Remember Why You Fear Me (69 page)

“I don’t think I caught your name,” I said to her.

“I have never been to Cristo Redentor,” she said. “Your Christ the Redeemer.”

“Oh,” I said. “You should. It looks good.”

“My husband will not take me. But you. When you go, you will take me.” And there was a slight upward inflection to that, but not quite enough to make it a question.

“Well, maybe,” I said. “Maybe we can all go together.” She stared at me. I tried to look away. “Your English is pretty good, actually,” I said. “Well done.”

And at this she tilted her head a little, looking at me as if trying to work out the joke—and then smiled. And it was an ironic smile, I think, I don’t think there was much warmth to it. But it was a smile nonetheless.

Then she looked away from me. And carried on smoking, flapping those big nostrils of hers about like sails in a storm.

“Well, anyway,” I said, and I made to go. And she caught my hand in hers. Not tight, it almost seemed as it could have been an accident, as if her fingers had just been clasping away for something and the fingers they’d clasped on to happened to be mine. She didn’t turn around to me. It was as if she didn’t even know she was touching me, as if she had no idea I was still there, only her left hand knew. The right hand had no idea, it was too busy pumping that ugly face of hers with smoke. And she stood still, looking out at the other people, out at Rio de Janeiro, out at the night skies, out at Christ glowing in the dark far above us, out at anything except me.

It took her maybe three more minutes to finish her cigarette. Then she dropped it to the street, ground it underfoot with one deliberate brutal twist of her shoe, looked at me at last, not a smile. “Come,” she said. And we went back inside. Somehow before we got in there my hand had been freed.

Saras greeted me as if he hadn’t seen me in days. “My friend, my dear friend,” he said. “I shall have to go home soon. I am an old man, I need my sleep.” I was relieved to hear it, it was two o’clock in the morning. “Our business is nearly concluded, I shall sign upon your dotted line. And what you have done for me, to take my work to your little country, to make it
English
, it is the act of a brother. A brother!” He hugged me.

“Well, you’re very welcome,” I said.

“You must not stay at the hotel,” he said. “An
airport
hotel. You must stay at my house. On Ipanema Beach, it is very beautiful. And there we can choose which of my works you shall display. Which of my art is your favourite?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They’re all very good.”

He smiled at that. “Then we will find out. We will create our exhibition together, you and I! Yes? Yes. But first, I just need to ask you something. And my English, it is good, but sometimes the right words are hard . . . ”

“Oh yes?” I said. “Well, if I can help.”

“I have mastered construction and grammar, but I have the occasional lapse at vocabulary. What is it, what you say, when a dog . . .  Ach. The noise it makes?”

“Barking?” I said.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s it exactly. So, before our business can proceed. Before you stay in my house! Will you bark for me, please?”

“Do what, sorry?”

“I want you to bark like a dog. I want you to bark for me. Like a dog. Like a little dog. Come on. Come on. Bark for me. Bark for your supper. You can bark for me, can’t you? Bark like the little dog you are.”

I tried to make light of it. “I don’t mind barking,” I said, “but is there any particular dog you would want me to be, maybe you have something in mind, ha . . . ”

“The next thing you must say,” he said, cutting through, silencing me, silencing me with that steel voice. “The next word you speak, it must not be in English. It must be in
dog.
”

“Yip yip,” I said. “Yip yip yip.”

And he smiled, he
grinned
, and the room relaxed, and I felt sick inside, I felt the gravy I had eaten bubble up at the embarrassment. And I saw Mrs. Saras’ face, and it glared at me, it was filled with such raw contempt—and for that moment I hated her, I felt I could actually kill her.

“Good,” said Saras. “And we will send the car to your hotel, yes? And pick up your bags, and bring them to my house, yes? Yes?”

“Yes,” I said. And I glanced over to where Mrs. Saras had been standing, but she’d gone, she’d already walked away. “Yes, that would be fine. Obrigado.”

I have never deceived myself that I am an attractive man. I know I possess charm, and it’s a charm that can cut a swath through the boardroom, and is sharp like a knife at a very particular sort of business meeting. But it’s not a charm that has ever made much impression on the weaker sex. Women don’t like me. I don’t know why. I am not an ugly man, I believe. I work with a lot of men on a daily basis, sometimes under very trying circumstances of great stress in which ugliness can be emphasized, and I think some of them end up looking very ugly indeed, and I fancy I am no uglier than the average of them. I understand seduction, of course, I understand the nature of it and how it works and what a useful weapon it can be. I have closely observed some very fine seducing in my time, and I think I have learned much from it—but as an observer only is the point I’m making here, rarely as seducer, even rarer as seducee.

And for those of you who will criticize, who would seek to remind me that I have a wife (as if, quite frankly, a wife like Margaret would be something I could easily forget), I will point out that she is the daughter of a senior management executive in her own right, and she not only appreciates the need to seize opportunities as they present themselves, she in fact urges me on to seize ever more of them, to search them out and grasp hold of them hard—and saying all the while that I shy away from that, shy away from making something of myself, something worthy of her and her father (her father being, as I say, a management executive, and one who gives every intimation that he has spent his entire life thus far seeking out and seizing at every opportunity he can get), saying that I don’t have an eye for the main chance, saying I’m letting all my potential slip by, saying that I’m wasting time, that I’m a waste, saying it all with a regularity that is undoubtedly consistent and logical but rather wearying to boot. By allowing myself the opportunities afforded by Mrs. Saras I had my wife’s most guiding maxims in mind. And if it’s likely that the actual circumstances would be something Margaret would regard with no little disapproval, I am certain that she can still take pride in the fact that by letting Mrs. Saras into my bed I was following her most cherished principles to the letter.

