Quiet Creature on the Corner Read online

  “The samba-in-Berlin went down harsh.”

  Well, I won’t be seeing Berlin this time, I reflected as Kurt passed some bills to the cabbie. But I need to man up, was what I whispered into my shirt collar, turning to see Rio for the last time, an arm’s length away from the open airport door.

  I took the napkin from that airport lunch counter and started to take down the poem, tapping on the bar with my fingers to the rhythm of the last lines I’d put on paper: A shot in the yard out front / A hardened fingernail scraping the tepid earth—and I went on like that for six or seven more lines.

  On the plane, the only open seats were separate from each other. I sat down and took a deep breath. Poor Kurt, I thought as the plane took off, poor everyone who had such a heavy burden. Kurt slept the whole way, seated three rows in front of me.

  About halfway through the flight, with my tray all messy and up against my chest, a glass of wine washing down my dessert, the flight attendant passed and smiled at me, and since we were going through some turbulence I gave her a bit of a yellow smile. When she passed by again maybe I would tell her I wrote poems—the start of a conversation that might interest her in me, since I ought to have kept in mind that I was no longer a young boy, but a man in the fullness of my functions in need of a woman to keep me company—Kurt would need to give his blessing to this union, preferably with a blonde girl like Gerda seemed she’d once been, he’d be so satisfied he’d give me half his fortune, opening the way not only to Germany but to who knows what other quadrants, and once I’d divorced the dumb blonde, a different woman in every hotel room.

  While we were waiting for our bags near the escalator in the Porto Alegre airport, I looked out the window onto the runway and saw our plane disgorge Gerda’s casket from the lower compartment of the plane, near the tail—the chestnut coffin was lowered down with ropes, as if it were being birthed from the entrails of some gigantic animal, the coffin, and inside it Gerda, whom I’d savagely bitten the night before—I don’t know if the person who washed and dressed her noticed the marks my teeth left on I don’t remember what part of her body, all I know is that she moaned, cried, seconds later shouted, My God, looked me in the eye for the first time, deeply, then died.

  Across the runway, two men were pushing a sort of litter onto which they’d place the coffin.

  It was a sunny day, just one or two clouds.

  A man in a white jumpsuit was coming down the runway, obviously some sort of airport official, he looked at me and seemed to understand, because he closed his eyes when he saw me, then threw his glance to the side, as though he’d already seen enough—I could still see that his expression had turned a bit nauseated, and when he looked in my direction again his gaze looked numbed, refusing to see.

  The late afternoon shadows had already insinuated themselves among the branches of the Protestant cemetery, the discreet headstones engraved almost exclusively with German names. Kurt and I were walking down a path and our steps made a cadence on the flagstones. Ahead of us, a gravedigger was pushing a little cart that carried Gerda’s casket. The wheels could’ve used an oiling, they made an infernal noise. From time to time the vision of an iron cross, stark, made my head pulse. Gerda’s grave just wouldn’t arrive. The gravedigger was really putting an effort into pushing the little cart, steeply bent over, his ass sticking out at us, pants straining at the seam between his enormous buttocks. I noticed it was getting darker. And the gravedigger started down another path.

  At that time of day it was hard to discern the bottom of the grave. The gravedigger asked Kurt if he’d like to open the casket one last time. Kurt shook his head no, and nearby a bell began to toll.

  I threw a shovelful of earth into the hole.

  We caught a taxi right there on what they called the melancholy hill, the city lights shining below, passing down the avenue with grave after grave on both sides of the road, I remembered the times I’d spend whole days up there, back when I lived in the Glória squat. All that seemed to have ended a long time ago, so long, but at the same time the memory galled me, made me want to vomit, stick my finger down my throat and expel all that detritus from my memory.

  Our arrival at the manor.

  The power was out. We lit lanterns.

