by John Freeman
He hid the Rawhide under the porch. His mother didn’t need to see it, to add to her collection of Saeed’s leavings. Last week Haider saw her thumbing the shreds of his brother’s beard from the sink into her palm, every last thorn.
He understands. It’s the same way he keeps thumbing through his texts, the ones between him and Saeed. Can u come? Bring cutters. Now his screen is cracked from when he smashed it against a wall.
While his mother takes a shower, Haider bikes the Rawhide thirty minutes away, to a shopping plaza where shit gets lifted all the time. The wind has whipped him of his buzz. He props the Rawhide against a parking sign and gives the handlebar a squeeze, his eyes stinging. When a woman in high boots glances his way, he removes his hand and walks to the bus stop.
He’d given Saeed the Rawhide as a gift, though Saeed had been a thankless little poon about it, wanting to know why Haider couldn’t nab him a Giant. In part, Haider was trying to protect him against thieves. “Only two ways to keep a pro like me from taking your bike,” he told his brother. “One: ride a shitty bike. Or two: leave your bike unlocked. Because then you’re telling the thief, I’m not far away. I’ve got my eye on my ride. I’m coming right back.”
Daniel Galera is a Brazilian writer and translator. He was born in São Paulo but lives in Porto Alegre, where he has spent most of his life. He has published five novels in Brazil to great acclaim, including Blood-Drenched Beard, which was awarded the 2013 São Paulo Prize for Literature. In 2013 Galera was named a Granta Best Young Brazilian Novelist. He has translated the work of Zadie Smith, John Cheever, and David Mitchell into Portuguese.
Eric M. B. Becker is a literary translator, a journalist, and the editor of Words Without Borders. In 2014, he earned a PEN/ Heim grant, and in 2016, he was awarded a Fulbright to translate Brazilian literature. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, and elsewhere. With Mirna Queiroz dos Santos, he edited the PEN American anthology Women Writing Brazil.
Twenty After Midnight
DANIEL GALERA
TRANSLATED FROM THE PORTUGUESE BY ERIC M. B. BECKER
The sudden urge to bring about the destruction of the world had to do with the smell of human shit on the sidewalks, with the fumes rising from the city Dumpsters, with the bus drivers’ strike, and with the general sense of helplessness brought on by the heat wave that bore down on Porto Alegre late that January, but, if there was a before and after, a marker between the life it appeared I was going to lead and the life I led, this marker was the news that Andrei had been killed in an armed robbery the night before, near the Hospital de Clínicas, a few blocks from the area near Rua Ramiro Barcelos where I was walking. I came to a halt so rapidly when I processed the news that had passed through my Twitter timeline that my right foot—damp with sweat—slipped inside my sandal and my ankle turned, causing me to tumble down onto the hot sidewalk, my left arm ridiculously stretched toward the sky to protect my cell phone.
Near the spot where I fell, a homeless woman rummaged through a Dumpster, bent over the edge like an ostrich with its head in the sand, black legs and bare feet emerging from her pink dress with its pleated skirt. As she heard me groan, she slid back out of the opening, closed the lid to the container, and began walking in my direction. I was already leaning over one of my knees, adjusting my sandal strap, when she asked if I was all right and offered help, and only then did I realize she was a male transvestite, exhibiting fine curly hairs along her sculptured thighs and arms. I responded that I was fine, thanks for asking, I only needed to sit down a while. She observed me with great interest as I made myself comfortable on the front steps of the nearest building, giving the impression that she’d like to draw closer to help me but maintaining a prudent distance. A thick layer of oiliness covered her beautiful face, recalling icing, and her smile full of straight white teeth was much more unlikely than the way the clothes she wore fell most naturally over her body. I assured her I was all right and she didn’t insist, walked off in the direction of Avenida Osvaldo Aranha, crossing her legs ever so slightly as she walked, like a young girl in a biquíni headed to the pool at the house of some friends of her boyfriend.
