May the bastard who invented the Portuguese pavement rot in hell. God damn Dom Manuel I and his lieutenants. Irregular stone squares beaten into place by hand. By hand! Of course they were going to work loose. Wasn’t it obvious they were going to work loose? White, black, white, black, the waves of Copacabana. What good are the waves of Copacabana to me? Give me a smooth surface free of calcareous protuberances. Stupid mosaics. They’re everywhere. Pour some concrete over the top and send on the steamrollers! Holes, craters, loose rocks, exploding manholes. After seventy, life is an endless obstacle course.
Falls are the biggest menace to the elderly. “Elderly,” what an awful word. The only thing worse is “senior citizen.” Falls are what separate old age from extreme senility. The jolt destroys the connection between head and feet. Bye-bye, body. At home, I go from grab bar to grab bar, groping furniture and walls, and I shower sitting down. Armchair to window, window to bed, bed to armchair, armchair to window.
There, another treacherous little stone out to get me. One day I’m going to take a tumble. Not today.
One day. “One day” used to be so far away. I ran into Ribeiro on Rua Francisco Sá. We hadn’t seen each other in a while. He said we should get together “one of these days.” The next he was dead. São Francisco Xavier Cemetery was horrific, an Auschwitz oven. The tombs looked like they were melting. I felt sick in the crematorium. People thought it was the emotion. They weren’t entirely wrong. Ribeiro had been in great shape. He played volleyball until his last sunset, left the beach, and checked out in the shower: heart attack. I don’t have a single friend left alive now. Ribeiro was the last. I was sure he was going to bury me. He jogged, swam, stopped smoking at forty, and refused to go limp. His sister thinks it was Viagra. Ribeiro fucked around; it was a big deal to him.
Before him it was Sílvio. Or was it Ciro? No, Ciro was the first to go, of cancer, then Neto and Neto’s wife. Neto couldn’t stand Célia, but he died a year after she did. Go figure. She was a pain in the ass to begin with, but when she got older, Jesus Christ… she was bitter, cranky, and ugly. Neto couldn’t take the peace and quiet.
And to think that Célia had been such a foxy bride. She should have died back then, in her prime. If Neto had only known, he wouldn’t have cried so much at the altar. Men are fools.
Sílvio departed one February, during Carnival. He started partying on the Friday and went for ten days straight. The following Sunday, he left three whores in his apartment and went out to buy more blow, mixed it with everything imaginable, and his heart gave out. They found him face-down in Lapa, near Avenida Mem de Sá, with a bottle of poppers in his hand and five Gs of coke in his pocket. Sílvio used to drink, which is no big deal, but when menopause came… I know, it’s “andropause,” but I don’t like “andropause.” It’s like “jill off”—it’s repulsive. “Jack off” is better, regardless of gender… Anyway, when menopause came Sílvio lost it. He met a pair of sex kittens from down south, dealers, and became their slave. We stopped seeing each other because of the gaúchas. They took him out of circulation. God sent two heartless bitches to finish him off. It was punishment. What year was that? I don’t even know, so many have gone: years and friends.
Not all that long ago, it used to take me ten minutes to get from my place to Dr. Mattos’s practice on foot. Mattos is my GP. Now it takes me forty. Walking isn’t an unconscious act any more. I watch my step, my knees, and focus on the route. Everything hurts, for a whole list of reasons, all of which have to do with old age. Mattos has sent me to more than ten specialists. One wants to operate on my cataracts, another, my gallbladder, and they all stuff me full of pills. Dr. Rudolf doesn’t think my veins can take the pressure and is planning to put stents in my femoral artery and my aorta. I stay quiet and pretend they’re not talking to me. They’re a neurotic bunch, doctors. They’re vain, and brutal. I’d like to see one of them go under the knife.
Whoa! Dog poop. The icing on the cake. There’s a woman in my building who breeds hysterical minihounds with high-pitched barks. She goes away every weekend and leaves them locked in the laundry room. They get lonely and yelp. I’m going to report the witch from 704 for cruelty to animals. It must be humiliating to pick up dog poop with little baggies, and I understand the people who can’t be bothered, but I just don’t agree with keeping dogs cooped up in apartments.
I regret every pet I’ve ever had. Unhappy, needy, dirty. Four dogs and a cat. The first one died of old age: blind, lame, and smelly. The cat was ripped to shreds by its father—it had a huge Oedipus complex and was obsessed with its mother. The other dogs expired for different reasons, all horrific: distemper, a tumor, poisoning. My mother had scattered rat pellets around the garden and forgot to lock Bóris up. I never trusted her again. Poor thing, she made sure he had clean newspaper, fresh water, took him to the vet, and cried as if she’d lost a child. Even so, I never forgave her.
No one is more selfish than a child. I can’t stand my grandkids. They live far away—better for them. They’re noisy and self-interested. I loved my daughter until she was five. After that I couldn’t bear her hysteria, my wife’s hysteria with her, hers with the maids. I used to do anything to avoid going home. I think the only reason I had an affair with Marília was so I’d have somewhere to go after work. I loved Marília’s house. I’d kill time there until about ten, drinking and listening inattentively to her jabbering.
I didn’t care if we had sex or not, but I made the effort for her sake. What I really liked was her small, but very pleasant, house in Jardim Botânico, with an outside area where she kept a few tortoises.
I’ve never been big on sex. I enjoyed it while it was happening, but couldn’t be bothered to make the first move. And women invariably transfer to men the obligation to be in the mood. Since I never was, my lovers only stuck around as long as it took me to seduce them.
Marriage is the marital status most suited to men who, like me, don’t enjoy the company of others. There’s nothing more exhausting than managing dates and expectations. A bad marriage can be great for both parties, and mine was. Irene turned her back on temptation, and so did I. We lived comfortably in two bedrooms, all very sad and civilized. One day, she realized she was getting old and that it was her last chance to fuck, have orgasms, and be passionately in love, those things women believe in. I figure it was Rita’s adolescence that pushed Irene over the edge. She started group analysis and did it with Jairo, the club manager. It was awkward. No man deals well with his wife’s cheating. I had to stop swimming at the club. I really liked that pool, but the membership was in her name.
Irene regretted it, but it was too late. I found myself alone and guilt-free, because she was the one who’d left me. I even took an interest in two other women, unlike Irene, who was unlucky and never had another partner after the rower at the club. He was married and stopped answering her calls after a month. Women are all naive. We haven’t seen each other in thirty years; we were together for fifteen. I started having problems getting it up with Aurora, my second girlfriend after Irene. I lie, things weren’t going so well back when I was with Irene, but with Aurora it was definitive. I suffered for a good few years then let it go. Bye-bye, hormones, bye-bye, ladies, bye-bye, heavy silence in the room, bye-bye, eyes full of pity. I would be Franciscan. A satyr and a friar.
My dad was just like Ribeiro; he couldn’t accept the fact that he couldn’t get it up. I remember seeing him and my mother looking radiant one Easter, and I asked what the secret was. Dad clapped his hand down on Mom’s thigh and claimed that his elixir was “this woman here.” I was proud of them. On Mom’s seventy-fifth birthday, she took me aside and said she was sick of trying to get Dad’s dick up. It was too much work. She felt it was her duty, but she was tired and didn’t want to anymore. She had even urged him to take a lover and said she didn’t mind, but it made him angry. That conversation made me really uncomfortable. Irene was at the peak of her crisis, and I’ve always been against parents talking about sex with their kids. Mom wanted me to convince Dad to leave her in peace.
I opened the door of the room, which was all shut up, and found him in bed in a foul mood. I asked how things were going and he said, “Bad, real bad.” He told me Mom was having an affair with their insurance broker. My father’s dementia had made him paranoid, jealous, and delirious. He’d gone off the deep end. He accused his wife of having cheated on him with a long list of men they’d known for the entire time they’d been married. She, of all people—a virgin when they married who had never dared lust after anyone. He owned a pistol and said something about shooting her and then killing himself. I threw the pistol into the sea.
I brought her to live with me, which only deepened Irene’s dissatisfaction. I became a lightning rod for family problems. Rita was held back in school that year, the cook quit, the last dog bit the dust, we had a leak in the bathroom—it was all stacked against me. We put Dad in a home in Maricá, where he died, convinced he’d spent fifty-nine years with a compulsive adulteress. Irene should have married him. They’d be going at it to this day.
And here comes a bike! Cyclists are all assassins—suicides and assassins.
When I look at myself in the mirror I see Aunt Suzel. “It’s the estrogen,” Mattos once told me. It makes old men look like old women and old women look like old men. Aunt Suzel died a spinster and a virgin, at the age of eighty-six. She’d spent the last twenty-six years pushing around the stuffy air of Andaraí with a hand-held fan, repeating that she wanted to die. It made you want to give her a helping hand. One afternoon, she fell down the stairs—the fall—and they couldn’t put Aunt Suzel together again. She lived with her niece in a three-story building with no elevator. Now she visits me in the mirror.
