Narcisa

by Jonathan Shaw

  Enraged, I slapped her twice in the face . . . Swak! Swak!

  “Bitch! Bitch!”

  She yelped as if she’d been speared with a harpoon.

  Then, all of a sudden, I snapped out of it. Disgusted with the whole affair, I let her go.

  Standing up, I glared at her, pointing to the door.

  “Out!!”

  65. THE GREEN HOUSE

  “THIS MISERABLE STATE IS BORNE BY THE WRETCHED SOULS OF THOSE WHO LIVED WITHOUT DISGRACE AND WITHOUT PRAISE.”

  —Dante

  Narcisa jumped up. Snatching my money off the table, she stormed out into the hall, screaming, threatening, raging. I listened to her footsteps, thundering off down the stairs like a pair of cannonballs racing each other to hell. I didn’t move.

  I didn’t give a shit if I ever saw her again. I didn’t care about the mess, or the cash she’d taken, nothing, as long as it got her out of my sight. Muttering under my breath, I got busy with a towel, a broom and a mop. It was easier than I’d thought. Finished, I took a long, cold shower. When I came out of the bathroom, I started picking up my books. One of them was laying open on the floor. Lawrence Durrell’s Justine. For some reason, I felt compelled to stop and look at the page it was flung open to. I sat down on the floor in my underwear and began to read:

  WHAT WAS I TO DO? JUSTINE WAS TOO STRONG FOR ME IN TOO MANY WAYS. I COULD ONLY OUT-LOVE HER—THAT WAS MY LONG SUIT. I WENT AHEAD OF HER—I ANTICIPATED EVERY LAPSE; SHE FOUND ME ALREADY THERE, AT EVERY POINT WHERE SHE FELL DOWN, READY TO HELP HER TO HER FEET AND SHOW THAT IT DID NOT MATTER.

  By the time I came to the end of the page, I was crying; weeping uncontrollably. I closed the book, gathered up all the others and placed them all back on the shelf, leaving that particular one sitting at the feet of my colorful plaster statue of Ogum, my heavenly spirit guide and protector. Choking back tears, I lit a candle and placed it on the little altar. Then I mouthed a short, simple Umbanda prayer for Narcisa.

  “Cobre ela com a Sua proteicão, por favor! Patacori Ogunyé! Saravá, meu Pai!”

  I climbed back up to the loft and fell asleep to troubled dreams; skulls and screeching demons, Doc strapping Narcisa into an electric chair—the usual stuff. But I slept. Mercifully, she didn’t come back.

  Shaken awake the next morning by the sound of a shrieking, jittering telephone, I stumbled down and grabbed the receiver.

  Collect call. I accepted . . . Here we go again.

  Her voice. That prideful, raspy growl.

  “Tudo bem, Cigano?” Narcisa chirped, as if nothing had happened.

  “Tudo bem, Narcisa.” I smiled, as if I hadn’t almost murdered her.

  Narcisa sounded happy. I was happy too. I’d survived the nightmares again. It was a new day, and I was armored with a full night’s sleep.

  “Well, you gonna invite me for lunch, hein, Cigano? Hungry!!”

  I glanced at my watch. Noon.

  “Where are ya, princesa?”

  “Casa Verde . . .”

  “Ehhh? Whaddya doing there?”

  “ . . . Não viaja, cara. Relaxa. I only come here for e’sleep, bro, just wake up now. Hungry! Come now, Cigano! Fome! Fome! Go go go . . .”

  “Whoa, wait a minute. I just paid a whole week at the Love House so ya wouldn’t have to go back th—”

  “They kick me out from de e’stupid Love House!”

  “What?!?” Kicked out? I was shocked. How could even Narcisa manage to get kicked out of that lowlife rat-hole?

  “Is no my fault, Cigano!” she cried. “Is only because all de e’stupid bar owner on de e’street go complain about me to de Arabian peoples at Love House! Porra! Is big conspiration against Narcisa in de whole Lapa now!”

  “Hold on! Back up! What th’ fuck are ya talking about?”

  “All these e’sheet happen because I go walk pass de birdcage in de boteco on de Love House e’street, an’ I go an’ free all de bird!”

  “What?”

  “Pois é, Cigano. An’ all de e’stupid clones peoples there, they e’say to de Arabian they gotta put de lock on de birds cages now, because de Narcisa e’stay there, an’ they wan’ de Love House peoples pay for all de bird I liberate. An’ now ever’body anger to me there! Hah! All cuz I make these e’stupid peoples to loose de hostage animal!”