I tested moving around on my ankle to make sure I hadn’t ruptured a tendon. I was scared to look again at my cell phone screen, since upon doing so I would confirm that, not long before, Andrei had taken a bullet at the hands of some thug somewhere around here and was dead, at the age of thirty-six, I calculated, recalling that he was three years older than me. The step I’d sat on was covered in burned matches. The thought that the matches could have been lit by Andrei’s assassin, a crackhead inclined to kill to ensure the next rock, gave me a horrible shiver down my spine, followed by nausea. Drops of sweat emerged from behind my ears and ran down my neck. I asked myself whatever had happened to the city in my absence, a ridiculous question, since until just a few minutes earlier nothing seemed to have happened to the city, it was the same city it always had been. It was probably then, during those moments of perplexity that came one after the other, that the notion burrowed into me that the days we were living were a passage toward a slow and irreversible catastrophe, or that whatever force, law of nature, or entity breathed life into our hopes—and by “our” I meant my expectations, those of my friends, those of my generation—was beginning to die out.
It was my first visit to Porto Alegre in nearly two years. I had arrived a week before, carrying with me recollections of an airy and colorful city suspended in the amber tones of certain spring days adorned with blue skies and the flowers of purple ipê trees in the Parque da Redenção, recollections that were undoubtedly real but which pointed back toward a past that was unclear and irreconcilable with the present. Throughout that week, the city covered in a carpet of filth, baking beneath the radiation of the worst summer in decades, had brought to mind a cirrhosis patient abandoned to his death beneath the sun. Vehicles and people stayed off the streets on that thirty-first of January, amid summer vacation and the approach of Carnaval; and the bus strike, which had resulted in a total freeze in service for the fifth day straight, was the final surge in the wave of lethargy that engulfed everything. Workers from the outskirts of the city cried into news cameras because they had no way to get to work and their pay was being docked by their bosses. Jitneys, school buses authorized by the mayor’s office for emergency use, and rickety clandestine buses flew down the empty bus lanes, crammed full of people on the verge of overheating. The taxi drivers honked and wreaked anarchy to their hearts’ content, wild with the overdose of passengers, and some charged overnight fares in broad daylight simply because they could.
The taxi driver who, days earlier, had taken me directly from the airport to the hospital where my father had been admitted told me that the strike had been deemed illegal by the Labor Court, but that the striking workers didn’t give a damn and it didn’t look as if the stoppage would end anytime soon. Buses that dared to leave the garages were pelted with rocks by union members. Bus workers fought with one another and against their bosses, the latter accused of causing the impasse to pressure the government into raising bus fares, something the government wouldn’t do, not in the wake of the protests of June 2013 that, spurred on by violent police repression, had managed to undo the rise in fares throughout the entire country. While all this was going on, plants were scorched beneath the sun, the heat index in the early morning recalled a rain forest, and in the afternoons the thermometers in the city center surpassed forty-five degrees Celsius. The water gushed out hot from the faucets. Not lukewarm. Hot. Nearly scalding. Water and electricity were out in various parts of the city, sometimes for hours or even days on end. Those living on the outskirts of the city had it the worst, of course, and were beginning to block roads and highways in protest against such negligence. The homeless spent early mornings huddled together in the shade, resting on cardboard beds, sleeping an improbable, pleading sleep, their eyes half open. My desire was to nestle up there on the front steps of the building and sleep that
very same sleep.
I looked again at my cell phone screen, which still displayed the story of Andrei Dukelsky’s murder on the website of the newspaper Zero Hora. I scrolled through it, wetting the entire glass screen of my iPhone with the sweat of my finger. According to Andrei’s girlfriend, some Francine Pedroso, he had gone out for a run sometime around nine-thirty at night and had taken only the house key and his smartphone, which had been stolen by those who killed him. There were no witnesses, despite the fact that the site where the crime took place was an area with a fair amount of traffic, even at night. “One of the most promising new talents in contemporary Brazilian literature,” was the honor the text conferred upon him. “Duke, as he was called by friends.” There was a hashtag, #GoodbyeDuke, offering an instant record of the expressions of shock and sadness on the part of his readers and friends on social media. I didn’t have the courage to click through.