Red light. There are no cars coming, but I don’t want to risk stumbling. I wait for the green light like a law-abiding German. It’s stinking hot. Rio has always been hot; it’s nothing new, nothing to do with all this Greenpeace nonsense. I fried many an egg on the cobblestones of Penha when I was a kid. The world’s been ending for as long as I’ve been in it.
I’ve only a vague memory of what testosterone is like. I don’t know what it is to be young anymore; it’s like talking about someone else. I never was very active. Ribeiro and I used to go out a lot, and boy, did we drink—too much. I traded day for night, put on weight, developed a solid belly supported by two broomstick legs and topped with a short neck that holds up my shiny bald head.
Not Ribeiro. He’d go straight from the nightclub to the beach. He’d only sleep after jogging from Lifeguard Post One to Six, there and back, nonstop. He kept his hair for a long time, which gave him a few extra years as the Don Juan of the beach promenade. Ribeiro never married; he taught PE and had a thing for seventeen-year-old female students. He once got a working over from one of their dads. Nowadays, he’d be behind bars. I always thought Ribeiro was immortal. But no one is.
Who will come to my funeral?
I got married after Ciro and was one of the last to get divorced. In the space of ten years, we all did the same thing. But not Neto. Neto endured Célia to the end. Poor thing, he never knew what it is to use the bathroom with the door open, fall asleep with the TV on, smoke in the bedroom, eat in bed, and not have to talk to anyone or watch the nightly soap.
I think Neto stayed married because he was half-black. I hesitate to say anything about the color of people’s skin. Even Monteiro Lobato, the legendary Monteiro Lobato, was labeled a racist. But Neto, because he was half-black—go ahead and burn me at the stake together with Lobato—always went out of his way to come across as respectable. He thought marriage gave him status. I don’t blame him, I get it. Is it racism? Whatever, to hell with Zumbi dos Palmares, Martin Luther King, et cetera. Sílvio, who was fair-skinned and blond with a receding hairline, didn’t give a damn what others thought of him. There must be something to that.
I got used to single life quickly and moved to an apartment at the back of a run-down, old building on Rua Hilário de Gouveia. Irene got the house and I got the car. I screwed Aurora and the other one in the metallic blue Chevette. Over in Barra da Tijuca, when it was still all sand. On the way back, we’d stop at a motel and watch a porn flick. When I was able to, I’d repeat the deed. I was still into sex in those days, even though I had a hard time getting it up.
It was women who made me lose interest. Nagging, sniveling, needy. Women love to blame their own unhappiness on the next person. I never let them drag me in. The minute they get one sign of life from you, they shoot off a three-page monologue in your ear. Boy, can they talk; they never get sick of yakety-yakking. Then they turn on the waterworks so we suckers will feel sorry for them. I don’t like women. Truth be told, I don’t like anyone.
I did like Neto, Ciro, Sílvio, and Ribeiro, though. Men don’t talk. We each say something idiotic, we laugh, we drink, and there you have it: a great night. Women are always trying to make an event out of things.
Green. This light takes forever to change and then it only stays green for two seconds. Off I go, as sprightly as Marília’s tortoises. I don’t believe it. It’s blinking already? It’s red! What did I tell you? There’s still a third of the crossing in front of me and the wretched thing turns red! Who did they base their calculations on—Speedy Gonzales? What’s your problem, mister? Gonna run me down? Go on, smartass, split my knee in half with your headlights. I know you want to pass, sonny boy! One day you’re going to be old (with any luck, you’re going to be old) and a young guy in a hurry is going to shatter your leg and you’ll spend the rest of your days in an adult diaper, terrified of crossing the street. Manholes, high curbs, the stench, Argentineans.
I don’t read the newspaper, I don’t read magazines. I don’t read. I can’t see properly either. All I do is watch TV. Football, all day long. I like the after-game commentary.
I stopped at the VCR. No, that’s a lie, I have a DVD player that came with the forty–inch TV, but I never did get the hang of the remote. Before that, I used to rent the odd film on the way back from Mattos’s practice, but the rental shop closed. I don’t miss it.
I’ve been fortunate enough to grow old smoking.
I don’t separate my trash, I don’t recycle, I throw cigarette butts in the toilet, I use aerosols, I take long hot showers, and I brush my teeth with the water running. Screw mankind. I won’t be around to see what happens.
I haven’t voted in thirteen years, I’m not responsible for the tragedy around me.
Detour due to road works. They love their road works. The dirty cones in the middle of the lane, cars speeding past, narrowly missing me. Don’t they see me here? Jackhammer. Jackhammer. Jackhammer. How does that poor guy stand it? He’s going to die young. He won’t be missing anything. Well, he’ll probably miss something. I don’t know what, but he probably will. I’ve never seen death as a possibility. Not that I’m really attached to anything special in life—it’s just that death doesn’t exist. Death is a chronic illness.
I remember seeing Sílvio’s hands shake and thinking it was a hangover. We were still young. But his son Inácio told Ribeiro at his funeral that it was Parkinson’s. He said his dad had continued screwing around, and had suffered in the hands of the gaúchas, but he’d started mixing up names, the number of his apartment, the time he was supposed to take his medicine. Sílvio was slim, elegant, and bad. Real bad. Nasty. He committed suicide that Carnival. There’s many a way to do it.
Women didn’t give Sílvio a second glance. But all they had to do was exchange two words with him and they’d be head over heels. And he played them—he’d call lots, then stop, pretend to be seeing someone else, treat them badly on their birthdays. Women love to be treated badly.
That was in the beginning. At thirty-two, Sílvio married Norma and slowed down. But then came the kids; Norma had post-natal depression after the second and became a pain in the neck. To make things worse, Sílvio’s mother-in-law moved in with them. The house became a Wailing Wall. There was bellyaching, the nightly soaps, and kids underfoot all day long, with kiddy baths, baby food, toys, runny noses, school, poop. He lost his patience, packed the oldest off to boarding school in Petrópolis, which the boy only left at Christmas, enlisted his mother-in-law to look after the youngest, said goodbye to Norma, and went to live in the bachelor’s pad he kept in Glória. Sílvio wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t poor either. He hadn’t even unpacked and he’d already arranged to meet up with three hookers, all on the day of the move. Sílvio enjoyed an orgy.
He fell hard for the gaúchas and went to live down south. We toasted his departure. We drank a lot at a party in Leme and popped some pills that he gave us. He wanted to teach us how to live. At daybreak, we were kicked out: me, Ribeiro, Neto, Ciro, and Sílvio. Five zombies and a troupe of easy women. Sílvio proposed we take the party to his bat cave. We applauded the suggestion. He started taking off his clothes the minute he walked in, saying he was hot. Ciro locked himself in the bedroom with the Argentinean—he always was a class act. I think Neto left, and I don’t know where Ribeiro got to. That left me and Sílvio, in his underpants, in the lounge room; plus the chick I’d brought with me, who’d been with Neto; and Sílvio’s brunette, who before I knew it was going at it with him on the armchair with tapered legs. The other two launched themselves at me without asking if I wanted to, Ciro started moaning on the other side of the wall, and the Argentinean yelled, “Faster, faster!” I was a spectacular flop. One of the chicks, a blond from the countryside, tried to help me along, but I gave her some money and sent her on her way. Sílvio fell off the armchair with the brunette and didn’t get up again. Ciro must have fallen asleep too, because I didn’t hear anything from him in the bedroom. I left at eleven with a throbbing migraine. I had a black coffee at the bakery and collapsed on the rug in the hallway. I was out of it for twenty-one hours.
Maybe Ciro and Sílvio did that all the time, but not me. That was the first and last time I came close to taking part in an orgy with friends. There’s something a little queer in every male friendship. Fucking the same women is a roundabout way of fucking each other. And in the same physical space, it’s a fine line. But there’s no way—not as a joke, not when I’m off my face, not anytime—that I’d kiss Neto, Sílvio, Ribeiro or Ciro. Well, maybe Ciro. Definitely Ciro. After forty, your turn-ons shift.
Ciro used to rake them in. Women would all but sit on his face. Ciro met Ruth at Juliano’s party and decided he was going to marry her in a church, do the whole big white wedding thing. He was mad about Ruth. She was really beautiful, and intelligent, and sexy. Ciro thought the love of his life would open the doors of monogamy for him.
It took about ten years of marriage to deflate Ciro’s hard-on. And Ciro without a hard-on wasn’t Ciro. He agonized and talked about it all the time. He didn’t want to cheat on Ruth because he knew it was a slippery slope, but Ruth had become a mother, a wife, a companion, a sister, everything but a lover.