  “Why’d ya go and open up th’ cages?”

  “Because I can understand it all de bird languages, Cigano, got it? So I know when de peoples lissen to de bird singing, really they all de time e’saying, ‘Fock you, e’stupid peoples! Lemme de fock outa here, you fockers!’ So I just go an’ do it, got it?”

  I got it. I was speechless.

  “An’ you wanna know de most crazy thing, Cigano? All these bird don’ even wanna go out for fly no more! E’stupid animal! Fock! I go an’ open up de cage an’ e’say, ‘Okey, go, go, get out, ever’body free now, let’s go!’ An’ they just sit in de focking cage an’ look back at me! E’stupid e’sheets! Arrrgghh! Hungry, Cigano! Fome! Come get me! Casa Verde, go, let’s go!”

  “See ya in a minnit, princesa.” I grinned, grabbing my pants.

  The Casa Verde. The Green House. The infamous punk-anarchist flophouse resembled a crumbling, crooked, moss-encrusted tombstone.

  Sitting at the end of a winding cobblestone alley in Santa Teresa, the overgrown hillside maze of decrepit colonial mansions and teeming favelas looming above Lapa, the abandoned old structure leaned to the left like a lopsided, hollow-eyed drunk, threatening imminent collapse.

  Home to a noxious, shape-shifting squatters’ community of drunken artists, trash-scavenging sculptors, clumsy acrobats, illiterate poets, uncoordinated jugglers and not-so-funny street corner clowns, the Casa Verde was a breeding ground for glue-sniffing bums and bottom-feeding derelicts—a crash-landing strip for Lapa’s wandering legions of winos, beggars, petty criminals, panhandlers, murderers and all-purpose creeps.

  Before moving in on me, the Casa Verde was where Narcisa had holed up on her marathon crack missions, consorting with her “tribe” of babbling, drug-addled anarchists, satanists, and so-called nihilists.

  The place was a putrid, vile nest of lost souls; shit-eating, subhuman degenerates and garbage-picking parasites, with faces the color of mold, as if they’d all been dredged up from the bottom of a stagnant sewer.

  Since most of the career losers there were too lazy to work and too cowardly to rob, they dubbed themselves “conceptual artists”—art, in this case, being the last refuge of scoundrels.

  Once upon a time, as local legend had it, the motley bottom-dwellers of the Casa Verde had put their greasy paws to the Rock of Culture, grandly christening the place a “centro cultural.” A ragged assortment of “abstract” sculptors and painters—egged on by none other than that stalwart patron of the arts, Doc—had even ventured downtown to the Prefeitura, demanding a grant to fix up the diseased, rat-infested hovel. They claimed they intended to turn it into a community art center, ostensibly to spread the heady blessings of Culture far and wide among residents of the poor, illiterate neighborhood.

  They never pulled that scam off, of course—though the boldness of the very attempt was an impressive testament to the overall persistence and crablike tenacity of the Casa Verde’s delusional tenants and supporters.

  And, speaking of crabs, the whole place was infested with head lice. Everyone who ever landed there was instantly converted into a walking, talking parasite farm. Once in a while, someone would shoplift a bottle of delousing shampoo, which they’d all pass around like a flask of cheap wine, rubbing it into their communal natty dreads for relief. Of course, the cure never worked, since they all kept going back there to crash, instantly reinfesting themselves. From time to time, in a collective fit of desperation to curb the plague of tiny vermin, they’d all bleach their hair en masse, so when you went in there, it was like entering some terrible, bleak netherworld of demented white-haired ghosts.

  Rats, spiders, roaches and the antennae of giant albino centipedes
would brush against the ankles of anyone desperate enough to venture into that damp, unwholesome pit. The Casa Verde wasn’t even so much a place, to my way of thinking, as a gaping portal to hellish realms of perpetual chaos; an open vortex to hell. A loathsome heart of darkness, where moribund nuthouse refugees gravitated in a frenzy of common agony and failure. Its unfortunate residents seemed to have been sucked into a fetid whirlpool of chaotic psychic sewage there; a godforsaken, phlegm-colored purgatory, from which there seemed no possible escape.

