If I Close My Eyes Now (22 page)

‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Equations,’ Ubiratan replied.

‘Equations?’ Eduardo said in surprise.

‘Equations. Situating Aparecida in the world she lived in. In 1952, the year she was married, a Second World War general was elected president of the United States, to command the
American empire in the Western world. The mayor was forty-five years old, which means he was thirty when Aparecida was born, and Senator Marques Torres was … hmm … seventy. When he killed himself, the senator was seventy-three. Seventy-three minus fifteen leaves …’

‘Fifty-eight,’ Eduardo said quickly. ‘What general?’

‘The senator killed himself ?’ asked Paulo.

‘Yes, Paulo. General Eisenhower, Eduardo. The senator was fifty-eight years old when Aparecida was born. Take away twelve?’

‘Forty-six,’ Eduardo said, with a mixture of pride and annoyance.

‘Forty-six! That’s how old Senator Marques Torres was when Elza was born.’

Opening his notebook, he wrote something in it, muttering to himself:

‘Fifty-eight when Elza gave birth to Aparecida … Seventy when Aparecida got married … And his son, the mayor … was thirty when Aparecida was born. Thirty! A fine age for a healthy man.’

‘It’s all over, isn’t it?’ Paulo concluded, sighing.

‘What’s over?’ Ubiratan wanted to know, finishing his notes and screwing the top back on his pen, which he placed on the cover of the small spiral notebook.

‘The investigation. Our investigation. It’s not going anywhere, is it, now that he’s dead?’

Ubiratan looked fixedly at both of them. He saw two mud-covered boys wearing the same crestfallen expression.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You didn’t hear a word of what we’ve been saying!’ Eduardo exploded. ‘Not a word! Nothing, nothing, nothing!’

‘Of course I did. The dentist died, the car knocked you down, Madalena died, the land round the lake was burned, the fence was put up … What else?’

Paulo was indignant at what he saw as a lack of concern for his own private drama:

‘My bike is completely twisted! Wrecked! And you sit here doing sums! When my father sees it—’

‘Equations,’ Ubiratan corrected him, picking up the sheets of paper and separating them into two piles, before putting one bundle into each of his side pockets.

‘Now that the dentist is dead, there’s no point trying to discover the real killer,’ Eduardo said disconsolately.

‘Why not?’

‘Well … Anita was murdered and—’

‘Aparecida,’ Ubiratan corrected him.

‘Aparecida. She was murdered, and the murderer killed himself.’

‘The sham murderer!’ Paulo was quick to point out.

‘There’s nothing more to investigate because there’s no longer an innocent man we can get out of jail,’ Eduardo concluded.

Ubiratan took off his glasses, folded them shut, then put them in the inside pocket of his jacket.

‘Who says the dentist was innocent?’ he asked, folding his arms.

‘But … you yourself said that …’

‘I never said the dentist was innocent,’ he stressed, standing up.

‘But he … he …’ stammered Eduardo.

‘The struggle, the stab wounds, the …’ Paulo protested.

‘There are many ways to kill someone. Aparecida was destroyed long before she was murdered.’

Passing between the two of them, he headed towards the refectory door. Eduardo and Paulo followed him. An everyday sound of plates, voices, cutlery came from within. The smell of hot food filled Paulo’s nostrils, made his mouth water, and reminded him he had not eaten a thing since breakfast.

‘The dentist isn’t the murderer,’ Eduardo said to himself, desperately trying to follow Ubiratan’s reasoning. ‘But he’s not innocent either …’

Ubiratan halted. Either because they reflected the light from inside the home, or because they were gleaming with the intensity of their first steps from the certainties of childhood to the tortuous complexities of the adult world, the boys’ eyes filled the old man with an immense (and as he well knew, impotent) desire to protect them.

‘Things aren’t always what they seem,’ he said, with a warmth that took even him by surprise. ‘Eduardo. Paulo. That’s a cliché. But it’s true. I’m hungry.’

‘Me too,’ said Paulo, already starting to think of the magic he would have to weave in order to get home, scrape off the layer of mud and hide the damaged bike, without being seen or punished.

‘Let’s go. My mother gets worried if I’m late.’

‘Why are you two so dirty?’

‘Ubiratan, you didn’t hear—’

‘I’m ravenous and tired. I’ve been busy the whole day. I even went to the cemetery. Do you like opera?’

‘Opera?’ said Paulo in astonishment.

‘I heard some once in my
nonno
’s house. He used to like it.’

‘I want to take you to hear
Tosca
. By Giacomo Puccini. It’s wonderful. But not today. Today I’ve got other plans for us.’

They didn’t understand, but were not upset.
Sagarana
, Mao, Guernica, Graciliano, there were already so many names for them to digest that one more made no difference. Ubiratan was plunging far beyond their reach. Time to go home.

‘All right then. ’Bye.’ Paulo said goodbye unenthusiastically.

‘See you tomorrow, Ubiratan.’

They left him and headed for the corridor on the other side of the kitchen. Paulo was in the lead, spurred on by his hunger and the anxiety at having yet again to get into the house by climbing through the bathroom window slats. The last few times, he had realized it was getting harder and harder for him to squeeze through. Perhaps he was growing. Getting stronger. Could it be? He wanted to think it was. He also wanted to think that his father had not yet come home. That he was in no hurry to get there, and was drinking another beer in some bar or other. He wanted to think that he was having another beer because he was in no hurry to get home because he was going to spend the night at the brothel with Antonio. He wanted to think that—

‘Paulo and Eduardo!’ they heard Ubiratan call out.