He started picking fights with her, ugly fights, for no reason. I don’t know if he planned it or if it was desperation, but overnight he started getting irritated at little things she said, a glass here, a deodorant there. He’d pack his bags and leave over something insignificant, slamming the door behind him. Ruth would go crazy, miss work, lose weight, and so would he. After a week, he’d come home and they’d fuck as if they’d just met. It worked for a few years, and he even got his color back, until their arguments became more destructive than the previous same-old same-old. First he took a shine to Marta, or was it Cinira? I can’t remember. He fucked one of the two, or both at the same time, anyway, all I know is that once the floodgates were open, Ciro laid half of Rio de Janeiro in little under a year. Ruth wasted away. Women nourish the fantasy that true love is capable of transforming men. When it doesn’t happen, and it never does, they lose their self-respect and become sorry-looking shadows of their former selves.
Ciro actually managed to be worse than Sílvio, because Sílvio had never loved anyone, but Ciro loved Ruth a lot. She was so shocked by her husband’s erratic behavior, his disrespect for her, and lack of patience with the family that she developed a strange kind of apathy. It all started the day she caught Ciro at Sílvio’s apartment with Milena, the wife of a client of his. After that, the residents’ committee forbade Sílvio to lend the apartment to his friends. That afternoon, Ruth burst through the door, shouting, Milena hid under the sheets, and Ciro scrambled for his trousers. Ciro kept his head, got dressed, and left without explaining a thing. Ruth continued yelling in the corridor as the elevator went down. Ciro took the first cab he saw and hurried home. It was amazing how cold that man could be. When he got there, he showered, put on his pajamas, and sat down to watch TV. It took Ruth about twenty minutes to arrive, possessed, frozen on the doorstep, ready to brawl. But Ciro, the genius—a bastard, but a genius—was all lovey-dovey. Ruth started on about the apartment, the whore, and, with a straight face, Ciro said he didn’t know what she was talking about and swore that he’d come home, wondered where she was, and sat down to watch TV. Little by little, he began to feign restrained indignation at her having set the dogs on a couple she didn’t even know and, what’s more, in Sílvio’s apartment! And he pretended to be worried about his wife’s mental health. Less than a week later, Ruth was admitted to a clinic. Ciro never forgave himself, but he didn’t do anything to change the situation either. He moved into a tiny apartment in Santa Clara, where there was no room for anything but himself. And he continued ticking off names in his little black book. He was averaging three a week, sometimes four, depending on how needy he was feeling.
I’d never thought Ciro could be so brutal. I expected anything from Sílvio, but the cold-blooded way that Ciro acted with Ruth was shocking. I had envied Ciro my whole life. He was very good-looking and one of those guys who could play pool, soccer, badminton, poker, and win at them all without any effort. And even in the most vulgar of situations, like that almost-orgy at Sílvio’s place, Ciro knew how to be courteous. He took the Argentinean off to the bedroom like a gentleman.
I got married because of him. Since I was single, I started being left out of Sunday lunches. Neto and Sílvio would go with their wives and Ribeiro and I weren’t invited. Irene was Ruth’s friend and they introduced us. I thought it couldn’t get any better than that. Afterwards, they spent years dragging us through the mud.
I thought he was losing weight because of the all-nighters and excesses. One sunny Tuesday, Ciro invited me out for a coffee and told me he had cancer of the pancreas and that there was nothing to be done. He’d just turned fifty. I was tongue-tied. I didn’t know what to say. I thought about the day he’d met Ruth at Juliano’s party and what a fine-looking couple they had made. Ciro was our Kennedy. He departed six months after that coffee. I avoided him. I was terrified. I didn’t want to see him like that. But I carried the coffin. Ruth didn’t attend.
Here come some little thugs. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been mugged. At one point, I would only go out with the clothes on my body. Then, one stupid afternoon, on my way home from an MRI over in Botafogo, I was approached by two boys. When they realized I had no money on me, no cell phone, fuck all, they beat me up. Now I always carry some money for the thieves. They’re gone. Maybe they were honest kids after all. Black, in shorts, flip-flops, shirtless, but honest. Blame it on Monteiro Lobato.
My dad gave me the entire collection of Lobato’s Yellow Woodpecker Farm one Christmas. I was twelve. The books survived and I gave them to my daughter, thinking I was introducing her to heaven, but she went into a sulk because she wanted a Barbie. I tried to teach Rita math with Viscount Corncob, history with Grandma Benta, and grammar with the rag doll Emília, but she complained that there were no pictures and developed an aversion to the collection. She grew up ignorant and futile. I prayed for her not to put on weight as a teenager, because with her IQ, the best she could do was marry well.
She married so-so: a radiologist from Uberaba. His dad owned an x-ray clinic and the son followed him into the business. They met while she was on vacation in Ouro Preto. My son-in-law is a monumental fuckwit, the sort who blames everything on stress. Right, stress. A hypnotic drowsiness washes over me every time I talk to him. I could be standing, sitting, in the car, or at an insufferable end-of-year party. Felipe and Marcelo whinny loudly to wake me up and chant like retards that Grandpa’s not all there. Little do they know that I’m only protecting myself from their bore of a father. The same individual who gave them half their mediocre genes, seeing as how the other half came from their mother, who inherited my worst genes, the ones that don’t like Monteiro Lobato. The branches of this tree are rotten, dear Felipe and Marcelo. Your children are going to be fat like you, they’ll get beaten up at school, and they’ll be spoiled brats. Go on, laugh. You have no idea what awaits you—acne, small dicks, baldness, high blood pressure, cholesterol, a chronic cough, halitosis, hair in your ears, shortness of breath, urinary incontinence, a stroke—and I’ll have a front row seat. Any street urchin has better genes than you two. Now go to your room, because your father’s whining is making me doze off.
Rita visits me in Rio twice a year. She wants me to move to Uberaba. As if. As if I could stand Uberaba, and she me, and I her children. Give me the home in Maricá any day. I try to be nice when she comes, her idiot husband always in tow. I arrange for them to come at night, when insomnia sets in, to see if all the griping will lull me off to sleep. It’s a powerful sedative, my son-in-law’s blather.
My block! Another fifty-seven steps and I’m there. I love counting steps. I don’t get out much. I have nowhere to go, haven’t worked in eighteen years. The other day I realized I’m an employee of my health—it’s a full-time job. Every month I have my monthly exams, every year the annual ones, every six months the six-monthly ones. When one’s done, it’s time for another. And you have to make an appointment, take the doctor’s request with you, get it stamped, and get in line. Private plans are no different than the public system. Mattos’s practice is in an office building here in Copacabana that’s full of senile doctors. Every now and then one kicks the bucket. I go there every week, I know the distance, the time, the total number of footsteps to get there, the block-by-block breakdown, the rhythm of the traffic lights, the flower beds, the lampposts, and the stones along the way.
Now that Ribeiro is dead, there isn’t anyone for me to meet up with, even if only by chance, at the intersection. The only people I visit are my doctors and I don’t like them. I don’t spend a thing. I rent out a shop in Copacabana that I inherited from my dad, and that pays for my health insurance. The rest comes from my pension. I eat sausages, bacon, chicken wings, and ribs, I drink water straight from the faucet, and I don’t need anyone.
What’s that siren? It’s the fire truck. I thought it was an ambulance. The good thing about sirens is that they stop me from hearing the buzz, the swarm of bees that appeared about five years ago in my left ear and then moved to my right, in stereo, and is only getting worse. I’m going deaf. Tomorrow I have another hearing test. I think I left my glasses at home.
What siren is that now? Ah! It’s a garage door. The garage of my building. I made it. I didn’t even count properly, I was so busy talking. To whom? Talking to whom? To myself, since I’m the one I like to talk to. There’s a car coming up the exit ramp, it’s coming fast, I’d better get a move on. It’s the heartless witch from 704. She’s fleeing the dogs, going away for the weekend, the coward. I don’t think she’s seen me. No, she hasn’t seen me. The car becomes airborne for a moment at the top of the ramp. She’s driving like a maniac, talking on her cell. She doesn’t realize I’m here. Drop the goddamn phone and pay attention to what’s in front of you! Me! I’m in front of you! Ah! Finally, she’s seen me, she’s going to brake, she missed the pedal. How did she miss it? She’s nervous. So she should be. How old is that crone? Did she pass a driving test? Can you even drive at that age? What about the dogs in her laundry room? She’s braking! She found the brake, I can hear the tires squealing. The car’s still moving. How is it still moving? Did it skid? Isn’t it going to stop? Is it out of control? She looks at me with pity and closes her eyes so she won’t see what she’s about to do to me. Open your eyes, you wretched woman, come see what you’ve done. Why didn’t I report you to Animal Welfare? I should’ve known that someone who treats her own dogs like that has no respect for human life. I can already feel the metal brushing my pant leg.
