Hermano’s BO was so nauseating that he was actually beginning to feel queasy. Even during summer break, there comes a day when a man must wash. He took the tin of pencils from the desk, walked a few paces down the corridor and locked himself in the bathroom.
He turned on the tap and splashed cold water on his face. Instead of getting straight into the shower, he sat on the toilet lid and began to speculate about what the consequences might have been if he’d returned Bonobo’s stare. Hermano had never been in a real fight. He’d been hurt in countless ways, all over his body, and in some cases his parents had had to take him to the hospital for stitches or an X-ray. He had smashed face-first into trees, fallen off the swing and landed on his chin, taken horrific spills from bicycles, buried a fishing hook in his inner thigh, split fingernails in half, torn several soft parts of his flesh on rusty barbed wire and broken a tooth on a bus turnstile. But he couldn’t imagine what it felt like to be punched in the face. He made a fist and pressed it into his cheek, his mouth, the tip of his nose, first gently, then pressing the bones of his hand hard into his flesh, imagining the kind of pain that might be involved in a hypothetical run-in with Bonobo. The feeling of punching someone else in the face was equally mysterious.
The tin of pencils was sitting on the counter and for a moment Hermano wasn’t sure how it had come to be there, until he remembered he had brought it there himself for no particular reason.
He lifted the lid and ran his fingers over the reds, which rolled on their axes, comfortably accommodated in their plastic grooves. He turned on the tap just enough to let a silent, unmoving thread of water run from its mouth and disappear into the plughole. There were five shades of red in the tin. He chose the darkest, next to the burgundy, and held the tip of the water-soluble pencil under the stream for a few seconds. Still sitting on the toilet lid, he drew a straight line across the back of his left hand. It left a bright-red mark. He stared at it for a few seconds, then stood and positioned himself in front of the mirror. His heartbeat quickened a little. The agitation he felt reminded him of the first time he’d shut himself away to masturbate, his imagination awash with unfathomable outcomes. He wet his whole face with his hands, rubbing away the crust of salt left by the dried sweat on his forehead and around his mouth. He took the same pencil and painted a small area of his upper lip red. He wasn’t satisfied with the result. It looked like the crappy make-up in late-night TV movies. He decided that just one red wasn’t going to do the job. The tin offered a whole range of tones, and realism could only be achieved by combining them. He tried applying each of the different reds on top of one another. He tested a few pinks, burgundy, and soon he had a convincing ruby-red. But something was still missing. There couldn’t be blood without a wound. With a sharp navy-blue he drew a small dark line, which soon bled partially into the surrounding red. He put a bit more red over it and took a step back. If someone had come into the bathroom at that moment, they’d have thought he had a real cut on his upper lip. The still-wet paint beaded and ran down to his lower lip, where it spread to his incisors. The effect, which was very realistic, brought to mind a frenetic sequence of images from films and comics, a montage of wounded heroes – Elektra being beaten by sadistic cyborgs, the young Veto Skreemer’s face slashed by a razor, Robert De Niro with a bullet wound in the neck, a bloody Mad Max dragging himself out of his black Ford Falcon after a spectacular roll, samurai, gangsters and avengers from TV screens and the pages of graphic novels, who didn’t just bleed, but wore their blood like warpaint, giving their stoicism a holy dimension. Now he was the blood-soaked hero, staring out of the toothpaste-splattered mirror. Bonobo had just punched him in the face, knocking him to the ground on the football pitch, but he got up and stared his adversary in the eye. He crouched on the bathroom floor and stood slowly, hands on the edge of the sink. His face appeared in the mirror in slow motion, greasy, wet and wounded, bloody saliva covering his teeth. Bonobo took another swing at him, but he dodged and got him in an arm lock, skilfully using the intuitive martial art he had developed over years of street fighting. He planted a well-aimed blow in Bonobo’s face. Bricky came to his aid, but he told him to stand back. The girls were screaming for them to stop. But now he was grappling with Bonobo again, throwing and taking punches in turn. The red pencils worked with precision on his wet face, making a cut in his brow, giving colour and flow to a nosebleed. When he layered on enough paint in one spot and then added a drop or two of water, a trickle of blood would streak down his skin. Every time he was hit in the face, he simulated the impact, throwing his head to one side, and the blood splattered on to the bathroom door and the glass of the shower cubicle. Drops of red plopped into the sink, reminiscent of the real blood that had marked the white porcelain on other occasions, cuts on his fingers, hands and feet that needed to be washed and disinfected. He took such a beating that the blood was now streaming down his chest and had splattered over most surfaces in the bathroom. He imagined the bones of his face breaking under Bonobo’s grazed fists, onlookers gathered in a semicircle around the fight, silently watching the loser’s complete destruction.
