The Shape of Bones
Page 7
Downhill
The 1990–91 summer break in Porto Alegre’s public school system was to last seventy-two days or, more precisely, from 8 December 1990 to 18 February 1991. Intervals between one school year and the next were long enough for it to feel not only as if school had ended, but also that it would never recommence. While the entire city took the opportunity to leave the capital and enjoy some time by the sea, the inhabitants of Esplanada had the eccentric habit of staying home, turning their noses up at the idea of travelling to the coast, or reacting with indifference, convinced that the maddening humidity of Porto Alegre, almost daily barbecues, wetting themselves with the garden hose, and occasional trips to Lami to eat chicken and chips and swim in the hot water were preferable to the traffic jams, high prices, crowds, parties, and treacherous, chocolate-coloured seas on the state’s coast, at beaches with grandiose names like Oasis, Casino, Queen of the Sea, Atlantis, Shangri-La. Now that the holidays were almost over, Carnival loomed as a reminder that the previous year’s routine would soon be back. There was tacit permission to indulge in no-holds-barred revelry anywhere they wanted from 9 to 12 February, but, even so, few residents were particularly anxious to explore much beyond their own streets during Carnival. Uruguay, Pellet and Chrome Black had filled their backpacks with underwear, packets of cream-filled biscuits and sleeping bags and taken the bus to Laguna, in Santa Catarina – Hell’s Door to depravity. Bricky had gone with his family to their beach house in Hermenegildo, ‘the longest beach in the world’, where, according to him, the biggest attractions were the Uruguayan beer and the ghost lights on the sand (he said ‘gross lights’, which everyone suspected was incorrect, but no one was sure). Everyone else stayed in Esplanada, happy to attend parties at clubs in Belém Novo and watch the samba parades on TV.
With the fan on high speed just two feet from his face, Hermano was finally freed from agitated sleep when his mother opened the door of his room to announce that lunch was ready. He remembered dreaming all night long, an unpleasant dream that was interrupted by brief moments of wakefulness and then continued where it had left off. He couldn’t remember a single detail of it. Some of his chest and arm muscles ached. He had stayed up half the night playing Metroid, until he got to the end of the game and discovered that Samus Aran was actually a woman, after which he’d done push-ups, crunches, and curls with his dumb-bells.
After lunch, he got on his bike and rode to Walrus’s house. It was four blocks away, one downhill, two uphill and the last one flat. He had retired his old Caloi Cross with the foot brake about a year earlier. Mountain bikes were the thing now, and almost everyone in the neighbourhood had upgraded to the new 26" models, with ten, twelve or fifteen speeds. Hermano’s bike was a red, ten-speed Arrojo, which was scoffed at by the owners of Monarks, Calois or imported brands. But he was used to it and, aside from constant glitches in the manual gears, which refused to be adjusted, he liked it. It was heavy and aggressive, made of unusually thick steel tubes. On his way to Walrus’s house, as was his habit, he insisted on keeping it in the heaviest gear even during the uphill stretch, each turn of the pedal demanding tremendous effort.
Walrus’s house was always undergoing renovation. There was always a wall, balcony or new floor in slow construction. The plaster would split in several places and sometimes it fell, exposing bricks. Now it was the garage that was being expanded, for the second time. Walrus’s father had a pot belly, a large moustache and sunburned skin, and spent most of the year in nothing but flip-flops and shorts. On very cold days, he would appear in a black turtleneck pullover. It was always the same one. Not infrequently, the handle of a revolver could be seen in the waistband of his shorts. The extra space in the garage wasn’t to make room for another car alongside his black Voyage, but for TV sets, clothing, toys, computers and other items from God knows where, probably stolen cargo. His friends called him, inexplicably, Skinny Face. His contrived friendliness only made him come across as more threatening.
‘Come in and put your bike there,’ said Walrus when he opened the door, pointing at the garage. Hermano picked his way around two small mounds of gravel and sand and leaned his Arrojo against the garage wall.
When he walked into the living room, Hermano didn’t see Walrus, but he did see two Dobermann pinschers. The dogs were standing in the corridor, tense. One of them took a step towards him. Walrus appeared behind them, passed in front of Hermano and said:
‘Attack! Attack!’
