Narcisa

by Jonathan Shaw

  Munching away like some mad, infernal eating machine, Narcisa shoved food into her gullet, swallowing without chewing. “. . . Mmmh, mmyh . . . So now I thinking ’bout how I gonna get my cash an’ get de fock out from these e’stupid place without wake de guy up an’ gotta see he e’stupid playboy monkey face again . . . mmmh, mmh nyamm . . .”

  I reached over and handed her a towel. She dropped it on the floor with a handful of crumbs and kept eating. “ . . . An’ so I go look outside de window, bro, an’ I see de doorman e’sneak out an’ walk away from de building, you know, walk down de e’street for meet these girl, mmmh . . . I look them go in to de park. Hah! Perfect, Max! De porteíro abandon his posto for go with de girl! I know he won’ e’stay away too long, mmmh, mmmh, ynum, yumm . . . but these geer-ool, she pretty, very pretty girl, you know?” She winked like an evil circus clown.

  I gawked at her with mute admiration as she rambled on, a rampaging babbling, rushing stream of Narcisa. “ . . . But he gonna e’stay away enough time, I know, mmmh, an’ these e’stupid trick e’sleep, an’ now no porteíro, nobody for watch de building door, got it? An’ then I e’say, ‘Now or never, Narcisa! Go!’ An’ so I carry it right out de door de focking guy tel’vision! Crowwwnnn crowwwnnn crowwwwnnnn!! Ha-ah!! I teef it de tel’vision, Cigano!! Hah!! I teef it!! The tel!! vision!! Fock!! So-oo perfect, Max!! Aahhh hah haahaha!!”

  Narcisa was shouting and singing, jumping, laughing, chattering, chirping like a branch of gleeful monkeys.

  Crash!

  Shit! There goes my last fucking plate!

  “Droga puta merda caralho! Son of a who-oore e’sheet! Mother fock! Po-orra!” She cussed like a bloodthirsty pirate, crumbs flying from her mouth like wood chips from a churning buzz saw. “You e’stupid kitchen, she too focking e’small, Cigano!! No place for put nothing! Bring de broom, cara, go, clean it up these e’sheet now! Go! Go go go go go!”

  Blasting past me, she leapt up onto the sofa and began attacking a big bowl of crackers, sliced pineapples, stale pizza, olives and gooey sweet doce de leite, all mixed together in a nauseating, overflowing heap. Narcisa was an obscene, infernal, furious machine. The way she shoveled that food into her pie-hole, it was as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. She probably hadn’t.

  I stared at her in lovestruck wonder. “You’re a fuckin’ animal, Narcisa!”

  She kept shouting and gesturing, talking, big chunky wet crumbs flying from her mouth, shooting like bullets across the sofa, landing on my arm.

  I was most impressed. I could feel my heart swelling like an overworked vacuum cleaner bag about to pop as I started laughing. “Careful, ya little beast. Ya might actually swallow some of that shit before ya spray th’ whole fuckin’ room with it!”

  “Shut de fock up, e’stupid, go! Mmmhh, mmmhh, nyamm . . . Oí! Oí! Go an’ give it to me de Coca Cola! Thirsty! Drink! Go!”

  “Hey, Narcisa!” I grinned. “I got an idea!”

  Her blazing eyes peered up at me over the mountain of food, like a raccoon peeping its snout out of a garbage can.

  “Next time ya could steal us a fuckin’ blender!” I cackled. “Then you could mix up all that food and just hold yer nose and swallow it. Yer always in such a big hurry, just think of all th’ time you’d save not havin’ to chew and all, y’know, more time to sleep and watch yer new television, when yer not toasting yer brains out on that fuckin’ crack . . .”

  “I get it this tee-vee for you, Cigano!” She frowned, pouting. “You don’ remember de time when you broken de other one?”

  “The other one?” I almost choked. “That was like three years ago! And you kicked th’ fuckin’ thing over and busted it!” I howled. “What th’ fuck?”

  “Menos! Nevermind these e’sheet! Is irrelevante! Shut de fock up! Mee-noos! Go plug it in an’ e’stop all you e’stupid talk, Cigano! Maybe you just e’say, ‘Thank you for de new tee-vee, Narcisa’ . . . Eí-íí, where it is my Coca-Cola, hein? Go! Now! Go! Go! Thirsty! Go go go!”

