‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ said Naiara.
Hermano sat on the bed and ran his fingers over her slender waist, stroked her soft little belly, a flat surface with a shallow belly button that looked more like a scar. He held her by the hips. Her tiny pelvis was a bone to which other articulated pieces were attached. Oddly, he couldn’t stop thinking about the internal structure of her body, its parts, and how they all fitted together and moved, irrigated with lubricating fluids, the warmth and silkiness of their coverings. One half of his mind processed this data and replied ‘machine’, ‘doll’, ‘child’. The other half insisted on ‘woman’, and he sensed that his arousal depended on the insistence of the second half.
Naiara ran her fingers through Hermano’s oily light-brown hair and she straddled him on the bed, digging her knees into the mattress like the stabilizers of a backhoe loader. Beneath her, Hermano was almost horizontal, leaning back on his outstretched arms.
‘Woman,’ Hermano repeated mentally to himself. With the second, third and each consecutive kiss he felt a little more secure; with each one he learned a little lesson. He wasn’t really sure what he was allowed to touch, but he gradually realized it was everything. She let him. He wanted to pull down her boob tube, but no, he didn’t dare do that.
As she pulled off his shirt, she asked if he knew that all the girls had the hots for him, that his body was their main topic of conversation and that they all dreamed of getting him into bed before anyone else, because none of them had ever had sex with him or even kissed him, and it was really unfair of him to share his body only with the girls from his school or wherever the girls he hooked up with were, neglecting his neighbourhood admirers. What a lack of community spirit. Snobbery, cruelty.
Hermano brusquely jerked down her boob tube with both hands. Her petite breasts were capable of triggering the action-reaction he wanted, making him stop thinking, stop seeing inside and through the body of that little creature (‘woman’), that girl (‘woman’, ‘woman’ …), so he trained his attention on them. But fear was beginning to set in and he was reluctant to carry on. Couldn’t they just leave it at that? Couldn’t that just be it?
But Naiara wanted to go further, and quickly. In no time, she had removed all their clothes. She sniffed his chest like a dog fixated on a scent in the grass, squeezed his arm muscles.
Then, suddenly, it was all over for Hermano. Self-consciousness got the better of him. There was something ridiculous about that skinny girl rubbing herself against him with demented eyes. She was a child acting like a woman. It was Naiara, Bonobo’s little sister. He began to see everything from the outside, like a camera installed in the ceiling. The goddamn camera was his only lover. Like a betrayed wife who, acting on intuition, calls her husband at work just as he is taking his secretary from behind on the desk in his office, the imaginary camera that accompanied Hermano everywhere also had an infallible sixth sense and loathed to be usurped. Sometimes the camera would appear at a crucial moment in his existence; other times it recorded the reality of banal, solitary moments, like when he was running in Ipanema and it started to rain, when he got off the bus and walked through the front gate of his school, as he rode his bike at high speed for hours on end, crossing several neighbourhoods, or when he climbed Police Hill as if he were alone, practically ignoring the company of his friends, because it was just him, the hill and the camera. It wasn’t merely the feeling of being watched, imagining anonymous witnesses of scenes in his life. It was as if he had left his own body to become the observer. He was the one operating the camera, the one who left the scene, crossed the membrane between reality and the imagination and chose a seat in the darkness of the empty movie theatre. Why would things be any different now? Hermano was no longer there. Naiara was interacting with an automaton, and both were being observed by his true consciousness, hovering like a cynical spectre over the red jumble of the bedroom, looking for the best angles and light to show the protagonist’s sad and solitary feats to best effect. And what the camera saw now was a thirteen-year-old girl doing everything in her power, using her entire precocious repertoire of techniques, to try to blow life into a dummy.
Hermano took hold of Naiara’s head, looked at her perplexed face and said:
‘Come here.’
He was lying crosswise on the bed with the back of his head propped against the wall. He gently tugged on her head and, obeying his command, she crawled up the bed and straddled him again. He ran his thumbs over her lips, revealing sharp little teeth, the bottom ones still new-looking and serrated.
‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.
‘Bite me.’
Completely serious, like a nurse listening carefully to a surgeon’s orders, she asked where.
‘Anywhere. Here,’ he said, indicating his chest with his chin.
