Five Days Apart

by Chris Binchy

  “No,” I said.

  “Then you will have a very good time. I can show you where to go.”

  “Okay.” He was the only person I could talk to, and he was being friendly, even if he did seem like an idiot. Maybe I just needed to acclimatize like he had. Whistling and doing a squiggle in the air at the old fellow, who produced an ashtray. It felt as if I should respond, so I said something that was true.

  “It sounds good.”

  “You have no idea,” he said.

  When we finished eating, he asked did I want to go to the beach for the afternoon, but I said I had stuff to sort out. He said he’d see me back in the hostel later. I wandered the streets. People saw me. I could feel myself being watched everywhere, and I didn’t like it. They clicked, calling out words at me that I didn’t understand. Guys walked along beside me, talking into my ear, telling me things, but when I turned, they skipped away. There was nothing I could do. I just shook my head and kept going.

  I went into an Internet café on one of the main streets and sent an e-mail to my parents. I told them that I had arrived and everything was fine. I wrote about what my plans were and where I was going next, even though I didn’t know if I would be able to get anywhere. I sat in the window and looked out onto the street. It seemed normal, nothing to be worried about, but I knew that when I went back out there, it would feel different. It wasn’t the heat or the fumes or the noise. It was the people and how they would encroach, as if my personal space were an affectation that they meant to rob me of. I wrote an upbeat e-mail to Alex, trying to imagine how I would describe the place if it didn’t terrify me. Vibrant. Hot. Sticky. Exciting. I copied it to Camille and sent it. I got back to the hostel and lay on my bed, letting the fan cool my sweat.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I woke at seven o’clock that night. There were five or six people in the room talking English, a mix of accents. They were planning a night out. When I opened my eyes and sat up, I saw the Canadian in the middle of them.

  “That’s David,” he said to them. “The cartels didn’t get you then.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “We’re going to go into Ipanema. Have some drinks. You want to come?”

  “Okay.”

  There were four of us, all from different places. We went down to the main street to get a bus. It felt better being in a group, being a part of a moving unit of noisy difference. I began to wonder about myself, whether or not I’d just been too tired. I stared back at the people that stared at us as we passed, and nothing happened. They just kept looking, and it didn’t escalate into anything bad.

  On the street in the warm damp of the night, a breeze coming in from the sea, two hundred people stood around a corner drinking and smoking and eating. There were guys selling beer out of coolers, somebody making caipirinhas out of a bar in the boot of a car, music coming out of the restaurant beside us, and the smell of pizza and perfume and dope. Beautiful people, and we belonged among them because we were from somewhere else. I was sitting on the curb drinking from a can and talking to a Mexican guy when a girl came over and stood above me. She looked like she might be taller than me, dark hair cut in a bob, a black short-sleeved shirt, and a black skirt. She bent over and asked me in English for a light. I went to stand up, but she sat down beside me. I lit her cigarette, and she said, “Do you not like me?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been standing over there for ten minutes, and you didn’t come over to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

  “Only if you like me.”

  “I like you,” I said. I thought this was going well, though I wasn’t exactly in control of the situation.

  “And I like you,” she said, and she stood gazing. Everybody in this country stared at me.

  “So,” I said. She leaned in, and I kissed her. I wasn’t even close to drunk, but it was easy. Eight thousand miles away from home. From my life and its worry and uncertainties and all the agonizing that from here seemed indulgent and pointless and over.

  At the end of the night I gave her the number of where I was staying. She said she was working the following morning, so I couldn’t come home with her, but she’d call the next day and we could meet and then I could come to her apartment.

  “You can stay with me,” she said. “For the weekend.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  I put her in a taxi and went and found the others. As we walked back to the bus stop, Dirk asked me about her, and I told him about her offer.

  “She won’t call,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “People here make arrangements all the time just to be friendly. I’ll call you. I’ll meet you. You must meet my family. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the way they do it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s nicer. Everybody’s happy. Don’t you feel good after talking to her?”

  “I did. Until I talked to you.”

  “She may call,” he said, “but I wouldn’t hold your breath. And I don’t think you should meet her anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “You can be with a different girl every night here. You don’t need to shack up with the first girl you meet.”

  “Did you see her?” I asked him. “I’m out of my league already.”

  “It’s up to you,” he said. “But it is your first day here, man. Your first day.”

  He patted me on the shoulder and laughed. I thought about punching him, just once in the mouth, but the moment passed.

  I wanted her to call to prove him wrong, to show him that he didn’t understand this place better than anyone. But when she didn’t, and when I thought about it, I didn’t mind so much. There was something to it, this idea that people should be told what they want to hear. Everybody was so open about what they wanted that saying no seemed to be rude.

