Then I get up, knowing where to go. A few more steps and I can read the sign on the front door of a large building: it says it’s a shelter, for “derelicts” as they say.
The man tells me to sit down. He’s resting his forearms on the desk.
“Why?” he asks under the dim light of a lamp.
“I lost myself, and I ended up like this…”
“Ah, so there isn’t any long history of misery in your family…”
“No, I’m solely responsible.”
“And your family…?”
“Please…just for today, I’m asking for a place I can rest, just for today…”
“All right, the dorm is next door. Bed seventeen, don’t forget…”
I take a shower. I hear an unfortunate drumroll outside the window—it’s way past eleven. Then, a trumpet. Then, someone sobbing. I hear someone breathing with difficulty, as if in a light sleep, a few steps down. Then, when I’m about to go into the dorm, a voice seems to come from the right wing of the corridor, murmuring—their teeth seemingly locked shut—murmuring that someone needs to leave. The voice doesn’t utter any name in particular—is it addressing me?—and then the voice murmurs: go away, don’t take the place of someone much needier than you…
Lightning flashes through the window and illuminates the entire dormitory. Only then do I realize there isn’t a single empty bed. But I was overcome by a sigh, a profound sigh, and I fell asleep.
I stayed for many years in the shelter.
The day after I arrived, there was no one in the dormitory when I woke up. I learned later that they had concluded I was sick, very weak, and had let me sleep in for a while.
I wore green pajamas with a number on my chest.
I got out of bed and wandered through the deserted corridors, sometimes going into empty rooms and babbling: Is anybody in here?
After prowling and prowling through the rooms of that endless building, I ended up finding all the derelicts who inhabited the shelter sitting in a vast cafeteria. The majority were older men. I sat in the first vacant chair I saw, in front of an old man who scrutinized me with very red eyes, his beard speckled with breadcrumbs and traces of butter…
“You know, sir, I heard drums last night. A trumpet, voices, sobbing. But I saw absolutely nothing.”
“Ah, you’re new here,” he said in a low tone, shaking his head, trying to smile.
“Your name?” I asked clumsily.
“Lucas…”
“Mr. Lucas…” I said, expressing my awkward camaraderie.
I hadn’t seen the man who’d opened the door for me the night before again. That morning in the cafeteria, I tried to describe how he’d looked to Lucas.
“Do you know who he is?” I asked.
“One of the people in charge of this place, especially in the evenings…but he left yesterday morning. He went to enjoy his retirement with his daughter, who lives far away…”
Lucas and I became friends. He would tell me about his life in bits and pieces, sometimes in the cafeteria, sometimes as we walked in the shelter’s tree-lined courtyard.
Lucas had not always been a derelict. He had gone through a rough time: One February morning, he went to his law firm’s office in downtown Harmada under a wet, hot, sticky sky—it was unbearable, he said, truly unbearable for the normal biological functions of a human being. When he stopped the car at a red light that morning, a boy came up and started wiping the windshield; the boy spit on the glass and methodically wiped the spot with a felt cloth; the boy was trying to make some cash, but when the light turned green, the boy didn’t move. He kept rubbing the windshield with the felt cloth; Lucas pulled out some coins, but the boy wouldn’t see anything, he seemed to just want to rub that felt cloth on the glass. To this day Lucas still can’t explain what happened, he tells me shakily beneath a lush tree in the shelter’s courtyard, he still can’t figure it out, but the fact is that the deafening sound of horns started blaring behind him, sweat drenched him from head to toe, he loosened the knot of his tie and unbuttoned the top of his shirt, and he stepped on the gas like a man who no longer knows what’s happening inside him. That’s how he tells me: like a man who doesn’t know what’s happening inside him anymore. He stepped on the gas and ran over the boy, who died, crushed by the rear tires. When Lucas said crushed by the rear tires, he let out a roaring laugh, as if the laughter were part of the story, as if the laughter had to be inserted right at this point in the story—when the boy is crushed by the rear tires—and in the same way that the laughter broke out it also vanished: abruptly, insanely. And Lucas now told me the story all over again but with a grave, very grave expression this time, like a headland contemplating the sea that’s so remote no one will ever see it…as if Lucas were incapable of living another existence, one without this story.