She bit him one, two, three, four times in different places, holding each bite for a few seconds with enough force to leave deep grooves that stung.
‘Want me to bite you harder?’
‘Bite me as hard as you’ve ever wanted to bite someone in your life.’
‘That might be preeetty hard.’
‘Let’s see.’
Naiara took a chunk of muscle between her teeth and began to clench them. He took a deep breath and held it. The pain grew proportionate to the pressure, and he was surprised she had the courage to bite him like that, harder and harder, without letting go, until the nerves in his body felt like they were on fire. The moment arrived when his defence mechanisms demanded that he do something, but he resisted. As he inhaled and held his breath, the agony he felt was almost unbearable, but each exhalation brought a shudder of pleasure that was intensified by the thought that her teeth were probably piercing his skin, sinking into his flesh, all the way to the gums. The mental image of gums and the sound of the word ‘flesh’ excited him. The gums, teeth and tongue in that tiny mouth, fastened to his chest. To stop the saliva running from her mouth, she sucked in air without releasing the bite, making a slurpy noise like a small animal’s hiss of warning. As it reached his ears, that singular sound brought on a climax of sorts.
When Naiara finally released her jaw and pulled her face back, he saw his blood on her pointy little teeth, and she saw the oval wound she had made above and to the left of his right nipple. It was superficial, but visually impressive. He stood up, chin pressed to his neck, watching the blood well up, bead, and slide unhurriedly down his chest. Then he turned to the mirror on the dressing table and stood there, frozen, contemplating what he saw until Naiara appeared behind him with a folded tissue and pressed it to the wound, stroking his stomach with the other hand. For the first time, he found her pretty. Her thick lips and nose that reminded him of an electrical socket were an exotic complement to her somewhat sinister black eyes and long eyelashes. Her face was very thin, but there was still some volume to her cheeks. A red droplet had almost reached his navel. Her hand smeared it across his skin. Hermano mentally recorded the entire scene. He knew he’d never forget it.
A few minutes later, Naiara put on her underwear and boob tube, left the room and came back a minute later with an enormous plastic cup of Coke.
Hermano was still undressed. It seemed appropriate to remain like that, lying on the bed, as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on. Naiara sat down beside him, ran a finger around the bite mark and asked if it hurt much. He nodded. A whole array of scars from various scratches and cuts was exposed in its totality to another person for the first time. The marks caught Naiara’s eye. On his left shin was a recent injury, a vertical cut almost five inches long, the result of his foot slipping off the pedal of his bike two days earlier. It was a little inflamed, the skin around it somewhat red.
‘You’re always taking a tumble, man. You’d think it was on purpose.’
‘I ride a lot. And I go fast. Sometimes I fall. I reckon that’s it.’
As she continued to explore his body, running her finger over every scar she found, Hermano m
ade up his mind that as soon as he left there he’d head home, put on his running shoes and go for a run, and he’d probably run until he dropped. For the first time, he felt able to share a small detail of his gallery of habits (that is, ‘perversions’) which he considered abnormal (that is, ‘shameful’) and which were a source of ongoing perplexity and embarrassment for him because he wasn’t very sure why he insisted on doing such things. All he knew was that he needed to do them, and behind them was the insinuation of a mystery, which attracted him.
‘This scar here near the elbow … is from when I fell while I was running.’
‘That’s an ugly one.’
‘It was on purpose. I do that sometimes. I go for a run, and I run normally for half an hour, and then I go as fast as I can. Full on. I usually start down in Ipanema and head up the quieter streets towards Esplanada, taking the hardest routes, where the roads aren’t paved, through vacant land, sandy patches, the forest, or even down the middle of the street. I go full throttle, eyes practically closed, slipping when I go around corners and jump over things, until I eventually trip myself up, step in a hole, or stumble and fall. I don’t stop until I’ve messed myself up. When I’m running I’m shit-scared, because I know what’s going to happen sooner or later, and it’s never something small – I really do hurt myself. That’s how I got this one on my arm here. I lost a chunk of flesh. It was a bloody scab for about ten days. I also cut myself here under the chin, see? Another time I fell hands-first and had to go to hospital to get the stones removed. Look at this here. And here. And it’s more or less the same with my bike. When I fall. It isn’t always an accident, if you know what I mean. Last year I broke a rib. At least I think I did, because I could feel it was broken. It kind of cracked and I felt shooting pains, like the tip of a knife digging in here. But I didn’t tell anyone. I hid it from my parents. The pain began to ease up and after a few weeks it stopped. I don’t know why I do it.’