We were no longer that close, Andrei and I. I’d last seen him a few years earlier, in São Paulo, at the last of his book signings, or at least the last one I’d heard about. He had stopped updating Twitter and, as I confirmed soon thereafter, committed Facebook suicide as well. Our closest interaction had been fifteen years earlier, during college, when we wrote together in our e-mail fanzine, Orangutan, and had a few conversations we would later recall as exchanges of great intellectual depth. He made me read Camus, João Gilberto Noll, Moby Dick. I tried imagining where the other contributors of the e-zine were at that moment, especially Emiliano, who I missed the most living in São Paulo. I remembered when I saw Andrei for the first time in the courtyard of the journalism school, smoking as though he’d been doing it since he was in diapers, stout and severe as a judo fighter, with a receding hairline that foretold a precocious baldness. He wore nice blue and white shirts and would go to the bars in a suit, total extravagance for a young college student at the end of the nineties. His fingernails were always long and dirty and he had a bit of a smell to him. Duke never stopped being a mystery to us. Among his friends, but above all among those of us from Orangutan, there was a sort of unspoken competition to see who would become the first to figure him out, to gain his confidence, to become his confidant. But Duke never opened up to anyone. And reading his short stories and novels did nothing to unriddle the enigma. From what I’d read, I had the impression there were things he hid even from his writing. As though he awaited some distant future in which he would find himself ready to write about them.
The funeral in the Jewish cemetery on Rua Oscar Pereira, the news story went on, would be closed to the public. No wake, in accordance with Jewish tradition. As I sat there on the front steps of some residential tower, yearning to be overcome with the numbing sleep of the homeless, I thought of Andrei’s body lying on the sidewalk some five hundred meters from where I found myself, how his dried blood across the flagstones must have left stains that now mixed with dog piss and traces of the muck leaked from trash bags, and then I caught myself thinking, against my will, that in actuality he had been spared, that perhaps he was lucky after all, since he had escaped something terrible that was approaching, something we’d all have to learn to get used to.
I remembered then that I was carrying the nicotine patches for my father in my purse. I tried to concentrate, I turned off the cell phone screen, stood up, and continued walking toward Avenida Ipiranga. A column of black smoke rose from the concrete embankments at the edge of the Dilúvio and, as I crossed the bridge over the water, I saw two boys dressed in rags bent over a crackling fire, likely melting copper wires to sell to the scrap yard. The Dilúvio riverbed had been reduced to a creek snaking between sandy banks exposed to the sun, but in the few spots that were deeper it was possible to see schools of fish swimming in the gray, pulpy sewage. On the other side of the avenue, where the neighborhood of Santana stretched on, located on a tiny block on Rua Gomes Jardim lined with tiny houses, their verandas almost hidden behind gardens in need of some attention, near a glassworks and an old butcher shop that had always scared me as a young girl, was the house belonging to my parents, for whom the world—as a matter of health and longevity—was closer to coming to an end than it was for me.
And the world had nearly come to an end for real for my father. At the age of sixty-six, he’d had a heart attack and was at home recuperating from bypass surgery. When I was awoken before sunrise by the ringtone of my cell phone in my apartment in São Paulo, eight days earlier, the operation, which would last four hours, had already begun. On the other end of the line, my mother sounded more angry than scared. Details of the episode came only later from my father, after the ICU, when his memory was refreshed. After eating a dinner of a salami and cheese panini, delivered by motorcycle from his favorite luncheonette, and after watching TV while drinking two glasses of Campari with tonic water and smoking with his habitual voraciousness, he’d lain down to sleep. He woke up in the middle of the night with heartburn and a slight pain in his chest, walked around the living room a bit, and, noting that the pain wasn’t going away, decided to pay a visit to the emergency room. He saw no reason to disturb my mother’s shallow sleep, and so he grabbed the car and drove alone to the Hospital Mãe de Deus, suffering a heart attack without realizing it, smoking Marlboro Lights with one arm hanging out the window and the other hand on the wheel of his Honda Fit Automatic, probably listening to something like Simply Red on Rádio Continental, certain that he was suffering from gas or some other relatively harmless thing. As soon as he mentioned the pain in his chest to the doctor in triage, they took his blood pressure and hurried him to the cardiologist. A short time later he was on the operating table.
