Harmada

by João Gilberto Noll

  On the road, I noticed a building farther along with well-lit windows. On the façade was the word Hotel in neon letters. I headed toward the building, which had no more than two floors. At reception, I saw myself in a mirror and realized how shaggy I looked: I had stubble, my hair was disheveled, and my shirt was torn and seriously frayed at the collar. I also saw that I needed to fix my ruined teeth, mainly the ones in my lower jaw, their poor state already caused me to chew with my front teeth only—what if they started failing me from having to work so hard? That was my stupid question that hung in the air.

  But, in that moment, no concern like that could hold firm, because music was coming out of the room that adjoined the small lobby where I was gazing into the mirror. I wet my finger with my tongue and passed it over my eyebrows, trying to get them aligned. I’d seen that gesture in a movie a long time ago, the actor doing it in front of a mirror, as if he were getting ready for a special occasion. A character who might not have much more to offer with his body besides aligned eyebrows, but no, it was not a sad scene, there was some sort of promise in his eyes—swollen from too much drinking—because they seemed ready to recover a certain…I don’t know…disposition? Perhaps what people usually call lightheartedness.

  To my left was a poster of a show that would take place in the salon in a few minutes. It was a play by a Russian author named Yuri Dupont. I thought the name was strange.

  I paid the woman who was selling tickets and went inside. The lights immediately went out, as if they had been waiting just for me. A shabby curtain opened. On stage, two women. I soon realized they were the only two characters in the play. Blondes, between twenty-five and thirty years old—their beauty deeply impressed me. In the show, they played two creatures without a defined sex who were meeting for the first time at a train station. One was going far away, the other would disembark somewhere along the way. The two ended up in the same cabin on the train, and toward the final act, they developed a sexual relationship, though of course I’m not talking about a good old fuck, since they were creatures without a defined sex; this sexual relationship had an unusual way of expressing itself: they kept their backs to each other but it was as if they were face to face, and in this way they spoke and touched each other, and at times they gasped as if one was feeding the gaze of the other. The two creatures were enraptured by the act of love that united them, but they looked in opposite directions, as if what was most essential to each of them (including the gaze) was, contrary to the norm, located in their backs, in the napes of their necks, in their asses.

  It felt good to appreciate those two beautiful women for a while. The sound effects got in the way a little, as there was always this loud and unbearable noise as if a train were passing by. In the most dramatic moments, a machine appeared that harmed the audience’s ears. All I could do was focus my undivided attention on the two blondes.

  To the right of the salon was a bar with a few tables. That’s where I went as soon as the show was over. I sat at a table by the door next to the stage—a door I imagined led to the dressing rooms.

  I was already on my third beer when one of the blondes came through the door. She passed by as if she was in a hurry. Not even a hint of a glance in my direction.

  The second blonde came out a few minutes later, this one in no hurry, looking around as if searching for someone she knew. That gave me time to calmly rise and greet her.

  “Listen. Congratulations. I liked it.”

  “You liked it?” She was wearing the same harsh makeup she’d worn onstage.

  “Yes. There was technique, there was destiny, there was spirit,” I said, feeling like the most ridiculous of men talking like that. But I think I was using such stupid phrases to try and quickly enamor something in that blonde head.

  “Do you always talk like that?” she asked.

  And we stood talking for a few minutes, until I suddenly invited her to sit at my table with me. She agreed. We talked so much, and we drank so many beers, and we poured our hearts out to each other so fully that after a while we were holding hands without being able to say who’d first touched whom.

  “Want to go up to my room?” she asked, releasing a shameless laugh.

  “Yes, let’s go,” I said, kissing her hands.

  “I have some records up there. Only a few—they’ve been with me for many years. Wherever our company goes I bring my music with me. Like the Symphonic Variations by César Franck,” she said, suddenly getting up as if she wanted to drop the subject.

