by Unknown
Bursts of noise can be heard outside. The new year is almost upon them. Another fifteen minutes to go. Juliane opens her eyes wide and looks about her in terror, as if she has no idea where she is, which bed, which room, which boyfriend. She lurches over and vomits once more in the bucket. He holds her head fondly, and she lies back again. ‘What can I do to help?’ he asks in a voice choked like hers, as if he’s on the brink of tears. Juliane, sounding more dead than alive, just begs to be left to sleep. She closes her eyes and falls asleep instantly. Ten minutes to midnight. Taut with nerves, he gets up to wander about the house. On the sofa he finds his book. The story begins as follows:
‘No one ever expects that they might some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms, a woman whose face they will never see again.’
He throws the book on the floor, as if it had delivered a shock so powerful that, had he not released the pages immediately, he would have been electrocuted on the spot. Although it makes no sense whatsoever, he takes this to be an omen and rushes to the bedroom, convinced of Juliane’s demise. She’s still sleeping and breathing. He begins to weep, shedding one small tear at a time. He goes back to his book and reads on, driven by the need to know what the opening sentence will lead to, what the novel is about – and may it have no bearing whatsoever on his own life, please. An abrupt change of subject, an explanation, anything like that would be a relief. But reading on brings no relief, each sentence renders him more nervous than the last.
The fireworks, intermittent at first, begin to explode en masse, like gunfire in battle. He puts the book down again and returns to the bedroom. Juliane is still asleep, her mouth smeared with greenish vomit. It’s midnight, and it’s 2011. He goes to fetch the book and sits down beside her to read. He has no idea why he does this, he could just as well turn on the TV and watch the firework displays in Copacabana, but then that would only depress him further. He could try and get some sleep, but – what a joke, what a horrible joke – he is sure, as sure as he is that the sun will rise in the morning, that he wouldn’t get a wink of sleep, not with that deathly pale girl lying there. ‘A moribund girl,’ he tells himself, immediately regretting having thought in such terms. How could he possibly sleep, given the possibility of waking up with his arms wrapped round a dead woman? So he carries on reading, obsessed with reaching the end of the novel, unable to stop, compelled to read every single line and go wherever the narrator takes him – it’s the only way Juliane will stay alive. Something has lodged in his mind, an absurd superstition, which is ridiculous because he’s not superstitious and never will be, but he puts his faith in it anyway, because if he doesn’t he’ll suffocate. What it boils down to is this: if he manages to finish the book, all will be well. The dead woman in the man’s embrace will remain forever captive in fiction.
He reads on feverishly, running his finger along the lines so as not to miss a single word. Juliane sleeps on, moaning softly from time to time. Looking up from his novel, he recoils from the sight of the body lying on the bed. Hours go by, his eyes ache and grow heavy, the lines begin to dance and swirl on the page. A drunken brawl breaks out in the road. Leftover fireworks are set off. Cars race by at a hundred kilometres per hour with music turned up full blast.
Page 300 – 5 a.m. already and dawn is about to break. He laughs out loud at the idiocy of his superstition, and can’t think how he could have got so carried away. But he’ll keep on reading, because it is imperative that he finishes what he set out to do.
It is the first day of 2011. In 2011 he will be twenty, and officially an adult. Perhaps this is what adulthood comes down to: utter loneliness. Deceiving yourself by inventing superstitions and other nonsense might work for some, but evidently not for him. The life he faces is not going to be easy, life is never easy for the kind of person who doesn’t believe in the supernatural or in God or in spirits, who wants to distance himself from his family and strike out on his own, who’s not at ease with sex, and who’s fazed by having a moribund girl lying on the bed beside him. It won’t be easy for someone who doesn’t watch much TV, who has trouble sleeping, who takes everything to heart to the point of not getting any sleep at all. Nor will it be easy for someone with only books for company (not that he knows that yet, he just suspects it will be so). Books never bring peace of mind.
Yet he carries on reading.
