August 2010—Vitória. I give up! Can’t take it anymore. After a whole month away from home, away from Narcisa, a peaceful month, peaceful like the grave, I’m dying inside, suffering from this long, ugly white waiting period of stifling, empty withdrawal. Abstinence. Suffering her absence. Hurting, obsessing, longing, jonesing, dying for a fix. Dying for Narcisa.
The last week passed slowly, agonizingly, like a bleeding kidney stone. My mind keeps playing cruel, merciless tricks on me, and I can’t stop the nightly flood of images of her wandering the greasy old streets of Copacabana, looking for a new man to save her from herself.
Shit. I’m like a racehorse slobbering at the gate now, waiting for the race to start. The rabbit. The gunshot. To my heart. Sitting at a table in a shack across from the mechanic’s garage, waiting while the guy changes the oil on my bike. Eating a plate of homemade moqueca de peixe. Fish and coconut milk stew; flavors charged with a nostalgic taste of cilantro, spices and the sea. Nutrition for the long ride back to Rio.
Chew. Swallow. Wait. Like a condemned man eating his final meal. Gotta scramble if I’m gonna make it back home by nightfall. Appetite’s gone. I’m a soldier going back to the battlefield; adrenaline pumping through my heart like a shot of bitter poison. Push the plate away. Call for a cafezinho. Light another cigarette. My tenth one today, and I’ve only been up two hours. Shit. I wonder where she is now. What she’s doing. Who she’s with.
89. WINTER’S GRIP
“HE YET CRAVED THE DRINK THAT WOULD BRING THE WHOLE RUIN DOWN UPON HIM AGAIN.”
—Charles Jackson
I knew all along that Narcisa’s big pipe-dream honeymoon trip to Paris would never happen; the gringo would surely come to his senses and pull the plug.
But I also knew that, soon enough, there’d be another gringo; another sucker, another fool. Another Savior. For Narcisa, there would always be another one to rescue her and abandon her, again and again, perpetuating the endless cycle of rescue and rejection, abandonment and dependence, trauma, drama and disappointment; terror, hatred, suffering, sorrow and loss.
There would always be someone to give her another little shove into the pit; another excuse to be bitter; to hate the human race and to feel sorry for herself. Another reason to hurt, and to inflict her pain on others. Another justification for Narcisa to take it all out on the next unlucky bastard who strayed too close.
But I always understood what motivated her, and that made it hurt a little less. Didn’t it? Beyond my constant thoughts of her inevitable infidelity, though, I really missed her. I missed everything about her; her laughter, her fire, her sorrow, her joy. Her need. Her hanging on to me on the back of the bike—all of it, all of her.
The absence of Narcisa followed me like a crippled beggar’s shadow, all along the long ride back to Rio, just as it followed me every day of my life; a deep and persistent melancholy longing. Nostalgia. Saudade. The unshakable ghost of her memory covered me like the chilling ocean mist as I rolled down that long, lonesome highway, limping home to Narcisa, jonesing for another dose, another fix; another hit of her sweet, crucial poison.
Back in Rio, a cold, drizzly Carioca winter had taken hold of the city.
The skies were the color of pigeon shit. A damp, foggy desolation hung over the streets Narcisa and I used to prowl together, like a foul, foreboding omen.
The winters in Rio always seemed to manifest this sordid, murky other climate. A dingy sort of spiritual mold, existing just below the surface of things, like a clammy phantom breath blowing in from places unseen on winter days, transcending all earthly measurements of temperature and climate. An indefinable shadow-presence; a persistent, oppressive otherworldly gloom, crawling across your skin like a dead man’s hand.
I remembered the cold, humid winters of my youth, that dank, dreary, unwholesome, indefinable sheen in the air, where even the bright, cloudless sunlight seemed frozen in place, tainted with a vague, pallid aura of despair. Like a lens smeared with a greasy rag, its sickly haze permeates everything and everybody, troubling even the Cariocas’ dreams with uneasy frights and cold sweats in the deathly predawn winter stillness.
