I knocked three times on the half-open door to Kurt’s room. I still had the lantern in my hand. In Kurt’s room there was another lantern. The lantern in Kurt’s room was on top of the nightstand. Kurt thanked me, said he’d already found what he was looking for. Do you need anything else? I asked. He said no, he didn’t need anything, he was going to sleep. If you need anything just give a shout, I said to the outline of his face.
The night was also entering through my bedroom window. Kurt didn’t just listen to Bach in the car, he liked to hear Bach all day long, preferably while closed up in his room. That night he couldn’t listen to Bach because the power was out. The truck with no muffler passing by on the road belonged to a guy I knew, the son of the owner of a small farm on the other side of the tall hill. One time he rolled the truck nearby and messed up his leg. Of all the stars that one is the brightest, my eyes tear up when I face it, like now. Kurt’s already snoring. The power’s back on.
I pick up the radio, pull the antenna way up. I turn out the light, lie down with the radio on my chest. I hear noises, interferences, spin the dial this way and that, voices from all over the world: a show in Portuguese coming from Moscow, Asian languages, French, English, German. One among the voices catches my attention, it speaks in Spanish and says: if you can hear me don’t change the station, stay where you are, keep everything intact and I’ll arrive in seconds to remake you, you will become another. Then comes a sort of ethereal music, the half-open door creaks like someone is pushing it, trying to get in, and the hand that’s now touching my arm suppresses me, and I know that I should annul myself in this way, without sorrow, so that another can come and take my place, I no longer exist here, I lack.
I awoke in the morning clutching the radio to my chest, low music badly tuned in. In the mirror I saw that during the night a zit had formed above my eyebrow. Big, very red and inflamed. The first thought I had was if Kurt had brought Gerda’s things from Rio — what I wanted to know: if I could find her makeup things, foundation, that’s what women call the flesh-toned paste I needed to see if I could find to blot out my zit.
Kurt was listening to Bach in his room. From six a.m. onward, he began to move implacably through his morning routine. So Kurt was in his room listening to Bach. I knocked three times on the closed door. He opened. I saw there was a woman inside with her back to the door. Leaning against the wall, looking down, like someone who felt sad, or maybe embarrassed — but from the thick black hair that fell down her shoulders and the way her left foot was resting on her right knee I had no doubts — is that Amália? I asked, and only later realized I’d pried into something before confirming what it was. Kurt said nothing — she turned and I saw her, fatter, her hips much wider — who knows where this penniless woman could have gone to return so corpulent, having left here a petite girl, almost unsatisfying, now returning so full of flesh.
“Hi, Amália.”
“Hi…”
Then I took hold of a finger on my left hand, raised an eyebrow, and told Kurt that I’d hurt my finger opening a window, asked if I could get the mercurochrome from the bathroom in his room (something I sometimes did). Kurt nodded yes and asked Amália to make him some coffee and see if the cow was still giving milk. And the two went out.
I opened the bathroom closet, rummaged around, ended up finding the foundation. With my usual tendency to overdo it, I plastered my forehead with foundation. Now no one would ever imagine I had that damn zit.
I went to find Amália. Not because her now-opulent flesh made her newly appealing in my eyes, nothing like that. It’s that a curiosity was gnawing me: to know what had happened to her, where she’d gone, with whom.
Amália was trying to milk a cow that recalled one of those animals decaying on drought-scorched earth.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“I went crazy for one of the landless squatters, I followed him. I ended up pregnant, ran away, got bigger and bigger, so swollen that one day as I went through a little village I stopped in the pharmacy to weigh myself: two hundred and fifty-three pounds. I was ready to pop. I looked for my sister and found her right where I suspected, twenty miles away — she pulled the thing from my belly faster than I could have imagined — I didn’t stick around long, I ran away through the countryside with that thing in my arms and drowned it in the first river I came to. They caught me, imprisoned me, now I’m here.”
“So then a long time really has gone by.” I affected fright, as though I was only then discovering it, at that instant.
I ran my fingers through the thick paste of sweaty foundation that was almost running into my eye.
“And the milk?” I asked.
“The milk won’t come out.” Amália yanked the cow’s teats and made a strong expression of either rage or repugnance.
Then the cow tottered, tottered, tried to take a few steps, fell back, collapsed, and upon collapsing, its bones made a muffled noise, as though there were soundproof glass between me and what I was watching.
“Bye, Amália,” I said.
As I neared the manor I saw the shape of a man on the porch, I could tell he was knocking on the door, a small suitcase at his feet — I saw Kurt open the door, the man entering, running his hand through his gray hair, and when the man ran his hand through his hair I understood it was Otávio with his old habit of running his hand through his grizzled hair.
First Amália, now Otávio: they’re coming back, I thought, they don’t know how to live out from under Kurt’s wing, they tried to extricate themselves but came right back to the center of what they never should have left.
And I, was I not another of Kurt’s charges? I couldn’t forget that he was already old, I didn’t have much time to get myself together and avoid ending up like the other two, stripped of everything that I’d managed to remake, far from here.
“How’s your mother, Otávio?” I asked, taking his cold hand.
“She died, just like Gerda died.”
Otávio was wearing a panicked expression. He’d transformed into a worn-out old man, a lump, larger than an avocado, had formed on the back of his head. He could barely turn his head, and when he tried he grimaced horribly in pain.
That afternoon I thought about appealing to Kurt’s heart, always so impassive, even with me, whom he seemed to hold in a certain esteem. So I invited Otávio to get some fresh air with me — he came along, and we went for a walk, he with a gimp leg, and when we got to the southern elevation I told him that tree over there is the finish line, that we’d play around a little, not exactly run like kids, just get him moving around a bit, try to warm up his rheumatic leg — come on, tag me, I said, and he came at me, dragging that leg, I ran backward, said come on, faster, I’m close to the line, he was gasping, exhausted from dragging his leg in my direction, drooling from pure excitement — Otávio, time had passed by him, too, plopped down, steadied one of his hands against a stone: Otávio’s tired, I said, he wants to go home, doesn’t he?
When we got back, I asked Kurt to lend me the car for the first time. I need to go back to Porto Alegre, I said. You don’t have a driver’s license, he replied. I told him not to worry. Otávio was sitting on the porch steps, bending over to look at an anthill.
I found a parking space on Riachuelo, and went walking down Borges. There, from Largo de Prefeitura all the way to Rua da Praia, a dense crowd was shouting. A windy night, a pamphlet blew between my legs. On the corner of Salgado Filho I asked a creole woman what was going on. She told me it was a rally for Lula, but he hadn’t arrived yet. A man was giving a speech on the platform, flags, everyone fired up. It was December, and there was an even fuller moon than the night before. Ah, next Sunday was the presidential election, the runoff, I mumbled to myself, so the creole woman couldn’t hear.