It wasn’t the first time Hermano had come face to face with Armageddon and Predator, but every time the situation repeated itself he couldn’t help but feel nervous. The dogs listened to Walrus and backed off, casting Hermano one last threatening look before disappearing down the corridor. Skinny Face had trained his Dobermanns with reverse commands. If someone shouted ‘Sit!’, ‘Lie down!’, ‘Still!’ or ‘Amigo!’ at the dogs, they would be brutally set upon. ‘Attack!’, ‘Bite!’ and the like made them try to put the stumps of their amputated tails between their legs. Hermano followed Walrus up to his room, where he showed him his new computer, which was sitting on a modular desk attached to a beige wardrobe. It looked identical to the last one, with a horizontal case and 14" monitor, but it was a newer model, much more powerful. Skinny Face had a shady business partner who smuggled computers and sold pirate copies of games. Every now and then Walrus would invite a friend or small group over to his place to see the latest game he had copied on a 5¼" floppy disk, or to show them how some new joystick worked. No one else in the neighbourhood had a computer. And if it weren’t for the computer, no one would ever have gone to Walrus’s house. Every group of growing boys seems to derive a kind of cohesive energy from the cruel segregation of one or more of its members. In Esplanada, the segregated element was Walrus. With the exception of football matches and visits to his house to see his computer games, Walrus was excluded and subject to constant ridicule.
‘It’s a 386 DX. With thirty-three megahertz and four megabytes of RAM memory.’
‘No way.’
‘The hard drive’s got eighty meg.’
‘That’s a lot.’
‘It holds a lot of games. But the best thing is that it’s got Super VGA video.’
‘Wow.’
‘Two hundred and fifty-six colours.’
No matter how fascinated he was by the games and colourful graphics, Hermano couldn’t bear to be in Walrus’s room for very long. There was an odour that he could only define as the smell of a drooled-on pillowcase. It was mild, perhaps other people wouldn’t even notice it, but Hermano started thinking about it before he even entered the room. Driven by the smell, his impatience quickly mounted, and after ten or fifteen minutes all he wanted to do was get out of there. Walrus always had a bottle of Coke with him and would begin to show him the games. It was always the same. Only the games were different. Or sometimes it was a new phase in an old game that he wanted to show him, or the end of a point-and-click adventure that had taken him months to reach. Golden Axe. Space Quest. Leisure Suit Larry. Maniac Mansion. Heart of China. Something about him inspired pity, and pity is generally the prelude to contempt. His never-trimmed dark moustache was obscene on his round, pre-adolescent face, with its mixture of adult and childish features. Walrus had never done anything to anyone. He wasn’t stupid; he held his own in football. But he suffered from that unfathomable weakness that makes certain people unpopular, the butt of senseless mockery.
After being shown the wonders of the new 386, in an exercise of tolerance that lasted a little over an hour, Hermano said they needed to leave for the downhill championship scheduled for three o’clock at the stairs. Walrus complained that, as usual, he hadn’t been told about any championship. Hermano insisted that he come, but he declined, saying he wanted to stay home playing computer games. It was the answer Hermano had been hoping for. As always, as he rode away from Walrus’s house, he felt ashamed at the irritation and impatience that had made him almost deaf to the things his friend said and blind to t
he images on the computer, and he felt the ridiculous urge to go back and apologize, though he didn’t really know what for. As always, he just kept pedalling.
Half a dozen kids with their bikes were gathered at the top of the stairs. There were a few more people on the other side of the street, sitting on the low wall that fenced off someone’s front lawn. Among them was Bonobo with a girl sitting on his thigh, a blonde who was a stranger to Esplanada, pretty in spite of her crooked teeth. Bonobo merely glanced at Hermano when he slowly crossed the street on his bike and stopped in front of the other cyclists at the top of the stairs. The visual contact was so fleeting and impersonal that it was as if Bonobo hadn’t recognized him. Several times after their confrontation on the football pitch, weeks earlier, Hermano had mentally staged a clash with Bonobo, a clash he believed was fated to happen and which, against his will, he imagined in detail several times a day, in moments when he’d rather have been occupied with other thoughts. His imagination worked as if it were projecting a film, cutting from shot to shot of the bloody fight, choreographing every blow and using slow motion for all it was worth.