Silence. As if Naiara had asked him a question, Hermano repeated:
‘I don’t know why.’
‘I’ve got a crush on you, you know?’
Hermano laughed.
‘We don’t even know each other.’
‘Oh, I know you.’
‘How can you know someone if you only see them around the place?’ He took the cup of Coke from her and had a sip. The subject made him ill at ease. He’d have preferred to be talking about himself, defending himself, rather than hearing that she had a thing for him.
‘You know when I first saw you? We’d only just moved here. About two years ago. I still didn’t know anyone and I’d go out alone, hoping to meet people. It was my second or third day here. I went for a walk and ended up sitting at the top of the stairs, checking out the view. It was all new to me. It was a Sunday. It was cool to sit and see smoke from barbecues drifting up everywhere you looked, all the way over to Ipanema, Vila dos Remédios and Ponta Grossa, in the distance, the smell of coal and meat in the air. Then you appeared and started climbing the stairs. You were going quickly, two steps at a time. And that turns me on, seeing a guy climb stairs two at a time. Almost running, but not running, taking long strides. You can feel the effort of each leg, you know?’
‘Ah, come on.’
‘I’m serious. But listen. When you got halfway up, I realized you weren’t coming up two steps at a time – it was three at a time. I’d never seen anyone do that before. And you were doing it so confidently, so effortlessly, that at the time it looked like it was two at a time. It stuck in my mind. It was like the stairs had been made to be climbed three at a time. It was so elegant. When you were near me, you nodded and looked away quickly. You were really serious. Dripping with sweat.’
‘I must have been coming back from a run.’
‘You can’t imagine the state you left me in. I wanted to follow you to see where you lived, but my legs were too weak.’
‘How old were you at the time?’
‘Twelve. Or eleven. No, I’d already turned twelve.’
‘You were a bit of an early starter, no?’
‘Jeez, men can be stupid.’
‘But aren’t you? At the age of twelve you …’
‘Wanna know how old I was when I came for the first time?’
‘How old?’
‘Four. I used to get turned on watching Spectreman.’
‘No way.’
‘I didn’t really know what was going on, of course, but I remember it well and now I know it was sexual. I use to love watching Spectreman. I found him fascinating. Something about his face. It was hard and serious, made of metal, I think. Those fights with monsters. He’d be taking a beating and then he’d shoot a beam at them and win, but his face was always the same. It turned me on. How could he be so expressionless? I wasn’t sure if it was really his face or if there was another face behind the mask. At any rate, I was hypnotized, and I’d feel this thing, this agitation. If his face didn’t move, he probably didn’t have any emotions, but I always knew when Spectreman was sad, or angry, or in pain. It was as if only I knew. I had a special connection with him.’
‘I’d never thought of Spectreman as sexually potent, but if you say so …’
‘Potent, that’s the word! But it was his face. And then one day I watched the episode where the Monster Salamander breathes fire right in his face, and he goes blind. His eyes sort of melt and there are those two balls of deformed iron in the middle of his face. And he can’t fight any more. I remember he suffered for ages, he couldn’t see, he was completely disoriented. And that was the bit that drove me crazy. Because blind men turn me on too.’
‘Get out of here.’
‘Yep, even now. I’ve forgotten about Spectreman, but blind men … ooh. I just got goose pimples. As I watched the episode I started touching myself down there. Like, there. I always did when Spectreman came on. But when he went blind it was amazing. And then I had that feeling for the first time, but I only understood what it was a long time later. But I remember it perfectly.’
‘What else turns you on besides Spectreman, blind men, and men climbing stairs two steps at a time?’
‘Let’s see … vampires. Vampires biting women’s necks. When they sink their teeth in and then take them out, and their mouths are covered in blood, and there are those two little holes in the woman’s neck. Oh, yeah. Vampires.’
‘Right, so that’s your fantasy. Blind vampires with metal faces that climb stairs three steps at a time. Super normal. And I thought I was the sick one.’
Naiara laughed.