  She didn’t say anything else until we arrived at her room. We sat on the bed, she didn’t flinch, she got straight to the point, bluntly:

  “The other actress in the show has been struggling with this question: As you saw, the play exposes us a little, in an oblique way, to the temptations of lesbian love. It has provoked a desire in my colleague to take a woman in her arms for the first time. Well, you might ask, then why don’t you two…? Alright, I’ll tell you: I’ve been married twice. With both men, I had glorious phases, etc., etc., but I confess I also had women lovers here and there, so that’s not the problem. The problem is that my colleague, although she dreams of having sex with me, will only accept that such a situation can happen if there’s a man involved. Me, her, and a man—that’s what she wants. So, I ask you: Do you want to go to bed with us? Now?”

  I touched my crotch. I was already pure excitement. I was receiving a gift from some god, I don’t know which. I was receiving the most formidable gift I’d gotten in some time.

  “Do you want that?” she repeated.

  “Call her, call her,” I implored, and began taking my clothes off. As she undressed, she banged her open hand against the wall, madly calling for her colleague, who was, of course, on the other side of that wall.

  “Amanda, come, come. I found a man for us. Come, my love, come!”

  It didn’t take long. A door connecting the two rooms, which I only then noticed, opened. Amanda appeared, wearing a transparent pink dress with one of her breasts out, full and round, as if she had been breastfeeding.

  Confirmation of that came abruptly. The blonde who had originally brought me to the room said: “Amanda just had a child, she’s still breastfeeding.”

  As she gave me that information, she was already completely naked, grabbing my cock, moving her carmine lips across my chest.

  Amanda started to undress, too. She took off the last item, her panties, in a blazing hurry, as if she were acting. She came to bed and began groping and kissing her stage partner. She bit her breasts, her neck. She licked between her thighs.

  So, there they were, the two of them, making frenetic, noisy, over-the-top love. And me? I started masturbating, wishing I was touching and stroking Amanda’s glorious ass instead, which was already showing scratch marks from the other blonde’s sharp nails.

  I masturbated, looking at Amanda’s ass and body. Amanda couldn’t look better, with those magnificent breasts of someone still lactating, and a recent scar, still swollen on her lower abdomen, certainly from a caesarean section. I approached her, slowly, while the two women kissed each other greedily. They didn’t pay any attention to me. I got closer and then plucked Amanda suddenly from the arms of the other woman and started fucking her so furiously that from that moment on, I don’t remember anything else.

  My memory gains more precise contours from when I’m alone with Amanda in her bedroom, while her little girl, just a few months old, sleeps in a crib by the window.

  I slowly run my index finger along Amanda’s pink scar. She says it feels good when my finger softly touches her scar. She tells me she’s getting more and more excited by my finger running across a place on her body that had just been cut open. A place where her guts had been on display. A cut through which a child had passed.

  “I felt such pain, sharp pain. I was not under general anesthesia. Look! See how I get wet just by having your finger on my scar? It feels so good. Look!”

  I got on top of her. Not with fury this ti
me, but with pure languor. Her swollen breasts had long lines of blue veins. Following, calmly, the route of each line, their winding, the suddenly straight stretches, became a shrewd distraction for me. It was a game that made Amanda moan.

  There I was, engrossed in these devilish antics in Amanda’s bed, when the door opened. The door that connected to the other blonde’s room. It was her, the blonde, and she was coming in accompanied by a man, a tall guy, about the same age as the two women. He said:

  “Look, friend, I’m not here by accident. Sonia told me about you, and I don’t see why I can’t join the party, too.”

  Sonia got closer. She leaned over and slipped a condom on my cock, which had kept hard the entire time, not going soft just because these two decided to show up.

  Amanda, almost moaning her words, said:

  “Wow, the four of us will make a carousel, the craziest carousel of all time!”

  As she said that, she pointed to the newcomer’s cock as if to show it to me. It looked as hard as mine. But his didn’t have a condom. The condom on mine had surely been this guy’s idea, I concluded with some dissatisfaction.