He finishes the book and puts it on the bedside table. He lies down beside Juliane, but doesn’t take her in his arms. He just lies on his back, staring at the ceiling. It’s broad daylight outside. Juliane wakes up with a start, as from a nightmare. He asks her if she’s all right (in the hoarse voice of someone who’s been up all night) and Juliane says yes, she’s feeling much better. She gets up, embarrassed about the mess and the vomit and the stink and how she looks half dead, and says she’s going to take a shower. He stays where he is, closes his eyes and thinks: Now I can sleep at last.
GRANTA
* * *
RAT FEVER
Javier Arancibia Contreras
TRANSLATED BY JETHRO SOUTAR
* * *
JAVIER ARANCIBIA CONTRERAS
1976
Javier Arancibia Contreras is a writer, journalist and screenwriter. He was born in Salvador, Bahia, after his family emigrated from Chile during the dictatorship. He has lived in Santos, São Paulo, since adolescence. Contreras is the author of two novels: Imóbile (2008), which was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature, and O dia em que eu deveria ter morrido (2010), for which he was awarded a literary grant from the São Paulo state government. While working as a crime reporter, he wrote a book on playwright Plínio Marcos, A crônica dos que não têm voz, which was part reportage and part biographical study. ‘Rat Fever’ (‘A febre do rato’) is a new story.
As I lie on the old spring bed, inherited from Mother along with the house, I get the feeling that night is advancing too slowly. I follow the passage of time on the clock on the bedside table, and I think about how medicine doesn’t bring about drowsiness but rather it has the opposite effect, overwhelming the body with stimulation. In truth, this is more likely due to the constant pain I’ve felt since the accident.
I’m in the bedroom I lived in for twenty-odd years, but despite the familiarity of the childhood toys arranged in orderly fashion on shelves, the unaltered position of the furniture and the recognizable smell of the bedclothes, I can’t stop thinking about how strange the situation is, in particular that it’s the first night I’ve spent here since I left home.
No silence is absolute, and though the flat is remote, it has its own noises. Not the sounds of life you get in the city – televisions, traffic, music, arguments – but rather something that belongs to the house itself, like the creaking of its wooden structure. At least that’s what I think, as the heat starts to conquer every pore in my body and make my mouth and throat suddenly dry. I may be feverish. But it’s so sultry in the small hours that there’s no way of telling. Everything around me, myself included, is warm and sticky.
With one leg broken and the other covered in haematomas, my movement is rather restricted. I should have brought a pitcher of water with me when I decided to have a lie-down in the bedroom, but quite apart from whether I’d have been able to do so in my condition, I never would have had the foresight. Perhaps I would if Mother were still alive, but it’s because of her death that I find myself in this situation.
Raising my torso squeezes my abdomen and causes me so much muscular discomfort that I let out a high-pitched wail, but performing that first manoeuvre doesn’t even come close to the pain involved in getting my legs out of the bed. Once I’ve managed it, the sense of relief feels the exact opposite of the pain, and it gives me the impetus to get to my feet and press my crutches to the floor.
I was in the final stages of recovery and decided to sign myself out of hospital and leave right away. I’d been interned for over a month after all. I lied when I told them I’d hire a private nurse, but not when I said I’d
be staying at the home of relatives, albeit with no relatives actually living there. With the help of the janitor, it took no more than an hour to grab some work stuff and a few belongings from my flat, before getting a taxi to the back of beyond, where I am now. Satisfied I’d make it worth his while, the driver carried my bags and helped me up to the house, and I was finally able to install myself in here. It’s an extensive property and the borders are rather haphazard, meaning the neighbours are quite far away.