‘Yep, and that’s exactly what you are. A blind vampire with a metal face that climbs stairs three steps at a time. Now you’d better get dressed, ’cause my mum and brother are in the living room and when I went to get Coke they asked me who the album on the floor belonged to.’
6.43 A.M.
He drove around the corner in reverse, stopped, put the car into first and accelerated after the boys. He immediately recognized the street, although the vacant land had given way to new residences. The thick forest on his right remained untouched, an island of green on to which the houses still hadn’t dared encroach. As a child, he had often explored the narrow trails that ran through the forest, jumping over streams, looking for the giant Goliath birdeater spiders that clambered over tree trunks like enormous hairy hands. He saw the youths running down the middle of the street two hundred yards in front of him. As he sped towards them, he glanced to his right, looking for the old paint can hanging from a branch, but couldn’t see it. It had been a long time: someone must have taken it down. He was certain the path to the clearing was nearby. That meant he’d already passed the lamp post. He could see two of them reflected in the rear-view mirror. Which one was it? He drove on, gripping the steering wheel and ice axe with the same broad hand. The engine roared as it strained in second at almost forty-five miles an hour. A hundred yards ahead, he saw one of the pursuers catch up with the fugitive, grab him by the T-shirt and bring him down. They hit the ground violen
tly and rolled across the dirty tarmac, throwing up a cloud of dust. The boy who had been fleeing looked like he wanted to get up. He leaned on one arm and tried to sit, but it was as if he’d offered his head to the next pursuer, who took the penalty kick. The impact made his head fly back at a horrific angle, dragging the rest of his body behind it. Fifty yards. Now all of the eight or nine boys had arrived and were kicking and punching him as he lay on the ground, trying in vain to move, waiting for a chance to make a run for it. Thirty yards. The handle of the ice axe slipped in his sweaty palm. He saw the entire scene from above, as if the car were accompanied by a crane camera, speeding towards the fight. His numerical disadvantage was huge, but this time he wasn’t going to hide. Twenty yards. He remembered the nitro-fuelled V8 in Mad Max 2, tearing through the desert wasteland with a gang of bloodthirsty outlaws right behind it. He had to face them this time. Ten yards. He wasn’t just imagining scenes from the movie. Now he was Mad Max: he had embodied the road warrior. He wanted to throw the Montero into a slide but didn’t know how. He jammed on the brake and the car skidded towards the thugs, whose reflex was to scatter, although they still hadn’t fully grasped what was going on. He opened the car door and jumped out, holding the ice axe. The boy was still on the ground, moving without going anywhere, his face smeared with blood. The gang turned to face him. Mad Max returned their defiant looks, brandished the axe and took a step towards the injured boy. The gang members were also youths of about sixteen. Only one, with a beard, looked a little older. They were boys, at the pinnacle of their illusion of invincibility, hungry for opportunities to test their physical vigour and avenge themselves of the cosmic injustice of having been born, muscles ripped after afternoons of pumping iron at the gym, nearing their sexual peak. At thirty, he was the only tired veteran there. The gang cursed him. He hesitated, not sure if he should attack or wait. Attack which one? A hero couldn’t hesitate. The boy received another kick in the head. The bearded one came towards him with a piece of wood. Mad Max was paralysed. The blow was aimed at his head. He dodged it and the wood grazed his ear, which began to burn. With a precise blow he buried the tip of the ice axe into the thigh of the enemy, who howled and staggered backwards. Another three came at him. The boy on the ground realized he was no longer the centre of attention and scrambled up. He raised the ice axe into the air, like a savage showing off his weapon in a war dance. It was his sawn-off shotgun. He noted something solid flying towards him a split second before a piece of ceramic tile struck him in the middle of the forehead. He couldn’t see for about five seconds and felt blood oozing over the corner of his eye. He took a punch. He took several. He gave up trying to use the ice axe with precision, as he would to climb a frozen waterfall, and began swinging wildly at the air, eyes half closed, hitting God knows what, but definitely hitting things. One of his opponents backed away howling, hands clasped to his face. The others let up for a moment. That was good. They were reassessing the danger of the serrated tip of that miniature axe. The victim was standing now and punched one of his aggressors in the Adam’s apple, making him drop to the ground, inert. Someone smashed a window of the Montero with a rock. The car. He remembered the car. He shouted to the boy to get in. Three or four gang members had now retreated to a cautious distance, while another three or four approached the car, ready to attack. Overcome with fury now, instead of protecting himself or backing off, he flew at them with the axe raised. