9780880015837

Chapter One

I awoke desperately trying to hold onto myself, everything whirling about as I fell, out of control, into an abyss. I managed to fix my vision on the band of morning light coming in through the curtains. The thin milky line fluttered rapidly. Moving my head in the direction of the window made my fall even more vertiginous. I remained motionless, my gaze focused on the line of light, waiting for the crisis to pass.

I was going to change apartments that day. After what had happened, I didn't want to live there anymore. I heard the bell: it must be the movers. If the attack didn't pass, I wouldn't be able to get out of bed. The men would leave without doing the moving.

Keeping my body immobile, I put out my hand and grabbed the medicine on the night table. I chewed the pill until it turned into a repugnant paste which I swallowed with difficulty, fearing I would vomit. Fortunately it didn't go beyond a violent nausea that racked my body, further increasing my torture. Sometimes the medicine took effect quickly, sometimes not. Two hours later, when I took the second pill, still feeling the same waves of nausea, the attack had passed. I was able to get up and open the door.

The men were sitting on the hall floor in the service area, waiting. We began the move.

The new apartment was on the fourth floor of a building without an elevator. No elevator; it didn't matter. I was working Ruth out of my memory, having got her out of my life.

The move was finished by eleven that night. I sent the men away. Furniture, books, objects and clothes lay scattered around the new apartment. From the midst of the confusion I separated Rouault's horse, the suitcase with the diary and Ruth's things; I went to the bed and lay down, Ruth's diary on my chest. I didn't have the courage to open it. I turned out the light. What would the dream be tonight? Would the vertigo come back? Liliana said I looked like a dead man when sleeping (and dreaming) with my eyes open. Ruth used to say the same thing. No, I don't want to talk about Ruth. Not yet.

Now, without a woman watching over me, I could look like a dead man without anyone nagging me.

I dream about a tall woman who has to bend down to kiss me. In fact I don't see a woman at all, for my dreams have no images. For a film director this is strange. I know the woman is in the dream, I know she's wearing a wide-brimmed hat -- an old one with a veil entirely covering her face, which is completely white, luminous, phosphorescent -- but I see nothing. I know her eyes are yellow; it's as if I saw the woman, but I don't see her, nor do I hear her words, but it's as if I heard them. I possess the information without the senses, the knowledge without visual perceptions. My dream is made of ideas.

I awoke with the doorbell ringing.

I got up and went to the intercom. `Who is it?'

It was a child's voice. `Help me, help me, they're after me!'

I pushed the button to activate the lock at the entrance. I opened the apartment door. From the little hall I looked down at the stairs below.

`Hello, anyone there?' I shouted.

`I'm coming.' The childlike voice, fainter now, came from the bottom of the stairs.

I heard the sound of footsteps climbing the stairs, slowly.

It was some time before she appeared on the third-floor landing. She climbed the last flight of stairs even more slowly. When she reached me, she smiled. She tried to speak but couldn't. Breathing with difficulty, she raised a small package wrapped in brown paper to her chest. I gestured for her to come in.

Once inside the living room, she threw herself into one of the armchairs. She looked at me as if asking me to be patient and allow her to catch her breath.

`Thank you very much,' she gasped finally. `My name is Angelica.'

She stopped talking. I sat down beside her, also saying nothing. Little by little, her breathing returned to normal.

`Who was after you?'

`I can't say.' Her little girl's voice was no longer breathless.

`Why not?'

`They'll kill me.'

`I'm going to call the police.'

`No!' she shouted in her shrill voice. `For God's sake!'

`Then I think you'd better leave.'

`Don't do this to me.'

`Get out,' I said.

Pursing her lips as if she were about to cry, she tried to get up from the chair and failed. I took her hand to help her. It was soft, warm, moist. She stood up, very close to me. I could see the scattered hairs on her chin, the beard of an adolescent boy. Angelica was a fat woman, vast; suddenly she seemed to become even larger -- like a great plastic balloon that had been inflated while we had been together -- and at the same time, having swollen, become fragile and unprotected. On an impulse, I said, `All right, you can stay here till morning.'

