“And I haven’t seen our book displayed anywhere till now.”
She said something else that I didn’t entirely catch. That accent of hers — which was perhaps only the English spoken by a native — was sometimes impenetrable for me. Nor did she understand what I was saying, and we stood there looking at each other, not understanding, frustrated.
I phoned my boss. Natsume was one of those diabetics who drink out of foolhardiness, and I knew that at six o’clock, with whiskey fermenting his brain, he would be mildly ill-humored.
“The assistant complained about the towels,” I said.
“What towels?”
“I think she’s going to notice the car we rented this morning isn’t armored.”
“What car?”
“A platinum-blonde intruded into our conversation and invited Greg to dinner.”
“What blonde?”
The panel, needless to say, was a mess, the way events tend to be in my presence. They put Greg at the end of a long table with a white cloth, and it was obvious that the ladies and teenage girls in the audience of two hundred — more packed than I’d ever seen at a book fair — were only there to see Greg. The moderator was an environmental journalist and insisted that each panelist, himself included, say a few autobiographical words before Greg. Greg fidgeted so much that his legs made the table shake — he was a veritable reservoir of positivity. When he finally took the microphone, he leaped up because he was incapable of giving a talk sitting down. What happened next was monumental. Racing from side to side, interacting with the audience, which didn’t understand a word he was saying, Greg told his story of self-awareness, of how he had been a poor child with no prospects, and how early on he discovered the gift of channeling positive energies to overcome barriers. Greg questioned people, Greg made them laugh, Greg summoned a woman from the audience, Greg did push-ups, Greg threw out fistfuls of colored pens, Greg drew applause that raised the temperature of that enormous sardine can by several degrees. The other panelists were as astonished as I was. At the end of his talk the stage was invaded, and only Ellie’s brute force allowed him to be led down the crowded corridors to our booth where, I should add, a plywood wall was knocked over during the autograph session.
I was wiped out, I needed a shower, I cursed our publicist for having learned English on cassette tapes. Only one other person didn’t try to get closer: the platinum-blonde, all in white, fiery lipstick, heavy eye shadow, whose gaze focused unwaveringly on Greg’s every action as he signed copies on the plastic table. Her and the unshaven guy in the overly large suit. Two people, then. Three, actually, because another guy was there, a guy with a foreign air about him, now I remember: tall and thin, very straight caramel-colored hair parted in the middle, prescription glasses with round frames, beige linen jacket. Standing a bit away from us, as motionless as a lizard.
We would see him again a few hours later, at the dinner in Greg’s honor, which I was forced to take part in. Ellie was nervous about anything outside the schedule, too nervous, and I had to spend a few hours in the lobby of the Windsor Barra, wearing the same clothes from the afternoon, still with my backpack because I hadn’t had time to check in to my own hotel, which was apparently a long way from there — more of Natsume’s stupid penny-pinching. In fact, it was so far away that the cabbie laughed when I gave him the address: Aterro do Flamengo. Even if Greg pumped iron, took a bubble bath, clipped his nails, and fixed his hair, there was no way I could go and be back in time to meet them.
We left at ten p.m. Ellie had tied her hair in a bun, light makeup, black silk pants, and a white blouse, and Greg was wearing the same beige-blue combination immortalized in his photo on the book jacket. The taxi driver passed through dark, empty treelined streets with high fences in what could well have been São Paulo and turned onto an avenue with unfinished buildings, colored posters advertising something of low quality, and fallen boarding swollen from humidity that revealed machines and rusted girders. Instead of taking the tunnel, the driver hung a right onto a narrow street and stopped at an iron-gated entrance whose green bars rose in waves to form a design of delicate leaves. We waited for a reply. Greg fidgeted every time he shifted on the vinyl seats, and he didn’t fidget just a little. The gate opened. Then we began going up.
The houses got larger the farther we went, and we stopped near the summit, in front of a two-story mansion that attracted attention not because it was imposing, nor because of the lights or the palm trees at the entrance, but because of the colors. Dark green, grenadine red, dark green, grenadine red, grenadine red, grenadine red, dark green, every wall, every window, every balcony painted with the colors of Fluminense’s jersey as if the owner was obsessed with it, or honoring a vow. Nothing else could explain such absence of taste.
I left my backpack with an attendant. The house was full. Greg was immediately surrounded by four women of indeterminate ages and was in his element, gesticulating, communicating with winks. He distributed a few colored pens, the women laughed, one of them raised her dress to show a muscular thigh compact as a chicken drumstick, and I recognized the hostess because she was talking the loudest; this time she was wearing a vivid orange miniskirt and a pink, brown, and gold leopard-patterned blouse. The battle between colors in such a short expanse of cloth was terrible.
“Try the caipirinha,” I told Ellie, who had been forgotten in a corner. I had already gotten a drink, sake with red fruit, and was amused to see the same guy with the oversized suit behind the fruit table, grinding sugar in a glass. “I thought you were the driver,” I said.
He filled the glass with booze and stuck a colored straw in it without looking at me. “And I thought real men didn’t drink sake caipirinhas with red fruit,” he replied.
The blonde followed Greg wherever he went. When Ellie returned, I commented that I hadn’t seen Mr. Platinum-Blonde anywhere. It was obvious, I said, that a house with those colors demanded a man. A rich, truculent man. Ellie didn’t hear me, or didn’t understand. She was looking a bit paler. She held her untouched caipirinha in both hands, which were now shaking. She said, “We need to get out of here. Now.” That was when I saw the guy again, leaning against one of the plaster Greek pillars. The same hair parted in the middle, the same linen jacket. The same lizard-like eyes, which he kept glued on Greg.
She pushed through the guests to pull Greg away and in a short time had disappeared. I finished my caipirinha, grabbed a beer, and went out a glass door into the night. The pool and terrace were on a level below the house. I descended the metal steps, crossed the lighted patio, and headed to the glass parapet. My God, the view was magnificent. To the left, a concrete elevated roadway lit by car headlights followed the curve of the mountain and hovered over the sea. Even at night it was possible to see the violent crest of waves crashing against the rocks down below. I looked at the dark water. Looked directly at the cliff beneath my feet. The ground disappeared suddenly amidst roiling black treetops and a chilling discharge rose between my legs. I moved away from the parapet, which suddenly seemed too low. I turned back toward the house, three stories above, also painted in the insistent dark greens and grenadines. In the brightness of the glass door I recognized the spare silhouette of Ellie.