If I Close My Eyes Now (3 page)

The first blow, with the back of the hand, caught Paulo on his right ear. He stumbled, a wave of pain flashing across his skull, and the only reason he didn’t fall was because another slap, this time with the palm of the hand, hit him on the left side of his head, knocking him against the dining table. He just had time to save himself from crashing into it, and watched in a daze as his father came closer, knowing he wanted to give him another one, two, as many blows as possible until he calmed down again. Tainted blood, shouted the fair-haired man looming over him, tainted blood, he repeated, narrowing his blue eyes between lashes that were so light-coloured they sometimes looked almost white, you’ve got tainted blood just like your mother and all her family, you monkey son of a bitch.

Paulo said nothing. It wouldn’t help to say anything. His father wouldn’t hear – he never heard anything when he was in a rage like this. In a rage against him, usually. Or always. Paulo could try to wriggle his way out, squeeze under the table and then rush into the street, run to … where exactly? He had nowhere to go. And no one to take him in. And it would only make his father all the more furious. It would be worse. When he beat him, and sooner or later he would beat him, the thrashing would leave marks and pain for days, as it always used to until he learned that the best thing was to stay and face the punishment. Better to stay now, it would hurt less.

Paulo saw the huge hand aiming for his face. He anticipated the stinging pain, knowing he would sleep and wake up with that throbbing ache, which was also the ache of shame and
sadness he felt towards this man who could only call him a monkey.

He felt his father’s vast paw strike him between his nose and ear. He stumbled again.

He let himself fall on his side between the chairs, curling up under the table, instinctively pulling his legs up to his chest and lowering his head, hoping against hope the beating would end there and then, but prepared to take more blows on his neck, then lashes from the leather belt his father was busy removing from his trousers. But his father did not drag him out from under the table. He lashed out once, twice, three and four times between the chairs, but only struck glancing blows to Paulo’s head. He stopped, striking the furniture with the belt buckle several times, then tossed the belt down on to his son, ordering him: come out of there, you son of a bitch, come out of there.

Paulo raised himself on all fours and crawled out. He stood with his back to his father and waited. Would the next blow be to his head? Another slap across the ears?

He could hear his father’s heavy breathing, mixed with the curses he kept repeating, but he did not come any nearer. A good sign. When he didn’t move, his father usually stopped hitting him. Instead he almost always let loose another string of abuse, so perhaps the thrashing would end there. Paulo desperately hoped it would.

His father simply said: ‘Pick up that crappy belt.’

Paulo bent down and picked it up.

‘Give me that piece of crap.’

Paulo gave it him.

‘You’re no good for anything, you little monkey, you’ve got their tainted blood in you, you brat, you’ve got their blood all right, you’re a good-for-nothing like all your mother’s family.’

Paulo lowered his head. Yet again he felt a deep-seated pain, the same pain he was to feel so often in the future whenever he recalled those moments with his father, a pain he knew did not come from the blows he received, but which as yet he didn’t know where to situate or how to understand.

His father slammed the door and left the room.

Paulo was on his own. The pain was increasing, coursing through his legs, arms, his chest, until it reached his eyes and turned into tears. He bit his bottom lip harder and harder, trying to transform one pain into another. The tears fell anyway from the corners of his eyes, running down his face, which was already starting to swell. Paulo ran to the bathroom, shut the door as best he could, hoping that neither his father nor his brother would come in, took the face cloth and stuffed it in his mouth. Hidden in the bathroom, he secretly sobbed and moaned while from a nearby house a radio once again trumpeted the first flight of a man in space.

When he went into the bedroom he shared with his brother, Antonio was doing exercises with dumb-bells in front of the wardrobe mirror. He was wearing a pair of shorts. Even though he was only sixteen, his large frame and hairy body made him look adult. Like his father and many descendants of people who came to Brazil from the north of
Portugal, he had inherited the physique and pale skin of the Visigoths. His thick hair was slicked back with brilliantine apart from one quiff that fell artfully over his forehead. Beneath thick eyebrows, eyes as dark as his mother’s peered with pleasure at his own body. He was counting the repetitions out loud as he raised and lowered the iron weights.

‘What’s all this about a dead woman, golliwog?’ he asked, deliberately using the nickname that emphasized the difference in their skin colour, without pausing in his exercises or taking his eyes off his own body.

Paulo didn’t reply. Making sure his brother did not see his still-red eyes, he went over to his bed, lined up beside the wardrobe. Keeping his back to his brother, he lifted the pillow in search of something. He didn’t find it.

‘And they kept you in, golliwog? All afternoon?’

He pushed back the bedcover, the blanket; it wasn’t there either.

‘Talk, golliwog! What did you do this time?’

Paulo lifted the mattress. Not there either.

‘They say she was naked. Nude. Is that true, golliwog?’

Bending down, Paulo searched on the wooden floor. He straightened up, stood on the bed. He glanced at the top of the wardrobe, saw nothing, ran his hand over it. Nothing but dust.

‘That dentist’s wife was hot stuff. She looked like Brigitte Bardot. A cross between her and Sophia Loren.’

Paulo had no idea who either of them were, and didn’t care. But something his brother had said took him by surprise.

‘The dentist’s wife? Wasn’t she a whore?’

‘The dentist’s wife.’

‘But at the station they said she was a whore.’

‘She went with everybody. She was a whore. A slut. A hot bitch who couldn’t get enough of it. But she was married to the dentist.’

Paulo got down from the bed.

‘Did you see her in the nude, golliwog? She was really hot, wasn’t she?’

‘She was covered in blood. Filthy, full of mud …’

‘Bouncy tits. Bouncy arse. Big thighs. Really hot. I’d like to have had her. If I’d stuck my prick in her, she’d have been crazy for me.’

