Quiet Creature on the Corner

  Two Lines Press

  O quieto animal da esquina

  © 1991 by João Gilberto Noll

  Translation © 2016 by Adam Morris

  Two Lines Press

  582 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.twolinespress.com

  ISBN 978-1-931883-53-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015958652

  Cover design by Gabriele Wilson

  Cover photo by Niall McDiarmid / Millenium Images, UK

  Typeset by Sloane | Samuel

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  This book was published with the support of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture / National Library Foundation (obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cultura do Brasil / Fundação Biblioteca Nacional) and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Contents

  Quiet Creature on the Corner

  A dark broth running from my hands beneath the faucet: I’d lost my job, and was saying so long to all that stubborn grease.

  A dark broth running, there went three months, and I’d gotten into the habit of killing time by rambling through the center of town, a slight malaise if I saw myself in the mirror of a public bathroom, nothing a nineteen-year-old guy couldn’t shake by sticking with it a little longer.

  Sometimes, right up until I sidled into one of the job lines, I’d pull out any old piece of paper from my pocket along with a pen, and if someone saw me I’d put on a stern air, like I was taking note, not of some verses that sprang to mind, but of a reminder of some urgent obligation.

  Through the center of Porto Alegre, without much variation, I’d stroll a bit through Rua da Praia, have a coffee in the Galeria Chaves, hit the newspaper stand in the Praça da Alfândega, leafing, leafing, all the way up to Riachuelo, pop into a used bookstore, spend some more time leafing, poetry, too flat broke to buy even used books, money down near zero—and oftentimes, like now, I’d go sit in the public library up the street from the used bookstore, taking in the lives of poets, every one of them stranger than the last—there was one who was never looking to get laid, had never fucked anybody, died like that, chaste, and another who secretly collected his own fingernail clippings, he’d stick the clippings in a small jar and make a sort of relic of them, struck by some feeling he never knew how to decipher.

  That afternoon it didn’t take long for the same old hunger to hit me, so I went about getting up, leaving, gawking at the various people that were reading hunched over dark, coarse tables, the majority of them the same old regulars, and I got to imagining they were all unemployed like me, or that they collected a pension for some sort of hidden disability—I didn’t see anything abnormal about them, seated there, reading, quiet, they didn’t look handicapped, they weren’t missing any obvious parts.

  When I got to the door of the public library, soot was falling, and nobody could really say where it came from—in certain places so thick that you couldn’t see the other side of the street. Some people went out anyway and got covered in soot, others ran, others were coming into the doorway of the library to take shelter. I took my wallet from my pocket and opened it, still had some cash, went out—the rain of soot was stopping—and went down Borges, took Rua da Praia to Vigário José Inácio, went into Carlos Gomes cinema, sat down to see a porno: the woman stopped the car with the top down and started rubbing her hand on her pussy, drawing a rowdy crowd of men around her, a Japanese tourist filming everything, and the woman like she didn’t see a thing, eyes closed, cumming over and over, pussy slathered, pink.

  It was almost late afternoon when I left the theater, and I went slowly, so slowly that I suddenly found myself stopped in Acelino de Carvalho alley, a chilly backstreet too narrow for direct sunlight, pedestrian-only, constantly reeking of piss, a couple barbershops on one side, three or four side-exit doors from the Vitória cinema on the other, hearing voices inside speaking English. Right then I remembered: I’m going home, and I walked resolutely in the direction of the bus terminal.

  It was a Monday afternoon when I first broke into the apartment in Glória, where I’ve since lived with my mother. I went in alone, carrying just a box of tools, a box I used to carry, I’m not sure why, in tricky situations like that one. It was a halted construction project: a door here and there, some windows, bathrooms almost finished, kitchens less so. Every day new squatters discreetly turned up—my mother and I, in certain pauses, would look at each other, wondering, yet we decided to keep up the ruse by hanging things on the wall, pushing the broken china cabinet closer to the window. Ever since the eviction at that half-crooked house on the edge of the pavement right there in Glória, ever since then we’d been catching each other in locked stares, with a sort of stupor.

