Lord Read online

  Early the next morning they had already left the house. In the bedroom, the blankets were in order, smoother than I generally left them over the sheets. In the kitchen, the dishes and pots were washed. I went to the living room window. At the corner of an alleyway, the two of them climbed aboard a truck that looked like it belonged to the British army. Many people were already settled in there, but I couldn’t make out who they were. There was a tarp covering the back of the vehicle. The two of them climbed into the truck, their uniforms the dark and light greens and browns of camouflage, as if they were heading to some military exercise or even the war itself. They both carried a bag with their civilian clothes. But they weren’t reacting as if they were doing anything all that serious, they were even smiling. It was the first time that the idea of going back to Brazil seemed appealing to me. That same day. Why was an English military officer interested in having me in England? What kind of service could I render to the diplomatic or military relationship between the two countries? This should not be the reason for me to give up now, I thought. If I had to collaborate, I would, as long as they told me why. What could not happen was to be forced to return to Brazil without my mission accomplished. To return, after being provided with housing and food for so long, without having given them anything in return…I could not allow that. I wanted to have a function: holy, diabolical, petty, innocuous, or heroic. And let that function have a geographically extreme distance, which I had to have crossed to end up here. Someone had committed the historic dirty trick of endowing a man with memories of Brazil, but I know those memories were about to expire. There were only two or three things left in my memory. Two or three things that made me shake my head. They clouded me; they clouded me to the point that I had to lie down, blanketed by fear. I was already dreaming, without knowing it. I was touching the skin of a mango in a tree. Even within the dream I knew it was a mirage, I had never been in that place. That I would shake my head and it would wake me up. I sat on the bed. I thought about the British Army truck. I went to the window. They were already gone. When the Englishman who called me to London returned, I would demand that he tell me everything. If the blonde came back with him, I would demand the truth from both of them. I would confess that my judgment had always been distractible, airy, that I lived in a world of floating things, but that I was no longer the same man. If they betrayed me, I would go to the English press and expose them.

  I would provoke an international scandal. They’d have to choose: either get rid of me or go fuck themselves—they and their whole gang. I fell to my knees, hugging the radiator. The heat was unbearable directly against my skin because I liked the rooms extremely warm. I moved away. How to move forward, hmm? I raised my arm, tried to touch something… No, it was nothing, just an illusion… The truth is that it was already dark and, bathed in red by the lights of the Vietnamese restaurant’s sign, the room showed me signs of my confusion. I was an idle prisoner inside this cell. There was no point in turning on the light. I was a prisoner; I had nowhere to go. I could take the 55 again…go to Oxford Circus. But eventually I would have to return, and I had no other place to return to but here. I was at the mercy of the Englishman who had brought me to London. A prisoner, I lived in solitary confinement, sometimes dining with my jailer and his mistress. A privilege? I squeezed my eyes shut, blinding myself in the night’s depths; I swore I was going to continue, to stay… There was a rigid nucleus inside me, something telling me: Yes! And my whole body hardened, standing on my feet, like it was made of bronze.

  Then, from a simple bang, turmoil erupted. At first, because of the Vietnamese light, I saw everything as if covered in blood. I thought the war had fully come to London. Maybe I had been buried. Maybe everything had already occurred, and I was a survivor in his final hours. Days ago, trying to get out of the cold during one of my walks, I had seen a painting in the National Gallery, a picture by Bruegel of a suffering woman lying in bed, a crucifix resting on a pillow at her feet. And me, where would I look if in this same situation? Was there not some totem I could turn to in these final moments? I tried to imagine one, rushing, but nothing appeared to me, nothing, until it came up from the depths, slowly…a boat, and I was placed on it, and they took me through calm, gentle waters…