As with his biceps and pectorals, Antonio was proud of the control he believed he exercised over any woman he penetrated. After his first visit to a prostitute three years earlier, he and their father went regularly to a brothel a Polish madam ran in a city centre street. Occasionally, they slept there. Paulo would sometimes run into them coming out of the Hotel Wizorek on his way to school.

‘Did they really cut her breasts off? And did she have no knickers on?’

Paulo lifted the horsehair mattress again, looked carefully underneath, then pushed it up against the wall.

‘Did she have blonde hairs? A pink pussy?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know. I didn’t see.’

‘A real blonde has a pink pussy and blonde pubic hairs. I’ve seen lots of them. I’ve eaten lots of blonde pussy.’

Paulo let the mattress drop back. There was only one dentist in the town, a frail-looking man with thinning hair
whom Paulo had seen a few times, all on his own, always wearing a coat and tie. It couldn’t be him.

‘The dentist is old. She was young. She looked young.’

‘She was about twenty-four or -five. The dentist must be twice that. Or more. She only liked old men. She only gave out to old men. She never looked at me.’

Laying the weights on the floor, Antonio puffed out his cheeks and posed sideways on to the wardrobe. He breathed out, put his hands on his flat abdomen, and caressed the blond fuzz there. He turned to the other side, took a deep breath once more, flexed his arms. The pose confirmed it: his biceps were growing bigger and bigger. Picking up the dumbbells, he bent each arm in turn behind his head, breathing noisily in and out, now working on his triceps.

Annoyed, Paulo pushed the blanket and cover to the bottom of the bed, but still found nothing.

‘Where’s the book I left here?’

‘How should I know? Did you see the husband arrested?’

Paulo turned to his brother, surprised again.

‘The police arrested the husband? Why?’

‘He turned himself in. He confessed to killing her. How come you didn’t see the dentist at the police station, if you were there?’

Paulo did the calculations: he had left the station more than two hours earlier, dragged away by his father. Together with Eduardo and his mother, they stopped off at the school, where the headmaster wanted to see them. They had to wait for twenty minutes or half an hour before he saw them, and then were given a long lecture. Night was falling by the time they
came out. The street lamps were lit when they finally reached home. Paulo concluded that the dead woman’s husband must have given himself up during this interval. He went over to Antonio’s bed, almost certain he was hiding the book Eduardo had lent him there. He only needed to reach under the mattress for his fingers to close round it.

He carefully pulled out the book. On its brightly coloured cover, his favourite hero was gazing from a clifftop into a deep valley through which ran a broad, powerful river, lined with the palaces of a civilization lost for centuries in the jungle.

Paulo went back to his own bed, lay down, kicked off his shoes without looking where they fell, and opened the dog-eared copy of
Tarzan and the City of Gold
at the page marked with a piece of string. He began to read.

‘What are you reading, golliwog? A dirty book? I don’t like reading. Not even dirty books. It’s a waste of time. My thing is fucking. What I really like is sticking it in. Into cunts, arses, mouths: my thing is to fuck, to shove it in and enjoy myself. A lot. I’ve got lots of sperm, so …’

But Paulo was a long way away. The pain had vanished. He didn’t feel ashamed or sad any more. He was roaming the streets of a fabulous city hidden in the depths of the African jungle, lined with sophisticated architecture, the walls made of precious materials that aroused all kinds of envy, centres of empire built thanks to highly advanced scientific knowledge, and inhabited by a race unlike any other in the world, and protected by proud warriors clothed in skins and armour studded with emeralds and rubies, brave soldiers who in the
end would yield to the courage, nobility and fearlessness of the king of the jungle.

‘How many times was she stabbed?’

Antonio’s voice brought Paulo back unwillingly to the room. He concentrated on a paragraph and flew back to the land of Onthar, where stood the ivory and gold towers of the lost cities of Cathne and Athne.

‘How many wounds did she have? Seven? Eight? People say there were more than twenty. How many were there?’

Paulo tried to return to the city in which Tarzan had been thrown into an arena where, when the trumpets sounded, he would have to face the fearful giant Phobeg, in a combat in which the loser would have his throat cut, to the delight of the beautiful and perverse queen, Nemone.

‘How many stab wounds?’

Tarzan freed himself from the ropes binding him and—

Antonio snatched the book out of Paulo’s hands.

‘How many wounds?’

‘Give it me! Give me the book!’

‘How many? How many stab wounds?’

Paulo tried in vain to reach the book his brother was holding in one hand above his head, while he fended him off with the other.

‘Give me the book! Give it to me!’

‘How many? First you have to tell me how many stab wounds she had.’

‘I didn’t count. Give me the book, Antonio!’

‘Tell me: how many? How many?’

‘I don’t know; I don’t remember, I don’t know.’

‘You were there; you saw. How many?’

‘The book, Antonio …’

‘How many? Tell me!’

‘Give—’

The memory of the chopped-off breast and the sight of the raw red flesh smeared with mud and blood suddenly flashed through Paulo’s mind. He felt very weak. He collapsed on to the bed, and fell quiet. Dropped his head.

Thinking it might be a trick, Antonio kept his eye on him for a few seconds, ready to react if he jumped up at him, keeping the book high above his head in his right hand. But Paulo just sat on the edge of the bed, head down, hiding his face. He didn’t move. His brother threw the book at him, and went to dress to go out.

Moonlight breaking
On the shadows
Of my solitude
… Where are you going?

Where was the voice coming from?

Tell me if tonight
You’re going out on the prowl
The way she once did …

Where did I first hear that song? he was to ask himself many years later. Was it a distant sound like it was now, and a man’s voice? Or was it a woman?

Who can she be with … ?