The Complete Stories (25 page)

With an inquiry much greater than the question on their faces, they had recklessly turned around at the same time, and the house stood as close as if, coming out of nowhere, a sudden wall had risen before their eyes. Behind them the buses, before them the house—there was no way for them not to be there. If they backed away they’d be hit by the buses, if they stepped forward they’d hit the monstrous house. They’d been captured.

The house was tall, and close, they couldn’t look at it without having to tilt their heads up childishly, which suddenly made them very small and transformed the house into a mansion. It was as if nothing had ever been so close to them. The house must have had a color. And whatever the original color of the window frames had been, they were now merely old and solid. Shrunken, they widened their eyes in astonishment: the house was
anguished
.

The house was anguish and calm. As no word had ever been. It was a building that weighed on the chests of the two kids. A two-storied house like someone raising a hand to his throat. Who? who had built it, erecting that ugliness stone by stone, that cathedral of solidified fear?! Or had it been time that embedded itself in single walls and given them that strangled look, the silence of a tranquil hanged corpse? The house was strong as a boxer dog without a neck. And having your head directly connected to your shoulders was anguish. They looked at the house like children facing a stairway.

At last both had unexpectedly reached the goal and stood before the sphinx. Openmouthed, in the extreme union of fear and respect and pallor, before that truth. Naked anguish had leaped up and stood facing them—not even familiar like the word they’d grown accustomed to using. Just a thick, crude house with no neck, just that ancient power.

I am the thing itself you were seeking at last, the big house said.

And the funniest thing is that I don’t have any secrets at all, the big house also said.

The girl looked on sleepily. As for the boy, his seventh sense snagged on the building’s innermost part and he felt the slightest tug of a response at the end of the line. He barely moved, fearful of frightening off his own watchfulness. The girl had become anchored in her alarm, afraid to emerge from it into the terror of a discovery. At their slightest word, the house would collapse. Their silence left the old house intact. Yet, if at first they were forced to look at it, now, even if someone informed them that they were free to escape, they would have stayed there, trapped by fascination and horror. Staring at that thing erected so long before they were born, that ages-old thing that was already bereft of meaning, that thing from the past. But what about the future?! Oh God, give us our future! The eyeless house, with the power of a blind man. And if it had eyes, they were the empty, round eyes of a statue. Dear God, don’t let us be the children of this empty past, deliver us unto the future. They wanted to be someone’s children. But not of this hardened, inevitable carcass, they didn’t understand the past: oh deliver us from the past, let us fulfill our difficult duty. For freedom wasn’t what the two children wanted, they really wanted to be persuaded and subjugated and led—but it would have to be by something more powerful than the great power that was pounding in their chests.

The young lady suddenly averted her face, I’m so unhappy, I’ve always been so unhappy, school’s over, everything’s over!—because in her eagerness she was ungrateful for a childhood that had probably been happy. The girl suddenly averted her face with a kind of grunt.

As for the boy, he quickly lost his footing in the vagueness as if mired without a thought. That was also because of the afternoon light: it was a livid light unmarked by the hour of day. The boy’s face was greenish and calm, and now he was getting no help whatsoever from the words of
the
others
: just as he had rashly hoped he would one day manage. Only, he hadn’t counted on the misery there was in being unable to express.

Green and nauseated, they didn’t know how to express. The house symbolized some thing they could never attain, even after a lifetime spent seeking expression. Seeking expression, be it for an entire life, would be an amusement in itself, bitter and bewildered, but an amusement, and it would be a diversion that would gradually distance them from the dangerous truth—and save them. They, of all people, who, in their desperate cunning to survive, had already invented a future for themselves: both would be writers, and with a determination as obstinate as if expressing a soul would stifle it once and for all. And if it weren’t stifled, that would be a way of merely knowing that you were lying in the solitude of your own heart.

Whereas the house from the past wasn’t something they could play around with. Now, so much smaller than it, they felt they’d only been playing at being youthful and suffering and sharing the
message
. Now, alarmed, they finally had what they’d been dangerously and imprudently asking for: they were two youths who really were lost. As their elders would say: “They were getting what they deserved.” And they were as guilty as guilty children, as guilty as criminals are innocent. Ah, if only they could yet pacify the world they’d exacerbated, reassuring it: “we were just kidding! we’re impostors!” But it was too late. “Surrender unconditionally and make yourself a part of me for I am the past”—their future life told them. And, for God’s sake, in whose name could anyone insist on hoping that the future belonged to them? who?! but who cared to dispel the mystery for them, and without lying? was there anyone working to that end? This time, struck mute as they were, it wouldn’t even occur to them to blame society.

The young lady had suddenly turned her face away with a grunt, some kind of sob or cough.

