If I Close My Eyes Now (32 page)

They left the home. Eduardo was more worried than Paulo: he was concerned about the fate of the black Phillips. Ubiratan might have forgotten it somewhere. What if he couldn’t remember where? If the bike was damaged, would
they be able to repair it? Repairs cost money, and Ubiratan didn’t have any. Nor did Eduardo. What if it had been stolen? How was he to explain to his parents that the precious English bike, which looked as good as new even though it was second-hand, the bike he had been given as a reward for the good marks he had received in the entrance exam for the Colegio Municipal Beatriz Maria Marques Torres, the bike they had paid for with such difficulty, had simply vanished into thin air? Just like that? If he told them he had lent it to an old man from the home, it would be worse. If he told them he had lent it so that the old man could go Eduardo had no idea where, to do he had no idea what, and on top of this, that the old man, he himself and Paulo were investigating a crime that had already been solved thanks to the murderer’s confession, then he was well and truly done for.

Paulo suggested he tell them that he needed the bike to do errands for his father the butcher, and that he had promised to return it before nightfall. It was a convincing lie. But sooner or later, Ubiratan would have to come out of hiding, face them, and give the bike back. The lie would get Eduardo off the hook for a few hours, and yet he felt increasingly anxious. He wasn’t so much worried about the bike, how much it was worth or the money he might have to spend to get it repaired, or even his parents’ anger or disappointment. It was none of that. It was … that. Once again. Yet again that same strange and distressing, nameless sensation that sometimes took hold of his body. What could it be?

They agreed to return to the old people’s home after lunch. They said goodbye. Paulo went off without knowing where to
go. He felt hungrier and hungrier, but did not want to go home. He continued wandering aimlessly. He didn’t realize that he was whistling one of the tunes he had heard in the Hotel Wizorek.

A green American car with a white top passed by. The mayor was driving. Next to him sat a thin woman. Her left arm was swathed in bandages. On the back seat was a blonde girl, with narrow eyes. The car sped on towards the asphalted road leading to the capital.

The weight would not leave his chest. Pressing and squeezing him. An odd pain. As if someone were burying a sharp spear in his guts, splitting and twisting everything inside him. He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t get rid of this … thing. Whatever it was.

What was this burden? Why? Where did it come from? What caused it? What was this … this thing that made it so hard for him to breathe, that brought a cold wave of fear that was not quite fear, stabbed at his heart beating in his chest and … what could it be called? It must have a name. Why did he feel it? Why did it leave him so empty? Why couldn’t he get rid of it?

When Eduardo pushed open the door at home, sweaty and breathless, he immediately felt a great sense of relief. His breathing
returned slowly to normal. He felt sheltered. Protected. In front of him were the same pieces of furniture, smelling of peroba oil, the same few reproductions of famous paintings, the same china ornaments, the same crochet squares, the same maidenhair ferns, bromeliads, violets and begonias in the same pots and in the same places they were in the week before and the week before that, where they were the day before yesterday, yesterday, and where they would be tomorrow.

He went in, closing the door quietly. He leaned back against it. He could hear the intermittent sound of the sewing machine, indicating that his mother was working, as she did from morning to evening six days a week until his father came home from the station of the Brazilian Central Railway. Familiar sounds, so habitual he no longer even noticed them, but which now brought him an overwhelming sense of relief and gratitude.

He was about to announce his arrival when the sound of the sewing machine stopped. His mother must have heard him come in. Now she was calling out to him. To Eduardo her voice sounded different, more nasal, as if she had been crying. He went to her room. She was sitting behind the Singer sewing machine; her eyes were red and swollen. His father was standing beside her, looking grim, and still wearing his work overalls. He was holding a telegram in his hand.

Paulo never discovered who bought the butcher’s shop, or how his father came to be appointed head of
store-keeping at a ministry in Rio de Janeiro. Antonio had no idea either, but he didn’t care. To live in Rio, even if it was in a suburb far away from Copacabana beach, was beyond his wildest dreams. He was going to the city with the most brazen, most beautiful, most tanned women in all Brazil: what difference did it make who was responsible?

They had the next day, a holiday, to sort out the move. It wasn’t much work: their furniture and household goods fitted on to one truck. On the Saturday they boarded a bus to take them away from the city where Paulo was born and grew up, never to return. His single suitcase contained the few clothes he possessed and dozens of bits of paper. Written on them were words he had once not known the meaning of, together with their definitions. Before leaving, he gave back the copy of
David Copperfield
that he hadn’t finished reading. Eduardo insisted he take it as a leaving present, but Paulo wouldn’t hear of it.