Still grasping my hand, Angelica let out a small sob that shook her ample breast. Large tears fell from her eyes. `Thank you, thank you!'

`You can sleep on that sofa,' I said drily, trying to prevent the dramatic scene from turning maudlin.

She stretched her immense body out on the sofa, completely filling it.

`I could never live in a fourth-floor walk-up. I'd die within a week,' she said.

`I moved here precisely because it has no elevator.'

`Who does that wheelchair belong to?'

`It's mine,' I said, sitting in the chair. I had brought the wheelchair. So? Did I really not want to forget?

`Are you unhappy?'

`Yes.' I wasn't ashamed to confess to that monstrous woman that I was unhappy.

`Usually men don't get sad. At least the ones I know. Why is your place so messy? It looks like a hurricane hit it.'

As soon as she said this, she went to sleep, without giving me time to answer. She snored, droning like a beetle.

I went to the bedroom, closed the door and lay down without removing my shoes. Ruth hated me going to bed in my shoes. I opened a book at random. I don't know how long I stared at the pages without reading.

Daylight came. I went to the living room to see Angelica.

She was gone. I have no idea how she left so silently. The apartment door was slightly ajar. The brown-paper package was on the table with a note, written on a title page that she had ripped out of a book. It wasn't a book I especially cared about, but that predatory gesture irritated me.

`My friend,' Angelica's tiny writing was hard to read. `Thank you very much for saving my life. In today's cruel and selfish world it is surprising to find a man as generous as you. Please take care of this package for me, hide it well, and one day I'll come back for it. Your friend Angelica.'

My friend Angelica. I looked at the package. What should I do with it? The best thing would be to throw it away. As I was taking it to the trash chute, I remembered the German producer who was supposed to meet me that afternoon. I needed to re-read the letter outlining his offer. I put the package back on the table and went to look for Dietrich's letter.

The meeting was not until the afternoon, but I went out in the morning, leaving the apartment in complete disarray. I liked wandering about the streets, seeing all the people. But that day I didn't look at anyone; I was thinking about Ruth, about Liliana, about the infamous work I was doing for my brother the television evangelist, about the difficulties I was having in arranging financing for a new film. Besides that, for the first time in my life I was experiencing a kind of distrust, even fear, of the people passing by -- men hiding behind their beards, women camouflaged by cosmetics and wigs, children who looked like dwarfs, or vice versa. The automobiles, making irritating noises and giving off black smoke, seemed ready to run me down. Even the cloudless sky exhibited a false blue, a Fra Angelico badly restored. What the devil was happening to me?

Later, feeling hungry, I went into a restaurant. On the way in I bought a film magazine at the news-stand.

Only a few tables were occupied. Normally anyone, anyone at all, can distract me, but that day, as soon as I sat down, I opened the magazine and began reading without looking at the people around me. I gave the waiter my order and continued to read, waiting for the meal to be served. But once, raising my eyes from the magazine, I sensed that a man was observing me surreptitiously. At that instant both he and I glanced away quickly, as if we were afraid of each other.

I went back to my reading. But the man kept on casting furtive glances at me. I stared at him defiantly. He stared back in the same way.

Then I noticed that the man looked like my father in his last days in the hospital bed, the bones standing out in his gray, dying face. Unexpectedly, I felt a pain so great that my eyes filled with tears. Seeing that the man at the next table was watching my suffering, I asked, him brusquely: `Is there something you want to say to me?'

We both froze and looked into each other' s eyes in surprise. In that restaurant with its mirrored walls, there was no one at the next table: I was looking at myself, at my own reflection. It was I, that haggard person who looked like my father. My heart stopped. When my father died he was almost forty years older than I was now! Was that aged, ravaged face mine?

`You're not going to eat?' the waiter asked, pointing to the plate in front of me. I had spent a long time thinking, without touching the food.

I went back to walking the streets. What the devil was happening to me?

