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  LORD

  Other titles by João Gilberto Noll available from Two Lines Press

  Atlantic Hotel

  Quiet Creature on the Corner

  LORD

  João Gilberto Noll

  Translated from Brazilian Portuguese

  by Edgar Garbelotto

  Originally published as Lorde

  © 2004 by João Gilberto Noll

  Translation © 2019 by Edgar Garbelotto

  Two Lines Press

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

  www.twolinespress.com

  ISBN 978-1-931883-79-5

  Cover design by Gabriele Wilson

  Cover photo © Jeff Cottenden

  Typeset by Sloane | Samuel

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Noll, João Gilberto, author. | Garbelotto, Edgar, translator.

  Title: Lord / João Gilberto Noll ; translated by Edgar Garbelotto.

  Other titles: Lorde. English

  Description: San Francisco, CA : Two Lines Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018023930 | ISBN 9781931883795 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Acculturation--Fiction. | Brazil--Fiction. | Urban fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ9698.24.O44 L6713 2019 | DDC 869.3/42--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023930

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This book was published with the support of the Ministry of External Relations of Brazil in cooperation with the National Library Foundation / Ministry of Culture (obra publicada com apoio do Ministério das Relações Exteriores do Brasil em cooperação com a Fundação Biblioteca Nacional / Ministério da Cultura) and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  For

  Mia, Angela and David Treece,

  Aquiles Alencar Brayner,

  Christopher J. Connolly,

  Jens Andermann,

  Nancy P. Naro,

  John Gledson,

  Claire Williams,

  Felipe Fortuna

  and

  Fernando Nonohay,

  Vera Rosenthal, Wagner Carelli

  CONTENTS

  Lord

  The secret interiors of these post-human fortresses solicit conspiracy, acts of sexual transgression. Illicit exchanges between dealers.

  —Iain Sinclair, London Orbital

  I exited customs pulling two heavy bags, a backpack hanging from my shoulder. I didn’t even think of looking at the people behind the rail, waiting for arriving passengers. All of a sudden, I felt amazingly calm. If he didn’t show up, I’d go to a cheap little hotel and return to Brazil the following day. I’d keep on walking down the hall, having those expectant shadows behind the rail by my side—those who always seem to have nothing else to do but wait sedentarily for the ones who don’t stop moving, departing and arriving. I had arrived at Heathrow Airport in London. An Englishman had invited me for some kind of mission. Although he had sent me the tickets from Porto Alegre to São Paulo to London…I don’t know, something was telling me he wouldn’t come through. That it wouldn’t matter if I called him at either of the numbers he gave me, one his office, the other his residence. That from that moment on those London numbers wouldn’t belong to him anymore; maybe they didn’t even exist in the city’s listings. Walking down the endless hall that would certainly take me to the airport’s exits and taxis, I knew ruminating about all of it was to pick at an open wound that needed to heal. I was in London now, for a special reason, the Englishman had invited me. But it seemed very unlikely that he’d show up at the airport or in any other part of that city in mid-winter—winter that I still hadn’t felt inside that airport with its artificial climate, insulated from the world outside. He perhaps intended to take advantage of my gullibility with his invitation, though he didn’t know that I don’t suffer from gullibility per se. I’d tortured myself with doubts about the trip up to the day of my departure, mulling over the Englishman’s intentions. Yes, the truth was I didn’t have any choice. So I came. It seems easy to say, “So I came”—to be able and willing to suddenly cross the Atlantic, without having anything that needed my attention back home. But I can affirm this is one of the hardest things I’ve ever said in my not-so-short existence: “So I came.” I could have made excuses. But no. All I had to do was to swap my loneliness in Porto Alegre for my loneliness in London, and I’d have a little extra money to support myself while in England. He’d promised me a mission—hadn’t he?—a job like any other in principle, but I didn’t know exactly what kind of job; any improbable task could be waiting for me, and I wanted to believe, walking down the airport’s hall, I wanted to believe I was ready for him not to show up and to spend the night in a cheap room in Soho, perhaps, unable to stay one more single day outside Brazil—with only thirty pounds in my pocket and maybe not even that.