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the boy climbing into the car. He was kicked in the kidney and in quick succession sank the axe into the shoulder of the son of a bitch who had kicked him. ‘The guy’s crazy!’ someone shouted. He roared, calling them all to fight. The pain shooting through his head dazed him. He could taste blood. It wasn’t the first time, but this time it was the blood of bravery, not cowardice. It tasted different, better. He swallowed it greedily, licked his lips. They pelted him with stones. One hit his collarbone like a punch. He took a few more steps forward, defying the gang. They were leaving. Walking and throwing stones rather than running, but leaving. The one who’d been punched in the Adam’s apple was carried by his companions. The bearded one was limping. Another was still pressing his hands to his face and staggered along, almost running, howling, helped by two pals. He glanced at the car. The boy had climbed in and was crouched on the floor on the passenger side, petrified, peering over the dashboard. Without taking his eyes off the aggressors, he returned to the Montero walking backwards. He touched its hot black hood and noticed the shards of broken windscreen scattered across it. He saw a few locals watching the tumult from doorways and windows, with puffy eyes and faces still creased from sleep. He climbed into the car, tossed the axe behind the driver’s seat, started the engine, drove back to Serraria Road and put his foot down. The boy in the passenger seat peeled off his white T-shirt that said GAUCHOS DO EVERYTHING BETTER and used it to clean his face, but when he pulled it away and looked at it, blood streamed again from his nostrils and a large cut in his eyebrow. He didn’t seem to notice and leaned back in the seat, holding the bloodstained shirt in his lap, breathing heavily with his eyes half-closed. ‘Hold it to your face.’ The boy looked at him. ‘Tilt your head back a bit, like this. Press it on your nose and here on your eyebrow.’ The boy did as he was told. His face was swelling up. ‘You’re bleeding from cuts on your knees and elbows too. I’m taking you to a hospital, hang in there.’ He drove down Serraria Road at seventy-five miles an hour and took a left on Juca Batista at the new roundabout. The avenue he had driven down just a few minutes earlier was now much busier. He wove his way around a bus and half a dozen cars, changing lanes brusquely. The boy was going to need a few stitches, as well as X-rays, and everything indicated that his nose, which wouldn’t stop bleeding, was fractured. He decided to take him to the emergency room at Mãe de Deus. Only then did he remember to look at his own face in the rear-view mirror. The worst thing was the wound at the top of his forehead, where the piece of tile had hit him. It was small but deep. Blood streamed from it down both sides of his face and around the bridge of his nose. Bad blood, black. The type that was good to get out of your system, to make room for clean new blood, the kind that ran through the veins deep inside. The boy was silent, staring through the closed window at the landscape. He was stunned and hunched over with pain, but at the same time showed a calm and resistance that you wouldn’t expect from someone his age. He didn’t look drunk. Of all the youths he had tended to during his residency, few had been able to stay so cool in a situation like that unless they were numbed by alcohol. It probably wasn’t the first time he’d taken a beating. ‘What happened?’ ‘What?’ said the boy. A few seconds later, without any further prompting, he said, ‘The one with the beard wanted to beat me up. The others helped.’ ‘Why did he want to beat you up?’ ‘Dunno.’ The boy must have known, but it didn’t matter. He was retracing the route he’d travelled that morning, but at three times the speed. The air was slowly acquiring the viscous texture of muggy days, and the temperature seemed to creep higher with each passing minute. ‘He was gawking at me the whole party, so I stared back. When I left he came after me,’ added the boy, who held the bloodied T-shirt away from his nose and mouth in order to speak. His skin was tanned; his curls looked as if they’d grown unchecked for months after having been shorn off, forming an irregular bloom that was comically bushy at the sides. A scar on the right side of his abdomen indicated he’d had an appendix removed some six months earlier. ‘I don’t have health insurance,’ he mumbled. ‘No sweat, I’m a doctor.’ Never in his life had those words sounded so artificial coming out of his mouth. I’m a doctor. He was a doctor, of course. He remembered each stage of his interminable medical training and specialization, but it was as if each day of that effort had been recorded with a chalk mark on a cell wall. He was a doctor, but from the moment he’d awoken that morning he hadn’t felt like one any more. He changed gears aggressively, the tyres squealing as he turned corners. It had been a long time since he’d surrendered so readily to fantasy.