  And now Narcisa was back again, holed up at the Casa Verde with her pet Crack Monster . . . Shit! What a mess! What the fuck was wrong with me? I wondered as I ran off to her rescue again. Approaching the squat, my stomach began to twitch like a cat with fleas . . . This cannot be good . . . When will I ever fucking learn?

  Waiting for Narcisa out front, I got to talking to a familiar Casa Verde denizen named Pluto, a hollow-cheeked mulatto anarchist kid—Narcisa’s androgynous male doppelganger on the streets. From him, I got the real story behind Narcisa’s expulsion from the Love House. It didn’t surprise me to learn it was more significant than her grand saga about captive birds.

  According to Pluto, Narcisa had heard noises in the middle of her last night there. Certain it was the Shadow People coming to get her, she’d panicked. Running out of her room, she tore butt-naked through the hallways, screaming about “vultos” and ghosts appearing at her window, together with Doc, trying to murder her with “electromagnetic shocks.”

  Her latest meltdown had done it for the Love House management, once and for all, hardening even their bulletproof hearts to Narcisa’s legendary antics. When she got back from copping the next morning, she’d found all her junk sitting out on the sidewalk. From there, it was back to the Casa Verde.

  Even before Pluto finished talking, I’d had my suspicions. As confirmation, he told me Doc had indeed been stalking Narcisa over there for days.

  I sucked my teeth in disgust. It all made sense . . . Fuck! He musta been lurking out there all night, trying to get in through the window! Bastard!

  I was on to the old kook now. Still, not wanting to add more fuel to her paranoia, I decided not to mention it to Narcisa. Judging from the complaints of Pluto and some of the other shaggy stoners loitering out front, Doc had been showing up at the Casa Verde a lot too lately, consumed by a fanatical fervor to reform all the squatters. I figured it was probably just an excuse for stalking Narcisa. But when he couldn’t find her there, he would indeed focus his attentions on the other resident head cases. There was hardly a freak in the joint who hadn’t been sent to the loony ward, at one time or another, because of Doc.

  When the persistent old mommy-whacker was on the prowl for her, I knew Narcisa would avoid the Casa Verde like a Narcotics Anonymous meeting—unless she was on the outs with me. Then she would hit Doc up for whatever cash she could get. Narcisa would always gladly pawn a chunk of her tattered soul for a few coins. But she was always as slick as a gypsy pickpocket. Even when bargaining with the devil himself, Narcisa drove a hard one; as soon as she’d gotten what she wanted from her dickless old zombie, she’d beat it, leaving him all the more pissed-off and frustrated.

  Pluto told me he’d even showed up there with the cops the other day, claiming to be Narcisa’s father. When she couldn’t be found, the shotgun-toting thugs settled for whoever they could squeeze a few coins out of, terrorizing the whole befuddled crew till they’d taken in enough beer money to make the visit worthwhile.

  Doc was working hard at it now, trying to make Narcisa’s last remaining refuge uninhabitable for one and all. Under pressure of ongoing police harassment, sooner or later they’d have to rat her out to him.

  Bastard! I wanted to skin him alive. With this new threat, Narcisa might go missing again, maybe for good . . . Shit! As long as I was around, I knew she’d be safe from his clutches.

  Still, he was out there, lurking, hoping to catch her alone. My blood boiled as I stood there waiting. Now, I’d have to keep an eye on the place, just to make sure Doc was kept at bay.

  66. THE GUITAR

  “THE PRIVILEGE OF ABSURDITY; TO WHICH NO LIVING CREATURE IS SUBJECT BUT MAN ONLY.”

  —Thomas Hobbes

  As Narcisa and I sat talking at a little hole-in-the-wall eatery in Lapa, Her Majesty rattled off a new wish list, pestering me to buy her a guitar.

  “A guitar? Are you serious?” I raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  As Narcisa swore that a musical instrument would be the start of a whole new life for her, I wished I could explain that the road back from addiction is a long, complicated, demanding trudge. But I knew she didn’t want to hear any of that boring recovery crap. Biting my tongue, I sat back in my chair and let her ramble on about her sparkly new musical pipe dream.

  Narcisa was persistent. As always, she would end up getting her way. Even knowing I was being played like a pawn shop banjo, I decided to buy her the guitar. Even knowing she’d never learn to play it, that it would just end up lost, destroyed, sold for drugs, converted to shit with her singular reverse Midas touch, I allowed myself to be persuaded. Maybe I just wanted to show her I believed in her.