A leap. How many years has it been since I last leapt? I bend my right leg, stretch out my left and throw my weight forward. Go! Metal on pant leg! Walking isn’t an unconscious act any more. I send the commands. Bend, stretch, I’m in the air, I prepare to land, my toes touch the pavement, I release my weight… the paving stone is loose? How can it be loose? I throw myself on it and it comes loose? Who was the dunce who beat it into place? Where’s the contractor? Where’s the mayor, who doesn’t come? It’s too late, my foot twists, I’m falling, the car scrapes past, but gravity is already pulling me towards the pavement. The fall. My fall, the one that will make me miss the days when I counted my steps to Mattos’s practice. From one moment to the next, I’ll be Aunt Suzel. My hand scrapes the ground, tries to break the fall—it can’t. The skin of my elbow tears, my hip pops out, and my head plummets towards the course granite of the curb, striking it like a church bell pealing.
Black, black, black, black, black, where’s white? Where are the waves of Copacabana? The hag from 704 is a dyed blond, the sort who reeks of cologne and talc and wears matching skirt suits.
My angel of death. Whoever would have thought?
I once asked a Buddhist who believed in reincarnation what actually reincarnates. He said it was something so very minute that there was no trace of the former individual in it. There’s blood coming out of my head. The battle-ax from 704 gets out of the car in a tizzy, the doorman comes running. I don’t feel a thing: no pain, no regret. I’m fine here. It was nice to remember my pals—nothing is a coincidence. If there were another life, it’d be nice to catch up with them, visit Ciro and Sílvio in hell, I’d like that. But there isn’t. Death doesn’t exist. Not even the reincarnationist Buddhist thinks he’s going to come back the same as he used to be. I’ll be on a plant, in the spittle of a lizard devouring a plant, in a fly licking the spittle of a lizard devouring a plant. I’ll be out there. It’s been long enough, and I’m tired. This indifference suits me.
I’ve said bad things about women. They deserve it. Men are all worthless too. And they weren’t made for one another.
I disintegrate in the air over Copacabana. I once read that death was the most significant moment in life, and it is. Mine has been good, so far, not for much longer.
Irene was impassive when she heard that the man with whom she had spent fifteen years of her youth had died. Her daughter called from Uberaba in a panic. Rita was at the airport while her father was lying in a refrigerator at the morgue. She had left the kids with her husband and wouldn’t be able to make the connecting flight in São Paulo, stop by the police station, and talk to the funeral director in time to bury him that afternoon. Rita complained about her lack of siblings and asked her mother to go to the morgue to ID the body.
“I know you hate him but I don’t have anyone else.”
“I don’t hate your father,” said Irene. She was about to say she didn’t feel anything for him, but thought it sounded worse than what she was being accused of. Hatred. Irene hated it when her daughter blackmailed her like she was now, forcing her to go downtown in that heat to see, of all things, one last time, the mistake. That was how she referred to him: “the mistake.” Irene really didn’t want to play the good mother right now. She didn’t want to go. She had buried him years earlier, when they divorced, but she decided it was best to go through the motions of loss. At ten thirty she stepped out of a taxi on Avenida Mem de Sá, in front of the morgue.
The smell of rot emanated from the building. The putrid air was even worse inside. The smell stung her nostrils, working its way into her nasal passages, even when she tried not to breathe through her nose. Couldn’t he have chosen a cooler day? Irene went to reception, took a number, and sat on a plastic chair to wait. The cracked seat nipped her thigh, obliging her to watch where she put her leg. The minutes that followed were interminable. Sorrow hung on the faces of those who, like her, were waiting their turn. She thought about getting a drink of water, but when she saw a cockroach dart across an electrical socket and hide in the drinking fountain, decided to go thirsty. She read the notices on the bulletin board, the messages of faith, and took down the phone numbers of two funeral directors, as Rita might need them. Lost in limbo, she was startled by a shriek coming from the corridor. An obese woman appeared, carried by two staff dressed in white. Washed over by waves of horror, she howled like a beast. The entourage crossed the waiting room and delivered the poor woman in all her delirium to a group of family members, who took her outside. The staff returned to their slow work and Irene shared their apathy. She was relieved that she was there for someone who meant so little to her. The howls from outside made her compare herself to the fat woman. The fact that she was suffering less than anyone else there was reassuring. She felt that she had one up on everyone else, a petty sentiment that was only excusable because of the strangeness of the situation. One hundred and seventeen, someone called. It was her number.
She went to the counter and from there a young man in a grubby white coat led her to the elevator. They rode up in silence, avoiding eye contact, and got out on the third floor. A long gallery of closed doors extended as far as the eye could see. Irene followed her guide to the second-to-last door on the right and waited while he fumbled with a key ring until he found the right one. They walked in. The air conditioning was better in there, but the stench was worse. The cold light flickered on the wall of squares, and, only then, watching the medical examiner go through the routine of comparing the tag number with the one on the protocol, did Irene realize what was about to happen. In one of those drawers was the phantom, her phantom.
The examiner was the one who was indifferent, not her. In this government building, Irene discovered, in dismay, moments before setting eyes on the frozen body of her ex, that she had been lying every time she played down his importance in her life. Álvaro still made her stomach churn. Her nausea had nothing to do with the funk of the place; it was the specter of unresolved regrets. She felt like throwing up.
Standing in front of the second square in the corner across from the door, the examiner motioned for her to come closer. His gloved hands pulled out the narrow metal drawer. On it lay the mistake. She hadn’t seen him in years. The light slowly revealed his nose, which looked even more hooked, and his sagging cheeks. His double chin and bald head created a halo of stiff skin around his face. His features were a flint-gray color. The drawer came all the way out, allowing her to see his wizened shoulders, his thin arms, the eternal pot belly, and his white body hair. She didn’t want to look at the rest. His nakedness made her uncomfortable. She stood there in thought, studying the contrast of his buttocks against the aluminum drawer. How small he was. There was blood on him, but it wasn’t that, his age, or even signs of the accident that intrigued Irene. Álvaro didn’t look like himself at all. His arched mouth had joined at the corners with the creases that ran down on either side of his nose, giving him a villainous look he’d never had in life. The comical passivity of times past had given way to a scowl. He had always been miserable, but not bitter. Had he become a bad man? The dead never look like the living, she thought. Álvaro was born old, but not evil, she concluded.
When had she seen him for the last time? At their daughter’s wedding? Célia’s funeral? Neto’s? She couldn’t remember. Her conscious efforts to remove him from memory had worked. The question ushered in a second: When was the last time she had been with him? In bed with him. Snatches of their fifteen long years together came racing back, involuntarily. The separate bedrooms, his unease, his conspicuous bald patch, his anger, his paunch, his tiredness, his inertia and impotence. The only image she had intentionally preserved was of the two of them naked, wrapped in the sheets of a mountain guesthouse, where they had gone to spend the weekend in the early days of what would later become a tragedy. No affection had survived their marriage.
“Álvaro doesn’t like women,” she said, lying on the cushions on the dark wooden floor of a mansion on Rua Visconde de Caravelas. “He should have become a priest.” Why did she stay locked away in a loveless marriage, treated like a second-class citizen by her adolescent daughter, while all her friends were getting divorced and moving on? Why was she still with him? The girl? The asthmatic dog? The maid’s end-of-year bonus? She wanted to live, fuck, love, and she didn’t even know if she had enough time left to learn to do it all. Couples who had much more going for them were coming to an end. Ciro and Ruth. “Álvaro’s a zero, a nobody, a nothing—why should I suffer over a nothing?”
Vera was harsh. She waited for Irene to finish her laundry list of complaints, then, as the session drew to a close, said they had come to an impasse. She didn’t believe they could make progress on their own. It wasn’t just Irene. The same was true in all her work as a therapist. Vera was convinced that group analysis was the only way to free Irene from the straightjacket of rationality that imprisoned her. She was completely within her rights not to accept it; however, if she preferred to continue with conventional treatment, she would have to find another professional to help her. Irene listened, offended. The affected way Vera had said “straightjacket of rationality” should have made her leave, but, at the age of forty, she was too young, too stupid, too lost, and too desperate to say no. She said yes to group therapy.
Her thoughts had wandered without her noticing. Why remember that afternoon? She had agreed to serve as a guinea pig in an experimental school of psychoanalysis, so popular back then but whose techniques, now obsolete, were like antiquated plastic surgery procedures, a breeding ground for neurotic aberrations among the generations that had served as its fodder. Irene didn’t like to reopen old wounds. Even dead, she thought, Álvaro brought back bad memories.