  I found a horrible bug underneath the stove. It could have been a spider but it looked more like a hangman. I was on my knees and I smashed it with the base of my lantern. The moon was full. The low sky, clotted with stars, was coming in the kitchen window. December, but the night couldn’t be called warm—because it was windy. I was crawling along the kitchen tiles with lantern in hand, looking for something that Kurt couldn’t find. I was crawling across the kitchen without much hope for my search: he didn’t have the faintest idea of where I could find it. It was a December night, bright, so bright that I almost didn’t need a lantern.

  I knocked three times on the half-open door to Kurt’s room. I still had the lantern in my hand. In Kurt’s room there was another lantern. The lantern in Kurt’s room was on top of the nightstand. Kurt thanked me, said he’d already found what he was looking for. Do you need anything else? I asked. He said no, he didn’t need anything, he was going to sleep. If you need anything just give a shout, I said to the outline of his face.

  The night was also entering through my bedroom window. Kurt didn’t just listen to Bach in the car, he liked to hear Bach all day long, preferably while closed up in his room. That night he couldn’t listen to Bach because the power was out. The truck with no muffler passing by on the road belonged to a guy I knew, the son of the owner of a small farm on the other side of the tall hill. One time he rolled the truck nearby and messed up his leg. Of all the stars that one is the brightest, my eyes tear up when I face it, like now. Kurt’s already snoring. The power’s back on.

  I pick up the radio, pull the antenna way up. I turn out the light, lie down with the radio on my chest. I hear noises, interferences, spin the dial this way and that, voices from all over the world: a show in Portuguese coming from Moscow, Asian languages, French, English, German. One among the voices catches my attention, it speaks in Spanish and says: if you can hear me don’t change the station, stay where you are, keep everything intact and I’ll arrive in seconds to remake you, you will become another. Then comes a sort of ethereal music, the half-open door creaks like someone is pushing it, trying to get in, and the hand that’s now touching my arm suppresses me, and I know that I should annul myself in this way, without sorrow, so that another can come and take my place, I no longer exist here, I lack.

  I awoke in the morning clutching the radio to my chest, low music badly tuned in. In the mirror I saw that during the night a zit had formed above my eyebrow. Big, very red and inflamed. The first thought I had was if Kurt had brought Gerda’s things from Rio—what I wanted to know: if I could find her makeup things, foundation, that’s what women call the flesh-toned paste I needed to see if I could find to blot out my zit.

  Kurt was listening to Bach in his room. From six a.m. onward, he began to move implacably through his morning routine. So Kurt was in his room listening to Bach. I knocked three times on the closed door. He opened. I saw there was a woman inside with her back to the door. Leaning against the wall, looking down, like someone who felt sad, or maybe embarrassed—but from the thick black hair that fell down her shoulders and the way her left foot was resting on her right knee I had no doubts—is that Amália? I asked, and only later realized I’d pried into something before confirming what it was. Kurt said nothing—she turned and I saw her, fatter, her hips much wider—who knows where this penniless woman could have gone to return so corpulent, having left here a petite girl, almost unsatisfying, now returning so full of flesh.

  “Hi, Amália.”

  “Hi…”

  Then I took hold of a finger on my left hand, raised an eyebrow, and told Kurt that I’d hurt my finger opening a window, asked if I could get the mercurochrome from the bathroom in his room (something I sometimes did). Kurt nodded yes and
asked Amália to make him some coffee and see if the cow was still giving milk. And the two went out.

  I opened the bathroom closet, rummaged around, ended up finding the foundation. With my usual tendency to overdo it, I plastered my forehead with foundation. Now no one would ever imagine I had that damn zit.

  I went to find Amália. Not because her now-opulent flesh made her newly appealing in my eyes, nothing like that. It’s that a curiosity was gnawing me: to know what had happened to her, where she’d gone, with whom.

  Amália was trying to milk a cow that recalled one of those animals decaying on drought-scorched earth.

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  “I went crazy for one of the landless squatters, I followed him. I ended up pregnant, ran away, got bigger and bigger, so swollen that one day as I went through a little village I stopped in the pharmacy to weigh myself: two hundred and fifty-three pounds. I was ready to pop. I looked for my sister and found her right where I suspected, twenty miles away—she pulled the thing from my belly faster than I could have imagined—I didn’t stick around long, I ran away through the countryside with that thing in my arms and drowned it in the first river I came to. They caught me, imprisoned me, now I’m here.”

