‘Look. Down there. There’s a vulture eating an animal.’
‘Where?’
‘There.’
‘I see it.’
‘This is the last beer. Anyone?’
‘I’ve never seen a vulture so close before.’
‘Yuck, it’s pecking at something really gross.’
‘I think it’s an opossum.’
‘Isabela, scoot a bit closer ’cause I want to tell you something.’
‘You can tell me from there, Uruguay. I’ve got good ears.’
‘It’s really cool.’
‘The air’s so still I can’t even smell the rotten flesh,’ said Hermano, coming over to the others to get a look at the vulture. He sat down next to Naiara.
‘Dead animals creep me out,’ said Isabela, looking away and making a face.
‘You guys ever been to a funeral?’ said Bricky, watching the vulture with a lost gaze, as if he were staring at something slightly to one side of it.
No one had.
‘I heard a noise outside the tent. It sounded like footsteps. I thought it might be a person, another fuckwit camping on the hill, a boy scout, a ghost, anything. I wasn’t afraid. I was way past fear. I needed someone to tell me what I was doing, to be my observer, you know? I stumbled out of the tent and, when I looked, I saw a white dog over by the embers of the fire.’
‘Hey, Naiara, he’s up to the bit about the dog.’
‘A really big white dog, massive. It stood there with its tongue hanging out, looking at me. I wasn’t sure if it was a dog, a wolf, some kind of wild animal. I wasn’t even sure it was for real, for fuck’s sake. Then it lay down, lifted its hind leg and started licking its balls.’
‘Any of you ever thought about what you’ll be doing in the year 2000?’ asked Naiara, ignoring the warning that Pellet had reached the only part of his story that she found funny and still wasn’t sick of hearing.
‘It didn’t stop licking its balls. It just didn’t stop.’
‘I’ll be twenty-four,’ said Bricky. ‘I’ll be in the army. Agulhas Negras Military Academy. Or in the Amazon.’
‘I’ll be married to Isabela, and I’ll ask her to bring me another beer when Faustão starts the countdown to midnight.’
‘In your dreams, Uruguay.’
‘I reckon Faustão will be dead in the year 2000.’
‘Seriously, it licked its balls for an hour. Non-stop. And there was no one around to ask if it was really happening or if I was hallucinating. It’s normal for a dog to lick its balls, but not for an hour.’
‘I reckon I’ll be living somewhere around here,’ said Naiara. ‘It’s not what I want, but it’s what I reckon is going to happen. How old will I be? There are nine to go …’ she said, starting to count on her fingers.
‘Twenty-two,’ said Hermano.
‘Yep … twenty-two. It’s hard to imagine being that age.’
‘Till I couldn’t bear it any more. I told myself that if it didn’t stop licking its balls, I’d have to kill it. I watched another few minutes of that scene from hell and then I jumped on the dog. And I reckon that’s when I blacked out.’
‘Maybe I’ll be pregnant, or already have a child by then. Or more than one.’
Uruguay whispered something in Isabela’s ear. She pulled back and scowled, but a few seconds later she scooted across the rock closer to him.
‘Maybe I’ll be dead already.’
‘Maybe the world’ll end in the year 2000. Judgement Day.’
‘You’re kinda Christian, aren’t you, Bricky?’
‘My family is.’
‘I don’t believe we have a soul.’
‘You don’t have to be Christian to believe in souls, Naiara.’
‘I know, but I don’t believe in them anyway.’
‘Most women believe in souls.’
‘I don’t.’
‘When I woke up on the Sunday morning with the sun hammering my face, I was sprawled on the ground about a hundred yards from the tent. All cut up. It was hard to find a part of my body that wasn’t covered in mosquito bites. The tent was burned. A huge tear in the side. But at least I found the other half of my cheese.’
‘They like tomatoes too. There isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t like tomatoes.’
‘Bricky, the big expert on women.’
‘But seriously, Naiara. Do you reckon people just die and that’s it?’
‘Yep.’
‘I don’t. I reckon something stays behind when we die. That’s the soul. The body dies, but there’s a spirit. Like … I don’t know how to explain. But there’s this thing that stays on after our bodies are dead.’
