If I Close My Eyes Now (19 page)

‘Meaning?’

‘Crime is a matter that should be left to the police.’

Ubiratan could not avoid a dispirited sigh.

‘The monsignor also mentioned an old man who stole the priest’s cassock from the São Joaquim chapel and wore it to come here to talk to me. He added that the same old man claimed he had been a teacher, whereas in fact he is a retired cook from a school in Recife, with a police record as a Communist, and has been seen in dark streets of the city in the company of two young boys. I won’t repeat the word he used to describe the relationship between the old man and the boys.’

The old man almost choked on his cigarette.

‘Therefore, as director of this orphanage, responsible as I am for the moral education of minors, it would not be
proper, it would not be acceptable, for me to talk to you again, to pass you information, or to permit any contact with the nuns who have been here since the days when Aparecida was one of our pupils.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘That is what the monsignor instructed me.’

‘I came here at your request.’

‘As I told you, I would very much like to learn how to play chess.’

She searched again among the sheets of paper.

‘Let me read you this other passage from
Mater et Magistra
, Mr Ubiratan: “Those who violate His laws not only offend the divine majesty and degrade themselves and humanity, they also sap the vitality of the political community of which they are members.” ’

Laying the sheets of paper down on the table, she took off her glasses and clutched them to her, trying to prevent Ubiratan from seeing how her hands were trembling.

‘Aparecida was taken from here as a young girl. Aparecida was humiliated in ways … in ways not even animals have to suffer. They destroyed that girl. They turned her into …’

Standing up, she went over to the bookshelf and stood with her back to him, rummaging among the books. She wasn’t really interested in any of them: she simply wanted to avoid being seen displaying an emotion as improper as anger. When she felt her rage subsiding, she turned back to Ubiratan.

‘You didn’t bring the chessboard. A shame. While you were teaching me, we could have talked about what I’ve been told by the older nuns concerning the years when Aparecida lived here.
A real shame. I can learn some other time. But perhaps it would be best to give you the information now anyway.’

In times gone by, matrons and young girls used to throw rose petals from this second-floor balcony down on to the litters of the processions winding their way up to the cathedral. Now, a prostitute was drying her freshly dyed red hair in the afternoon sun. She was reading a magazine, oblivious to the activity in the steep street, ignored in her turn by the few passers-by, who avoided the pavement on her side.

A white-haired man appeared at the opposite corner, and stopped in the shadow of an acacia tree. He stood there motionless, watching.

He could not see any signs of movement inside the Hotel Wizorek. The other women must be playing cards, chatting or attending to the few early-evening clients.

He heard a squawk. He couldn’t immediately make out what it was. Then a female voice. Singing. Someone had put a record on the phonograph. It sounded scratched. It came from the same mansion that in the nineteenth century had belonged to the family of a Portuguese immigrant who had made his fortune from importing and selling slaves from Angola. The music grew louder.

‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore,
Non feci mai male ad anima viva! …
Con man furtiva …’

The sound reached him more clearly. He recognized an aria from an opera lost in the fog of his memories. The tune was taken up by violins, a harp and other instruments he could not identify.

‘
Sempre con fè sincera,
La mia preghiera
Ai santi tabernacoli salì …
’

He crossed the street and stood a hundred metres from the building. The grimy ground-floor windows were closed, except for the two on either side of the main door, which had curtains. That was where the music was coming from.

‘Perchè, Signore, perchè
Me ne rimuneri così?’

He knew he had heard the aria before. Perhaps on the school radio. Or on some record. Not in the theatre. He had never been to an opera. He had some opera records, but had never seen one. Helena liked the opera. She was the one who had introduced him to it. They had planned to go one day to Rio de Janeiro to hear and see the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from
Nabucco
. Helena liked Verdi, and he learned to appreciate the composer. ‘
Va Pensiero
’ became like a personal anthem for him. But they had never been to Rio de Janeiro. He had never set foot in the Theatro Municipal. They also had an album of
Il Guarany
, one with Helena’s favourite Mozart arias sung by Bidú Sayão, another by Mozart with a German
soprano whose name he could never recall, and two or three more he couldn’t remember very well. Like so many other possessions and mementoes, they had all been left behind when he moved to the old people’s home.

He weighed up the risks of approaching the brothel. The street was almost empty. Close to the building there was only the possible occupant of a black car, parked in the street opposite.

‘Diedì gioelli
Della Madonna al manto …’

It wasn’t an aria from Donizetti, he thought. Nor from Verdi: it lacked the pomp and grandiloquence that always characterized Verdi’s tragic heroines. It didn’t sound like Rossini either. He couldn’t hear the light, breezy notes typical of Rossini. This is a song of intimate suffering, he concluded. Intense and delicate. Neither Verdi nor Donizetti nor Rossini. It could be Bellini. It had the dramatic weight of Bellini’s characters. But it wasn’t that. Not as intense. Less sober.

‘Nell’ora del dolor perchè,
Perchè Signore,
Perchè me ne rimunere così?’

He moved towards the hotel window. Behind the curtains he could make out a salon lined with claret-coloured wallpaper. To one side, a woman with blonde curls was standing alone next to the portable phonograph. She was wearing a peignoir over her stout body. Her eyes were outlined in black
like a silent movie actress. Her lips, coated with dark lipstick, moved in imitation of the voice that the needle was drawing from the big black record. She stretched her hands out in front of her. The voice on the phonograph begged:

‘Vedi,
Ecco, vedi,
Le man giunte io stendo a te!’

