Narcisa

by Jonathan Shaw

  87. PIGEONS, SHOES, LOVE, PAIN, SHIT

  “MUCH OF YOUR PAIN IS SELF-CHOSEN. IT IS THE BITTER POTION BY WHICH THE PHYSICIAN WITHIN YOU HEALS YOUR SICK SELF.”

  —Khalil Gibran

  July 2010—Vitória. Sunrise over the dirty old docks. What a nasty fucking place to die, I’m thinking as I stumble along in the cool, salty morning mist. Dawn reveals a dank, defeated landscape, defined by creeping, sagging cargo trucks limping in and out of the banging, clanging industrial port. Their brakes hiss like a thousand poisonous snakes as a damp Atlantic winter wind follows me down the road, howling like a tubercular beggar’s dying curse.

  Ratty-looking pigeons patrol the birdshit-coated cobblestones in a stupid, fumbling, listless dance of aviary apathy, pecking at the ground for little crumbs of nothing. I kick out at them and they scatter off in a fluttering gray cloud of winged vermin, only to land a few steps down the cold, greasy sidewalk.

  Pigeons . . . Narcisa always hated them. I remember when we were sitting one time at the fisherman’s shack near the end of the beach in Copacabana. Some pigeons gathered at her feet, picking in the dirt. Narcisa stomped and kicked at them with her big black combat boot and I said, “Baby, don’t hurt them. They’re just little birds!”

  She spat at those pigeons on the ground. “I hate de focking pombo, Cigano! These pigeon, he de most e’stupid of all de flying animal! So e’stupid he don’ even know he got de wing for fly away from these e’sheet place! But he never wanna fly! E’stupid ignorant pest! He just wanna walk around on de floor an’ eat from de garbage, cuz he just like de focking beggar! E’stupid e’sheet! Hey you! Don’ come around me, got it, e’stupid?!” And she spat at those trash-picking birds and kicked at them again, scattering them off into the dusty shadows of my soul’s blighted memory. I’m looking at these pigeons now, picking at the road like a gang of miniature bums, and suddenly it hits me why she always hated them so.

  Narcisa, in her perpetual existential discontent, despised those dirty scavenger birds for so starkly replicating her own ironclad mental matrix of self-imposed lack and limitation. She hated them for being a taunting little reflection of just how much she really hated herself for possessing that same slavish, garbage-picking mentality; the beggar’s soul.

  As long as I’ve known her, Narcisa has always lived her life driven by nameless fears and a tragic, unbreakable belief in her own worthlessness—shackled to her weaknesses, her crippled, unhappy self-image, condemning herself forever to life as a bum, a beggar, a delinquent, a thief, a liar, a cheat, a hustler, a loser, a whore; trapped by her own persistent blindness, that perverse inability to see the Goddess, the Princess, the magnificent winged Angel behind her poor, damaged, broken eyes; her goddamned fear of just spreading her wings and flying away from her crummy, stifling, sordid little earthbound existence of mental poverty.

  Her world has always been a big, gaping deficit. That’s why she always hated it when I called her my princess, my angel. Because inside, Narcisa saw herself as a pigeon; a lowly little earthbound rat, forever dragging the worthless burden of her dirty, broken wings through the squalid refuse of her own tainted self-conception.

  Still, there was always that part of her that seemed to rise up and fly somehow. It would surface in the strangest places and times, reminding me that, no matter how close I ever got to knowing Narcisa, she would always be an enigma.

  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this one afternoon when I went looking for her at the Casa Verde. Narcisa was nowhere to be found, but when I climbed up into her cramped little attic cubbyhole, I came across a hastily scribbled note there, lying on the floor.

  It read: “Thank you all for the courage to participate in my world, directly and indirectly, the permitted ones, and the invaders too.”

  The “invaders” she referred to were the Shadow People, those creepy, unseen spirit companions she spent her days and nights consorting with in solitary fits of delirium. Poor Narcisa! But even at the height of such soul-shattering paranoia, she’d still taken the trouble to thank them for their company! Maybe just that little drop of gratitude could save her from the solitary curse of her own self-centeredness—even if it was a wry sort of gratitude. Could someone really find thankfulness for something so disturbing, and even find a meaning for the disturbance, or just accept it as meaningless.

