Harmada
HARMADA
Other titles by João Gilberto Noll available from Two Lines Press
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Atlantic Hotel
Quiet Creature on the Corner
HARMADA
João Gilberto Noll
Translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto
Originally published as Harmada
© 2013 by João Gilberto Noll
Translation © 2020 by Edgar Garbelotto
Two Lines Press
582 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94104
www.twolinespress.com
ISBN: 978-1-949641-05-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-949641-06-6
Cover design by Gabriele Wilson
Cover photo © Ralph Gibson
Typeset by Jessica Sevey
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Noll, João Gilberto, author. | Garbelotto, Edgar, translator.
Title: Harmada / João Gilberto Noll; translated by Edgar Garbelotto. Other titles: Harmada. English | Description: San Francisco, CA: Two Lines Press, [2020] | Translated into English from Portuguese. | Summary: “A former actor is on a journey that explores essential questions about identity, the power of art, the vanity of glory, and the meaning of life.” --Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020007856 (print) | LCCN 2020007857 (ebook) | ISBN 9781949641059 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781949641066 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PQ9698.24.O44 H3713 2020 (print) |
LCC PQ9698.24.O44 (ebook) | DDC 869.3/42--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007856
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007857
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Nobody sees me here. I can lie down on the ground at last, and delight in the earth that has turned to mud after the storm.
Something hits my shoulder. I lift my head and roll onto my back. Next to me, a soccer ball. Farther off, a boy—the owner of the ball.
I grab the ball, urgently. I look at the boy, but I don’t want to get up. I keep lying on the ground, all muddy. The boy looks at me, then fixes his gaze on the ball locked in my hands. His expression gives no indication that he’s scared to see me in this state.
“What is it, boy?” I ask.
“Nothing, my ball…”
“What’s up with your ball?”
“It’s there,” he points at my hands.
“Oh, here…”
I looked at my hands. And then I threw the ball.
The boy caught it.
I stood up.
“I hurt my leg playing soccer today. I need to put a bandage on before I go to bed. I can’t see the wound very well, it’s back here.”
The boy let this information out mechanically, indifferently, as if he was just saying something to fill the void.
But I decided to take him seriously. I bent over and pressed on his calf near the wound. He yelped, I said it was almost nothing, and I looked up to see a bit of disappointment in his eyes; there was an orange halo around him—the sun was rising on the horizon over some river nearby…
“Some river,” I murmured, distracted.
“What?”
“Some river,” I repeated.
“I swam a lot before the game,” he said.
I got very close to the boy’s wound. I felt a repulsive taste in my empty mouth, and spat right into the middle of the wound.
“This is good,” I affirmed, resolutely. “The people of Mesopotamia treated their wounds like this. This is very good.”
The boy squinted, bit his lower lip, bent his leg, and looked down at it.
“The cure lies within, that was the way in Mesopotamia,” I insisted.
After that, the boy sort of emptied himself out, right there in front of me… His body was still whole, yes, with its wound and all, but he seemed somehow hollow. I’m not sure. What I know is that he started walking away until he joined a trail in the midst of the brush, leaving footprints behind him which a small wind quickly erased, covering the marks from his tennis shoes with dead leaves, dried grass, twigs…
I heard the faint noise of raindrops, which may have been dripping into a reflecting pool. Sometimes the noise was more like a dry beat, as if the drops were falling on a zinc surface, perhaps a can. Whatever it was, it had a sharp tone, a defined duration, and it was able to calm me down.
It was then that I decided to curl around a tree trunk…and I fell asleep.
Once in a while I felt an insect bite my skin, I would then slap that spot, open my eyes, looking right into a crack in the trunk, where the tree’s interior was kind of lugubriously and slowly being devoured, but I didn’t move, choosing to subject any inconvenience that could arise in that thicket to my exhaustion; I dreamed about something I don’t remember very well now, but I recall a shapeless force that was strong enough to drag me down, and that—despite being frightened at first—the thing that debased me was not turning me into an apostate per se, but was dissolving my self inside something like a warm passage that reminded me, astonishingly, of a sexual orgasm. This was such a large truth that I woke up at the exact moment of a nocturnal emission. I wanted to confirm it, so I touched my groin, and it was wet.
I managed to untangle myself from the undergrowth; everything perplexed me a little: Were these my nails I was looking at, these open hands, these stretched fingers, these long, long nails, as if I hadn’t clipped them in months? I almost didn’t recognize the house where, at that moment, I seemed to be heading, now, there, just a few steps from it. Is that you? she asked when she saw me opening the door, her hands on the table, her hair blonde and straight, Sandra. I said, You know, Sandra, I need a bath, you know? And a soft song started playing, I think it was coming from the neighbor’s, and I could’ve said the wind, and I could’ve said the fog, and what else could I have said? That I was back and bringing lots of gifts—I just needed to get them from the car, but I was dirty, covered in earth, so I said I needed to take a bath.
As I walked by the bedroom, I saw a man inside, sitting on the bed. I went in, closing the door behind me. The man moved as if to get up.
I opened the door again, controlling my laugh.
