About a week earlier, the shocking news that Bricky was going to be a father, at the age of fifteen, had spread through Esplanada. No one knew who the girl was. She lived in Tristeza, was sixteen, had never been seen with Bricky, and he had never spoken about her. After disappearing for a few days, Bricky came out, confirmed the rumours and announced that he was taking responsibility for the child. The two families had met and the situation would be dealt with. The information he gave was succinct and precise. His tone was that of a boy who had become a man and planned his entire future in a matter of two or three days. What his plans were, no one knew for sure. When the rumour reached Hermano, he found it hard to imagine his friend even having a sex life. Imagining him as a father was nothing less than absurd. Bricky was his best friend. They played video games and football together and liked to talk about the films they got for free from Bricky’s parents’ video rental shop. They were almost the same age and had grown up together. An active sex life must have seemed as unthinkable to Bricky as it did to Hermano. A child must have seemed as remote and implausible to Bricky as it did to Hermano. But now it was clear that things weren’t what they seemed. Despite their friendship, or because of it, they couldn’t talk about it. True intimacy appeared to depend on their ability to talk about what was going on in Bricky’s life, but now they discovered they didn’t know how to exchange confidences of that nature. There was no point talking about video games any more. There was no point parodying dubbed dialogue in Escape from New York or Commando. Inside jokes were losing their effect. Bricky was going to be a father. When they were five or six years old, the two of them had combed the thickly vegetated vacant plots of land in Esplanada for exotic ingredients with which to prepare imaginary elixirs, potions and poisons. Armed with bottles of perfume, small jam jars, knives, spoons, droppers, syringes and a spade, they had harvested leaves from weeds, evil-looking little red berries that grew on thorny bushes, roots, milky sap, insects, arachnids, moist soil taken from secret locations, water from puddles and murky ponds covered with green scum, a long list of ingredients that they measured and combined with rigorous attention, following previously invented recipes. There was a potion for hibernating all winter long, and others that bestowed superpowers such as the ability to talk to dogs, to move objects with the power of one’s mind, like Luke Skywalker, and to not feel pain. The dark branch of their childish alchemy included poisons that could blind, take away a cat’s ability to always land on its feet, and, the most important one of all, the most secret and powerful recipe: a liquid that would instantly kill a girl if sprinkled on her skin. It was a mixture of gutter water, pieces of a white flower that grew in the front garden of the ugly boy who would later come to be known as the Joker, an orange fungus that grew on rotten tree trunks, spider legs and, finally, the most coveted and dangerous ingredient of all: a live yellow wasp. They kept an ample stock of the nefarious mixture hidden in a buried box. When and why they might need to kill a girl didn’t even occur to them. But they were certain the potion was of vital importance. Until proven otherwise, all girls were threats and to be regarded with suspicion. The secret recipe was a defence that united the boys against them. When he heard his friend confirm the rumour about the pregnancy, Hermano remembered the poison they’d made as children. The secret stock was probably still there, but neither of them could have remembered exactly where it was buried. Somewhere in his subconscious, in spite of having recently got to know Bonobo’s sister a little better, there were still traces of the conviction that girls were to be fought, not made pregnant. Hermano felt betrayed. He recognized the irrationality of the feeling, but he also knew that reason had no power over certain emotions, and so he let the feeling be, without trying to suppress it. It wouldn’t be long, he was sure, before he felt happy for his friend.
Wallace Wissler, for his part, was about to move somewhere yet to be determined. His explanations were vague because he really didn’t know much, but his dad, Skinny Face, was in trouble with the police. The move would be quick, that weekend. This was the last time they’d play computer games at his place. It was also possibly the last time they’d ever see him, but no one dared say it out loud. He wouldn’t be missed by most people, but Hermano and Bricky had a bond with him – a bond that was less about pity than they cared to believe. Wallace still didn’t know if he was going to live with his mother in the state of Santa Catarina or with his father God knows where.
Although he felt abandoned, Hermano’s betrayal was perhaps the worst of all, because it had nothing to do with an accident, a twist of fate or any other factor outside his control. On the one hand, he was spending more and more time alone, locked in the house or immersed in his crazy routine of bike rides, runs and solitary exercise. On the other hand, he was spending less time in the company of his childhood friends to spend more time with Bonobo. You couldn’t say that he and Bonobo were close, but even their occasional encounters seemed to demand all of Hermano’s energy for sociability. There were also the rumours that Hermano and Naiara were a couple, or at least going out occasionally. It wasn’t true. He did everything he could to avoid Naiara in public. He’d leave the minute she showed up anywhere, or, if that wasn’t possible, he’d find a way not to exchange a word with her. Nevertheless, it was true, he’d gone back to Bonobo’s place on a few occasions to spend time with her. They’d never gone beyond confessional conversations that culminated in kissing and groping each other. The memory of what had happened the first time they’d been alone together loomed in his mind as something both good and bad, success and failure, victory and frustration, a succession of moments recorded in vivid imagery, but which always came back to him accompanied by a disturbing feeling that he couldn’t put his finger on.