  I could stay put on a bench at the airport, thinking perhaps that he would still come to pick me up. I had met him only once, in Rio, when he asked me to please send my books to his address in London because he couldn’t find them in the bookstores he had visited that afternoon. He was returning to England the next day. He said he needed to understand something in my work—something that even I did not recognize but that had interested him for a number of years—he was writing a book about it. If I’m not mistaken, his book was about the senses. Was that it? Well, if not, I won’t mention it again, I told myself as I dragged my bags toward an exit where he’d be waiting to tell me about my first assignment: where to go…where I’d be living…and maybe I’d never leave again, who knows?

  I saw a public phone and a young woman selling phone cards behind a counter. I still had the crumpled piece of paper with his numbers in my shirt pocket. When I touched the startlingly cold receiver, I heard a voice behind me. I turned around as if I already knew who it was. The person whom I had started to not understand. I stood in front of him. I, who had lived all those years, let’s say naked, in Brazil, without friends, barely making a living from my books, writing in short bursts, going through rough patches and doing all sorts of juggling to hide my material precariousness—hiding it for what exactly I don’t know, since I saw almost nobody in Porto Alegre. Yes, during the interviews for the release of my last book, I put on an act: I am going to spend some time in London, representing Brazil…I’ll do my best—the guffaw rising in my trachea but not coming out…do you understand?

  We looked at each other. We said each other’s names as if it were necessary to confirm we were present. To reassure ourselves. We clasped hands. His were cold, but not as much as the phone. It was cold in London, he said. It had snowed the day before.

  He said we were on our way to the train station. He pointed me toward a large glass door. He said we’d go by train to the city center and take a taxi from there.

  Where would we end up? I wanted to ask him. I knew deep down that he’d be in charge of everything up until a certain point, and whatever needed to be done would be—maybe not necessary to my benefit, but it would become evident that it was the most sensible thing to be done regardless of whether I could handle what was coming. The orders would come from him until I could…not dismiss him, no, never that…but hold on to some autonomy, which would always be limited…that I knew, too. After all, I was in a country I’d never been to before, and I lacked the youth that might make me easily adapt.

  We looked at each other in the train station, bags at our feet; there was no one around. He said that we’d stop by his work. There was an empty office because his colleague was on vacation, and I could rest there until he took me to my new home in Hackney, north London. Hackney, I repeated in silence, as if the sonorous pronunciation would give me some kind of guarant
ee I still couldn’t name. And what might I want any guarantee about? To be happier than I’d ever known happiness could be? To die late, after I’d become totally destroyed, or to take fewer and fewer risks until life became inoffensive? No, this man represented no danger to me. Neither did the city of London, which I was ready to take in. I didn’t need any guarantees.

  From the black hole to our left, I heard the ever more intense rumble of the train that would take us to the city center. The train was long, so it took a while for a car to come to a stop in front of us. We got on and put my bags on the luggage rack.

  This man could be a companion in the numb center of my hopelessness, which I had long ago stopped waiting for. Why in fact did he call me in my hometown in southern Brazil? Why did he beg me to come to London on a mission that sounded so special?

  Our breath escaping through our thick coats was the only thing that existed between us for a long part of the journey. An Englishman and a Brazilian, having so much to say, in principle, about the imminent arrival of one of them in that immense city. But now, on the train, all we felt was the barely discernable movement of two bodies living alone, without any surprises.

  We’re here, he said, and we had to pull the bags through another gigantic, crowded train station until we arrived at a taxi line. A black man was trying to organize the line with a placard or something in his hand. He said something I didn’t understand, possibly in an accent from the Caribbean. My English companion said the man was telling us to go to the spot marked with a number one on a sign at the curb. We’d be next.