He was still standing where they had left him, although by now he was nothing more than a silhouette they could barely
distinguish among the shadows of the yard and the walls of the home.

‘No one wears a suit and tie in a prison cell,’ he said softly. ‘Nor a belt. Nor shoelaces. It’s forbidden.’

Eduardo looked from Ubiratan to Paulo, then back at the old man. He wanted to ask something like So how did he kill himself? but in order for his doubt to become a proper question he would have needed to be aware of a perversity he was not yet familiar with. So he said nothing. He heard Paulo ask:

‘Never?’

‘Never. In no circumstances. Do you like the cinema?’

Another twist. This time it didn’t take them by surprise. Shoelaces, belts, ties, jacket, cinema: why not? They were getting used to the extraordinary links made by the man in the shadows. They both nodded.

‘Good. I stopped going to the cinema some time ago. But today there’s a film I want to see. Tonight, the three of us can go to the movies.’

‘No, we can’t!’ Eduardo said regretfully. ‘It’s a film banned for under-fourteens.’

‘Find a way,’ Ubiratan said, shrugging his shoulders, then turning and entering the refectory.

The moment Anita Ekberg went spinning through the air in the arms of a broad-shouldered man to the sound of rock ’n’ roll, Paulo felt his body grow hot. He was sitting, his eyes
glued to the screen, in the balcony of the Cine Theatro Universo. He was burning as if he had a fever, yet it was below his waist. Anita was dancing, smiling, shaking her thick blonde hair and revealing her quivering milky-white breasts as she circulated barefoot among the guests at some incomprehensible party, until she climbed on to a dais and was lifted high into the air by the man with the blond satyr’s beard. The longer the display of acrobatic dancing and teasing went on, the greater the uncomfortable, prickling sensation became, and the greater Paulo’s confusion. Because it was a pleasant sensation, it made his heart beat faster, brought him a feeling of … almost … almost a feeling of happiness. He felt a great desire to reach out and touch the exuberant flesh of the woman being whirled through the air. He wished it were his hands clutching the ankles of this immense blonde. He wanted to plunge his face between the ample breasts squeezed into the neckline of her dark dress, to breathe in the sweet-smelling perfume. Without realizing what he was doing, he raised his left hand to his trouser front. He sensed that his body was no longer responding to this unknown maelstrom with a boy’s physical anxiety, but with the hard evidence of his entry into the world of desire. He smiled silently in the darkness. With a shiver of pride, he clasped his penis in his first-ever erection.

Oblivious to the courting couples seeking refuge in the darkness of the balcony to exchange caresses forbidden outside by the moral conventions of a city still rooted in the nineteenth century, Ubiratan was moved and disturbed by what he was seeing of an Italy he no longer recognized. He had always felt
an affectionate link to a country he had never visited but had glimpsed in numerous films shot in the streets and alleyways of Rome, Milan, Genoa and Naples, devastated by the war and inhabited by a population trying to survive with dignity and to renew their interrupted futures. One of his last visits to the cinema had been to see an Italian film:
Umberto D
. D for Domenico, if he wasn’t mistaken. A retired pensioner, wandering through the dilapidated post-war Rome with a dog, thrown out of his home, with no future or hope. One more – of many – workers who discovered the system did not need them. It had been barely nine years earlier that he had gone into the cinema in Recife to see it. It seemed such a short while ago. But to the two boys sitting beside him, nine years was almost their entire life. In nine years of tedium and the Marshall Plan, Italy had been transformed into this cynical circus now displayed on screen. Ubiratan felt as though he had emerged from a time capsule and found himself in a world where frivolity, meaninglessness and indifference reigned supreme. Could it be that everything humanity had achieved, at the start of this second half of the twentieth century, had become nothing more than a vehicle for sterile passions? Did progress lead only to lives stripped of meaning; did freedom and even the freedom of the press end up in these senseless Edens?

When the wife of the sceptical intellectual, unaware of his suicide, is surrounded by paparazzi desperate to capture her reaction to the sight of her husband’s dead body, Ubiratan felt like closing his eyes the way children do in horror films, to avoid being engulfed by the sensation that the world that so
horrified him now was the same as the one for which, two decades earlier, millions of men and women had sacrificed their lives in the name of a freer, more dignified and more equal future.

Sitting on his right, quiet and almost without moving, Eduardo was watching the film as if it were a dream taking place outside his mind. As with dreams, what he saw projected on to the screen did not have a logical narrative, and yet, just as when he saw himself in his own dreams without knowing what he was dreaming about, everything seemed intensely real. He couldn’t tell whether he was enjoying it or not. He had no way of understanding a universe inhabited by indolent nobles wandering like blind men through ruined castles, ordinary people seeking redemption in miraculous visions, statuesque women bathing in public fountains, fathers whose sons casually offer them their lovers, a crazy sequence of images where each event might have a meaning, but not one he could grasp. He could only perceive, with instinctive certainty, that the good and the bad, heroes and villains, cops and robbers, dancers, parents, actresses, the religious faithful, photographers: none was any different. They were all part of the same … the same … he didn’t know the word. He remembered another one, although not where he had heard it: sordidness. As so often happened, he felt sad without knowing why. And when, after a night on the tiles, the journalist tries to respond to the little girl’s gesture next to the fish that looked like some sea monster, Eduardo could not understand why his eyes brimmed with tears so that he could hardly see the final scene.