  The cryptic message had been sitting up there amongst piles of other paper scraps, all scattered around the dark, moldy little space. There were many sketches of mysterious, intricate geometric patterns, all drawn in crazy psychedelic colors, all sizes and shapes. Looking around up there, I saw some other, larger designs she’d scrawled right onto the walls. Mandalas. They looked like multidimensional portals—as if she were trying to design some kind of doorway, through which to exit this world. Like the Merkaba pendant she always wore.

  When I asked her later what it all meant, she told me the drawings were for “protection.” She explained how she would sit up there in a position of a yogi, right in front of one of those weird Indian mandala things. She sketched it out for me in one of her notebooks, and those drawings I’d seen at the Casa Verde had looked just like it—flawlessly symmetrical, like a perfect image of some weird, complex digital imaging software impregnated into the wall.

  How could it be possible? How long would it take her to measure and design something so exact like that, manually, while cracked out of her skull, sitting all alone in the dark, and with all the matching colors? It was a total mystery.

  And then she told me about the lines, like rays of light, and about the occult energy they represented, and about the meaning of time and space, and all sorts of other wild esoteric shit. She was talking so fast, and seemed so sure of herself, like a scientist or something, she was confusing me with her mad paranormal visions. And still, I really believed everything she was saying—about the Shadow People conspiracy, especially. In that moment, it sounded like the most logical thing I’d ever heard, a very precise and intelligent explanation of the material world and the different dimensions and energetic planes. I remembered thinking she was mad, but it was a kind of singular, incomparable madness, a genius way beyond my comprehension.

  Fuck! I can’t stop thinking about her! I rode all the way up here just to get away from her, but there is no getting away! She’s everywhere I look—even when I’m with these other girls. Especially with other girls. What a mess!

  Earlier tonight, I almost fell asleep thinking of Narcisa while mechanically fucking this chubby-faced teenage whore in a dirty little room. I never even asked that one her name. She had a particularly anonymous quality, even for a rented cunt. I did tip her a fiver, though, with the standard friendly little kiss on the cheek as we said goodbye at dawn on a cordial, rain-slick neon street corner. What did it matter? I’d never see her again. Then, standing there at sunrise, I noticed it: one shiny black patent leather high-heel shoe, lying toppled sideways in the gutter, like a fallen drunk. Lost, crippled, thrown away, rejected and abandoned forever.

  In a flash, the memories rose up to haunt me again; a hundred unwelcome mental images of all the girls and women I’ve loved and shared my life with and the gigantic collective shoe collection they all amassed over the years. And then, I thought of Narcisa’s shoe closet back in the gringo’s apartment in New York. Were all those shoes still there?

  Where are they all now, all the girls, all the shoes?

  I ambled away to the crooked music of night birds awakening the dawn. Then, off I went to find some breakfast and pass some more time, still thinking about Narcisa.

  July 2010—Vitória—Life with Narcisa was always such excruciating, savage torture, it was inevitable we’d have to go our separate ways eventually—the only way to avoid some horrible tragedy. But as terrible as it ever was, this is worse. Because love is the worst drug of all. The most lethal. More than mere heartbreak or loneliness, this brutal self-imposed withdrawal from Narcisa feels like dying! Narcisa’s absence is a dark, bottomless pit of q
uicksand. I stumble around it all day long, then fall in again every night, sinking, drowning, suffocating, dying a thousand deaths, strung out on the potent, toxic chemistry still raging and rampaging between us like a crackling, blazing, devastating forest conflagration. Even from far away, I can still feel the heat, the stench of burning lives, the smell of ashes approaching. And it has already destroyed both of our lives, laid waste to those solitary survivor’s worlds we each inhabited separately, before getting sucked like bugs around a garbage fire into the irresistible gravity of each other’s dizzy orbit.

  Now, for the first time in my long, womanizing life, I want nothing to do with other girls. It’s no use anymore. Shit! All the enticing little whores I used to love. She’s killed them all off! Fuck-brained, ball-breaking bitch of a pissed-off, hissing Medusa! Burning all illusions, torching it all to ashes! Even the simple, innocent pleasure of easygoing casual sex with strangers has been ruined by her insane goddamn “metaphysical orgasms.” That’s what she called that shit!