Tosca!
That’s what it was, he remembered. Puccini, obviously. Floria Tosca’s plea to the heavens, when she is being harassed by the villain, Scarpia. Obviously. The moment when Floria Tosca has to choose between satisfying Baron Scarpia’s carnal appetites to save her beloved Cavaradossi from death by sacrificing her dignity, or keeping it and so condemning Mario to the firing squad. Vice that saves, or virtue that kills. To behave like a prostitute, although from the purest of motives.

The pale-faced woman flung her plump arms out, shaking her curls and exposing their white roots. The peignoir fell open, displaying the Polish madam’s heavy body squeezed into a lace shift. But it wasn’t the ageing madam who was in the room.

Instead it was the young prostitute Hanna Wizorek, disembarking at the port of Rio de Janeiro at the start of the 1920s, fleeing the war that had devastated Europe, destroyed her village and decimated her family. All alone, with a fake passport in a foreign land, unable to speak the language, and with no one to turn to. She was begging for pity and compassion.

‘E merce d’un tuo ditto
Vinta, aspetto …’

Desperate, she let her arms drop, preparing to hear Baron Scarpia’s cynical reply. At that moment, a broad-shouldered figure came into the room, went over to the phonograph and lifted the arm of the needle, interrupting the music.

The woman turned, pulling the peignoir closer. She looked at the man, said something to him, and then went over to one of the sofas and sat down. Picking up a silver cigarette box from the side table, she took out a mother-of-pearl holder and a cigarette, and lit it.

Ubiratan continued observing the room for some moments longer, while Hanna Wizorek and the mayor Marques Torres began a heated argument. Then he left, walking unhurriedly away down the street.

First it was the sound of the whistle: one-two, one-two, one-two. Then plumes of white smoke appeared over the hill, to the rhythmic beat of a steam engine. Finally, the chimney of the ancient locomotive came into view, pulling carriages blackened by years of soot. Inside, jolted on wooden benches, sat those increasingly rare passengers on the return journey from Rio de Janeiro who did not prefer the soft reclining seats of the buses that left twice a day from the modern coach terminal.

Two boys were pedalling in silence along the road beside
the railway tracks. One of them was listening absentmindedly to the chugging locomotive, concentrating instead on the thoughts sparking in his mind: some day I’m going to take one, some day I will, some day I’ll catch this early morning train, in the other direction, and I’ll never come back. I’ll go to wherever Uncle Nelson went. I’ll find out where he lives, I’ll ask him for help, he can send me money for the ticket. I’ll pack my case, I’ve not got many things, I’ll pack my suitcase and leave. I’ll leave. Yes. I’ll leave behind these narrow streets, these dark mountains, my father, my brother, the mist and cold. I’ll go to the city where it’s hot, with tall buildings and long avenues that end in the Atlantic Ocean, just like the River São Francisco or the Amazon. And me, because I’m not going to stay here. I don’t want to end my days as a barber or a shopkeeper. Or a textile worker. Or a welder, petrol-pump attendant, rubber-tapper, lathe operator, typist, baker, electrician … or a butcher, like my father. I’m going to study something that will turn me into a … a chemist? Diplomat? Army officer? Astronaut? Nuclear physicist? Town planner? Archaeologist? Uncle Nelson could help me. He’s never met me, but we’ll get on. Doesn’t my father say I’m like him? Wiry hair, flappy ears. And dark skin. Like his and my grandmother’s.

Heavy leaden clouds were gathering in front of them. The wind pushing and pulling the clouds like a flock of black sheep had not yet reached ground level. It was the start of the stormy autumn. The seemingly endless days of summer were drawing to a close.

They went past the ruins of the Mello Freire ranch. Paulo
stopped to pee. He could remember how imposing the abandoned big house had looked on its thick wooden columns, until it had collapsed a few years earlier. Once a proud testimony to the wealth of the only family in the region that could compete in power and influence with the Marques Torres, the mansion suffered the same fate as the riches they had amassed during the golden age of coffee. The descendants of those early Mello Freires, who now worked as bank employees and modest civil servants, could not prevent it becoming a pile of ruined walls, rotten beams, smashed tiles, fragments of glass and rats’ nests. Plump and dusty, one of the rats clambered up what had once been a doorway and stared defiantly at the urinating boy. It scuttled away when a stone Paulo threw bounced close to its pointed head.

Eduardo had continued on his way. Paulo soon caught him up. They were both so deeply engaged in their own concerns that neither of them noticed the silence that had grown up between them.

Eduardo’s worries included a fear he had never known before: what if he had no future? The future that until that morning, in the headmaster’s office, he had taken for granted. What if in Brazil, in this new Brazil where industries, highways, jobs, were springing up all the time, what if in this new Brazil, even though, as their teachers taught them, it was a democracy, where we, the people, have free elections and can choose who is to govern us, what if in this Brazil there were powers, forces he could not describe or explain, or point to where they were lurking, what if they existed, those forces, those powers that could decide his destiny without him being able
to do anything about it? Decide to change everything irremediably? Just as on the day when they took Aparecida from the orphanage and married her to the dentist?

They reached the dirt track. They rode on for almost ten minutes before they saw the fence. They went even faster, anxious to reach the lake. All at once they had to stop and dismount. Fresh barbed wire had been put up in the open ground at the edge of the woods. On the wire, a hand-painted sign read:
Private Property: No Entry
.