I woke up and ran to my parents’ bed in tears. Daddy was listening to the radio and Mom — where was Mom? I shouted for her but she didn’t appear. It was only when I awoke the second time that my mother was at the foot of the bed with a plate of angel hair pasta and grated cheese.
4
It took time, maybe months, for me to recover from that phonetic improvisation that, according to my mother, was an Italian tongue twister. I even came to forget the song of the neurasthenic.
I started having agonizing pains in my head and eyes. I cried and screamed. Mom dragged me to a macumba terreiro, I remember a dark room leading to another room separated by a beaded curtain.
An old man rocked me back and forth and gave me two punches on the ear that still ring today. Afterward, at home, my mother swung a chicken over my head.
But the bad luck, and the pains, won out, which made my mother resort to an extreme measure: to look for an optometrist. The man was shocked and, instead of recommending I see a psychiatrist, prescribed window-pane glasses, thinking it was an imaginary crisis.
The bad luck only lessened when Mom put two sambas on the Victrola. A samba-rock and a samba-samba. The samba-rock was luminous and lofty.
The samba-samba, on the other hand, tempered its haughtiness with the sun of a suburban and moderate Sunday.
Both sambas had in common pleasant words like February and Carnival, but there was one uncomfortable word, Flamengo, our team’s archrival, which I had learned when my father dragged me to a large stadium; I had a balloon filled with urine thrown on my black-and-white-striped Botafogo shirt. At the exit, Daddy tripped on a hole and fell into some mud. An older man helped him up.
When we got home, Daddy turned on the Transglobe radio that picked up stations from around the world and we listened to the Maré Mansa comedy group. The next day he brought corn on a stick from Guinle Park and we listened to Chacrinha’s show.
The headaches got better and the glasses disappeared, along with the ill-smelling hen swinging over my head. As a consequence I came to like the chicken stew the maid, a woman who rooted for Flamengo, prepared on Saturdays and which I had found nauseating before.
At that time, fate revealed the first threads of a happiness that, if not possible, was at least visible. In the middle of the city rose a crooked architecture, and I always found odd that bus line with a sign saying, Jacaré.
I was relieved to discover that Jacaré was another place and not that one, and that there was even a neighboring district, Jacarezinho. In a book of native languages I found out that, in one definition, jacaré comes from yacaré, “that which is twisted, sinuous,” like the Jacaré district, the destination of the bus that didn’t go there.
The existential nausea, however, persisted, and the sight of my father sucked down into a muddy tomb comprised the worst moments of my night terrors even two decades later, when that stadium finally lit up, when Botafogo won for the first time in twenty-one years, and I clutched my striped shirt at my heart.
Jacarepaguá thus remained suspended over the territory of doubt, made up of vestiges, songs, and symbols.
The day I departed, Jacarepaguá would be ready. And I would be ready for Jacarepaguá.
5
While I waited, bones, joints, skull, and nose grew. My dick, not so much. When soft, it resembled a mushroom attached to a blond sword. If I stretched the foreskin, it looked like it had arms. The nanny watched out of the corner of her eye. My little sister thought it looked like the Christ statue we saw from the window and wanted me to do it again.
“Do the Christ.”
“No.”
“Aw, do it.”
I brought out the small organ and stretched the skin, and my sister laughed like mad. Once, when my sister wasn’t there, the nanny, at the foot of the bed, came closer and suddenly rubbed her nose against the mushroom. I felt a sharp sting, different from the usual phenomenon that now and then overcame me.
That way, my dick even had a certain majesty, recalling a monk or an astronaut, and itched like the devil. With the help of a beige-colored soap that smelled of bleach, one day I had my first creamy, watery ejaculation, which had the same smell as the soap because the skin must have absorbed the acids listed on the wrapper. It was time to go to Copacabana, according to my uncle, who also arranged the address where there awaited me a woman who repeatedly washed her mouth in a basin located in a bedroom smelling of Chihuahua.
I was anxious for the great journey and in college I crossed paths with the loonies from the Pinel colony and greeted them intimately. They treated me like a longtime friend. I also learned that in a neighborhood in the West Zone, whose name I don’t remember, there was a famous insane asylum that inspired an inane song at the start of the 1970s.
At the university there were people from all over — Copacabana, Méier, Sulacap, Quito, Leblon. There was a small lake where you smoked grass and an academic center where you smoked grass and a football field where you smoked grass and a dark parking lot where you smoked grass.
It was during a rainy night that I spotted, in that parking lot, her car; the key had fallen to the ground, the girl was groping on the pavement, the slit in her miniskirt was half open, her thighs marked from leaning against a low, jagged wall — I think there were even leaves with oily grime covering her skin.
Her hair was the color of vanilla ice cream, and she wore green high-heel shoes without stockings, tight, dying to come off. She owned a dingy white Beetle nicknamed Roach. I wanted to accompany her, but I lived a long way from there. When she told me where her house was, the blood rushed to my head.
“Where? You swear?”
“Yes.”
“Will you take me there?”
“One day. But it’s still early.”
“Want to go for a ride?”
At the top of the Vista Chinesa I tested the soles of her feet to see what she was like, and her soles were bloody and covered with talcum. I coughed and came on the sole and made the talcum into a holy paste with which I anointed my mouth and I think the paste never came off.