Lord

by João Gilberto Noll

  I heard a groan… I looked around… On the steps of a portentous building, just ahead of me, a young man with dreadlocks seemed injured. Blood on his throat. I removed his scarf, and with it tried to remove the clots that hid the exact size of the wound: it was huge, maybe a shot…no, certainly a stab. Would I know how to treat him? I’d be his nurse; I’d heal him on the sidewalk in two or three months, only by the strength of our friendship. I think I went crazy that night… I won’t argue, but the fact is that I was already hugging him; I was holding him to my chest and he began to whisper. I brought his mouth to my ear, staining myself with blood, and I heard: It was him… The guy was feverish on that cold night, and it gave me heat. My life was suddenly thrown in with his, into that embrace with the possibly dying young man. It didn’t matter; my life could have been thrown in with anything that came my way on the streets of London. The young man finally expired in my arms. I realized it because his head fell back and so remained, a desistance I only knew how to rehearse. I squeezed his hand. His mouth opened, and I could see the pool of blood that had overflowed his rotten teeth. That death, in some way, in some corner of my mind, gave me tremendous satisfaction. Someone was not afraid to go all the way to the end. To do for others what everyone tried to avoid. I wished I could follow him, but I didn’t have his bravery; I lacked the necessary elements to consummate the act. I needed that hug today. No, no, I would not go back to the apartment in Hackney; on the streets of London I was going to resist until I too might triumph. Listen… wasn’t I the bull?

  I supported the boy’s head on my legs. I heard a police car’s siren. I moaned: Let the cops not come near us. The pool of blood began to spill. The siren faded away. I lay the dead man on the step. I hid the bloodstain on my scarf, rewrapping it around my neck, and kept walking. I crossed neighborhoods. I smiled at some of the passersby so they wouldn’t suspect the drama I carried on my scarf. I didn’t want to throw it away yet, as if at some point in the future I might still prove to myself that I hadn’t been such a coward, that I still carried some of the warm essence of the dead man with me, that I had not abandoned him entirely. I smiled; my smile was sometimes a sickening grimace, to set me apart a little more. I was passing through Bloomsbury. Down Oxford Street. I got to Soho. There was a black woman in white panties and bra at the door of a whorehouse. She whispered something to me. I stopped. She had a firm body, entirely beautiful. She said she had a room upstairs…very, very warm, with a fireplace. Yes, that was what I needed. She sat on the bed, called me over to her, asked me for the money in advance. When I grabbed the wallet from my pocket, my pen fell, and so did several receipts I was keeping for the Englishman. I paid her. She opened a drawer in the bedside table and put the pound notes inside. In bed, I lay my head on her legs. From between her legs came the heavy scent of some extravagant perfume. That odor was impregnating and took away my desire to do anything other than to lie there, getting more and more drunk on the fragrance passing up my nostrils; perhaps I could fall asleep until my hour was up. She ran her hand over my head and didn’t try anything else. She kept caressing my hair and spoke in a certain African tongue. From Kenya, she said when we said goodbye. Those words without semantics worked as a mantra for me. And, as such, they were hypnotic, leading me to a state of indeterminacy: a silky whisper that never blossomed into gesture or action. Of course, I would have stayed in the arms of that black geisha for the rest of my life if she had let me. I would have given her three times the money if I’d had it so I could stay a whole day submerged in that sub-ecstasy. I would leave there healed, ready to accept anything, and to go all the way to the end without looking back.

  But she squeezed my shoulder and shook it lightly. I understood. I got up slowly. I descended the stairs like a drunkard, running my hand over the wall, looking for support. The day had broken. I walked and walked…I was in Soho Square. I passed an open church. I went in and sat for a while. There was a small line for Communion. I hadn’t been hungry at all; I was one step away from anorexia. But putting a warm Communion wafer in my mouth that early in the morning seemed like a good idea. I got in line. When my turn came, I stuck out my tongue and immediately the thin white wafer, almost nothing, began to dissolve in my mouth. So quickly, I thought, with hardly any taste. I sat down, leaning back in the front pew, and fell asleep.

  Sir, sir, said a devout Catholic lady, bent over me. It might have been early afternoon. Hmmm, I said, hmmm, and I waved my arm in a gesture as if shooing curious people away. The woman backed off with large steps. I hadn’t forgotten that I needed to get rid of my scarf, stained with the Rastafarian man’s blood. I was not exactly illegal in this country, but it wasn’t advisable for a foreigner in a state of confusion like I was to have somebody else’s DNA on his belongings. This is the fate of cowards: to get rid of the evidence of any experience that does not bring along with itself a greater justification. They don’t participate in anything; they simply hint at some higher human aptitude, in fear of any misunderstanding.

