If I Close My Eyes Now Read online

  About the Book

  If I close my eyes now, I can still feel her blood on my fingers. If only I had closed my eyes then, or kept my mouth shut, not told anyone about our discovery by the swimming hole, we could have gone back to dreaming about spaceships.

  A horrifying discovery by two young boys while playing in some mango groves marks the end of their childhood. As they open their eyes to the adult world, they see a place where storybook heroes don’t exist but villains and lies do . . .

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The High Mountains and Areas in Shadow

  Chapter 2: Out on the Prowl

  Chapter 3: Cowboys and Indians

  Chapter 4: Anita’s Birth

  Chapter 5: The People Out There

  Chapter 6: The Fragrance of Lavender

  Chapter 7: How Many Madalenas Are There in the World?

  Chapter 8: Mater et Magistra

  Chapter 9: Mao, Snow White and Another Anita

  Chapter 10: Josef and Svetlana

  Chapter 11: A Corpse of No Importance

  Chapter 12: The Snake Comes Out of Its Nest

  Chapter 13: São Paulo, 28 February 2002

  Chapter 14: Lausanne

  Chapter 15: 20 April 1961 and the Following Months

  Chapter 16: Brazil, 12 April 1961

  Read for more from Edney Silvestre

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ‘The dead don’t stay where they’re buried.’

  John Berger, Here Is Where We Meet

  IF I CLOSE MY eyes now, I can still feel her sticky blood on my fingers. Stuck to my fingers as it was in her blonde hair, and high on her forehead, on her arched eyebrows and black eyelashes, on her face, neck and arms, on the torn white blouse and the remaining buttons, on the bra ripped in two, on the nipple of her right breast.

  I had never smelt that pungent smell before. Ever afterwards I associated it with the odour of other women, the ones I knew intimately, the odour overpowering theirs, always taking me back to her. That mixture of sweet perfume, gouged flesh, sweat, blood and – as far as I could tell – salt. The smell you find close to the sea. When it sticks to your hair, for example. Not grains of salt, but the invisible, strong tang of salt you get on damp days by the sea.

  But back then I did not know the sea either; I had never smelt or seen it, so the smell of that woman in the mud, naked … I had never seen a naked woman, nor smelt the smell of a naked woman so close up. Well, she was not completely naked, but that breast with its big nipple, and … her thighs were splayed open, her skirt lifted, and I saw the tangled black hairs at the top of them, of her thighs, the point where her long legs met, and from there came – no, not from there, from all over her – came the smell of woman mingled with blood. I think she must also have shat herself, soiled herself the way I now know we all do at the moment when life leaves our body and it completely relaxes, the sphincter opens and … that’s another word I had never heard then. Or read. Sphincter. I was twelve years old and words like that were never spoken in my house. We didn’t even know such words existed.

  She was there, dead. Naked. Almost naked.

  I knew she was dead. Both of us knew it. Her skin was cold. The skin on her arm, which was the first thing we touched. The skin of her face, so … pallid. Was that the word, pallid? It was. With her mouth open. Half open. As if she were starting to smile. Big, dazzlingly white teeth, only partly visible, glinting between her soft lips. Had she been beaten? Were there other marks on her face? There were. But it was on her lips that the blood … I think I touched her lips. I don’t know. Yes I do, I did touch them. Smooth lips. Red lips. Blood-red lips. Red with blood or lipstick? With blood and lipstick. And mud. She must have twisted round when she fell. Or did she hit her face on the grass and mud? When the heel of her shoe got stuck, it snapped off and she almost flew over the grass and wet mud. Was that her last flight, filled with horror and sadness? Flying. A silent flight. Interminable. And, either struggling or surrendering, she registered the blue sky and the fresh autumn breeze, the cry of a bird and the killer’s breath, as the blade repeatedly punctured her flesh.

  Later, neither he nor I were able to say how many times she had been stabbed. Lacerated in so many places, her skin reminded me of the wounds of the Christ in the cathedral’s central nave, his arms spread wide just like hers in the mud, beneath the cloudless sky that April morning.