Instead of continuing on to the bathroom to turn on the shower, I went back to the main room. Sandra was working on a painting. I got closer—there was a paint-stained cloth, I wiped my mouth with it.
I don’t know how to describe that house, there was nothing in it that was worthwhile, except for maybe that woman painting shadows in a way that seemed filled with electricity. That’s what I said:
“These shadows seem full of electricity.”
I grabbed some clothes I had forgotten in the corner of the room a few months ago. A cold shower to get clean and cool off—that’s what I needed. I was a lumberjack, a bearded man reflected in the glass shower door wearing a yellow baseball cap with a phrase I couldn’t read. That man was all about trying to knock down a dead tree with a hatchet, a bit of hay stuck in his mouth…but this shower, I thought, look at the dirty soup going down the drain…
I could laugh, so that’s what I did, I laughed. No, it wasn’t in front of the mirror, it wasn’t in that bathroom, it was in the tavern where I now found myself, leaning against the bar, talking to the young man who was serving me. He was telling me he had just finished his military service.
“Oh,” I said, “not me. I entered the headquarters only once, on the day of conscription, with that long line of naked men, and when my turn came I said to the doctor: I lost my left eye pretending I was a pirate when I was a kid, this one here is made of glass, a boy stuck a wooden sword through my retina
and I saw blood gush out—it didn’t even hurt at first. The doctor told me to join the line for the men exempted for physical and mental impairment.”
That is when I laughed. I laughed, and the young man seemed to laugh a little, too. To be honest, I don’t really remember if he laughed or not. What I do know is that, while I was laughing, I noticed a guy sitting next to me with his elbows on the bar, and that guy seemed interested in laughing with me, that’s how it looked at least, for he was sort of giving off an accomplice-like air, but no matter what it was, the guy was signaling something that—to anyone with good intentions—might have been the preamble of a laugh, perhaps. He wasn’t asking me for company, that wasn’t quite it, but I understood something deep inside him was waiting for a chance, and that chance was right there in front of him, and it could only come from me and nobody else.
Lightning bolts ripped the sky. We were walking down a dirt road, and he offered me his handkerchief, which looked white against the dark night, so I could wipe the sweat that was getting into my eyes. He had just wiped away his own sweat with the handkerchief he now offered me—the man was expressing a gesture of solidarity in his own way, by offering me that handkerchief soaked with his sweat. I thanked him but refused the handkerchief. I pulled up the collar of my shirt and wiped the sweat from my forehead with that, nose, chin; the man had a bum leg, he limped, but he didn’t limp to the point where I needed to slow down so we could walk side by side; no, I walked normally, or almost. He dragged that leg along at a regular pace and nothing really seemed to weigh heavily on him, until we got to a wet and slippery patch, which, of course, made it more difficult for him to walk; at some point the man even grabbed my hand so he wouldn’t fall. An animal roared from within the thicket, and I asked him what that noise was to test his familiarity with the environment, he replied that it was a subá. What? I asked. A subá, a nocturnal bird, he said, and at that moment we found ourselves at the edge of a steadily flowing river, the lush canopy of a silk floss tree over our heads, and on the other side of the river, at the top of a high, steep slope, a man was fishing with a rod and hook; it was not possible to quite discern him except that he wore a hat and a dark cloak down to his ankles, and the crippled man next to me said, Look over there, it’s him. Him who? I asked. He’s always fishing in that spot at night, he replied, shush, don’t make any noise, and the fisherman was suddenly illuminated by a moonlight that ripped through the ominous clouds and tried to impose itself on the impending storm, lightly brightening the river, the current, the crippled man, and the fisherman, and I asked myself: Will we stay here for the whole night? And suddenly I realized that inquiring at all about that night would have no practical benefit for me, would not lead me to any precise outcomes, nor would it prevent them, either—the truth is that I was there, accompanied by a crippled individual who was walking along the edge of the river as if he wanted to move out of the fisherman’s field of view; yes, I was accompanied by that individual who was walking, yes, on the river’s bank, compelling me to follow, even more so because it wasn’t inconvenient at all for me to follow him rather than go some other place…such as heading back to the bar, sitting down, leaning on the bar, listening to the young man talk about his military service…no, there was nothing better to do than to continue following the disabled guy along the edge of the river, which now glinted here and there in the moonlight, and I tried to evoke some supposedly distant relatives, some ancestors disappeared in the dust of time, or a friend who had been submerged in my memory, I tried to evoke any figure I could lean on, so I’d feel less odd with this stranger who was limping and walking in front of me; but no, it was fine this way: I, one stranger, and he, another, and I was learning, right there, about a state of pure detachment, action without premeditation.
We arrived at a bend in the river and couldn’t see where its course led any longer. There was the moon—the moon that brightened everything so much—and if I stretched my neck maybe I could see a good portion of the stream further down. But it was a seriously sharp curve, and the crippled man had finally decided to stop, as if avoiding what might come beyond.
