Harmada Page 5

  They were old; when, however, they were listening to my narratives—usually incisive accounts that’d leave an impression on them—they became a cohesive unit, devoted to a single destiny; a destiny that embraced them and involved them in the same interests that my stories seemed to dig out. They twinned their selves to each other, saving them from turning into lost and lonely beggars on the streets…

  And I, by keeping the shows running, ended up guaranteeing a roof over my head, three meals a day…what else could I expect at that point in my life?

  Another show night—I climb on the desk.

  “Until one day, ladies and gentlemen,”—I started like that—“until one day, this man who speaks to you now found a little wounded jewel. This man, who no longer expected to find anything that might possibly quicken the pace of events…”

  I opened that night’s narrative with such a show of conviction that I realized there was no turning back for me after that: I had definitely become a former actor. And worse, I had become a corroded image of what I’d once been; in other words, I was just an impostor.

  “What was this jewel that could quicken the pace of events?” a toothless old man named Oscar asked me.

  “It was a girl, about fourteen, who arrived at the shelter having been abandoned. Well, after a few weeks of talking to her, I found out she was the daughter of Amanda, a beautiful woman I had met when the girl was just a baby… Once upon a time I had held that baby in my arms…”

  “Where’s this girl? Is she here now, among us?” they asked.

  “No, my friends. This girl, named Cris, tried to kill herself yesterday. She’s currently under sedation in a little room at the back of the shelter. Let her rest, let her heal,” I said, arching my right eyebrow—a sign that I no longer believed in the shameless enthusiasm I was trying to instill in my narrative.

  I went on: “Oh my friends, please let me go, even if I have barely started my story today. Let me go because I don’t feel well. I promise I’ll continue tomorrow at the same time…”

  Grunts filled the air. A small attempt at protest was soon contained by the more patient audience members.

  I opened the door of the little room where Cris was lying in her tormented sleep. The hall light bathed her sweaty body. She was moaning and bewilderingly calling out my name in her sleep, as if running away from some imminent danger, crying for help.

  I walked in and closed the door. I sat in the chair by the bed where she slept.

  As soon as I sat next to her, she quieted down. Soon, her snoring became light, gentle, barely audible.

  She had come to the shelter all disheveled and dirty, exuding an unbearable smell. She cried and cried, but then would abruptly stop…

  At first, the shelter administration decided to keep her separate from the other residents. I didn’t quite understand the reason. Perhaps because she looked helpless yet on the verge of something insane, so it seemed wise not to expose her to her peers.

  I learned of Cris’s arrival right on the first day, since I was a resident who had obtained the power to circulate through the managers’ area and had more access to administrative affairs, and mostly because I possessed the element that produced the narratives: the word.

  One day, they asked me to talk to Cris privately and listen to what she had to say, since I was a man who knew how to—as they put it—make people show their most intimate selves.

  And that’s what happened. It was the first time Cris and I found ourselves alone in the leafy shadows of the courtyard. I was fanning myself with a leaf from a fig tree; Cris was performing her customary gesture, which was pulling her long dark hair up to let her neck and shoulders breathe. We were in a very secluded corner of the courtyard.

  “What is it, Cris?” I asked when I saw her biting her upper lip. Something was obviously bothering her.

  Cris, straightforward and without preamble, answered in a single shot:

  “Two years ago, my mother disappeared. That’s it, she simply disappeared. They say she may have died in the last earthquake up north. I’m not sure. What I know is that everything was going so well then all of a sudden, she was gone. I got home from school one day, and she wasn’t there anymore.”

  When Cris described her mother to me—blonde, beautiful, an actress who had been traveling all over the country on tour—I felt an awkward sting in my ear, without exactly knowing what kind of memory was rekindling in me.

  “What was her name?”

  “Amanda.”

  Amanda, I repeated two, three times. Cris spoke, but I was no longer listening to what she said. Amanda’s image possessed me wholly, and I experienced a disgraceful nausea, as if I were birthing Amanda as a full-grown woman, who was uneasy in that moment, tossing and turning inside me, unable to find the proper position in my body. My organs responded with sharp spasms, which caused me to stand up and try to hold on to things around me. Cris’s voice sounded diffuse, insanely distant, unbearably inaccessible, but it was only when I went into the bathroom that her voice vanished completely, slightly diminishing the horrible feeling I was experiencing.

  I pulled my pants down, sat on the toilet, and a flood of liquid shit drained out of my asshole. It had a weirdly dark appearance against the toilet bowl; it looked like a mixture of feces and blood.

  I went back to the tree where I had left Cris. I was still dizzy, but was slowly starting to discern the shapes of things again.

  “You’ve gone so pale…” I said when I saw her.

  “You, too. You look almost transparent…”

  I sat on a blue painted stone. “So, you’re Cris.”

  “You didn’t know that yet?”

  “I didn’t know you were the Cris I held in my arms when you were…what? Four, five months old?”

  Then I told her that I had met her mother, Amanda.

  My mother, she murmured. Cris had never met her father. By the time she was born, he had already left for a drama school in Belgium on a scholarship. Amanda never heard from him again. Cris told me that, from what Amanda had told her, she looked just like her father. The man she had never seen.