‘Hermano?’
He stopped. The door was splattered with red. His neck and chest were covered with red paint. The sink was completely red. The floor was red.
‘Everything OK in there?’
‘I’m fine, Mum.’
‘I heard noises.’
‘It’s nothing. I’m going to have a shower.’
He used an entire roll of toilet paper, water and soap to clean the bathroom. Then he turned off the water heater and took a cold shower. Paint mixed with water tinged the floor tiles red for the first minute. Then the water ran clean. He felt ashamed, not really because of the scene he had just staged and starred in, but because he had lost a fight scripted in his own imagination.
6.13 A.M.
On the Tuesday morning he read Renan’s reply: ‘good to hear, faggot! the mountain’s ours!!!! come to the gym today so we can talk. u seen the new babe in spin class?!!?? if u haven’t, u’ll see her today. c. u. renam.’ Renan was the kind of guy who spelled his own name wrong. But few people in Brazil could climb as well as he could, and that night he discovered that his friend had more than enough know-how and logistical wherewithal to plan an expedition like the one they intended to undertake. Driving up Nilo Peçanha towards Carlos Gomes Avenue, he slowed from fifty-five to thirty miles an hour twenty yards from the electronic speed bump and heard his enormous backpack roll across the boot, a compact mass of camping accessories, mountain- and ice-climbing gear, special clothes, food, electronic equipment – a bundle of items that had been methodically researched, bought and packed, and included a tent for two and a sleeping bag for temperatures as low as minus twenty, thermal insulation, a benzine camping stove, benzine, plastic soft-drink bottles (the lightest, most practical, cheapest canteens of all), cutlery, two small titanium pans, a torch, batteries, a pocket knife, water-purifying tablets, a lighter, matches, plastic bags of different sizes, sealable bags for clothes and fragile equipment, painkillers, muscle relaxants, a first-aid kit, dried fruit, chocolate, muesli bars, rice, lentils, sticks of beef jerky, a range of tinned foods, a toiletry bag containing the most basic of personal-hygiene items, four pairs of underwear, three T-shirts, a pair of trousers, a pair of shorts, three layers of special clothing for climbing in low temperatures, starting with thermal underwear made of polyester up against the body to absorb sweat, then a layer of fleece, and over the top a moisture-wicking anorak that allowed perspiration to evaporate while remaining waterproof, as well as a hood, gloves, special protective glasses, a neck warmer, sunblock, lip balm, a 7.2 megapixel digital camera, an iPod, a GPS, a notebook, not to mention the actual climbing gear, such as static and dynamic dry ropes of different lengths, a helmet, a rappel seat, snap hooks, slings, figure eights, rock-climbing shoes, double boots for ice, an ice axe, crampons, and a host of other things that might be needed at base camp and during the climb, while also striving to ke
ep weight to a minimum. Renan had all kinds of tricks to reduce the overall weight of the backpacks, from cutting the tags out of every item of clothing and breaking off toothbrush handles to opting for 9.8-millimetre ropes, the thinnest considered safe for that kind of climb: apparently insignificant measures but which all together could take a few pounds off their backs. For five months they had stockpiled the gear they would need and mapped out the route, drawing a jittery line of state and federal highways that would take them through the Gaucho Highlands, across the states of Santa Catarina, Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul, where they planned to cross the Bolivian border and then drive up the treacherous, winding roads to Potosí at almost thirteen thousand feet on the Bolivian Plateau, where they would stop for a few days before travelling the remaining two hundred and twenty miles to the Cerro Bonete region. According to their calculations, they would still need to hike another four or five miles through valley floors to the foot of the mountain, where they would set up their base camp. At first, Adri had had a few unforgettable fits of hysteria. She had disapproved of the expedition from the outset, and it took her a few weeks to realize it wasn’t just a passing obsession. First she’d tried to convince him that it was a ridiculous waste of money, and the amount he’d have to invest in it all really did place the project in the category of eccentricities. Renan had obtained partial sponsorship from a brand of backpacks and sporting gear. The contract stipulated that the company logo or name should appear explicitly in all publicity, as well as in photographs of the expedition and a range of other situations that were described in minute detail. It lightened the financial burden, but Adri had quickly realized that the financial argument wasn’t going to change his mind anyway, since money hadn’t been a concern for them for at least two years. They were doing fine. So she had changed tack and begun a campaign of psychological pressure and emotional blackmail, pointing out the danger and unpredictability of the journey and stressing that neither of them, not even Renan, who was a professional, had enough experience to take on something so extreme. But he had replied over and over that the daring and risk were part of what had appealed to him in the first place. Her last resort revealed the true nature of her feelings. ‘You’ve got a daughter, I hope you haven’t forgotten that too,’ she said abruptly one night, shortly after arriving home from a new Italian restaurant in Moinhos de Vento and relieving the babysitter. They were sitting in