When it gets light out I’ll turn to the interior of the cell, and the newspaper with the story about me will be passing from hand to hand, and this will calm me, restore my sleep, because the five will see proof that I am one of them.
The day was breaking as I walked around the cell, and for every eye that opened, every stretch, yawn, fart, belch, I was there watching, and I did the same myself, stretched, yawned, pretended to fart, belched, and this was how I managed to penetrate that set of ugly, spent bandits.
A prison bitch with a turban on her head appeared on the other side of the bars and passed a newspaper to one of the prisoners: the paper was already open to the police blotter, and there was my photo — me seated there in front of the sheriff, my busted sneaker — and beside my photo a three-by-four-inch portrait of Mariana.
I didn’t get to read anything written in the story, not even the headline, I only had time to see the photos — I wanted to take advantage of the bitch’s presence somehow, so I could, I don’t know, say I needed to talk with the sheriff, so maybe she could do me a favor and talk to him. Sure, the bitch replied, smiling — she couldn’t stop smiling.
Do me a favor, I repeated, and the urge to shake the bars came over me — I went as far as clenching the bars, but as I was about to shake them the urge to vomit overtook me and I stopped.
I saw that the bitch had taken off. My cellmates were making a big commotion with the newspaper, calling me a retard and letting out the strangest cackles — the way I’d like to laugh if I were so bold.
In that cell retard became my name. I went closer and mentioned taking the newspaper from them. They held me down and started tickling me, poking me, yanking on my dick — one had huge fingernails, he could only scrape when he touched me. In the middle of the confusion someone bit my hand, CHARGE! I yelled, and I threw myself headlong into one of their black leather jackets, I headbutted two, three times against the jacket of I couldn’t tell which prisoner, my head spun, and then my eyes hurt. I felt like I was on the verge of the flu.
I was wiping snot on the sleeve of my shirt when I heard a voice from behind me calling: the jailor, telling me to come with him.
The metal bars half opened and I went out, the jailor steering me by the arm down the corridor, I heard the murmur of the sheriff’s room, but when I got to the door they all fell silent, two flashes exploded, I noticed a huddle of reporters in a corner taking notes, and then suddenly the huddle broke open and they too went quiet, and in the middle of the reporters Mariana’s scared expression appeared: she looked panicked, regretting that she’d reported me to the police, and from the looks of it she would have asked me for help if she could — she was so young and was so flagrantly scared, there, in the middle of those reporters asking her questions — I went toward her, but when I got close various arms detained me. Mariana took three steps in my direction, slightly lifted her arm as if to reach out to me, maybe to undo her denunciation, but she knew it was already too late.
They pulled her away and took her through a door beside the sheriff’s desk. Strangely, I didn’t see the sheriff. I felt a touch on my shoulder, looked back, it was a man wearing a hat and a black overcoat — he reminded me of a photo I’d seen of a street in Vienna in the thirties — and he didn’t take his hand off my shoulder, just told me I was coming with him, I was leaving this place, I was going to a clinic in São Leopoldo, and he handed me a package, telling me that inside were some books of poetry and some paper for me to write on.
Wow, I sighed to myself, my entire life looks like it’s about to change. More flashes exploded, and I said that yeah, I was ready, we could go.
The reporters and photographers stopped at the door to the sheriff’s office, the man opened the car door, I got in, and he said, softly: and now São Leopoldo.
The clinic was a two-story building: we walked in through a garden full of arbors, with a white statue of a reclining woman pouring water from an amphora resting in her hands — the amphora was the source of a stream that ran beneath a little bridge we were crossing. On a plaque over the door was written ALMANOVA CLINIC.
I looked at the man, he seemed imperturbable, like someone whose sole mission was to install me in that clinic. We went up the steps, walked down a long hallway, he stopped in front of a door, opened it, asked me to enter.
I sat on the first thing I saw, a bed. A bed with a white sheet, a flattened pillow. The man asked me to lie down. I thought it was a good idea to try to sleep at last.
I dreamed I was writing a poem in which two horses were whinnying. When I woke up, there they were, still whinnying, only this time outside the poem, a few steps away, and I could mount them if I wanted.
I gave a few good pats to their haunches, and guided them, with waving movements of my outstretched arms, into a fenced pasture.
About a hundred yards away, on the top of a low hill, was a wooden house, yellow, puffing smoke from the chimney.
I went into the house and saw Mariana. She doesn’t have teenage breasts anymore, I muttered to myself.
We sat down to have some coffee, on opposite sides of the table. Mariana spread grape jelly on some bread, then handed me the slice.
I touched Mariana’s leg under the table. She trembled softly. I kneeled on the floor, crawled under the table on all fours, and started to lick her thighs.
The bedroom was dark, beside the bed a lit candle. On the wall, shadows. The wind was blowing outside. Mariana was lying down admiring the shadows — I got on top of her, calmly, very calmly, as if some unknown plan were guiding my instincts.
I woke up at the crack of dawn to get some milk from the corral, now that I was doing the milking in the mornings.
As I made my way to the corral with a pail in my hand, the sun was starting to rise: roosters were crowing, birds flocking. I went along a path through fields of low crops.
When I got to the corral, it was still a bit shadowy, but it didn’t take long to brighten up. Before sitting down on a stool next to the cow, I liked to make a few preparations for my daily chores — obsessively inspect the hay, make sure everything was tidy — I needed to straighten up in the morning, remind myself that Mariana and I liked to fuck in the hay. The first few times we got up feeling all itchy, but later we got used to it, to the point where one day we realized we no longer remembered to scratch.
After returning with the full pail it was already what you might call morning: the rooster had already shut up, and if the birds were still singing it wasn’t really noticeable.
I remember the morning when, returning from the corral, still in the middle of the path, I heard my son crying from afar for the first time. He’s getting to be strong, a real man, I thought. I opened the door — Mariana was breastfeeding the boy.
One night in bed, I brought my hand to rest in the wetness between Mariana’s legs, and said I wanted another son. It was a cold night.
It was freezing when I woke up, and I grabbed the pail and went out across the gravel with my coat collar turned up, thinking that now that it was winter the nights would be getting longer, and when I got to the corral I’d have to wait for a while before it got bright enough to do the milking.
I opened the gate, there was some light in the corral, I looked back and saw it was the moon, dim as it was, that dimly lit the spaces between animals. The cows started to moo. I walked toward the back of the corral, to the haystack.
I stopped, a few steps away from me was a dark shape.
I had a flashlight in my pocket, I shone it on the dark features: it was the man who had picked me up from the sheriff’s and brought me to Almanova Clinic. Even though I hadn’t thought about that slice of my life in a long time, the memory of this man occurred to me naturally, without any effort.