  “So then a long time really has gone by.” I affected fright, as though I was only then discovering it, at that instant.

  I ran my fingers through the thick paste of sweaty foundation that was almost running into my eye.

  “And the milk?” I asked.

  “The milk won’t come out.” Amália yanked the cow’s teats and made a strong expression of either rage or repugnance.

  Then the cow tottered, tottered, tried to take a few steps, fell back, collapsed, and upon collapsing, its bones made a muffled noise, as though there were soundproof glass between me and what I was watching.

  “Bye, Amália,” I said.

  As I neared the manor I saw the shape of a man on the porch, I could tell he was knocking on the door, a small suitcase at his feet—I saw Kurt open the door, the man entering, running his hand through his gray hair, and when the man ran his hand through his hair I understood it was Otávio with his old habit of running his hand through his grizzled hair.

  First Amália, now Otávio: they’re coming back, I thought, they don’t know how to live out from under Kurt’s wing, they tried to extricate themselves but came right back to the center of what they never should have left.

  And I, was I not another of Kurt’s charges? I couldn’t forget that he was already old, I didn’t have much time to get myself together and avoid ending up like the other two, stripped of everything that I’d managed to remake, far from here.

  “How’s your mother, Otávio?” I asked, taking his cold hand.

  “She died, just like Gerda died.”

  Otávio was wearing a panicked expression. He’d transformed into a worn-out old man, a lump, larger than an avocado, had formed on the back of his head. He could barely turn his head, and when he tried he grimaced horribly in pain.

  That afternoon I thought about appealing to Kurt’s heart, always so impassive, even with me, whom he seemed to hold in a certain esteem. So I invited Otávio to get some fresh air with me—he came along, and we went for a walk, he with a gimp leg, and when we got to the southern elevation I told him that tree over there is the finish line, that we’d play around a little, not exactly run like kids, just get him moving around a bit, try to warm up his rheumatic leg—come on, tag me, I said, and he came at me, dragging that leg, I ran backward, said come on, faster, I’m close to the line, he was gasping, exhausted from dragging his leg in my direction, drooling from pure excitement—Otávio, time had passed by him, too, plopped down, steadied one of his hands against a stone: Otávio’s tired, I said, he wants to go home, doesn’t he?

  When we got back, I asked Kurt to lend me the car for the first time. I need to go back to Porto Alegre, I said. You don’t have a driver’s license, he replied. I told him not to worry. Otávio was sitting on the porch steps, bending over to look at an anthill.

  I found a parking space on Riachuelo, and went walking down Borges. There, from Largo de Prefeitura all the way to Rua da Praia, a dense crowd was shouting. A windy night, a pamphlet blew between my legs. On the corner of Salgado Filho I asked a creole woman what was going on. She told me it was a rally for Lula, but he hadn’t arrived yet. A man was giving a speech on the platform, flags, everyone fired up. It was December, and there was an even fuller moon than the night before. Ah, next Sunday was the presidential election, the runoff, I mumbled to myself, so the creole woman couldn’t hear.

  What time is Lula supposed to arrive? I asked the creole woman, who I now saw was rather sexy, well put together, and she said she didn’t know, she’d been there since five and the crowd just kept growing—she was talking and I couldn’t respond with more than an ah…the thing was that I’d never banged a creole and I thought the time had come. I noticed it was already a different voice speaking from the platform, but I couldn’t hear anything the guy was saying because the crowd was shouting campaign slogans, a group was passing by singing a Carnival marching tune with the lyrics all changed to other words that I couldn’t understand amid the ruckus, and the creole woman was right there in front of me, her plump mouth wouldn’t stop moving—commenting on the rally I guess—wearing a low-cut blouse so I could almost see her entire breasts, heaving, sweaty, and excited to tell me everything about the rally.

  It’s so damn hot, I said, why don’t we go have a beer while we wait for Lula?