My father was a handsome man with many girlfriends, a man who played tennis, swam and was never ill, even with a cold -- until his cerebral hemorrhage. He was always involved with `hussies', as my mother called them, and in chronic business failures. He'd had a fur business, in a city where it was hot as blazes practically all year round. Naturally it went bankrupt, but his customers were never prettier, despite being so few. Earlier he'd had a hat shop and women had stopped wearing hats. At the end he had a small dry-goods shop -- he'd always had stores that were frequented mainly by women -- on Senhor dos Passos Street. My mother used to drop into the shop to see if some hussy was there. Sometimes they argued at dinner-time. In reality my mother did the arguing and he remained silent; if she wouldn't stop fighting he would get up from the table and go out. On such days my mother would go to the bedroom and cry. I would go to the window and spit on the heads of the people passing by and look at the luminous neon sign of the store across the street. That kind of light still attracts me even today and has yet to be captured by cinema or television. When my father returned, much later, my mother's desperation would have passed and I would see her go to the kitchen to make him a glass of warm milk. Once he told me it was too bad that men had to be judged like race horses, by their record. `Your father's problem,' my mother once told me, `is that he's very good-looking.' She didn't see him become paralyzed, nor did she have to clean up the feces and urine in his clothes, nor have to bear the immeasurable sadness in his look as he thought about the hussies. My father was still a good-looking man when my mother died.

The pitiless lucidity with which I now thought about my father filled me with horror -- we can't with impunity see the people we love as they really are. In that mirror, for the first time I had seen his poignant face, his face that was mine. How could I be turning into my father, him, the sick man?

I arrived at the Copacabana Palace Hotel promptly at three o'clock. I called Dietrich's room and we agreed to meet at the poolside bar. I hadn't met him before. I tried to imagine what his face would be like.

He approached with his hand out, saying `I'm Dietrich.' He was accompanied by a woman carrying a book.

`I know you're a very busy man, as am I, so let's get straight to the point,' he said after we had ordered drinks. We spoke in English. `We saw your film The Holy War , which is going to the Latin American Film Festival in East Berlin, and we want you to take part in our project.'

Two years had gone by since I had finished The Holy War . The film's backers still hadn't managed to recoup their investment.

`You've seen my film?'

`Yes,' he said. `I really liked it.'

Dietrich's assistant appeared indifferent to the conversation. Her interest was in the people in the pool.

`What did you think of our proposal?'

Their proposal, which I had received earlier by mail, was for me to film Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry in Germany.

`I still don't have an answer. I've been very busy.'

The woman pushed the book in front of her toward me. So she wasn't as distant as she appeared.

I looked at the book. Collected Stories. Isaac Babel . On the cover was a robust, almost fat man looking to one side, a fur cap on his head, wearing a uniform jacket trimmed with gold braid and with wide sleeves, also with gold trim. He looked like someone dressed for a Carnival dance in the 1920s. I had seen that face before. When I see a face, even in a photograph, I never forget it.

`That's Babel. This is practically everything he ever wrote.'

`I know. May I keep the book? I seem to have lost mine, or at least I don't know where it is.'

`We brought it for you. We'd like to have you go to Berlin to talk with our people. Are you planning to attend the festival?'

`I still haven't had confirmation from the organizers ... I haven't received the program, still don't have the plane ticket ...'

`We left a ticket for you at Lufthansa. Connecting in Frankfurt with Pan Am. Lufthansa doesn't go to Berlin. A carryover from the war.' He laughed. `We'd like you to leave right away. For preliminary discussions. All expenses paid, of course.'

`I have some things to wrap up.'

`We can wait a few days.' He stood up as he said this. He handed me a card. `Phone and advise us of your arrival date. I'll wait for you at the airport in Berlin.'

Chapter Two

Dietrich struck me as a serious type. When I had received the letter from Germany I hadn't attached much importance to his project, even though I was anxious to get back to film-making. But after our interview the proposal had taken on new significance.

I shut myself up in my apartment, reading and re-reading Babel and making notes. At first I was motivated merely by the desire to get back to film-making after two years away from it directing commercials for TV. But as I re-read Babel's stories my interest grew.

I was working on the part of the script that describes the death of Dolguchov, to get an idea of the potential of Babel's text, when my brother Jose, the television evangelist, phoned. He wanted to talk about the film I was doing for his weekly TV program. He called daily with suggestions.

