‘Sorry ’bout that. I was aiming for the goal.’ It was Walrus who had kicked the ball clear across the eighty-foot field. He apologized with his head down, puffing, one hand resting on his spare tyre and the other flat on his head. Walrus had more than a hundred nicknames. Kid, Kibe, Pudge, Mouth Tentacles (or just Tentacles), Fat Fool, Senator, Electronics Man, Big Toe, Orson Welles, How Cool Is That, Boobs and dozens of others that Isabela had once compiled into a list in her round handwriting. She had interviewed everyone in Esplanada and delivered the results of her survey to Walrus himself so he could memorize them and respond even when people used the lesser-known ones. But ‘Walrus’ was sovereign. Although he was fat – not too fat, but fat – and far more walrus-like than most people, it was his Christian name, Wallace, that had given rise to the nickname. Wallace Wissler. No fourteen-year-old boy had a moustache bigger than his.
The match stopped for a few seconds. Hermano crouched on the field, looking like a sprinter at the start line stricken at the last minute by a terrible headache. Holding his throbbing scrotum with his left hand, he didn’t make a sound or utter a word, not even in response to ‘Y’OK?’ and ‘Take it easy, breathe.’ He didn’t move, experiencing the pain with curiosity. It was as if his testicles had become knotted together, and the slightest movement might activate a muscle or nerve and bring on an unbearable, stabbing pain, in addition to the more diffuse ache spreading from his groin to his thighs and stomach.
They were playing five-a-side. One at the goal and four on the pitch. The score was ‘six to them, five to us’, as they were now reminded by Bricky (about a year earlier – and no one got what was so funny about it – Bricky had started calling everyone ‘Bricky’, and had only stopped when people began using it on him), the goalie for Hermano’s team and one of his closest friends. The other team members, identified as such by the fact that they were wearing T-shirts, were Uruguay (self-explanatory), Pellet (of unknown origin) and Wagner Montes (after being hit by a vegetable cart on Reservation Street, he’d limped around for two weeks with a horrible cut on his foot that had become infected and oozed secretions of every colour but blue, and when people saw him coming in the distance they’d greet him with the theme song of the talent show on which the real Wagner Montes, who walked with a limp, was a judge). There was no avoiding nicknames in Esplanada. Hermano himself was best known as Horse Hands, because of his extremely long arms and enormous hands, as strong as a Nordic dockworker’s, at odds with his fifteen years of age. Bricky whacked the ball upfield into the opposition half, hoping to get it to Uruguay, who was always positioned to attack. Hermano had just stood up, partially recovered, as the ball whizzed over his head. The rival team was playing without shirts and was made up of Walrus, Chrome Black (skin so dark it glinted), the Joker (because of his smile), Mononucleosis (or just Mono, self-explanatory) and Bonobo.
Bonobo was playing well today. He intercepted the ball before it got to Uruguay and dribbled it up the side of the pitch. He was wearing blue nylon shorts and a pair of worn-out football boots. Pellet and Wagner Montes charged at him. Such an open threat of physical contact with Bonobo was only possible in football, though not without misgivings. He continued running with the ball as if there were an empty corridor in front of him, ignoring the fact that a violent collision with the two defenders was imminent. Although he was only five foot seven and thin, except for a reserve of abdominal fat that contrasted grotesquely with the rest of his body, Bonobo moved like a creature twice his weight and size. Other human beings were insignificant obstacles. Everything in existence was an insignificant obstacle. He was always bumping into people and knocking over furniture and potted plants, and never apologized or even turned his head to see if he’d damaged something. He didn’t give a shit. He was the kind of guy who’d step on a shard of glass and keep walking around in flip-flops for the rest of the day, totally unfazed, leaving a trail of bloody prints behind him.
The four girls watching the match from the sidelines, sitting atop a mound they referred to as ‘the royal box’, swung their slender shins and shouted a rehearsed ‘Baaahhh’ when Bonobo dodged Pellet with a feint to the right and got Wagner Montes out of the way with a shove to the neck that left him gagging, face down on the ground. There was only one opponent left between Bonobo and the goal.
Hermano wasn’t so keen on football. He was a mediocre defender who, once or twice a year at most, out of sheer luck, managed to score a goal with a long ball from the far end of the pitch. His reasons for playing were unclear even to him. He liked the physical effort. Being watched sometimes by girls was another undeniable motivation. What attracted him, however, wasn’t the game, the competition, or even the interaction with his neighbourhood friends, but the ambience, the setting, the opportunity to be immersed in the atmosphere that enveloped the pitch in the late afternoon. And there was something else. Something that was now hurtling towards him as if deliberately seeking a collision. Something that was staring him in the eye with an intimidating smile. Something to which Hermano only exposed himself so openly on the field, where the very nature of the game brought players’ different levels of aggressiveness into alignment. In these matches, Hermano could, to an extent, be physically near Bonobo. He could look at him from close range, study his semi-erect gait and simian features. He could steal the ball from him with a sliding tackle. He could get in his way. As a defender, it was expected that he stop any forward, Bonobo or otherwise, from getting near the goal with the ball at his feet. So Hermano didn’t move out of the way or make as if he were about to try some clever footwork as Bonobo barrelled towards him. Instead, he raised his leg and launched himself at Bonobo.
