Granta 121: Best of Young Brazilian Novelists

by Unknown

  When he gets up for a beer, Ramiro sees that the argument over Bilica’s nose has ended. The topic under discussion now is more difficult to determine, since, in the midst of the confusion, a classmate of Egídio’s has taken out a guitar and started to bang out some Tropicália classic. Damned guitars, thinks Ramiro as he goes to the kitchen, hearing the guy asking for silence as he prepares the audience for the show.

  The beer is warm. Ramiro rummages through the refrigerator but finds only soft drinks, dead batteries, sliced bread, hamburger meat. Lacking an option, he decides to open a warm can. The drink goes down roughly. He feels like putting ice in the glass, but somebody will laugh at him, and Ramiro will have to answer in kind, and then one of those laborious dialogues will begin, full of taunts and witticisms. It’s not worth it.

  In the living room, they prepare for the celebration. There will be no surprise. Bilica is going to come down the stairs, with the flushed face of someone who’s just got laid; he’s going to listen to the murmur, catch on to the whole thing, casually enter the room; then come the shouts, the clapping, the birthday boy feigning surprise, hand on heart and an appreciative sigh. Of course, that’s part of the game, but there’s something unpleasant in this play-acting, at least to Ramiro. Maybe it’s the certainty that a few moments after the hugs, the presents, the laughter, when everyone is scattered about the living room and the party has returned to its original state, someone is going to bring up the subject – and everything will begin again.

  Having a dead friend is often equivalent to having a special stamp on your documents, the kind that attests to some distinction. People suffer, cry, ask themselves why, and after finding no answer they begin, perhaps as a kind of defence, to try to make a precious thing of it, transforming suffering into a badge of honour, petty as any other. Two months earlier, at Milena’s party, Ramiro experienced the first demonstration of this phenomenon. Someone mentioned Nestor’s name, and after a brief silence a long rosary of memories began. Soon, everyone was trying to recall a more extraordinary story, a funnier incident, a more unusual situation they experienced with him, and suddenly it had turned into a veiled competition in which, through closeness to the deceased, one was guaranteed a transcendental kind of virtue.

  It was going to happen again. One spark was all it took: the name of the dead person, uttered a single time – then comes the silence, the pleated mouths, the genuine sadness, all quickly buried under avalanches of sentimentality. What would the dead man say if he knew he’d become a household saint? Probably he would take a drag on his cigarette, look up, blow a few smoke rings, and, with the tranquillity of the disembodied, decree: ‘Bunch of fuckers.’

  And he’d guffaw, and clap Ramiro on the back and invite him to get drunk at a bingo parlour or watch girls at the bus station or maybe board a subway car and allow himself to be swept up, at least for a few minutes, in the illusion that it’s possible to forget oneself. But now Nestor is far away, and Ramiro finishes downing his third can of beer and gradually feels he’s regained his lucidity. Egídio brings more peanuts, Pedro begins another unlikely story and everything seems small while, on the ottoman, two of Bilica’s female cousins fight fetchingly for more space.

  The noise goes on. The guy with the guitar tries to show off his eclectic taste, strumming Bob Dylan for one of the girls who came with Vanessa. They make a curious couple, he striking poses, she in that weird outfit, exchanging ambiguous glances that will probably lead nowhere. Perhaps Ramiro should call Tati, convince her to put off her work till tomorrow – because sometimes it seems like a lie, that there’s no swamp at all, that he loves her exactly as he did before and is merely hiding his true feelings under a mountain of pride and cowardice. Yeah, call Tati, or maybe forget her and sit down beside Bilica’s cousins, or get out of here and slip into a movie theatre, or simply get another beer and let the time go by. But then someone hears a noise, and everyone scrambles to a corner, and the lights are turned off, and Ramiro is squeezed between a fat guy with a beard and a bookcase full of books, old notebooks and computer parts. It’s hard to breathe. Someone hands him a whistle and a bag of confetti and, fingers to his lips, asks Ramiro to keep quiet.

