I smiled at how spot-on my prediction was. Sometimes those regurgitated conversations really got under my skin, ’cause they made it seem like things were always the same, day in, day out. But sometimes I’d get involved and, in those moments, I took pleasure in those fixed dialogues.
“You guys only ever talk about drugs, never seen a thing like it.”
“That’s ’cause the world’s doped up, brother. It’s almost like you hadn’t heard. I’ve told you once, I’ll tell you again: one week without drugs and Rio de Janeiro grinds to a halt. No doctors, no bus drivers, no lawyers, no cops, no street sweepers, nothing. Everybody bugging out, cold turkey. Cocaine, Rivotril, LSD, pills, crack, weed, Novalgin, whatever, mano. Drugs are what this city runs on.”
Alan loved to talk about that stuff, and we loved listening to him.
“Drugs and fear,” I concluded.
Mid-banter, we were already on our third blunt, and nothing. Just a weird pressure in my head, dizziness. I kept wondering if Léo’s wife, Amanda, wouldn’t be pissed if a bunch of stoners rolled up to her house reeking of ammonia. Must be eight p.m., at least. I wanted to alert the crew, but decided to let it be. They’d just say Amanda was real chill, that she’d always gotten on with the gang. And it was true. The girl was as mental as we were. Before her daughter was born, we used to hang out all the time with her and Léo in Lapa, and she was always one of the wildest when we ran out of Coca-Cola and the time came to drink straight vodka. In any case, kids change people, and I wondered whether they’d want us to stop by some other time, some other day.
“Lua vai iluminar os pensamentos dela, fala pra ela que sem ela eu não vivo, viver sem ela é o meu pior castigo…”
“Vai dizer…”
The song rang out from the bar behind the station. I can’t quite remember when or how, I think Felipe started leading the crew along to Katinguelê’s lyrics and we followed him, clapping, spreading our arms, cracking up. Until we fell into absolute silence.
I never understood that stuff. I mean, I’ve always felt deeply uncomfortable with inexplicable silences. It’s always as if something were breaking. From one moment to the next, everything comes undone, collapses, and we’re left on our own, faced with the abyss of another person. Then, you feel like saying something or other just to try and sweep up all these pieces of people, half a dozen fragments scattered by our mysterious coexistence.
“I’ll go to Jacaré tomorrow, then. Y’all’s mission is to get hold of ten reals each, before noon, that’s when I’ll be heading. Don’t worry about the ticket, it’ll be courtesy of SuperVia,” Felipe said.
“Go earlier, fool. The sun’s fierce at noon. If you make it back fast we can even hang at the waterfall in Barata,” I said.
“You out of your mind, dude? The a.m. trains are lose-lose. Commuting time’s grim, from here to Central they just pack you in tighter and tighter.”
“Go later in the a.m., mano. Shit’s chill by nine, you can even get a seat. Noon’s when it’s rough. And you risk getting stuck with a full train on the way back.”
All that back-and-forth was just an attempt to get us to where we’d been. To normal.
“All right, then. I’ll leave at nine. Y’all got cash on you?”
“Nah, man, still got to parley that out at home.”
“I’ve got money in my account. Dad’s pension came in today. When we get to Bangu, I’ll take some out at the ATM. Then, this is what you’ll do: go buy the weed, take your part, and leave the rest with me. Then, when y’all give me the dough, I’ll hand over what’s yours, got it? But, check it, if y’all don’t put money down, like last time, don’t even bother begging, I ain’t saving you. I’ve told you before, if you don’t pay up, only Jesus saves.”
All that talk was getting me down, I knew what we’d end up deciding and I knew they did, too. Which is when, out of the blue:
“Hell, don’t know if I’ve told y’all this before, but there was this time when I went to Jaca, this was a while ago now, I’d cleaned up good, so the cops wouldn’t suspect nothing. Plenty of plainclothes rolling by the trains back then, I remember. So I went there, right, I was even wearing shades. Except, when I get near the tracks, a crackhead rocks up outta nowhere, I swear, no clue where she came from, if she just walked straight through the station wall, or if she popped out of a manhole, all I know is I was spooked. Then she started staring at me, looking me up and down with these, like, fiendish eyes, I swear, don’t laugh, man, I’m serious, that junkie wanted to seduce me! Then she came out with: ‘Blow you for a fiver.’ And I said I was good, thanks. Then you know what she said? Said she’d blow me for free.”