As I trudged the streets of the neighborhood, searching for Narcisa, I thought back to another somber winter’s morning, decades before. It was in a darkened little flophouse room, where I lay holed up with some nameless whore, sleeping off another hangover. A phone had rung, and a shadowy voice stretching across the slippery reaches of time had informed me of my father’s passing. I’d never even known the man, and I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean to me. I didn’t cry. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. I didn’t cry then, nor did I think about how that’s where it all must have started for me—the very roots of my own impossible love for poor, tragic little birds with scorched, broken wings like Narcisa—with some nameless trick who they said was my father, some anonymous swinging dick who’d stumbled into the insane, unhappy vortex of my poor, deranged mother’s raging soul sickness; the Curse.
I guess other people must feel compelled to cry when somebody tells them their father has died. Was I supposed to? No idea. I felt nothing. I just rolled over and hugged the whore’s sleeping body, clinging for dear life to the only warmth I knew. Then, I went back to sleep. What else could be done?
The following day, though, I ascended the crooked cobblestone path up to the crumbling ancient colonial church of Gloria. And there in that shadowy sanctuary, I lit a lone candle. More as a matter of course than out of any real feeling, I prayed for my unknown father’s soul.
Boa viagem . . . Safe travels to you, whoever you are . . . Were . . . Weren’t . . . Whatever . . . Thank you come again!
Now, I remembered that long-gone foggy winter’s day again, as I plodded along the slick gray streets, reliving its piercing silver needles of rain and winter cold. And now, I cried at last—for my father and for me and for my mother and for Narcisa, and for all the lost, homeless, hopeless Narcisas in the world; for all us poor, demented little monkeys scrambling around on this lonely old dustball in cold, futile circles of ashes and ruin, searching for the answer to another gloomy winter’s riddle. Shit. All ashes and dust and shit.
At each desolate corner, I felt the ghosts of Narcisa and myself living out our daily battles of love and terror. The specific memories, the visual ones, filled my heart with a singular type of pain, sharper and quicker, stinging me in a deep, tender place inside, like damp, rusty little knifepoints. I looked for her at all her usual haunts. She was nowhere. But I could feel it, sense it already; like some ancient built-in antenna, telling me what I already knew, deep down in the cold, forlorn pit of me. If Narcisa was in Rio, I’d know it. I would feel it.
She was not. I knew. Narcisa was gone.
It would take a bit of detective work to find out about her, but I knew just where to go. All I had to do was bribe her stoned-out cronies at the Casa Verde for information.
The first thing I discovered there was that she’d been kicked out of the squat a few weeks before, right after I’d left town. That in itself was significant, since the place had always been a safe haven for the most unwelcome dregs; the lost, the damned, the crazed, the unloved, the unwashed and unwanted. They’d all been beaten and booted and kicked around and kicked out of everywhere all their lives, ever since being kicked out of the womb. In keeping with their general dislike of rules, the only sacred law of that marginal last gasp community was that nobody could ever be expelled from the Casa Verde.
But they’d had to make an exception to their sole, lonely little regulation, just for Narcisa. As I put the pieces together in my mind like a faded old jigsaw puzzle, I could hear her voice whispering in my inner ear, spurring me on.
“These why I get kick out, Cigano! Cuz I am Nobody here! Nobody, got it?”
I got it. Longtime Casa Verde residents would never forget the day she’d misplaced her Merkaba pendant in there. Up for a week, smoking crack all alone in the attic, Narcisa had stashed her charm in a crevice in the w
all so the dreaded Shadow People wouldn’t get it. But she’d hidden it so well in her crack-fueled paranoia, she’d forgotten where it was. Then she’d accused the others of stealing it. In a misguided attempt to enlist their communal sympathy, she’d gone on a rampage, breaking things, kicking at the squatters with her big steel-toed combat boots, threatening to kill them all like roaches if someone didn’t come across. Not having the slightest idea what she was talking about, they’d all dummied up. In a typical rage, Narcisa stormed out, clamping a padlock she just happened to have in her jacket pocket onto the rusty chain on the front gate, locking all the befuddled stoners inside.
Surrendering to the memory, I could hear her voice again now, screeching like a buzz saw as I’d stood outside that day, watching in horrified silence.
“Now I gonna go an’ get de gasolina an’ we gonna find out who teef my focking Merkaba! An’ if he don’ give it back, I gonna burn down these focking e’sheet casa, an’ all you teef motherfocker gonna burn up inside, got it?”