By the time I had reached the Saras house its master had long since retired to bed, and so, I thought, had its mistress. The car that had taken me back to the hotel had waited whilst I packed my bags and checked out, and I had done both as quickly as I could; the roads were empty and the driver was fast; even so, I didn’t reach Ipanema beach until half past four in the morning. The house was dark and silent. A maid led me to my room. If I had thought that the guest bedroom of a multi-millionaire would be better than my suite at the airport hotel I was disappointed—the room was small, largely unfurnished, and smelled of paint. There was a ceramic sink set into one corner where I could wash, but no mirror in which I might see what I was doing. The bed was hard and short. The light was a single naked bulb, hanging down from the ceiling. The maid didn’t say a word to me, and I suspected she couldn’t speak English, but she may simply have been rude. I wasn’t sure whether to offer her a tip. I decided not to.

I say the room was unfurnished. It wasn’t, quite. There was one picture on the wall. A picture where the mirror should be, so I was forced to look at it as I blindly brushed my teeth. It was a picture of a small dog. It was not a good picture; the dog’s body seemed rather elongated, as if the artist had painted the head and then realized he had more canvas to fill with the torso than he’d hitherto expected. The legs were strange and stumpy, one of which was a different length to the others, another extended not to a paw but to a smudge; the legs didn’t look as if they even belonged to a dog at all, let alone
this
dog, this dog that seemed so out of proportion that he’d have required thicker legs just to support his frame, surely? The dog was faced out towards me, and its tongue was lolling out, and its mouth was set into a grin, the whole thing designed no doubt to be a pose of ordinary genial dogginess—but there was no joy to the expression on that face, the eyes were flat and dead. And there was no context to it, no background, not even a hint of colour, the misshapen beast just standing there on plain white. I took a closer look at the picture. I was surprised to see that it was signed: ‘Saras.’ One of his lesser works, then.

I finished washing. I put on my favourite of the three pyjamas that Margaret had packed for me, the pair with the stripes, the ones that seemed a little jaunty. I got into bed, and, tired as I was, decided to look at the guide book once more before turning off the light. But I could so easily have put it out, I could so easily have been in darkness—and that’s what made it so much more fortunate for Mrs. Saras that when she came into my room without even knocking that she didn’t disturb me.

She was still dressed. Though not, I realized later, in the same clothes she had worn to the restaurant in Santa Tereza earlier that night. I was too surprised to see her in my bedroom at all to be surprised by this little fact as well—but in retrospect, I must admit, it bothers me. Did she change clothes in the middle of the night in anticipation of my arrival? And if so, why did she not try to make more of an impression? Because she still looked awful. The dress she had worn at the party had not exactly been flattering; this replacement was no better, the colours were dull, they hung off her baggily.

It occurred to me in a split moment of guilt that the reason she was there was that I had done something wrong; Saras and his wife
had
been waiting up for my arrival; they
had
intended to be welcoming host and hostess; going straight to bed as I had, without even stopping to say good night, I had slighted them, I had offended Saras, I had ruined the negotiations and Mr. Gladwell would be displeased. So the first words I said to her were, “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head impatiently, put a finger to her lips. I understood of course that she wanted me to be quiet.

And we just stayed like that for a while. Me in bed, guide book in hand, the construction of Christ the Redeemer in mid-paragraph. And she, now looking around the room, taking it in, as if she’d never been in it before, judging it coolly, as if the sink were fascinating, the lack of décor fascinating, as if the Englishman in striped pyjamas were the least fascinating part about it.

“Can I help you with anything?” I whispered.

“No,” she said, perfectly loudly, too loudly I thought—she hadn’t wanted me quiet then so I wouldn’t disturb her husband, she just hadn’t wanted to hear my voice much. And then she looked directly at me, walked straight to me, stood over me. Frowned in some consideration, and as she did so the skin on that unlovely face of hers tautened and twitched, the scarred map of her face readjusted its nations’ boundaries. Then without another word the head shot closer to mine, she forced her tongue into my astonished mouth, she hammered away at the back of my throat with the blunt tip of it for a few seconds.

As kisses went, it may have been the most decidedly unerotic I had ever had—it was right down at the bottom of the list alongside Aunt Amanda’s, the one who would always aim for my mouth whenever she greeted me as a teenager, alongside that fat secretary’s (since departed) I had drunkenly snogged at the Christmas party of 2008. And yet, and yet. Even though my brain was screaming its old warnings at me, get away from this woman, there must be no arousal here, even as I was starting to gag at the relentless pounding of that tongue—there was a stiffening downstairs under the bed sheets, I could feel something poking its way up and out of the striped pyjamas, a perk of interest from an organ who had long ago shut off and gone to sleep. O-ho, something primal said, it seems like there might be some fuckery afoot!

The kissing done, she climbed on top of me. I stared up at the face, trying to find the best angle to view it by. The harshness of that light bulb wasn’t doing it any favours. “Can we at least do this in the dark?” I suggested.

No time for that, it seemed—because then she was licking me. She was licking at my forehead, the tops of my cheeks. She licked at my eyes, she put a whole wad of tongue in there and slurped away freely.

“You want to please me,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“Well, yes. All right.”

“Then bark for me. Bark like a dog.”

“. . .  Do I have to?”

“You barked for my husband. You bark for me.”

“Yip yip,” I said.

“Louder.”

“Yip yip yip,” I said, and put some real welly into it.

And as I yipped, so she licked—great gobby licks that left my skin feeling soaked. Working her way down my face now, coating my nose with a sheen of spit, now back on to the cheeks, the tongue massaging it in hard, painting the spit on thick. She pulled back. “Open your mouth again,” she commanded. And stuck out her tongue in readiness.