  Damned shutters. Leaning against the wall, his gaze running over his fingernails, Ramiro notices how the light reveals the imperfections in each object. His nails are dirty. As is the lampshade. Cars honk their horns down below, and perhaps there’s nothing to do but close his eyes and tell everything to piss off.

  To piss off would mean calling the management and asking for a new room. The girl would attend to him with a distracted air. Ramiro would summon his best baritone voice, the manager would come on the line and the move would be effected in minutes: Ramiro would abandon 501 to find the comfort of a new dwelling, where the shutters glided freely and the act of taking a shower didn’t lead to morning terrors and paranoid fears of annihilation. But Ramiro won’t do it. He won’t let go of his old room, this setting for infrequent masturbation, irregular dozing, harmless meandering mind games, all impelled by a kind of permanent catatonia.

  Room 501 was similar to the majority of single rooms in the Royal Soft Residence. As Ramiro had opted for an apartment in the rear, the space that at the facade was taken up by small balconies – duly decorated with battered ferns and colourless violets – was here replaced by an annexe, which allowed the installation beneath the window of a reclining easy chair and a rack for shoes. When not in bed, Ramiro would sprawl on the easy chair, losing himself in mental exercises among which were the making up of names (Ficner, for example, or Garbeliades, or even Plaucio or Cintileria) and the attempt, using the strength of his neurons, to control the flight of the insects flitting around the light bulb. There was also what Ramiro called ‘concretist erection’, which consisted of imagining some object and, through the force of concentration, trying to become aroused by it – the previous week, for example, he had achieved surprising results mentalizing a Xerox machine.

  He needed to empty his head. He needed to sit in the chair, turn his attention to the curvature of the doorknob, the navigation of moths, that small dirty ball that persisted in forming in his navel – and, there, it was done, thought disconnected from body until it was extinguished for good. Thus Ramiro avoided the thin lips of his father, or the flaccid skin of his grandmother, or the day he fell out of his bunk and broke his chin on the wooden floor. His mother, her obsession with hats, the dental braces Roger lost in the neighbour’s yard, Nestor with his anxious way of lighting a cigarette – everything would crumble until a single image was left: Tati. They were on a bus, going to the movies, she took his hand, and said, you have a woman’s nails. He looked at his nails, and she explained that he must have taken his mother’s hands, and then Ramiro raised his eyebrows and observed that he had long ago ceased taking his mother’s hands. She laughed, and coughed, and said that people in her family commented that her laugh was exactly like her grandmother’s. How is it possible, she asked, to inherit a laugh, especially a laugh she had never heard? Ramiro didn’t know what to answer. He took her hand, bit it, she punched him on the arm, and at that moment the bus braked abruptly and they realized it was time to pull the cord.

  The cord. A hand pulling the cord. The fingernails of the hand, dirty like the edge of a lampshade, the morning light drenching the room, and there in the middle is Ramiro and his muddled brain like a grimy wad of cotton. Ramiro pats the robe’s pockets, where he finds a crumpled cigarette. He is sticking the cigarette in his mouth when the phone rings.

  It must be the reception desk, the girl with the shrill voice announcing discounts at the panoramic bar, or advising that the fitness centre is going to undergo renovations. Ramiro doesn’t answer. As always, he goes to the bed and presses the pillow against his ears. He remains that way, staring at the telephone, a smile on his lips, but then realizes the protection is not enough. The ringing of the telephone vibrates through the furniture, the walls, the built-in wardrobe. Ramiro tightens his grip on the pil
low, to no avail. He gets angry. Goes to the phone and yanks it out of the wall. Advances towards the window, ready to throw it out, but then checks himself, opens the minibar, deposits the phone inside, behind the sports drinks.

