Harmada

by João Gilberto Noll

  “You here?” I ask.

  “And you?” he returns.

  I walk lazily down the beach beside Bruce when suddenly…something around me, which seems to have always been around me—though it doesn’t show any natural features because it’s amorphous like a sentiment—this thing that is out there, outside of me, and which may even be as material as a rock if I were to probe it with some precision—this thing around me pulls me in, yes, and if I let myself be dragged by it, if I surrender myself to it, I will no longer be this person who is walking on the beach next to Bruce. And the silence with which I walk on the beach next to Bruce will be so spectral that Bruce will no longer recognize me, and I may be dealing with some kind of death. Let’s put it this way: Death, which is nothing more than a minimal state, extraordinarily concentrated, and even though it’s as invisible as a speck of dust in the dark, it attracts other bodies to it, and in this attraction all the components clash and rub against each other, so much so that from the sparks coming from these clashes and frictions other galaxies are born, which in turn will generate other galaxies through the same attraction and repulsion of bodies…

  “What was that?” Bruce asks.

  “That what?”

  “You sped up. I had to run to catch you. I’m breathless. Look!”

  “I was distracted…”

  “You were staring at something in the air. Have you been drinking?”

  “Just a couple of shots of whiskey while I watched Cris pack up her things to move in with the guy.”

  “I’m going in the water.”

  “I’ll be there soon…”

  I hear a girl passing by tell another girl that it’s the hottest day in Harmada in many years.

  I go into the ocean.

  Children are playing around, dunking each other in the water.

  Up ahead, Bruce swims in the calm ocean, out past the breakers.

  I swim, too. When I get out of the water, the sun is at its zenith. I lie on the sand. I fall asleep and dream that Bruce went into the ocean and never returned.

  A little girl is watching me a few feet away when I wake up. She’s bending over me, and her head blocks the entire circumference of the sun. The sun’s rays shine through her hair. I close my eyes so as not to blind myself.

  “Who’s there?” I ask, with my eyes closed.

  “It’s me,” says the little girl.

  “Me who?”

  “Me. I’m me and nobody else.”

  With my hands over my eyes, I try to sit up.

  Seated, I open my eyes wide.

  “Oh, is that you?” I ask.

  “Yes, it’s me,” says the little girl.

  “What about your mother, your father?”

  “They stayed.”

  “Where did they stay?”

  “Under the umbrella.”

  “And have you gone in the water yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  “It is…”

  She looks, with interest, as someone approaches. I make a shade over my eyes with my hand and I see: it’s Bruce, getting out of the water.

  I’m going to keep looking for an apartment, I thought, looking at Cris’s vacant bed. Out the window, the sky was purple. A thunderstorm was forming.

  The phone rang. It was a journalist. She wanted to know how long the play’s run would be. I told her that, according to our contract with the theater, we still had another four months to go.

  Then she asked me more questions.

  “You used to be an actor…”

  “Yes, until about twenty years ago…”

  “Why did you abandon your career for all this time?”

  “I was breeding chickens…”

  “Chickens?”

  “Yeah, chickens…”

  “Did you kill the chickens that you ate or sold yourself?”

  “Yes. I used to twist and pull their necks as well as I was able to… I’d stop as soon as I saw the first sign of blood coming from the neck…then…then the job was to pluck the bird…that was a tiring task…but I didn’t have enough employees to spare me from spending whole afternoons plucking chickens…”

  “And what do you do with your leisure time these days?”

  “Leisure?”

  “Yes…”

  “Hmm…beach, movies…”

  “What was the last movie you saw?”

  “The Inflamed Hour.”

  “Who directed it? What’s it about?”

  “It’s by a Bulgarian filmmaker who lives in London. It’s the story of an English pianist who’s in love with his own sister. She rejects his passion so intensely that she ends up exiling herself in an African country. There, she falls in love with an official from the Spanish embassy. From that point on, this man takes over the film.”