She was objective.
She signed the form stating that the body of the scowling individual before her was that of Álvaro Pereira Gomes Soares, resident of Copacabana, eighty-five years of age, white, old, and miserable. Signed by his ex-wife—mother of his only daughter, Rita da Costa Soares—Irene Azevedo da Costa. A long time ago, to her delight, separation and then divorce had expunged the Soares from her name.
When she set foot outside, the asphalt was scorching hot. One o’clock in the afternoon. The whole ordeal had lasted three and a half hours. She wanted to go home, bathe, and throw her clothes and shoes in the incinerator. She considered her moral duty to her offspring fulfilled. There was no way in hell she was going to the funeral. She had the right to return to the paradise of her solitude.
Despite her vow, Irene attended Álvaro’s farewell. Rita insisted, sobbing through the telephone line. She complained again about her lack of siblings. Siblings, thought Irene, one doesn’t make the same mistake twice.
She had just scrubbed off the crud from the morgue with a long shower. The idea of getting dressed and facing the sauna outside all over again, the decrepitude of the cemetery, the cockroaches… I’m an old woman—has the girl no compassion? Grow up! Bury your father without the self-pity. He was over eighty! I don’t pity anyone, much less her. She’s still young, she can do whatever she wants with her life. I’m not going to throw away another dress, another pair of shoes. I’m not going to track cemetery dust into the apartment. I’m seventy-three, missy! I’m the one who should be blackmailing you!
But she didn’t say anything. She arranged to meet Rita at two thirty at São João Batista Cemetery. The procession would leave at four. She begrudgingly chose an old skirt, a black blouse that didn’t suit her, and a pair of too-tight sandals. At least she had cleaned out her wardrobe, she thought. On the sidewalk, she hailed the first taxi she saw. It was an old Chevrolet Corsa with loose gears, no air conditioning, and an exasperating funk of air freshener and construction worker’s armpit. She wanted to make up an excuse to get out, but she felt sorry for the driver. She told him to drive on. Even as she breathed through her mouth, the bitter perfume found its way to her olfactory glands through her taste buds. She wasn’t having a good day.
Chapel Ten. She climbed the stairs and went inside. There was no one there. She thought she was mistaken and did an about-face, then decided to take a look at the deceased. She got close enough to the bier to see Álvaro’s scowl. It was him, the bald head, the double chin, the curved mouth, all his. She avoided looking at him again. She took a seat at one of the chairs arranged in rows, their backs to the wall. Irene counted the seconds separating her from the shower she was going to take when she got home.
No one had sent flowers, she noticed. Just a crown of white lilies with the words: “In loving memory, Rita, Cézar, Marcelo and Felipe.” Who had fixed Álvaro up? She should have brought a magazine. No, it wouldn’t look good. Where’s Rita? Why don’t you say something, Álvaro? Irene laughed at the thought. Then she fell silent.
Out of the quiet came the memory of the day she had helped her husband wrap up his old Monteiro Lobato collection to give Rita for her seventh birthday. His boyish expression, anticipating his daughter’s delight, reliving his own childhood through her. Irene’s eyes welled up. He was a good father, she thought, and was moved. She felt respect for and even missed the man lying motionless in front of her. She was struck by her widowhood. She was a widow. A widow, she repeated. Something she had desired so often back when they were married, that he would disappear once and for all, was now a fact and absolutely no good to her. On the contrary, she missed something and didn’t know what.
A humble, respectful older man opened the door. He greeted her from a distance and went to pay his respects to the deceased. He stood leaning against the wooden coffin for several minutes, praying. When he was done, he made the sign of the cross and turned to the room. The lack of a quorum made him uncomfortable. He needed to share the moment with someone, but the only mourner present didn’t look like she was in the mood to chat. Ignoring her reserve, he took the chair beside Irene’s. She shuddered and pretended not to notice.
“What a shame…” muttered the man.
“Yeah, what a shame,” replied Irene.
“Here one minute, gone the next, but God knows what he’s doing.”
No. It wasn’t possible that, to make matters worse, she’d have to listen to a bunch of platitudes from someone she’d never seen before. Better to interrupt him.
“Were you a friend of Álvaro’s?”
“I was the one who came to his aid. I’ve been the building doorman for more than fifteen years. Time flies. You get used to seeing someone every day, then suddenly… That’s why I live every second as if it were the last, you never know what tomorrow will bring, life is a match that you light and you never know when it’s going to go out.”
Irene thought about calling for help. Clichés made her skin crawl.
“The only way is forward. There’s no turning back the clock. It’s God’s will.”
The doorman was a Gatling gun of readymade phrases. Suddenly he stopped. He must be worn out, thought Irene, and was thankful. He lifted his head and looked at the coffin.
“I lost my wife a month ago. She… She…”
His voice caught in his throat. He tried again, but couldn’t go on. Irene watched the pantomime of pain, the tears that came and went, the spasms and gasps, the erratic gestures.
“It isn’t right, it isn’t right,” he repeated, shaking, and collapsed into convulsive sobs. “I prayed to God…”
Irene placed a hand on the widower’s shoulder so as not to do nothing. She glanced anxiously at the door. Where’s Rita? Rita! I found someone to mourn your father with you!
“What about you?” asked the man.
“I’m the mother of his daughter.”
“Ah…”
He recomposed himself in the face of her objectivity.
“We hadn’t seen each other for many years. It’s more for her that I’m here.”
The doorman realized that his commotion had been a waste of energy and apologized for bothering her. Irene told him not to worry and the conversation came to an abrupt end. They sat there quietly, staring into space. The no-nonsense manner of Álvaro’s ex-wife helped jolt him to his senses. He didn’t cry again, even when the coffin was lowered into the grave.
Rita arrived almost an hour after the doorman. Her mourning had morphed into a nightmare of stamps, signatures, and copies of documents. A problem with the paperwork meant the funeral had to be put off until the end of the day. It was to be the last one.
“They almost had to make it tomorrow,” explained Rita, mopping up her sweat.
Irene reined in her desperation at having to stay there another hour. If Álvaro had had friends or relatives, she could have snuck away. If her daughter’s useless husband had left the boys with his mother and come to help, she wouldn’t be stuck in that purgatory.
“Isn’t anyone else coming?” she asked.
“I don’t think so, I don’t know,” said Rita. “His friends are all dead, he only went out to go to the doctor, but doctors don’t attend funerals, it’s against their principles.”
Rita thanked the doorman for coming and he acted out the accident in detail, from start to finish, indignant that it had taken so long for help to come. Without a pause, he described the neighbor’s distress.
“She has heart problems, she’s in a state of shock,” he said. “Her son’s taken her to stay with him and put the apartment on the market. The dogs are still there. It’s just tragic.”
“I know,” said Rita.
Irene listened, bored. She felt sleepy. When the sun hides behind that building, she promised herself, I’m leaving.
There were still a good few inches of blue left in the sky, so Irene turned back to listen to the endless conversation between Rita and the windbag. The light coming through the window had caused her pupils to dilate and it took a few moments for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dimly lit interior. The ceiling went black. She felt dizzy and leaned back in the chair. She rested her head against the wall, stayed calm, and waited for her vision to return. Rita and the doorman had left the room. As a natural reflex, she checked to see if the bier was still there. It was. But the corpse was sitting up, with its hands on either side of the coffin, which made it look like a fishing boat. Álvaro was grinning at her.
“I’m so glad you came, Irene,” he said sweetly. Her glottis tightened with panic; she wanted to scream but couldn’t. Her hands stiffened and she struggled to open her mouth. She called for help. Then she awoke with a start.
“Mom! Are you okay?”
It took Irene a while to focus. When she came to her senses, she remembered to look at the body. The tip of his nose, the only piece of flesh visible from where she was, assured her that Álvaro was still lying down.
“What time is it?”
“Four thirty. I’m tired, I need to go.”
“It won’t be long now,” insisted Rita.
Irene went out to the corridor to get a drink of water, took a sip, then remembered the cockroach in the drinking fountain at the morgue and decided she wasn’t thirsty. She didn’t want to go to the bathroom either and avoided touching anything. Even the air disgusted her. She returned to the wake.
She was standing in front of the door when someone kicked it open. It was the chaplain, dressed in character, holding a bible and looking tense. He paused and shouted, “Who’s next?”
Rita, Irene and the doorman turned around in surprise. Not satisfied, the chaplain repeated the question, “Who’s next?”
They stood staring, open-mouthed, as the cleric uttered his ominous words.
“Who called this clown? Rita, was it you?”
Irene looked the chaplain in the face, exasperated. If nature was fair, she’d be next.