  Still chuckling, shaking my head, I handed her a glass of soda. Then I saw her eyes fix on the bulge in my underwear. It was on. I peeled the stolen cotton briefs down over those long, beautiful legs. Narcisa twisted around, raising her butt off the sofa, looking at me, playing with her perfect shaved hardwood clam.

  Just as I was about to mount her, she pointed to the television.

  “Peraí, cara! Plug these e’sheet in, Cigano! Go! Naa-ooow! Go-ooo!”

  I stared at her, drooling like a lovestruck hamster.

  “Go, Cigano! Vaiiii! Go! Then we can look it while you focking me!”

  Now she had my full attention . . . Of course! Watch TV while we fuck! Business and pleasure! Two birds, one stone! The best idea ever!

  Preferring to read and write when I was home alone, I’d never bothered replacing the little television she’d smashed. There was just my plastic portable radio. Narcisa would sing along with the popular songs while I shagged her, hypnotized, lost in her brittle, cracked-up voice. I couldn’t get enough of her singing. I loved Narcisa’s voice as much as I loved everything else about her; that rough, sandpapery rasp, like the ghostly wails of horny alley cats in heat in the plaza below my window on sultry summer nights; a husky edge of danger and primal violence. And all I wanted to do anymore was fuck.

  I would screw Narcisa all day long when she’d let me. Somedays that’s all we’d do. Eat and fuck and sleep, falling in and out of each other, rolling around in a comfortable tangle of arms and legs, in and out of the Land of Sleep and the Land of Fuck, while she snored or sang with the radio songs, or rattled away with that manic, childlike, singsong growl of hers, unleashing dazzling torrents of stupefying alien poetry and wild, surreal stream-of-consciousness rants.

  And now it was a television, a new addition to our funny little nuthouse honeymoon; like a new baby, or a puppy. Perfect, Max! I grinned at her like a kid at Christmas.

  “Put it on, Cigano, go go! Naa-ooow!”

  I got up, went over and plugged the thing into the wall. Standing there with a throbbing hard-on in my hand, I watched as the TV sprang to life, like some mad scientist’s laboratory monster. An old black-and-white western movie; two rugged-looking gringos in cowboy hats sitting on horses in front of a Wild West saloon, talking in badly dubbed, outdated television Portuguese.

  “Ye-eah! Mmmmh, yumm, yum, mymmh . . .” Narcisa shoved another moldy slice of pizza into her mouth. “Leave it on these e’show! Don’ touch it, Cigano!” She sprayed a new flurry of soggy crumbs across the floor.

  I watched her like a cat as she stared at the television. Her crazed, crack-maddened eyeballs were bugging out, riveted to the flickering screen with the intense, unblinking focus of a late-show-movie zombie. Her brain sucked up like an albino moth into the little gray box vibrating away in the dark corner, Narcisa was gone, mesmerized, lost in TV land. Under that haunting blue electronic spell, she didn’t even seem to notice as I slid down like a cat burglar on the sofa behind her, lifted her long, pale leg up and worked myself into her from behind.

  It was on. The perfect TV honeymoon.

  We stayed like that for hours, for days; coupled together, grinding our careless sex away in the shadows, before that eerie, glowing, all-seeing, all-knowing television eye. We slept like that and woke up in the same befuddled televised trance, the sofa groaning and sagging under the weight of our churning, machinelike sex; through movies and novelas and comedies, westerns and game shows, soccer matches, newscasts and boring agricultural programming, late-night test patterns and commercials; nights and days, all merging together in a steamy limbo fuck-stupor stew; sailing the airwaves together, dick and pussy melded into one solid, unified unit, we fucked and fucked, an unstoppable, mindless hump machine, only disengaging from time to time to eat snacks or go to the bathroom, before resuming the idyllic fantasy-ride fuck-dream life had become.

  35. THE HOUSE OF LOVE

  “I AM ‘THE FACE OF RIO’ . . . THE PEOPLE OF THE UNDERGROUND ADORE ME! I AM THE QUEEN OF T
HE UNDERGROUND!”

  —Narcisa Tamborindeguy

  When not smoking, fucking, watching television or sleeping off a mission, Narcisa began spending her time in this ratty little rented room downtown.

  The Crack Monster’s new headquarters was a run-down transient rooming house in the dark, greasy backstreets of Lapa. The place was called Love House. Love House Hotel.

  When Narcisa was on a run, I just had to put some distance between us sometimes. A matter of psychic survival. And the Love House’s rates were cheap. There was one drawback, though. The place was infested with roving herds of frightful-looking, over-the-hill transvestites and their shifty-looking tricks.