The musculature of my arms has to be completely rigid and firm to absorb the jolts when I walk. I start to move slowly, first to the bedroom door, which is only ten feet away but seems impossible to get to. I hold on to the doorpost, sweat pouring down my face and soaking my back. The kitchen is at the opposite end of the house and getting there in my condition is like scaling a mountain. It’s dark in the corridor, the bulb has gone, and so I struggle over to the light switch in the living room. Exhausted, I switch the light on, and immediately hear a strange sound, like a sharp whistle or a knife scraping against stone. I look about me but don’t see a thing. I take one of the crutches and check whether the sound repeats itself when I put pressure on the floorboards inside the door, but I immediately feel pain shoot up my leg. At the dining table, I pull out a chair and sit down in relief. I look over at the kitchen and think how I should have picked up some shopping before installing myself in here. I’m soon back up on my crutches, and when I finally reach the kitchen I practically have to hug the fridge so as not to fall over. I open the fridge door and confirm the worst, that the contraption no longer works. There’s a bottle of water but also fruit withering and rotting on the shelves and other bits of food in a dreadful state, including a worm-eaten piece of cheese, the grubs slumbering in a glass compartment, and a half-opened milk carton giving off a nauseating smell. I walk on a little further and find practically nothing edible in the cupboard that’s supposed to serve as a pantry. Leftovers, things that had been opened by Mother and are now spoiled, limp, turned green. I lean my left crutch against the side of the fridge and take out the bottle of water. The taste is musty, but that’s the least of my worries. I have to find a way of getting food and water, as well as the extra supplies of medicine I forgot to buy. The lack of a phone signal is worrisome, as is my certain knowledge that for quite some time Mother has had no landline. I know this because I did telephone her a few times when I first left. She would answer, my being stuck for words would render impossible any chance of us starting again, and then from one day to the next the number simply ceased to exist.
It’s clear I haven’t properly prepared for coming here but I’ve been feeling disheartened since Mother died. Mainly due to having spent so many years without seeing her. Perhaps it was because of that, as well as the partisan stares and insults my presence caused at the funeral, that everything around me became so abstract as I sped through a red light after the funeral.
Sitting back down on the chair in the lounge, I search through all the things I brought from my apartment, laid out on the dining table before me. My laptop, dictionaries and grammar books, the book I’m working on in its original version, a large travel bag full of clothes and shoes, a diary with notes and phone numbers and a sixteen-millimetre film can – a useless souvenir I once acquired in a junk shop along with a projector, and which today serves as a container for the drugs I consume while I work. Contrary to appearances, I am not a writer, playwright, scriptwriter, columnist, journalist or anything of the sort. I am merely a translator. But not one of the trivial ones who translate from boring, insipid languages like English. I translate directly from uncommon languages, grammatically complex and unmelodious languages like the Scandinavian ones. What brings me most pride and massages my ego is that I’m considered the only proficient and qualified professional in the country capable of translating directly from the most mysterious, dialectic and literary of all the Slavic languages, Russian. While I know that, aside from a few tiresome academics and those of the literary milieu, most people couldn’t care less, I consider translating from such a language to be a work of art. I feel as though I’m writing the book itself, through the act of rewriting it. On the other hand, even though I have a clear sense that my extensive literary knowledge would allow me to write better than any of the creeps who currently enjoy prestige in intellectual circles, I have great difficulty expounding my own ideas. This is because there was a brief moment in life when my desire to become a writer was stronger than my feeling that nothing could reach or even come close to what had already been written. But then a phrase came to me and went, disappearing inside my head, and it has nagged, trapped and tormented me ever since.
I pick up the book by the young Russian author in the original and read its strange title out loud: or, in Westernized form, Zvuk vyskablivanie kamennym nozhom. I delight in the guttural phonetics of the words as I stamp them upon my voice, even laughing with pleasure. A sort of electricity runs up my spine and a sense of stimulation flows through my blood. I switch the computer on and get down to work right away because my deadline, which my editor felt the need to remind me of when he visited me in hospital, is not as far away as it might be: an unforgivable lack of respect for the complex syntax of the greatest mother tongue of the Eastern world. However, this is not really a problem, as performing such an unusual translation will give me much more pleasure than will the money the fool pays me for doing it.
I open the book and smell its pages, the same ritual I’ve performed for years, and then read the opening lines out loud and realize they are potent, shocking even, which brings me extra delight and satisfaction.
The dead man’s blue eyes still sparkled in the early hours of the morning. The pale body, its brown uniform plastered with dust and blood, is different from the others on account of the man who existed inside it having spent several hours in a state of utter horror, still alive though cut to pieces by shrapnel from the bomb that decimated the whole platoon. When the paramedics arrived at the battle scene, Lazar Ganchev tried to say something, his mouth agape and trembling for lack of air, his eyes protruding like those of a beheaded pig, his face all blood and bones, but all that could be heard was his raggedy voice, panting, calling out countless times for his mother. Until the end came. Mothers may not be physically present at war, but they are always there in the imminence of death.