  Not that it’s any consolation, but I know I’ve wrecked it all for her too. Because no matter how much she always bitched and lamented and whined, restless and dissatisfied, longing nostalgic for her old solitary hooker’s life, complaining of being bored and underpaid since hooking her little red whore-wagon to my broke but enthusiastic dick—I know it’s all been ruined for her too now. Because now she can’t stand the idea of sex with other men anymore, either. At least that’s what she told me once, in a rare moment of lucid sincerity.

  Maybe I just spoiled it for her by loving her too much. Now she’ll need to find another one like me. She will never find another man like me. They’re all dead from self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head. And I live on. Shit! I wanna die.

  88. END OF THE LINE

  “THE DEGREE AND KIND OF A MAN’S SEXUALITY REACH UP INTO THE ULTIMATE PINNACLE OF HIS SPIRIT.”

  —Nietzsche

  July 2010—Vitória. End of the line for my homeless, wandering, lonely dick and crippled heart, I march the bastard whorehouse alleys of the port again, looking for some body to grab hold of, a way to pretend for just another brief rented moment that I’m not all alone on this cold, spinning dust ball in space. Same shit. Another week gone by. The same late-night stench of stale piss and rotting garbage; same old drab rhythms of tired-out fuck music echoing from another grimy, low-rent whorehouse. Whatever hookers are left over like errant soldiers from the frantic weekend all look ruined and ugly and tired now. Dull, hungover and crabby, they lurk around the bar in dreary, defensive little fuck-clusters, like gangs of drooling, vacant-eyed war refugees.

  After a few more listless turns around the stinking streets of this hammerhead zone of ruined desolation, I stumbled upon a fuzzy-faced little morena with a row of lopsided stars tattooed across a slouching brown shoulder.

  “Quer fazer um sexo?” the disembodied female voice droned from the shadows as I passed the darkened doorway.

  I stopped for a moment and glanced into a pair of listless bovine eyes, shaking my head.

  “Nah . . . Not in this dump, darling.”

  I’d already been in that cut-rate hump-dungeon the night before, and I wasn’t going back again—not for a round with this old bag of bones anyway.

  No thanks! The place was nasty, and I do mean nasty. Pissy, humid, bunched-up bundles of newspaper rolled in a filthy, cum-encrusted gray sheet for a mattress, laid out on a narrow concrete slab in a doorless little cubicle, with shit-and blood-stained walls. Cold cement floor, slimy with snot and spit and jizz and God-knew-what-the-fuck-else, punctuated with sluglike used rubbers. Ugh! After stepping, barefooted, on one of the squishy scumbags in the dark, airless chamber, I’d wanted to cut my fucking foot off and leave it behind in there.

  As I turned to walk on, the whore persisted with a winning smile, pointing to the corner.

  “We could go to the hotel over there . . .”

  I stopped and looked her up and down. What this hag lacked in charm and youth and looks, she was going to make up for now with a display of professional zeal. Probably because she knew with that infallible hooker radar that I could take it or leave it.

  She gave me another cheery little grin. There was still a spark of life in the old sweetheart. I had to give her that.

  “Dizaí . . .” I shrugged, without interest.

  She kept smiling, trying her luck. “Cinquenta?”

  I shook my head and started away again, mumbling. “Another time, gostosa . . .”

  She called out behind me. “I could go for forty . . .”

  I grinned and turned around. This one meant business. I kind of liked her attitude. Yeah, she was started to grow on me . . . like a staph infection.

  “ . . . If it’s only for an hour . . .” she added quickly, saving face.

  “Aw, why not?” I nodded.

  Nothing else to do. I took her by the elbow and led her across the street—thinking of Narcisa the whole fucking time.

  August 2010—Vitória—Wandered back into the corner bar around two in the morning. Sat there till sunrise, surrounded by sad little street whores, nursing a lukewarm Guaraná soda. Feeling like a bug-eyed toxic frog croaking all alone in a shitty little mud puddle of lost memories and regrets, condemned to replay the same old movie again and again, I thought back to what Narcisa had told me in that weak, stoned-out burst of uncustomary openness: that after being with me, she would “rather die” than go back to turning tricks on the street.