“Just like a woman to start crying at a time like this,” he thought from the depths of his perdition, not knowing what he meant by “a time like this.” But this was the first solid thing he’d found for himself. Grabbing this first plank, he could bob up to the surface, and as always before the girl. He recovered first, and saw a house standing there with a “For Rent” sign. He heard the bus behind him, saw an empty house, and beside him the girl with a pained face, trying to hide it from the now-awakened man: she for some reason was trying to hide her face.

Still hesitant, he waited politely for her to regain her composure. He waited hesitantly, yes, but a man. Skinny and irreparably boyish, yes, but a man. A man’s body was that solid thing that always let him bounce back. Every so often, whenever he really needed to, he became a man. Then, with an unsure hand, he stiffly lit a cigarette, as if he were
the others
, rescuing himself with the gestures the Masonic brotherhood of men had given him as a crutch and a direction. And as for her?

But the girl emerged from all this smeared with lipstick, her rouge a little smudged, and adorned with a blue necklace. Plumage that a moment before had belonged to a situation and a future, but now it was as if she hadn’t washed her face before going to bed and had woken up with the indecent traces of a previous orgy. For she, every so often, was a woman.

With a comforting cynicism, the boy looked at her curiously. And saw that she was no more than a girl.

“I’m just going to stay here,” he told her then, taking his leave haughtily, he who no longer even had to be home by a certain time and was feeling the house key in his pocket.

While saying goodbye, they, who never shook hands because it would be conventional, shook hands, for she, flustered at her bad timing in having breasts and a necklace, she had awkwardly reached hers out. The contact between the two clammy hands groping each other without love embarrassed the boy like a shameful operation, he blushed. And she, wearing lipstick and rouge, tried to disguise her own embellished nakedness. She was nothing, and walked away as if a thousand eyes were following her, flighty in her humility at having a condition that could be labeled.

Seeing her walk away, he examined her incredulously, with amused interest: “could a woman really know what anguish is?” And his doubt made him feel very strong. “No, women were good for something else, that you couldn’t deny.” And what he needed was a male friend. Yes, a loyal male friend. He then felt clean and candid, with nothing to hide, loyal like a man. From any tremor of the earth, he’d emerge with a free forward movement, with the same proud negligence that makes a horse neigh. Whereas she left with her back to the wall like an intruder, nearly a mother already to the children she’d some day have, her body anticipating its submission, sacred and impure body about to bear. The boy looked at her, amazed at having been tricked by the girl for so long, and almost smiled, almost beat the wings he had just grown. I am a man, his sex told him in obscure victory. From every struggle or rest, he’d emerge still more of a man, being a man was even nourished by that wind that was now dragging dust down the lanes of the São João Batista cemetery. The same dusty wind that made that other being, the female, curl up wounded, as if no covering would ever protect her nakedness, that wind in the streets.

The boy saw her walk away, following her with pornographic and curious eyes that didn’t spare a single humble detail of the girl. The girl who suddenly broke into a desperate run so as not to miss the bus . . .

Alarmed, fascinated, the boy saw her running like a madwoman so as not to miss the bus, intrigued he saw her climbing onto the bus like a monkey in a short skirt. The fake cigarette fell from his hand . . .

Something uncomfortable had thrown him off balance. What was it? A moment of great wariness was coming over him. But what was it?! Urgently, disturbingly: what was it? He’d seen her run so nimbly even if the girl’s heart, he easily guessed, were faint. And he’d seen her, all full of powerless love for humanity, climb like a monkey onto the bus—and then saw her sit quiet and polite, fixing her blouse as she waited for the bus to leave . . . Could that be it? But what about that could fill him with mistrustful wariness? Maybe the fact that she started running for no reason, since the bus wasn’t leaving, so there was time . . . She didn’t even need to run . . . But what about all that made him prick up his ears in anguished listening, in the deafness of someone who will never hear the explanation?

He had just been born a man. But, as soon as he owned up to his birthright, he was also owning up to that weight on his chest; as soon as he owned up to his glory, a fathomless experience was giving him his first future wrinkle. Ignorant, uneasy, as soon as he owned up to his masculinity, a new eager hunger was arising, an aching thing like a man who never cries. Could he be experiencing his first fear that something was impossible? The girl was a zero on that waiting bus, and yet, man that he now was, the boy suddenly needed to lean on that nothing, on that girl. And not even to lean on her on equal terms, not even to lean on her in order to concede . . . But, stuck in his manly kingdom, he needed her. For what? so he could remember some stipulation? so that she or some other woman wouldn’t let him go too far and get lost? so that he might feel with a jolt, as he was feeling now, that there was the possibility of error? He needed her hungrily so he wouldn’t forget that they were made of the same flesh, that poor flesh from which, by climbing onto the bus like a monkey, she seemed to have made a fateful path. What! but what after all is happening to me? he thought fearfully.

