3.14 looked at me with an expression of pity. Lots of people on Bishop’s Beach pitied Sea Foam. I never really understood this: Why pity him? A person who went swimming every day and laughed and said that there was the white hair of the sea; a person who spoke Cuban and knew the stars in the sky and the mathematical value of Pi and — who knew for sure? — a person who kept an alligator in a doghouse; maybe even a person who was happy, and only he could know this. 3.14 put his finger to his head to signal that Foam was cuckoo, demented, crazy, but to tell the truth I don’t know if Foam was crazy like those real crazies people talk about.
“Maybe he’s just a different kind of person,” as Granma Catarina said. “You kids have to show respect.”
I loved Sea Foam’s swims in the white foam.
“Let’s split, this is taking too long. We’ve got other business to settle.”
3.14 had those phrases of his: “other business to settle.” I figure he liked to imitate how the elders talked, and he also learned by heart lines from soap operas, even soap operas he had never seen: words spoken by Senhor Nacib in some episode of Gabriela or something, or some comrade politician someplace in the arsehole of the world in the Brazilian backlands, I think it was called Sucupira and he was something like Odorico Paranguaçu.
“It’s not ‘Paranguaçu,’” he corrected me, “it’s ‘Paraguaçu,’ and he’s one hilarious comrade.”
“But you haven’t even seen those soap operas, 3.14. Excuse me, but you can’t know.”
“You bet I know because people tell me about them. I know tons of lines from tons of soap operas my aunts saw when we weren’t even born.”
“But your aunts didn’t even have television. They were off in the bush with the guerrillas, shooing the mosquitoes off their legs.” I was giving him a ribbing.
“You’re full of it…In the bush they have medicines and plants that keep away the mosquitoes.”
“Just listen”—he didn’t like me to talk about this—“in the bush did they have paper to wipe their tails?”
“And in your Granma’s house, when you don’t have toilet paper, how do you clean up?”
“We’ve got newspaper pages…You just crumple them up a bit and they feel smooth.”
“Then in the bush they had leaves…You think being a guerrilla was a joke?” He got nervous when we took the piss out of the guerrillas.
“Cool it, I’m not talkin’ about the guerrillas. I’m just sayin’ that sometimes you must make up a few lines from those soap operas you haven’t even seen…”
“I’m not in the habit of making things up. It’s just that sometimes it’s necessary to do a bit of adapting.”
“What do you mean by ‘adapting’?”
“Like you mess around with things a bit…The story gets better and the person who’s listening enjoys it more.”
“I guess my grandmothers do a lot of adapting.”
“I guess so. Let’s get going.”
We came across Charlita with a piece of paper in her hand and a worried look on her face. She was sweating in the sun and her super ugly glasses were sliding off her nose.
“Hey, how come you don’t use one of those little straps to keep your glasses in place?”
“Straps are for Sea Foam’s alligator. If you like him so much, why don’t you use a strap?”
“Jeeze, you don’t have to talk like that.”
“How’s it going? Do we have results, Comrade?” There was 3.14 with that elder-talk.
“The results are tons of houses.”
“What are you guys talkin’ about?”
“Charlita’s discovered the mark they invented.”
“What mark?”
“For the houses that are going to be dexploded.”
“Isn’t it ‘exploded’?”
“I prefer ‘dexploded.’ Isn’t Sea Foam speaking Cuban all the time? Then I can speak Angolan here on Bishop’s Beach. Comrade Charlita, what’s the latest on the situation?”
“Lots of houses are marked. They mark them at the back, on the wall that faces the alley. They use a Soviet letter.”
“And the houses that don’t have a side facing the alley?”
“They mark the sidewalk. A little ways away.”
“Is your place marked, Charlita?”
“Yeah.”
“And my grandmother’s house?”
“That too. They even marked the gas station, the bakery and the Kinanga Cinema. Bishop’s Beach is gonna practically disappear.”
I felt a teary sadness rising into my eyes and had to pretend it was the sun. 3.14 also looked strange as he surveyed many of those houses of our neighbourhood of dust and children’s games. A huge tractor passed by very close to us. It was heavy and made a lot of noise but nobody got out of the way. The driver swore under his breath, the main gate of the Mausoleum opened and the tractor went inside. Then there was an odd silence.
“Good morning, Pioneers.” It was the Comrade Gas Jockey. “You have to leave now. I’m going to hose down the station.”
Half-smiling, we walked slowly in the direction of the house of Charlita’s father, Senhor Tuarles. The Comrade Gas Jockey did that almost every morning. He hefted his broom, put on rubber boots, unrolled a hose, turned on the faucet and there was no water.
“How strange, there’s no water in the faucet.” And he would put everything away again, very slowly.
What was strange were elders who did things over again every day in spite of knowing that nothing changes. How many years had it been since there had been water at that gas station?
We sat down on the sidewalk, between Granma Agnette’s house and that of Senhor Tuarles. A mark in pale ink was there, right on the edge of the potholed sidewalk.
“That’s the mark.”
“But you don’t even speak Soviet. How do you know that says they’re going to dexplode?”
“Cause yesterday morning in the middle of the night I saw a Soviet make that mark.”
“In the middle of the night? You were awake?”
“Not me. It was my Granma Maria.”
“Granma Maria was awake in the middle of the night? Then how is it that she gets up early in the morning to make her kitaba?”
“Granma Maria doesn’t need to wake up early because she doesn’t sleep.”
3.14 gave a doubtful look, but I believed Charlita. Every morning Granma Nhé says that she hasn’t slept even though I hear her snoring at night when I go to pee in the dark. But, for example, Granma Catarina doesn’t sleep at all. Either she sits in the rocking chair in her room, or she goes to the kitchen, or I hear the sound she makes when she goes up and down the stairs, but she doesn’t sleep. Or maybe she sleeps in the morning, but it’s unusual to find Granma Catarina moving around the house before noon. And if she moves around, she doesn’t speak.
“All that’s left for us to find out is when they’re going to do this.”
“I figure they won’t give us any warning.” Charlita spoke in a sad voice. “Because if they warn us, it’s going to cause an uproar. The day they dexplode is the day they’ll arrive with news of new houses, in a neighbourhood nobody’s ever seen.”
“If that neighbourhood doesn’t have the sea, what’s the Old Fisherman going to do?”
“And what about Sea Foam? Where’s he going to swim?”
“You guys aren’t seein’ the whole problem we got with this.” 3.14’s voice had become serious. “The problem is that there aren’t even any houses in that neighbourhood.”
“What do you mean?”
“Is it possible that neighbourhood exists?”
“It must exist, 3.14. Comrade Gudafterov says…”