‘Doesn’t make any difference to me. Death is death.’
The vulture left the mangled carcass, flapped its wings and disappeared over the hill, swooping low. Naiara and Bricky turned to watch it. When she turned back, Naiara looked at Hermano.
‘What about you, Hands?’
‘So, if anyone here ever decides to have datura tea and needs company, or an observer, count on me. I mean it.’
‘I reckon you’re both wrong. I reckon there’s a body and a soul, but it’s the soul that disappears when we die, and the body that remains.’
‘That’s a new one,’ said Bricky, looking slightly annoyed.
‘How so?’ asked Naiara.
None of the three said anything else, not even when Bricky nudged Naiara, who nudged Hermano to show him that Uruguay and Isabela were lying on the lichen kissing, hands timidly parked on each other’s inert bodies, statue-like.
6.17 A.M.
Passing under the new Protásio Alves Viaduct, with a structure that looked like it had taken its inspiration from an old-fashioned lunar-landing kit, he imagined that his wife didn’t exist, that she had left him or died, a recurrent fantasy that had haunted and seduced him at the most unexpected times ever since Adri had almost died for real, some two and a half years earlier, giving birth to Nara. In a way, it was as if she really had died but insisted on remaining in the world out of sheer stubbornness, overshadowed by a light, never-ending case of post-partum depression. He felt he’d done everything he could to help her recover her former restlessness: paying for cooking classes, buying her presents, and using his connections as a doctor to keep her in a constant supply of free samples of 20mg fluoxetine capsules that came in little boxes with ‘Returning the colour to life’ written on the back. Although Adri was an affectionate and attentive mother, it seemed as if all her feelings and actions of late were commanded by highly sophisticated automatic-pilot software. She was living as he was driving now, in third gear and cruising at about twenty-five miles an hour, almost completely unaware of what was going on around him, as if the eyes and limbs driving the car were controlled by an operations centre entirely independent of the one responsible for his incessant flow of thoughts. He realized this when a silver Ford Focus sped past, narrowly missing the Montero and accelerating down the new, wide Salvador França Avenue, with its three lanes and central reservation of scrawny palms that the local government had had the gall to call ‘urban greening’ in its last, unsuccessful campaign for re-election. With the sun imposing itself, he felt annoyed as he remembered that he had suggested several times that they set out earlier, before dawn, to gain time and avoid a few extra hours of driving in the sun, but Renan – who never missed an opportunity to spew rules and remind him that he was the experienced climber and mentor of the expedition – had replied that ‘getting up before six is simply unacceptable’, a jocular comment that seemed out of keeping with the kind of mental and physical demands they were about to face. The same friend to whom he was going to entrust his very life, the person who had assured him that he could teach him all about ice climbing at base camp and during the climb itself, thought it was unacceptable to get out of bed two hours earlier to ensure that the first day of their trip went smoothly. The contradiction made him so angry that he stepped on the accelerator, as if wanting to chase the Ford Focus th
at had overtaken him. He ignored the red traffic light in front of the Botanical Garden. Why hadn’t he woken Adri up, even though he knew she was only pretending to be asleep? In retrospect, his wife’s attitude struck him as a play for attention. And why hadn’t he woken Nara up so he could hear her little voice before leaving, so he could turn to stone one last time? It was her favourite game. Every so often, without warning, he’d pretend to freeze in the position he was in, as if a spell had turned him to stone. When she realized her father had stopped moving, she’d give a little squeal and start trying everything in her power to restore him to his human form, with a flurry of shoves, punches, tickles, jumps and all kinds of attacks, all the while cackling with laughter and spouting sentences that showed an impressive vocabulary for a two-and-a-half-year-old, until he too cracked up laughing or collapsed or made a brusque movement to indicate that the statue had turned back into her father. Two and a half. He often mused at length about his daughter’s future, imagining what she’d be like as a teenager, the accidents she’d have, the dental problems, sexual discoveries, wondering if she’d see life as a burden or an adventure, and what his role would be in all those experiences. One thing was certain: she took after him in temperament more than she did Adri. She didn’t talk a lot, observed everything, and already had a rather adult-like way of suffering in silence that drove Adri to desperation. When she was still in her mother’s belly, only his voice had been capable of calming her down when she was agitated: he would usually describe in detail the things they’d do together when she was two, three, five, twelve, eighteen. ‘Daddy’s going to take you to the place where he grew up, over in the southern suburbs, and we’re going to climb a really big hill there, to see the whole city from up high.’ ‘She’s calm now,’ Adri would say after about three minutes, fascinated by that precocious interaction between father and daughter. The delivery had been such a traumatic experience that he had unconsciously repressed the memory, but now, with the car speeding along the Terceira Perimetral, the long axis of avenues connecting the city’s northern and southern suburbs, he couldn’t stop the memories from rushing back, with images flowing from the deepest recesses of his mind, beginning with the realization that Adri’s waters had broken and the strange serenity of the moments that followed, both for him and Adri, who, after phoning the obstetrician, had calmly announced that she was going to have a shower and then proceeded to spend a good twenty minutes in there, at least. She had been in high spirits during the drive to the hospital. The obstetrician, Thales, had been his lecturer. He was forty, competent and experienced, although a little too playful for his taste. But Adri liked his wisecracks, and if it made her relax, great. Thales had greeted them with a smile at Moinhos de Vento Hospital and asked, ‘Did you manage to contact the father?’ Fortunately, in the maternity ward, he went into serious mode and completely stopped messing around when he checked her dilation and decided to put her on oxytocin to induce labour. Thales showed Adri the numerical indicator on the monitoring device and said that with the hormone it would go up to thirty, with peaks of forty, fifty or even a bit more with each contraction. Meanwhile, he tried to pay as little attention as possible to what the obstetrician was doing, trying to put the role of husband before that of doctor, because for some reason it didn’t seem right to mix the two. But Adri’s pains were growing much stronger, the indicator was going way over fifty, and he was the first to notice that with the peak of each contraction the baby’s heartbeat slowed drastically, until it appeared to level out at a much lower rate than normal. He brought it to Thales’s attention, at which point all his composure drained away. Adri had developed gestational diabetes in her last month of pregnancy and the diverse complications it could cause during childbirth were beginning to rear their heads. The obstetrician became visibly concerned when he heard that Adri had had a high blood sugar reading the day before, something that he himself, husband-father-doctor, hadn’t been aware of, because a few days earlier he had entrusted her with the task of monitoring her own blood sugar levels with a glucose monitor. On the monitor, the baby’s heart stopped and started. Adri looked at him, confused, apologizing for not having told him, and his attempt to assess the gravity of the situation and the blame they each deserved for that oversight plunged him into a blinding spiral of self-blame from which he emerged only when he heard Thales requesting an operating room for an urgent C-section. Adri began to cry as she was prepped for surgery, saying she was afraid. He held her hand and told her that everything would be fine, that he’d be there by her side the whole time, when in fact he was afraid too, because despite being a surgeon with a bright career, despite having been considered one of the most brilliant students in the history of his medical school, at that moment he was unable to comprehend what was going on with his wife’s and baby’s bodies. The part of him that was the doctor ceased to exist, and the only reality was that the lives of the woman he loved and the child still in her belly were in serious danger. The anaesthetist arrived, a very thin woman who appeared to be of Polish descent. She asked the questions that had to be asked and left aside all others, as there wasn’t time, and promised Adri that she wouldn’t feel any pain, just the movements of the surgical interventions, which shouldn’t be confused with pain. He knew, deep down, that the anaesthetist was only saying these things to keep her calm, but it was necessary. The obstetrician and nurses were in a flurry around the operating table. He kissed Adri, told her over and over that he was there, that he’d stay there with her. She was given the epidural, which was supposed to take effect in fifteen or twenty minutes, but to his horror, Thales declared that there wasn’t enough time and he’d have to make the incision immediately. Adri’s hands were tied. Thales made the first cut and she howled. It was obvious that the anaesthesia still hadn’t kicked in. He tried to stroke her face, but she told him not to touch her. With each new intervention by the obstetrician, she howled like a beast being slaughtered, the veins and tendons in her neck bulging, eyes