On Sunday, Eduardo went by train with his father to Barra do Piraí, where they caught the connection to São Paulo. There they took another train to Taubaté, the city where the telegram stated that Rodolfo Massaranni was to be transferred with immediate effect. Rosangela Massaranni stayed on in the city long enough to take care of the practical side of their move.

Over the first weeks and months, Eduardo and Paulo wrote each other many letters. Eduardo’s were long and sad, going
into great detail about how cold his new classmates were, how the teachers showed no interest in him, about the tiny squares and almost treeless streets, the ugliness of the modern buildings in the city they had moved to. He wrote how much he missed their bike rides and the squawking of the macaws in the bamboo groves round the lake. Paulo’s letters spoke in short sentences of his weekend trips to the neighbourhoods of Méier and Cascadura, and how lively they were, and of how much he enjoyed the cries of the vendors on the trains he took to go from Bento Ribeiro, where he lived, to Marechal Hermes, where his new school was.

Eduardo also wrote occasionally to the old people’s home, but never received a reply from Ubiratan. Finally, in September, all his letters were returned to him in a bundle, together with a note informing him that nobody of that name lived there.

A few months later, in a letter sprinkled with exclamation marks, Paulo wrote that he had been with a woman, and that it was great. Eduardo wrote back that he had also had sex with a woman, and that he had also enjoyed it a lot. He soon regretted his lie, but had already posted the letter. In his next one, he wanted to tell the truth. He ended up writing vague sentences in response to Paulo’s questions about this first, non-existent conquest. Once again he was embarrassed at lying to his friend about an experience he would only really have five years later, in São Paulo, with a female colleague on his pre-university course who was also a virgin and just as clumsy as he was about finding pleasure.

Perhaps it was as a result of this first breach of confidence
between them, or perhaps it happened some time later: in the years to come, neither of them could tell when or why their letters became shorter and shorter, and increasingly less frequent. Until one day, without them noticing, they stopped altogether.

THE SKINNY, PALE-FACED
boy lying on the grass that bordered the blue lake like an undulating green frame opened his eyes and saw his dark, flap-eared friend standing over him. He was dripping wet.

‘Did you believe the story about the Russian?’

‘The one this morning? About the first man in space?’

‘Yes. Do you really think he went round the world in a hundred and eight minutes?’

‘I think I do.’

‘Would you like to do that?’

‘Yes. Both of us. In ten years from now, space travel is going to be much more common.’

‘So we can are astronauts.’

‘We can
be
,’ the thin boy corrected him.

‘Even though we’re Brazilian.’

‘Everybody is going to be able to be an astronaut. But I think I would prefer to be an engineer.’

‘I want to be a scientist. To discover remedies for incurable diseases.’

‘For all incurable diseases!’ the pale-complexioned boy added.

‘All of them!’ his friend agreed enthusiastically. ‘Every single one!’

They laughed. It was a fine, warm day.

Monday, 20 August 1990, 15.43

THE BOY WAS
startled when the limousine pulled up alongside him, and the man at the wheel waved for him to get in. The boy smiled, because it was in his nature to smile and show gratitude for a kindness done or promised. The boy smiled in anticipation of his pleasure at climbing into that shiny dark-blue car, with its soft tan-leather seats.

The boy smiled because he had learned that by smiling and tilting his head to the left a little, as he was doing now, and looking at adults with the blue eyes he had inherited from his Pomeranian great-grandparents, he almost always received a smile in return. A smile from his parents’ bosses, a pat on his fine blond hair, sometimes a few coins or even a banknote slipped into the palm of his hand by the man with dark-brown skin, the owner of that vast house with such high walls where his parents worked. He smiled because that was what he believed made the men in black who were constantly patrolling the house hurry up, as they were the only ones able to open the gate he left by every morning to go to school in this big city where his mother and father had finally brought him.

He smiled because that was what he had done in the months while he waited for them to come and get him as they had promised. Thanks to his smile, he was rewarded with a little more food or a little less punishment when he did something wrong, like the afternoon he opened the sheep-pen and ran up into the hills with the sheep. He didn’t shout or make any noise as other children would have done, but tried to catch some of the smaller ones, which were disappearing into the bushes. The boy smiled because that was what he always did when he was spoken to gently, as the man behind the wheel was doing now. He smiled because he was unable to speak; he never spoke a single word, or ever heard any: he didn’t know what words were, although he knew they existed, that it was through them that adults and others the same size as him expressed what they wanted and expected of him, as long as they pointed to him, or showed him.