Suddenly, he burst out:
“My son”—it was the first time he addressed me, acknowledged my presence—“from then on I couldn’t understand either myself or what existed outside of me. I let them arrest me, and later they put me into a criminal mental hospital. I abandoned everything and everyone abandoned me, and at the end of my life I came here, do you understand, my son?”
I, in my spent middle age, was among the youngest in the shelter. Why did they let me stay? It seemed like those whom the staff called “young men” were fated to only stay in the shelter for a short time, then the social workers directed them to some other situation outside these walls…
I was able to stay for one reason: three or four nights a month, I gathered the institution’s population to tell them, often via dramatization, of episodes I had lived or witnessed.
These soirees took place in the cafeteria after dinner. The tables were piled against the walls, and the chairs were formed into rows and were filled with a respectable audience. I would stand over a very old desk, covered with a black carpet on top, and tell them… I would tell them whatever my fierce memory, like a tractor tearing through the bushes, was able to pull out of me—going wherever it could get through, opening trails here and there—sometimes clearing the ground meticulously—until it came across the one shockingly intimate path that was ultimately able to give reason to what had been narrated with so many advances and retreats.
I left those narratives feeling exhausted. At the end, with a certain precise gesture, I would jump from the desk and be surrounded by my audience, who would want to know more details about the story I had just told. Then I would get in the shower, where the cold water comforted me, and I’d go to bed right after. On those nights, sleep slipped onto me like a glove. I would lie down and boom! My eyes, different than on the sleepless nights, would quickly soften against the madness of the world outside. And it was not uncommon that they would recap, deep in the retina, the narrative of the night, point by point, as if the narrative was a fluid I emitted, thinly, toward a world still unknown, where all stories were protected from oblivion’s rotten air and safely stored in an archive of time.
I was back to being an actor. I was back to deserving the house that sheltered me. I deserved the nutritional intake that kept me standing.
One afternoon the board of the institution told me: “Thanks to you, our residents have been able to rehabilitate a bit of human inactivity. Because of your stories, they no longer need to roll like stones. They want to participate in the titanic effort that’s the steady pulse of life.”
And as a result of this judgment by the leaders of the shelter, I ended up staying, but was left wondering for how long. Until I died? Or would fate still have unexpected deviations in store for me?
Because of the situation, some of my sheltered colleagues started to deify me a little, of course. A very large and crazy old lady who had been under that roof for almost thirty years stopped me in the courtyard one day and asked:
“Where did you come from? From a man and a woman like me, like all of us?”
I told her I would tell the story of my origins that evening, that I had, in fact, spen
t all day reflecting on my strange upbringing.
The lady walked away, her pupils flashing excitedly.
I never prepared my narratives beforehand. They mostly came out spontaneously. The course of the plot’s unfolding was realized right there, in the act of uttering. I hated to think about what I was going to say in advance. I always let my speech lead me, that’s all, and my speech has never let me down; on the contrary, it has always known how to take me toward unexpected and wondrous incidents.
That night I said:
“Today, I’ll tell you about when I was conceived. I remember everything, or almost, since there is some thin screen between me and my conception, as if an opaque glass stops me from visualizing the exact outline of things, but look: an explosive convulsion: I see particles twitching, and they look very bright in the total darkness; and I now see a terrible incarnation, my friends, terrible—it looks like the opaque glass has broken and, now I can see that the thing has finally begun to take shape. It’s terrible, don’t get too close because it’s terrible to see matter forming in its already obvious slumber, yes, the same matter that didn’t have a presence before, the same matter that had no desire to come to this place and attach itself to form; look, my brothers and sisters, look at me to see how it all ended up.”
