The doctor is sponsored by someone, that’s certain, he was one of the worst students in his class, his diploma was bought in a for-profit school, but even he knows that brain death happens when blood ceases to flow to the brain and the individual perishes, suffocated. Which is death, beyond any dispute, and can occur as the result of heart stoppage through an overdose of cocaine, “for example” . . . The main thing is that Adviser would like his “doctor friend” to receive that stiff in private as if it were some unknown indigent, so the suspicious death can be given a clinical pretext, an official place in the government statistics; cause unknown but correct for the medical records . . . It should be submerged among the many cadavers of the city of São Paulo: He needs to disappear . . . But—the entire body? Impasse on Rua Santo Elias.
Nearing 4:20 p.m.
The doctor is reflecting. He’s not good at that (“reflecting”?!), with a diploma bought from a for-profit school. Have you tried funeral parlors? I don’t know anyone who owes me favors like you do. Adviser wants to go home in time to help his wife bathe their daughters. Otherwise they all get irritated! The doctor doesn’t know whether to repay the favor the other says he owes him . . . What did he do that I didn’t do myself? He can’t recall anything specific but knows that he owes everything to someone or something. Maybe I should ask for a new car? A plasma TV? A small laboratory for clinical analyses! Yes, Dr. Celso . . . or Carlos . . . also thinks about asking Adviser for money to cover up the corpus delicti. But how much is it worth, for God’s sake? Is twenty or thirty thousand enough? This god, duly named, keeps quiet, as always. And the doctor finds himself obliged to ask directly whether he should risk his position, which is insignificant, virtually nothing, but solid: Should I? Or shouldn’t I? Speak to me! The phone rings: You said you were going to call and you didn’t. What’s going on? Now it doesn’t matter anymore, you jerk. My lo—she hangs up.
And they remain in that indecision until 5 o’clock . . .
. . . alternating between drinking hot water and cold coffee sold by wandering vendors camouflaged in the soot of the parking lot, when the doctor decides the best thing to do—in the manner of the wise who make it to old age—is nothing. Yes, nothing! And you know why? I owe. I don’t deny it . . . But it happens that his supervisor, the holder of the opening for which he is currently the first alternate psychoanalyst member of the society, had been appointed by an enemy: a top-level qualifier, above any suspicion! And in addition, the director of the unit, an experimental psychologist appointed by a deputy of the federal police, was opposed to all the previous appointments and was concerned now with recruiting his own gang—that is, “his team.” He wasn’t going to help others who were trying to cut corners. All of it under the patronage of the pharmaceutical industry that, through gastronomic conventions and sexual events, encourages the quarrel among the diverse clinical specialties, to improve the sale of medicines to all. Our boss’s boss can take advantage of this body, you understand? I understand, of course, you ratshit! What did you say? I said I understand and that’s it! There are so many living-dead awaiting their turn in the cars that no one suspects that Adviser and the doctor are talking about a cadaver. Where’s that sickly sweet smell coming from? It’s the stands selling Indonesian food! All Adviser required was a signature on a medical report, but the problem was that it was precisely the signature of that other man that he needed, the other man who saw all the advantages of not committing himself to anything, from his position, so compromised: the process of decomposition of proteins is highly fetid. Adviser finally gives up on attempting to rid himself of a simple dead man among the many peculiar cadavers in Tatuapé Hospital. How much time do I have before that—before he—causes me more problems than I already have? The smell, for example . . . The doctor was weak, but he was interested in the matter and had encyclopedic knowledge: The first phase of putrefaction is the chromatic period, or the period of blotches. In general, it begins eighteen to twenty-four hours after death and lasts approximately seven to twelve days. Around him, attendants faint beside relatives and friends, frail and needing assistance, none of them receiving any help. The sun melts the plastic roof tiles, which drip and scorch the skin of the people. As if that vision of hell weren’t enough, the other man, the sponsored doctor, has the gall to add, as if delivering a judgment: It has been demonstrated that putrefaction can accelerate under certain conditions of pressure . . . and temperature. Am I fucked? Of course you are. Thanks. You’re welcome.
6 p.m.