  Narcisa was forever whining how nobody ever gave her any trust. I didn’t swallow it, of course, always remembering the Magic Gringo who’d bet on her and lost to the Crack Monster. Still, I figured getting her a guitar would show her somebody still cared enough to try.

  After lunch, I took her to one of the ancient, wood-paneled, turn-of-the-century music stores downtown. Stepping inside, I breathed in the hoary musk of generations of music, a magical aura of Pagode, Chorinho and Samba traditions. The place had the look and scent of a museum. Standing there in the cool afternoon shadows, I envisioned the passage of a hundred Carnavals, looking around as the wiry, smiling gray-haired mulatto behind the counter polished and gift-wrapped Narcisa’s new guitar.

  Outside, she shredded through the wrapping. Scraps of paper and cardboard went flying into the street like triumphant confetti. Extracting her precious instrument, grinning with pride, she strapped it across her back.

  Ten minutes later, as we dodged through downtown traffic, Narcisa began slapping at my shoulder . . . What now? But I already knew.

  Shaking my head, I groaned . . . Up to the fucking favela to cop again!

  She assured me she just wanted to score some weed, to “take the edge off.”

  I stopped the bike and turned around to face her. “Ya think that’s a good idea? Ya just told me you were gonna lay off that shit for a while . . .”

  “Relaxa, Cigano! I telling you already, is only for get some maconha so I got de little something for e’smoke. Is de harmless weed only these time. No more crack.”

  Moments later, I was sitting on the bike by the entrance to the boca, watching Narcisa strutting down the narrow alley, her brand-new ego-trophy slung across her back, swaggering like a ghetto superstar.

  On our way back down the hill, running low on gas, I cut the motor and coasted through the stillness of the early evening shadows. Narcisa sat behind me in silence, holding the guitar at her side. A soft wind blew through the strings, making a haunting little melody. She leaned close and whispered in my ear. “The e’spirits making these e’special musica, just for us, Cigano . . .”

  A magical moment.

  Back at my place, she plopped down on the sofa with her new prize.

  After lighting a fat, stinky basiado, she began plucking away, tugging at the out-of-tune strings like an angry monkey, oblivious to the horrifying racket she was creating. Sixty seconds later, the guitar sat silent by her side as she concentrated on smoking her weed. Then, a few minutes later, she got up and propped the thing against the wall in a corner.

  What the fuck? That’s it? Really? Unbuttoning her shirt, she grinned and told me she’d give me the fuck of my life for a ride back up the hill.

  So much for that big plan . . . What could I say? Strung out on Narcisa as bad as she was on crack, I stood and followed her per
fect ass up to the bed.

  The next day, as I sat watching her smoke herself stupid battling the demons of another mad crack attack, I glanced over at the guitar. From its lonesome corner, it seemed to be looking back at me. I shrugged and sighed.

  That’s where it would remain for the rest of the week, abandoned, forgotten and collecting dust, while Narcisa smoked herself to Alpha Centauri and back again; just another sad, mute little reminder of Hope’s inevitable defeat at the hands of the relentless, bloodthirsty old Crack Monster.

  Days later, sleepless and disoriented, I crawled off the infernal merry-go-round and up to the loft to sleep. Narcisa remained sitting on the sofa down below, smoking. Delirious with exhaustion, I conked out.

  After an hour surfing the golden waves of slumber, I woke with a start. From below, a symphony of obnoxious, disturbing sounds assaulted my ears.

  What the fuck? It sounds like a fucking catfight down there!

  Narcisa, in a sudden outburst of crack-fueled inspiration, had decided to pick up her guitar again . . . Arggghhh! Great! I looked at my watch with shell-shocked, blurry eyes . . . Perfect! Six in the fucking morning . . . Bitch!

  There were few things Narcisa could do to really piss me off anymore. I was so used to living in hell by then, I could have had a phone line installed in the Bottomless Pit. But prolonged enforced sleep deprivation is an insidious form of slow torture, proscribed even by the Geneva Convention. Its effects had frazzled my brain into a painful, throbbing mush, converting even my indestructible passion for Narcisa into a slow, seething, murderous hatred.

  I climbed down from the loft, my fists curled into trembling cannonballs of vengeance. She dropped the guitar and threw me a look of such helpless innocence it stopped me in my tracks. Before I could say a word, Narcisa got busy, swearing not to wake me again, under any circumstances, if I would just give her some cash to go smoke somewhere else.