`I have to reach the hearts of the faithful. You do good work,' he said, `but I think I ought to be more direct, like the Americans, say that I need money for the day-care centers, the nursing home ...'

A hateful conversation. I agreed to go to his house in Ipanema at nine pm.

I went back to the death of Dolguchov. Babel doesn't say how the Cossack Afonka applies the coup de grace to Dolguchov. The scene was described by Babel in this way: `They spoke briefly. I did not hear a word. Dolguchov held out his papers to the sergeant and Afonka secreted them in his boot and shot Dolguchov in the mouth.' This was much better than the scene I had written. The reader didn't need to know exactly how Afonka shot Dolguchov in the mouth, needed no details to see and feel, to imagine what was happening. The reader wasn't told what Afonka's face looked like, or Dolguchov's, at the moment the shot was fired, but he or she knew everything that mattered at that instant. In the film I could, for example, place the camera so that it framed Liutov and the coup de grace could be audible only, but that would take away from the power of the narrative. Or I could show the landscape, the sky or whatever, as the shot was heard. That would be a cheap syntactical trick that would weaken the scene even further and deprive the spectator of the tension that Babel had built up. But did that matter? Who among the millions of semi-illiterates produced by the educational institutions, consumers of a comfortable art represented by pop music, by the movies and television, would be familiar with Babel? All they would know of Babel would be my film. In other words, very little.

It was time to go and see my brother. In the taxi I thought: Afonka puts a shot in Dolguchov's mouth. Fine. What kind of shot? Babel doesn't say. I had Afonka using a revolver. How would the scene play with a rifle?

It was after eleven when I got to Jose's mansion, one of the last remaining in Ipanema.

Alone in the living room, he was watching the video I had made. He wasn't wearing the girdle he normally used so the faithful wouldn't see the size of his paunch. `You're late,' he said softly. He hated waiting, but he had learned to control his irritation. He saved it for his preaching, when he inveighed against sin and the devil. `Gislaine has already gone to bed.' Gislaine was the woman he'd married back in the days when he still sold used cars.

He rewound the tape. `I like the film, you know. The photography is beautiful, and I come out of it well. I liked your idea of putting in that young couple, the woman believing in what I say from the start and the man doubting, and then, when I finish my sermon, the man is convinced and nodding his head in agreement with what I'm saying.'

`You'll find that in the publicity films of any televangelist,' I said, knowing he didn't like to be called that. But Jose pretended to ignore my observation.

`Only here, in this short bit at the end, we could add what I spoke to you about.' Jose froze the image. `Here I could make a frank and direct appeal to the members of the congregations, asking them to contribute to the spread of our Church and to the upkeep of its social work. No hypocrisy. As the prophet Malachi said, "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in my house, and prove me now herewith." A direct kind of message.'

His Church was the Evangelical Church of Jesus Savior of Souls. Over ten thousand people contributed part of their pay to the Church every month, voluntarily. The majority of them were domestics and laborers earning the minimum wage.

`Malachi ...' I said.

`The name means Angel of the Lord. He's the last of the twelve minor prophets.'

Jose knew how to sell. He had dropped out of school, while still a boy, to sell things. He'd been a street peddler selling smuggled trinkets, then he'd sold encyclopedias door to door, then used cars, and now he was selling the salvation of souls.

We watched the film several times. When he was assured that I would add the parts he wanted, he offered me a whiskey. Then he asked what I thought of his running for senator in the forthcoming elections. `We evangelists need strong representation in Congress. But I have doubts about whether, at the moment, it might hurt my Church. We're growing fast; maybe this isn't the time for me to divide my efforts.'

He stopped talking and took a swig of whiskey. I said nothing. I could see a conspiratorial gleam in his eye. `I'm going to surprise you,' he said, taking another swallow. I noticed he was hesitating; but he had already begun his revelation. `Brother, the day isn't far off when this country will have a pastor as president.'

I left Jose's house depressed, as always happened when I visited him. He lacked the essential qualities -- love, compassion, charity, tolerance. He had no love for his fellow man, which, contrary to popular belief, did not keep him from loving himself.