  After a couple of days I got used to it. The smell of alcohol and drains, vegetation advancing everywhere as if the city was a temporary arrangement that the plants had agreed to but were now reconsidering. The feeling that if you left the window open in your room, by the time you came back life would have made its way in there and changed things around. Black girls with paler skin than me, German guys driving buses, the beautiful girls who were prostitutes who slowed to check when they saw me, just to see, looking at me yawning just in case I had money and was interested and then turning away, scouting all the time as I looked to the ground. The people who pointed at me and laughed to provoke me. To make me come over and talk. I love you, they shouted. For goodness sake. What time is it?

  “Look how this one is nervous,” a girl said to her friend as my hand shook, drinking coffee standing at a counter in a café beside them, feeling the warmth as she leaned against me, her back sticking to my damp arm.

  “Look,” she said, and her friend laughed.

  The young rangy guys in shorts and nothing else, barefoot, swaggering in groups as if the streets were theirs and not belonging to the moneymen with linen suits and Italian ties. The lines at juice bars and at the ice cream hatch at McDonald’s. The smell of fruit and the undertone of the peelings and waste turning already. Chickens cooking on rotisseries. Dried fish hanging in windows like driftwood. Rice and black beans. Dinner by the hundred grams. Cats and dogs that had torn each other apart. Taxi drivers and cops standing around in groups, and everybody talking the way they did, not like a conversation but like a celebration of the tongue, lips, teeth. A physical demonstration of what you could do with your mouth. The girl who changed my money in the bank who looked like she was trying to kiss me as she bent down to speak English to me through the gap in the glass. The confidence, the ease of their movement. Three homeless guys with Coke bottles of rum, two sitting on the ground, the other lying on the street with his head re
sting on his hand, having a loud conversation that had been slowed down, the three of them laughing together in coughing, rasping shouts as people walked around them. The cop that took the bottle from one of them and poured it down the drain as the three looked on in sad silence. Shirts you could buy in installments, monthly payments, interest-free. The fight on the street in the middle of the day that sent people running and I froze waiting to see what was going to happen next but then it dissolved, everybody involved melted away and disappeared as the siren grew and the cops arrived at the right place but found nothing. Going to the cinema to get out of the rain on an afternoon, watching a film in English, the only other person being a businessman who made phone calls for the first hour and then slept through the second hour, snoring so insistently that I thought it was a joke.

  Passing girls and looking and smiling and, if you liked them, turning to watch them go. It was funny. Dirk told me to walk back after them if I liked the look of somebody. That I should talk to them, and even if they didn’t speak English, it wouldn’t matter.

  During the day we hung around on the beach. There was a group of us from the hostel and then other people turned up. We went out a couple of nights later. I ended up talking to an English guy. He told me about how he had taken out a loan and had spent all his money and his parents sent him a thousand dollars to come home and he was spending that now. He was eighteen. I asked him what he was going to do when that money ran out.

  “Get some more. Borrow it. Steal it. I don’t know. I may never be here again.”

  “Yeah, but . . . ,” I said.

  “Get over yourself,” he said. “Not your business.”

  When we got back to the hostel, I was going to go in with the rest of them, but then I changed my mind. I told Dirk to go on in, said I was going for a walk.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  “Just around this block,” I said. I walked down to the corner, not looking for anything, not knowing what I was doing. I was just wandering around in the middle of the night, and I wasn’t afraid or worried or thinking about anything. When I got to the coast road, I turned and walked along, past the tourist bars and the hotels. There was hardly anybody around, just some strip-club bouncers outside places that I couldn’t see into. On a corner one block back from the seafront avenue, I saw a bar that was open. A glass-fronted place with a horseshoe-shaped counter. It was busy, a mix of men and women. I went in and ordered a beer. After a minute I realized there was a girl standing beside me, and she wanted me to talk to her. She was on her own, facing the other way, but she was standing so close to me, I could feel the warmth of her arm against mine. It wasn’t that crowded. I said hello in Portuguese, and she spoke back to me in English. I bought her a drink, and she asked me where I was from, and we talked about that for a while. As I was finishing my beer, she put her arm around my neck and pulled me close to her.

  “Come on,” she said into my ear. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We walked out hand in hand back down to the coast road. She walked straight on across the avenue onto the sweeping black-and-white wave mosaics beside the beach.

  “Where are we going?” I asked her.

  “Down here,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “In the sand. You will love it.” She broke away and ran on ahead of me. I followed, picked up my pace to try and catch her. She turned around and laughed and I ran after her and then I tripped and landed on my face in the sand. I was thinking that I didn’t know why I’d fallen, and then there was somebody on my back, a hand on my head pushing it down into the sand. One of my arms was bent around and pulled up behind me, hurting but ready to hurt more. There were two of them, I realized now, and there was something hard being pushed into the back of my neck, something cold and metal. I could hear them panting, could feel the breath of one of them as he leaned in close to my face, a sweet alcoholic smell. He spoke to me slowly, sounding calm.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “No Portuguese.”

