Harmada

by João Gilberto Noll

  At the time, he was performing in a play called Fine Lines by a Czech author who’d died at the age of twenty-eight in a motorcycle accident in Paris.

  Bruce played a much older man. He wore heavy makeup. His wrinkles were accentuated with dark, broad streaks to look deeper.

  There were two other people onstage with him—two women who, for no apparent reason, hated him more than anything. And the character Bruce played needed the hatred that emanated from them; that feeling was the only force driving the protagonist to stay alive. He cultivated that hatred as if it were the last plant on Earth.

  I look at Bruce in the dressing room mirror, as he takes off his makeup, rubbing a special cream on his face with a piece of cotton. Suddenly, he notices me. He looks at me, too, and so we’re both looking at each other in the mirror.

  Cris opens the dressing room door. She comes in, slams the door. Now her gaze is also in the mirror. She looks at me a little, then looks at Bruce a little. The three of us look at each other like on a carousel: one turns their eyes to another who turns their eyes to another and so on, until we feel an intoxicating danger that forces us to stop.

  Why? I’d ask myself if I were alone. Why would this man, Bruce, in his fifties like me, and this girl who’s not even fifteen…why would these two be able to take me to hell if they wanted to? And then: What does it mean to go to hell? Is it good, bad, terrifying? Or could it be mild?

  I was just a fool, yes, a foolish old man, and as such I should have been sleeping at that hour, I should’ve forgotten that idea of returning to my career, that Cris was born to be a star—I should just pack, go find a haven on top of a cliff with only the wild sea crashing against the rocks as a source of ecstasy, and only this: rest. But no, those two could take me to hell if they wanted to, whatever that word means, hell… And I sat in that dressing room so lost in my thoughts that when I came to my senses, I realized Bruce and Cris had gone, it was just me in the mirror. I heard their voices coming from the hall; they were talking about the show with other laughing voices.

  I avoided passing them, turning the other way and leaving through the emergency exit. The air felt especially stuffy. Many junkies wandered around the theater that late at night. A young man came over and asked me for the time. But instead of waiting for my reply, he quickly moved off, laughing. A bit further down the street, I ordered a coffee. I liked leaving places discreetly sometimes; I preferred to leave without giving any explanation sometimes; I needed to believe sometimes that my leaving prematurely and without justification would not provoke any scandals among the people I’d been with; as if, in leaving prematurely and without justification, some ghostly apparition—normally dormant in my quite palpable physical presence—would, at last, reveal itself.

  I used to think that whenever I encountered the people I had left without warning—as in this case with Bruce and Cris now—they would point out what existed in me that I couldn’t see for myself on account of being too self-obsessed.

  I sipped my coffee. So many voices around made me happy. I was thinking about the show I’d direct, which would introduce Cris to the public in Harmada. Bruce was helping me with the production. We had just secured a decent theater. The play, a monologue written by a Mexican author, was about a grieving woman who believed, with all her hatred and despair, in eternity. She didn’t express grieving in her body or her soul; she wasn’t mourning the death of someone or how life is finite; no, her grieving, on the contrary, was an expression of sadness for the harsh and colossal heritage of eternity.

  At points, Cris wears a veil of black lace. Haunting light bathes her body. She kneels on tiny pebbles. An unexpected wind blows her veil. She then covers her eyes with a chunk of her black hair. She rubs her hair in her eyes, just like I saw her do a long time ago.

  “Live,” I said. “That’s how it is. You’ve always known.”

  It was a flustered rehearsal, I also kneeled on the pebbles, asking her to imitate me. Yes, on her knees, as if she was outraged by endless centuries of being a widow of humanity: That is what you wanted to belong to, not some deity who wants you—with your spurious faith—to be the absolute lady of death, but who wants you, so it seems, to be the bride of all the ages… No, no, I will draw a red tear in blood on the left side of your face, a trace of fury on your left cheek, like this. With paint and brush close by, I had to bend just a little to reach them on the floor, and when I grabbed the brush, I immediately brought it to Cris’s left cheek, where the brush painted a sort of electrified crest on her face…then she said a line from the text, which she was supposed to say at that exact moment:

  “Leave this starry sphinx with me. Please! And you’ll see what I can do with it.”