the kitchen, just before bed, as he drank a glass of water with a few drops of lime juice and she smoked one of the latest low-yield cigarettes. He’d been waiting for the selfish-irresponsible-father-with-a-child-to-raise approach and was ready to strike back with a mixture of indignation, reassurance, existential insights and attempts to pump up his opponent’s self-esteem, but what caught his attention was the ‘too’ at the end of the sentence. The word came out crooked, her voice trailing off. It wasn’t part of what she had planned to say. And there could only be one thing that he was forgetting too. He wanted to jump out of the chair and hug her tight, but he’d learned that hugs only resolved things temporarily and weren’t remembered later. Hugs were impotent. She wanted him to give up what he was doing for her. It was a plea. But what about his own dreams? He had hoped, until a few minutes ago, that she’d admit that deep down she knew how important it was to him, give him a long goodbye kiss and say that she understood and would be there waiting for him to come back, and that she’d tell Nara that her dad had gone to do something very brave but that he’d be fine and would be back in a few weeks with presents from the Indians in Bolivia and photos of a volcano crater that no one else had ever photographed at close range. But neither of them had given in. He hadn’t decided not to go, and she had pretended to be asleep when he left. Now it was too late. He turned right on to Carlos Gomes, recently widened and resurfaced with an almost white concrete that made him remember, absurdly, the strip of white sand lit by the headlights of his dad’s Fiat Tempra some six years earlier, when he’d left a party with Adri in the middle of the night and, instead of taking her home, had driven over twenty miles to Lami Beach because she’d said she wanted to be alone with him, far away from everything and everyone. They’d known each other for about two months and for the first time in his life, at the age of twenty-four, in the home stretch of his medical degree at the Federal University, he had begun to question his certainty that he would remain single, a perspective that contained a small amount of resignation and just as much intention. He didn’t see how living with a woman could make his life any better, and his brief experiences with girlfriends had only drained him of enormous amounts of energy that he believed vital to his primary objectives, which at the time were his studies, his quest to become an outstanding surgeon, and maintaining his impeccable physical form and stamina. Just imagining a long, hypocritical courting ritual caused him more anxiety than any university exam, and it didn’t help that he was the only sober person at the rare parties he forced himself to attend. It wasn’t the first time he’d been intimate with a woman, but it was the first time he’d been with one. She was the same age as him, was studying Fine Arts after dropping out of Pharmaceutical Science, and used to joke that she needed a man who was going to become a wealthy doctor to bankroll her creative whims until she became internationally famous. She was pretty, inconvenient and enchanting. He took her to Lami, parked on the sand in a secret spot he knew, about fifty yards from the water, and they spent the rest of the night probing the boundaries of each other’s personal histories and bodies, pulling back the moment before revisiting difficult experiences or doing anything that could actually be classified as fucking, as if it might destroy the almost euphoric state of happiness that hummed inside the car and seemed to depend on a delicate balance of factors. The radio was tuned to Continental and, suddenly, right after something that may well have been Ray Conniff, a lesser-known song by Pink Floyd came on. He had heard ‘Fearless’ on vinyl at some point in his adolescence and it had become his soundtrack for moments of solitary meditation. Adri climbed on to his lap in the driver’s seat and started shaking out her black hair, which at the time came down almost to her waist. She predicted that they’d be together for a long time and explained why she was absolutely fascinated by the art philosophy course she was taking that semester. At some stage he realized he was screwed and that keeping her happy had just been added to his small list of primary objectives. And he felt the need to say it. ‘You know how you’re feeling right now?’ ‘What about it?’ ‘I want to make you keep on feeling like this for as long as possible.’ Approximately one year later, weeks after his graduation, they were married, living in an old one-bedroom apartment that belonged to his mother, on a nice street in the suburb of Petrópolis. And now, if the truth be known, his intent to extend the happiness of the hours they spent at Lami Beach for as long as possible could be considered his biggest failure, because nothing remotely like that had ever happened again. Their life together had passed quickly and on automatic pilot. They’d spent little time together in the first few years; he, busy with medical residencies and post-grad courses, one in São Paulo, as well as excruciatingly rigorous scientific reading and long runs at night, which were the only way to buoy his spirits, stay disciplined and keep his sights set on his objectives; she, increasingly involved with artists and ‘creative people’, as she called them with open mockery, helping her painter friends put on exhibitions, and slowly creating her own works that sought to ‘explore vegetable matter to expose the biological nervure that the urban landscape conceals beneath tarmac and concrete’, as he clearly remembered reading in a flyer for a joint exhibition held in an old renovated mansion where she’d exhibited a composition of fragments of paving that had been broken up by tree roots, as well as root segments that had been removed by the Department for the Environment for the same reason and, finally, the crowd-pleaser: part of a Tipuana tree trunk, in which slabs of pavement, a chrome car bumper and an improbable plate of glass were embedded like shrapnel from a grenade, painstakingly assembled with the u
