When Kurt’s thin lips finally closed, I concluded that never again would I see him laugh so effusively, I could barely believe how genuine his laughter had been — I wondered if he hadn’t had a fit of hysteria or something — and as the car descended the parking garage ramps the mood that came over us was the same one as always, reserved, sometimes bored, other times not, a silence from which a verse might spring, like in the car now, with Bach on the stereo, a lumberjack having a nap, holding the ax against his chest like a child.
I looked sidelong, examined Kurt’s profile, and without being able to contain it I let out a silent but stinky fart. I rolled down the window, said that the temperature wasn’t so bad, though the wind blowing against my ear was super cold — maybe Kurt hadn’t even noticed the smell, he seemed to be listening to the chorale, enjoying his German choral music. For my part I had no complaints, I was going to put up the window as soon as the smell went away, and then I’d pretend to rest my eyes, take a nap, dream that I was in Rio, or in Berlin, or maybe even Amsterdam.
I was awakened by Kurt’s voice calling me. In front of us was a huge line of stopped trucks with people piled on top of them. Farther ahead was a beautiful sunset, the teeth of a rake held up against the light. I rubbed my eyes, Kurt told me they were landless people who wanted to occupy a farm that was up around the next curve.
A soldier holding a pistol appeared. He leaned into the car on Kurt’s side, said there were a bunch of encampments already on the farm, but the Brigade had intercepted more than half of them — those who were in the trucks in front of us wouldn’t advance any farther.
The soldier told us we could drive along the shoulder.
Kurt started to drive along the shoulder, the car passing by those people perched on top of the trucks, crying children, a pregnant woman holding her belly, placards asking for a plot of land, settlement, agrarian reform. The car went along with some difficulty over holes and muddy patches, but as though to compensate, the landless people didn’t say a word to us, good or bad, and getting through them didn’t take long since we were already close to home.
Amália had once again thrown some junk on a fire — with a piece of wood she went about stirring it into the flame: a chair with a partial backrest and missing a leg was beside her, waiting its turn. I thought about whistling from the car, giving her a sign, but for the past few days Amália wouldn’t even look at me, lowering her eyes when she passed by, and I actually felt relieved that the thing with her had ended this way, without any effort on my part.
As Kurt parked, three huge dogs I’d never seen before ran up to the car, barking out their fury — one of them put its paws against my window. Kurt told me that in situations like this Otávio let the dogs loose. He asked me not to get out for now, then went in front of the car and started to scold the animals in German — slowly the dogs stopped barking and sat down around Kurt. He signaled for me to get out.
Otávio was on the porch, in a straw chair with a wide back, his hands nervously trying to cover a gun resting in his lap, he didn’t want to look at me as I went by.
I went to my room, night had already fallen, and up the road the landless people were striking matches, a pitiful flame would extinguish and then another would light up nearby. I leaned out the window and remembered a song that kids used to sing back in my Glória days, but I couldn’t get past the first verse, and even that single verse began to dilute in my head and came undone within minutes — it actually seemed like suddenly my destiny had overtaken me, along with all the songs that used to flow from my lips by heart, such that there would come a time when I’d look back and wouldn’t be able to recognize anything. Soon I’ll no longer need to lift a finger to evade my past, I thought with relief.
The dogs were perturbed, they wouldn’t stop barking, and I threw myself in bed with a deep fear of finding myself outside this situation which provided me a bed and everything else.
I rolled around on the mattress for hours on end — I found it strange they hadn’t called me to supper — the dogs were quiet now, but they weren’t sleeping, I could hear them pacing nearby, the cavernous respiration of beasts, a voice from up on the highway, certainly someone transmitting a warning across the distance, others responded, every now and then a child’s cry, then suddenly a shout, but this shout had come from the manor, and it was a woman’s, it was Gerda’s, and someone knocked on my door, Kurt asking me for help, Gerda was lying on the bed breathing with difficulty, Kurt said he was going to open up her nightgown a little, to alleviate the feeling of asphyxiation, and he opened the nightgown, and from between her shriveled breasts to beneath her navel was an ugly cut, and Kurt asked me to help him carry her to the armchair, I said I could do it myself, and I took Gerda in my arms, and as I carried her she put her arms around my neck and began to hiccup, I stopped, saw through the window in front of me that they were still lighting matches up on the highway, only now there were fewer flames flaring and extinguishing, and Gerda hiccupped while clasped to my neck, Kurt pointed to the armchair, I put her there, she wiped her hands across her eyes, stopped hiccupping.
The dogs had begun to bark again.
I went to the kitchen for a drink of water and found Otávio, who was seated with his hands on the table, a glass tipped over, a bottle of red wine without a label. I brought a glass of water to the table and sat down in front of him.
“So, Otávio?” I attempted.
He coughed, said that he was going back to his homeland, Jaguarão, to stay with his elderly mother — she couldn’t live by herself anymore, and he was tired of it here.
A few days went by in a downpour of rain, the landless wouldn’t budge from the highway. Sometimes troops of military police would get down from the Brigade trucks in nylon slickers that came almost down to their feet and stand there talking with a group of occupiers — one afternoon a lightning bolt struck nearby, rumbling everything, but it caused only a few shouts to ring out, children bawling, coughing, they must be drenched to the bone — my trip with Kurt and Gerda never materialized, I thought, because of the stalemate with the landless people practically on our doorstep.
After the thunderbolt, in the middle of all the commotion, I noticed that some of the children were slipping through the wire fence and running down to Amália’s shed. A lot of kids had gone in, and it surprised me that there wasn’t any noise coming from down there, as though when they entered the shed they lost their tongues or fainted or maybe made a pact of silence, the fact is that it intrigued me, and I decided to go take a look.
It was late afternoon, rather dark in the shed, a slew of completely mute children surrounded Amália: she was sitting on the bed, indifferent to a fly on her neck, another on her arm — near the lit candle, her face was awash in deathlike clarity and from her eyes ran tears, many tears. The children contemplated her.