Padre Graça rose before dawn. He prayed, bathed, ate only a little, as always, and prepared a small valise with liturgical objects. São João Batista Cemetery awaited him. For twenty-four years he had fulfilled the task of taking God’s word to families who had lost their loved ones. In the beginning, he had seen meaning in being a chaplain, but not anymore. He wished he could be transferred to a small community where people were still religious. Urbanites were hostile; they no longer believed in eternal peace. His enthusiasm as a seminarian had given way to a sterile isolation, with no way out. He dreamed of celebrating weddings, baptisms, anything but that. Too much contact with death had made him insensitive. He was no longer suited to the job. He had requested a transfer months earlier, but his superiors didn’t appear to be in any hurry to find a replacement. Padre Graça waited in resignation. For this reason, he was overwhelmed at the prospect of a sequence of funerals on what promised to be a long, hot day. Had he lost his faith?
No one seeing him enter the building in Botafogo would have suspected the battle being waged in the silence of his soul. The idea of abandoning the cassock seduced him, especially at night, like an insistent demon. He had always dismissed the thought, but, more recently, he’d spend hours tossing and turning, unable to push away the treacherous desire. He would be a teacher, a nurse, a bank clerk, and would answer to God himself, without having to impose Him on anyone. He was tired of the crusade against the friendly fire of the evangelicals and the enemy fire of atheists. The battle was lost.
It was riddled with doubt that Padre Graça began that morning’s service, praying for the soul of a great-grandmother of seven, grandmother of fifteen, mother of four, and widow of one. Although sad, the relatives seemed resigned to the departing of their matriarch. They were practicing Catholics and made an effort at mass. He briefly forgot his current discontent with his job. Afterward, he thanked those present and confessed, “I came here without hope, I leave with it redoubled.”
The following services reduced that morning’s communion to ash. A teenager, a young mother, and a loving father. Of the five deceased, only the old woman that morning and an old man at sunset followed the natural logic, the order that should prevent mothers from burying their children, babies from being deprived of their mothers’ love, and fathers from being absent in hours of need. Once again dismayed at the number of times God appeared to have been asleep on the job, Padre Graça succumbed to pessimism. I’m God’s undertaker, he muttered to himself.
As the day was dying, he bitterly climbed the stairs of the chapel on his way to room 10. At one point he slowed his pace, certain that he was incapable of offering any comfort. I’m the one who needs consoling. Who will do it for me? That was when the opportunity, the idea, the temptation arose. It was a priest’s duty to remain firm precisely when the flock was at its most vulnerable. Vulnerability in the face of death was auspicious for revelation. His mistake lay in his passive benevolence. What good was mercy? Catholicism should elect firmness as its ally. I am a priest, he thought, but I castrate myself by donning the skin of a sheep. May I show no kindness. I will be ruthless, virile, Roman, warlike, and rapacious. The terrible side of the divine being. May the Old Testament be my guide.
And, certain of his new conviction, he stalked into room 10 at a quarter to five that Tuesday afternoon, stopped on the doorstep, and bellowed his cruel question, “Who’s next?”
Padre Graça fell silent and stood there, holding the door, not sure if it was the beginning or grand finale of the service. Proximity to the end should have inspired a heightened awareness in the living, but there was no sign of such elevation here. The stupefied looks of those within earshot expressed only their disapproval. Padre Graça’s eyes came to rest on an elegant elderly woman who was looking at him in dismay. It was Irene. The next to go. Padre Graça regretted his outburst, gave a little nod, and left without closing the door. He walked down the stairs to the front office. There was no one left to pray for. The day was over. So was his career.
It was the last straw. Irene had no reason to stay there listening to the affronts of a prayer boy to the dead, wasting precious minutes of her life to bury a man who had been born old. I have to go, Rita! Where’s Cézar? Why didn’t he come to help you? What marriage is this, where you can’t make the sacrifice?
But before she could say it the gravediggers came for the coffin. Irene accompanied them. She walked through the lanes to one end of the cemetery, where they buried Álvaro in a simple grave.
As she passed through the gates of Tartarus on her way out, she hurried to a taxi. Collapsing into the back seat, she turned her head to one side and watched the traffic through the window, the hustle and bustle of the living. She examined her own hands, the hands of an old woman, her visible veins and wrinkled skin. She was over seventy, but she didn’t see herself like that. She missed her father doting on her, her mother’s face, the house in Cosme Velho. How good it had been to feel safe, and how hard to lose her certainties. Adolescence had taken away her grace, school her innocence, and men her sweetness. No one recognized the princess in her anymore, just her, there, in a traffic jam on Rua São Clemente.
The burial, the wake, it hit her all at once.
How much time did she have left? She didn’t need much. She was tired, had no plans, and wouldn’t mind departing. Not even her daughter needed her anymore; in fact, they rarely saw each other. The last thirty years had been devoted to absolute solitude, a lack of romantic prospects, not depending on anyone. She had managed. She didn’t long for a partner anymore, anxious to complete every stage in life: dating, studies, work, family, children. She had done it all as best she could.
That night she had a dream.
She was on the beach. The sun was setting behind Morro dos Dois Irmãos, the weather was pleasant, the sea calm. Álvaro was kneeling before her in swimming trunks, his back in silhouette against the orange sky. He was slim, strong, and good-looking. He smiled at Irene.
“I’m glad you came. I’m glad, Irene.”
And he kissed her. Then they stayed there like that, arms around each other. A little further along, in front of the country club wall, a circle of people were watching them. It was her analysis group. They were talking about her but she couldn’t hear what they were saying. Álvaro asked if everything was okay and turned his wife’s head so she’d be looking at him when she answered. Álvaro had become Álvaro. He was flaccid, bald, shriveled, and couldn’t get it up.
Irene opened her eyes and couldn’t sleep anymore. The next day she took her daughter to the airport.
Rita seemed proud to have completed the Herculean task. She talked about her father as children do after funerals, with great ceremony. In her words, Álvaro acquired a greatness he had never had in life. Napoleon, crowned with defeats. Irene listened—it was her job to listen. Children rarely take much of an interest in their parents’ suffering; they guard the role of victim jealously, unwilling to relinquish it for anyone. It was time for Rita to tally up her achievements and for Irene to appreciate her daughter’s maturity. She pretended to. When they parted, she hugged her daughter, remembered her as a baby—the future she’d imagined for her, the tears, the fears, the fights—then she looked at the woman in front of her. Rita had grown up, accepted a modest existence in an inland city, with a man who was mediocre, but solid, faithful, and present. She hadn’t taken any risks, nor had she wasted any time. She had enough of her father’s bovine passivity to be content with the boys’ soccer victories, the nine o’clock soap, and Carnival at the club. She was happy, much more than Irene. And from Irene she had inherited her pride. She bowed to domestic life, but not to her husband. She had been successful where Irene had failed; she knew how to control her impulses and to be satisfied with her dissatisfactions. Rita fulfilled the two great obligations of the modern world masterfully: to be young and active. She worked out at the gym every day, ate properly, and moisturized at night. She did the bookkeeping for her father-in-law’s clinic. She was solid, upright, pragmatic like her mother, simple like her father, and good at accounting. She had eliminated doubt. She had no aspirations beyond buying a new car, organizing Felipe’s and Marcelo’s birthday parties, and putting on Sunday barbecues. Irene looked down upon and admired her daughter’s achievements. At any rate, she had turned out a lot better than her atrocious adolescence had indicated.
Rita’s skin had broken out in pimples, her hips had grown broader, and her belly, which was cute at four, was worrying at twelve. At the end of her fourth year, Irene had been called in to the school. They wanted Rita to repeat the year. The same thing had happened the following years. Decembers were spent trying to make up grades, shouting and sitting by her side for hours on end, drilling equations and irregular verbs. Rita liked to laze about watching TV and eating crackers with cream cheese. She wanted to be like the soap opera heroines and be kissed by the leading men. The worst was yet to come, when she abandoned the soaps and stopped bathing. She only bought secondhand clothes, walked around in flip-flops, and didn’t shave under her arms. She listened to Led Zeppelin at a volume the whole neighborhood could hear and answered all questions angrily. She abused her mother, making fun of her clothes and opinions. Irene was her archenemy. After flunking the first year of high school twice, she finished her studies at a school for adults, Fast, where there wasn’t even a roll call. She paid and passed. She didn’t try to get into university. All seemed lost. After graduating from Fast, to celebrate no one knew exactly what, her parents paid for her to take a vacation in Minas Gerais. Fifteen days in Ouro Preto in the company of some equally bizarre girlfriends. Irene thought she was crazy when she left the three of them at the bus station.