  “Who are the actors?” she asked.

  “The actress is an American who’s been working in Europe a lot lately. If I’m not mistaken, her name is…”

  “Rita Byatt?”

  “Yes, Rita Byatt.”

  “What about the male actors?”

  “The pianist is an Italian actor who’s been working in the United States lately. He was in a movie shot in Argentina about four years ago…”

  “Oh, Carlo Tavazzi?”

  “That’s right…”

  “And who was the other actor?”

  “Uh, I completely forgot his name. I’m not sure, but I think this is his first film. His features seem grossly carved—he looks like a domesticated barbarian in an embassy employee suit.”

  “Oh, one more thing,” she said, snapping her tongue, “what’s your next theater project?”

  “It’s a German play from the thirties, only discovered in the seventies.”

  “Who’s the author?”

  “Hans Grüber.”

  “How do you spell it?”

  “G-r-ü-b-e-r.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s the story of a paralyzed woman. Cris will play the woman.”

  “Okay, a paralyzed woman…” repeated the journalist, waiting for more information.

  “A paralyzed woman who decides to sing. So, it’s a musical. The original scores have not been found. We only know that the songs were composed by the author himself. Things are mysterious because Grüber lived in an isolated cabin in the Black Forest, and there is no record of him ever visiting any city in Germany. The first time this play was performed was in Berlin in 1982. In my version of the play, Gustavo Horácio will be responsible for music and lyrics…”

  “Okay, I think that’s good for me… And you… anything else?” she asked.

  “No, nothing…”

  “Good luck,” she added and then said goodbye.

  I go into the kitchen, drink a glass of milk.

  “Hi,” Bruce rumbles as he comes into the kitchen.

  We both sit down and lean over the table. The rain begins to fall.

  I go see an apartment for rent. I enter one room, then the other. Twelfth floor.

  I taste blood in my mouth. I’m sitting on the floor in the corner of the empty apartment and I taste blood in my mouth. I go into the bathroom, look at myself in the mirror. Blood is coming out of my nose; a trickle of blood goes into my mouth. This used to happen to me when I was little. Blood was always dripping from my nose. I turn on the tap, lean over the sink, and clean my face. Then I sit on the toilet and throw my head back like I used to do forty years ago. Although I have begun working again and am already planning what I’ll do next after this show, I feel that my life has ended. Here, sitting in this unfamiliar bathroom with my head tilted back to stop the bleeding, I have the feeling that my life has ended.

  I wander around the empty apartment. From the laundry room, I have a harsh view of Harmada: toward the southern bay, where the sea is dark and the water is the color of clay, spreading out to a flat horizon, stripped of islands.

  I wander around the empty apartment. My shirt is stained
with blood. I would have myself seen like this, all bloodied, throughout the streets of Harmada, running from the rain that has begun to fall. I stop in the middle of the empty room. I want you, oh submerged heart / I want to breach the core of things / see the animal pulsing / bathing in itself / like the bottom of the drawer / of the dungeon’s humid appetite. Standing in the middle of that empty room, I sing this song. I don’t have a beautiful voice, but I can sing in tune, so I slowly sing the song. A plane is flying overhead and shakes the empty apartment. I want you, oh, submerged heart. What am I hoping for here? I ask.

  I order a beer at the first bar I see. An old guy appears, gives me two kisses. He’s always liked to kiss his friends.

  “Yeah, I’m back in Harmada,” I said, answering his question decisively. It was thundering terribly, and the bar’s windows trembled in response. He was telling me the streets were already totally flooded.

  “We’ll be stranded in this bar,” he reminded me.

  Then he looked purposefully at my shirt and asked, “What’s up with all this blood?”

  “I cut myself.”

  “How did you cut yourself?”

  “I don’t know. I only remember seeing the blood coming out, but it’s nothing serious.”

  A song from our youth came on.

  “Remember?” I asked.

  He said he did. And, bowing, he took me out to dance.