Night falls as if someone was turning off the damned light. Suddenly, just as it came into the world, this miserable day goes away. The sun disappears hurriedly for the other side of the planet, better and more peaceful than this half. Each one takes care of what is his. That’s what you always hear. Along with the whore that bore you—against black foreigners in general and Latin Americans of any color in particular. The body won’t be as hot, less rotten now, I suppose, thinks Adviser. What am I gonna do with that—with him—my God? As is customary, the divinity doesn’t lift a finger to help rid Adviser of the cadaver, and vice versa. In spite of everything, he still remains, like others, very spiritual.
The daytime car watchers are departing for the outskirts of the city and taking their firearms with them. The nighttime watchers haven’t yet arrived in the parks and alleyways. The residents have their own nightmares, as they doze in front of the TV. The news is bad and the examples worse. As for those still stuck in traffic, soon they’ll all be home. The trip will be long and exasperating today, by decree of the priests and ultra-Catholic congressmen; the recording of our parents and grandparents is back on the radio: hailmary,fullofgrace,thelordiswiththee;blessedartthouamongstwomen,andblessedisthefruitofthywomb,jesus,holymary,motherofgod,prayforussinners,nowandatthehourofdeath,amen.
7 p.m.
These are the saddest and most invisible hours in the unhappy city. Everyone is on his way out of here; quick, out of here! I didn’t have lunch and I’m going to try to have dinner before it’s too late and I’m devoured by my own hunger! He stops in a semiabandoned bar that he calls by name, near the Juventus playing field. He orders a chunk of fatty meat, grilled red onions, greasy french fries, a lot of salt, and a cheap alcoholic drink, preferably strong to forget the wasted hours: A meal like that means three or four fewer days of living! That was the warning in some self-important magazine. And two cans of Coca-Cola bubbling in the middle of all that must be worth three or four fewer hours, for sure. Sugar and starch, less complex in their makeup, stink less in the process of putrefaction. Seven buses caught on fire this afternoon, which the authorities attributed to “electrical malfunctions”—but no one believes it: this was the day for the 10 percent payoff to the highway traffickers, and whoever is late pays with his life, or the destruction of material or moral values . . . His wife calls, in a panic because the school van hasn’t dropped off their children, his two little girls; the driver’s telephone is busy. Is he phoning and driving at the same time, the perverse bastard? Why doesn’t that pothead talk to me, huh? Do you have any way of knowing? The cadaver, to be clear, is liquefying back there, the blood decanting inside the young half-naked black’s folds of skin, forming a red pool, leaking out his ass, or out the ears maybe, but in any case completely melting there in the trunk, and him here having to calm this woman wed to the fury of her own elements: What? I don’t think I’m hear—Believe me, the connection is awful. Really terr—I have to hang up so as not to hear you better . . . Eh? Me too . . . I’m not—Hea—Ciao! He hangs up.
The 8 o’clock news
TRAFFIC: Since Sunday, thoroughfares in the West Zone have been closed off for work on the flood control reservoir and for a coordinated army blitz to apprehend explosives and illegal weapons.
WEATHER FORECAST: A high-pressure system is influencing atmospheric conditions in the city. Cloudy skies and scattered storms. Tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow, temperatures will be higher, with a predicted maximum of thirty-seven degrees Celsiu
s.
ECONOMY: With the publication of the balance of payments, the relevance of remission of profits from our prostitutes working abroad to the gross domestic product is greater than ever. It’s a question of total credits generated in markets throughout the world, whose value grows and remains a reliable source of income for the treasury even when a consumer crisis affects the importing countries, leading to reduced demand for our commodities and services.
HEALTH: According to the metalworkers union in São Bernardo, insistence on the theme of class struggle on the part of the owners and provocateurs depresses the morale of workers and harms the efficiency of the chain of production.
MIGRATION: A network of passport counterfeiters has been discovered, along with the sale of visas and permits for slave labor in which Argentineans and Chileans subcontract Peruvians who exploit Bolivians—who normally utilize Paraguayans and Brazilians for the more menial services, but are now using Haitians to save money. Scum! Scum!! Scum!!!