I sweat a great deal as I start to work and once again think about the fever that has possibly invaded my body. I soon look over at the film can thrown on the table and think for just an instant before taking out the little wrap of cocaine. As cigarettes and drink do for many people, cocaine has always helped me work, and only work. It’s a rule I’ve been strict about for a long time, because method and euphoria are complementary extremes for me, like a balanced risk. This all started when I did a few German translations of Freud’s studies and writings on the drug for science magazines. I think of all the trouble that warped genius spread about the world, as I rack up two lines straight on the tabletop and energetically snort one of them.
Which is when I hear the scraping sound again. I also have the feeling that something is happening behind me. I turn my body agilely without thinking about the position of my legs, and let out a howl of pain. My eyes squint so tightly the sockets practically turn inside themselves, blurring my sight for a few moments. When my vision finally regains its composure, I look into all the corners of the room but there’s nothing there.
I decide to get up. I grab the crutches and walk three paces into the middle of the room, from where I have a broader view of the place. I still don’t see anything, so I walk over towards the corridor, go a bit further and, for the first time since coming back to the house, I feel compelled to go into what used to be Mother’s room. Like my own, the room is exactly the same as it’s always been, tidy, unaltered in its arrangement of trinkets, the coat stand to the right of the dressing table, the chest at the foot of the bed, where I sit down. Mother was always orderly, organized, accustomed to doing her househo
ld chores. That the house remains spotless even though she’s dead doesn’t really surprise me, even after all these years. Years that reinforced our estrangement and overcame me, made me old, bald, bland, all of which I’m reminded of when I see my scraggly appearance in the mirror atop the dresser. I found out from the funeral director that Mother died here, lying down, probably in her sleep. I now realize I didn’t even get a chance to ask about or even interest myself in the causa mortis. I try to think of her, but the images I have are remote, distant, like photographs left forgotten at the bottom of a drawer. It’s a horrible feeling. It’s almost as if she never really existed.
Going back into the living room I look at the dining table and have it confirmed that I am not alone in the house. Someone has finished off the cocaine while I was in the bedroom. I open the film can. The rest is still there but the second line has vanished from the table. I notice a few letters have been tapped at random on the computer, after the translated passage – onuyftsew. I check everything else on the table. It’s all there. I sit down and try to think in an objective and rational manner. There is no one at home other than me. I myself must have snorted the second line amid the euphoria of translating the book. I myself must have knocked the keys when I heard the piercing sound behind me, turned and smashed my legs against the table.
Though I consider rationality to be a virtue, disbelief blows hard in my ear.
When Lazar Ganchev caught sight of the giant columns outside Moscow’s Lomonosov University, his eyes clouded over. His beating heart and trembling hands felt vindicated. Ganchev would have to promptly drop out of the law course he’d given so much time to, in order to go to war. After informing the rector that he was giving up, he left the place feeling the exact opposite of how he’d felt on his arrival. Anger and a general sense of rancidness upset his stomach and took hold of him with increasing force. There were still fifteen days to go before the official date of his call-up and Ganchev knew they would perhaps be the last days of his short life. Rather than cause him fear or anguish, this thought produced a feeling of revolt and indignation in the young man. He thought about the possibility of deserting, of fleeing, but he was terrified of being branded a coward. My God, he thought, trying to justify himself, are there not enough homeless and unemployed in the country to send to the trenches? Ganchev walked all around the town centre while he thought about what he’d say to his mother. He had found out about his call-up and pulled out of university without saying a word to her. He thought of telling her of his plans to go and study in America, but he was unsure whether she’d oppose him, humiliate him and forbid him from fleeing. He also knew that if he were to go through with the plan, he’d never see her again, though that would probably also be the case if he decided to go to war. The only difference was that in one scenario he’d be alive and in the other he’d be dead.