  So I let the scarf slip, fall to the floor, between one pew and another. If the devout woman found it, she would think it belonged to me—yes, a wounded man who had fallen asleep in the church and who, disturbed by feverish nightmares, shooed her away. And wasn’t I living in a feverish nightmare after all? What would be my next step? I started walking again, passing through Covent Garden; a group of young people played Mozart; I stopped and gave them a coin then suddenly decided to give them two; I looked up as the sun came out after being hidden for weeks; I wanted to scream for joy, to faint, to be taken once again by chance to the hospital in Bloomsbury… Was someone really staying there in my bed? And was he just waiting for me to come back and give him my place out here? The day had come. Either I gave up on myself so that I could be the other, or…I don’t know, I’d have to spit in the face of the first passerby and let his anger get beyond consideration of consequences. Understand? I asked the air. No, no one could understand, let alone I, who was escaping from the situation that had brought me to London and to which I no longer knew what service I had to give. And had I ever known, huh? People on the street looked at me as if they saw a ghost. Huh? Huh? I was opening my arms as if dancing an irrefutable ballet, passing a hand over my genitalia occasionally, as if to accentuate the spring heat, the blooming.

  Some people stopped and smiled, others made faces of pity. I heard timid claps. I abandoned my lonely ballet and headed toward the place I thought I had to overcome. If I passed that point, I wouldn’t have to deal with anyone anymore. What point? I didn’t even know, I only knew that I no longer wanted to have anything to do with that truncated invitation to stay in London. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to leave the city. Never! I lacked the memory of my bed in Brazil…, there’s always Hackney, right? I asked a passerby who turned out to speak Spanish and who commented that, yes, he could understand me quite well. He had the same mental register as me. He knew what was going on long before he saw me. He was pedaling a rickshaw for the tourists wandering around the neighborhood. He was Chilean. He told me to climb on, he would take me to wherever I wanted to go. On the seat was a thick, fuzzy blanket. I wrapped myself up in it, and he pedaled me away. This is good, I said after many laps. I gave him my coins. It was drizzling. How handsome this Chilean was. Such features! I felt a desire to kiss that face. If the kiss popped close to his ear, even better. His ear came from the gods. Instead, I kissed his hand. If the house in Hackney was still at my disposal, would he want to go there and share the bed? No? There was so much I wanted to ask. But a French couple asked him for a ride. And there they went, making me swallow my thousand questions…

  Wasn’t it time for me to take the 55 to Hackney and see if the house was still mine? If the Englishman who had brought me to London had left another of his notes? Hopefully not a final one…canceling my permission to be in the city. Hopefully I was not homeless all of a sudden. Because I would never use the return ticket to Brazil. At the same time, I couldn’t see how my official or sem
i-official stay in this country could continue. I could only hope then that this impasse lasted for the rest of my days here. That I could keep a roof over me, paid for by them, and continue receiving the minimal funds from them that guaranteed me food and transportation around the city so I could warm myself up at the National Gallery—enjoying Van Gogh, seated on a bench some afternoon, or appreciating Cézanne some other day, circling to keep myself a little warmer. That, of course, would have been my ideal life, and the English people might provide it to me because of some permanent misunderstanding, born of some state and/or cultural secret impossible to extricate. Why did I avoid taking the 55 and facing my destiny? Would I spend another night on the street? Wasn’t I old enough for this extravagance? More extravagant than if I had to live illegally in London, working hard at God knows what—me, accustomed to writing books. The right thing to do was to write a letter requesting an undetermined, provisional period to myself. And at the end, I would discover a way to die, that’s it!

  But I couldn’t see myself walking toward the 55 stop on Oxford Street. I was on my way to the palace where the Englishman had taken me directly from the airport as soon as I arrived in London. It was on Jermyn Street. Its construction began in the seventeenth century and ended in the eighteenth. The building had no inscriptions. A flag of the United Kingdom fluttered. The building’s haughtiness didn’t resemble that of a university. It looked more like a diplomatic building. Who had invited me? Once again I opened the letter I always carried in my pocket in case the police stopped me. There was the signature of the Englishman who had invited me. Underneath his signature were the initials of the institution he represented, handwritten, with no stamp. At the time of the invitation, I thought about asking somebody in Porto Alegre about it, or calling someone in Rio, Sao Paulo, something. But I didn’t know anyone. I called the British honorary consul in Porto Alegre. I faxed him the letter so he could tell me if I would pass through immigration without any problems with it in my hands. He only recommended that the invitation letter should not mention money. He asked me if I smoked or liked to eat well, because if I was like that, what they were paying me wouldn’t make it past the third of the month. I did not pass along the consul’s concerns to the Englishman, who had already sent me the plane tickets. Yes, the order for me to pick up the tickets had already been issued, then I had the tickets in hand; I had no doubt this Englishman and the group he represented wanted me to come to England because of the books I had written—they had shown that they had, at least, the means and a clear desire to support that story.

  I looked at the imposing building where the Englishman who had invited me should be. The wear and tear that my body might have suffered over the course of the dragging, endless days of my stay seemed irreversible. My reputation might have fallen so low that the only way out was for them to escort me back to Brazil. But why? I wondered. What had corroded things to this point that it was too late to turn back? Or was it not like that at all? Were they doing what was best for me? I scratched my genitals like an idle man in the full orgasm of a Taurus fantasy. I should go back to Hackney now, stay in my room, recover from last night’s lack of sleep with a beautiful rest, and when I awoke, I would receive glorious news that would justify my entire stay in London. But would I like that to happen? To fully understanding would imply imminent departure. No, no, I should keep simmering slowly, and hope that the decisive moment of my return to Brazil would only come when I succumbed once and for all to the afflictions I had lived until then.

