The lights were on in the room. He lay down, said he’d had too much to drink. I lay on top of him, facing him, our faces so close that we couldn’t recognize each other anymore. It was a mass of flesh in excess, which we only increased when we took off our clothes, never changing our positions—me on top of him, face to face. All of a sudden, we were naked. And just as suddenly, we had nothing to say. Then he settled under me, taking my cock in his hand and pressing it against his. He began to stroke them, slowly at first. I’d lift my hips to look. I covered his hand with mine, and he stroked us both at the same time. We were two men who—though no longer in the prime of our youths—still looked like two roosters, cockfighters at the peak of their strength, and who, instead of scuffling to the death, had entered into a new rite with the emission of fresh blood: this milk, that came out now in gushes, sullying our hands, bellies, groins, legs…
I woke up first, and found everything too white. Like a photograph trying to accentuate the gray tone coming through the window. I got up and tried to see the city. It was impossible, either because of the day’s intense fog or simply because it was raining. The view from the window was completely dull. There were faint shadows down the street. A United Kingdom flag, which I had noticed before, now only showed itself as an indistinct, floating stain. I went to the next window: the same. I wondered if the world would be like this from now on, foggy. If there would be nothing solid left in it; if I should not expect anything from it to be clearly defined; if all I had allowed myself to aspire to in Liverpool was disintegrating in this realm of imprecise forms, where neither I nor anyone on this side had access to its history (spread throughout that emptiness in mere nuances of gray). I heard the shower. I noticed there was a large cloud of steam coming from the bathroom. I called softly, as if any voice in here would be disturbing: George! No one answered. I called louder: George! Nothing. Then the sound of the shower stopped. There was no noise at all, not even coming from the street. And the vapor dissipated, making the windows even foggier. I went to see. In the bathroom was no one. I had been cast off, left alone in a city that did not exist, was that it? Left confined to this room, with just a bathroom and a view of black-and-white spots, some gray or cream, mostly meaninglessness—would that be so bad? Portuguese classes, George—all buried within the chimera? What was left to do, I asked myself, to give passage to a new panorama, to unleash what was still trapped in my chest but maybe wanted to come out? I ripped the cloth off of the largest mirror in the room. In it, a whole person could be seen. But he too was blurred to obscurity. I wiped an area of the mirror with my hand, at the height of my face. It smeared, now even murkier. My fingers still carried traces of semen—mine and George’s mixed together. The smear was right in front of my eyes, blocking my view. I picked up the sheet that had covered the mirror. I rubbed the glass, rubbed every corner, seeking out any small possibility of seeing my skin again.
The work was done. I went to turn on the lights so I wouldn’t miss a thing… On the way, I noticed the door to the hallway was open. Had he run away? It didn’t matter, his semen was still here, syrupy on my hand; it had to be someone else’s, mine was not so dense, so gooey.
The first thing I saw in the mirror was a tattoo of the sun with emanating rays on my arm. I looked at the ground so I wouldn’t be surprised by more. I murmured: But had that sun really been on my arm or on George’s? The mirror confirmed the answer, and there was no use putting things off with more questions. Everything had been answered. I was not who I thought I was. George had not escaped, he was here.
There it was, only one man in the mirror: him.
Had someone escaped through the door? I propped it open; I needed to think… Did any off-shoot of myself still linger inside me, maybe enough to make him leave? And where else would someone go who had declared his desire to stay so clearly? Oh, no. I closed the door and turned the key.
Alone, I stared at my nakedness, my entire frame in the glass, surrounded by an ornate golden frame.
I am a Portuguese professor, I said in Portuguese, of course, eyes glued to the reflected image of that now lonely body, and with the mirror returning George’s breath to me, which, contrarily, I breathed in: yes, into me, syllable by syllable… I am a Portuguese professor, I repeated in my Brazilian accent and with the same disposition, mine; except that—on another surface, more incisive, oily, with the thick mane of a barbarian—his. It was necessary to let the moment go, to try starting again, not to tell anyone. What if all of this came to nothing? Well, there was always the bed, open and generous, and I could always sleep on it and dream. George’s dreams? I could travel through his evasive images, through those nocturnal sewers—I wanted to believe in this, hoping I could live some new adventures. Astute, I would absorb the matrix of the other’s soul—but not the disagreeable ideas or the simple day-to-day sensations—with one intent: to store the essence of more life inside the chambers of my brain. Because, when the scoundrel gets lost in sleep, he passes his mind’s rudder to a new giver, who fills his brains with his own script without a thread of filter: a fallen god, causing an outbreak.
And who would teach Portuguese? And the hardware store, would it close? Which of us would actually succeed in this story? Or would just one existence continue from the two? And what for? I almost revolted, without getting any specific response from this organism’s nervous network. I wanted to lie down, to make George a living dead man and make him solve this thing for me. I would stay as long as my consciousness persisted and struggled, for this is the greatest task of our consciousness: to deny even in the midst of its desertion. It would be like this from now on. Or would it be just the opposite…?
Oh, come, George, come. I squeezed my new biceps on this arm, this same arm that came from my shoulder. Come, George, I repeated, without knowing if I was calling to someone, still disoriented by the act of translating myself from my own body. He had already transferred a solid physical autonomy to me. I had it. And I couldn’t feel imprisoned in it. No: I rejoiced in this gain, smothering the gift in the bending of this abdomen, folding and stretching that leg, shaped by victorious soccer games in its puberty perhaps. Come, George, come…
I was driven by my own, brand new internal disorder. I pressed ahead: I got dressed and walked down the hall of the hotel with the determined steps of a new man. Outside, Liverpool was the same. Only now, it was bathed in sunlight. The streets enjoyed a fair sharpness. Kids ran around, caught up in laughter.
It was good to walk with a new muscular calibration. There was a little pain, unknown to me until then, in the lumbar. Upon thinking about it, it disappeared. My gestures widened, I grew.
I took a cab, asking to be taken to the oldest cemetery in town. The driver said he would take me to one, inactive since the nineteenth century; a few famous people were buried there. He didn’t drive very far before he stopped in front of a graveyard. He asked if he should wait. I said no. And I walked among the rows. Seabirds screamed in the background, indiscernible. And I went beyond the last row into where a thicket had overtaken the place. All was still leafless, in the dryness of winter. I jumped over a crumbling stone wall. I walked. I walked along, scraped by prickly branches, pushing them away. As if suddenly in an enchanted forest, on the eve of spring, I was going to have a place of my own. I took off my new coat and folded it several times. I lay on the dry grass, my head on my coat. I needed to fall asleep. See if I would dream the dream of the other, whose semen I swore I still had on my hand. It would be the irrefutable proof of what I would have to learn to accept… And I fell asleep…
JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL was the author of nearly twenty books. His work appeared in Brazil’s leading periodicals, and he was a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, King’s College London, and the University of California at Berkeley. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, and received the prestigious Prêmio Jabuti five times. He was born and lived in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and passed away in 2017.
EDGAR GARBELOTTO is a writer and translator who was bor
n in Brazil, but has lived in the U.S. for the past twenty years. His work has appeared in venues including the Kenyon Review and Asymptote. He lives in Chicago, where he is working on his debut novel and a collection of short stories.
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