  Sonia introduced him as the director of the show. He smiled in my direction, his cock totally erect. I looked at mine; it was also still hard. So hard that it had torn open the cheap condom I’d been given. But what really mattered was the fact that there were two dicks, one on each side, and the two women laughing hysterically at the fringes of that show. I looked each of them in the eye, and they shouted back at me: Go on, keep going. They jiggled their hands in the air, and I stared at the man’s dick again—I fixed my eyes on it. I touched mine, still hard. I was staring at the man’s dick, the girls were screaming—go on, keep going—my hands were sweating. The girls took my hands as if giving me the support I needed in that delicate moment. I heard a strange voice resonating in my head, imperative, blatantly commanding me to just go all the way—that’s when the child in the crib started crying at the top of her lungs.

  Amanda got out of bed and made a gesture for us to not stop, then another to indicate she wouldn’t take too long, and she went to look in on the little girl.

  “My princess, my little princess,” she whispered to her daughter.

  I turned my eyes to the crib and saw Amanda leaning over the baby, her glorious butt facing us, still showing the scratches Sonia had made.

  Amanda carefully tried to put the pacifier into the baby’s restless mouth. The three of us waited in bed for her to return from her maternal duties. But at that point we were just waiting for her so we could have her company, nothing more than that, someone whom we could talk to, perhaps some cuddling, if that even.

  The three of us waited for Amanda, stretched all over the bed, our sexes at rest, our breathing resuming naturalness, our blood flowing normally again.

  Amanda came back to be with us. She smiled, and the rain started drumming all around us.

  When I woke up the next morning, Sonia and the guy were no longer in Amanda’s room.

  The baby babbled in her crib; Amanda, standing, looked out the window.

  I grabbed the baby and brought her tiny, tiny body to my chest. The child reached out her little hands and mouth searching for my nipples. She’s hungry, I said, looking at Amanda. She laughed and asked me to wait and see if the girl would suck my nipple. No, Amanda, I’m sweaty, I said. Amanda laughed and took the child. Her name is Cristina, Amanda said, laughingly.

  “Cris. Do you like the name Cris?”

  “I like it, Amanda, I do.”

  I was looking out the window now. From the same hotel room. But Amanda and her company had already gone. They were continuing the tour, they said, taking the show to lots of other cities throughout the country. How many days had passed since Amanda left? I wondered.

  I did the math: almost two weeks. And I had stayed behind in this room, and now I didn’t know how I would pay the hotel.

  I put one leg out of the window; the room was on the second floor. I touched a hard surface. An angled roof jutted off the building; it must have covered a shed or something in the back.

  I looked all around—nobody—so I put the other leg out. When I stepped on the roof tiles they made a noise, but nothing that would raise any alarm. I jumped. Some chickens that were pecking around flapped their wings and scattered. There was nobody else. Lively voices came from inside the hotel.

  Oh, I had an acquaintance nearby, who worked cockfights in a backyard. Hey, he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. There were gigantic basins scattered around the yard, covered with very thick leather inside—it was in these hollows that the cockfights took place. My acquaintance was now going into a narrow, half-dark corridor. On each side, a lot of angry roosters were trapped behind wire screens, each one in its own cubicle. Yeah, he said in the midst of those grumpy animals.

  “I know you’ve been wandering around with nothing to do. Do you want to work here? The boss always pays, not that much really, but he pays on time at least. What do you think?”

  I silently remembered that I had just escaped from a nearby hotel. Okay, so far there’d been nothing to characterize my leaving as an escape. It would be an escape if I didn’t return for several days and nights. But I don’t know: something in me wishes my leaving could already be characterized as an escape. That’s it, I didn’t want to go back to that hotel again; if possible, I didn’t even want to see it, not even pass by; and I also wanted to remove the memory of Amanda from my mind, she, who had suddenly come in one day to announce that the three of them were continuing their tour around the country and were actually leaving that very afternoon… The whole time, I was just waiting for an invitation to join them, to follow them like a poor dog—but no, not even a weak, discreet invitation came out of Amanda’s mouth.