  “Money?” he said then.

  I felt hands going through my pockets, patting down my legs. My shoes were pulled off. “There’s no more,” I said. I needed them to know. I felt them move, the pressure lifted off me.

  “Now. You don’t move.”

  I lay there for a minute or two as I heard them run off. I could feel my heart beating. I lifted my head, then turned around and saw that I was alone, nobody, just waves lapping at the shore and the lights of the hotels behind. The dark of the Sugarloaf was ahead of me. It was very beautiful. I stood up slowly and walked back up to the road. I went up to two bouncers in black T-shirts. I saw them looking at my feet before I spoke.

  “They robbed me,” I said. One of them said something back, the other shook his head and shrugged. They started talking to each other and turned away from me, just a shade of an angle that told me I should move on. I walked back in the direction of the hotels. A police car came along the seafront, and I put my hand up. The car slowed and stopped beyond me. Two guys got out quickly and walked over, not looking at me, watching up and down the road.

  “Speak English?” I said to the first one as he came up and stood beside me. He was one step too close.

  “What do you want?”

  “Two guys on the beach. They robbed me. Just now.” He still wasn’t looking at me. His hand was resting on his gun as I spoke. I could only see the other guy out of the corner of my eye. I tried not to move.

  “On the beach?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why were you on the beach?”

  “Why? I don’t know.”

  “You buy drugs? Or went with a girl or a boy?”

  “No drugs. No. Nothing.”

  “So why do you go to the beach? You didn’t see the signs?”

  “What signs?” He translated back to his colleague, and the two of them laughed. I spoke slowly.

  “I met a girl in the bar back along there,” I said, “and we went on the beach and then she ran off and two guys came and robbed me. They put me on the ground and took my money and my shoes. That’s all.”

  “There was a girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you pay her?”

  “No. No.”

  “Why did you go to the beach?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought . . . I don’t know why.” The two of them laughed again.

  “You know why. I know why. How much did they take from you?”

  “Thirty dollars. Maybe forty.”

  “You are lucky.” He walked back to the car. I stood with the other guy, and the two of us stared out across the road at the sea, the beach hidden by darkness. When the other guy came back, he handed me a notebook.

  “Write your name and country here.” I did it and handed the book back to him. He copied something down, and then gave me a card. “Come to this address tomorrow at two o’clock and ask for this man. He will take a report. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Do not go onto this beach at night. They can kill you. Don’t come back here. Do you know where you are?”

  “Yes.”

  “So go home. You have a hotel?”

  “A hostel.”

  “Okay.”

  I stood looking at him and nodded.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Go,” he said, shaking his hand at me. “Go home.”

  I walked back barefoot, picking my way through broken glass and rubbish and every type of shit on the street. By the time I got to the square, the familiar smell and light of a space that seemed like my own, I had started to feel something like euphoria. I had been mugged. It hadn’t hurt. I hadn’t lost anything important. I wasn’t afraid. In a situation where other people might have done the wrong thing, shouted or panicked or fought back in some way, not because
it mattered to them but because that would be how they would react, I had done the right thing. I had put myself in danger through my own stupidity, but I had known what to do to get out of it. I had survived.

  The following afternoon I sat on a bench in a room in a police station, holding the card that the policeman had given me the previous night. The door to an office was across from me, a removable plaque with four names slotted into it on the wall beside it. Every few minutes people would cross the room, carrying files. None of them looked at me as they passed. I had been directed to this room when I arrived, had knocked on the door, but nobody answered. I didn’t know what to do, so I sat. At half past two a man went into the office. Indian looking, goatee, long hair in a ponytail down his back, gun in a holster on his belt. He closed the door behind him. I got up and went over. I could hear him talking inside, maybe on the phone. I knocked on the door and waited. Nothing happened. I waited until he stopped talking, and then I knocked again. Nothing. I began to think that maybe there was another door in the room that led on to somewhere else. I sat down again and waited. I had only come because the guy the night before had taken my name. What could they do? Give me forty dollars? Take me shopping for shoes? I didn’t want to be there, and now I didn’t know what to do. So I did nothing. I sat on the bench and waited for something to happen. At a quarter to five, the same guy came out of the office. He locked the door behind him. I stood up.

  “Senhor Oliveira?”

  “Yeah?”

  He turned to me and I saw that he was ready for an argument. He wasn’t happy.

  “I was told to come here.” I handed him the card. “I was robbed last night.” He looked at the card for long enough that I felt I should say something else. As I was about to speak, he held the card in front of my face, pointing at it.