  Was it cold? Not really. An inner voice whispered to me that if I ran along a wire fence following an airplane landing at a forgotten airport in Scotland or Ireland, if I ran—scratching my nails along the wire fence that separated the road from the runway—then yes, I’d feel real cold in my nostrils, but I wouldn’t otherwise.

  Side by side, my English companion and I were already seated in a typical London taxi, with ample space between our legs and the driver’s cabin for our bags, which remained comfortably in view.

  Where were we going again? Oh, to his work. I’d wait for an hour or two in the silent office of his vacationing colleague, the bags resting in the corner of the room. I needed to repeat it all to myself so nothing would escape me, no act, no chapter, so if I needed to testify to the authorities in the case that this Englishman—who even now looked like my benefactor—suddenly failed me, and yes, disappeared forever, even after saying he would take me to his office… Was he really going to open his life to a stranger? Anything could happen, maybe he was bluffing; I’ve seen it all in this world: people of all kinds, some of whom take revenge on entire nationalities, in this case Brazilians, because they never lack for a reason, always having one; I don’t doubt that I could do the same if I were him; I would leave me alone in London, without the money (what he had called a fellowship) or any way to pay rent for the house in Hackney; I would leave me just like that, with offering my wrists to the first policeman to handcuff me, deport me…or even worse, never let me go.

  But there we were, pulling my bags once again up the ramp behind a large building, three, four stories high, close to London’s center, after we’d passed Buckingham Palace, St. James’s, and so on, in the taxi. There we were, dragging my bags up the staircase, there was no elevator in the centuries-old building. It all seemed like a difficult stage we had to get through before another stage could begin.

  He stopped in a narrow hall and showed me his name on an office door. I didn’t read it. I was distracted looking at his ring. He turned and pointed me to the office where I’d wait for him, for an hour or so. We put the bags in the corner of the room. There was a table with chairs around it, as if people attended classes here, small lectures, meetings with a department head, etc. The walls were covered with books. I trailed my hand over them as if to confirm the reality I was living in. Though I knew I was not living an unreality per se—like those born out of a simple dream and ending up in a nightmare, which we can only escape from when we wake up sweaty, trembling, and confused.

  I knew I would be alone in that room. I could sleep if I wanted to, or read a book—I passed my eyes over their spines, ascertaining that most were Portuguese editions about Portuguese subjects. I knew I’d have to justify to someone the reason for my presence in London someday, waiting for the Englishman to give me instructions as soon as he finished his meeting in an hour or so, even if the task for now was just to go to Hackney—that distant neighborhood in the north of London, full of Vietnamese and Turkish immigrants, outside of what the travel brochures usually showed on the city maps.

  There was a gigantic volume on one of the shelves. I could barely hold it in my hands, still trembling from the weight of the luggage. The title was Expansionism. I was frightened to have picked it out from among all the other volumes. I don’t know if it was because of its theme or its physical grandness, but it looked like it kept expanding moment by moment. I couldn’t keep up with its weight, I must confess. I struggled to put it back in its place on the shelf. After all, what good would it do me to snoop around Portuguese Expansionism, a dead subject, when I had to prepare myself for the task that required so much more from me than I felt I could offer? Or would the task require nothing besides the fact of living in Hackney and keeping my name to a certain quality as a guarantee for a circle of English people to whom I still had no access?

  Looking at it a different way, was I really representing Brazil? I had written my books, yes, but what could they possibly reveal that was not already familiar to anyone born and raised in the country I had just arrived in without knowing exactly what for?

  Nobody knew the exact reasons a Frenchman chose to live in Scandinavia or a Russian dreamed about the vines of Chile. Who could know me? A deluded Brazilian who suddenly found himself surrounded by the Portuguese editions of a poet and scholar from Lisbon on vacation in the Algarve (it seemed), and whose name I couldn’t remember because my mind had started to forget names. One could suspect that I was experiencing a sneak attack of amnesia, or becoming a victim of Alzheimer’s.