They’d gotten it. Narcisa had been banned for the first time then. The Casa Verde was still standing, of course. Luckily for the good folks there, Narcisa had soon gotten sidetracked by the Crack Monster, forgetting her homicidal arson mission.
Within days, she was back among them again, as if nothing had ever happened.
I shook my head, shrugging off the memory like a ghostly hand, as I wandered into the decrepit old hovel, seeking a clue to her present whereabouts.
With the exception of Pluto and his flaming homosexual pickpocket sidekick, Zé—Narcisa’s two closest cronies on the streets—the residents all hated and feared me as much as they did her; mostly because every time we fought, she would run right back there, telling them all sorts of delusional tales of brutality, violence and cruelty on my part. Nonetheless, it usually only took a bottle of cheap wine or the price of a can of shoemaker’s glue for her “good friends” at the Casa Verde to climb all over each other to rat her out to whoever wanted information. Including Doc.
Even given the usual incoherence of that spaced-out bunch, I began piecing together the beginnings of a story from their confusing, babbling accounts. Doc, I learned right away, had been involved somehow in Narcisa’s latest disappearance from the ranks of the befuddled.
Shit! No!
I guess the look on my face inspired pity. Finally, Pluto pulled me aside and confirmed—over the drinks I bought him in the cheerless little boteco across the street—that she had indeed split town.
Narcisa was holed up in the country, he informed me with a downcast look, somewhere near her hometown in Penedo, living off a weekly allowance from Doc—with all the inherent tangled strings such an arrangement would attach to her shattered little soul, like an infestation of Casa Verde lice.
90. CRIME SCENES
“THERE ARE CHARACTERS WHICH ARE CONTINUALLY CREATING COLLISIONS AND NODES FOR THEMSELVES IN DRAMAS WHICH NOBODY IS PREPARED TO ACT WITH THEM.”
—George Eliot
I listened with a mixture of fascination and dread as the two teenage barflies talked off the rounds of beer and cachaça I bought them. As the afternoon dragged on, I got the full lowdown on Narcisa’s latest misadventure.
Shaking his big, sad woolly mammoth mulatto head, Pluto confirmed that the gringo had indeed backed out at the last minute. Predictably, their tearful Paris reunion had washed out. Suddenly stripped of her grandiose travel plans, and cut adrift from me now too, Narcisa soon left the Casa Verde to rampage the city streets like a headless goat from hell. But before that, Pluto said, she’d become further entangled with the creepy lesbian, Francisca.
“Fuck e’stupid shit-cow bee-eeches!” Zé chimed in with mincing effeminate contempt—ending any lingering illusions of Gay Unity at the Casa Verde.
Pluto’s eyes swung on his pal, hovering there like a straight razor. Zé said no more. As I called for another round, Pluto picked up his story again. In another weak attempt to dodge the Crack Monster’s insatiable demands, Narcisa had taken up wine-tasting with her soul-sucking sapphist soul mate.
Not a bright concept, I mused, given Narcisa’s explosive temperament, emotional instability and unlucky genetic heritage . . . Shit! I grimaced at the image of her lurching around the greasy old streets of Lapa, drunk on cheap wine, with that foul creature in tow.
After getting thrown out of the squat one chilly evening for refusing to share their toxic red swill with the others, Narcisa and the dyke had kicked up a boisterous man-hating tandem tantrum. Then, off they went, Pluto said, as his partner Zé—who hated everybody, especially women—sneered into his beer.
Suddenly, the tipsy faggot began singing, with a sarcastic, rot-flecked, slobbery grin.
“Jus’ de two of us . . .”
Pluto stopped again and glared, as if contemplating the most efficient way of decapitating his obnoxious pal. Finally, he sighed and continued. He’d taken them to a burned-out, abandoned house up in the cold, windy hills of Santa Teresa, he told me, where they’d all guzzled the bitter remains of the wine, sitting around in the dark.
I gave him a curious look. Was this little degenerate banging Narcisa now too?
As if sensing my misgivings, he explained that he’d only been trying to help. Feeling sorry for Narcisa, Pluto hadn’t wanted to see her out on the street again, having to hit up Doc for cash. It made sense. Pluto was a loyal friend.