The computer game distracted them from the awareness that from then on everything was going to be drastically different. They managed, for a few hours, to build and test a track that couldn’t be finished. The sequences of obstacles were so difficult that it was impossible to accelerate the car enough to make it through certain loopings and jump from one side of a drawbridge to another. They spent as long testing the track with every possible car model as they’d spent creating it. Even the Formula One car, a champion at acceleration and final speed, ended up totalled. Convinced that it was 100 per cent impossible to get to the home stretch, they decided they were satisfied with their work and said goodbye. Hermano and Bricky left, while Walrus began disconnecting cables in order to disassemble the computer.
The night sky was clear and in the direction of the Guaíba an almost imperceptible incandescence could be seen, a red vestige of dusk like a door closing behind the night. There was something solemn in the air, and the whole neighbourhood was heading home for a long period of waiting out the cold. They walked side by side for three blocks, cursing the weather, and parted ways with a firm handshake after a brief moment of eye contact. Hermano walked the last few blocks to his house quickly, feeling his sweat cooling beneath his T-shirt and nylon jacket.
The smell of soup evoked afternoons of TV-watching, lying on the sofa, rolled up in blankets. His parents were sitting at the kitchen table, his mother already mopping up the last drops of soup in her bowl with tiny chunks of bread, his father sucking down spoonfuls with his chin cautiously projected over the steaming bowl, yellow broth dripping from his spoon. Hermano got himself a bowl from the back of the cupboard, ladled in some soup and sat down. His father wiped his moustache with a napkin and asked how things were going. Hermano assured him that everything was fine. His mother got up, left the kitchen and came back holding a green report card. She handed it to his father, who left his spoon in the bowl, opened the report card, studied it for a moment, then looked at Hermano with a wry smile. He asked what was going on in a tone that was reassuring. His father was a serious man who rarely raised his voice. He had a square face, and Hermano had inherited his broad shoulders and arms too long for his torso. His father had worked for many years as the manager of a local food distributor, re
ad the Zero Hora, Folha de São Paulo and O Globo religiously in two daily shifts, at breakfast and after dinner, and played doubles tennis with three old friends on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings at the Professor Gaúcho Club. Hermano said there was no problem. For the first time in his life, he’d flunked two subjects, Portuguese and History, and would have to sit the tests again. He’d scraped through in his other subjects. He wasn’t a brilliant student, but he’d never had to try very hard to pass. He studied little, on the eve of exams, in short bursts that never exceeded half an hour. It wasn’t difficult. But that term he’d simply forgotten to study. He’d attended class on automatic pilot; it was all completely meaningless. There was no reason. There was no problem. He’d pay more attention, go through his notes and textbooks again before the tests. His father wasn’t too pleased with the nonchalance of his reaction. School had never been a problem before, and it shouldn’t become one at this stage in the game. Hermano swallowed a spoonful of soup and nodded. His father went off to read O Globo in front of the television. His mother sat beside him and they smoked their once-a-day cigarettes, he, Camel, she, Carlton, a decade-long habit. Hermano showered, set the alarm on his clock radio for 11 p.m. and fell asleep.
He awoke at eleven, pulled on a pair of jeans and a wool-lined jacket, told his mother, who was still in front of the TV, that he was going out to meet some friends, and headed for the clearing. He crossed the square and walked through unlit streets, moving further away from the centre of the neighbourhood, where there was a greater concentration of homes, towards more deserted blocks that were yet to be built on. On the pavement of the last street, City Council employees working on the electrical grid had dug a number of holes for lamp posts, but hadn’t had time to finish. A few concrete lamp posts were lying in a large vacant plot of land, vaguely lit by a bright half-moon. Flanking the pavement on the right-hand side of the street was the Jungle, a black forest agitated by the chirring of crickets and the scandalous yowls of stray cats mating. At the spot marked by a rusty paint can hanging from a branch, Hermano disappeared into the trees.
Most of the children in Esplanada could walk the hundred-yard trail with their eyes closed, though only the older ones went there at night and had their parents’ permission to do so. He reached the clearing just as Bonobo threw a jar of petrol on a pile of dry branches, transforming the shy flame into a thundering bonfire. He saw Chrome Black, the Joker and Isabela. He also recognized Livramento and Savage, two of Bonobo’s friends who, it was said, were responsible for more than one house burglary in the region. There was another guy and a girl Hermano didn’t know. As expected, no sign of Naiara. She and her brother didn’t usually mix.