  The bus that took me home passed along a ridge of cemeteries—I was surrounded by cemeteries on both sides, on this melancholy hill as they called it on the radio—every day from up there I saw the valley on the other side, the Glória neighborhood, full of low rooftops and the ugly church with towers that looked a little bit pink at that time of day.

  I recalled my mother’s face, waiting for me in the small apartment: just one room, brick walls exposed, bare lightbulb, and that woman who just seemed to wait for me—ever since my father took off, she was there without much to do except wait for me, waiting as she watched a black and white TV that didn’t get all the channels.

  Down below, the building had a big lobby full of columns, it was already dark when I arrived, and like every late afternoon, there they were, propped against the columns: a gang of kids, almost all of them out of work like me, a little pale under the weak lighting. I was in the habit of stopping to listen, throwing in my two cents if I could: a rumor that the military police might come in formation and throw us all out of our apartments by force, that it could happen at any moment—there was laughter from those who didn’t want to keep talking about it, and then it was my turn to hold the slobbery joint. Two or three of them concealing syringes slunk off behind the building, where there were unformed blocks from a building whose construction was paralyzed almost right from the get-go, which we all called the ruins.

  I opened the sagging door to the apartment and there was my mother, like always, waiting for me—only this time she was crying, saying she was leaving the next day, she couldn’t live like this anymore, that I was young, but she was going to live with her sister somewhere on the outskirts of São Borja.

  We sat down, leaned on the table. My mother remarked that the milk was thick. Indeed, there were rings of fat down the sides of the glass.

  Someone knocked on the door, and I went to open it, already knowing who it was: the eldest son of the neighbor lady, a crazy kid who had this obsession with coming to ask me for a nail, and for the hundredth time I said I didn’t have any more, but like always he needed to nail something—this time it was for nailing a beam, yes, nailing a beam in the ceiling above his mattress—he was almost shouting, and banging, banging, banging, until he bled. I looked up because that was the direction he was pointing so vehemently, I looked and saw the split ceilings in the hallway: I just need to borrow one nail, the kid was repeating, loan me one nail, that’s all—the kid was gagging, and as usual he suddenly fell silent and returned to the apartment where he lived, with such a distressed expression that it seemed he’d just experienced a defeat that no other child was even capable of imagining.

  While my mother was watching her soaps, seated on the shredded sofa, I went downstairs to see if anything was new, and I went down the stairs thinking of her: it really was a good idea for her to go to São Borja, because there was every reason to believe that everything was headed for collapse here in Porto Alegre, and then I would
n’t know what to do with her.

  All around the building downstairs it was nearly a jungle, damp, parts of it always flooded, frogs croaking ceaselessly. There wasn’t anyone there.

  I leaned an arm against a column, stared down at the floor, my busted sneaker. I could take advantage of the silence to write a poem, pull a piece of paper and pen from my pocket: images of undulating things pursuing me, perhaps a thin stem, very thin, adrift on the breeze. That was when I heard someone singing, a high-pitched voice. I looked around—undulating things, the thin stem, very thin, adrift on the breeze would have to wait for another time. I went looking for the person who was singing—it had to be nearby, it wasn’t coming from upstairs in any of the apartments—my steps drifting, looking in all the corners, the voice quite high, I went toward the ruins behind the building, where the voice seemed to be coming from, ah, it was the girl that lived on the top floor, Mariana if I’m not mistaken, seated on a chunk of ruin, younger than me, singing a romantic ballad by a singer who was hideous but provoked hysteric screams from girls in auditoriums on TV—hey, I said to her, you all alone out here?

  The girl kept singing a while longer, then suddenly stopped and said, with the sky the way it was tonight, so full of stars, with the moon so high, it was likely the Druidesses would be descending in droves. This girl was like that, always talking about Druidesses and other strange beings—she said she never went to school, that she went every day to her hideout on the top of a hill, and stayed there singing all morning long.