The sound of the resulting collision, which involved very little in the way of sporting technique, echoed throughout the square. An organic, primitive vibration, the contraction of an enormous heart in the centre of the Earth, which stunned the other players, the girls in the royal box, and even some of the children in the playground, who stopped playing and looked at one another as if trying to find the reason for that sudden silence in each other’s faces. Bonobo did a full 360 degrees in the air and seemed to float, suspended in the cloud of brown dust for one or two seconds, before hitting the ground and sliding over the rough dirt on his chest, knees and the palms of his hands. He still hadn’t come to a complete halt when he leaped up and turned to face Hermano, making it clear that the mistake committed in a few tenths of a second would result in several days of deep regret.
Hermano’s first reaction was to avoid eye contact with Bonobo. He instinctively glanced at Bricky, who had frozen mid-wince in the middle of the goal, his face contorted in a mixture of terror and resignation.
‘That’s right, don’t look at me,’ snarled Bonobo. ‘If you look me in the eye, you’ll be shitting your own teeth in the morning.’ The threat was rhetorical, but coming from Bonobo each word was a deep thud driving a hypothetical nail into a hypothetical wall. To disobey would be too risky, but Hermano wanted to. He wanted to look, but he hesitated. Bricky, whose eyes were still locked with his and who knew what he was thinking, opened his eyes even wider and shook his head slightly, trying to stress that defiance was a very, very bad idea. Hermano glanced down at the ground, at Police Hill, at a glider crossing the pink sky, respecting the silence of the square. He glanced at a whole bunch of things, except Bonobo, who was standing about six feet away. Meanwhile, Uruguay, Chrome Black and Wagner Montes positioned themselves between the two to reduce the chance of visual and/or physical contact, while Mononucleosis, the owner of the ball, tucked it under his arm and sidled away to force the match to end, disperse the players and make a fight less likely. The girls came down from the royal box to get a closer view of what was going on. Isabela, Lara and Ingrid kept away from the centre of the conflict, standing on the sideline as if it were a safety barrier, Isabela holding Lara’s arm, and Lara’s fingertips resting on Ingrid’s plump waist, all as curious as they were tense. Only the most petite and slender of the four, Na
iara, dared set foot on the pitch. She approached Bonobo.
‘Hey.’
Hermano was now testing the limits of his peripheral vision, his eyes trained on a spot on the ground halfway between him and Bonobo. It was the borderline of disobedience. Moving his eyes just a little further towards Bonobo would be taken as a response to his challenge.
‘Hey!’
The presence of Naiara and her shrill thirteen-year-old girl’s voice trying to get her brother’s attention only made Hermano want to look at Bonobo even more – and to hell with the consequences. He tried to control his breathing and weigh up the pros and cons of a range of possible responses, but the simple fact that he was thinking too much meant he wasn’t really ready to face his opponent. The realization paralysed him once and for all.
‘Hey, bro, let it go. He didn’t do it on purpose. He’s clumsy.’
‘Butt out.’
It was the last thing Bonobo said. Afterwards, Hermano stood there staring at the ground for he didn’t know how long, absorbed by the absence of thought in his mind. Ten seconds or ten minutes might have passed before Bricky put his hand on his shoulder and said that everyone had gone. Mononucleosis had taken off with the ball and the match was over, Bonobo had disappeared up the square with Chrome Black and Uruguay, and the girls had gone too. Only the children were still there, spinning around on the merry-go-round.
For his thirteenth birthday, Hermano’s parents had given him a metal tin of Swiss Caran d’Ache watercolour pencils. The tin was red and cold to the touch, approximately fifteen by ten inches, and contained two plastic trays, each of which held forty pencils. The outside of the pencils faithfully reproduced their actual colours, and the eighty different shades lined up in the trays formed smooth, luminous progressions of colour. It was hypnotizing, so beautiful that Hermano had been reluctant to even touch them for a few days, as if disturbing their order might break a spell. The present was imported and had cost a small fortune. On the back of the tin was the product description in twenty-three languages. Although Hermano himself couldn’t remember it, his parents assured him that at some point in his early childhood he had emphatically declared that he wanted to be a painter when he grew up. A few days after his birthday, when he had plucked up the courage to take a few pencils out of the tin, he’d tried to draw a few things on Canson paper. He’d tested each colour and used a small paintbrush dipped in water to experiment with water-colouring. After a few weeks of scribbling and attempting to explore the pencil collection as an artistic instrument, he had stuffed the tin into the bottom of a desk drawer and never brought it out again. The sheets of Canson paper that had figured in Hermano’s short-lived career as a painter still existed, stored away in a folder. There were a few attempts at drawing, a pig’s face here, a tree there, a Saturn-like planet, and poorly copied scenes of violence from comic books, but for the most part the pages were filled with doodles that made no sense, little blotches of saturated colour, experiments with layering, places where the paper had torn because there had been too much water on the brush, gradations of colour, cross-hatching.