I arrived at the hospital with suitcase and backpack in hand and caught him at the end of the first full day following the procedure, hugging a pillow as he coughed up mucus before my mother’s eyes. He was disoriented and constantly asked whether it was day or night. When the sheet was pulled back for some exam or procedure, I found his naked body unbelievably white, and I thought that couldn’t possibly be my father’s color, he was darker than that. They had drained too much fluid from him, he had a shortage of blood, something wasn’t right. I tried not to look too closely, imagining he felt shame at being exposed before me in that situation, and for my part I felt repulsion at seeing him so debilitated. Lying on the hospital bed at the mercy of probes and needles, his sternum sewed up with steel wire that would remain there in his skeleton even after all his other body tissue turned to dust, he was the emblem not only of his own death but also of mine. These morbid thoughts began to retreat to the background the moment he was transferred to his room. He regained his good humor and joked that his useless body was at my disposal for experiments, that the time had arrived to donate it to science. I told him I didn’t need anything aside from Arabidopsis seeds and sugarcane for my research but that I had a friend at the University of São Paulo who studied the effects of cigarettes and processed meats on the bodies of stubborn old men and would perhaps have an interest in his carcass. My father was visited by a few colleagues from the college preparatory courses and high schools where he taught literature and Portuguese, and also by a trio of students who held him in high esteem. I supported him on his walks down the hallway, during which he complained about Mother’s recent obsessions, the economic interventionism of the federal government, the permissive pedagogy of our time, and spoiled students who thought they had a right to everything, all the time looking at me from the corner of his eye to measure my reaction to the things he was saying. After five days of hospitalization, he was able to return home, where his spirits took a nosedive. Sometimes he cried out of the blue and looked at us perplexedly, saying that he didn’t know why he was crying as the tears streamed down his cheeks. He insisted on taking a shower standing up, he cleaned his own wounds and dedicated himself to the breathing exercises prescribed by his physiotherapist. He still had years to live, I thought, who knew if he wouldn’t come back from it all even stronger, strong enough to see the world waste slowly away tow
ard its own end.
The morning I learned about Andrei’s death, I had gone out to buy nicotine patches at my father’s request. He wanted a specific brand that wasn’t so easy to find and, as the buses were off the streets, I had to walk to a pharmacy in Bom Fim. I returned home looking like a malaria patient. I saw that my father was sleeping, left the bag with the patches on the dinner table, and walked into the kitchen. I filled a glass with ice cubes and iced black tea, right beneath the stream coming from the air conditioner. The old, worn-out sofa had its own distinct smell that overwhelmed the roses and lilies my mother kept in a vase on the center table. I called that smell the smell of dust mites. Ever since I was a young girl, when I learned about dust mites from a magazine article about respiratory illnesses, I associated the smell of the sofa with an army of these tiny creatures, which I imagined had infiltrated the rough fabric of the sofa cushions by the millions. The magazine article was illustrated with a close-up from an electron microscope in which the dust mites looked like green olives with legs poised above balls of gray spaghetti. I must have been nine or ten when I saw the image, and at the time the threat of dust mites had reached the status of a household phobia in homes across Brazil. My parents, following the example of everyone else, had installed air filters that looked like tin robots in all the bedrooms. I would listen to the mechanical hum of the filters and imagine the dust mites being chewed up in a massacre committed by minuscule gears. What had happened to those filters? Nobody paid the least attention to dust mites anymore. “Four pairs of paws and a pair of palpi,” I said under my breath, remembering a fragment from one of the biology books I read and reread as a child. Those were the traits of arachnids, the class that included dust mites, spiders, and scorpions. I liked pronouncing that phrase, its alliteration and almost comic sonority reminiscent of the lines from some children’s song. Sometimes I found myself singing “four pairs of paws and a pair of palpi” in my head as I dried the dishes, took a pee, or sat before the computer screen trying to work on the incomplete draft of an article.