Harmada

by João Gilberto Noll

  “Cris!” I call.

  She appears. They kiss each other. She points at me and tells the young man:

  “He’s my father.”

  The guy shakes my hand. He seems to be of Arab descent, showing premature baldness, wearing a good suit. I might say he’s handsome.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “I’m okay, how about you?”

  “Pretty good…”

  “And Cris? Has she always been like this?” he asks me, trying, unconvincingly, to act like the laid-back type.

  “Always,” I say.

  Cris doesn’t say anything; she only watches us. She looks pale.

  To Cris, I am her father, as she has just demonstrated. I still don’t know if this makes me feel afflicted, excited, delighted, exasperated, or bothered.

  “You look pale,” I tell her, trying to understand why I suddenly feel so invested in playing the role of a father.

  “Oh, Father, my father…you and your worries…”

  “Take off your jacket,” I tell the young man. And he does.

  “Lou Reed,” Cris sighs.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Lou Reed,” she repeats, poking her index finger in the air.

  Yes, someone is playing Lou Reed, I get it now. On a record player somewhere nearby, Lou Reed is playing.

  “And what should we do now?” I ask.

  “Have you seen the whole apartment?” Cris asks me.

  “What?”

  “The apartment…”

  “Have you seen it?” I pass the question to the young man.

  “No, I haven’t,” he says.

  “Let’s go, then?” I ask.

  “Let’s go,” they both say.

  The three of us go into one of the bedrooms. Then the other one. Then the bathroom, the kitchen, and the utility room. I tell them the kitchen is too dark, and the view from the utility room is humiliating.

  The guy says, “It is.”

  Cris: “It really is.”

  Then we all look at each other. We’re in the dark kitchen. We look, not like when you lock onto someone else’s eyes and don’t look away, but in a manner that allows us brief intervals in which we turn our gazes toward specific details in the dark kitchen, like the rusty faucet or the plaster molding that surrounds the hollow fixture in the center of the ceiling—the kinds of things that generally don’t deserve to be retained in the memory; the kinds of things that should usually be ignored if their condition doesn’t require repair or an immediate reaction from whoever observes them.

  So that’s how it was: the three of us looking at ourselves in the dark kitchen and—I repeat—we didn’t look at each other as if we were three fools who, by having looked at each other for so long, now needed to give some concrete, objective, and palpable reason for those glances. Rather, we looked at each other as if distractedly thinking about which way to go in our assessment of the apartment.

  However, I can’t deny that, from that moment in the dark kitchen on, the young man gave me the impression that he had always been known to me, as if we had already experienced at least a few moments of intimacy together; no, I’m not saying that from then on I nurtured a special affection for him, nothing like that, but I will say that the young man in that dark kitchen had Cris on one side of his body and me on the other, and in that very brief coexistence something was made clear that had been diffuse or reticent before.

  We all went for a drink at a bar called White. Yes, the bar is all white except for a gold-plated chandelier. Cris orders a beer. The guy, whiskey. Me, gin. We drink at that bar called White, and it’s apparent that the two of them are infatuated with each other. Sometimes they kiss sincerely, sometimes they hold hands, and each time they touch each other’s skin, I notice there’s a flow of electricity that is hard for them to conceal. If I wait a little longer, I’ll be able to hear their moans, which remain submerged for now. That gentle exchange of caresses, right in front of me in the bar called White, does me good. I don’t need anything else to make my own body feel contemplated. My body is savoring one person’s dedication to the body of another, right there, and it’s fine this way, even if my body is not the recipient of any personal promises that would provoke feverish sensations. My body, just by discreetly admiring these two other bodies seeking each other out, experiences its own kind of almost rare burning, the existence of which I’ve only begun to notice now in my mid-fifties: Yes, I’m here, discreetly admiring these two and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, because nowhere else will I find honesty between two bodies revealing itself fully to me, and this gives me an assurance that I’m going to achieve some kind of unexpected satiety today. Being here with these two bodies demands nothing more from me than just being here—not entering the scene doesn’t hinder any of my senses—and I was meant to be here, silently admiring those two, and these minutes will not be saved for later, for later I will realize that I had been completely stricken and then renewed myself…

  Suddenly, Cris recalls that she and I have an interview with a journalist.

  We run to the theater. In front of the theater, the young man says goodbye. I shake his hand; mine is sweaty, I know.

  We sit with the journalist in the audience seats.

  In this fleeting moment, the dogs remember…

  The journalist asks me to say the verse more slowly. I say it slowly. He notes it down.

  “Yeah, they gave me that poem to read at an audition a long time ago,” I said, telling the same story again.

  The journalist even wrote down my repetitions.