  But nobody here would suspect that they had brought a man to their country who had started to forget. They? Or only that one crazy Englishman, hatching a plan in the name of some institution where he only pretended he worked? Pretending to me and me alone because he had noticed I was already living in forgetfulness. Perhaps it would be better for his project if I died without ever knowing the name of this place, or even a simple thread I could follow to arrive at something that might make some sense to me.

  Besides, had I been in any condition to decline his invitation? How would I be living back in Brazil in three, four months, if all my attempts to live beyond my books continued to fail? Yes, I was going through a dangerous bout of writer’s block.

  Yes, all that was left for me was to pose, ineffably, as the proprietor of the books I’d written, and to believe with conviction that they had gained some kind of prestige both inside and outside my country because of some translations. All that was left for me was to come here before I had to start screaming in vain for help.

  Then the Englishman opened the door of the aforementioned Portuguese poet and scholar’s office. I was asleep. I opened my eyes. I didn’t recognize him at first. Was I home? Who was this blond man who had entered the room? A visitor of mine? For the first time he smiled openly.

  For a moment, I wished I were home in Porto Alegre. I wished I didn’t have to continue this journey, drag my bags God knows how much longer, to the farthest suburb in the city, enclave of the immigrants who were most deprived of those luxuries of the city’s center that I saw out of the corners of my eyes as I was coming from Heathrow and talking to the Englishman, who was casually showing me some of the landscape, as I plated my role of attentive visitor.

  The taxi drove along Old Street and then Hackney Road; more and more warehouses and factories filled the view. Then we arrived, finally, at my address on Mare Street. My apartment was on
a corner, on the second floor above a Vietnamese restaurant. The restaurant’s owner was the one renting the place in the name of the Englishman or his institution. I was going to live there.

  An outside corridor behind the restaurant—completely dark in the early evening of a London winter—did not allow any door to be seen. It’s here… The Englishman spoke with the knowledge of someone who had already visited the rooms I was about to inhabit. Oh, and there was a pallid moon under which purple clouds swiftly passed by as if in a rush to get somewhere.

  Yes, I could see two locks. He showed me where the keyholes were. But he didn’t take the keys from my hand. He let me try them myself since this would become my daily routine: open my apartment door in London, in a remote neighborhood, with tiny brick-walled houses to my right, each with a little garden in front. A long, unending street.

  Every room had its corresponding cleaning supplies. In the hall that led to a staircase was a bucket with a blue liquid already prepared inside of it; a broom with rags was beside it. In the bathroom were rubber gloves, a big brush, and detergent to clean the bathtub, which looked immaculate, almost new. Same in the kitchen: more yellow gloves, sponges, and detergents on the counter. In the living room and bedroom: brooms.

  It was time for me to thank him. After all, the first journey was concluded and I was in my new home, which I wouldn’t have to pay for. If the Vietnamese landlord showed up at my door at the end of the month, I’d just have to say, “They’re paying the rent, utilities, all of it,” as if every stage of what I was living through in England wasn’t just some sort of joke, which I wouldn’t be able to solve except by offering myself to be handcuffed, without even a chance for deportation.

  He said he’d like to show me the neighborhood. He opened a map and pointed to Victoria Park, not too far away. I could take my morning walks there like I used to take every morning by the Guaíba River in Porto Alegre, between the Usina do Gasômetro and the Pôr do Sol Theater. He knew about my walks, but I didn’t remember telling him, if I even really had. He knew… I repeated silently. He knew everything I had already forgotten about myself. All I had lived until then seemed to be slipping away. Only what I was experiencing in that moment seemed to exist, the house I had to inhabit, the new language. My old language, with which I had been so intimate already seemed to be deserting me—except of course the general notion of it, or who knows, it might still provide me a little help in some extreme case, like if I were about to die I might still be able to pronounce a dear old word from my childhood, one of those words you don’t even know you have inside of you until it comes out when all the useless words of now drift away to the point where the hard edge of that sharp longing can reemerge in but one or two syllables.