‘No.’
‘Does your father know? Does your mother know you have no bike?’
‘I told them I lent it to you.’
‘Do you want to go to the old people’s home to look for it?’
‘Let’s go. The old man has to explain why he did what he did.’
Ubiratan was not sitting at the table under the tree that spread over the walls. Nor anywhere else in the courtyard. Nor in the refectory. He wasn’t in the bathroom, or in the dormitory. Nor in the corridor or in the garden at the back of the property. Nor in the kitchen, the chapel, nor in the visitors’ room. They scoured the home from end to end, but there was no sign of him. Or of the bike. The other inmates – those who could still understand what they were talking about – knew nothing of Ubiratan. They hadn’t seen him since the day before. They were certain he hadn’t slept there. Paulo didn’t believe any of it. He suspected that the old man was trying to avoid a face-to-face argument because he was ashamed of his lack of loyalty. Before the boys left, they tried in vain to get some information from the nuns.
They left the home. Eduardo was more worried than Paulo: he was concerned about the fate of the black Phillips. Ubiratan might have forgotten it somewhere. What if he couldn’t remember where? If the bike was damaged, would they be able to repair it? Repairs cost money, and Ubiratan didn’t have any. Nor did Eduardo. What if it had been stolen? How was he to explain to his parents that the precious English bike, which looked as good as new even though it was second-hand, the bike he had been given as a reward for the good marks he had received in the entrance exam for the Colegio Municipal Beatriz Maria Marques Torres, the bike they had paid for with such difficulty, had simply vanished into thin air? Just like that? If he told them he had lent it to an old man from the home, it would be worse. If he told them he had lent it so that the old man could go Eduardo had no idea where, to do he had no idea what, and on top of this, that the old man, he himself and Paulo were investigating a crime that had already been solved thanks to the murderer’s confession, then he was well and truly done for.
Paulo suggested he tell them that he needed the bike to do errands for his father the butcher, and that he had promised to return it before nightfall. It was a convincing lie. But sooner or later, Ubiratan would have to come out of hiding, face them, and give the bike back. The lie would get Eduardo off the hook for a few hours, and yet he felt increasingly anxious. He wasn’t so much worried about the bike, how much it was worth or the money he might have to spend to get it repaired, or even his parents’ anger or disappointment. It was none of that. It was … that. Once again. Yet again that same strange and distressing, nameless sensation that sometimes took hold of his body. What could it be?
They agreed to return to the old people’s home after lunch. They said goodbye. Paulo went off without knowing where to go. He felt hungrier and hungrier, but did not want to go home. He continued wandering aimlessly. He didn’t realize that he was whistling one of the tunes he had heard in the Hotel Wizorek.
A green American car with a white top passed by. The mayor was driving. Next to him sat a thin woman. Her left arm was swathed in bandages. On the back seat was a blonde girl, with narrow eyes. The car sped on towards the asphalted road leading to the capital.
The weight would not leave his chest. Pressing and squeezing him. An odd pain. As if someone were burying a sharp spear in his guts, splitting and twisting everything inside him. He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t get rid of this … thing. Whatever it was.
What was this burden? Why? Where did it come from? What caused it? What was this … this thing that made it so hard for him to breathe, that brought a cold wave of fear that was not quite fear, stabbed at his heart beating in his chest and … what could it be called? It must have a name. Why did he feel it? Why did it leave him so empty? Why couldn’t he get rid of it?
When Eduardo pushed open the door at home, sweaty and breathless, he immediately felt a great sense of relief. His breathing returned slowly to normal. He felt sheltered. Protected. In front of him were the same pieces of furniture, smelling of peroba oil, the same few reproductions of famous paintings, the same china ornaments, the same crochet squares, the same maidenhair ferns, bromeliads, violets and begonias in the same pots and in the same places they were in the week before and the week before that, where they were the day before yesterday, yesterday, and where they would be tomorrow.
He went in, closing the door quietly. He leaned back against it. He could hear the intermittent sound of the sewing machine, indicating that his mother was working, as she did from morning to evening six days a week until his father came home from the station of the Brazilian Central Railway. Familiar sounds, so habitual he no longer even noticed them, but which now brought him an overwhelming sense of relief and gratitude.