“And you let her?”
“Nah, man, I got outta there.”
“Check you out, breaking doped-up hearts all over Jacaré!”
“Bet you she would of asked for the dough after sucking you off, though. For sure. Then, if you didn’t give it to her, she’d of gotten you into some mad trouble.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Y’all really think a fiver’s too steep for the best buff of your life? Contemplate this: crackhead takes one look at your junk, sees a piece of five-real candy, and clocking that goes down on you hard, with gusto. And there’s something else, too, none of those Jaca junkies got teeth, her little velvet mouth would of swallowed you savage, no pain.”
We only stopped laughing because the train was coming our way and we had to get up. I kept wondering if we weren’t already high and if this high wasn’t the kind of high where you don’t think you’re high, like on my birthday when Vítor dropped a tab for the first time and kept yelling, all night long, so everybody at the party could hear: “I DON’T FEEL ANYTHING!”
It’s always easier to tell if the high has hit when you stand up. Often enough you’ll smoke for a long time and not feel a thing and then when you get up, you realize you’re totally baked. After the train cleared us, everybody sat back down, except for me. I kept feeling things out. I couldn’t understand what was going on, and that was starting to bother me.
I had this weird feeling when I sat back on the tracks, a kind of agony. An urge to get up and walk off, to follow my own path. Alone. Suddenly, the air had vanished, I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I looked at my body, sweat trickling down. I quickly realized I was kicking off a bad trip or, who knows, a green-out, but I was too embarrassed to tell the gang and so I just stood there, unmoving, just focusing on getting my breath back.
I couldn’t believe it, me, who was always so proud of having never smoked bad bud. My motto was: “You can’t fight the high. If it comes on strong, just let it take you. Ride the tide, surf the wave.” I’ve seen people who think they’re going to suffocate after smoking more than they can take, calling home in the middle of the night, minds fried on acid, running after people, huffing loló. I always laughed at those sorts of trips, and my friends would say: “Your time will come! Everybody’s does.”
Little by little, my blood pressure went back to normal. I looked over at the guys and felt like I was seeing them for the first time that night. I was back. It was like I’d quit that scene and left behind only my body, empty. It was completely bizarre. And yet, what had felt really intense and frightening to me seemed not to have existed for any of my friends, right there next to me. They hadn’t noticed a thing. Was all that connection I thought I felt thrumming between people just in my head? Was the hard truth of the matter that we’re born and die alone, and never share our inner life with another being?
There was a time when I couldn’t smoke on the street ’cause I always felt like I was being watched, that everybody was judging me. To be fair, it’d always been like that. With everything. Whenever something embarrassing happened—when somebody cussed me out for something I had or hadn’t pulled, when my dick got hard on the bus for no reason—I always had the feeling people were watching me. But pot paranoia’s the worst, it felt impossible to escape anyone’s eyes, everybody seemed to be zeroing i
n on everything I did. Little by little, I broke free of that. These days, I know that on the street no one can really see us. Our pain, our addictions, our vexations—it’s all too distant.
It reached me, the last joint, before we set off. I took it, acting natural. I’d overcome my unease, and no one had to be any wiser. I smoked half-heartedly, it tasted disgusting. Sometimes I wondered if it was worth smoking weed that was bad, old, dry, laced with ammonia. And I always kept at it, ’cause life seemed to be telling me that smoking was better than not. Even despite all the perrengue with the cops, my family, that kind of thing. When my friends and I met up to burn a blunt, there was this feeling that life could be good, that it didn’t have to be that crazy shit they teach us as kids, all the rushing about, the stuffiness.
As we got up to leave, I felt tired. I didn’t want to visit anybody or go to the square. I just wanted to go home, sleep, wait for tomorrow to arrive, and not think about a thing.
