platinum-blonde in dark glasses with her likely driver, a scowling unshaven guy in a suit too big for him. The blonde advanced and to the sound of tinkling jewelry extended her slender fingers, which Greg took delicately. “How are you?” he said, with slightly more warmth, and a sly smile appeared in the right-hand corner of his mouth. He handed her a pink pen, without breaking eye contact. I began to explain that I was from the publishing company, that I—the blond woman had started talking over me, in Portuguese (while I was getting tangled up in schoolboy English), about how honored she was by his presence and how she was sure he wouldn’t be so unkind as to decline the invitation to dine at her house that evening.
* * *
Greg Nicholas enjoyed considerable success in Brazil with his method of losing weight: You Can Do It—How to Lose Those Extra Pounds by the Power of Thought. It had been launched by our publishing house without much fanfare—marketing was an alien concept to Natsume—and no one could explain how it had been successful here when that hadn’t been the case anywhere else in the world. Two months after publication, among our other random titles (The Ten Cruelest Leaders in History, 101 Microwave Cupcake Recipes), Greg’s book had slowly begun climbing the list of best sellers, settled into a solid sixth place in the self-help category, and stayed there. His method, according to the website of the Greg Nicholas Institute of Positive Knowledge, had been adopted by the rich and famous, among them the actress Lindsay Lohan and one Mimi Lesseos, a longtime wrestling star and stunt double for the protagonist in Million Dollar Baby.
I know this because I wrote the text for the book’s flaps, and both names were important to sweeten the press release. To cite the lead paragraph of my text:
Greg spent two months in Tibet, where he learned Buddhist monks’ age-old technique of concentration. By studying the energy that flows from our mind and courses through our body, Greg developed ten steps to channel this positive energy into radical weight reduction. Tested with patients around the world, You Can Do It is revolutionizing Western medicine.
Greg currently lived in Belize, where he conducted cutting-edge research at his institute. I didn’t know anything more, and I wouldn’t have access to him during his stay in Brazil. His schedule was rigidly controlled by the girl who, while Greg was led by the hand through the lobby, stared at me with anger and incomprehension. It took me some time, lost in those eyes, but I was finally able to identify their hue. They were amber-colored, a bit yellowish. Her name was Ellie.
* * *
She had scheduled three heavily packed days for Greg Nicholas. That afternoon he would give his first interview. Afterward, he would take part in a fitness and health program and continue, in early evening, to the main event: a debate in the grand salon of the book fair with Tatá Mourinho, a journalist and student of female behavior; Laura Ruiz, nutritionist to the stars; and the retired judge Gilberto Mendes Albuquerque (Mendes Albuquerque had written a folkloric saga with spicy elements). Later Greg would sign copies in our tiny booth, with me beside him preventing access from the fans. In the days following, he would have two more interviews; visit the TV Globo studios, where he would demonstrate live one of his mentalization recipes—as he called them—and give an exclusive talk for subscribers to the newspaper O Globo; climb up Rocinha with a TV crew, where he would watch a show of children’s capoeira; eat feijoada in the company of a society columnist; and conclude by autographing his book at a shopping center in Barra before embarking for Belize, with connections in Panama.
* * *
In the few minutes he was unaccompanied in the VIP section at the book fair, Greg sat at a small
table and ate compulsively from a bowl of colored peanuts while his assistant was stern, very stern with me. She wanted to know who the devil that woman was who had spoken to Greg earlier, and what was that dinner invitation that Greg had been forced to accept, and said Greg didn’t like being harassed by unauthorized individuals, Greg needed his rest, Greg wasn’t comfortable with the pillows at the hotel, Greg’s towels weren’t as she had specified (one of the things Natsume had cut from the budget), Greg needed a neutral room to radiate his positivity before the talk, Greg found it very annoying not to be able to use his PowerPoint presentation, and Greg was upset at having to share the stage with three other people. I merely looked at the horde of uniformed schoolchildren down below, sweeping through the booths like termites, asking myself why I had accepted such a job.
“And I haven’t seen our book displayed anywhere till now.”