  One day, Cris asked me if I could get her a lipstick. That very afternoon, I left the shelter and went after the lucky lipstick. I went into a women’s store. I stole a lipstick without any difficulty. I took the opportunity and grabbed a bra on my way out, too.

  “Look, I brought you the lipstick, and a bra, too.”

  Cris carried a little mirror in the pocket of her round skirt. She put the lipstick on right there at the door of the women’s dorm.

  It was only when she was applying the color to her mouth—entirely focused on the little mirror—that I realized the bra had been an inappropriate gift for her. Under her blouse, Cris had two completely stiff, tiny little bumps—what was the bra for?

  “For one day when you need it,” I pointed to the bra, which she had draped around her neck.

  She didn’t seem to have heard me. She didn’t answer.

  “Do I look pretty with lipstick on?”

  “Cris, do you want to follow in Amanda’s footsteps and become an actress?” I asked.

  “After my mother’s death, I used to walk the streets, aimlessly, with no real desire to go anywhere. Sometimes I’d pretend I was acting. You can relate to that, can’t you? Then, I’d look for a high place to stand on—an empty box left at a street market, a bench on a square, or some stairs—and I’d practice disguised gestures with my eyes and mouth. I’d put a discreet expression on my face, and invent lines that didn’t exactly transfer past my lips. I did it like that so nobody would notice I was acting, because if they did, my God, they’d put me in a mental institution, and I didn’t want that. Thinking about it, even if they had sent me to a shelter like this, where I could just eat and sleep without having to wear a straitjacket or get electroshock and things like that, then yes, I’d have been fine with that. But I didn’t want to go to a shelter. I’d rather have stayed on the streets, sometimes making a fire with r
ubble I’d find; and I’d watch the flames moving like I once… Oh, I don’t want to say anything else. I think you already know how I ended up here: It was because I picked up a razor I found in the trash and ran the blade over my tongue to see if it’d make me stop talking. I didn’t talk to anyone, but I did talk to myself, in my head, of course. I spoke to myself all the time, and it had started getting on my nerves. The hours were insufferable, and I no longer wanted to hear the thoughts that kept pulsing over my tongue, so I thought: I’ll cut my tongue and make it ugly, take a piece out, shut it up for good. After my mother disappeared and I ran away from the boarding house where I had been living with her, I didn’t want to go live with anyone else, no, I didn’t want that… Since then, I can’t stop hearing my own voice resonating inside me, but the razor blade began losing its sharpness on account of how often I used it. I remember seeing the rust beginning to show on the edge, you know? One day, an old woman saw me using the razor on my tongue and called a policeman. More policemen came, and people gathered around, but I refused to speak. It wasn’t a big deal—it was just a little pain in my tongue and some blood coming out the corner of my mouth. But a black van showed up. I read the word Shelter on the side of it. Soon after that, here I was. I remember saying just one thing: that I needed to sleep, because I hadn’t been able to close my eyes for nearly two years. During my life on the streets, the few times I managed to knock out into a deep sleep, all sorts of things happened to me: I had my hair set on fire, I was raped, or…who knows what the fuck else happened to me.”

  “And now?” I asked. “Do you want to pursue Amanda’s career? Be an actress?”

  Cris opened her mouth a little and pointed to a cut on her tongue. Her lips, half open, looked extremely red from the lipstick. So different from the girl who’d arrived at the shelter all messed up.

  “Yeah?” came out of my mouth.

  “Yeah…,” she said affirmatively.

  “So, let’s go…?” I muttered.

  “Yes, but first, I want to feel how things are here in the dorm.”

  Cris turned around and walked into the dim light of the women’s dormitory. When she turned, the bra I’d given her fell from her shoulders. She didn’t notice, or preferred to ignore it.

  I looked around, there was nobody there, so I tried to slip the bra into one of my pockets. Of course, I couldn’t get it all in—the cup for one breast hung down by my thigh.

  I went to the men’s dorm and hid the bra under my mattress. An old man was praying on his knees, whispering incomprehensible words, his elbows on the bed.

  As I was leaving the room, I passed him and muttered:

  “Amen…”

  “Oh, my son, you need one of those fierce animals that is miraculously compassionate once they look into your eyes, that would know how to lick your wounds,” the old man said softly.

  “The day will come,” I said, feeling a sudden fire burning on my cheeks as if forming inside me was a savage instinct from my gut, an impulse like that of the samurai who only knows how to perform his most authentic gesture through a lacerating blow.

  I looked at my right hand. I saw a grudge in it that I chose to suffocate by hiding it in my pocket. The old man went back to his prayers.

  I had a moment of fright, and amid that dark silence, broken only by the old man’s mouth whispering his prayer, I asked myself:

  “Is this how it is?”

  And the light came on. One of the shelter’s employees was calling us to supper.

  “Free your brothers!” another old man growled next to me from the table.

  “Who and where are they?” I asked.

  “Just go to the fields, you’ll find them there. They sow during the dry months, but they do it full of shame. People say many of them bury their hands in the ground and weep,” the old man said.