But suddenly one of Rodrigo’s friends rocked up, this guy who’s from the 77th. He greeted the crew. He’d asked for a sheet of notebook paper, but it took me a while to realize, because of his thick stammer. It was only when Rodrigo pulled a notebook out of the bottom of his backpack that I realized he was planning to smoke a zirrê with the two fools waiting behind him.
“If y-y-y’all wanna smoke a s-s-skinny before y-y-y’all s-s-split, just h-h-hit me up, k? This rock’s p-p-p-p-puny.”
I wanted to ask if he knew you couldn’t smoke crack on the tracks anymore, but in the end I let it be. Everybody knew; if they wanted to get themselves into that mess, that was on them, who was I to be keeping tabs?
“Thanks, mano. That’s solid, but we’re gonna head. This grass’s chaff, we’ve smoked shitloads and still feel straight. This junk’s only good to smoke with gravel.”
That’s what I said, wanting to get out of there ASAP. Glancing to my side, I spotted a woman over the way smoking out of a Guaravita cup. I thought: “That’s it, the favela’s never gonna be the same after crack. No way to keep a handle on so many addicts.”
“Pô, we should get in on that. Last round. Add that to this butt-end here and roll ourselves a mad-sweet spliff.”
I didn’t even bother answering. I knew that, no matter what I said, we’d end up smoking that blunt. I also didn’t want to come off as being too bouldered, or scared, because what I felt wasn’t fear, it was just the need to leave. “Okay,” I thought. “Dry as this weed is, won’t take us ten minutes to shred, roll, toke, and split.”
I was already at the other end when two dudes rolled up on a motorbike, the passenger with an AK-47 strapped across his chest and the driver a pistol at his waist. After that, everything happened double-quick, next thing I knew we were all standing against the wall, the AK pointed at our faces, the thug yelling:
“Y’all fucking crazy? Y’all retards? You wanna fucking die? Don’t you know you can’t smoke crack anymore in this shit?”
I was about to say we were just smoking weed when the junkie shrieked back at him:
“For God’s sake, mister, I’m pregnant!”
I responded to this information by glancing at the small bump poking out from her skeletal frame. It was true.
“Shut the fuck up, you crazy ho, shut up! If you want your kid to live, don’t be smoking this crap.”
Driver didn’t even get off, he just held the bike upright and watched things go down. Except, he pulled out his gun and cocked it to show everybody he was in it, too. As if he had to, as if we stood a chance against that AK if it set to serenading us.
“I just wanna know one thing: who wants to go first?”
And he pointed the AK’s muzzle at our faces, lingering for a moment or so on each of us. When he got to the end, Thiago said:
“Shit’s fucked now.”
I’d never seen so much fear plastered across my friends’ faces. And we’ve been through plenty of perrengues together. All I wanted to know was what would happen if, in that moment, we stopped existing, how our world would react, the people who worried about us. I remembered then how my mom had said to always keep my ID on me, ’cause if something happens and you don’t, you go down as a John Doe. As usual, I didn’t have mine.
At the bar, the pagode tunes kept on playing, indifferent to our situation. As I listened to the patrons’ voices mingling with the music, I understood everything: it was terror. They were terrorizing us. If they’d meant to kill us, they would’ve taken us someplace else, somewhere specific. They wouldn’t just leave our bodies there, strewn over the train tracks. They also weren’t planning to drag us into the favela and set us on fire or dump our bodies some other way. On top of that, on the other side of the thin wall we were lined up against, plenty of locals hung about soaking up their pagode tunes and drinking beer. If they shot at us, the bullets would no doubt pierce through those walls and strike a local. And if I knew that, no way the lunatic with the AK didn’t. It was all about terror.
I paid zero attention to anything else the thug yelled at us. I’d taken control of the situation, now all I had to concern myself with was keeping that look of terror in my eyes, as a sign of respect. This was no time to seem confident, no way could I let myself break into that smirk I get every time I realize that all the tension around me will come to nothing.
It wasn’t long before he belted at us to scram, hailing bullets into the sky, as if he were signaling the beginning of a strange and desperate race. In a split second, we were all dashing as fast as we could toward the train, even the pregnant woman, who ran heavy, gripping her belly. I don’t know how those scrawny legs didn’t break on impact with the concrete. I watched my friends moving farther and farther from me, as I lost speed, thinking: “Someday I’ll write this story.”
