João Noll - Quiet Creature on the Corner

Kurt lowered the glass, said his plans were kaput, his body diseased — for years now — and from now on he didn’t think he’d be in any condition to travel, for a while now he hadn’t been able to urinate right, he showed me his swollen feet, darkly swollen, he was getting headaches that drove him near to the point of despair, said it was an abscess, definitely, but keep it a secret because I hate doctors, no doctor is going to touch me, they see everything here inside, and inside here there’s nothing worth seeing, what’s interesting lives out in the light of day, I’ll unbutton my shirt and show you the blotch on my chest, every day it spreads, for a long time I didn’t let Gerda see my bare chest, she didn’t know about the blotch, she always believed I was a strong man, but I’m not going to die, not now.

I sat down at the other end of the table and thought, I don’t want this: What good did it do me to have him bail me out of jail just to get caught up in illness and old age? First Gerda, then Otávio, and tonight I get home and find him drunk and besides that all rotten, telling me he’s not going to die. What do I get out of this?

Or, if I wasn’t going to get anything from it, why was he telling me all this? Wouldn’t I be better off among the prisoners, who lacked any appetite for reward? Or in that clinic where nobody demanded my company, where books of poems appeared without me asking for them, where I couldn’t expect any more than that, maybe I’d be better off there?

But then came this man who brought me here to lick his wounds.

I stuck my tongue out of my mouth, in the direction of my chin — for the first time in my life I thought that I had my own heart, which beat so many times per minute — I thought about touching the vein in my wrist, counting, I thought about the occult organization of those to whom obedience is owed, I thought that being here before this old man was to obey this same organization — my tongue was now prowling up above my mouth, frightened by the prickle of the mustache that had begun to form, my tongue was passing all around my mouth. Kurt had a dim stare, and I was sure that in that moment he couldn’t distinguish me from the surroundings, but a breath would bring the exact word to my lips, capable of reactivating the senses of the man in front of me, the exact word flowering on my lips would bring him back to my image, my company, and I’d try to swallow everything again, as if this were all a game of patience:

“Kurt!” I called out.

“Huh?” he tried to straighten up, “you’re back?”

“Listen to the hoot of that owl,” I said devilishly.

“The owl’s hoot, I’d like to hear the owl’s hoot,” he said, looking around, searching.

I got up, opened a can of sardines. I went back to sit in front of Kurt. I emptied the can of every last morsel and wiped it clean with a hunk of bread.

The dogs were barking in the distance — I had no interest in knowing where those beasts were imprisoned.

He told me he’d heard a voice calling for Amália. He said: God knows who’d be calling her, maybe some stranger who’s trying to use her to take charge around here, invading little by little until not a trace of me is left.

“Plot by plot,” I remarked, without a clear idea of what the words meant.

“Plot by plot,” he emphasized.

Kurt seemed blind. He was staring at the refrigerator, but beneath his gaze the refrigerator appeared as a shape without any likeness, strange even to itself, on the verge of dissolving.

I got up, took a few steps toward Kurt: if as long as all this lasted I stayed close, not letting anything escape me, yes, I wouldn’t regret it later — it was in this difficult thing that I needed to believe.

Otávio appeared at the kitchen door. There was silence. Only Otávio’s huffy breathing. He was wearing pajamas that were all frayed at the edges, suspiciously stained, a beret on his head, I could tell now it was a uniform beret, a Brazilian Expeditionary Force beret.

Kurt was still staring at the refrigerator — it was possible that he’d found a way to fill the dead hours before dawn.

Otávio, in his dirty pajamas and expeditionary beret, and right behind him just then, right on his tail, appeared Amália with half-indecisive steps, Amália avoiding my eyes, as though she were trying to convey her shame — following Otávio out from some hiding place I might not know about, I thought to myself. Otávio looked at me and said:

“I put on my BEF beret and came to get a drink of water.”

“You sleep in that beret?” I asked.

“No,” he was shaking like he wanted to laugh at my question, but was obviously too weak.

“No?” I insisted.

“It’s just a little obsession,” he said softly, “I bring the beret to bed with me. Ever since I got back from Italy, I go to sleep with the feeling that during the night the enemy will come and I need to be prepared.”

I noticed the beret was really worn out, misshapen, saturated by the kind of care that children show the ragged things they won’t get rid of.

Amália came out from behind him, filled a glass of cold water, and took it to Otávio, who was still standing in the same place, not having budged from the threshold.

Maybe it was visible, the sacrifice that was being imposed on me by who knows whose designs — accepting the nauseating contact with these creatures until I was completely consumed — and so yes, instead of being a man ready to act.

While Otávio was gulping down the water, Amália stared at me. She had a thread of blood along her lower lip. I saw Kurt staring at her, caught off guard. Otávio handed the glass back to her and also stared at her, until she asked if he wanted more.

“No,” Otávio mumbled, now staring at me.

No, I repeated without knowing why. Sometimes a word slips out of me like that, before I have time to formalize an intention in my head. Sometimes on such occasions it comes to me with relief, as though I’ve felt myself distilling something that only once finished and outside me, I’ll be able to know.

Otávio doesn’t want any more, I concluded with an indecisive tone.

“No,” Otávio reaffirmed.

“No,” said Kurt, returning his gaze to the refrigerator.

I yawned, looking at the white of the refrigerator.

Then I belched a little from the sardines.

I said goodnight and withdrew.

As I made my way out I paid attention to the abnormal silence in the kitchen. I wanted to go back and see what was happening there inside the inertia the whole atmosphere seemed to have fallen into, but no, tomorrow I’d finish out another whole day with them, and if the three were to drown in that silence, then tomorrow I’d declare my conspiracy finished, finally, hallelujah.

I closed the door to my room and I wasn’t sad. You might say that the two old men and I don’t know what else left me limp with sadness, but it was nothing like that: when I took off my clothes I caught a whiff of Naíra’s scandalous scent on my body, it was nice to slip my hand across myself and sniff it, as though that sultry odor were coming from my own skin.

No, I wasn’t sad, and when I turned off the light something came over me: I fell to the floor on all fours and began to feel a strange momentum first to crawl, then drag, myself, in silence, as though the floor were a battlefield swamp, guessing where the next bomb would go off as they flashed closer and closer.

In the morning, when I awoke, I would remember: I had submitted to this like a man, and I was prepared to master these events, which had confused me before.

I could sense that someone had opened the door to my room, there was no noise, only the light from the hall washing over me a little — I considered sitting up and turning my head to look at whoever was watching me. But it wasn’t worth it: that presence was incapable of threatening my submerged state, bordering on sleep. I blacked out completely.