  The fact is I was in a train station and not at the edge of a river. It was in a place called Hither Green. It seemed…yes…still a suburb of London. But I couldn’t leave. It looked like it was a Sunday or holiday. It was almost deserted and the afternoon was abruptly fading. It was necessary to go up and down stairs to reach the platform that would take me back to the city center. A young woman was trying to maneuver a stroller. I asked if she needed a hand, already grabbing the other side of it. She seemed shy, not saying yes or no. A child’s voice under the canopy said thank you, effortlessly. I answered formally, without being able to see the child. I completed the task, and then looked for the train that would take me to London Bridge station. It was taking forever; there were far fewer trains scheduled that day. The nearly empty station, getting more and more shadowy by the hour, was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. From London Bridge station I would take a bus to Hackney, without knowing what I would find at home. I had thought of running away. But I had gotten off at Hither Green, twenty minutes ago. And now I was waiting for another train to take me back to my prison. It was already evening when the train arrived. Inside, I sat down. There was a young man who stared out the window the whole time. For him, the train’s interior didn’t seem to exist. His eyes ran along the endless brick houses of the London suburbs, little gardens in front; his eyes passed over squares and parks, their bare trees, as if stunned by the night; his eyes passed over what the window showed him to be real, as if he himself were generating the images—he had an expression of complete control over his creation: a small solitary god, whom I watched with something like devotion. This trip could last a lifetime because I would always have a new detail about him to observe: the small ring in the ear, the piercing of the lower lip, the absent-mindedness without posturing, the hood half-fallen, letting slightly wavy light hair appear. His foot on the seat in front of him. Until he noticed me. And I lowered my eyes, knowing that the train was approaching the London Bridge station. He got up, too. We stood side by side waiting for the doors to open. We headed in the same direction. We stopped in front of the same poster showing the schedules of several bus lines. If the two of us fix our attention on the same line, the night might show some promise…I thought to myself, impudently. In fact, not a single day passes that I don’t imagine stripping the clothing from someone’s body. That I never follow through with my desire, all the better…! Only picturing my hands opening buttons, the zipper, removing clothing piece by piece, unhurried… Then I realized the boy was no longer there. And I was relieved.

  I got off in Hackney in peace. They might be occupied with their war activities. The house that night was mine. I passed by the alley where they had climbed into the army truck. Yes, I decided to go down the alley. Toward the chain-link fence in the back. Steel sheds. A plate engraved with something like ROYAL REGIMENT. Behind me, someone approached. He was a black man in an overcoat and woolen cap. He asked me if I knew what the army had been doing there. It used to be just an open field. The train passes in the background. Just then, I heard the sound of the train passing not far away. It had been sudden when the army came and set up the encampment. There are days when they disappear. No one knows why. This man who wanted to talk made me lose sight of the fact that I was in London. And the darkness gave me the sensation of having a chat on the side of some road… He still hadn’t stopped talking about the reasons that would have made a whole regiment settle in that half-abandoned corner of Hackney. I saw myself as a country bumpkin who did not like to talk. Nothing frightened us there. Soon we’d be able to see shooting stars and more. And no one would say that we were standing in a neighborhood of immigrants in London, who had their hands on the chain-link fence guarding the place where a British ar
my regiment spent time, every fifteen days or so they came, the man said. If that man were an undercover spy for the regiment, he wouldn’t be getting a word out of me. Even if he was not… I chose not to talk. I had started talking late, when I was six. Suddenly, words had begun to come, in the backyard, talking to a tree. Here in London, on the edge of the regiment’s quarters, listening to this man speak of some bellicose hypothesis that held little interest to me, I came to the distinct conclusion that life didn’t want me to have optimal conditions, that’s it. Life had given me seven books, that’s true. But despite them, where was my autonomy? How long would I be the slave of this secret project without a glimpse of liberation? As I said, being a slave is not insurmountable, but one really does need to know to whom or what. The man was saying that the regiment was an anti-terrorist unit. That there were lethal antivenoms in there. I shook the chains of the fence lightly, as if my body burned and I was rolling in the grass to find relief. Ahhh! was the first thing I said. What? the man asked. I repeated, ah, ah, ah…! And another train passed. That ah! was not a moan brought on by tediousness. It sought to dramatize the man’s words: Yes, the imminent danger that the two of us—no matter how much we talked and groaned—did not seem to be able to express, since we stood there like two men smoking cigarettes near warehouses of European extermination weapons. We were two poor peasants from the suburbs of the decision-making center. Should we keep hanging on the fence that separated that unknown military power from us mortals? And all this, just two blocks from my house. It was time for me to beget a child so she could tell me later whether or not I was right. I burst into laughter. And the black man burst into laughter. And the two of us walked away from the military post. When we reached the corner of the alley, each of us turned in the opposite direction. And the world did not end, and I went into my house—empty, empty, me alone with Bach to listen to on the radio I had brought from Brazil.