  It was then that I saw myself running through Piccadilly Circus, scaring doves, forcing people to make way. I crossed Soho in a rush, ran a length of Oxford Street, along came the 55 to carry me to the truth. I got on, went to the upper deck. Inside, they were speaking Portuguese, Persian, Chinese, Vietnamese, English, Spanish, Italian, Turkish. What had they all come to do on these streets, which, as Hackney approached, grew increasingly ugly, dirty, and beset by endless construction? I had serious doubts they lived better in these London ghettos than in their meager birthplaces. What set me apart from them was that I was trying to indefinitely prolong a stay that, providing me almost nothing, didn’t ask for anything in return. It asked only for the cost of my vigil. But when would an opportunity like this happen for me again? I would make a pact, I’d said already, that when the arrangement became unsustainable for the institution, I would commit hara-kiri in their offices if necessary so no one would doubt that my debt was fulfilled. Or else I would stop eating, spend all the money from the miserable grant on amphetamines, never closing my eyes again to further diminish my lifespan, and consequently my expense to them. I would live my last days as a vagabond, wandering the streets of London, through the museums with free admission, with my amphetamine-bloated brain hovering above the daily lives of the mortals. Having my house in Hackney, the little money at the end of the month… I descended to the bottom level of the bus as my stop neared, feeling my lips dry up, my hand tremble. It was now or never. And this inexorable situation would kill me before my time, ending the joy of this untranslatable stay abroad.

  I walked toward the house in Hackney like someone who was going to save a shipwreck survivor, slowly performing the necessary measures to avoid shocking his system. One situation was that the Englishman who had called me to London might be waiting in the house, another was that my key night not open the changed lock, and a third hypothesis was that a powerful committee would be waiting for me there, to not only disavow me but also take away my temporary freedom. Fool, I told myself repeatedly, how foolish you are for believing in blessings.

  The key still fit in the lock. I childishly thought I would find peace there again. As soon as I closed the door behind me, I heard the clatter of cutlery. There was someone in the kitchen. I galloped upstairs. The Englishman who had invited me to London was sitting at the table with a woman, having a meal. He introduced me to her, an employee. He filled a glass of wine and offered it to me. I accepted, but I didn’t drink it. I realized that things were beginning to take a different tack in regard to the members of that organization. A real dysfunction: the figurehead of a British entity invites me—the author of seven books—for a stay in London, providing a house and some money; but then I arrive at that house and he’s having a meal with some woman with whom his relationship is unclear, at least as far as the institution is concerned. It’s another chapter, I thought. Can I use this situation to my benefit? I could cover up their clandestine relationship that was going against their entity’s rules, which felt like those of a paramilitary organization. Let them use my kitchen, my bedroom; I’ll sleep in the living room, or in the kitchen even; they’ll have the bathroom…all the rooms with heating. As long as the relationship lasts, my residency will be guaranteed. Meanwhile, my shame will flow from me as I sleep to disappear down the drain. When they wake up, there’ll be no trace of me. And I wouldn’t have to go back to Brazil. It would all be so beneficial to me. And for them, too? They invited me to sit down. She was beautiful and blonde. She served me a chicken breast, two, three vegetables I hadn’t experienced in Brazil. I remained silent throughout the meal. Any urge to speak that came up in my throat dissolved at the slightest tentative movement of my tongue. My words would disturb. I needed to become invisible sooner than later, I thought. For now, I was going to lie down in the corner of the living room and pretend to sleep. I’d leave my room to them so they could have their orgy…that’s what I’d do. If I had to dream to prove I was asleep, who knows, I would end up dreaming if my body reached the limit of resistance. Perhaps, everything could be possible in the dream, unlike here, and thus I’d be able to rest, and get new and different results. My tiredness did not demand sleep, but, damn!, how I craved some indistinguishability between bodies, volumes, and formats. Was this the night my wish would be granted? I would fall asleep with some other identity, and they would not find me: I would be disguised not only among them but distributed throughout the entire house in Hackney. I would be in the curtains, at the t
able, everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  I asked if they needed the room. They both looked at each other and smiled. Their libidos were running wild, and they didn’t mind making me an accomplice. Okay…I had nothing against it. I excused myself. I turned off the lights in the living room. I did not take off my clothes. I lay in a corner, on the hard floor. The neon light of the Vietnamese restaurant bathed me in red. What I found at that moment was my exact measure, with it I could rest not only that night but in the future. Let the English couple enter the room at dawn, full of lust. Even now I was beginning to hear their giggles, their moans in the bedroom. I got comfortable; I curled up beside the radiator. I had no idea what I wanted anymore. Less, maybe? No matter what, I needed to accomplish it sooner rather than later, now…in London. I could no longer imagine my genitals burning and sending their missiles into the hell of someone else’s entrails. And yet, curled up, my genitals were on fire. But just like the sunflower is ruled by the cycle of sun and stars, sleep would placate me. And it descended.