  “In that damn audition, as I held the page, my hands wanted to shake, but I didn’t let them shake, I resolved to grab onto that page as if I were holding a stone, firm, grabbing the rough mass of a stone—I couldn’t hesitate, I couldn’t shiver. The stage was empty; in front of me, sitting in the audience, were about five guys, including the director and producer of the show I was auditioning for. If I’m not mistaken, the poem I was reading was from a Finn woman who died mad. I’ve never come across this poem or the author again; I just remember these stanzas and no other details about it, but I do carry these lines in my memory, except for the last one. Let me be honest, I don’t remember that one, but all the other verses remain, intact, in my head. Want to hear it? It goes like this: And the hour shivers / and the belly swells / but no one expects anyone’s skin / no one listens to the gravity of bodies / no one asks / Yet you know / ungrateful rumor / you / only you know well / that the fussy lizard in the final cave vomits / its green callus. And the last verse, which I’ve forgotten, comes next. One day I woke up thinking that my memory had finally rediscovered that line—I remember that I got out of bed looking for a pen and paper, but when I saw the white page, the wave that had brought me to it had dissolved. I remember I had the instinct to immediately look at my hands, and I saw that they were shaking. Yes, like that day of the audition, yes, like that day, my hands on the deserted stage, shaking, shaking, until I decided to look at the page with the poem as if it were a stone, a firm and dense stone that could suddenly calm my hands and allow them to hold that sheet of paper with the sheer clarity of the poem’s words.”

  Then, I realized that in the middle of my story I had picked up, without noticing, a sheet of paper from the pile the journalist had left on the chair next to me. There I was: both hands gripping the edges of the white sheet. And, as on the occasion of the audition, my hands were under control, they weren’t trembling any longer.

  The journalist was looking at me. I looked at Cris and she clapped her hands three times, simulating applause.

  “Sorry,” I said, looking at both the journalist and Cris.

  And they laughed.

  “This is my father,” Cris said, moving her arm in the air right in front of me, as if introducing me to the journalist.

  I closed my eyes and saw an old man running away into a deserted valley. He was dragging his belongings with him inside a brown duffel bag. When I opened my eyes, Cris was st
ill talking.

  “My mother died a few months after I was born. I was raised by my father. He’d take me to the theater, let me sleep in the dressing rooms. He says he was afraid of hearing me cry every time he went out onto the stage. I was always with him. We took a lot of trips together, through dusty towns… God knows how many hellholes we went to together.”

  “I remember once,” I said, “when I was onstage playing Redbeard, I heard her crying between my lines. I remember I started sweating profusely, everything in me grew watery, and I didn’t know what to do. About ten, fifteen minutes later, I wasn’t onstage for a few seconds, so I ran to the dressing room…and she was asleep.”

  “I remember once,” Cris said, “when we went to an indigenous village. I couldn’t have been seven years old yet. My father’s troupe used to go to these tribal villages to perform a very funny Christmas play. Baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, all the human characters, were animals in the play. Baby Jesus was a calf, Mary was a cow, and Saint Joseph, the character my father played, was an ox. They all dressed their parts, of course, and the animals that traditionally surround the crib in a Christmas play became people. So, humans were reduced to nothing but being supporting characters. But I want to tell you about the indigenous people. I remember that I entered, alone, the hut where I was to stay with my father, and it was very dark inside the hut, even though we were in the middle of the day. I remember groping around, but then I heard a labored, cavernous breath. I touched it. It had terrible, strong, pointed teeth. I ran and told my father. We later learned that there was a little dog inside the hut. It was dying of a disease that no one in the tribe was familiar with. And so it was dying, there in the hut, in agony.”

  The journalist took notes with admirable dedication.

  “I remember,” I said, “that on one of these trips to the countryside, I lost Cris. She had stopped going to the shows with me every night; she was already nine years old. When I got back to the hotel around eleven or so one evening, she wasn’t there. I looked for her everywhere, and I made everyone in the hotel do the same. I called the police and went to the only hospital in town, but there was no trace of her. That night was hellish, so hellish that, at a certain point, I banged my head against the wall. Well, around five or six in the morning, I heard loud voices coming from the lobby. I came down; it was Cris, soaking wet from head to toe.”

  “I had fallen into a river near the main street,” Cris interrupted me, “I remember a train was passing along the riverbank; I remember that every two hours or so the train came by, whistling like crazy, and I saw, through its windows, the smooshed faces of sleepy children, and a woman being kissed ardently by a man. Once in a while I’d see the dining car with people inside sipping drinks and waiters bending over the seats with their mannerisms, but what I want to tell you is that I ended up falling into the river. I was sitting on a muddy slope and I rolled all the way down, scratching up my legs a little—not a big deal—but the thing is that I got soaked, and that kind of humiliated me. It made me feel ashamed; I didn’t want to go back to the hotel before I got dry, but despite the evening’s air being moonlit and arid, my clothes stayed wet, until I decided to go back to the hotel anyway, feeling sorry for myself. I found the way back by forcing myself out of myself; I began to see that girl from the outside as if she were someone else and not me. That alleviated my shame a little bit—it had been that sad girl with her indecisive steps who had fallen into the river and not me. I only observed her, the poor thing, and when I got to the hotel and my father kissed me, I swear, I was so removed from myself, looking at myself from such a distance, like how an audience might, that I didn’t feel my father’s embrace. I noticed that he had kissed me, but I couldn’t feel any warmth on my cheek, and that’s so true that to this day I still remember that in the instant I realized my father was going to unlock his embrace, in that instant, I—now looking at everything from afar—caught myself caressing my own face as if I hadn’t known a caress for a long time, and I wondered if the humidity I felt on my face had to do with the river’s water or if it was just perspiration.”