THE BLIND MAN
Seu Matias was born blind. He’s never seen the ocean or guns or women in bikinis. Even so, he keeps on living life, and cruises all over as if the world were made for people like him. People who can’t see, but who listen, smell, touch, feel, and speak.
And, in his case, speak powerfully. Seu Matias’s job is to touch bus passengers’ hearts. To achieve this goal, he plays a game of words and harrowing sounds with them, his voice mixing with the clamor of the city, the clinking of the coins rattling in his Guaravita cup, his tin cane always swinging left then right over the bus floor.
Everything hinges on how each potential patron’s day is going. On whether it’s the beginning or end of the month, whether they’ve eaten well or poorly, believe in God or not, are vulnerable to feeling, or guarded against the outside world. And yet, even considering all these factors, Seu Matias manages to pocket a decent amount of money every week, always working one day on, one day off.
As a kid, Matias couldn’t stand the company of other children. They were always prattling on at a ridiculous pace, trampling through topics, their voices jumbled, images spilling over each other; their words always flew far, far away. For this reason, he preferred talking to old men, who always had the patience to meticulously explain the shape of each thing, and with the degree of care only lonely old men can muster. The sky, rivers, rats, the rain, kites flying high, the rainbow, all those things we say throughout the day without a second thought to how they appear.
He soon memorized the hill’s pathways, and began playing alone on those narrow streets, like a person whose eyes are parted only slightly, pretending to be blind, listening to the sounds of life bustling around him, picking up the smell of women’s perfume, young men’s weed, of lunch and sewage, happy to uncover his very own stories, without feeling he had to share them with anyone.
When he was six, his father went missing, vanished. The dominant theory was that he’d been killed for becoming a good-for-nothing. Which isn’t hard to believe considering the state he got himself in when he boozed too hard. Several times, he’d ended up in the boca, and by the look of things, there’d been a ditch with his name on it for a while. What’s weird about the whole thing is that no one on the h
ill breathed a word about it, no one knew a thing. It was all left unresolved, a mystery hanging in the air; they never did find the man’s body.
Even years later, there was always somebody popping up claiming they’d seen Raimundo god-knows-where, doing god-knows-what. The truth is he wasn’t missed at home. Dona Sueli, who was always swearing that if the beatings didn’t stop she’d slip scalding water into that bastard’s ear, could rest easy, certain she wouldn’t have to fulfill her promise. What they did miss was the money he used to bring home, because, truth be told, when he wasn’t drinking or getting himself into trouble, the son of a bitch was working. And even though the cash that made it past the bar all the way to the kitchen table wasn’t much, it was enough that Dona Sueli had to double her workday, leaving in the morning and coming home at night, and putting up with her neighbors’ malicious remarks.
Matias’s siblings drifted apart slowly and naturally. Marcos got himself an older woman, with a kid and everything, and moved in with her. The youngest, Mariana, got herself a belly and moved in with the baby’s daddy. When illness brought Dona Sueli down, only Matias stood by her side. Her neighbors, the same ones who used to tell tales, started caring for Dona Sueli. A few times a day, as they helped the old lady go to the bathroom, or fed her as she lay in bed, they asked what her other kids were up to that they couldn’t look after their mother at a time like this. Dona Sueli always responded, implacable: “I didn’t raise my kids for myself. I raised them for the world!”
After his mother’s burial, walking back from the cemetery with his neighbors, Matias thought of what he’d do to get ahead. He’d have to keep feeding himself day after day and couldn’t think of a single job that suited him. He refused to stand on the street rattling a can of coins, as had been suggested. He thought that if he was going to be asking, it should be by communicating with people, by telling his story.
He spent days rehearsing what he’d say when he stood before his audience of bus passengers. He spoke of his mother, of his missing father. Of how difficult it was for a blind man to get a job in the city. And, finally, he asked God to bless everyone there, both those who could and couldn’t contribute.
The Sun on My Head Page 7