A gallon bottle of sweet red wine was being served in plastic cups which Hermano had to re-refuse every five minutes. Bonobo lit a cigarette in the fire and told them about an accident he’d seen on Serraria Road the previous Sunday that had been given a quarter of a page in the Zero Hora. An employee of a motorbike repair shop in Ipanema had thought it’d be harmless to take a client’s Kawasaki Ninja 1100 for a spin that sunny afternoon. He was doing about ninety-five miles an hour, according to a police estimate, when he was surprised by a horse and cart emerging from a side street to cross the road. The employee wasn’t wearing a helmet, and his head had collided with the horse’s. The Kawasaki Ninja had gone flying in one direction and the employee in the other. The employee had hit his head again mid-flight, this time against a wooden post. The result, a few seconds later, was a dead body in a pool of blood, pink bits of brain stuck to the post, a Kawasaki Ninja transformed into a compact ball of twisted metal, a dead horse lying on the ground with its head facing the wrong way, a capsized cart, and a cart driver with an exposed fracture in his arm. The conversation stayed on the topic of car accidents and then broadened out to include stories of all kinds of accidents. At the age of twelve the Joker had lost his balance on a rock at a beach in Santa Catarina and fallen into the choppy sea. He’d been rescued, covered in lacerations, by two surfers. Isabela had fallen on some glass and had had twenty-two stitches in her shin. Hermano told some stories of falls from his bike. Time passed and soon everyone but him was drunk. They had finished the bottle of wine quickly and it was suggested that someone go get another bottle at the Maragato, a bar that stayed open well after midnight. Hermano volunteered, and Bonobo said he’d go with him to buy cigarettes.
They walked for about twenty minutes. At the Maragato, Bonobo went behind the counter and disappeared through a door with the owner of the bar. On the way back, he showed a little brick of marijuana to Hermano, who remained firm in his resolve to abstain for life from any and all substances that might be bad for him, which didn’t stop him from feeling excited by the simple fact of having accompanied Bonobo on such an expedition. Hermano had earned his trust. The gallon bottle was heavy, but he insisted he could carry it on his own.
Shortly before they reached the paint can marking the trail to the clearing, Hermano spotted some silhouettes in the vacant plot of land on their left and recognized Uruguay’s compact body and long hair well before Bonobo, who kept walking quickly with his head down for a few seconds before he realized they weren’t alone. The word came out of Bonobo’s mouth with a strange serenity, as if he had carefully placed it in the air:
‘Run.’
For a split second Hermano was confused. Run, why? Oh, yes, that was obvious. But where? Towards them? Back to the Maragato? Into the forest? Before he knew it, Bonobo was already charging across the cobblestones towards the clearing, where the others were sitting around the fire, waiting for the wine. Hermano dropped the bottle in the middle of the street and ran too. That was something he was good at. Running. He caught up with Bonobo with ease and looked over his shoulder. There were five or six of them and at least two were holding objects that looked like pieces of wood or iron bars. A brick shattered some six feet to his left. He was relieved they were running. Fleeing like this was something he’d never have associated with Bonobo, him of all people: the invincible Bonobo, the toughest kid not only in Esplanada, but in all the southern suburbs, a fame that had spread to surrounding areas. He’d beaten up eight guys at the same time and had given a guy who’d threatened him with a revolver a serious working-over. There were dozens of infamous stories, but now Bonobo was running and Hermano was glad. The very thought of a confrontation came accompanied by flashes of terror that urged him to run even faster. He saw the first holes left by the City Council in the pavement, and further along he saw the lamp posts lying on the ground and knew now that they were only two blocks away from the trail to the clearing. If they made it there, the others would help defend them. Hermano ran as fast as he could and began to pull ahead of Bonobo. Then he heard a cry, followed by the plea:
‘Shit, gimme a hand!’
He looked over his shoulder and couldn’t understand where Bonobo was. All he could see was Uruguay and the others running down the middle of the street, still at a safe distance.
Where was Bonobo?
Uruguay kicked something on the ground. From the dull thud, he could tell it wasn’t a rock or a can. The thing didn’t move, because soon the others started taking swings at it too.
Hermano dashed for the trees, tumbled in a ditch and hid behind leaves and branches. He couldn’t see much of what was going on in the street, but he could hear it perfectly well. No one shouted, no one spoke. There was just the sound of trainers continuously kicking what could only be Bonobo for what felt like an hour.