  When she started up with the thing about Druidesses my first reaction was to think of how sleepy I was, that I’d go to bed, or maybe get back to that poem.

  But a second later, when she began to sing once more, I saw that, no, it wouldn’t be so bad to hang out a while longer, it wasn’t cold, so I stayed, wandering through the ruins, and she started singing a song that wasn’t half bad. The night was clear and the ruins were yellowed by the moon.

  Suddenly I realized I was so close to the singing girl that I could almost feel her breath—I didn’t say anything, she stopped singing, I noticed there was a speckled wall that hid us from the building—I hit her with a kiss, and she fell with me onto the wet earth, my tongue passing through a murmur stifled in the girl’s mouth, for sure a scream if I were to take my mouth off hers, and it was too late, I needed to suffocate that scream—I came right as my dick went in, and that dry murmur, the shout I suffocated by crushing my mouth against hers stopped—and I got up.

  I went back to the apartment. My mother was sleeping on the shredded sofa with the light on. I went to my room, threw myself on the bed, and fell asleep.

  I awoke in the middle of the night to voices outside, got up, went to the corner of the window, and saw the military police talking to some guys that were getting out of a red Escort, and a station wagon with a spinning light on top. The wagon had parked diagonally in front of the Escort, one of them started cuffing the guys, the other pointing his gun.

  It was routine to be awakened during the night by troubles like these in the neighborhood: police, car thieves, drug traffickers, even on a calm night like this, it wasn’t strange for shots to ring out, and there I was, like on so many other late nights, peering from the corner of the window, not wanting to be seen, because if I were I’d certainly fall under some kind of suspicion.

  I sat down on the bed, listening to the police siren. Then the silence returned. In the living room my mother was snoring, tomorrow she’d go to São Borja.

  I saw a bolt of lightning cut the sky, everything went blue, then came the thunder. I returned to the window and another lightning bolt illuminating the sort-of clearing where they were constructing the building next door: the Escort was still there. I doubted I’d be able to sleep with a downpour starting to rail against the window, the water blocking my view outside. I thought how my life was really taking its time figuring things out, and my mother snored as if saying don’t even start—and there I was, staring at streams of raindrops that wouldn’t let me see outside, unable to sleep, without even a way to take a walk in the street due to the rain, so I went to the living room, the light was still on, and I could’ve stolen my mother’s wedding ring right off her finger, and even taken my time rolling out since she wouldn’t wake up, but that wedding ring probably wasn’t worth a nickel, and I was a coward anyway: I called out to her, asked her to make me a tea because I was feeling woozy, ready to vomit.

  Early the next morning I took her to the bus station, she was leaving at eight, the rain had stopped, but the sky hadn’t opened up, clouds were moving along lashed by a wind that seemed to come from the south, the temperature had fallen, my mother kissed me, I said that she was doing the right thing by moving to another city, and the bus left.

  I went up Borges and jumped on the bus back home, and right when it was passing along the ridge of cemeteries, I looked down again at Glória, the church towers, coughed, spat out the window, crossed myself furtively, laughing to myself, pulled the cord for a stop, got off, said hello to a neighbor with a kid on his lap, took a shortcut that led over to my building, I was already in the clearing around the building and could smell the eucalyptus, I saw a paddy wagon and two military police talking with a guy who saw me and said: that’s the guy.

  There were five prisoners in the cell they stuffed me into. I’ve never seen people as ruined as those five, there were scars and sometimes holes all over their entire bodies, mouths completely toothless, one of them with a harelip that had never been sewn, but even worse than the toothless guy was the one with a single rotting, snaggletoothed canine, bleeding.