He remembered how in his youth he’d roamed the unknown streets of Esplanada on his Caloi Cross with balloon tyres, imagining himself a unique breed of adventure sportsman, blazing trails through vacant plots of land and over pavements packed with obstacles, in search of the city block that no other cyclist had ever successfully completed, so immersed in his heroic distortion of reality that he often experienced reality itself as a pause within an existence in which fantasy was the norm. The truth was: he was an up-and-coming plastic surgeon who had unjustifiably aborted a mountain-climbing expedition he’d been planning for months with his best friend, walked out on an atmosphere of marital acrimony that could have been resolved quickly with a little compassion and a few well-chosen words, and, in a kind of knee-jerk reaction, had taken a detour to the neighbourhood where he’d been born and raised, where he’d been surprised by an act of violence and had ended up intervening in a way he’d never imagined himself capable, and now he was doing the right thing, taking the injured boy and himself to an emergency room. But ever since he’d driven past the turn-off to Renan’s house, he’d been gripped by the idea that he was in fact a solitary renegade deserting all ties to his life to seek something in his origins, driving his vehicle through a hostile land until chance provided him with the opportunity to do justice with bravery. He’d saved the boy’s life, and now he was going to the place where they’d wait until their wounds healed. It was the moment in films, comic books and adventure novels when a man discovered his true nature and became a hero. He was so caught up in the fantasy that the phrase ‘I’m a doctor’ had sounded artificial, totally alien to who he really was and everything that was happening that Sunday morning. ‘Someone’s calling you,’ said the boy, holding out his mobile, which was flashing in silent mode. The caller ID indicated that it was from Renan’s home number. He answered. ‘Hi, Renan.’ ‘Hey, man, what’s going on?’ ‘Have a nice sleep, Renan?’ ‘Where are you? I’ve been ringing you non-stop since six-thirty.’ ‘I stopped the car and took on the lot of them, Renan. I used the ice axe.’ ‘What’re you talking about? Adri’s in a flap. She said you were acting weird, and that you said you weren’t coming.’ ‘There were about ten of them, but we managed. You should’ve seen it.’ ‘Who’s we? It’s not funny, you dickhead. I’m all set to go here.’ ‘I’ve switched partners, Renan. I’m going to Bonete with my new friend here. I like him more than you. He doesn’t talk much. I like people who don’t talk much.’ ‘Come again? What new friend, you fuckwit? Are you drunk? I hope you’re not serious about not going –’ ‘I’ve been to Bonete and back already. It’s no big deal. Go check it out if you want, but you’ll get there second. Second-place winner is loser number one, isn’t he?’ ‘…’ ‘Anyway, I’m going to the hospital to get my forehead stitched up. Talk later. Take care.’ ‘What the fuck, you –’ He hung up and glanced at the boy, who pretended he hadn’t heard a thing. ‘Want me to call your parents or someone? We’re going to the emergency room at Mãe de Deus.’ ‘No.’ ‘But your parents –’ ‘No! Seriously, you don’t need to call anyone. OK?’ ‘Can I ask why?’ ‘Because you can’t. Can I get out? Stop the car. I want to get out.’ The boy felt for the door handle. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. I just thought … forget it, I’ll take responsibility for you. Relax.’ The boy pulled the T-shirt away from his face and stared at him with an almost defiant expression, assessing whether or not he could trust him. He returned the look with intensity and felt like he was staring at himself fifteen years earlier. It was as if the boy were a version of himself who had reacted differently to a certain episode that he did everything in his power not to remember, but did, in quick flashbacks. He was the boy he’d have become if he’d confronted Uruguay and his gang late that night. His memories of what had happened near the clearing had been buried for fifteen years and now, as they resurfaced, they sent a shiver through him. The boy was the first to look away. He pressed the bloody T-shirt to his face again and leaned against the car door, hunched over in the seat, drops of blood and sweat sliding down his chest. He looked back at the street in front of him. He couldn’t remember half of the drive to where he was now, on Padre Cacique Avenue. He put his foot down, seventy, almost eighty miles an hour, ignoring the electronic