  I open an overlooked window backstage. I see a sunny morning. A few meters away, Bruce is leaving a cab. I hear water falling over Cris’s body in the shower. I see dense dust moving inside a sunbeam that hits the ground like a spotlight. I hear Bruce’s footsteps. I see Bruce, suddenly in front of me: his thin hair, all gray, his well-maintained body, the glasses he only wears offstage. I remember that he’s been my friend for at least thirty years, that he’s one of the few I’ve managed to keep; I ask myself what has changed in his demeanor: almost everything, my inner voice rushes to say; almost nothing, another voice attempts to respond, but isn’t strong enough to echo inside me, perhaps because it knows deep down that there’s little to say that’s constructive in relation to the passage of time in our carcasses… We may even say, when we see an old friend after a few years have passed: he looks so little changed since then, but we can’t avoid realizing that his eyes have sort of withered, the line from his chin to his neck has slackened, it has fallen. But the one in front of me now is still him, Bruce, and I have something to say:

  “You seem well, my brother.”

  “Who, me?”

  “Yeah, you.”

  “And you? Are you doing well?”

  “I’m anxious about the premiere on Thursday… But you’re here, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I came to watch the rehearsal.”

  Cris appeared, her hair wet. She asked me to pull up the zipper on her black dress. It was our first rehearsal in full costume.

  “It’s been ten years,” Cris says, beginning her line.

  I ask her to look straight ahead, not exactly at the audience, but just above it, as if she were speaking to some infinity, which could be the sky, the sea, or, with grandiloquence, outer space itself.

  She goes on:

  “It’s been ten years…and you know I’m not kidding when I say ten years. I’m not saying twenty or five: It’s been precisely ten years we’ve been living together, staring at each other, sometimes diplomatically, sometimes disdainfully, and I’m out here in the cold, hoping to see a sign from you that would give me a reason to have pride in myself, or even a sign that indicates I’m a nuisance, either of which I’ve been waiting ten years for, many times leaving fierce skirmishes without any remaining strength. We stayed here despite it all, roaring at each other, spitting on the dry earth, teasing each other, and when it was time to fight, time to stiffen and strike, we retreated and distended, while the night’s heat lightened from a slight breeze, and the morning mist came, it seemed, from the very entrails of the ground. And we sort of evaporated, only seeing each other again briefly during the midday glow, but by then we were different people; we no longer wanted to fight, and just stared into the light’s idle sharpness. Everything was there, in place, not giving us any chance to look for what only the night can hide…”

  I interrupt Cris. I don’t exactly know what to say. I don’t know if I will actually say anything. I interrupt Cris by snapping my fingers… Bruce stands up, uneasily.

  Cris is the one who speaks:

  “Yes?”

  I take off my sweat-soaked shirt and ask Bruce if he doesn’t want to do the same. Cris lies down on the stage as Bruce unbuttons his shirt—I see he has gray hair on his chest—he lies next to Cris; I dry my sweat with a tow
el; I feel impelled to accompany them; I lie down too. Now Cris, Bruce, and I are lying on the stage, outside of the spotlight’s focal point, we could sleep for a while in this penumbra, maybe savoring the kind of vacuum that has settled in for a little bit, but I say no, and my voice echoes firmly around the stage. I get up and pull Cris by her arms, Bruce rolls his body across the stage and nearly plummets to the seats below, but right when he reaches the edge of the stage he gets up with a jump, which must have taken a brutal effort, being as he’s a man in his fifties and unathletic; nonetheless, he has rolled to the edge of the stage and gotten up and screamed. You don’t quite hear what he says in his scream, but he screams, yes he does, and I tell the light technician—who’s been hiding in his little cocoon—I say: Here should come a lightning bolt, a lightning bolt that will cut the scene like a terrifying scalpel. Bruce’s low voice shatters the air, imitating thunder, while Cris opens her arms in a cross and continues her speech from the point where she had stopped. Go Cris! Don’t stop, and right at that moment she throws herself on the floor, violently, hurts herself; I notice her knee is bruised, blood stains her dress. Bruce is now sitting on the back of a chair in the audience, Cris gasps as she gives her speech, sometimes hiccupping: She says she can’t stand living in a state of constant emergency anymore, what she wants now is to go into the river and maybe die, she’s not quite sure, but going into the river is what really matters, along with turning her back to that crazy machine they call mystery. From now on she’ll just try to belong to the river, that freezing Lord, and let’s face it, she’ll end up surrendering herself to the river as if she had been some kind of spy…