  But before that I had waited hours for the sheriff—the police searched me all over, took a wad of papers with my poems on them from my pocket, spread the papers over the sheriff’s desk, and when he arrived they started asking me if I had brothers, a mother or a father still living, and when I told them how my father took off and my mother and I had fallen into poverty, that I had to leave school to eke out a living for us both, the sheriff seemed to take a real interest: he leaned in close, thumped me on the shoulder, and yelled for me to tell him all about that time, that was the reason for everything, that was where it all had started.

  Go ahead, he finished, impatiently.

  So then I told him about those days, an assortment of things from here, leaving things out there, and when I got to the previous night, his eyes bulged at me, another thump to the shoulder when I said I’d stayed at home, that I’d gone to bed early, early because I had to take my mother to the bus station. He called over a police reporter, a completely blond man—the tufts of hair coming out of his ears, even those were super blond.

  “Let’s hear it,” the reporter said, gathering up the papers with my poems.

  Then came the jailer to take me to the lockup. When I got there one of the prisoners asked me what time it was, another if I had anything to give him; another said he’d strangle me at night, another that he knew I was a poet, and that I should write a poem in charcoal beside his mattress. The fifth one didn’t say anything.

  That night the five of them made a big racket masturbating, the bunks squeaking, the guys slapping the walls, their labored breathing audible when they came, nearly bursting. I was the only one lying on a mattress directly on the slab floor. Waiting out the sleepless night, I knew that if I stayed there much longer I’d end up taking part in the communal jackoff session.

  Then they were snoring and it was dark, the only light a single bulb that was swaying in the drafty corridor. The window in that little hole had iron bars that left such a narrow space between them that not even an arm would fit through—I took a stool from under one of the beds, pushed it against the wall, got on top of it, and peered out at the night through the bars. A guard was passing hurriedly in the distance in front of me, a rooster began to crow.

  While I waited for daylight I’d stay put, seeing if maybe some verse might emerge—maybe I’d have to get used to this, get close to these guys, figure out a way to esc
ape. Or maybe it wouldn’t be so rough—I’d at least have some company with those five guys, if I stayed with them through what would come, with those five spent and stinking bodies, so I’d need to see them without repugnance, be able to put an arm around them, talk to them, hatch a plan or something with those ugly, spent men.

  When it gets light out I’ll turn to the interior of the cell, and the newspaper with the story about me will be passing from hand to hand, and this will calm me, restore my sleep, because the five will see proof that I am one of them.

  The day was breaking as I walked around the cell, and for every eye that opened, every stretch, yawn, fart, belch, I was there watching, and I did the same myself, stretched, yawned, pretended to fart, belched, and this was how I managed to penetrate that set of ugly, spent bandits.

  A prison bitch with a turban on her head appeared on the other side of the bars and passed a newspaper to one of the prisoners: the paper was already open to the police blotter, and there was my photo—me seated there in front of the sheriff, my busted sneaker—and beside my photo a three-by-four-inch portrait of Mariana.

  I didn’t get to read anything written in the story, not even the headline, I only had time to see the photos—I wanted to take advantage of the bitch’s presence somehow, so I could, I don’t know, say I needed to talk with the sheriff, so maybe she could do me a favor and talk to him. Sure, the bitch replied, smiling—she couldn’t stop smiling.

  Do me a favor, I repeated, and the urge to shake the bars came over me—I went as far as clenching the bars, but as I was about to shake them the urge to vomit overtook me and I stopped.

  I saw that the bitch had taken off. My cellmates were making a big commotion with the newspaper, calling me a retard and letting out the strangest cackles—the way I’d like to laugh if I were so bold.

  In that cell retard became my name. I went closer and mentioned taking the newspaper from them. They held me down and started tickling me, poking me, yanking on my dick—one had huge fingernails, he could only scrape when he touched me. In the middle of the confusion someone bit my hand, CHARGE! I yelled, and I threw myself headlong into one of their black leather jackets, I headbutted two, three times against the jacket of I couldn’t tell which prisoner, my head spun, and then my eyes hurt. I felt like I was on the verge of the flu.