rolling. He suffered his first loss of blood pressure since childhood, so long ago, when he was still overwhelmed by such things. Cloudy vision, shaky hands and legs, cold sweat, nausea. He was about to black out like any first-time father, because he was reduced to precisely that when he saw her face transfigured by a torture he had no way of relieving. He was afraid she might literally die of pain, and there was nothing he could do, because no matter how much he loved her he had no way of sharing the agony with her, shouldering some of the pain. He remembered his mother and the expression on her face whenever he hurt himself as a child, the impossible desire to alleviate her child’s suffering. He’d never forgotten that expression. It had taught him from a young age that physical suffering was solitary. He could only witness it, and the sight of his wife’s face quickly became unbearable. He got up from his seat beside the operating table and saw, over the top of the curtain that blocked the patient’s view, the operation that was taking place. Blood was gushing, neutral and innocent, from the cut in the base of her abdomen. Just as his eyes focused on the scene, the doctor forced the cut open, exposing the layers of skin, fat and flesh in Adri’s belly, as distinct as in a textbook diagram, but moist and shiny as only organic matter can be, and there in the middle he could make out the baby’s head, covered in blood and amniotic fluid. That was when he regained control and felt the queasiness begin to abate. He couldn’t wrap his mind around Adri’s unspeakable suffering, but the inside of a human body and the violence of scalpels were familiar territory to a surgeon. It was as if the exposed viscera, contrary to the screams and grimaces of pain, were anonymous. Thales’s hands forced the cut open even further and the anaesthetist helped, holding up the ribs, but when he tried to pull the baby out by the head it slipped from his hands as if it had been sucked back into the uterus, which let out a slurp of suction. Adri screamed ‘Stop!’ with all her might, dragging out the vowel until she had used all the air in her lungs. By now, Thales, the anaesthetist and the nurses were visibly terrified. The baby slipped out of
the obstetrician’s grasp four times in a row. He was aware that both Adri and the baby could die at any moment and wanted to do something to prevent it, but he didn’t know how, nor was there room for another doctor to get involved. He could only be the father, but he didn’t know how to be a father yet. The anaesthetist climbed on to the operating table and straddled Adri, using the weight of her body to heave the baby out, a brutal manoeuvre that, in retrospect, took on an almost surreal quality. Remembering it, he was certain that, of the whole episode, this was the moment that had most shocked him. But it worked. Seconds later the baby was in the obstetrician’s hands, a tiny being, purple, almost black. And silent. The umbilical cord was cut and the baby whisked away. The obstetrician and the anaesthetist consoled Adri, saying, ‘It’s over, it’s over,’ but the doctors, nurses and his wife herself had ceased to exist at that moment, because he was certain his daughter was dead. There was no crying. He stood, catatonic, in a corner of the room for almost two minutes, oblivious to everything, until he finally heard the tiny cry that began as a splutter, then a whine, and finally the shrill, broken cry that was the greatest indication of life, the baby’s protest at having been expelled from the cocoon of gestation into the cold, sterile atmosphere of the hospital. Propelled by a new injection of adrenaline, he went to see his daughter. Twenty inches. Seven and a half pounds. A tiny mammal. A minute hunk of living flesh. Everything he had experienced and achieved culminated in that little creature, and everything that happened from that moment until his death would be a mere reflection of the fundamental event taking place at that exact moment. Gripped by this euphoria, he took the baby to its mother. Adri glanced out of the corner of her eye and just moaned, ‘Not now.’ Only then did he realize that the obstetrician was suturing her belly, she in a state of shock, bearing the torture heroically. Later, after the baby had been breastfed and family members were gazing at it through the nursery window, he discovered that the entire birth had lasted seven minutes. To him it had felt like seven hours, and weeks later it seemed to have taken an entire day. When he told Adri this, she replied that in her memory it all seemed to have taken place in a matter of seconds. ‘To be honest, I remember nothing.’ ‘What do you mean, nothing?’ ‘Nothing. I don’t remember what happened at the hospital, I don’t remember the pain. Nothing. The last thing I remember is the shower I had before leaving home.’ As soon as they’d found out the baby’s sex Adri had wanted to name her Felícia, but at the last minute, after much insistence, he managed to talk her into the name Nara.
The Shape of Bones Page 6