  We went down Rua da Praia, the sounds of a drum circle on the corner of Uruguai mixing with the sound of beer cans rolling along the ground, kicked along consciously or not. Later, a man brandishing a Bible with a black cover fumed to anyone who’d listen that this cannot be, this cannot be. A street kid was fooling around, mimicking the man, pretending to stab him with something when his back was turned, and the crowd laughed, laughed at the kid, only I couldn’t laugh, because the boy was the spitting image of me as a child, it was just a question of glancing at the portrait I carried in my wallet, from when I was eight, nine years old max, with a Grêmio club T-shirt, the one taken by my father in Parque da Redenção: look at this, I showed the photo to the creole woman—what’s your name again? I remembered to ask, Naíra, she replied, Naíra, I repeated, look, this kid in the photo is me, and I ask you, the boy who was just here trying to fuck with the guy with the Bible in his hand, that boy has the same face as mine in this photo, right? Who is he? Naíra asks. I’m going to go find out, I reply. Naíra says she never saw a resemblance like that, even in twins, so then I go brandishing the photo until I find the boy, still entertaining himself with the man with the Bible in his hand, and when the boy sees me he takes off running, clearly afraid that I’m a cop, and the man with the Bible in his hand comes over and puts his face into mine and in his thick rasp says, if we’re going crazy it’s because God is making us crazy, if we return to sanity it’s for the rest of you, Corinthians—and then he pointed to my chest, saying that those were the words of Saint Paul, the words of Saint Paul, I repeated, and suddenly he reminded me of a priest from back at the church in Glória who used to talk to me when I was more or less the age of the boy in the photo—he told me about the letters of Saint Paul to the Corinthans, Corinthians, Corinthonians, whatever, that priest would say: the purest poetry you could ever want to read, when you’re bigger you’ll see…and I turned to Naíra, half-stunned, and embraced her madly, and thus entwined we kept on walking.

  And we sat on a bench in the Praça da Alfândega, where a guy with a styrofoam cooler was selling cans of beer. Naíra and I toasted by tapping our cans together—this was how I was trying to forget the existence of a boy with my face running around here, a boy that, if he wanted, could someday pass for me—and I slipped my hand down Naíra’s blouse, her warm tit was tender and swollen, and after letting out a long deep sigh she told me, look, here comes the boy, and sure enough there he was, heading for the doc
ks, and here he came—amazing!—holding hands with the man with the Bible in his hand, as though they were heading home after a long day’s work—there the two of them went, and I shrugged, whatever, deciding to let it go. I noticed a few tramps around our bench lustily ogling as I felt up Naíra. Well, they’ll be treated to a lot more than that tonight, and, for the first time, I kissed the plump mouth of a black woman, and she was one of those women who dominate a man’s mouth with her ferocious tongue, her tongue struggled for primacy inside my mouth, like she was trying to dig out my cavities—I pushed her away, took a breath, and said c’mon, let’s go somewhere we can be alone, c’mon, and we got up, still clinging to each other, and clinging to each other took long steps down Rua da Praia. Borges was roaring from the rally, a voice from up on the platform said that Lula’s plane had just landed at Salgado Filho airport, popcorn was bursting, and Naíra and I kept on clinging to each other as we made our way to the car I’d left parked on Riachuelo.

  When I put my hands on the wheel Naíra told me she had her own place. I asked where. She said it was on Marcílio Dias, near Érico Veríssimo.

  We’d already turned down Marcílio and were passing by a row of low houses when Naíra said: it’s one of these, park right here, but she said it at the last second and I only managed to stop two or three houses later, in front of a door with a plaque advertising umbanda supplies. Naíra put a hand on my arm and asked me to go a little further, closer to the corner. I told her I was confused, had we passed her house or not? Go a little further, she insisted. Here, she said, in front of what looked like an abandoned lot hemmed in by old hedges. Come, she murmured with her eyes darting around, and she started pulling me, ducking through a hole in the hedge—the other side, sure enough, was an abandoned lot.