Nine p.m.
The woman, the wife, calls again: the girls got home from school, finally. The van is old. Slower, less safe, and cheaper. The driver was a replacement and got lost en route. Retard! He apologized with that humble demeanor taught in the service unions’ training sessions. Excuses false but accepted, because he’s false but no one cares, or demands honesty in anything. You’re forgiven, retard. It’s all rather fraudulent. And disorganized. To make things worse, a police van was bombed at an intersection on Avenida Paes de Barro, it seems. It was parked sideways on the median between lanes, with the wounded men moaning while they waited for their friends to act, which took some time and was twice rebuffed by the adversaries, but thank God everything is all right now . . . When are you coming back? I don’t know. Why not? The temperature of the conversation is rising rapidly, very rapidly, despite the late hour! What have I done? Adviser knows where it will end. I still have a package to deliver. His wife hangs up again, but this time she calls back almost at once, immediately regretful, to say: Sorry, the girls went to bed and I get crazy when they’re not around. Thank God we have your job. I love you. Amen. My cazzolino! Me too. The Lord is our father. Bagascia mia. Saravá! Kiss/baccio.
Ten p.m.
I’m not Guatemalan, or Mexican, much less Nigerian . . . Finally it rains as it cools off, which is no longer necessary for those who spent the day sick from heat, or dying from suffocation: sons of bitches, all of us. All who survived, however, are desperate for that brackish, dirty, slimy water. They open their water tanks wide, put buckets and basins in their yards. The government’s reservoirs are empty, on full-scale alert, and equally thirsty for it. They drink everything that falls from the sky, dirty as mud and acidic as vinegar. I need a new car. Adviser remembers the condition of his imported vehicle in the first years after 2000: leakproof then, but now . . . The trunk’s going to be soaked, he knows. The guy’s flesh is gonna melt inside there. The smell is gonna get into the carpet, the floor I walk on when I leave there, in the garage in my building, the living room of my apartment, my daughters’ bedrooms! No! Adviser even starts to pray, but his divinity fails to declare itself, even now, when he has reached the peak of his ability to believe in superhuman forces. Where am I gonna stick this fucking dead man, Lord? That’s all I wanna know . . . You there! Tell me! Any of you! No one is going to get involved. People move away, their heads lowered (best answer III: it’s a logistics problem, and a police problem!). That thought stays in his head . . . He’s unaccustomed to thinking in frankly abstract terms. He thinks only about concrete data of assistance given, calculating: amounts of money, favors, stabbings leading to death . . . And he brakes in the left lane of Avenida Aricanduva. In the ugliest stretch in the most desolate place in a city most indifferent to beauty, where no one has the courage, the stomach, or the displeasure to park in front of these blots of paint, rust, and assorted filth. There, isolated from any of the world’s aesthetic intelligence, Adviser opens the trunk and observes the twisted corpse. He laughs like someone in a Tim Burton film, and he, the seminude black youth, were he to awake, would sit up on the deflated spare tire and explain how to get rid of his own remains . . . But . . . But it’s then that a somewhat daring but efficient idea occurs to Adviser (Wow! Wow!! Wow!!!). Lacking an appropriate place to dump “his” cadaver, he will do the opposite—denounce it in order to get rid of it! The poor guy is still black and probably indigent, that makes everything easier, thank God! Eureka! Eureka!!
