Harmada Read online

  “Who is this boy?”

  My inquiries were fading… I felt myself fading…

  The night was made for that fading. It was a gentle relief, like the chant coming out of the chapel. A chant whose lyrics I no longer recognized.

  I leaned on the windowsill, my head in the open air. Between the low branches in the convent’s garden, I saw a ball made of patchwork, perhaps left by a child who had thrown it there and then abandoned it.

  A few minutes later, the ball was no longer visible, the night had gotten darker.

  And when everything seemed to be fading away, the boy shouted. He shouted behind me with all his lungs.

  I turned around. The boy grabbed my arms and began to shake them, fiercely.

  I tasted hot blood in my mouth. I reminded myself that the blood might be dripping from my nose.

  There was no more singing coming from the chapel. There was no garden anymore. No night. There was almost nothing.

  There was just a stage with a single delicate spotlight following the random steps of the mute boy, who enters wearing a red shirt.

  Upon reaching the center of the stage, the mute boy stops and lets out the same scream he’s screaming now, as he shakes my arms with unexpected strength.

  I pull my arms away from his grip. I light a candle.

  The boy stops screaming.

  I start making hand signals as if I’ve always had a mastery of sign language.

  I tell him a long story that takes place in Persia, full of knights, monsters, and ghosts at the bends of roads…

  A disgraceful lightning bolt cuts a child in two on his mother’s lap; a white horse neighs; in the distance, a purple glare in the sky.

  Swordsmen hang on by a thread in the duel atop the castle wall.

  The eternal lady enters the lake. She drowns herself. Deep in the water, she discovers that death is a dream. Creatures with imprecise anatomy surround her and invite her to attend a black dinner of pebbles softened by slime.

  The hero encounters so many adventures that the boy feels as if he’s surrounded by so many goodies and he doesn’t know which one to pick.

  Suddenly, I feel my hands go numb; they’re tired. I take a handkerchief from my pocket.

  I wipe the sweat off my hands.

  The day rises.

  The boy has fallen asleep on the living room floor.

  I extinguish the candle’s flame with my fingers.

  I go to the window and breathe the thin morning air.

  “Don’t abandon me, I want more…”

  My voice came out like a wave breaking near the shore, as if it were coming from the womb of the high sea, and suddenly, without having time to prepare, surfaced and hurled itself toward the beach, growing shallower and thinner as it approached, then weakening, seeping into the sand.

  “Don’t abandon me, I want more…”

  My voice once again was a near-inaudible sound in the thin morning air.

  Up ahead, beyond the convent, the mountain was turning green under the sun.

  “Don’t abandon me, I want more…”

  Again I heard my request. It seemed that I was discovering a mantra…

  And before I spoke again, I noticed the air: there were some…remnants…scant, very light, almost transparent, floating around.

  It was the first time I was seeing these floating, shapeless, shifting remnants, and I blew, I blew in the air, realizing that the remnants flew away… Some of them were gone or in pieces; others seemed to resist for a little longer, but only for a short time, until they too began to gradually crumble…

  The mountain, up ahead, turning green under the sun.

  When I turn around, I see the apartment door is open. The boy’s no longer sleeping on the floor. He is nowhere in the apartment.

  I run down the stairs. He left the door of the building wide open.

  I see the boy standing at the corner. I walk up to him. He looks at me. My breaths increase in frequency.

  One of us has to cross the street, so we can face each other. But a column of running soldiers passes between us wearing shorts and T-shirts. They breathlessly scream drunken-sounding words in the thin morning air, and run to the rhythm of those words. The last ones in the group laugh and trade light punches with each other.

  They pass. The boy is still standing across the street.

  Then comes the sound of a parading band at an intersection two blocks away. The band plays Harmada’s anthem.

  I remember it’s a holiday, Harmada’s anniversary.

  I cross the street. I look at my hands. I stretch and bend my fingers to exercise them.

  I raise my hands, willingly. I start signing, telling the boy that today is Harmada’s anniversary.

  It’s the date on which a man arrives by boat at a beach. This man is coming from a war, wounded on one arm.

  He gets out of the boat holding his injured arm, and falls to his knees. Drops of blood on the sand.

  He thinks: I will found a city on this land. I’ll partner up with the first woman I find. If she’s still too young, I’ll wait for her to grow up so she can have a child with me. I just need her to be a woman and I just need to be with her when she’s of child-bearing age.

  The sun looked more or less like the one right now, the morning grown mature. And the man looks up, almost drowns his sight in the sun. At the point of losing his balance in golden vertigo, he stands.

  I’m Pedro Harmada, he shouts, hoping someone will hear him.

  I’m going up that hill, he says.

  And he sticks a bayonet he brought from the war into the top of the hill.

  A few feet away from our corner, a group of students was leaving school with little city flags in their hands.

  The students seemed shy; their little flags barely fluttered in the air.

  But the band was still playing. The musicians seemed determined to convey it was a day to party in Harmada.

  The boy grabbed my hand and led me away, far, many blocks away from where we had been.

  We came to a dead-end street in the old part of town. There was a three-story building. It was an old, dark, and astonishingly damp construction—from cracks in the façade, thin, slow water seeped, continuously…

  The boy took my hand again and pointed to the doorbell, which he couldn’t reach.

  I agreed to play what might just be a silly children’s game, and rang the bell.

  A young man answered. He was wearing black pants, no shirt.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  I looked at the boy, waiting to receive some sign from him so I could invent something to say.

  No words came out of my mouth. I seemed to be contaminated by the boy’s silence.

  “Yes?” the man asked again.

  The boy and I looked at each other. I realized that no help would come from him; nothing that would show me what to think or say.

  “Yes, I’m Pedro Harmada,” the man said, and he opened the door wider.

  JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL (1946–2017) is the author of nearly twenty books. His work appeared in Brazil’s leading periodicals, and he was a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, King’s College London, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. A five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, and the recipient of more than ten awards in all, he died in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the age of seventy.

  EDGAR GARBELOTTO is a writer and translator born in Brazil and based in the U.S. for the past twenty years. His translation of João Gilberto Noll’s novel Lord was published by Two Lines Press in 2019. His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Asymptote, Ninth Letter, Little Patuxent Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Illinois. Terra Incognita, written in both Portuguese and English, is his debut novel.

 

 

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