se of chisels, drills and a small electric saw. The trunk still oozed sap and resin, and there was a strange beauty to the arrangement, beyond the obvious environmentalist reading. The piece earned her an invitation to the Porto Alegre Biennial at the end of the year. She had deferred her university enrolment one semester before graduating, alleging that she didn’t need the diploma but she did need time to work on her next creation, about which she refused to reveal a thing, except to a few of her artist friends. The pre-Biennial press coverage noted the mystery surrounding the work of artist Adriane Weissmann, a promising new local talent. A large shed was built beside the Guaíba River, near Harmonia Park, to house the installation. ‘Does it have to do with trees?’ he had asked her on one occasion, and it was the only thing she revealed before the exhibition opened. ‘Yes.’ What his wife had done was dig up an amazing specimen of Ficus benjamina, a species of fig tree that sent out roots over an enormous area, destroying walls and paving. She’d sawn off the treetop and had hung the intact trunk and roots from the ceiling of the shed, making people look up. It was mind-boggling. You couldn’t exactly say that the tree – which she had been allowed to uproot from a property in Viamão only after a series of municipal authorizations and environmental compensation agreements – had been torn up. Rather, it had been surgically removed from the ground in a patient and meticulous excavation that had preserved its enormous, winding roots almost to perfection, a job she’d finished just two days before the Biennial opened. She’d had to cut the tree into several parts in order to transport it, and then reassemble it with the help of diagrams and photographs. The public entered the shed through a narrow door and found the floor strewn with shiny fig leaves. There was a panel showing the many different meanings and symbolisms associated with fig trees. In the Bible, after eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve cover themselves with fig leaves. In ancient Greece, the tree was associated with Athena, and the exportation of its fruit was forbidden. In ancient Rome, it was considered a sacred symbol of Romulus, and the fig had an erotic connotation, associated with Priapus. In India, the Ficus religiosa is the holiest of trees, and according to Vedic legend it is inhabited by Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwara, thus symbolizing the Hindu triad. In a number of cultures it is a symbol of abundance or immortality. And so on – not forgetting, either, that the majestic fig tree in the Pampas is an icon of the gaucho landscape of Brazil’s deep south. Overhead, lit by narrow windows set in all four walls of the shed, the public could see the intricate and vaguely radial structure of the gigantic roots reaching through space, as if the tree had been planted in the air. It was breathtaking, and long queues formed at the entrance. There were protests, articles offering the most disparate interpretations, and newspaper surveys asking if it was a brilliant work of art, sheer stupidity or an environmental crime. Despite the repercussions, Adri refused to give interviews and, to his complete dismay, declared that she was done with the art world for ever. She had simply lost interest. It was always the same with his wife and the mother of his child: she lost interest. Shortly before she became pregnant, she and two friends had opened a clothing shop, but Adri had opted out of the partnership a few months later. The shop closed a year later. Then she had worked as art director on a short film by a local director. Before they had even finished shooting, she would come home in a state of stress, promising that she never wanted to see those people again and cursing film-making everywhere and for all time. Then she fell pregnant and it was as if motherhood had prematurely torn her from a long process of experimentation and indecision that seemed far from over. He often wondered when she was simply going to tire of him, and sometimes suspected that it had already happened, a long time earlier, shortly after they were married or perhaps before. But he knew that there was still something holding them together besides their daughter. He might have lost hope of restoring in her the sheer happiness that had steamed up the car windows that night on Lami Beach, but he couldn’t bear to see her in pain, not even a little, for whatever reason, and he felt capable of doing anything to end her suffering. Recently, lying on the bed while he did sit-ups on the floor, she had looked up from the novel she was reading and said, ‘My life is like musical chairs, except back-to-front. Whenever the music stops they add more chairs.’ He could try to add chairs, if there weren’t enough. But how did you remove chairs from someone’s life? How could he choose for her? He still loved her, he was entirely certain of it. But it was a rational love. He knew exactly why he loved her, and had countless reasons for them to stay together. She no doubt felt similarly. For a host of reasons that they kept to themselves, they continued to choose, day after day, to stay where they were.
The Shape of Bones Page 4