The stairs were composed of flights of cobbled steps between level areas of beaten earth. They connected two nearby streets, which were almost parallel, but separated by a steep slope. Next to the stairs, flanking the steps, was a wide strip of earth broken up by grass, rocks, holes, and ruts hollowed out by erosion. This was Esplanada’s downhill track.
The championships had been inspired by imported magazines about mountain biking and followed a simple and somewhat malleable set of rules:
The objective was to descend the strip of beaten earth next to the stairs as fast as possible.
It didn’t occur to anyone to time each competitor’s descent. No one had ever brought it up. It took the elite ten to twelve seconds on average, but the real time was irrelevant. The assessment criteria were how the spectators and other competitors perceived the speed and risk of the ride.
In this sense, the riders’ frequent spills played a dual role: they could either ruin a descent or be so spectacular that they worked in their favour. A bad fall was pathetic. A good one was glorious.
The competitors could attempt the course as many times as they wanted and in any order, as long as everyone was in agreement.
The competition ended when a competitor was badly hurt or everyone tired of it and decided to go home, debating who deserved what place.
The street that served as a finish line at the bottom of the stairs wasn’t very busy, but it was still a miracle that there hadn’t been any deadly collisions with motor vehicles. The most skilled riders managed to stop their bikes with a skid before they got to the kerb, but the manoeuvre came with its own risks.
That afternoon, the competition started out a little more organized than usual. An order was established for the five competitors present. Hermano was fourth. The first was Wagner Montes, riding an imported Trek with semi-automatic gear shifting, a gel saddle and a chrome-molybdenum frame, a light, elegant ride, without a doubt the most expensive and sophisticated in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, Wagner Montes wasn’t a very skilled rider. He actually used his brakes on the way down, which was ridiculous, leaving embarrassing skid marks on the track. His descent this time was, in fact, above average. He didn’t brake once, as far as anyone could see, but his average speed was less than impressive. The Joker said that he never pedalled during the descent. In short, he was chicken. Next went Pellet, and then Mononucleosis, the group’s pet, who, at twelve, appeared to have a promising career in daredevil cycling.
By the time it was Hermano’s turn, most people who’d been sitting on the wall had already crossed the street to the top of the stairs to watch the competition. With Bricky, Walrus and other closer friends not present, the audience was made up of people he barely knew: some older cousins of Ingrid’s, some kids who lived on streets further away, and some friends of Bonobo’s from heaven knows where. When they came over, Hermano overheard a fragment of the story that Bonobo was telling the others. It involved a bottle and shots fired into the air. Bonobo was the protagonist of many such stories. The best known was a kind of founding myth for Bonobo’s reputation, and had taken place a little over a year earlier, when his family had just moved to Esplanada. There were many versions, but the general idea was: there used to be a small mulberry tree in the square. It had been planted by old Ijuí, one of the first residents. It was a young tree, about six feet high, with a trunk no thicker than a thumb. That year, its shy top of tiny leaves had been laden with mulberries for the first time. At the request of Ijuí, an old man who was loved by everyone and who planted trees everywhere, the children had all agreed to wait for the mulberries to ripen before picking and sharing them equally. Parents had watched with indulgent, doting faces as their little ones gathered around the mulberry tree hatching mind-boggling theories to predict the day the berries would be ripe. The children had watered the little mulberry tree and invented all kinds of fertilizer for it, using combinations of different-coloured soil, dead insects and fruit peels. Finally, Ijuí had announced that in two or three days, at most, the children would be able to pick the mulberries themselves. On the morning of the third day, when eight children arrived in the square holding straw baskets and plastic bowls to carry out the long-awaited ritual, all they found in the place of the mulberry tree was a sawn-off stump. The atmosphere in the square that morning was one of tears and distress. Ingrid’s dad drove past, saw the commotion and stopped the car to say that when he’d gone to buy bread earlier, he’d seen the new residents’ son, a delinquent by the name of Bonobo, sawing down the tree and returning home with it on his narrow shoulders, the little black mulberries