  “I’ll go, yes, and I’ll know how to get there,” I said, measuring my words, lifting my empty spoon in the air.

  The old man put his hand on mine and looked at me. Where was dementia in those eyes? No, there was no dementia in them, because the world outside the shelter the old man was referring to—no matter if that world the television showed the men and women of the shelter was only populated by ghosts—that world outside, at any time and in any quarter, would always embrace someone sowing with shame or burying their hands in the ground and weeping.

  Cris sat at another table. She had her back to me, but I could see her profile. She was laughing with an old man who had facial paralysis. Cris seemed to laugh even harder to compensate for the old man’s inability to move his mouth. I couldn’t help but notice the astonishing difference between the girl who had arrived at the shelter looking practically disfigured, swallowed by misery, and the girl today, laughing with that old man who could no longer produce his own laughter.

  “So, you really don’t want to be an actress?” I asked her the same question a few days later.

  Cris closed her eyes and turned her head, slowly at first, then in a wild spin—her black hair whipping the air. I was a coward for not moving close to her, for not grabbing her by that hair and making her kneel before me, for not forcing her to apologize for all this time she was making me wait before I’d know, once and for all, whether she was going to be an actress or not. I was anxious to know the answer because I wanted to direct her on the stage. I—way past time to be an actor again—now possessed the necessary tricks of a director. A new potential was finally on my horizon, maybe my last one. It encouraged me to leave this life I had been leading for so many years; yes, leave the shelter, take Cris with me, look for my old friends in Harmada and introduce her to them. I needed that chance, I needed to direct her. Yes, maybe in a monologue: Cris covering her eyes with her hair, as if blurring her vision, but also hiding herself. Hiding from what, Cris? From what? From the evil curiosity of the public eye, Cris tells me. She now has an enraged gaze, and she’s trying to convince me that the best way to present all this is to make a beast jump on cue, a beast she no longer knew how to train. And Cris says: This arrhythmia, my friend, I can have a seizure at any moment, or perhaps fall hard, as petrified as a proud rock—Cris’s voice had changed so much by then that an unsuspecting person might suppose it was a man speaking, her roaring baritone suggested such a somber atmosphere in that leafy shadow in the corner of the courtyard.

  Her body suddenly loosened, and she fell into my arms. Her hair spread across my chest.

  Silence. On the other side of the wall, the siren from an ambulance cut the air sharply. I think it was that noise that made Cris’s scalp shiver.

  “One of these mornings, very soon, you’ll be in paradise with me,” I said.

  I could have said: The angry dog bites the hem of the blue pants.

  Or else: The lake here doesn’t get turned into a skating rink because the air is not as cold as it is there.

  But I said: One of these mornings, very soon, you’ll be in paradise with me.

  Cris came back to her senses. She pressed her closed lips against mine. A move so fast and instantaneous that it gave me no time to react.

  I then realized we were sitting in the bleachers of the stadium near the shelter, watching the old Eldorado football club play. Apparently, it was an important match for the team. The stadium was crowded.

  But I wanted to know something else: What were Cris and I doing sitting in those numbered stadium chairs? We, who depended on other people’s money for our most basic needs? We sat there as if we were father and daughter—or an almost-old-man and a Lolita, it doesn’t matter—the two of us serene, showing mild curiosity about what happened around us…

  Cris looked at me, her ponytail reaching the scooped back of her violet dress. She handed me a package wrapped in a white scarf.

  “Look later,” she said. “Just keep it in your pocket for now.”

  But I couldn’t resist. When she wasn’t looking, I opened the edges of the scarf. There was a wallet containing hundred-dollar bills.

  “Yeah, man,
” I said to myself as people started cheering. “This is just another of Cris’s brilliant heists…” And I remembered how we’d gotten there, to those comfortable numbered chairs, to that important match for Eldorado.

  The next day we started planning our escape. People would never accept it if I ran away from the shelter with a minor. We needed to execute our plan well, without leaving any trail.

  We started spending less time together so no one would suspect our plot.

  It was a pretty easy escape in broad daylight.

  We arrived in Harmada by bus. At nightfall.

  I knocked on Bruce’s door, an actor like me, an old friend of mine from the same generation. He hadn’t heard from me in years. We gave each other a long hug.

  I told him my story. I said that, as incredible as it sounded, I wanted to get back into the theater. To direct Cris now, a girl who was becoming more and more of an actress each day.

  “I’m confident in my stage capabilities,” I said, feeling like the most ridiculous of mortals. Maybe incurably unforgivable for my audacity. I tried to remedy it by changing the course of the conversation.

  “Here’s big Bruce,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder, in a jolly tone I hadn’t used since leaving my acting career behind.

  Bruce was still a well-known actor in Harmada. I had followed his career in the newspapers that occasionally fell into my lap at the shelter.

  He offered us a room in his apartment. Two large beds. A view that overlooked half of Harmada, including a beautiful stretch of beach.

  Cris had the bed by the window. She often got on her knees on the mattress and leaned out, over the windowsill. But when we weren’t sleeping, we moved around the large apartment as if at home, and the feeling seemed real, Bruce’s welcome was so warm.