It was late, but there were still people in lower Leblon. I went to the Pizzeria Guanabara and ate a pizza standing up at the counter on Ataulfo de Paiva, along with taxi drivers, a couple of homosexuals and a prostitute. Then I crossed the street and headed toward home. I passed several young people, of both sexes, sitting on the steps of a bank, some of them high, some waiting for the dealer, others waiting for customers, waiting for Godot, waiting for the film (me, certainly), waiting for the night to end, for life to end. It was in the midst of these musings that I saw a girl get up from the steps of the bank and come in my direction. She was wearing tight jeans and had thick legs and thin arms. The make-up on her mouth and eyes, and her dark hair, gave her very white face a morbid fragility.

`Hi,' she said.

I turned away. She came after me and took my arm as we walked.

`I said hi and you didn't answer.'

I stopped. I looked at her. She couldn't be more than sixteen at most.

`What do you want me to say?'

`At least say hi.'

`Hi.'

`Wanna buy me some grub at the Guanabara?'

I kept quiet, thinking.

`Later I'll go home with you if you want.'

The girl had a decent and deserving face, even if perverted; she might be a student prostituting herself to buy drugs. Whatever it was, she promised release and tenderness.

`What's your name?'

`Dani.'

`Let's go,' I said. We crossed the street, back to the side where the Guanabara was.

`Can I order a steak and fries?'

`You can order anything you want.'

When her food arrived, Dani asked, `Aren't you going to eat anything?'

`I'm not hungry.'

She ate voraciously. Between forkfuls she stopped and smiled gently. She chewed first on one side then on the other, a harmonious thing, healthy, bovine, perfect, to be envied.

`Well?' she said.

`Well what?'

`What now?'

`What now what?'

`Now.'

`Now what?'

`Now.'

We were standing on the sidewalk.

`Good night,' I said.

She held me by the arm. `I have a rubber; you don't have to be afraid.'

`It's not that. I'm tired.'

When I got home I sat in an armchair and stared at the ceiling. Ruth's diary was still on the floor. The disorder of things seemed to have increased.

I went back to working on the script. I had to decide what to reply to Dietrich; he'd only given me a week.

I rewrote the scene, starting with the moment Dolguchov is found by Liutov and Grishchuck lying against a tree. His legs are spread and extended, his boots dirty and torn; his belly is ripped open and his guts are visible, as well as his beating heart. Dolguchov asks Liutov to kill him: `The Poles are coming back to do their dirty work. Here are my papers. You'll write and tell my mother how it happened.' But Liutov doesn't have the courage to kill him and, spurring his horse, rides off. Dolguchov stretches out, after first examining the bluish palm of his hand. `All right then, run away, you pig.' Then Afonka arrives and asks what's going on.

My text went like this: Afonka comes up to Dolguchov. He dismounts. The two men talk, the one on foot, covered with dust, radiating strength, and the dying man lying on the ground. Liutov, watching from a distance, can't hear what they're saying. Dolguchov gives Afonka his papers. Afonka puts them in his bag. He goes at once to his horse and withdraws the rifle from the saddlebow. Then, with slow but firm steps, he returns to Dolguchov, the light of the setting sun behind him. Dolguchov, supporting himself on his elbows, raises his head slightly and looks at Afonka. Afonka places the rifle barrel in Dolguchov's acquiescent mouth and shoots.

It was late when I turned out the light. To me, sleep was, was -- what?

Dream. A woman with no face, beside me with her lips full of white foam, gives off a strong odor of wrapped presents, with dark fissures in the middle of her body. (In reality I don't see this, but it's what is happening.) `Are you ashamed to be dancing in front of me,' I ask her -- is Ruth the woman without a face? -- `ashamed of me with my callused hands and scarred prick who danced on the tiled pavement on Vieira Fazenda Street kissing on the mouth a girl with a dark false tooth?' Iron and fire in my head, hot coals in my retinas, saliva and sweat, shit and piss, bones, muscle. It's three o'clock; the neighborhood is sleeping in front of color television. A voice: `Careful with the head wound!' The photo of my mother, in a frame edged in mother-of-pearl, fills all of the invisible screen.

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Vast Emotions and Imperfect Thoughts

0880015837

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