  We started dancing between the tables in the empty bar. The guy behind the counter laughed and rubbed his hands together.

  “Cheek to cheek, cheek to cheek,” my old friend said to me. And we danced and danced for hours in each other’s arms while the rain fell torrentially outside.

  Between songs we drank beer, lots of beer.

  My friend’s belly got in the way a little. It required me to arch my hips backward slightly so I could align my body with his.

  It was getting dark, but the guy behind the counter wouldn’t turn on the light.

  Into the dark bar came another man. I couldn’t make out who he was, except that he had a mustache and was smoking a cigar.

  The man sat at a table in the back of the bar. He remained there, drinking, perhaps watching the two of us as we danced with such dedication. From time to time, we were illuminated by the lightning outside. Or by the ember of the cigar when the man pulled in smoke.

  “We’ll be stranded here,” my old friend would remind me every once in a while.

  “Stranded,” I’d repeat, like a lunatic, laughing.

  Suddenly I noticed, over my old friend’s shoulder and through the bar’s glass door, that a tree had fallen in the gale. The raindrops were now coming down arrhythmically, so inconsistent were the wind currents.

  There was no music that could reach the disheveled air of that wildly remote geography, which ever since has been nothing but rough images to me, but in the moment encircled me with its entirely plausible weight, perhaps more plausible than my entire life had been until then.

  Plausible, too, were the bewildered wind and the fury of the falling rain. And there was no one else around, I was alone in the middle of the storm. Then, the strange cry of an animal, and I was covered by a dark fur.

  No, I was not covered by a dark fur. The dark fur was mine, and I wanted to flee because I no longer recognized myself, I was no longer me.

  However, I didn’t need to run away from anything, because I was alone, and the tragedy of the rain and wind couldn’t affect me because my resilience was capable of sheltering the convulsions of the entire world, and I recognized that as something as natural as the dark tint of the fur I had.

  Even so, I viciously thought about what measures I should take, quickly realizing that from now on I’d have to learn how to include myself in the world around me—that was all. And that attitude shouldn’t be called cowardice, since it was the only way I could preserve myself.

  I looked at my disproportionate, beastly genitals.

  At first, I was disgusted. I couldn’t imagine living in my body now without constantly being afflicted by nausea—it was as if I couldn’t bear the brute material that now constituted me. But naturally, fairly quickly, I was thrust into the center of myself, somewhere around stomach level: in a dazzling glare, with a single stroke I stripped myself of any disgust, and a sensation of well-being descended on me instead, nothing jubilant, but accurate—like a new outfit that simply fit my measurements.

  I opened my arms as if to train myself. A strange animal like nothing I had ever seen before approached me. It was maybe some sort of a buffalo on account of its apparent strength, but at the same time it had soft lines—either way, it had a suggestive elegance.

  The animal kept its hindquarters turned toward me. Everything indicated it was female. A peculiar mist made me, at times, slightly confused, but I’d quickly manage to return to my center and say to myself:

  “It’s a dark-furred animal like me, and it’s female, yes.”

  Then, suddenly, there was nothing more that came between us.

  Her hips—taut, powerful.

  And when I saw my sex was ready, I had no time to fear the vigor that was like nothing I had ever felt before, so I just went for it. I put my enormous hands on the thighs of this one whose name I didn’t even know yet, and I entered her, I entered her deeply, and she responded with an even deeper sound, which startled me at first with how its colossal vibration brutally churned my insides, but which, a second later, brought my own voice to the surface. So I roared too, with the same impressively concave, full, and monumental tone…

  Bruce is lying in bed. That’s what I see when I arrive at the apartment later that evening. His bedroom door is open, the bedside lamp is on, and Bruce is reading while lying in his bed.

  “This blood on my shirt… My nose, after forty years of not spilling a drop of blood, has shown new signs of life today,” I said before he could say anything.

