It’s that Kurt had practically turned into an old man — and I, if I stopped to take note, would no doubt find myself a man and not the boy that Kurt pulled out of jail.
A period had passed since the day Kurt brought me to be with him, and now there was no denying it: this period had been longer than I had supposed.
And I wondered, a wave of goosebumps passing over the flesh of my scalp: Why this lapse in recognizing such a duration?
In any case, if I managed somehow to cure this lapse, if my memory ran backward to reconstruct this time, who would be able to evaluate its accuracy?
Something happened, I said to myself, and the secret seems to have been lost inside me, or maybe there, inside Kurt, a man unshaken by tears or any sort of commotion. And there he was, sitting in the backseat of the taxi, waiting for me to get in and remain beside his infinite dryness until we got to the airport, then from one airport to another, and from there to the manor for who knows how many more years, and from the manor, finally, to the edge of a hole — certainly the same as Gerda’s.
I sat beside Kurt. Gerda’s casket had already gone on ahead — it would obviously get crammed deep into the entrails of the airplane so that none of the passengers would see it.
As the taxi drove along Guanabara Bay, Kurt raised his hand in a tremulous gesture, and recalled that, years ago, he had come to Rio on business by himself a few times, in those days he stayed at the Copacabana Palace, he had an old friend who lived in Rio, younger than him, heir to a large fortune, who later died of leukemia — at the mention of the friend’s death I looked over at Kurt, he was taking pains to hold his gaze, looking out over Guanabara Bay — this friend had taken him for nights out on the town in Rio, in his company Kurt had even drank cachaça, until then he’d never tasted it, but it wasn’t pure cachaça, it was mixed with Coke, and this mixture was called samba-in-Berlin, samba-in-Berlin was what we ordered in the good old days, Kurt was saying carefully, without registering any emotion, the strange thing was that he started repeating the story of his trips to Rio: the friend, heir to a solid fortune, the two of them in the arbor at the Copacabana Palace, a world-famous actress whose name he’d now forgotten surrounded by photographers, and the story would stop when he got to that mixture of cachaça and Coke, the samba-in-Berlin, then he started over, repeating what he’d said before — those trips to Rio, the heir friend — always adding a detail or two, the late afternoon on the beach at Urca, the window of his hotel room facing the beach, and of course, topping it all off was the samba-in-Berlin — three, four, five times, as though he were trying to illuminate a point that kept escaping him, making it necessary to start all over again, two, three more times, and so on, until we arrived at Galeão airport and Kurt finally stanched the flow of his memories. His last phrase:
“The samba-in-Berlin went down harsh.”
Well, I won’t be seeing Berlin this time, I reflected as Kurt passed some bills to the cabbie. But I need to man up, was what I whispered into my shirt collar, turning to see Rio for the last time, an arm’s length away from the open airport door.
I took the napkin from that airport lunch counter and started to take down the poem, tapping on the bar with my fingers to the rhythm of the last lines I’d put on paper: A shot in the yard out front / A hardened fingernail scraping the tepid earth — and I went on like that for six or seven more lines.
On the plane, the only open seats were separate from each other. I sat down and took a deep breath. Poor Kurt, I thought as the plane took off, poor everyone who had such a heavy burden. Kurt slept the whole way, seated three rows in front of me.
About halfway through the flight, with my tray all messy and up against my chest, a glass of wine washing down my dessert, the flight attendant passed and smiled at me, and since we were going through some turbulence I gave her a bit of a yellow smile. When she passed by again maybe I would tell her I wrote poems — the start of a conversation that might interest her in me, since I ought to have kept in mind that I was no longer a young boy, but a man in the fullness of my functions in need of a woman to keep me company — Kurt would need to give his blessing to this union, preferably with a blonde girl like Gerda seemed she’d once been, he’d be so satisfied he’d give me half his fortune, opening the way not only to Germany but to who knows what other quadrants, and once I’d divorced the dumb blonde, a different woman in every hotel room.
While we were waiting for our bags near the escalator in the Porto Alegre airport, I looked out the window onto the runway and saw our plane disgorge Gerda’s casket from the lower compartment of the plane, near the tail — the chestnut coffin was lowered down with ropes, as if it were being birthed from the entrails of some gigantic animal, the coffin, and inside it Gerda, whom I’d savagely bitten the night before — I don’t know if the person who washed and dressed her noticed the marks my teeth left on I don’t remember what part of her body, all I know is that she moaned, cried, seconds later shouted, My God, looked me in the eye for the first time, deeply, then died.
Across the runway, two men were pushing a sort of litter onto which they’d place the coffin.
It was a sunny day, just one or two clouds.
A man in a white jumpsuit was coming down the runway, obviously some sort of airport official, he looked at me and seemed to understand, because he closed his eyes when he saw me, then threw his glance to the side, as though he’d already seen enough — I could still see that his expression had turned a bit nauseated, and when he looked in my direction again his gaze looked numbed, refusing to see.
The late afternoon shadows had already insinuated themselves among the branches of the Protestant cemetery, the discreet headstones engraved almost exclusively with German names. Kurt and I were walking down a path and our steps made a cadence on the flagstones. Ahead of us, a gravedigger was pushing a little cart that carried Gerda’s casket. The wheels could’ve used an oiling, they made an infernal noise. From time to time the vision of an iron cross, stark, made my head pulse. Gerda’s grave just wouldn’t arrive. The gravedigger was really putting an effort into pushing the little cart, steeply bent over, his ass sticking out at us, pants straining at the seam between his enormous buttocks. I noticed it was getting darker. And the gravedigger started down another path.
At that time of day it was hard to discern the bottom of the grave. The gravedigger asked Kurt if he’d like to open the casket one last time. Kurt shook his head no, and nearby a bell began to toll.
I threw a shovelful of earth into the hole.
We caught a taxi right there on what they called the melancholy hill, the city lights shining below, passing down the avenue with grave after grave on both sides of the road, I remembered the times I’d spend whole days up there, back when I lived in the Glória squat. All that seemed to have ended a long time ago, so long, but at the same time the memory galled me, made me want to vomit, stick my finger down my throat and expel all that detritus from my memory.
Our arrival at the manor.
The power was out. We lit lanterns.
I found a horrible bug underneath the stove. It could have been a spider but it looked more like a hangman. I was on my knees and I smashed it with the base of my lantern. The moon was full. The low sky, clotted with stars, was coming in the kitchen window. December, but the night couldn’t be called warm — because it was windy. I was crawling along the kitchen tiles with lantern in hand, looking for something that Kurt couldn’t find. I was crawling across the kitchen without much hope for my search: he didn’t have the faintest idea of where I could find it. It was a December night, bright, so bright that I almost didn’t need a lantern.