Rita lost her virginity in Ouro Preto, at the age of eighteen, and came back a different person. She began to date Cézar and everything about her mellowed. Unlike her mother, Rita was terrestrial, satiable in love. She got married at twenty-one, after a long engagement, and went to live in Uberaba. She had two sons and now she had just lost her father. Her mother was still alive and well, thank God. Rita wasn’t given to speculation. She’ll die in peace, thought Irene, which is really something. And she hugged her daughter, this time with the respect she deserved.
Rita disappeared through the gate and Irene found herself lost at the airport. She hadn’t traveled in a long time. Would she ever do it again? Irene was left alone with her frustrations. She decided to enjoy their company in public. She sat at a counter and ordered a coffee, to wait until the plane had taken off.
“And why do you think you hit your daughter?”
“I don’t know. She came home drunk saying she needed money and got dressed to go out. It had just turned dark. I told her I wasn’t going to give it to her, but she opened my bag and took a wad of notes without asking. She did it in front of me and marched off down the corridor. I thought it was too much, so I stood in front of the door and ordered her to put the money back. She gave me a shove and tried to turn the key in the lock. I tugged on her hair and her head hit a corner of the door jamb. I don’t know what I did. I knocked the key out of her hand and slapped her, I think it was on the face… but… I don’t remember… I don’t remember. She’s always been ornery.”
“What about you, Irene? Are you ornery?”
Irene stared at the Holy Inquisition. The faces of those present showed explicit pleasure that she had accepted the role of defendant so readily. The group’s mirth grew with each of her failures. Irene had admitted that she was flawed and weak, making everyone else feel better about themselves. Vera’s question was a clear insinuation that the source of Rita’s hysteria was her. They were all waiting for the atonement, the mea culpa that, as the theory went, would free her of the psychological wounds that kept the door to happiness closed. The bubble. Irene would have to admit, before the jury, that Rita’s aggressiveness had its origins in her neurotic mother, her sexual frigidity and unacknowledged envy of everyone else.
“The problem is that marriage of hers.”
“She needs to get laid.”
“Who? Mother or daughter?” laughed Roberta. Roberta, of all people, with a husband who beat her and a son who was a drug addict. What are you laughing at? thought Irene.
“Do you think maybe Álvaro was a flop with you because you were a flop with him first?”
“You’re all a flop. That’s why the girl is the way she is.”
“You need to get laid, Irene. And by somebody who knows what he’s doing.”
The last remark was delivered by the group’s alpha male, an attractive, seductive alcoholic. There were suspicions that he was having an affair with Vera. The analyst had undergone a big transformation; she had lost weight and started wearing skirts, high heels, and lipstick. The change had coincided with the arrival of Paulo, who never talked about himself and amused himself with everyone else’s psychodramas. Paulo liked to end attacks on Irene with ironic, always sexist remarks, wisecracks about the neediness of women and the glories of the penis.
“You’re a classic case of a woman who isn’t getting enough,” he would say, suggesting that he would know how to resolve the problem, although he had no intention of doing so.
Irene came out of the sessions in shreds. Vera had barely intervened. It was as if her therapist had left her naked in the savanna to be devoured by carnivorous lizards.
When she left the elevator, she hid her face, which was swollen from crying. She decided to walk. Botafogo was so ugly. It didn’t used to be, but it was now. She didn’t want to go home. Álvaro’s mother was there because of her senile husband who’d accused her of adultery and was planning to put a bullet through her head. She was a good mother-in-law, quiet and discreet, but she’d been sleeping in the study for a month. She spent the day in the kitchen and the living room, cooking and watching TV. She liked cooking, which had been Irene’s salvation when the cook quit, the only tiny bit of respite among so many disasters. Rita was well on her way to flunking for the third time and even the dog was on its last legs at a veterinary clinic in Copacabana. He was old. He’d been Rita’s eighth birthday present, after the Monteiro Lobato fiasco. The animal could no longer see. He stank, limped, and had intestinal issues. He lived in a corner of the laundry room and it would have been a blessing if someone had called to say he’d gone to a better place. The night she’d had to jump out of bed to rush him to the pet hospital, unconscious, she had considered asking for him to be put down, but her Catholic upbringing had gotten the better of her. How good it would have been to hear that Major wouldn’t be coming back. But he did. So he could die by our side, said the mother-in-law, all choked up. The elderly are moved by anything. Irene wished she could throw him out the window, but she just smiled and pretended to be happy about the dog’s extra time.
Now she was wandering aimlessly through Botafogo, with nowhere to go. If she could, she’d have shed her skin, left herself behind, changed her name, started all over again. Until the age of thirty, Irene had thought it was all a rehearsal. She observed what happened around her and went along with things, but when her daughter was no longer a baby, she realized that the future was defined early on. Rita was insecure, fussy, and fat, and not particularly bright. It had never occurred to Irene that her maternal dreams might not come true, not for her or for her offspring. She could admit that she had chosen the wrong man, profession, friends, but she had carried with her the arrogant conviction that she would make an example out of Rita. She had failed.
The girl was enrolled in a traditional school—Catholic and strict. She would be a lawyer or an economist, her mother predicted. When she was learning to read and write, however, her poor handwriting, difficulty reading, and inability to understand the basics of mathematics were a sign that things weren’t going the way they were supposed to. Her small learning problems soon took on catastrophic proportions, and to avoid having her repeat the year, her parents decided to change schools. They chose Jean Piaget. Irene sent her to an experimental institution in Jardim Botânico and went to parent meetings—talks on freedom and creativity, and the importance of discovery and the pleasure of learning as opposed to dictatorial teaching methods, which are top-down and shove subjects down the students’ throats. On the first day of class, she left Rita at the new school convinced that the problem wasn’t her daughter, but the system. Her certainty lasted less than a semester. In June, Rita received a terrible assessment from her teachers and school psychologists. If the school had report cards, she’d have gotten Ds. And to make matters worse she’d become agitated, rebellious, refused to eat sitting down, jumped about, and drew breasts and penises compulsively. The interminable homework of her former school vanished at Jean Piaget. Concerned, Irene made an appointment with the school psychologist. The psychologist explained that children should only do their homework if they were motivated to. Essays weren’t compulsory either. Irene laid out her arguments for discipline and her worries about Rita’s passivity, but none of it was of relevance to the psychologist. Something else was worrying her.
“Here it is,” she said, pulling a piece of paper out of a pile of drawings. It was a doodle by Rita, a penis strung up by the glans with “Daddy” written beneath it. Beside it was a spiny creature, somewhat like a pink porcupine, flashing two angry eyes and a mouthful of sharp teeth. Underneath it said “Momy.”
“Maybe some family therapy is in order,” she said, and ended the meeting.
Wandering down Rua São Clemente, Irene tried to accept that she had lost control. She tried to separate her own pride from whatever became of her daughter, but it was hard. She compared Rita’s development to that of friends’ children—her peers, all sane, strong, and healthy—and the inferiority of her offspring was a cause of suffering. I bred wrong, she thought. A knot in her throat forced her to stop. She sat on a low wall, dizzy and gasping in agony, feeling like she was suffocating. Where could she escape to? She remembered the club; she still had it in her to relieve her nerves with a swim.
She swam two thousand meters without thinking a thing. She climbed out of the pool feeling better and showered in the changing rooms. Because she had left her membership card at home, she should have stopped by reception beforehand to get a stamped authorization to give to the lifeguard. But she had pleaded that they allow her to take care of the paperwork after letting off steam and they had agreed. Now she climbed the stairs to management, glad to have something to do, something else to put off going home. An athletic man of about fifty, tanned and helpful, took care of things for her. His name was Jairo. He criticized the club’s strict rules. A beautiful woman like Irene didn’t deserve to be treated like that. Irene blushed. She’d heard so few compliments that she barely remembered they existed, so that “beautiful” made her knees weak and jump-started her heart. She smiled, bright red, and lowered her eyes. She was fifteen years old again. She started going to the club on a daily basis, always forgetting her card. She would climb the stairs as soon as she passed through the turnstile, get her authorization from Jairo, and head for the pool, where she swam with cadenced strokes while fantasizing about rendezvous with her new object of desire. The title of manager gave Jairo the air of a king, and he began to accompany her to the swimming pool. Later, they arranged a set time to meet at the entrance, so she wouldn’t have to go upstairs. He would go with her to the turnstile and tell the staff to let her though. On the third week, Jairo asked Irene to start bringing her membership card, as he was being pressured from higher up. Nor did he see any reason for using silly pretexts to hide his desire to be with her. Irene almost passed out. She didn’t know what it was to be courted anymore and had turned her back on romanticism. Jairo had everything that Álvaro denied her. He was manly and straightforward. The afternoon she started bringing her card again, he insisted on walking her to her car afterward. He was leaning in the window, and Irene was about to start the engine, when, without warning, he slid his hand up the nape of her neck and took a handful of hair. He asked her to meet him at a bar on Rua Farme de Amoedo at six. Irene didn’t reply. Suddenly self-conscious, she put the car in reverse and almost took the barrier gate with her.