11, 11:30, about
Come home, love, I miss you here . . . Here . . . Here . . . And here . . . Kisses . . . Me too . . . And here . . . Goddamn! Nobody below him can do this job: it’s a burden. He hangs up. Right at the time the best films start on TV and I’m not at home . . . Adviser decides to leave the cadaver in Bela Vista itself, near that samba school, on the steep descent that ends at 14 Bis. He parks on Marques Leão, takes the body from the trunk. Drags it along the ground in full view of anyone leaving or arriving home before or after prostituting themselves in the streets, government offices, or private businesses. Nothing any longer causes suspicion or embarrassment in these people. It’s full of the poor . . . and actresses . . . Adviser sets the body of the young seminude black man on the driver’s side with his hands on the steering wheel, as if he were the owner of the car. He buttons the shirt over the vomit, using the tips of his fingers. He doesn’t have the heart to touch the flaccid penis, but he notes that even in that condition, flopping and softened like a severed tail, stuck to the dead man’s thigh, it’s larger than his own penis at its full erection: which my wife wouldn’t have the courage to say—the boy . . . Anger, envy, pettiness cloud the remnant of thought. Furthermore, Adviser is no better than those he serves. However . . . Therefore, he takes the gun from the rusty toolbox, a Taurus pistol with the serial number filed off, wipes the butt and the breech with a flannel cloth, places it in the youth’s hand, vigorously rubs the youth’s hand against the metal to transfer DNA. Adviser lifts the man’s hand holding the gun and points it outside the car and upward. He fires at random. The gunpowder burns the dead man’s hand at once. He fired in the direction of the TV Paulista antennae but hit the last working mercury-vapor streetlamp on Veloso Guerra. It dims for a moment and blacks out. Total darkness. Carai! Taxi, please!
Zero hour
Adviser enters the precinct with a nonchalant air. The three cops on duty (two detectives and a scribe, hired without competitive examination and appointed by the deputy mayor of the area), who were sleeping on the sofas and swivel chairs of the establishment, alerted by the Chinese ding-dong bell, leap behind the reception counter, protecting themselves and pulling their unregistered private guns, expecting the worst. The precinct chief runs toward the rear, where a wagon with a permanently running engine awaits, ready for departure. Adviser has to show his ID from someone in the government before the men relax from their combat positions and come forward for congratulations. Is this any time to lodge a complaint, partner?! The police recommend that you call them during normal business hours, in sunlight, with your hands up. Adviser apologizes for the urgency and for the inconvenience but it’s a matter coming from above, way above. I have to report the theft of my vehicle to save the reputation of a federal senator. They all understood that things from above could very well affect everybody there below, on the ground floor of a precinct house. Right away, my friend. A task force is rounded up of everyone who can write a report of a certain cultural level for the blotter. The precinct chief, for example, who bought his law diploma for the state qualifying exam but knew quite well how to draft a public document: THAT a young black perpetrator had accosted Adviser at an intersection; THAT he had exposed his penis and stolen the car; THAT the assailant appeared to be under the influence of drugs; THAT the victim barely had time to recognize him . . . One hundred and eighty reais were quickly distributed in appreciation, although not mentioned in the text: forty for each of the investigators and the scribe, and sixty for the precinct chief. Everyone saw that the ch
ief, more cowardly and higher ranking, received 50 percent more than the others, but no one complained. They respected the hierarchy: for practical purposes. Adviser considers picking up some phony receipts—gasoline, pharmacy, meals—to offset his operational costs.
1:40, 1:45, whatever
That was when Adviser called the deputy secretary of government to confirm that the mission had been completed: by the grace of the Lord. That information was relayed by the deputy secretary of government to the secretary of government, overjoyed that those below him had resolved the whole thing; he didn’t even want to know how: Spare me the details, for the love of God! The senator is awakened by the governor with the news, considered a blessing by both: Our congratulations! By every indication, all evidence of the recent incident that took place with His Excellency’s son has vanished from the face of the earth!
At 2:20 sharp
Adviser arrives at his apartment. Late night is covered in silence. His daughters sleep with open arms, enveloped. Melancholy takes hold of him: the ineluctable solitude of the provider, the paterfamilias. Adviser goes to the bedroom, sits on the double bed, begins to undress. His flaccid penis on his thigh. Then comes the surprise that matrimony holds for him (they are monogamous, from fear and laziness): his wife’s hand grips his member. Moves. His penis reacts, becomes tumescent. She runs her fingers up and down, and each time she runs her fingers up and down, it grows and expands in the caressing hand. Then it’s the mouth: Good night. And his wife’s blessed mouth sucks the sweaty dick of Adviser, her most worthy husband, with a knowledge and dedication that make him think at the end of that workday: What whorehouses were you in before you met me? Speak softly, dear! We don’t want to wake up the children! It’s good to be back. Amen.
São Paulo Noir Page 16