The boy ran into the house. I thought I heard the hoarse growl of the dog and a tearing sound of lacerated viscera, an echo.
The next instant, she was no longer there. In my hand, the box she had brought moments before.
There was no house, quarry, or valley. Only fog. The ground was mud, like the mud where the body of my father was almost lost.
I opened the box. In it, the hand was still fresh and smelled of sulfur.
9
I thought that all my friends, or whatever they were, would enter into logical considerations and rationalizations, led by the plot, avoiding the truth. That they were going to ask whether the fat woman was really her, whether that boy was my son, or whether the son was me myself on the wrong side of a dream. Whether the hand was mine (and whether it was the right or the left) and whether upon receiving it in the box I had both of mine intact or was missing one. If there were a psychoanalyst in the bar, perhaps he would want to know if the fat woman was my pregnant mother. Or if that man (me) was the son of another man (me), a policeman killed by a drug trafficker (me) found at the foot of the sierra with a hand cut off, being that my hand of his ended up in the hand of her, that I had received the double hand as a trophy, that I was the perpetrator of those happenings, assassin of the fetus, son of Jacarepaguá, and that it would therefore be the son I never had, properly or improperly, the incarnation of an angel. Maybe someone versed in the lines and history of the city might argue that, in the ultimate analysis, Jacarepaguá isn’t a district, since with the growth of the West Zone it transformed into a collection of districts, a region, a city.
But no.
Instead of that, a solemn and moving silence filled the bar. It was no longer a silence of criminological suspense but a silence of empathy, compassion, and even submission. The waiter bringing the birthday cake retreated, took it back to the kitchen, and, I think, never returned.
The German linguist, in turn, was holding her head low in such penitence that one could say the entire weight of the world was resting on her shoulders, which would be, deep down, the dream, or the reality, of every German, every Frenchman, every European, all of us on their backs, on our neighbor’s back, and the neighbor on the back of the dog.
I left money on the table (just my part) and got up, heading out into the empty streets.
When I was about to reach the foothill, behind me there was some kind of procession. I think I even saw a candle.
I went on walking, at the head of the line. Sometimes I’d risk a sideward glance, but I grew tired of checking to see if there was still a cortege.
Frequently I felt, at such times, that I was walking in circles, or spinning like a record around a tree, following a curve, an axis, in a lighted courtyard redolent of bygone rose apples, at the hour of a sunbath, and afterward everything vanished for a time; I’d feel a sharp pinch in the wrist and fall into a sleep as deep and as cloudy as death, in a sterile bedroom.
When I awoke, the story would begin again, and I’d await, attentive, for the next intermission.
Part IV
Rio Babylon
Tangerine Tango
by Marcelo Ferroni
Barra da Tijuca
I could have called it a premonition, but I don’t believe in that, or in luck; in fact I believed in few things other than some money at the end of the month and a decent place to sleep, maybe someone beside me and a bit of happiness. I believed in what I didn’t have and laughed at myself at the counter of that hotel made of plaster and granite, of plywood with a veneer imitating hardwood, plastic plants in cement pots, lustless leather sofas. A steady bureaucratic rain was falling; I leaned against the counter and observed the curtain of thick drops that descended the narrow roof of glass a few feet beyond the automatic door. This city sucked up my air, this city of false appearances and low ceilings, this city whose buildings were neoclassical aberrations under a leaden gray sky, a São Paulo simulacrum of hell, while the receptionist — braces, the face of a kid — waited on the phone for my author to answer. I didn’t hate just the city, I hated my job, and before I could go back to cursing myself she passed slowly by outside. The automatic door opened and closed while she moved along the sidewalk without coming into the lobby. She had yellowish-beige skin, and her slightly flaccid arms emerged from a modest black dress that descended a little below the knee. Black shoes with medium heels, discreet legs. She rested her cheek on the phone in her left hand and in the right balanced an umbrella, which suddenly swept my senses into a celestial premonition (but I don’t believe in that), each of the umbrella’s colorful segments a portrait of Rio de Janeiro — Christ the Redeemer, Sugar Loaf, another showing Maracanã, still another the beach and the wave-patterned sidewalks — and I thought I could be in a better place, warmer, where people smiled like that girl with large white teeth. She continued to the edge of my field of vision and disappeared into a service entrance.
“What did you say your name is?” the receptionist asked me.
“Mariconda. Humberto Mariconda.”
I waited a bit more. My author sent word that he’d be down any moment, but the moment didn’t come. Behind the receptionist hung a panel with the name of the hotel, and farther back, in the rear, where the office must be, she reappeared, without the umbrella or the phone, but still displaying her teeth in a half-smile, and only then did I notice how round her eyes were, and she raised them and looked at me. She was plump and diminutive at the same time, her dark hair tied in a bun, bare shoulders with small variations in color, and my God I smiled at her and her entire face opened up. She was about to say something but saw that her colleague was already taking care of me, then lowered her eyes to the computer monitor and started typing.
I could have said so many things to her. If she were alone. If the guy beside her weren’t looking at me the way I was looking at her. If the elevator bell hadn’t dinged and a man as shapeless as melted Camembert hadn’t emerged, accompanied by a blond woman who seemed like a collage of several faces, new and old, put together by a child in an art class. They didn’t notice me when I stepped forward with my best smile to escort them to the taxi waiting in the street. I started to help him, but he grunted, pulling his cane away.
That was what I was doing lately, greeting authors who didn’t want to be greeted by me, who would like to be successful with another publishing house, lionized by more relevant people, selling out entire printings of their tired novels, but who one way or another had fallen into the well and felt it was our fault, always our fault.
Natsume, my editor, assigned me the unpleasant duties only because my behavior was more stable than that of Rose, the publicist — a lady as old as our dot matrix printer — and because I was the only one there who could manage more than three sentences in English.
Seven months later, there I was again, playing the same role in another city, imparting concrete form to my premonition (though I don’t believe in that), leaning against a slightly larger counter in a more spacious lobby, monumental without having anything to be proud of, the salmon-colored walls with high-relief plaster waves, uncomfortable sofas, old palms, and carpets that made an effort to instill a warmer atmosphere in that third-rate Persian temple. I could be in the outskirts of anywhere in the world, except for the strip of ultramarine blue beyond the avenue, which merged with the turquoise sky at the horizon whenever the smoked-glass double doors opened to admit the fitful service of the porters.