He was about to announce his arrival when the sound of the sewing machine stopped. His mother must have heard him come in. Now she was calling out to him. To Eduardo her voice sounded different, more nasal, as if she had been crying. He went to her room. She was sitting behind the Singer sewing machine; her eyes were red and swollen. His father was standing beside her, looking grim, and still wearing his work overalls. He was holding a telegram in his hand.
Paulo never discovered who bought the butcher’s shop, or how his father came to be appointed head of store-keeping at a ministry in Rio de Janeiro. Antonio had no idea either, but he didn’t care. To live in Rio, even if it was in a suburb far away from Copacabana beach, was beyond his wildest dreams. He was going to the city with the most brazen, most beautiful, most tanned women in all Brazil: what difference did it make who was responsible?
They had the next day, a holiday, to sort out the move. It wasn’t much work: their furniture and household goods fitted on to one truck. On the Saturday they boarded a bus to take them away from the city where Paulo was born and grew up, never to return. His single suitcase contained the few clothes he possessed and dozens of bits of paper. Written on them were words he had once not known the meaning of, together with their definitions. Before leaving, he gave back the copy of David Copperfield that he hadn’t finished reading. Eduardo insisted he take it as a leaving present, but Paulo wouldn’t hear of it.
On Sunday, Eduardo went by train with his father to Barra do Piraí, where they caught the connection to São Paulo. There they took another train to Taubaté, the city where the telegram stated that Rodolfo Massaranni was to be transferred with immediate effect. Rosangela Massaranni stayed on in the city long enough to take care of the practical side of their move.
Over the first weeks and months, Eduardo and Paulo wrote each other many letters. Eduardo’s were long and sad, going into great detail about how cold his new classmates were, how the teachers showed no interest in him, about the tiny squares and almost treeless streets, the ugliness of the modern buildings in the city they had moved to. He wrote how much he missed their bike rides and the squawking of the macaws in the bamboo groves round the lake. Paulo’s letters spoke in short sentences of his weekend trips to the neighbourhoods of Méier and Cascadura, and how lively they were, and of how much he enjoyed the cries of the vendors on the trains he took to go from Bento Ribeiro, where he lived, to Marechal Hermes, where his new school was.
Eduardo also wrote occasionally to the old people’s home, but never received a reply from Ubiratan. Finally, in September, all his letters were returned to him in a bundle, together with a note informing him that nobody of that name lived there.
A few months later, in a letter sprinkled with exclamation marks, Paulo wrote that he had been with a woman, and that it was great. Eduardo wrote back that he had also had sex with a woman, and that he had also enjoyed it a lot. He soon regretted his lie, but had already posted the letter. In his next one, he wanted to tell the truth. He ended up writing vague sentences in response to Paulo’s questions about this first, non-existent conquest. Once again he was embarrassed at lying to his friend about an experience he would only really
have five years later, in São Paulo, with a female colleague on his pre-university course who was also a virgin and just as clumsy as he was about finding pleasure.
Perhaps it was as a result of this first breach of confidence between them, or perhaps it happened some time later: in the years to come, neither of them could tell when or why their letters became shorter and shorter, and increasingly less frequent. Until one day, without them noticing, they stopped altogether.
16
Brazil, 12 April 1961
THE SKINNY, PALE-FACED boy lying on the grass that bordered the blue lake like an undulating green frame opened his eyes and saw his dark, flap-eared friend standing over him. He was dripping wet.
‘Did you believe the story about the Russian?’
‘The one this morning? About the first man in space?’
‘Yes. Do you really think he went round the world in a hundred and eight minutes?’
‘I think I do.’
‘Would you like to do that?’
‘Yes. Both of us. In ten years from now, space travel is going to be much more common.’
‘So we can are astronauts.’
‘We can be,’ the thin boy corrected him.
‘Even though we’re Brazilian.’
‘Everybody is going to be able to be an astronaut. But I think I would prefer to be an engineer.’
‘I want to be a scientist. To discover remedies for incurable diseases.’
