Kurt had the same solemn air as his wife, Otávio did not. Otávio seemed like the plebeian of the household, besides the maid, obviously, who served lunch and stared at me curiously, lowering her eyes theatrically when they encountered mine.
Otávio was the one spinning the yarn, even though at times he obeyed the long silences I’d say were almost tense, if it wasn’t for the sound of dishes and silverware slightly diluting the exposition of those pauses.
I’d never eaten so well and was hoping the wine would be at all future lunches. Everything led me to believe that my time had arrived, and I’d cling tooth and nail to this unique opportunity that had come out of nowhere and was heading who-knows-where — that’s right, I’d never let it escape, even if I had to do exactly what they wanted, this was mine, and the best thing would be for me to forget my shitty past.
Seated at the desk in my room each day I tried to fill the blank pages in the drawer, writing my lines as I looked out the window at the eucalyptus, and as I wrote, the image of the eucalyptus overflowed and occupied my entire field of vision until it became something I could no longer distinguish, until I suddenly returned to the things that surrounded me inside that big house: those two men, Kurt and Otávio, and that woman, Gerda, who all seemed to want me there, without even asking for anything in exchange, as if they only wanted my negligent company as I wrote my verses, a silent shepherd guiding them to old age.
A fog. I put my hands in my pockets and went out for a walk — a few swallows were eating the still-warm shit of a horse that was wandering away through the pasture — I saw a gymnastic bar, ran, did a few somersaults around the bar, hung by my arms, did some chin-ups, broke a sweat, swayed with my arms stretched out, finally jumped off, slipped, fell, clapped one hand against the other, got up, ran, went up a small hill, saw that on the other side two men were fighting at the foot of the hill, and those two men were Kurt and Otávio. Even in the fog I could tell they were wounded here and there, blood at the corner of Kurt’s mouth, on his shoulder, and down Otávio’s arm ran a thread that, from that distance thick with mist, looked more black than red. They were fighting in silence, sometimes falling and rolling together, hurting themselves even more.
Suddenly they ceased fighting, stopped in front of one another, half staggering, then went their separate ways. From his shaky gait, Kurt looked to be the more afflicted.
Kurt didn’t turn up at dinner that night, Gerda said he had the flu, Otávio was eating more than usual, talking with Gerda about the number of days that remained before he commemorated his return to Brazil from Italy as a grunt in the Brazilian Expeditionary Force.
On my evening walks I usually avoided the shed where Amália, the maid, slept, at the edge of a black and muddy lake, but that night when I realized I was standing in front of the boards that formed the door of the shed, I got the urge to knock — Amália opened, asked if I wanted to come in, a little cold inside, in the roof of the shed were open slats, the half-moon.
I sat on the bed, there was only the light of a candle on the nightstand, a radio I couldn’t see was playing some Paraguayan folk music, a harp, a man singing in Spanish of grinding rocks between his teeth, such was his passion for his absent love — in the darkness, smelling the heavy scent of the sheets I felt like playing dead or pretending I was a fag or something. I’d let Amália take all the initiative, even if I were on the edge of cumming I wouldn’t move a finger in her direction.
Amália lifted up a corner of the mattress, brought out some newspaper clippings and showed them to me: it was the news from when they threw me in jail, but I didn’t look long enough to see, averting my eyes as if none of that had anything to do with me. Amália brought the candle closer, looked at the photos, then watched me look away, confessed that she found me different, very different, she didn’t know just how, she was kneeling on the floor between my legs, asking if she could sit beside me, but I didn’t say anything, closed my eyes, and with closed eyes I saw a tremble in the shadows provoked by the flame. I let Amália’s mouth kiss across my chest, nothing in me reacted, just intensified breathing, the sound of my zipper, the wet mouth, hot, descending, but I was quiet, not moving, Amália was sitting on my legs, she was getting there, now she was licking my closed eyelids, calling me lover, lover came out of my mouth without my meaning it to, lover, I repeated and I came — and I opened my eyes.
From then on we met every night in the shed. On the first night it felt like springtime, as soon as I got there Amália leaned up against me, put her arms around my neck, and whispered that she knew I wanted a son. She told me she’d read in a report that I confessed the desire for a child moments before entering my cell, and on that occasion Amália wanted to write me a letter, so that if she’d known how to find the right words, she’d write to offer to be the mother of my child.
Amália told me more, that one drunken night I’d babbled in my sleep about the story of a child who woke up crying as I went through the dark on a cold morning to do the milking — I was sitting on a little stool beside the cow and had put a cloth over my legs so I wouldn’t wet my pants with milk, the child still crying.
After that night I started taking every precaution: when I was about to cum I’d pull my dick out from inside Amália and cum on her stomach, just like in porn flicks, the guy ejaculating outside the woman, who then rubbed herself with cum and in some cases licked it.
Other times I preferred Amália from behind — it was more relaxed because I didn’t need to worry that as soon as I got to the edge I’d have to pull out, and Amália had started to like it more and more when I did her from behind, telling me she’d never done it that way before, but then it became frequent that in the middle of our caresses she’d turn over and ask me to get inside her.
She never breathed another word about a child.
I don’t know if any of the other residents at the manor found out about my nocturnal absences. One morning as I was returning from one of my encounters with Amália, I ran into Otávio, seated at the kitchen table drinking, pulling hard from a bottle of gin. I sat in front of him and looked at his bulky features, his sometimes jowly habit of chewing on nothing, as if ruminating on some gory predilection that prohibited mention — Kurt and Gerda seemed to prefer things left unsaid, the intervals — so that he was obliged to remain there, turning things over, turning that strength, perhaps already useless, deteriorated, between what remained of his teeth.
But when I sat down he stopped chewing, looked at me, and said:
“It was always like that.”
“What’s that, Otávio?” I asked.
“Like that…”
“What?” I insisted.
Otávio, without stopping:
“Ever since I saw him for the first time, riding his horse, when he looked at me half-cockeyed from above and asked if I wanted work, ever since then I’ve become his trained bloodhound, the one that tries things first, to save his master from falling into any traps, so on any trip, in any unknown place, if he thought the smell of the food was off, he’d ask me to take the first forkful and see if everything was all right, same with women, some of them I’ve tasted first, before him, like wine; it was the fear that poison could be hidden anywhere, so I tried first — this lethal mistrust always afflicted him, he kept me fed and housed to try to cure it, he took me on some trips, never once let me off my leash.”
The next morning, on one of my walks, I once again happened upon Kurt and Otávio going at it. I watched from behind a tree, only this time everything looked worse: there came a moment when, with a blow to the chin, Kurt fell and didn’t get up. Otávio hovered around Kurt for a bit, then finally decided to drag him by the legs back to the manor.