  The journalist took notes on everything. Suddenly he shook his hand, the one that had been writing, as if he wanted to revive it.

  I went to the theater’s lobby. It was raining heavily outside. An employee was arriving for the show that started in a couple of hours. She greeted me fearfully, for she had seen me behaving frantically, if not furiously, in a few rehearsals, when I’d try to extract something from inside Cris that neither she nor I were finding. I was often in that situation with Cris, wondering: Is it going to happen today? Is today the day when this thing I can’t name will break through and come out? Cris would try so hard, sweating all the while. She’d approach me and I’d approach her, dangerously, and when we were on the verge of madness—like, for example, when I tore her apart or stopped wanting her anymore and ran away, or when she called me an irreparable, disgusting old man, or when she was the one running away and falling, into the arms of another reality, let’s say—when we’d get to that point in our rehearsals, that’s when something devilish would come out of her (or I would draw it out of her). That’s it, I’d think. Something that, at first, we were not sure we’d keep or just immediately reject the first time we thought about it. That thing comes dirty and dazzling and dizzying when it surfaces for the first time between the two of us, right there.

  “Do you want it this way, Cris? Do you like it?” I’d ask.

  I tell the employee that a journalist is interviewing Cris inside the theater. I ask her if it’s been raining for long. She says that it just started a few minutes ago. She goes to the theater’s office. A window exposes her as if she’s in an aquarium. She flips a switch on the wall. I know that she’s turned on the lights of the theater’s façade.

  Cris comes into the room in her nightgown. I’m lying down, staring at the ceiling. She asks if she can turn off the light. I say yes. I see her kneeling on her bed and staring out the window.

  “Cris!” I call to her.

  “Huh?”

  Framed by the window, open to the city lights, she turns to me.

  “Tonight’s show, did you like it?”

  Cris spreads her arms, and the long sleeves of her nightgown look like wings. Then she stands up, gets off her bed, and comes toward me, very slowly, keeping her arms open.

  “Did you like tonight’s show, Cris?”

  She asks me to make some room for her on my bed.

  “Tonight’s show was beautiful,” she says.

  We had spent so many nights in that room, talking.

  But that night was different, I felt she wanted to tell me something.

  It wasn’t raining anymore. An occasional noise from the city…

  Cris put her hand on my chest.

  Bruce should be asleep. I knew he was home because I’d seen his jacket on the back of the chair in the living room. He wasn’t an early sleeper, but we couldn’t hear him walking around the apartment that night.

  Therefore, he should be asleep. Cris put her hand on my chest. I knew she had something to tell me.

  She was lying down, stretched out beside me.

  Cris: “You know, starting tomorrow, I’ll be going to live with him…”

  “Him who?”

  “The guy you met at that vacant apartment.”

  “The guy we had a drink with at White Bar?”

  “Yes.”

  The next day.

  I look out the window, and the guy is putting Cris’s belongings in the trunk of a car. Before getting in, Cris looks up and waves to me.

  Further beyond, the sea. I see it through the window.

  I put on my shorts and go to the beach.

  It was on this beach that I met Bruce. I was coming from one direction, and he from the other. We couldn’t have been older than twenty. He asked me where Breve Beach was. I told him it was the next beach down from the one we were on, that he could go on foot. I raised my arm and showed him the way.


  I already wanted to be an actor then. Bruce asked me if I knew the Continente Theater near Breve Beach. I had seen a play the night before at that theater. He told me he was looking for an actress friend. He also told me that he had arrived that morning from a town called Alvedo. He had come to Harmada to work on a play with this friend of his. She was a well-known actress. Her name was Vera Vidal.

  He was the son of an American and a woman from Alvedo. Hence the name Bruce.

  Bruce’s mother had met her future husband in New York. At the time, she was working as a telephone operator in the office of a Texan company on Park Avenue.

  His father had been a man of financial ups and downs—a true adventurer. He died of a heart attack while sailing off the coast of Southern California.

  A few days after, his mother discovered a secret: medication pamphlets for serious heart problems in one of her husband’s pockets.

  On that far-off morning on the beach, Bruce seemed more determined than me. Then I lied, saying that I too had been invited to act in a play.

  If we could only have guessed, right then, that because of that chance meeting, we would end up working together in that same play with Vera Vidal…

  We never worked together onstage again after that.

  Someone shouts that a child has drowned. In fact, just a few steps from me, they’re dragging a child through the sand.

  “Lay the boy here,” a man shouts.

  I approach the scene. Amid the helping bodies, I see a purplish child, his lips swollen.

  I’m driven by an impulse: I ask people to let me through, kneel, put my mouth against the boy’s, and breathe. I inhale and exhale deeply, though nothing within him seems to react, but I continue pushing my air into the boy’s inert lungs. I force my intruding air into the boy’s mouth four, five times, but then I silently say, enough, enough, enough…and I look up and see the small crowd around me. I see Bruce in the small crowd; it surprises me to see him on the beach at this hour when the sun is strongest. I get up and Bruce and I disband from the small crowd…