  I lifted the blanket, sat, then laid my upper body down. The bed smelled of the sweaty flesh from those two the night before. It wasn’t bad spending my sleeplessness breathing the fumes of bodies on fire. From time to time the kid constantly looking at the landscape on the train was beneath me and I bit him all over his body, even if he complained. From time to time Bach was a counterpoint from the heavens to the hell of my senses, playing heavily against my chaste destitution. My cum gushed out, toward the bedside lamp. Its shadow fell on my bedroom, and I went back to the aromas of the bed, which wouldn’t let me fall asleep for the night.

  And why fall asleep? To rest for what? If that black man had been inclined to not go into his cocoon but to stay, endlessly chattering to me about military power quarreling with the forces of terror, things like that, I would have liked to stay out all night under a sky that from time to time let one star or another slip away…as he had spoken it hadn’t been the subject that enraptured me, but his baritone timbre, so rare to hear. It was not every night that you could have in your ear a voice that didn’t need to sing even one entire song for you to understand it. As I breathed in the scent of the recent sexual activity from the sheets…as long as I was healthy, I would never tire of impregnating myself, as if I could feel myself birthing other selves, something like that. As I rolled on the sheets, I remembered the man as someone I would want to hear singing when the time for my final agony came. While Bruegel’s dying virgin preferred to look at the crucifix as she died, I no longer wanted to see anything when my time came. I just wanted to listen to the unadorned melody of that man’s voice. Suddenly, I was on all fours on the bed, like Rome’s ancestral wolf feeding its babies, born from me in my solitary ecstasy. They were inebriated with my milk, yes, and excitement permeated my stay in London as if I wanted to impregnate it more and more.

  The thermostat in the house was set to thirty degrees Celsius; I was sweating heavily. I jumped into an ice cold shower. I couldn’t distinguish the heat of my body from the icy water. The thermal war was so colossal that I fell into the tub as if I had been electrocuted. I felt I needed someone to help me get up. But I was a solitary man, so I crawled out of the tub myself. I went to the bedroom. I fainted on the rug.