  I saw a bottle of whiskey on his nightstand. In his left hand, he held a glass with tiny ice cubes that had almost entirely liquefied.

  His look indicated he’d already had several drinks. I was still drunk from the bar, too.

  I sat on his bed.

  “Do you know who I saw today, Bruce?”

  “Who?”

  “Orlando…we drank and danced cheek to cheek in an empty bar downtown. I think we were dancing and drinking for nearly seven hours, waiting for the rain to pass and the streets to clear up a little.”

  Bruce laughed. I laughed. I laughed so hard that I exhausted myself and lay back on the bed—my head next to Bruce’s feet.

  Bruce was a bald man these days, and now he was pointing to his head as if he wanted me to see something on it.

  From the position I was in—my eyes at his feet—I couldn’t really see his head.

  “Come up here and look at my head. I’m too fat to bring it over there,” he said with a laugh.

  So, I went over to his bald head. Someone had painted a naked woman on it.

  I burst out laughing. Bruce was laughing, too.

  “It was a fan of mine. She came up to me after the show and asked if she could paint something that would make me remember her. I said sure, and I kneeled on the floor backstage, offering my bald head as her canvas.”

  “That’s impossible, impossible,” I said, choking with laughter.

  Bruce kept interrupting his story to laugh, rolling in the bed—so much that his body sometimes passed over mine.

  “Ouch, you’re going to crush me,” I screamed, dying with laughter.

  I grabbed the sides of his head in my hands to stop it from moving so I could appreciate the painting.

  On his sleek skin was a woman in red, standing naked, her body youthful but something somber in her facial expression.

  “Seriously, there’s sorrow in her gaze, Bruce… yes, there is!”

  “Sorrow?” Bruce asked. He was almost purple from holding in his laughter so he could convey a type of serious tone when repeating the word sorrow.

  “Yes, s
orrow,” I said.

  And we both exploded in a loud laughter, the loudest of the night. But then, abruptly…we were serious, both of us.

  Then again, like two kids playing a game of who can stay serious longer, one of us wouldn’t be able to keep it together and would start shaking with laughter, making the other burst out, too.

  Once again we’re serious, both of us. Bruce gets up suddenly, telling me to take off my shirt—that he’s going to wash it to remove the bloodstain.

  Unsteady from too much whiskey, he pulls me by the arm to the sink in the laundry room.

  “Come on, take off your shirt,” he insists.

  I obey.

  “Look, I’ve got a great stain remover here.” He slowly pours a dark blue liquid into a bucket. He has a goofy grin on his lips as if he were recording a TV commercial.

  Suddenly his glasses fall into the bucket, which already contains my lathered up shirt.

  “Help! I can’t see a damn thing without my glasses,” he says, groping around him.

  He trips over the bucket and lands on the concrete floor of the laundry room.

  “Here, I’ll help you get up,” I say, bending over him.

  Minutes later…

  “It’s not easy, but we’ll make it,” I say, reeling at the tremendously difficult task of lifting Bruce’s drunk body from the floor.

  “How?” he asks breathlessly.

  “Bruce, do you remember that night at the hotel in New York? Do you?”

  “What a bad fight, my brother…”

  “We’d had a few Bloody Marys, remember?”

  “I remember when we both went up to our room in that dump, there was that strange atmosphere in the air, a smothered hatred that ended up exploding between those two wobbly beds.”

  “I remember that we detonated our most horrific insults and started punching each other. If the hotel manager hadn’t knocked on the door to see what was going on, we’d have seriously hurt ourselves… Who knows how far that fight might’ve gone?”

  “I remember…” Bruce says, turning on his side and letting his head drop onto the floor.

  “Oh, I remember, too…” I say, sitting on the floor and reclining against Bruce’s ribs.

  I adjust my position to get settled…

  “I also remember,” I continue, “one afternoon in a cheap hotel in Washington when you went down to the lobby to call your very sick mother in a Dallas hospital. You came back to the room and said she was in agony on the phone…”