‘For all incurable diseases!’ the pale-complexioned boy added.
‘All of them!’ his friend agreed enthusiastically. ‘Every single one!’
They laughed. It was a fine, warm day.
Read on for an extract from Happiness is Easy
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1
Monday, 20 August 1990, 15.43
THE BOY WAS startled when the limousine pulled up alongside him, and the man at the wheel waved for him to get in. The boy smiled, because it was in his nature to smile and show gratitude for a kindness done or promised. The boy smiled in anticipation of his pleasure at climbing into that shiny dark-blue car, with its soft tan-leather seats.
The boy smiled because he had learned that by smiling and tilting his head to the left a little, as he was doing now, and looking at adults with the blue eyes he had inherited from his Pomeranian great-grandparents, he almost always received a smile in return. A smile from his parents’ bosses, a pat on his fine blond hair, sometimes a few coins or even a banknote slipped into the palm of his hand by the man with dark-brown skin, the owner of that vast house with such high walls where his parents worked. He smiled because that was what he believed made the men in black who were constantly patrolling the house hurry up, as they were the only ones able to open the gate he left by every morning to go to school in this big city where his mother and father had finally brought him.
He smiled because that was what he had done in the months while he waited for them to come and get him as they had promised. Thanks to his smile, he was rewarded with a little more food or a little less punishment when he did something wrong, like the afternoon he opened the sheep-pen and ran up into the hills with the sheep. He didn’t shout or make any noise as other children would have done, but tried to catch some of the smaller ones, which were disappearing into the bushes. The boy smiled because that was what he always did when he was spoken to gently, as the man behind the wheel was doing now. He smiled because he was unable to speak; he never spoke a single word, or ever heard any: he didn’t know what words were, although he knew they existed, that it was through them that adults and others the same size as him expressed what they wanted and expected of him, as long as they pointed to him, or showed him.
The man at the wheel got out, opened the rear door and signalled for him to enter.
The boy did so, struggling to clamber up into the car. He sat with his short legs on the seat and his feet dangling down, careful not to get anything dirty. He took off his black and green backpack, covered with stickers of cartoon characters he had never seen. He laid it beside him, took out a notebook and some coloured pencils, and began to draw. He couldn’t write or read, and would never learn to do so, but he didn’t know this, and thought that what he was doing was studying and so he did it conscientiously, drawing lines and shapes up and down, at the sides, making lines longer, rubbing some out, redoing the shapes, using another colour here and there, methodically and carefully completing scribbles that made no sense to anyone else.
The driver set off, slowly leaving behind the crowd of mothers and children hurrying towards the bus stops. The cracked pavements around the school were filled with narrow stores, a stationer’s with a cluttered window display, a couple of grocers, a Korean trinkets shop, a laundry.
Peering in the rear-view mirror, the driver saw with amazement how quickly the boy had become absorbed in his own world.
He thought of himself at that age, running through the unpaved streets and constantly evolving houses in the shanty town on the city outskirts, which flooded whenever there was heavy rain. Shouting all the time, flying kites or delivering the lunch tins his grandmother cooked in her dark kitchen, up and down the favela he didn’t even know was called that – to him it was simply the place his mother had brought him to and left him – a boy weighed down with lunch boxes, always shouting, shooing away the mongrels or calling to the customers, dodging and excusing himself to everybody in the alleyways because he was in a hurry to deliver the food, then fetch some more and deliver that too, and so on and on, until it was time to go to the school down the hill. Unable to sit still, he never took any interest in what the teachers were saying, but even so he listened and wrote down numbers and names, desperate to get out again and run home through the maze of shacks and cramped stores, although he didn’t realize they were tiny and cramped because he had never known anything different and because he had never been taken outside that neighbourhood. Until one day his mother did so, accompanied this time by a man he had never seen before, a man who beat him so that he would be quiet and stop shouting and laughing and running round the gardens of the big house where his mother and the man worked.