At that moment, people cheered me as they never had before. My hands shook, my face throbbed, my forehead was feverish, nausea rose in my throat.
That evening, I told them I needed to get straight into the shower, and then I would retire to my room. I needed to rest. This time, I had gone too far. I wanted to say or hear nothing more until the next day.
“Man, oh man,” I said as I lay down, realizing it was the first time I had used that expression in a long while. That exclamatory phrase had stopped being a real habit of mine. It only sporadically reappeared. Like a vice that comes back to insinuate itself but has no strength anymore; so that, hopefully, it will eventually disappear for good.
These days, every time I stand on the desk and tell my colleagues in the shelter about this old habit, they laugh and repeat it back to me: Man, oh man…
Their way of saying, man, oh man, became a source of entertainment. Whenever I wanted to make them laugh immediately, I found a way of fitting that exclamation into the story I was telling, and that encrypted hook assumed a poignancy independent of anything that had any relation to its possible meaning, closing itself off from any allusion.
Recently, when we giddily pronounced, man, oh man, we couldn’t connect the expression back to its primary motivation, to the initial reason that had caused its entrance into my narrative in the first place. Man, oh man, worked as a chorus now, like a magnet that pulled—from within everyone—a vague but hilarious incentive for cohesion.
But then one day, the exclamation was lost into the void, so much so that no one besides me bothered to remember it anymore.
My life in the shelter would have been unbearably tedious were it not for those kinds of spectacles I performed regularly for my derelict colleagues. There was only one other thing that could hold my attention and gave me some pleasure: my friendship with Lucas, the old man who crushed the boy cleaning his windshield a few years back. One night, he said to me:
“I’m here, my son. You can count on me.” He had definitely started treating me as his son.
Until one day, he died. A week later, I stood in front of the crowded auditorium:
“I’ll tell you: it was a hot afternoon, as you all remember, when Lucas died. We were strolling through the courtyard when he said, my son, I feel pain. I asked: where? He didn’t answer. Then I looked very closely at him and saw what was happening: his whole body was dissolving on the hot concrete. The concrete gets so hot during the day that it’s impossible to walk on it barefoot. But his body was lying on that burning ground, and I took his pulse and there was nothing that would cause me to say if he was dead or alive, because each time I thought he was slipping into inertia, his vein seemed to react, and I—trying to spare the old people in this shelter—didn’t want to waste any more time so I began to pull Lucas’s body along the street, because I knew, of course, that the country was suffering from fuel shortages. There were no cars on the streets, no taxis or ambulances, buses only running every hour, so I kept pulling that body through the streets hoping I’d get to Mercy Hospital. It was wishful thinking, obviously, because I knew it’d be hard to find a doctor on duty in the midst of the so-called health professionals’ long strike, until…until I stopped, carefully released Lucas’s feet, looked fervently into his eyes, and saw… I saw that his eyes were open and glassy, and as much as I waved my hands before those eyes, the pupils were stagnant, they no longer responded. And then clarity descended on me, and I spoke…I spoke to myself before that body that no longer pulsed among the living. I said: A lightning bolt, one of those that strike furiously through the air without a storm, killed him. And when I looked up, I saw people surrounding me. They asked me to tell them how it had all happened—if the dead man was my father, who he was—and I spoke, spoke in a contrite fashion, expelling from my body a vessel made of words, like those that float lonely in the air for who knows how long, like those that tear the firmament then disappear, leaving us to wonder if what had come out of our mouths had not been simply a miracle, so enormous is the oblivion that owns us after it’s gone. And this is so true that, after I uttered that vessel of words, the people who heard me started slowly retreating, as if sleepwalking, leaving me alone again with Lucas’s still-warm corpse.”