The Agris was a run-down little building with a veranda at the end of Farme de Amoedo, almost in the favela of Cantagalo. The conversation didn’t last long. Jairo knocked back his whiskey, pulled a bank note out of his wallet, and placed it on the table as a tip. They left with their arms around each other, she anxious, he focused, both full of lust. The hotel was three blocks away. They went to room 304, at the back. The sheet smelling of disinfectant, the little bar of soap in the tiny bathroom, none of it was what Irene had fantasized, but it was a first step, a stance, a beginning. He came; she didn’t, despite her efforts, but she wasn’t frustrated. On the contrary, she stared, enchanted, at Jairo’s face as he came, above her, because of her, in her, and she left, floating. Jairo walked on the traffic side of the sidewalk to protect her from the cars and called a cab. Before opening the door, he gave her a long kiss, then asked the driver to take it easy. He knew how to be a man.
Irene received applause at the next group analysis.
The separate bedrooms alleviated any potential awkwardness. When she got back from seeing Jairo, Irene didn’t have to go to bed with Álvaro. In the morning, all she had to do was listen for the sounds of the shower and doors closing in order not to cross paths with him. They rarely saw each other. Her husband, preoccupied with family problems, was relieved by her unexpectedly good humor. If it was good for her, it was good for him.
They had been sleeping in separate beds for two years. It had happened by chance, after a fight—yet another—occasioned by Sílvio’s digs at Álvaro during a Sunday lunch at Ciro’s apartment. Sílvio had been drinking and decided to crucify Álvaro. Dripping with venom, he said that Irene had chosen the worst of them. He listed off Álvaro’s bad habits: his snoring, his lack of ambition.
“Álvaro can’t even beat us in spoof,” he exclaimed, and roared with laughter.
Ciro told him to shut up, which only made the snake’s tongue wag harder. He listed off the women who had rejected Álvaro. There had been Bete, Cláudia, Mina, Sandra, Paula, Maureen… Even dingbat Dora had said no.
“I was surprised you said yes, Irene. You deserve better.”
It would have all been forgotten if it hadn’t reflected Irene’s secret frustrations so precisely. She put on her nightgown and climbed into bed, furious. Álvaro came out of the bathroom, pulled on his pajamas, and snuggled under the blanket as if that afternoon had never happened. Irene exploded. She wanted to know why he had taken all that humiliation without a fight, did he have any idea what she was going through? How ashamed he made her feel. All the things that were missing. Álvaro apologized for existing and said he’d do whatever she wanted, the way she wanted it, whenever she wanted it. His answer made her even more irate. She took out a sheet from the cupboard, a pillow, made up the bed in the guest bedroom, and ordered him to sleep there that night. Álvaro obeyed and never returned to the master bedroom. The only reason they didn’t break up was because Irene was more afraid of solitude than of dissatisfaction in love. She liked hearing the sound of the key in the lock when Álvaro came home at night, his presence as father, the household expenses split down the middle. And she had no illusions about her chances of finding something better. Unlike Ruth, Irene never knew what it meant to have men falling all over themselves for her. It had always been like that for Ruth—in elementary school, in high school, and especially in college. They had studied language and literature together. Ruth had married the best of the five, and she, the worst, even though she was an attractive woman. She never understood it.
Álvaro was Ciro’s friend. Ruth sang his praise, talked him up to Irene. Irene was tired of being alone and hadn’t been serious about anyone for over a year. Her last boyfriend had moved to Spain. She had considered going with him, but she’d have had to give up the classes she was beginning to teach, her life in Brazil. They had promised to give it a go long-distance. Their correspondence had lasted a few months and then suddenly dwindled. He married a woman from Andalusia the following summer and she never heard from him again. Álvaro was all wrong, but had a twisted, self-deprecating sense of humor, which charmed Irene. Why not? She had never loved him, staying with him as if she were waiting for the next streetcar to come past and rescue her from her little detour—but it never came. Time, chance, and their friends in common kept them together. Álvaro chose the ring, Ciro helped, and one sunny Sunday, with Ruth and Ciro as witnesses, Álvaro asked Irene for her hand in marriage. The wine was good, the autumn afternoon, what did the groom matter? I’ll say yes, she thought, I can leave him later. Let’s see what happens. The years went by and she kept waiting for someone to wrench her away from Álvaro. Jairo. Jairo would set her free.
How silly she was, she thought, as she watched her daughter’s plane take off over Guanabara Bay. It would have been good to be on it.
Sílvio couldn’t hide his glee at the news.
“A little bird told me your wife is planning to run off with a guy from the club. Wake up, my friend, ’cause these women are hot to trot,” he said, finishing off in English with, “They’re willing and able!”
The little bird was none other than Paulo from group therapy. One of the Casanova’s favorite pastimes was giving the crowd at the beach the dirt on his fellow group members. Vera liked to discuss the sessions with him in their frequent rendezvous, often in her office. She loved his frankness, his self-confidence, his self-respect. He was an alcoholic, it was true, but besides that he was perfect. She was in love, she had lost her composure. They bitched about the group, laughed at everyone’s desperation, and were as happy as could be.
All it took was one drink at the Coqueirão beach kiosk for Paulo to spill the beans from the last few therapy sessions. The scandalmonger’s overtime with his therapist had enriched his vocabulary of certainties. Ever since the affair with Jairo had taken off, Irene’s private life had become his favorite soap opera. Paulo could smell his equal from afar.
“Jairo? He’s a total sleaze,” he said, reveling in the opportunity to watch from the front row as Irene fell into the womanizer’s web. “The stupid woman’s going to give it up next week, I’m telling you. In one month, this Jairo guy’s going to stop taking her calls; in two, she’ll be begging that limp-dicked namby-pamby of a husband to have her back.”
After this prophecy, he tossed back the rest of his beer and headed for the volleyball court.
Ribeiro knew Paulo by name. They had a friend in common, also a lifeguard. Ribeiro preferred the crowd that played beach volleyball in front of Rua Miguel Lemos, in Copacabana, but this day he had accepted an invitation to play doubles at the Coqueirão, in Ipanema. He and his partner shared the court with Paulo. Before the game, they had the drink that got his tongue wagging. Irene’s name was the first thing that caught Ribeiro’s attention. The husband who couldn’t get it up, the hysterical daughter, and the dying dog erased all doubt. It was Álvaro’s wife, his Álvaro. Ribeiro hated being party to the imbroglio. He’d have to do something, but what? He needed to share it with someone. Ciro had been Álvaro’s best man. He wanted a more impartial opinion and decided to consult Sílvio.
Sílvio was in ecstasy. He wanted to infiltrate the group, start therapy, get to know that Vera woman, an analyst so open to experiences. Ribeiro was in a dilemma about whether to tell his friend or not. He remembered the time he’d bad-mouthed his cousin’s ex-girlfriend, never imagining they’d get back together the following weekend. They ended up married with three kids, and Ribeiro was left out in the cold. Sílvio played counselor, arguing that he wouldn’t be able to look Álvaro in the eye without telling him the truth, and practically begged Ribeiro to let him play Cassandra and break the news. Ribeiro granted him the mission, happily freeing himself of the burden.
* * *
Álvaro didn’t like the beach. He went because everyone else did, but he stayed on a folding chair under the beach canopy, reading the newspaper and drinking mate tea. He rarely went in the water, but when he did he brought back a bucket of water to clean the sand off his feet when he was leaving. One bright morning, there he was, reading the sports section, when Sílvio came over and took a seat in the shade. With a troubled expression, he told him about Irene’s infidelity then rattled off his “willing and able” to show off his broken English. Álvaro hated Sílvio for taking pleasure in something as pathetic as washing his dirty laundry amidst the commotion of Lifeguard Post Nine. Now he understood why Irene had been so cheerful lately, the reason for her light spirits; she was leaving. But Paulo from group therapy had been spot on: in one month she would return, confused, asking him to take her back; a year later she would hit perimenopause and fall into a deep depression. She would emerge from it just fine, two years after that, but she would never be with another man. It was the beginning of the end of Irene’s sex life. Things wouldn’t have been terribly different if she had stayed married.
With a serious face, Álvaro packed up his tent, beach mat, and chair, put the newspaper in his bag, retrieved his flip-flops, hat, and bucket of water, and turned to face the beach promenade. Before crossing the scalding sand, he gave Sílvio a solemn look and wished he was dead. But that wouldn’t happen for another twenty-five years.