speed bump in front of Beira-Rio Stadium. His heroic fantasy was fading, but his image of himself in reality didn’t fill the empty spaces left by the fantasy. He was neither the hero of his imagination nor the doctor. He glanced in the rear-view mirror and didn’t recognize himself. Only the blood running down his forehead was incontestable, doing what blood does, beautiful and predictable. He turned right on José de Alencar, drove around the central reservation and pulled up at the emergency entrance to Mãe de Deus Hospital. He was careful to park so that he wouldn’t obstruct the flow of other vehicles. A receptionist called a nurse and a doctor. He lied, saying a bunch of drunks had attacked them out of nowhere on a street in the southern suburbs. The boy was whisked off to emergency while he filled out the admittance forms, pressing an improvised bandage to his own forehead. Then he was also taken inside, but not to the same ward. They cleaned the wounds on his ear, neck and forehead. He didn’t tell the doctor that he was a doctor himself. When they went to give him a local anaesthetic before stitching up the deep cut in his forehead, he asked them to do it without it. The doctor on duty insisted, saying it would hurt. Only then did he reveal that he was a doctor, to convince him that he knew exactly what to expect. After a brief discussion, the doctor agreed to suture him without the anaesthetic. It was very painful, but every time the needle pierced his flesh he was certain it was precisely what he had hoped to feel. It was a therapy of sorts, slowly soothing him, bringing his entire body back under control. Fifteen minutes later, with an enormous bandage of white gauze on his forehead, he looked for the ward where the boy was being treated. He found him on a bed with a drip in his arm. A doctor was suturing an ugly cut in his left eyebrow while two nurses were finishing cleaning his many wounds. He walked over and pressed the boy’s nose lightly with his fingers. He moaned and the doctor turned to glare at him. He introduced himself and said the boy was his friend. ‘Your nose must be broken.’ ‘That’s what they said. They’re going to take me for an X-ray soon. They reckon I’ve got some broken ribs too.’ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘João.’ ‘João … Do you live over in Esplanada?’ The boy didn’t answer. ‘Don’t worry about anything, I’ve taken care of everything.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘I’m going to write down my address and phone number on this piece of paper here, see. If you don’t want them to call your parents or whoever, call me.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘João … You know, I can’t remember the real name of a single friend of mine from Esplanada. We all knew each other by nicknames.’ ‘Do you live in Esplanada?’ ‘Used to. Until a few years ago.’ ‘Thanks for helping me out there. Those guys were going to kill me, I guess.’ ‘I don’t doubt it.’ ‘What was that thing you hacked them with?’ The doctor and the two nurses stopped what they were doing for a fraction of a second then quickly went back to work. The boy grimaced, recognizing his slip, and asked, ‘Where did you live in Esplanada?’ ‘507 Rodonel Guatimozim. The one with the exposed-brick walls.’ ‘I’m not sure which one that is.’ ‘So you live around there too?’ ‘Nearby.’ ‘I still know some guys that live there, I think. Pellet. The Joker, too.’ ‘Don’t know him. The Joker …’ The boy laughed at the nickname. The doctor finished suturing the wound and one of the nurses began to prepare a bandage. ‘Funny thing is, only the guys had nicknames, the girls never did. We called them all by their names. Isabela, Ingrid …’ ‘I’ve got a friend called Isabela too, but it wouldn’t be the same person. Course not, she’s my age, duh.’ ‘Lara, Naiara …’ ‘I reckon Naiara still lives there.’ ‘Huh?’ ‘I think I know who she is. She still lives nearby.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Isn’t she the one who runs a day-care centre?’ ‘Dunno. I haven’t talked to her in years.’ A nurse informed them that everything was ready for them to go to the X-ray room. ‘Where does this Naiara live?’ ‘Hmm, I don’t know the name
of the street … I know it’s kind of, like, on a corner, and she’s got a day-care centre in her house, there are some children’s pictures on the outside wall … near the hill …’ The nurse looked at them impatiently, with a wheelchair ready. ‘João, I have to go. I’ll call the hospital later to see how you are.’ He nodded.
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