  The Love House “girls” were strange, tragic-faced creatures. I shuddered at the sight of them, stumbling around the narrow mazes of darkened hallways in their ratty, cum-stained lingerie, like potbellied old truck drivers in clown makeup.

  Too destitute to think of getting real breast implants, the dilapidated drag queens there would inject themselves with industrial truck tire silicone from the nearby flat-repair joints—or so Narcisa’s breathless stories went.

  Lapa, the Love House’s neighborhood, was Rio’s traditional old bohemian quarter. Situated on the run-down edge of the Centro, its ancient cobblestone backstreets and alleys had long been a refuge for threadbare local artists, poets, musicians and old-school malandro street hustlers. In recent times, the once-folkloric district had degenerated into a filthy, crime-infested labyrinth of crumbling tenements, cheap hole-in-the-wall bars and humble working-class eateries. After nightfall, the streets of Lapa morphed into a chaotic, booze-soaked netherworld, where Cariocas and foreign turistas went slumming to bask in its rotting air of nostalgia and local color. They spent the sweaty nights there singing, dancing and drinking till they puked. On the long summer weekends around Carnaval, Lapa was like an open portal to hell.

  Outside Narcisa’s window at the Love House, a steep escadaria, hundreds of steps long, climbed into the winding hillside ruas of Santa Teresa, a vintage tangle of timeworn colonial mansions, surrounded on all sides by a cancerous sprawl of deadly shantytown favelas. The landmark stairway—the neighborhood’s only real saving grace—had been converted from a former piss-soaked, pestilent eyesore into a multicolored mosaic-tiled work of art by a visionary painter named Selarón.

  When not painting, the globe-trotting Chilean immigrant had spent his years in Lapa productively. Lovingly, patiently, the eccentric poor man’s Gaudí had singlehandedly transformed a filthy, crime-ridden, abandoned concrete blemish into a living masterpiece. A neighborhood fixture, old Selarón was always to be seen out on his escadaria, wearing his trademark floppy red hat, chatting through his bushy handlebar mustache with neighbors and visitors. For over a decade, a day at a time, he had worked his dream into a reality with a single-minded obsession, proudly maintaining and adding new tiles to the ever-evolving project.

  Eking out a meager living to support his ambitious urban monument by peddling unique, soulful paintings to locals and foreign tourists, Selarón was the heart and soul of Lapa; a true old-school bohemian artista. On nearby brick walls festooned with his distinctive candy-colored glazed ceramic tile paintings, Selarón had added effusive sections of vibrant poetry to the glittering collage, dedicating his enchanting walk-through sculpture garden to the people of his adopted homeland:

  “Brazil, I love you,” one read. Another colorful panel declared: “I will only end this mad and singular dream on the final day of my life.”

  Ironically, he would be found murdered on his beloved stairway early one morning; doused with a can of his own paint thinner, then set ablaze by one of the subhuman, glue-addled bottom-feeders of Lapa, who had converted his magnum opus into a noisome spawning ground for drug dealing, petty larceny and strong-arm muggings of curious visitors attracted to the artwork there.

  Selarón’s mad dream would eventually be destined to rats and ruin; a living testament to the ugly undercurrent of Rio’s infamous melting-pot neighborhood, Lapa. Within days of his death, the legendary Escadaria Selarón was appropriated by the greedy, bloodsucking pimps of Rio’s corrupt, draconian Prefeitura—always eager to take an official bow for works of popular artistry whose penniless creators they neither sponsored nor encouraged in life.

  To add insult to Selarón’s final betrayal by the city he loved, the police blatantly covered up his murder, loath to delve into a crime that might leave an unsightly bloodstain on the lucrative tourism racket. His savage extermination was deemed an official “suicide”—though everyone in Lapa knew better.

  To me, it was hardly a surprise. Poverty and decadence, greed, corruption, envy and malice had always been a way of life in the passive-aggressive social landscape of the city of my youth. No wonder Narcisa chose to blot it all out in a swirling maelstrom of deadly crack befuddlement.

  Across from the Love House sat a grungy, low-rent open-air bar. That dreadful roach pit was the definitive unofficial borderline between the asphalt world of the “real” city and the lawless underworld “other” city within a city at the top of Selarón’s steep mosaic stairway—a world of teeming, crime-infested hilltop favelas, where all the usual urban street codes and social norms were automatically reversed, replaced with unwritten, inflexible, merciless ghetto-world codes—strange, random laws enforced by roving packs of gun-toting teenage bandidos, minions of the shadowy donos, the drug bosses.