  Ramiro sighs. He sits on the bed, throws his body back, his feet touch the carpet, looking for his slippers. Finding one, he puts it on his right foot, while his left foot explores the nearby area, traversing the imperfections in the rug, bumping into a bottle cap, plunging into a small mound of crumbled cracker. Can it be that Ramiro’s feet look like those of some relative? What about his arms? And lungs, pancreas, intestines? He lifts his hands in front of him and what he sees are feminine nails, dirty, inherited from he doesn’t know who, from his mother, his grandmother, a gust of wind, and it’s time to get up and leave and put an end to all this. Ramiro finds the other slipper. The morning takes hold of the room, and now he leaps up and tries to bring order to his thoughts. He raises his hand to his mouth. Where the devil did that cigarette get to?

  It didn’t seem as if she was going to go to sleep. She cried, sighed, wiped her face on the pillow, giving the impression that soon she would turn and try to change the subject, talk about the college or about film or last night’s storm, her voice at first choked up until resuming its normal firm, delicate tone. But she didn’t turn, and Ramiro went on stroking her hair, and when he looked she was almost snoring and there was no longer any alternative but to turn out the light and observe her body profiled in the half-shadow; she was sleeping more and more deeply, while her eyes were becoming less swollen.

  When Ramiro turns on the lamp, he’s able to see a bit more. Her purse is thrown behind the door; she arrived so distressed that he didn’t even have time to ask questions. You don’t know, she said, and then Ramiro found himself in the difficult position of having to listen to a horrific story and balance shock and resignation, desperation and serenity. Ramiro felt none of that, the matter was grave but his head was somewhere else, and when she told him her friend had been the victim of a flash kidnapping, the only thing that occurred to him was the headline he’d seen in the newspaper a few days before, ENERGY CRISIS REDUCES FLASH KIDNAPPINGS, and that was so absurd that he felt like interrupting what she was saying to tell her about it. Of course, that would have been totally inappropriate, she was very upset, and besides, it had not only been a kidnapping; the thieves had abused the girl badly. Ramiro berates himself for being so insensitive, he hasn’t known Tati for very long, she isn’t quite real to him yet, and perhaps because of that it’s easy to think of headlines and funny things and stare at his girlfriend’s breasts, counting the seconds before tearing off her clothes and biting her neck and squeezing her thighs and so on.

  She sleeps, and Ramiro watches her, and it’s strange to see her like this – she whose body is beginning to let itself be known, the supple skin that makes him believe in chance and happiness. Ramiro thinks about waking her, but to do so would spoil something, like smudging a drawing. The truth, he muses, is that Tatiana is a very strong name, a name for a fat, powerful woman full of vigour, who leads armies and enslaves husbands. It’s not a name for someone who is sleeping. Not a name for someone who is crying and saying she wants to live at the beach and who ten days ago was only a drunken girl waiting in line for the bathroom, who took Ramiro by the arm and asked him, a complete stranger, to help her vomit.

  Ramiro observes her and sees an animal. A beast. A beast that breathes. He knows that soon he’s going to be hungry, that he’ll have to get up and face the chaos in the living room, push aside the boxes to find the telephone. He knows that the noise will wake Tati and that she will come, groggy, looking like a zombie, to hug him before babbling something and locking herself in the bathroom. Ramiro will stay on the sofa, gazing at the mountains of boxes, thinking about putting some order to it all. It’s been more than a month since he moved in, but it seems as if he arrived yesterday – or is leaving tomorrow. He’s living in quarantine, as if his body needs time to adjust to the new home by inhabiting it gradually, without shocks or jolts. It’s evident that this is only an excuse, but Tati usually finds it amusing and calls Ramiro a bum, and it’s good to arouse in her that kind of superiority, that ingenuous way of raising her eyebrows and curling the corner of her mouth. On second thoughts, Tati isn’t really that strong a name, Tati is a very fragile and subtle name, and who could have known that a name like Tatiana could house so much delicacy, Tati, Ta-ti, and then she moves as if to awaken, but it’s only her body seeking a more comfortable position.

  Ramiro continues to lie there. I have more to do, he thinks, pondering the need to get up, take a shower, put on decent clothes. He looks at her face, feels a twinge of envy because he’s not sleeping. That’s so petty, she’s only napping – and Ramiro feels guilty once again and briefly reflects on how unstable his moods can be.