When he walked into his room after the incident on the field, Hermano remembered the tin of pencils, sentenced to oblivion at the bottom of the drawer more than two years earlier. He fished it out from under a pile of old textbooks and other classroom material, sat at his desk, opened it and stared at the pencils. Although most of the tips were a little spent, none had ever been sharpened. They lay there neatly in their original sequence. The top tray comprised predominantly reds, pinks, blues, greys, black. The bottom one, yellows, greens, browns, beiges and special tones of gold and silver. He left the tin open on the white Formica desktop.
He peeled off his T-shirt, trainers and socks and sat on the bed. His clothes were soaked with sweat, and Porto Alegre’s muggy summer heat kept him perspiring heavily, even though his body was now relaxed. In addition to the desk, there was also a single bed with an iron frame in the room, a wall-to-wall wardrobe and a little table with a 14" colour TV and a Nintendo video-game console sitting on it. Shelves on the wall over his bed held a modest collection of children’s books, teen fiction and classics, a helicopter and half a dozen G.I. Joe action figures (Flash, Rock ’n Roll, Zap, Glider Pilot, Short-Fuze and Cobra Officer), four He-Men (Prince Adam, Orko, Ram Man and Mer-Man) and other children’s toys abandoned not so long ago. On another wall, a Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior poster showed Mel Gibson in black leather holding a sawn-off shotgun. Bricky had got it for him, as his parents owned a video rental shop. The sound system had been broken for about a year. Comic books, porn and video-game magazines were stacked in a corner. The room looked as if it had been unoccupied for a long time. Although it was never particularly tidy, it wasn’t a picture of seismic devastation like most teenagers’ bedrooms.
Hermano pulled a pair of six-pound iron dumb-bells out from under the bed. With a weight in each hand, he stood in front of the mirror behind the door and began pumping his arms in alternating bicep curls. He did two sets of twenty reps for each arm. Then he dropped down to the worn beige carpet and did thirty push-ups. When he stood up again, the waistband of his shorts was drenched with sweat. He looked at himself in the mirror for a few seconds. The veins in his forearms were visible, palpitating. With his feet planted on the ground, he turned to each side, examining the muscles in his back, around his ribs, his calves. He spent some time adjusting his position until the mirror reflected back a casual stance, not the pose of one who is studying his own image. His arms and knees were covered in cuts and scrapes, some still raw and recent, others dark scabs that were already coming loose. Elsewhere, recently healed wounds had left patches of pink, sensitive skin. His body was slim and well proportioned. Only his arms looked longer than they ought to. His muscles were firm but not bulging. His brown skin was covered with short hair only partially darkened by age.
Suddenly, the image of Bonobo sliding across the ground on his chest lit up in his memory, eliciting a snort of laughter, because seen from a distance like that it was pretty funny, just as Bricky’s gaping face framed by the goalposts was also funny. As he recalled what happened next, however, he ceased to find it funny and was filled with loathing and frustration. He didn’t really know why he had gone for Bonobo like that. His actions had been instinctive and gratuitous. The worst part wasn’t that he’d kept his eyes glued to the ground. It was that he’d taken the initiative himself, sticking his heel out and throwing the entire weight of his body against his opponent. Avoiding Bonobo’s glare was the reaction you’d expect from most people – except perhaps Uruguay, who wasn’t afraid of anyone and considered physical strength one of the main attributes of the people of his straight-highwayed little country – but provoking Bonobo and then chickening out of the fight was inexcusable and humiliating. He had acted like a stray dog that, traumatized from a beating or an accident, barks furiously at anything that moves then sticks its tail between its legs and curls up like an armadillo, cowering under a car at the slightest sign of aggression. Bonobo had no shoulders. His head looked like an oversized bean perched atop a triangular torso held in place by a tyre of fat. He had short little tyrannosaurus arms. Everyone thought he looked like Horácio from the Turma da Mônica comic books, but no one dared tell anyone else for fear it might get back to Bonobo, so they all thought they were the only ones to make the secret comparison and chuckled to themselves whenever they thought about it. But despite his almost deformed appearance and thuggish behaviour, it was impossible not to fall under Bonobo’s spell. No matter how much fear or repulsion he inspired in others, any interaction with him felt like a privilege. From any point of view, no matter what the circumstances, messing with him in a football match was just plain stupid.
The Shape of Bones Page 3