She said something else that I didn’t entirely catch. That accent of hers—which was perhaps only the English spoken by a native—was sometimes impenetrable for me. Nor did she understand what I was saying, and we stood there looking at each other, not understanding, frustrated.
I phoned my boss. Natsume was one of those diabetics who drink out of foolhardiness, and I knew that at six o’clock, with whiskey fermenting his brain, he would be mildly ill-humored.
“The assistant complained about the towels,” I said.
“What towels?”
“I think she’s going to notice the car we rented this morning isn’t armored.”
“What car?”
“A platinum-blonde intruded into our conversation and invited Greg to dinner.”
“What blonde?”
* * *
The panel, needless to say, was a mess, the way events tend to be in my presence. They put Greg at the end of a long table with a white cloth, and it was obvious that the ladies and teenage girls in the audience of two hundred—more packed than I’d ever seen at a book fair—were only there to see Greg. The moderator was an environmental journalist and insisted that each panelist, himself included, say a few autobiographical words before Greg. Greg fidgeted so much that his legs made the table shake—he was a veritable reservoir of positivity. When he finally took the microphone, he leaped up because he was incapable of giving a talk sitting down. What happened next was monumental. Racing from side to side, interacting with the audience, which didn’t understand a word he was saying, Greg told his story of self-awareness, of how he had been a poor child with no prospects, and how early on he discovered the gift of channeling positive energies to overcome barriers. Greg questioned people, Greg made them laugh, Greg summoned a woman from the audience, Greg did push-ups, Greg threw out fistfuls of colored pens, Greg drew applause that raised the temperature of that enormous sardine can by several degrees. The other panelists were as astonished as I was. At the end of his talk the stage was invaded, and only Ellie’s brute force allowed him to be led down the crowded corridors to our booth where, I should add, a plywood wall was knocked over during the autograph session.
I was wiped out, I needed a shower, I cursed our publicist for having learned English on cassette tapes. Only one other person didn’t try to get closer: the platinum-blonde, all in white, fiery lipstick, heavy eye shadow, whose gaze focused unwaveringly on Greg’s every action as he signed copies on the plastic table. Her and the unshaven guy in the overly large suit. Two people, then. Three, actually, because another guy was there, a guy with a foreign air about him, now I remember: tall and thin, very straight caramel-colored hair parted in the middle, prescription glasses with round frames, beige linen jacket. Standing a bit away from us, as motionless as a lizard.
We would see him again a few hours later, at the dinner in Greg’s honor, which I was forced to take part in. Ellie was nervous about anything outside the schedule, too nervous, and I had to spend a few hours in the lobby of the Windsor Barra, wearing the same clothes from the afternoon, still with my backpack because I hadn’t had time to check in to my own hotel, which was apparently a long way from there—more of Natsume’s stupid penny-pinching. In fact, it was so far away that the cabbie laughed when I gave him the address: Aterro do Flamengo. Even if Greg pumped iron, took a bubble bath, clipped his nails, and fixed his hair, there was no way I could go and be back in time to meet them.
We left at ten p.m. Ellie had tied her hair in a bun, light makeup, black silk pants, and a white blouse, and Greg was wearing the same beige-blue combination immortalized in his photo on the book jacket. The taxi driver passed through dark, empty treelined streets with high fences in what could well have been São Paulo and turned onto an avenue with unfinished buildings, colored posters advertising something of low quality, and fallen boarding swollen from humidity that revealed machines and rusted girders. Instead of taking the tunnel, the driver hung a right onto a narrow street and stopped at an iron-gated entrance whose green bars rose in waves to form a design of delicate leaves. We waited for a reply. Greg fidgeted every time he shifted on the vinyl seats, and he didn’t fidget just a little. The gate opened. Then we began going up.
The houses got larger the farther we went, and we stopped near the summit, in front of a two-story mansion that attracted attention not because it was imposing, nor because of the lights or the palm trees at the entrance, but because of the colors. Dark green, grenadine red, dark green, grenadine red, grenadine red, grenadine red, dark green, every wall, every window, every balcony painted with the colors of Fluminense’s jersey as if the owner was obsessed with it, or honoring a vow. Nothing else could explain such absence of taste.