When I finished that night’s narrative, some colleagues wept and some turned their eyes to the crucifix on the wall, right above my head. That time, they didn’t applaud for me. When I closed the story by saying, This is it, my dears, this is it, a somber silence took over the place, and it lasted until the moment I stepped into the cold shower. After the show, in the shower, the lines Lucas used to sing with his tired voice came to my head:
The wound that burst in me
in the deaf folds of my chest
glitters with red blood
the same color as the freckle she revealed
as she sang and undressed for me
who gaspingly saw
the turgid mouth of the song
“Does that song have a name?” I had asked him one day.
Lucas looked up as if he wanted to catch something in the air. Then he shook his head, perhaps indicating that the question bothered him.
“No, my boy, no. Not everything has a name in this unfortunate life,” he snapped at me, then he didn’t say another word for a couple of days.
In the shower, I wondered if tears often failed me because I had some kind of physiological dryness or because I lacked a certain weepish character.
“Infected,” I grumbled, as if I had tasted my own defection, unapologetically.
Apparently, the objective of all those clandestine theatrics in the cold shower was to restore my awareness of what I already knew: I couldn’t be considered a good man.
Whenever I observed human misfortune, especially during my own difficult times, I couldn’t avoid feeling an immediate and disturbing rush of exultation, an unexpected conviction that the victim had chosen to suffer, or that he or she, somehow, deserved it.
I would then be taken over by absolute contempt for the sufferer.
And—unanticipated, as if punched—I’d fall into a state close to dispersion—loosening the stiff rope inside me—which could one day end me.
I am a bad man, was the opening line of my first show after that revelatory shower.
“I’ll tell you, friends, I’ll tell you now that I’m a bad man,” I said to an audience that was growing impatient and nervous.
I continued: “But don’t fret until you hear what I really have to say.”
“What is it? Say it!” somebody shouted.
“Patience, my brothers and sisters, patience, for there are all kinds of things in the world, including people like me.”
“Liar! This
is a farce,” cried a shaky old lady.
At that moment, one of the shelter managers came up and asked me to leave. I left the cafeteria to boos and whoops.
I spent days unwilling to leave the dormitory. I felt like an ill-treated dog. I’d lie in the men’s dorm, sleepless, furtively watching some of the old men fucking in the dark. They’d sneak out of their beds and into a colleague’s. It was unpleasant to witness all that breathless and suffered fondling, the battle of bodies through the night, each man moving forward with so much effort, inch by inch, until—either by consummating an orgasm or from mere tiredness—they’d eventually calm themselves down… Sleep would descend over the men, but their yearnings would stay, left behind like treaded waters, and their carcasses, finally delivered from the imprisonment of desire, lay as they did in their pre-lives—embryos of all that those old men had lived over the years.
During this period, I suffered from a strange weakness. I felt ashamed in front of my colleagues the few times I got out of bed: Only two or three of the old men showed a similarly dramatic difficulty in moving—and I was one of the youngest people in that shelter. I’d sit on the edge of the mattress, wondering if my back pain would allow me to walk to the bathroom, the patio, the dining room…
I only started to heal after a thunderstorm one day, which alleviated the heat and blew an anxious breeze through the dormitory. I sat on my bed and glanced at things without feeling dizzy, at last. I realized that my colleagues had stopped frowning at me; they seemed to have forgotten my disastrous show, some of them asked if I was feeling better.
I could no longer live without the support of those old men, without what was coming to me from them, a thing I couldn’t name yet—often, with all my shriveled affection, I’d come up with more lies so they could keep living, since demonstrating their interest in me helped them stay alive, so I—returning from my lethargy—was a key player in their battle to extend their existences. I’d surely be able to put on other shows, new narratives from atop the desk—and here I go again, I thought, as two or three old men helped me get dressed, one buttoning my shirt, another slipping my pants up past my feet, all of it because I was an actor, a storyteller, and at night, I was the burning torch around which they’d become a lively, expectant, and attentive audience.
Harmada Page 4