  Everything is so stupid. It’s stupid that he has yet to get out of bed, it’s stupid to continue thinking about it, it’s stupid to realize that now Tati is murmuring something and to believe that, if he brings his ear close to her mouth, he’ll be able to understand some of what she’s saying. If he were alone or, rather, if he weren’t afraid of waking her, Ramiro could start to cough, or light a cigarette, or open the closet door and make faces in the mirror, laughing and feeling sorry for himself. But it must already be past two, and the sun is blazing out there, and the noises of the city seem to invite him to a commitment that cannot be postponed. It’s more or less at this moment that she starts to awaken.

  First comes a twitch. Then a click of the tongue, a light grumble, and she turns on her side as if she were going back to sleep. She moves slowly, her body limp, re-encountering herself. She stretches her neck. Unfolds her arms. Yawns. She opens her eyes, widens them, and for a moment seems startled and lost. She props herself up on one elbow. Wipes the sweat from her forehead. She looks at Ramiro, puts her hand on his hair, her index finger curling around the fringe. She tries to say something, her voice doesn’t come out. She clears her throat. She tries again, and this time the voice emerges slowly, slurred, almost childlike. She says: Ramiro. But now it is he who appears to have fallen asleep.

  GRANTA

  * * *

  SPARKS

  Carol Bensimon

  TRANSLATED BY BETH FOWLER

  * * *

  CAROL BENSIMON

  1982

  Carol Bensimon was born in Porto Alegre. In 2008, she published her first work of fiction, Pó de parede, consisting of three stories. In 2009, Bensimon’s debut novel, Sinuca embaixo d’água, was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature, the Jabuti Award and the Bravo! Prize. ‘Sparks’ (‘Faíscas’) is an extract from a new novel of the same title.

  All we did was take the BR-116, passing beneath bridges that showed slogans of cities we hadn’t the slightest intention of visiting, or which told of Christ’s return or counted down to the end of the world. We left behind the suburban streets whose beginnings are marked by the highway and which then disappear in an industrial estate or among the abandoned shacks along a stream where stray dogs crawl and rarely bark, and we carried on, on until the straight road turned a corner. I was driving. Julia had her feet on the dashboard. I could only look at her occasionally. When she didn’t know the words to the song, she hummed instead. ‘You’ve changed your hair,’ I said, glancing at her fringe. Julia replied: ‘About two years ago, Cora.’ We laughed as we climbed into the hills. That was the start of our journey.

  My car had been out of action for some time, under a silver waterproof cover, like a big secret you just can’t hide or a child trying to disappear by putting her hands over her eyes, surrounded by junk in the garage at my mother’s house. Initially, my mother was desperate to resolve the situation. It’s a bad business leaving a car off the road for so long, she would say, although she understood very little about business and even less about getting rid of things. She lived in a house that already seemed too big when there were still three of us. When you ope
ned certain wardrobes in that house, you could see the entire evolution of ladieswear from the mid-sixties onwards. Lovely jackets, pretty dresses that didn’t fit my mother any more. I was direct about the car. I said: ‘Maybe I’ll come back.’ I could sense her breath crossing the ocean and almost capsizing before returning to dry land. Perhaps it was a mistake to offer hope to a single mother, given that I wasn’t even considering the possibility of moving home at that point. We never spoke about the car again.

  Three years later, I was back and found the garage fuller than ever, so much so that I could barely see the terracotta floor tiles for the bags full of papers, the boxes of all sizes. There were balls of dust, an electric heater, a small bicycle, a minibar missing a leg. I got the impression I could have written wash me in the air with my index finger. I pushed open the wooden concertina doors and let in the light. I stood looking at the street for a while. It was no longer the same street, I mean, it was the same street, but in place of the houses belonging to my childhood friends – where were they now? – an apartment block had been built. It scared me to think that one person’s aesthetic preferences could be summed up in that white, seventeen-floor mastodon, which stuck out on the block like a naked woman in an order of nuns, or a nun at the First Brazilian Meeting of Polyamorists.