João Noll - Quiet Creature on the Corner

And we sat on a bench in the Praça da Alfândega, where a guy with a styrofoam cooler was selling cans of beer. Naíra and I toasted by tapping our cans together — this was how I was trying to forget the existence of a boy with my face running around here, a boy that, if he wanted, could someday pass for me — and I slipped my hand down Naíra’s blouse, her warm tit was tender and swollen, and after letting out a long deep sigh she told me, look, here comes the boy, and sure enough there he was, heading for the docks, and here he came — amazing! — holding hands with the man with the Bible in his hand, as though they were heading home after a long day’s work — there the two of them went, and I shrugged, whatever, deciding to let it go. I noticed a few tramps around our bench lustily ogling as I felt up Naíra. Well, they’ll be treated to a lot more than that tonight, and, for the first time, I kissed the plump mouth of a black woman, and she was one of those women who dominate a man’s mouth with her ferocious tongue, her tongue struggled for primacy inside my mouth, like she was trying to dig out my cavities — I pushed her away, took a breath, and said c’mon, let’s go somewhere we can be alone, c’mon, and we got up, still clinging to each other, and clinging to each other took long steps down Rua da Praia. Borges was roaring from the rally, a voice from up on the platform said that Lula’s plane had just landed at Salgado Filho airport, popcorn was bursting, and Naíra and I kept on clinging to each other as we made our way to the car I’d left parked on Riachuelo.

When I put my hands on the wheel Naíra told me she had her own place. I asked where. She said it was on Marcílio Dias, near Érico Veríssimo.

We’d already turned down Marcílio and were passing by a row of low houses when Naíra said: it’s one of these, park right here, but she said it at the last second and I only managed to stop two or three houses later, in front of a door with a plaque advertising umbanda supplies. Naíra put a hand on my arm and asked me to go a little further, closer to the corner. I told her I was confused, had we passed her house or not? Go a little further, she insisted. Here, she said, in front of what looked like an abandoned lot hemmed in by old hedges. Come, she murmured with her eyes darting around, and she started pulling me, ducking through a hole in the hedge — the other side, sure enough, was an abandoned lot.

By this point Naíra was lighting a joint, she offered it to me — I thought it was a great idea to have a little toke, and I took three, four deep hits, feeling great, but I hadn’t come all this way just to get stoned — I was crazy for something I’d always been dying to see: a white cock going into a black woman’s pussy. I imagined that inside her I’d find a tone to shock a whitey like me, and the very bright moonlight would make clear every doubt and detail, and I confirmed once more that the moon was really full, resplendent even, and I put Naíra up against the remains of a wall that still endured in the middle of the lot, lifted her skirt, opened my pants — cum outside, Naíra said — and I plunged all the way into her wetness and she moaned, oh wow.

The moon wasn’t as friendly as I’d hoped — I could barely see any parts of the creole woman who was now quivering and sliding down the wall until she fell on the dirt. And her skirt, now still, had flapped around the whole time, and my shirt was so long I’d had to keep pushing it out of the way with my hand — all that cloth didn’t let me see things very well. But, with respect to Naíra’s drowning wetness: it felt like she was pissing on my hard-on the whole time.

Naíra stayed sitting in the dirt, I got down to see where she was, groping around — it was the wet dirt she seemed to like. You like it? I murmured. Like what? she asked. Sitting here, I replied.

I might as well repeat that the moon was full, and can add that it was orange, and also add, or repeat, I don’t remember, that with the breeze you couldn’t exactly call it a hot night, only hot enough to wet through your shirt in the middle of the crowd at the rally, but Naíra…let’s go back. Naíra was sitting at my feet, saying something, telling me she lost her virginity when she was thirteen to a cracker German from São Sebastião do Caí: just think, to be born as black as I am and raised in the middle of those crazy blondes in Caí, well that’s how it was, my father worked at the slaughterhouse, when I was a girl I killed time on Saturday afternoons by going to see the cattle lined up, waiting their turn, and when they got close they’d start to moo desperately, that was my hobby, cattle moaning so loud you could hear them halfway around the world, to this day I can’t forget the sound of it, I’d crouch down by the fence for the whole afternoon looking at them, they wouldn’t let you get very close, they wouldn’t let anybody who didn’t work there jump the fence, Naíra, I said, Naíra, should we go? She said my fly was still open, which it was — I slipped my hand through my fly, gave a tug on my shirt so it wouldn’t stay sticking out of my pants, even down there my shirt was covered in cum, the moon full, the wind somewhat refreshing, pulling Naíra’s hand so she’d come with me, Naíra’s skirt all dirty, the two of us going through the hole in the hedge, looking around to make sure nobody saw, a whistling man coming down the street went by without looking and stopped on the corner without hesitation, as though that were his place, Naíra taking off her high heels, walking away barefoot without even saying goodbye, me seated in the car, picking out a tape from the glove box, a trusty Bach of Kurt’s, there wasn’t anything else, I put on the Bach, hit the gas, the moon full, December, the starry sky and everything else…

What was he doing there, in the kitchen, with his arms crossed over the table, the low lamp brightening his rope-veined hands? What was he doing there, at that time of night, when I got back to the manor? What was he, Kurt, doing there like I’d never seen him before, it looked like he’d shrunk, yes, he who had been so imposing before was now a man diminished in stature, sitting there in the kitchen under the low lamp — ah, there was a glass, and beside it a bottle of a cachaça called Isaura, beside that a Coke, empty. Long live the samba-in-Berlin, I growled, pulling out the paper napkin with the poem that I’d kept in my pocket ever since we got on the plane in Galeão — a name for it still hadn’t come to me, I wondered if “Quiet Creature on the Corner” wasn’t the title the poem was asking for — Kurt followed me with his eyes, raised the glass like he was toasting me, ah, so he was drunk, I didn’t know how drunk, only the silence of the glass in his hand. I, in the doorway of the kitchen, thinking it was the first time I’d seen Kurt drunk, I stood in the kitchen doorway wondering if I really wanted to go in and continue with the farce that was unfolding, Kurt tremblingly raising the glass, toasting me, I couldn’t stand him drunk, not Kurt, I could tell the night was hanging by a thread, I could tell what I was observing was an invitation: an old man widowed just hours prior beckoning me into the tavern to keep him company, to drink, drink until dawn with an unhappy man, that was the idea — but if someday a miracle were to burst over me, that miracle would come from him: that was what I needed to believe in, a chance I couldn’t throw away because it would never be repeated, but I wondered, I wondered what this man could have besides the skeleton of a cow, a peeling mansion, a sad piece of land, whatever business Gerda had in Germany…

I took a few steps, tried to say gently: let’s go to Germany, let’s not let Gerda’s death keep us from going.