The next Saturday we went to the Reserve, a beach area, deserted, taking a bottle of coconut cocktail from Oswaldo’s bar. From the sand we returned to the smooth leather of the Beetle and she steadied her ass in the space between the front seats and asked me, in the backseat, to stick it in her pink aureole under the weak light.
Afterward we continued, with her at the wheel, along the Bandeirantes highway. Groggy from the drink, I saw an unknown city go past: a dirt road that in the dark seemed like an Indian village, half inhabited; a winding mountain range; and a long-deserted avenue. The next thing I realized, we were there.
6
I sampled all her fruits, including the ability to look at the sky through a telescope, and the art of screwing on a roof, fucking in the woods, fornicating on the ground where ten dogs roamed loose.
From time to time some of them would kill each other and we heard their doleful yelps there inside, in the spacious semiabandoned house on a vacant lot. But on the following day it would seem like there was an extra bevy of dogs, adult offspring that death added instead of subtracted.
She said she had a mother and no father, but I never saw her mother, although there was a bedroom whose door never opened. The area around that place had roads with strange names that multiplied like parasites, ironwood, arroyo, tindiba, gerenguê, cafundá, boiuna, curumaú, catonho, and marshal miguel salazar mendes de moraes.
Another road was said to lead to Grajaú, but how can you go from an improbable place like that to an established, famous, treelined district?
At the top of the hill was a cabin that might function as an establishment, but I never saw anything around there, although there was an indistinct movement of bodies to which the girl referred and which I glimpsed in flashes.
One day, the girl had a dream. That from the hillside, instead of all of Rio de Janeiro in view, there was only a foggy swamp, and on an especially dark night she went looking for me, descended to the swamp, and after searching through it pulled out like a root my still-fresh hand, ejected bleeding from some random spot.
I thought the dream was a summons, that I should take a stand by acting or making a pact. I heeded the summons at once.
“Tomorrow I’m going up there. The place in the dream.”
“Because of me?” she asked, rubbing her heel between my iliac and sacrum.
“Tomorrow,” I promised.
I have no idea how I got there. I know that up at the top I felt like releasing the steering wheel of the Passat 1.8T and letting the fragments from the collision with the rock scatter into the fog, and that my hand was the only whole, intact form to repose in the swamp and later disappear under one final bubble of air.
However, things didn’t happen that way. The truth is that I skidded, flipped, was blinded by the fog until, lacking hope, I ended up at the foot of the quarry, in its arms, and the dog pack howled at the moonless sky and the Victrola was playing Pink Floyd and in the darkness of the bedroom that had a phosphorescent vault on its ceiling we made love.
7
I was in Jacarepaguá. The sky, the quarry, the roads, the cabin, the fog, the swamp: city-word. One night I think I actually found myself amid a group of humans, at the counter of a bar in a Scandinavian restaurant. We had a strong drink made of Nordic herbs.
A gentleman, thin like an umbrella, tall as the ceiling, bent down to give an urgent warning.
“The airplane. Be careful with the plane,” he said, displaying his infinitely long finger. He bowed and left the bar.
That night we made love for a long time and without protection, as we always did five days before or after her period.
On a foggy Sunday she said she was leaving and would be back the next day.
“I’m going by bus,” she emphasized, without my having asked and without her saying where she was going.
I waited for her in the same place, covered in the smoke of four packs of filterless cigarettes. When she returned, we went into the quarry and rubbed ourselves against the walls of a cavern, hearing distant drops of water.
Her belly began growing three months later.
She loved dogs. The animated creatures.
I wanted nothing of any kind that might take me back to life in the city, to pin me down, nothing — a child, a saint, an envoy — that would remove me from here.
“I’ll get rid of it,” she said, impassive, but there was a shadow.
So, I returned to Copacabana and settled there. I didn’t go back to the university. For a time Jacarepaguá became a forbidden word. By phone I learned that she dreamed about the fetus as an angel, the ectoplasm pursued her, stuck its fist in her navel, and abraded her breasts.
One day, in my sleep, the umbrella-shaped man returned to me. I woke up and called her.
“The airplane.”
“What airplane?”
“You didn’t go by bus.”
“Yes I did.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“You went by plane.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Planes are pipettes of uteruses, centrifuges of ovaries, graters of placental walls.
She left. And took the city with her.
8
One day six or seven years later, I had taken every kind of drug known to man, got my father’s Maverick, and drove up the sierra, down the other side, and stopped in front of the house there, still intact. I saw the Beetle, but by now it was decomposing and ready for the junkyard.
The surrounding region was becoming a favela and the house was already part of the complex. It looked like no one was there anymore, except for a dog, the patriarch, who in earlier days almost spoke, shouted my name. He recognized me and tried to shout and speak but only succeeded in emitting a weak and screechy whistle.
From the house a fat woman soon emerged, dragging herself.
One hand pulled a boy who looked a lot like me in the time when I listened to records on the unseen Victrola. The other hand carried a box, supported at the waist. The fat woman had crooked teeth and a neck covered with pockmarks.
The boy looked at me, opening his eyes wide and covering his mouth as if about to vomit.
I felt my throat convulse and my intestines tighten.
The woman stared deeply into my eyes as far as my throat, and in her eyes I recognized a glimmer. A voice of gales whirled through the mountain range of her teeth. “You took a long time to come back,” said the voice.
Everything spun.