But the hour ended and Hermano’s heart was still thumping like mad. He tried to control his breathing, but it was impossible. They stopped kicking and began to talk. They appeared to be arguing. He made out a few curse words and little else. ‘Shake him,’ someone said. Thinking they’d come for him next, he listened hard for his name, but Uruguay and company sprinted off. They’d let him off. He heard the sound of their footsteps fading away until they disappeared. He stayed there, squatting behind the branches for a few minutes, wait
ing for Bonobo to make a sound. Nothing.
Before explaining why his face was covered in blood, after dashing breathlessly into the clearing where everyone was still sitting around the fire waiting for the gallon of wine, he took a few moments to register the look of surprise on each of their faces, revelling in the expressions that conveyed their certainty that he, Hermano, had just taken part in a violent episode, a conflict from which only he had escaped and returned to warn the others, bearing on his face the marks of an unquestionably real fight, and it was only after some insistence and probing about what had happened and where the hell Bonobo was that he began to relay the events of the last few minutes, starting with the moment he and Bonobo had been surprised by Uruguay and his rabid gang and they had dashed for the clearing, hoping the others would be able to help them in a fight that wasn’t going to be easy, as there’d been six or seven of them, armed with bricks and pieces of wood, until something unbelievable had happened: Bonobo had been supremely unlucky and fallen into one of the holes that the fucking council workers had dug for the lamp posts on the Friday afternoon, which the cunts hadn’t bothered to fill in or fence off, probably because they were in too much of a hurry to start the weekend with a cachaça in some shithole of a bar, and Bonobo had ended up falling into one and getting stuck, with one arm pinned inside and the other sticking out, scrabbling at the earth and plants around him in a futile attempt to free himself, and as soon as he’d realized Bonobo wasn’t with him, Hermano had stopped, looked back and seen that Uruguay and company were kicking Bonobo’s unprotected head, which was the only exposed part of his body except for his arm, battering him cruelly, and Hermano had had no choice but to go back and try to pull the bastards off him, and he’d even tried to reason with them, to get them to stop that cowardly attack, but they weren’t in the mood for chit-chat and not only had they continued to kick Bonobo but they’d also come after Hermano, who’d done his best to defend himself and try to save his friend at the same time, but all he’d managed to do was get himself punched in the face, knocked to the ground and kicked relentlessly, like Bonobo’s head, until they’d grown tired and left, laughing and saying who’s the tough guy now, hey, hey, unconcerned by the fact that Bonobo was motionless, his head hanging to one side, apparently unconscious, the only difference being that people who are unconscious breathe and, from what Hermano had seen, horrified, Bonobo wasn’t breathing, his face was smashed in and inert and he didn’t respond when he called his name and slapped him and shook him, and when he’d felt his friend’s neck and wrist for a pulse he hadn’t been able to find one, and he’d freaked out and come running to get the others, who barely waited for Hermano to finish his story and charged down the trail through the dark forest to find Bonobo in the hole in the pavement, all except Hermano, who stayed squatting by the fire a moment as he recovered his composure, going over every detail of the story he’d just told and memorizing the things he’d changed or omitted, because the truth was he hadn’t gone back to help Bonobo, he’d remained crouched in the forest like a coward while an assault took place only a few feet away, an assault whose details he’d only discovered a few minutes later, when he plucked up the courage to venture into the street and found Bonobo in the hole, with an arm and his head sticking out, dripping with blood, even from his ears, blood devoid of beauty, which reminded him more of roadkill, unbreathing, with that absence of organic vibration that could only mean he was lifeless – it was death, and a death in which Hermano instantly felt implicated, as a result of his cowardice, which had finally emerged in its entirety and which he was determined to keep secret, for he wouldn’t be able to go on living if he had to wear it like a brand on his forehead for the rest of eternity, if he had to be the gutless wonder who’d sneaked into the forest without a sound while a gang had beaten his friend to death; no, that would have been unbearable, and the solution he’d found at the time had come in the form of a blow – not a figure of speech, but a literal blow that Hermano had delivered to himself, punching himself in the face, after which he’d thrown himself to the ground and rolled in the dirt and tugged at his T-shirt until it tore, and punched himself again, over and over, and finally discovered what it felt like to take and throw punches in a real fight, a series of sharp, throbbing pains that brought to mind the shapes of bones and the arrangement of facial nerves, that grew until they became a single pain, not as sharp but more all-encompassing, duller, easier to bear with each new blow, the taste of his blood, somewhat sweet and sour, like tart tomato sauce, surging readily from his split lip, his nose, a cut in his eyebrow, and after the first few minutes of pain the whole thing had actually become easy; it had been a relief to finally feel it for real, to feel it in his own flesh for the first time rather than in wild daydreams, movies and comic books, to let it happen for the first time and discover that feeling it was easy, imagining it was hard.
The Shape of Bones Page 14