  I heard a police car’s siren. Another. I felt between my lips a substance with a jelly-like consistency. I opened my eyes with effort. With even more effort, I touched the thing in my mouth. Remains of vomit. It looked like a slab of bone marrow—it had been a while since I’d put anything in my mouth. It seemed I was feeling better—I might even have said sanctified—as if recompense were about to be given…for what I was not really sure, but it was as if the natural order of things—in which I had never believed—whispered that it was time to turn over the record. Understand? Something like that… Of course, it could all be a sign that I was going insane… this idea that I was entering some kind of oasis at last, after having tortured myself with the interior babble I’d been living with in London. I think I had suffered some type of ugly collapse in the tub. And when you come back from something like that, the little or almost nothing life usually gives you starts wanting to be extrapolated on, understand? You see yourself from higher up, in direct contact with luck; the beneficiary of a martyrdom that is nearing its end, or perhaps already over. I laughed. Even without the strength to laugh, I laughed at all this buffoonery my body was naturally enacting in its attempt to recover me. The Englishman who had brought me to London would continue his silence—in uniform or not—and the little bit of money I was being paid out of what seemed to be the British Government’s coffers would no longer come, and suddenly I would be homeless in England unless they escorted me onto a flight back to Brazil. Was running away into the English countryside my only prospect? I asked myself, screamed it in my head, because my tongue was as hard as a cock, unable to emit a word. I’m going to a small town near Manchester, I’m going to work picking up debris in a junkyard, selling it to anyone who might be interested: my hands will be covered in blackened grooves; pubs will ban me for my bad smell; I’ll sleep in my pigsty without removing the only clothes I own; I’ll pay that price for wanting to stay here, until one morning I won’t awaken, ending up in a common grave by Anglican mercy. I tossed and turned on the rug, naked, my mouth nasty from vomit. I couldn’t get up. A horniness tried to wake me, I felt it, fluid that flowed down my spine, and when it reached its destination, it would make itself an accomplice to my cock, suffocate it since I was lying on my stomach in that moment. I managed to turn over, and my cock was the only part of my body that was revived. Where did it come from, this obstinate fire that didn’t want to vanish? From London, my comrade, it was London that provoked this empire of the senses, and whose deep mystery seemed to bring me this pleasure that insisted on rising despite such an extreme situation of weakness and starvation. Done. I came, and at that moment a fine needle penetrated my brain, piercing, I know, another point that could now withdraw, certainly opening space for a greater night ahead. I was a reptile that still had the power to love. If another body were lying on the rug in my room in Hackney, like the boy who stared out the window on the moving train for example, I would fuck him and still want more. But if he asked me to bend over and kiss his navel instead, who knows, I would be unable to perform, even with groaning effort, the act of sitting up and bending my spine to extract from his navel the stench of that flesh he was denying me. I still loved, but I was a reptile, gentlemen: a being without the dorsal structure to live among its equals, except to fuck—lying down. And maybe I’d be this way forever. But what future could there be for a man resigned to the sole functions of fucking and ejaculating? Who would be inclined to continue this bland existence? All I could do was ask for help. However, I had no voice anymore. Now that… I wondered if I might be able to survive if I came again. So I began to think about the boy who looked out from the moving train, wishing he were here with me, wholly, I didn’t care—all I could do was crawl. I was thinking about all these things, seeing if I could put an end to this joke: a good orgasm that would finish me once and for all—and then I’d
be found, decomposing, when the British army finally decided to release that Englishman who was responsible for my last days in London. I focused my gaze out the window. It was snowing. It wasn’t accumulating on the ground too much. But timid and scarce flakes were falling, yes. One day, I won’t have anyone to tell today’s episode to, but will I ever make it to that day? And why should those agonizing hours in London be kept for posterity? It was snowing, that was all. Looking at the snow, the extent of that fact did not negate my time. So what?—I was disgusted by my stupid mind games.

  That’s when I felt two hands catch hold of me like a shovel. And they brought me very close to a chest wearing a camouflage uniform. He examined me for a few seconds. He seemed not to mind me knowing about his relationship with the British Armed Forces. Then he put me to bed. And he made a call from the cellphone next to me. My hearing was not in perfect condition, like my vision and genitalia. As he finished the call, he reached down and took my wrist. He took my wrist with a puzzled frown, and I felt that I was going to escape from my conundrum, that they wouldn’t want to see me fall into such a situation while I was in their hands. However, he just covered me. Turned off the light. I wouldn’t mind having a prolonged recovery, as long as they were able to heal me. After all, if there was no cure, what was a mild discomfort like the one I was feeling…if I could just stay here, eating at least the bare minimum so that the days wouldn’t end? Yes, and I wouldn’t have to go back to Brazil, but stay here watching for the dry tree to bloom in the approaching spring… What good would it be for me to return to South America in full health if I didn’t bring the smallest memory with me? The powers here in the UK felt I was their responsibility: They had created a role for me, and their attempt to heal me was the only way my success in that role was possible. I would know how to do it well, whatever its dimensions. They just needed to bring me back to perfect health, and I would be able to perform the thing they expected of me. But this time things would be different, because I was no longer the same; in explanation: if I did everything right, if I betrayed and fought and renounced and performed the crucial act, if I were, in short, the promised man, I would demand they let me stay here forever. I would claim my British nationality, retirement benefits…and other things that only my complete sanity would allow me to imagine. I turned around, managing to grab the second pillow and hug it. And I realized that I could already love this Englishman who was keeping watch over me from the next room as if he owned me… I don’t know, I felt I could already love him like a friend to whom I owed my life. Now, yes, I felt ready to defend him to the end. All he had to do was come and give me orders. In that bed, I was being born again. Let them not ask me about the past, other nations, nothing else—I was just an assistant to the Englishman who was waiting in the living room for my cure to take place.