Nothing. Nothing, and you shouldn’t make too much of it, it was just an instant of weakness and hesitation, that’s all, there wasn’t any danger.

Just an instant of weakness and hesitation. But within that system of hard last judgment, which doesn’t allow even a second of disbelief or else the ideal collapses, he stared in a daze at the long street—and now everything was ruined and dried up as if his mouth were full of dust. Now and finally alone, he was defenseless and at the mercy of the hasty lie with which
the others
were trying to teach him to be a man. But what about the message?! the message had crumbled in the dust that the wind was dragging toward the gutter. Mama, he said.

Monkeys

(“Macacos”)

That first time we had a marmoset in the house was around New Year’s. We had no running water and no maid, people were lining up to buy meat, the summer heat had exploded—and that was when, silent with bewilderment, I saw the present come into the house, already eating a banana, already examining everything with great speed and a long tail. He seemed more like a big monkey not yet fully grown, he had tremendous potential. He’d climb the laundry hanging on the clothes line, from where he’d holler like a sailor, and toss banana peels wherever they fell. And I was exhausted. Whenever I’d forget and wander absentmindedly into the laundry room, the big shock: that cheerful man was there. My youngest son knew, before I did, that I would get rid of that gorilla: “And what if I promise that one day the monkey’s going to get sick and die, will you let him stay? and what if you knew that sooner or later he’ll fall out the window anyway and die down there?” My feelings made me avert my gaze. The little-big monkey’s happy and filthy lack of awareness made me responsible for his destiny, since he himself wouldn’t take the blame. A girlfriend understood of what bitterness my acquiescence was made, what crimes fed into my dreamy manner, and crudely saved me: some boys from the favela showed up in a happy commotion, took away the laughing man, and for the lackluster New Year I at least got a monkey-free house.

A year later, I’d just been feeling a surge of joy, when right there in Copacabana I spotted the crowd. A man was selling little monkeys. I thought of the boys, of the joys they gave me for free, unrelated to the worries they also gave me for free, I imagined a circle of joy: “Whoever gets this must pass it on,” and on and on, like a chain reaction running up a trail of gunpowder. And right on the spot I bought the one whose name would be Lisette.

She nearly fit in my hand. She was wearing the skirt, earrings, necklace and bracelet of a Bahian woman. And she had the air of an immigrant who lands still dressed in her country’s traditional clothing. There was also an immigrant quality in her wide eyes.

As for this one, she was a miniature woman. She spent three days with us. She was so delicately built. And so incredibly sweet. More than just her eyes, her gaze was wide. At every movement, her earrings would tremble; her skirt was always neat, her red necklace shiny. She slept a lot, but was sober and tired when it came to eating. Her rare caresses were just light bites that left no mark.

On the third day we were in the laundry room admiring Lisette and the way she was ours. “A little too gentle,” I thought, missing my gorilla. And suddenly my heart replied very sternly: “But that’s not sweetness. It’s death.” The harshness of the message left me speechless. Then I told the boys: “Lisette is dying.” Looking at her, I then realized how far our love had gone. I rolled up Lisette in a napkin, went with the boys to the nearest emergency room, where the doctor couldn’t see us because he was performing an urgent procedure on a dog. Another taxi—Lisette thinks we’re on an outing, Mama—another hospital. There they gave her oxygen.

And with that breath of life, a Lisette we didn’t know was suddenly revealed. Her eyes were much less wide, more secretive, more laughing, and her protruding and ordinary face had a certain ironic superiority; a little more oxygen, and she felt like saying that she could hardly stand being a monkey; she was indeed, and had a lot to say. Soon, however, she succumbed once more, exhausted. More oxygen and this time a serum injection to whose prick she reacted with an angry little swipe, her bracelet tinkling. The nurse smiled: “Lisette, dear, calm down!”

The diagnosis: she wasn’t going to make it, unless she had oxygen nearby and, even then, it was unlikely. “Don’t buy monkeys on the street,” he scolded me shaking his head, “sometimes they’re already sick.” No, you had to buy a good monkey, to know where it came from, for at least five years of guaranteed love, you had to know what it had or hadn’t done, as if you were getting married. I talked it over with the boys for a moment. Then I said to the nurse: “Sir, you’ve taken quite a liking to Lisette. So if you let her spend a couple days near the oxygen, and she gets better, she’s yours.” But he thought about it. “Lisette is pretty!” I implored. “She’s beautiful,” he agreed, thoughtful. Then he sighed and said: “If I cure Lisette, she’s yours.” We left, with an empty napkin.

The next day they called, and I told the boys that Lisette had died. My youngest asked me: “Do you think she died wearing her earrings?” I said yes. A week later my eldest said to me: “You look so much like Lisette!” “I like you too,” I replied.