swinging merrily from its branches. The children’s parents had gone to Bonobo’s family home. Bonobo himself had answered the door and said yes, he’d taken the tree, so what, street trees don’t have owners, if you don’t like it, you can try to get it back, but you’re going to get hurt, etc. The intimidation had worked, and the parents had gone home resigned and spent the rest of the day consoling their children. A group of older brothers of the traumatized children, however, had felt the community’s ire and decided to turn it into physical punishment. Different versions of the story held that between eight and twenty people had surprised Bonobo near a bus stop to teach him a lesson. He had run for a few blocks, then suddenly tired of it, stopped, turned to face his pursuers, grabbed a rock with one hand and a heavy piece of wood with the other, and said, ‘Bring it on.’ He’d beaten them all and managed to get away. A convoy of two cars had taken the injured to the emergency room. A little over a year later, few of those involved were willing to talk about it, and some had even moved away. They had fuzzy memories of that piece of wood swinging, those fantastically short arms delivering blows with animal fury. The fact is that Bonobo had beaten up eight of them. Or fifteen. Or twenty, according to the most exaggerated versions. Bonobo himself loved to confirm the story, but referred to it with calculated contempt, as if it were the sort of thing that happened all the time (and it was, in a way). He claimed that his front tooth, broken in half, was a trophy of that fight.
As he got ready to ride, Hermano felt Bonobo’s eyes boring into the back of his neck. He placed his hands firmly on the rubber grips of the handlebars. Only his middle fingers remained outstretched, resting on the handbrakes. It was a quirk of his to brake using his middle fingers instead of his index fingers. He pedalled a few times to push off and picked up speed on the slope. Pedals aligned at the same height, knees and elbows slightly bent. He pedalled two more times to reach maximum speed. The cobbled steps flew past on his left. Halfway down there was a hump in the terrain, and from there on the slope was even steeper, reaching approximately forty-five degrees, and then tapering off on the home straight. Hermano jumped over the hump. Back at the top of the stairs, someone honoured the stunt with an enthusiastic shout. He was good at it. He was the best. He almost always won. And his falls were highly spectacular. He knew that
over a certain speed it was virtually impossible to maintain control of the bike. And what interested him most was passing this limit, entering the zone in which brakes were useless and the bike appeared to glide on a wire. The possibility of a terrible accident was left to chance. He reached the end of the track, where the already much milder slope gave way to a horizontal stretch. He stopped on the beaten earth with a precise skid. It had been a good ride, certainly one of his personal best times.
As he climbed the stairs with his bike on his shoulder, he saw the Joker position himself at the top of the hill and begin his descent. He flew past him, pedalling hard. The Joker was Hermano’s only rival in downhill racing. Hermano didn’t stop to look back to watch his adversary’s performance and kept walking, with a nonchalance that was a part of the whole mise en scène. Besides, his attention was trained on the top of the stairs, where Bonobo and his thuggish-looking pals were gathered. When he got to the top, Wagner Montes complimented him on his excellent ride, but no one else said a thing or even looked at Hermano. He suddenly felt very alone. He wasn’t close to any of those people. There were two or three conversations going on, but he couldn’t really work out what they were about. He saw Naiara arriving with Isabela. Isabela was wearing red lipstick. Hermano thought her make-up was vulgar, horrible. Naiara was barefoot, her dirty little feet treading the cobblestones without a care. The features she shared with her brother were only evident if you looked for them. Slightly upturned nostrils, lips almost the same beige colour as their skin. Simian features, reminiscent of illustrations of their hominoid ancestors. He thought about striking up a conversation with the girls, but in the presence of Bonobo he and Naiara never spoke. He didn’t know why. They barely greeted each other. Bonobo was now entwined with the blonde with the crooked teeth. Hermano thought about leaving. He thought about heading back to Walrus’s house and telling him that he was the only decent person in the neighbourhood. Only Walrus deserved his respect. With him he didn’t even have to talk. They could sit around staring at computer games and drinking Coke in mammoth-sized green glasses, and the minutes passed one after another and made sense. Walrus was the wise one, at home playing on his computer.