So, he stopped. And he began to undress. He asked me to do the same, telling me I was about to experience how wonderful the river water felt on a hot night like this, and he said that the threat of rain had passed, and he just wanted to see us in the water, listening to the sound of the current, tucked into that water, like that…
As he said like that, I noticed that he was already naked, with water up to his knees. I had nothing else to do except start undressing, too. Each instant of the operation was filled with a wacky self-awareness: I unbuttoned my shirt as if unbuttoning a shirt was a timeless art; I unzipped my pants very slowly, as if only upon opening the zipper of my pants would I be entitled to earn the prize I had yearned my whole life for, and then the shoes… I let out a light sigh when I saw my naked feet, and before I got rid of my pants I discreetly rubbed my toes, and upon entering the river I realized I was in for a real bath. Yes, the water could be called cold, that was a fact, because rivers don’t absorb heat from the sun, the current in its continuous and prideful movement doesn’t give any quarter to the seemingly unmerciful sun; yes, the water was cold, but that coldness assailed my blood, urging it to do something…maybe I should keep diving deeper, with severe determination, into the waters of that night.
In that bright boulevard, I heard an echo of a radiant tone reverberate, moved, I thought, by a light that was more intense than the light from the boulevard I was passing through, and I figured I could belong to the next breath of wind, so I got ready (made as if straightening the collar of my shirt, my hair) to let myself be taken away… I don’t know where these words came from, if from memory or a momentary fever, what I know is that they came into my head as I took my first steps on the river’s rocky bottom—muddy in several places. The crippled man waved to me with both his arms. He was already in the middle of the current, and I thought that as soon as I got close to him I would have a strange realization not only about that man, but about everything, which made me conclude that it’d be good if I just reached that point in the middle, finally approaching whatever it was that I still couldn’t see.
And there was the crippled man, old and ugly, unpleasant in his deformity, never showing the slightest elegance in his movements, beckoning me with his arms in cloying signs, lacking the sovereign abundance of the river—that river whose inner nature ignored the sun, the sky, the stars, and the moon, didn’t give a damn about the two of us bathing in its waters, didn’t even give a damn about the fish and animals traveling in its guts—the river just haughtily flowed, and in front of me was the man, now just a few steps away. That crippled weight now grabbed onto me and pulled me and brought me close to him, he whom I was trying to repel with my last force, whose crazy screams I was trying to confront with my own screams. Yes, and the crippled man now shuddered, finally backing away from me, and he frantically moved his head and eyes and arms around, and he, suddenly, without me understanding why or how—and apparently without any reason—yes, suddenly, I repeat, leaving me stupefied and unresponsive, the crippled man disappeared in a puff! Out of the blue, yes! He disappeared under the water. I waited one, two minutes and he never came back; I don’t know if he was dragged under by an animal or sucked into a hole along the bank of the river, I don’t know. What I know is that I never saw him again, I even dove four or five times, going quite deep and carried by the current, eyes wide, but I was unable to see anything that I could say was him! I surfaced and I was already past the bend in the river, where the waters were more violent, so I didn’t hesitate and with difficulty I reached the bank, frantic, my heart coming out of my mouth. I sat on the riverbank. I looked at the moon and resumed breathing.
I stayed still like that for quite a while, thinking about what had happened, trying to take stock of those events, wondering if my memory was indeed composed of real events, by facts that surfaced in the seconds and minutes of that still-not-so
-late night, or whether it was all the result of a brief collapse between the appearance of things and the intimate reality of things, that nothing was actually quite what it seemed—the crippled man had not disappeared, perhaps he hadn’t even existed. I didn’t know what I was doing near that flowing river, underneath that starry sky, that moon, probably nothing even existed, maybe it was all a mental secretion originating in whatever ingrained motivations I had in me. It was necessary—I began to toy with this idea—it was only necessary that I get up and search for my clothes, which shouldn’t be far away, and I get dressed and get out of that undergrowth; only that movement was necessary, and I could at last leave everything behind, forgetting the crippled man for good—dissolve him in my thoughts the same way that he had dissolved in those river waters before my very eyes.
I was dizzy when I got up and felt a disturbance in my spine, as if a burning stem ran through it—not a discomfort per se, but rather the sensation of a nuisance mixed with a latent enjoyment… I got up, nevertheless, trying not to hold on to anything that would prevent me from getting to my clothes: my pants, my underwear, my shirt that I had now found; yes, and that I now wore, thinking only this: I need to get out of this thicket as soon as possible and bury everything I have just witnessed deep inside. Not that I was feeling responsible for how things had transpired out there, let alone guilty, but I wished that none of it had happened, because the images somehow sabotaged a certain, let’s say, placidity, that’s it, placidity, which I had in the past few months been looking for, especially since the thing happened that caused me to decide to explore this region looking for this: what I just called placidity.
And then out of the blue had come that crippled man, guiding me into the turbulent current of this river—ruining everything…
I passed the spot where I had seen the fisherman on the far bank with his hook and his hat, wearing a dark cloak that looked like nylon…but the man was gone. I stopped. I looked around, not really trying to find him still fishing, no…what crossed my mind was a strange distrust. Maybe the fisherman knew more than I did, and now he was spying on me and controlling me, that’s what I thought.