  The noise of the fighting roosters was starting to burn my ears. I said to my acquaintance:

  “Look, I’m going to confess something, it’s the first time in many years that I’m confessing this: I was once in the theater, do you know theater? So yes, I was an artist, an actor. And since then, ever since I left the profession or was left by it, I don’t know, since then I can’t do anything else. It’s not that I haven’t tried, I have, but now I don’t even try anymore; I’ll explain why: everything I do is like acting, you see? If I grab a stone here and I take it over there, something happens inside me, as if the lie of carrying the stone was a trillion times heavier than the stone itself, I don’t know if you understand me, but my case is serious, believe me. Let’s look at another example besides the stone. You and me here…do not believe anything I’m telling you, it is all a repulsive lie, I am not reliable, do not believe me.”

  My acquaintance blinked. Blinking was all he could do.

  “Take care of your roosters,” I said softly, “they need you.”

  This heat, this heat, I repeated, sitting under an awning by the yard with the fighting cocks, where some guinea fowl—those precious little beings—also strolled. This heat, this heat, I repeated, sitting there—a scene that brought me back to my childhood, when I’d sit around with a stick in my hand, poking the earth next to a ridiculously large anthill, the sun perhaps at its zenith. That little caboclo boy in my memories of childhood had perhaps been even happier than I pictured him, wearing the smile of childhood. I smiled too. I decided to take an interest in smiling—a large smile, a smile for everything and nothing—then I pictured a snake meandering over the anthill. I straightened up automatically, even without getting up I straightened, though my smile remained on my face, intact, for everything and nothing, for the snake even. I thought: This smile goes out to the snake, too, yes, it goes out to the snake, it does, to that huge snake that wants to get comfortable by my feet—I suddenly hit the snake with the stick, two, three, four times, stabbing it and stabbing it, and the snake broke into two, three, four pieces, and the blood around it was dark, almost black, and the earth around me, earth like I had never imagined before, it shook, yes, shook, shook for real, and this is tr
ue, it was a real earthquake, and I realized that something was going to fall on my head, and do not ask me what happened after that, because at this point it would do no good to lie about what I saw and did and dealt with.

  But if you really want to know? In those explosive seconds I still had time to think: How is this possible? Didn’t they say that this place was free of earthquakes and natural disasters? Didn’t they tell us that?

  A deadly silence followed the quake, and what I can tell you is that I roasted in the sun for days and days, which caused serious burns on my forehead and chest (my shirt was torn) on top of my other traumas and injuries.

  Once I gathered my senses, all burned and wounded as I was, I spotted a line in a wide open field. It was a long line of people with pleading eyes. They were ragged, some had wounds like mine, wreckage was all around us; children jumped over imaginary hurdles, making such a shrill racket that no adult seemed to have the patience to punish them. It was that childish activity that drew my attention the most, I don’t know why, but the foolish activity of children, all their running around, and those volatile voices as, all the while, serious stuff descends over men, was what made me wake up to reality, what took me out of my daze… I realized I could get up, where it hurt, how strong the pain was, and how much I could bear, so I got up and I walked. I wanted to know more about that line in the open field, if necessary I’d join it, I’d be one more, I’d wait for my turn, and I’d receive whatever it was those people seemed to be waiting for.

  You know? From that point on I was blatantly speaking to someone—no, apparently, there was no one really listening to me. I began to speak as soon as I woke up after the earthquake anyway, not initially realizing that there existed a diffused urgency that listened to me.

  No, this formless listener didn’t answer me at all, but some strange throbbing came from it, as if it engulfed me with every vibration, wholly and precisely to not give me any reason to doubt that its movement was a possible answer, or rather, perhaps a pure understanding of what I’d said.