I left my backpack with an attendant. The house was full. Greg was immediately surrounded by four women of indeterminate ages and was in his element, gesticulating, communicating with winks. He distributed a few colored pens, the women laughed, one of them raised her dress to show a muscular thigh compact as a chicken drumstick, and I recognized the hostess because she was talking the loudest; this time she was wearing a vivid orange miniskirt and a pink, brown, and gold leopard-patterned blouse. The battle between colors in such a short expanse of cloth was terrible.
“Try the caipirinha,” I told Ellie, who had been forgotten in a corner. I had already gotten a drink, sake with red fruit, and was amused to see the same guy with the oversized suit behind the fruit table, grinding sugar in a glass. “I thought you were the driver,” I said.
He filled the glass with booze and stuck a colored straw in it without looking at me. “And I thought real men didn’t drink sake caipirinhas with red fruit,” he replied.
The blonde followed Greg wherever he went. When Ellie returned, I commented that I hadn’t seen Mr. Platinum-Blonde anywhere. It was obvious, I said, that a house with those colors demanded a man. A rich, truculent man. Ellie didn’t hear me, or didn’t understand. She was looking a bit paler. She held her untouched caipirinha in both hands, which were now shaking. She said, “We need to get out of here. Now.” That was when I saw the guy again, leaning against one of the plaster Greek pillars. The same hair parted in the middle, the same linen jacket. The same lizard-like eyes, which he kept glued on Greg.
She pushed through the guests to pull Greg away and in a short time had disappeared. I finished my caipirinha, grabbed a beer, and went out a glass door into the night. The pool and terrace were on a level below the house. I descended the metal steps, crossed the lighted patio, and headed to the glass parapet. My God, the view was magnificent. To the left, a concrete elevated roadway lit by car headlights followed the curve of the mountain and hovered over the sea. Even at night it was possible to see the violent crest of waves crashing against the rocks down below. I looked at the dark water. Looked directly at the cliff beneath my feet. The ground disappeared suddenly amidst roiling black treetops and a chilling discharge rose between my legs. I moved away from the parapet, which suddenly seemed too low. I turned back toward the house, three stories above, also painted in the insistent dark greens and grenadines. In the brightness of the glass door I recognize
d the spare silhouette of Ellie.
We took a cab back, in silence, Greg with a smile trapped on his lips, squirming as he did on the earlier trip. His yawns didn’t convince me. I left them at the door of the Windsor Barra, Ellie and I reviewed the itinerary for the next morning, and Greg went through the automatic door without waiting for her. It was the last time I saw him.
* * *
I found out that he had disappeared the next morning when I answered the third or fourth call on my phone. It was ten thirty and I had ridiculously lost track of time. To be expected, since I had gotten to my hotel, the Mengo Palace, at almost three a.m. after crossing the city in a ride that cost over a hundred reais, which I had to pay out of my own pocket. I entered the mirrored lobby, with its slight smell of must, and realized I had left my backpack at the home of the platinum-blonde. I got under the poor electric shower, lay down on the bed with my underwear inside out. The air conditioner rattled like a jalopy, someone laughed loudly all night, and the sound of buses cutting across the Aterro seemed to materialize itself directly over my bed.
It was Ellie on the phone, and from what little I understood she was saying that Greg hadn’t come down for breakfast, wasn’t answering calls, hadn’t gone to the gym or left for a run on the beach. The manager had just opened the door to his room, and Greg’s bed hadn’t been slept in.
On the way to Barra I called Natsume.
“Greg has disappeared.”
“Did he sell a lot of books at the talk?”
“You don’t understand. Greg has disappeared.”
“Rose asked for five autographed copies, for us to promote on radio.”
“You don’t understand.”
* * *
I was escorted into the Windsor Barra, through the lobby to a sliding door in the rear that opened onto the Emerald Room. They had pushed back the chairs and she was in the middle, among unfriendly types. She was blowing her nose into a tissue and her eyes were puffy. One of the guys, tall and paunchy, with gray hair forming small greasy waves on his shirt collar, came up to me. He wanted to know my name and what I did, and the way he asked the questions made me want to confess to anything. My hands were shaking.
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