Quiet Creature on the Corner Read online

  I got dressed and went to the fire, didn’t find Amália: it looked like a party had just ended, at the base of the fire things were already unrecognizable, twisted, various flames around them, but one thing I recognized, the BEF beret—I first saw a tongue of flame licking the band, then the emblem was twisted upward by the tallest flame, Otávio’s beret had been thrown on the fire last, only now was it beginning to be destroyed—I took a rod, stirred the fire, and pushed what remained intact of the beret into the middle of the bonfire—I wondered what it was doing there, if Otávio knew about it, if for some incomprehensible reason it had been his idea, if he had come with Amália to admire the objects being consumed and had decided to toss in his expeditionary beret, or if not, if Amália had stolen the beret from him to destroy it in the dead of night, the night which was at that moment ending: there behind the hill a band of blue, above that violet, I could say for the last time before the daytime definitively arrived that there were stars in the sky, the moon full, or maybe say that I was a man and I wasn’t in love, for the tenth, eleventh time, but I preferred to remain silent, gaze at the lake filling with light, the dark and muddy lake that, in the timid start to morning, seemed to mirror another landscape, some sort of chalky plane, maybe from the thin mist, but a color so light that I began to doubt.

  I went in. When my feet felt the cold, freezing water, the old rooster crowed. Then the murmur of birds, the crickets’ slow paralysis—no, it isn’t important, because this is what I want to say: the water was freezing cold and I kept going deeper.

  Then I swam breaststroke, sliding, sometimes floating on my back and confirming that the day had already overtaken the entire sky, a clear December day—I flipped over to try the butterfly, and as I turned I noticed that Kurt was on the shore watching me.

  Over his pajamas he wore a black overcoat, and in his hand, his arm outstretched, he was offering me some clothes I didn’t recognize as mine: I figured they must have been some of his.

  I looked down, I was where I could no longer stand, I moved my legs like I was riding a bicycle, sometimes sinking a little toward the bottom, just until my head went under, then I’d return to the surface and see Kurt smiling at me in a way I’d never seen before, like someone who smiles because they feel themselves to be small before a situation—he was offering me clothes from the tip of his outstretched hand, and I kept returning to the depths, counting to find out how long my breath would last beneath the lake, on the next submersion staying longer, then opening my mouth to pull all the air into my lungs, submerging my head once more, and then emerging again, my eyes above water, Kurt smiling, not saying anything, he was showing me the clothes I should trade for these soaking wet ones, what he was offering me was a striped shirt and dark pants, there, on the shore of the lake, and I put my head underwater again, I thought about counting once more how many seconds I could withstand, but I said, no, I’ll go over there, I’ll take those clothes, I won’t even button the shirt, it will be hot today, then I’ll see about what to do—and then I came to the surface, took two or three strokes, then I started walking on the gelatinous lake bed, suddenly I was stepping on the pebbles of the shore—I needed to accept those clothes Kurt was offering in his trembling hand, and when I got close something came over me like a poison, and I yelled, I ripped the wet shirt from my body with one movement, I tore it, the buttons flying, in a fit I stripped off my pants and underwear, furiously kicking my leg to untangle myself from my pants, and now I’d dress in the dry clothes Kurt was handing me, and then I’d go to bed, calm myself, sleep, and maybe even dream.

  JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL is the author of nearly 20 books. His work has appeared in Brazil’s leading periodicals, and he has been 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, he lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

  ADAM MORRIS has a PhD in Latin American literature from Stanford University and was the recipient of the 2012 Susan Sontag Foundation Prize in literary translation. He is the translator of Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes (Melville House Books, 2014). His writing and translations have been published widely, including in BOMB magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many others. He lives in San Francisco.