  I remembered how I’d just laughed and told her, “Baby, people like us, we’re so fucking rotten inside, even Jesus can’t save our fucking souls. And the devil don’t want us either. That’s why we’re stuck with each other now.”

  I hadn’t bought what she said anyway. Not really. I just figured “Once a whore, always a whore” and shrugged it off at that. But now, looking back, I think the problem is that she really didn’t want to be a whore anymore. At least not a common street hooker. I’d even fucked that up for her. Just like she’s smashed it all to pieces for me. All my pretty little floozies, so careless and carefree, friendly and pretty and horny and fun. Ruined now. Dust. Ashes. Shit.

  So here we are, stuck in another terrible, gut-wrenching dilemma. Love is shit. Even separated by all this time and space, it hasn’t helped. Nothing helps. There’s no relief anywhere. I am really, finally, totally, completely fucked! They used to be such great kissers, these simple country girls. Now I don’t even give a shit. It’s like kissing a cow. I loved them all listlessly these last few weeks here, fucking them without desire, unable to even come half the time, always thinking about Narcisa. Being with other girls after Narcisa is like doing some boring, slightly painful, tedious manual labor. Like eating dirt.

  After a few more miserable little turns around the zona, I gave up and went up to bed. Alone. No fun. No relief. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Shit.

  August 2010—Vitória—Another lonesome Sunday afternoon, sitting on a big granite rock by the sea, writing in a notebook, all alone. Isolated. Alienated. Bored.

  Humanity looks as appealing to me as a bucket of worms.

  I’m an outsider here. A weirdo. A freak. People come and go. Every once in a while, someone wanders up, looks over my shoulder and asks me what I’m writing. When I mumble “poetry,” they just smile and drift off to go get a beer. Why do they even ask, I wonder? Curious, I suppose. Whatever. I may as well be explaining quantum physics to a rock oyster. Nobody else reads or writes around here. Many can’t, I guess, but even if they’re not illiterate, that shit’s just “school stuff” for people these days. It’s not the way of the common man. Too busy watching the box, or slaving to pay the bills. The systematic dumbing down of the whole stinking planet.

  Maybe I’d be better off on Alpha Centauri too.

  A stout brown woman with a wide smile stands nearby, fanning fish on a grill with a frantic little scrap of cardboard. People crowd around her, hungry, thirsty, waiting to eat. Me? Shit. I’ve long lost any taste for food
.

  6:00 p.m.—Dusk falling over the beach. The last light of day reflected in tremendous pastel sunset over the dark, rolling waves. Oily black silhouette figures of the day’s last late swimmers; fishermen casting their big white nets out over the water, contrasted by the huge dark mass of sea, waves, rolling in and out, in and out. First winking, blinking lights of night. Little fishing boats bobbing over the horizon, like tiny dots of fire twinkling in the distance.

  Sitting by the water, I stare into the sky, listening to the sound of the rolling breakers, punctuated by the dreamy, birdlike screams of children at play; a constant background jingle-jangle song of voices and tinny amplified instruments reaching across the sand from little beachside botecos along the lazy Sunday avenida, all weaving their ineffable rhythms into the night’s fading memory. Soon they’ll all be at home, watching their televisions, or sleeping in their beds, while I sit awake and write, writing, writing, trying to write her off my mind.

  Lord Jesus, when will this fucking torture ever end? I ask the sky as the first lonesome star appears beside a perfect, sharp, bright sliver of cold, cold moon rising up over the horizon.

  Alpha Centauri? Whatever.

  An enormous white ship of glittering, fiery lights emerges from behind the big rock at the end of the beach, reminding me of the night I first met Narcisa. Everything reminds me of Narcisa. There is nothing but Narcisa. Even the little waves breaking at my feet seem to whisper her name . . . narcisa narcisa narcisa narcisa narcisa . . . and I sit like a castaway, thinking nothing, thinking everything, watching, wanting, waiting to go back to Rio, back to her sleazy siren’s call.