As he talked on, I called across the counter for the next round. Powering down another shot of cachaça, he described a damp, depressing scene that night. It had been dark and cold and raining hard, he said, and the roof had been leaking. Everything was damp and miserable. Then, out of nowhere, a drunken, belligerent Narcisa had started a big fight with Francisca and split.
I didn’t bother asking what it was about. I knew Narcisa never needed a reason for a violent outburst. Any pretext was a good enough motive to storm out into another cold, rainy night, all alone. As I pictured her out on the wet winter streets of Copacabana again, looking for the action, a grim soundtrack echoed in my mind, like the voice of a little lost ghost.
“Game Over! Hah! Thank you come again! Next? An’ then you just wan’ it de freedom to e’stay cold an’ hungry again, an’ walk all alone, walk, walk, walk in de street, wanting, wanting . . . wanting to want, got it?”
Pluto talked on, describing Narcisa’s latest deadly downward spiral. Loose on the the streets, all alone again, she went looking for the action. Following her time-tested script, she soon found it. As my drunken informants narrated a surreal voiceover, I watched the whole sordid drama playing out in my head, like a movie:
Opening scene: Narcisa back in Copacabana . . . She comes across a group of gringos, sitting around a table at a beachside kiosk, drinking . . . Cameras rolling . . . Action!
She goes up and speaks with them in her frantic, singsong broken English, weaving a well-practiced spell, hamming it up for the camera, reeling ’em in.
Narcisa, sitting, drinking with the gringos . . . Vodka caipirinhas, one, two, three, down the hatch . . . Fade to blackout . . .
As the liquor-spawned demons flowed from their boozy wormholes to dance like tipsy fireflies in her bad bad blood, Narcisa began a crooked ballet of seduction for the gringo with the money. I could see it all. Narcisa, back in Copacabana, working it hard again. Pouring it on thick. Milking the image. Playing her role of the precocious, hard-luck, homeless waif, down on her worn-out whorehouse heels . . . Like a fucking Dickens character . . . Oliver Twisted! Yeah, gringos are suckers for that kinda shit . . . And Narcisa must have been putting on an Oscar-winning performance. Cuz now she was gonna get paid and get some good strong crack smoke into her head, even if it killed her! Yeah, that’s how Narcisa likes to talk . . . Death or glory! No half measures for my bittersweet little pirate princess . . . Life or death! Right now! Go go! The big trembling tightrope . . . A hush falls over the crowd . . .
The drinks went down, and Narcisa got her good old ho-stroll mojo working again. As Pluto n
arrated, I could picture her out there, feet dancing on the street, her head unattached. Performing, posturing like Madonna, microphone in hand, strutting across the stage. Controlling the audience. Shouting. Gesturing. Seducing. Posing. Telling them all her best war stories. Weaving her mad, compelling mind-control spells. Reeling ’em in for the big, fat mother-lode-winning hand!
But there was a surprise guest appearance at her commend performance that night, when the gang of kids from the local ghetto crack den spotted her, sitting by the beach, speaking English with a bunch of tourists; fat, overfed, pink-skinned imported chickens. Ripe for the plucking. Easy prey for a pack of Copacabana pivetes. Narcisa was well acquainted, of course, with every tough little slum rat from all the nearby favelas. The skinny teenage thugs she smoked crack and weed with up in the hillside shantytowns were just part of the everyday scenery of her sordid little world. She knew them all by name, rank and police file.
They stood there in the shadows, grinning like a pack of threadbare jackals, checking out her action. Then the oldest one strode over. Greeting Narcisa with a casual fist bump, he whispered in her ear, instructing her to lure the gringo with the cash and big shiny watch around the corner. He and his partners would do the rest.
By all accounts, Narcisa had been drinking hard and heavy that night—something I knew from years of bitter experience she should never do. The last time I’d seen her drunk, she’d taken her clothes off and lay down butt-naked, right in the middle of the Avenida Atlantica, on a busy Saturday night, taunting passing motorists, daring them to run her over.
Somehow I’d managed to get her home intact that time.
But on this cold, rainy Copacabana evening, there would be no Cigano to get Narcisa home, or to watch her back in any way. In that truculent booze-addled state, high as a seven-foot-tall bulletproof pimp, she told the cool little thugs to fuck off back to their dirty nigger hovels and find their own fucking pigeons. Narcisa had already marked her gringos, and wasn’t in a sharing mood.
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