Then one day, without deciding to, he fell silent. He became a quiet boy, a quiet youth, a quiet soldier, the quietest among the military police recruits, a quiet corporal out on patrol, a quiet sergeant during the raids on drug dens, a quiet patient while he was recovering from the bullet wound that shattered his knee, a quiet retired soldier in his bare city-centre apartment, a silent security driver whom the other employees looked up to and called the Major, a rank he had never reached.
He didn’t feel sorry for the boy. He didn’t particularly like the boy. He didn’t particularly like anyone. Except for his daughter. Liking people, things, tastes, or whatever it might be, was not something that interested him. He was indifferent to others. To all others.
At least that was what he had convinced himself.
Normally he would not have picked the boy up. The VW hired to transport the children of the domestic employees in Jardim Paulistano was supposed to do that. He had already done his job earlier, when he took home the chubby boy who was as dark-skinned as his father, the owner of the car he was now driving. But the boss’s wife gave the order. In this case, an unusual order, as unusual as the day had been so far. As unusual as his feeling had been when he saw the housekeepers’ son at the school gate, pack on his back, so blond and pale-looking, so small, so … defenceless.
He followed the same route back as he had taken with the boss’s kid.
It didn’t take him long to reach Avenida Rebouças, with its usual annoying traffic. Switching on the radio, he heard the same news that had been in all the media since the start of that month: the Iraqi dictator had invaded Kuwait. With 60,000 soldiers, Saddam Hussein had seized a fifth of the world’s oil reserves. The driver changed station, but eventually gave up and switched the radio off, fed up with the same blah-blah, the recession brought on by the Collor government impounding all bank deposits,
even savings accounts, with more than 50,000 cruzeiros in them. He loathed politics, the commentators irritated him, he didn’t much care for any kind of music, there was no football game on at that time of day. He preferred silence.
A few blocks further on, he turned right into Rua Joaquim Antunes. This was the start of a neighbourhood with tree-lined streets and quite elegant houses, built in one of the first waves of urban development which, in the second decade of the twentieth century, displaced affluent families from São Paulo to what had once been small farms to the west of the city.
The streets were quiet; nobody was walking on the pavements. The people living in this area travelled around only by car. The stream of vehicles trying to avoid rush-hour traffic jams would only start later in the afternoon.
He drove on slowly, taking the roundabouts carefully so that the German car’s soft suspension did not sway too much and spoil the boy’s concentration.
He looked at him again in the rear-view mirror. For a split second, without realizing it, he was envious of him.
Happiness is easy. All you need is a piece of paper and a box of coloured pencils, he thought – almost at the same instant as the first bullet hit him.
His trained eye and brain immediately registered: a tall, hooded man in a dark-coloured parka, firing a long-barrelled Magnum with his left hand. He had jumped out of a black pick-up that had just blocked the path of the Mercedes-Benz. Two smaller cars were preventing any possible retreat backwards, and beyond them was a black saloon car. Other hooded figures were leaping out of the two smaller vehicles, running in his direction: one, two, three, four, five men, revolvers and pistols in their hands, none of them armed with anything more powerful. What are they doing, what do they want, he wondered, his right shoulder burning from the bullet that had whizzed through it. He put his weight on his left leg, straightening up and turning towards the back seat where the boy had stopped drawing and was peering at him quizzically, not comprehending what was going on. Shouting at the boy, forgetting he couldn’t hear a thing, shouting for him to get down, to lie flat on the floor of the car, at the same time as he sees the hooded men coming towards him, only one of them firing – the one who has the silver Magnum in his left hand, the big guy who came out of the black pick-up, it must be him, it has to be him, but the boy doesn’t move and the Major cannot reach him. He feels the impact of another bullet, this time in his left shoulder, it must be a crack shot who does not intend to kill him, if not he would have gone for the head, he had a clear enough sight for that, the Major reasons, leaning back still further but only succeeding in grabbing hold of the green and black backpack covered in cartoon stickers. Two hooded men open the rear doors of the Mercedes as he drops back into the front seat, reaching behind him for the Glock semi-automatic he keeps hidden under the seat, cursing himself for not doing this before, instead of trying to save the boy first, but the man in the dark parka is already alongside him, and quickly fires his .357 Magnum three times into his chest and the back of his head.
If I Close My Eyes Now Page 24