  We receive a standing ovation on opening night. Cris—that’s it, just Cris, no last name—becomes a star in the Harmada theater scene.

  I start earning a reasonable income as the director of the show, so I go to the dentist for the first time in many years. Fixed or removable bridge? I choose fixed—I can pay a little more.

  A cat walks on the windowsill at the dentist’s office.

  Whenever I go to the dentist, I try to arrive twenty minutes early. I like to flip through old magazines; it relaxes me.

  “It’s your turn,” the assistant tells me with a smile. Yes, she smiles at me—this man who can afford an appointment for treatment.

  “So?” the dentist asks with his very straight teeth, drying his hands on a small white towel.

  “Look, that thing you put in my mouth three appointments ago, the uncomfortable one, has stopped bothering me,” I say, sitting then lying in the dentist’s chair.

  “Wonderful.” The dentist smiles.

  He asks me to open my mouth, and he squirts a little needle into a hole in my tooth.

  My mouth is open. I have money to pay for the treatment—it’s good to remind myself—and I see the first stars appear in the sky through the window.

  “Your show is a big hit in the city,” the dentist says, scrabbling at a wisdom tooth that hurts me.

  Without being able to speak, I make sounds to confirm what he just said.

  “So, as I already told you…it’s cheaper if I just extract this painful tooth, but according to my exams, I could restore it. It’d be much more expensive though…what do you think?”

  I had already decided on the most expensive treatment many consultations ago. So, I answer:

  “I’d rather save the tooth.”

  I don’t mind telling him again. This time I speak as if I’m claiming a total restoration. After spending many years in a home for derelicts watching my teeth deteriorate, I now have some money in the bank, so I can afford sitting here, paying for these services, and can leave this office not only with new teeth but as a new man. From now on, I’ll be able to flash an umblemished smile, let my tongue enter another mouth again, and allow another tongue to enter my mouth without having to run into cavities, rubble, and gaps.

  I leave the office, get in the elevator, pass the building’s concierge, or, I don’t know, I get in the elevator, pass the building’s concierge, leave the office, the sequence of my tedious task of going to the dentist doesn’t really matter, and the same goes for when I look at myself in the mirror, wearing only my underwear, as I try on different pairs of pants in a tight fitting room at a clothing store—looking at my bare legs makes me want to call the saleswoman, pull my underwear down, and show her my dick. I miss my shelter days when I didn’t need to do any stuff like going to dentists or trying on new clothes—some pieces of clothing would occasionally just get to me through some charity organization or via donation, and I didn’t even bother trying them on, I simply put them on and started walking with them on my body, they could’ve been too tight or too big, those were details that didn’t conform to my circumstances then. I was wearing clothes that had once belonged to another body, but that was of no interest either—the important thing was that those clothes seemed to adhere more or less to my body. They had been washed before they got to me, I remember, and had a particularly pleasant smell, probably from the detergent or some other scented substance used in the laundry—what I know is that I’m now standing in that tight fitting room calling the saleswoman, and when she opens the curtain slightly and asks me if the pants fit well, I’m wearing a beige pair and I tell her that I could buy two pairs, maybe even three if I wanted to, because I have some money in the bank now that allows me these kinds of splurges. The woman blinks nervously; she says she believes in me, and right then I understand that she has actually stopped believing in the man before her. Then I say I’ll come back another day when I have more time—I’m very busy today and have many things to do—and as I say all this I feel that her salesperson gaze has reacquired a certain credulity, but I decide to go to different stores nonetheless, and I arrive back at Bruce’s apartment wearing all new and shiny clothes.