  Organized crime was the only de facto government up in those lawless shantytown slums, sprawling like a ragged human cancer of poverty across the once-verdant hills of Rio de Janeiro. Prophetically, Selarón himself had included a haunting little admonition in his jinxed crazy quilt collage: “Living in a favela is an art. Nobody robs. Nobody hears. Nothing is lost. Those who are wise obey those who give orders.”

  Like the favelas from which many of its patrons hailed, the shabby boteco below Narcisa’s window was a distribution point for drugs. All kinds of unsavory characters would gather around the open-air pool tables and rickety wooden stools out front at all hours of the day and night, drinking, bickering, smoking weed, dancing and sniffing cocaine in paranoid little clusters at the end of the bar. Samba and Forro blasted from a pair of big, weather-damaged speakers in a pounding, distorted cacophony; an obnoxious soundtrack for the ceaseless loud arguments raging in that marginal netherworld of petty crime and sleepless vice.

  In the predawn hours, the boisterous barroom debates would escalate, rising in crescendo like some mad doomsday symphony. Trouble would break open like a burst of billiard balls there, the festivities often ending in a staccato rattle of gunshots ripping through the greasy night air, bottles falling off tables, breaking like crashing cymbals as the bar’s ragged denizens scrambled like rats for cover.

  The backstreets of Lapa were host to a splendidly dysfunctional little society.

  Narcisa had spent the last two days there at the Love House, tweaking her brains out in her airless cubbyhole, while I did some laundry and tried to recover from her last visit.

  As soon as she came up for air, she called me, and off I went.

  When I pulled up half an hour later, Narcisa wasn’t waiting outside, as planned. I looked up and down the street, then up on the crowded mosaic stairway.

  No Narcisa.

  Sitting back on the bike, I waited, sucking down a sweaty soda from the bottle, then another. Lighting a cigarette, I waited some more, observing the freak parade: winos, pickpockets, skinny preteen thugs, degenerate gamblers, aging transvestites, saggy old alcoholic whores and dog-faced losers. Squinting through a humid, sickly-sweet cloud of marijuana smoke hovering over the motly crowd occupying the stairway, time was an endless loop of tedium. Bored and edgy, I began scribbling impressions of the night into my little pocket journal, while fending off the constant stream of freeloaders, hustlers and bums as they came over to hit me up for change and smokes. Finally, I got off the bike, marched up under Narcisa’s window and yelled for her to come down.

  Nothin
g. I must have taken too long after her call; she’d already been out to do whatever she had to do. She was holed up in there now, smoking alone in the dark.

  I waited some more, but I knew it was useless. She wouldn’t come down. Not till she’d smoked the last fucking crumb. Not till she was done searching every crevice of the rotting wooden floor in her coffinlike cubicle. I winced as I pictured her up there, crawling around like an overgrown Kafka cockroach, foraging for imaginary coke flakes no self-respecting crackhead would drop. By the time the sun comes up and the birds are singing, I knew Narcisa would smoke Margaret Thatcher’s old yellow toenail clippings without a second thought.

  Swallowing a bitter little groan, I went back to the bike and sat again. Leaning back on the seat, I glared at the sordid procession of petty crooks, coming and going from the bar to the stairs, like forlorn legions of the damned.

  “Porra, que merda!” I cursed under my breath, feeling like a strung-out chump. My eyes wandered over to a creepy-looking geezer with a brutal flat face, sitting at an outdoor table littered with empties. The guy’s whole head was deformed, as if he’d been dropped on the ground at birth, or clobbered with an iron skillet or something. A nasty-looking specimen. He lurked across from another drunk passed out at the table. As I watched, Flat-Face started going through the other guy’s pockets. Casting furtive rodent looks around, like a vulture feeding on a corpse, he glowered at me, sneering, baring his rotten, ratlike underbite in my direction.

  I felt a sudden mad urge to march over and smack him right across his evil, subhuman mug with my Coke bottle. Pow! But something stopped me.

  I remembered that Narcisa knew every one of those crummy barflies and smelly lost souls by name . . . Don’t make trouble here . . . She’s got enough trouble!

  I swallowed the frustration and hate of my progressive addiction to her. Plastering a blank look on my face, I averted my eyes. Still, my fucking blood boiled to think that she’d gladly spread her long, elegant white angel legs for any one of those dirty, degenerate creeps, for the price of a few lousy crumbs of rock.