Tony Bellotto - Rio Noir

Near the beginning of the book there’s a scene where the protagonist hires a hooker for his virgin friend. That part kind of stymied me. I didn’t know much about hookers. Georges understood right away. The next Tuesday, when I got to his place, he had company.

“This is Suellen,” he said. She was a short, busty woman with curly hair that smelled of shampoo. She was chewing bubble gum and wearing shorts that showed the panties up her ass. I wasn’t taken with Suellen in the least. She was sexy, but her style didn’t turn me on at all.

Georges told me to make some caipirinhas in the kitchen because Suellen only drank caipirinhas. As I was squeezing the limes, he came in and said I was going to screw her. I was against the idea, but he said it was already paid for and I needed to screw a whore to write the scene authoritatively. Did I want to be a decent writer or a hack? He was forceful, Georges.

The truth is, I had never screwed anyone. It was very bad, I almost couldn’t get it up. Suellen was on the rough side and was impatient; she looked at my dick with that I’ve-seen-bigger expression. When it was over, I lay in bed, dead tired, and Suellen got up, slipped on her shorts, and left without a word. I thought I would never see her again — and didn’t want to. Georges asked no questions; he was discreet. Weeks later, in the middle of a conversation, he asked if I had written the scene. I said yes. The fuck was fucking great.

I may be mistaken, but it was during this time that he mentioned having begun a new novel. Goddamn, after two decades without a line, Georges Fullar was writing again. I was crazy curious to know everything, but held back. I knew he would shut down at the first sign of intrusion. I changed the subject, we spoke of women and even soccer — I don’t know the first thing about soccer. That night we had Japanese food instead of sandwiches from Cervantes (I couldn’t take any more ham with pineapple). We drank half a bottle of sake. He started rattling on about rare poisons, he was interested in the topic, doing research, reading books; colorless poisons, tasteless and odorless, you with me? And that same night he spoke for the first time about mecicitronine. He was familiar with all the properties of the compound, all its effects and characteristics. A poison with an acid taste, slightly bitter, but colorless and lethal, that leaves no trace in the body. He was fascinated by it. Mecicitronine dissolves in the bloodstream and the guy has a heart attack. Weird, huh? At the time, I didn’t understand why he had such interest. I figured it was for the book.

In subsequent meetings he didn’t mention poison, nor did he talk about the book. I also stopped telling him about mine. I can’t explain it, but I think knowing that Georges was writing a new novel made me uneasy... I kind of went into a tailspin. I was an idiot writing my paltry little book while a genius was crafting a masterpiece two floors below me. All I could think about was his book; all I wanted was to find out about it. Does what I’m saying make sense?

There came a night when I couldn’t resist. He was in the kitchen making pasta. I said I was going to pee and snuck into his office. I was looking for a rough draft, a page from the book, a block of notes, anything. Okay, I was being kind of obsessive, but when you read Georges Fullar you’ll understand. I needed to do it. I saw the typewriter, the mahogany chair, the desk, books about poison, some blank sheets of paper scattered around. No text. I went back to the living room disappointed, a bit suspicious. Was the old man lying to me?

I don’t know if he noticed I had gone into the office, but he cut me off for two or three months after that dinner. He started canceling one plan after another, and telling me that the following week he also couldn’t hang out, and didn’t even make up excuses. He could have said he was writing or that he wanted to be by himself, whatever. I found it highly offensive of him to just disappear like that.

This period was hell for me. My parents were separating and those weekly meetings with Georges were like my therapy. Besides which, as I already said, I was no longer able to work on my own book. I reread it and found it to be a piece of crap. I became depressed, and that’s no laughing matter. Then one day, a Wednesday, he called me on the building’s intercom and invited me down to his apartment. He never called me on Wednesdays because he liked watching soccer on TV. I found it strange, but I went.

When I opened the door, it was another Georges. He had aged ten years in those months. Exhausted, without any strength. We made small talk, but his sense of humor was gone. He didn’t use profanity anymore. I asked what was happening and he said he had come to a crucial part of his book, a part in which... in which the character killed a woman. With poison. “And I’ve never killed anyone,” he said, anguished. “I don’t know what the feeling is like.”

I said that he could imagine it, that he was creative and brilliant enough to describe the feelings of committing a murder, but he wasn’t listening, he didn’t want to listen. He kept repeating that he had tried to write but felt drained. Shit.

“Suellen,” he said finally. “Would you help me kill Suellen?”

I thought he was joking. But he kept those hard eyes on me and asked again. He took a small vial from his pocket. Mecicitronine. “Boy, I need your help,” he said. And he did. He was on his last legs, Georges.

I never thought about killing anybody, you know? But at the time the idea didn’t seem so absurd. I took the vial of poison from his hand. It was a white powder that looked harmless, like talcum powder. I envisioned Suellen with the expression she wore when we had sex, and I thought it would be amusing to see her whore’s eyes lifeless, her cocksucking throat clogged with mucus and vomit.

I agreed. I wanted to know where and when, and he told me he had an appointment with her that night. I’d rather not go into detail.

Suellen arrived and was disappointed when she saw me. She went straight to Georges and kissed him, to show she wanted nothing to do with me. He took my hand, slipping me the vial, and told me to go to the kitchen and make a caipirinha for her. I closed my hand around the vial. Suellen was a true whore; she immediately sat on Georges’s lap.

In the kitchen I mixed ice, lime, sugar, cachaça, and some of the mecicitronine. I handed Suellen the caipirinha. She drank it while talking about a series on Brazilian TV about prostitutes. Georges watched her very attentively, saw when she lost control of her speech, lost control of her body — in a word, died. We took the corpse out through the back door, placed Suellen in the trunk of my car, and left her on a bench in Lido Square. By then it was late at night.

In the days that followed, nothing appeared in the newspapers. Lots of people are murdered in Rio de Janeiro. And a whore who suffered a heart attack isn’t news. Georges told me I could call him if I had a problem, if I felt any remorse or guilt. To tell the truth, I felt fine. I didn’t like Suellen. And there was still Georges’s book to consider. One day he called me to say he had finally written the passage in question. “Goddamn good,” he said. He was excited, Georges. Obviously I was proud of having helped, of being part of it, you know?

Our meetings went back to being like they had been before. Sandwiches, wine, good conversation. Suellen never came up. Georges received lots of books from people and gave me almost all of them as gifts. He recommended some, but without explaining why I should read this one or that. He just handed them over and I accepted them. We didn’t talk anymore about our own books, as I already said. Actually, he didn’t speak about his and I ended up abandoning mine at the first of the year. It made no sense to go on. I knew I would only be able to write after reading Georges’s new novel, understand? It was like some invisible barrier, the grandeur of his creation.