  “I threw my old pants, shirt, and shoes in the trash,” I told Bruce.

  “You look handsome, my man, very handsome,” he said, looking absently at my hand as it grabbed a cigarette from the table near the sofa.

  He could look at me, we were face to face, and I could look into his eyes. But when Bruce’s gaze left my hand and met my eyes, I looked the other way, at the rug. And why would we want to look into each other’s eyes? To remember the beginnings of our careers thirty years ago?

  No, I had no reason to be dissatisfied with anything at all: not with our unmet stares, the new clothes and shoes I was wearing, let alone the play I had produced for Cris.

  I got up and went to the window. I looked out at the landscape of Harmada and believed that the time had come for me to simply get it right. The problem now would be maintaining this situation.

  “Did you take a siesta?” I asked Bruce, turning my back to Harmada.

  Bruce was no longer there.

  It was the heat in that land that made me bitter…or made me cruel…I couldn’t quite remember the line I used to say when I was playing a blind character many years ago. But it was that line that came to mind when I noticed Bruce’s absence, perhaps because that character didn’t believe in what he considered to be the alleged benefit of seeing the world, or perhaps because I was feeling a bit silly and the blind man had been the silliest character I’d played, I don’t know… The blind man used to say: It’s for the best that I can’t see so I don’t have to witness what are conventionally called forms—displays that are nothing but the excrement of things. Real beings are those that are clean of a figure, those who remain sheltered, removed from shapes, curves, or straight lines, far from volumes and colors. Real beings are fruitful in the absence of such things because they become more juicy—appetizing and nutritious from being separate from the thick jungle of visual instinct. I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect that the blind are meant to be pioneers in the field of this other vision, which is finally free of form.

  The blind man ended up becoming a kind of monk. He had mastered most of the impositions of the material world, and became almost a pure spirit. As such, he lost the capacity fo
r human language; if he were ever asked to speak, he would, but he’d no longer use words, instead exploring more alien sounds. Another character in the play, the blind man’s disciple, announces, almost in the epilogue, that we had finally arrived at an invertebrate language, one that is unaware of any guiding principle, one that doesn’t want to lead anywhere, one that liquefies itself in microexplosions upon the foggy canvas of the blind man.

  I remember: I used to play that character wrapped the entire time in a red and purple flag. The flag, according to the disciple’s manuscripts, was from a country that would receive the descendants of the blind in the future. A woman who was passing by the stage asked:

  “But did he leave any children or heirs?”

  “No,” answered the disciple, “his children are of a different kind, his heirs do not suffer from this body, which I will now return to dust.”

  At that moment, three shots are heard. And the disciple’s body falls, bloody, upon the stage. The woman suddenly finds herself with a gun in her hand. She starts screaming, throws the gun at the disciple’s lifeless body, shouting that the gun isn’t hers and she has never touched a gun before. She asks for help, desperately looking at the audience as the lights go out and a deafening hailstorm of coughs and throat clearings grow from the speakers…

  I remember: that show ran for eight months.

  “Did you take a siesta?” I ask Bruce again. He was in the living room—I can see it now—sitting in his old chair.

  “No,” he answers, lifting his eyes for a second from the page in his book.

  Cris and I go to check out an apartment we saw in a rental ad. Cris moves through the space quicker than me. She goes into each of the two bedrooms and says that she likes the room facing the back of the building best. I stay put, looking out of the window in the living room. I see a huge line forming around the corner, apparently candidates for a job at a factory that builds vaults, where the line begins…

  The doorbell of the empty apartment rings. I open the door. It’s a young man. He asks for Cris.