  Even here, now, in this foreign city where I live off and on, even now occasionally when I’m not concentrating, when I leave the metro, or turn a corner of harmonious buildings that make the world seem organized and logical, or leave a café where I’ve casually bought cigarettes, put the change in my coat pocket and fumbled for the lighter, I feel on my face the same cold wind that suddenly arose on that April morning: sometimes, not always, sometimes, the same fresh breeze that began to stir that warm day, making the tall grass sway gently from side to side round the lake where we had gone to hide, far away from adults, as we had done all that summer.

  From the top of the hill it was hard to make out the lake’s irregular outline, hidden behind tall bamboo canes where dozens of noisy macaws had made their nests. The macaws and bamboo groves that he recalled so often later on in the long, melancholy letters he wrote me.

  I don’t know what the lake was really like. After that day in April I never went back there. All I have is the image in my memory: its bright blue, transparent water, sparkling in the rays of a sun that always seemed to shine in those days.

  I think it was a Tuesday. I could look at the calendar to make sure. I don’t want to. I prefer the certainty of my memory, which tells me it was a Tuesday.

  Tuesday, 12 April 1961.

  On the radio early that morning a presenter announced: a man has travelled into space. The first man in space. A Russian.

  His name was Yuri Gagarin.

  He said the Earth was blue, and I thought – we both thought, him and me – we talked about it as we rode along lazily on our bikes, escaping punishment at school because we had been caught looking at a dirty magazine – talking about Gagarin the way we did about everything: that’s what we could be, we could also be a man flying through outer space.

  At twelve years old, when any fantasy can seem real, Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin’s flight on board Vostok, a metal sphere two and a half metres in diameter, with windows scarcely larger than a book, literally opened up the skies for us.

  Astronaut: another word I did not yet know.

  Astronaut as well. I could be an astronaut. Everything was possible for someone still hesitating between becoming an engineer or a cowboy, a football player or a bandit in the Sertão, a pilot, test driver, a businessman, deep-sea diver, an archaeologist, or Tarzan.

  Until that April day, Tarzan had been my favourite. I was good at swinging from creepers, and yet without my knowing why, both Lord Greystoke’s African jungle and Oklahoma, which is where I thought the Wild West of good guys and bandits was to be found, were starting to pall. I was also toying with the idea of being a scientific genius and inventing remedies that could cure the most dreadful illnesses, possibly a vaccine so powerful it would eliminate all pain. Or perhaps he was the one who wanted to be a scientist. One of us thought we might be president of Brazil and put an end to the century-old drought and hunger in the north-east. I think that was him. Among the ambitions that seemed to us perfectly possible, we both wanted to go and live in Rio de Janeiro one day. Brasilia had been inaugurated less than a year earlier, but whichever of us got to be president was going to transfer the capital back to Rio. We were twelve. It was
another country. Another world.

  1

  The High Mountains and Areas in Shadow

  THE LAKE, AT LAST.

  They turned off the paved road and took the winding gravel path. They stopped pedalling. The bikes rattled down to the barbed wire fence at the foot of the hill, where they dismounted. They removed their books from the baskets and hid them under some tree roots, then took turns lifting the wire to help each other through.

  The dark-skinned boy’s bike was rusty and battered, with only one mudguard at the front. It had belonged to his father, when he still worked at the textile factory, and then his brother, before he bought a new one. On the frame of the other boy’s bike the name of its English maker was still visible, twelve years after it had crossed the Atlantic, imported after the war along with thousands of other goods from Europe, when the Brazilian currency was strong. This boy was taller, lighter-skinned and skinnier.

  They pushed their bikes through the mango plantation, their tyres leaving tracks on ground still damp from overnight rain. To avoid getting any mud on his trousers, the lanky boy pulled them up to his knees. His dark-skinned companion didn’t bother. No one would notice. The school badge was coming off the pocket of his grubby shirt. Both of them had taken off their black clip-on ties – the part of the uniform they most detested. Only the tall boy folded his carefully before stowing it in his trouser pocket.

  As they walked along the narrow path through the bamboo grove, the macaws rose into the air above them, squawking loudly.

  They talked about the kind of things twelve-year-old boys discussed in those days: terribly important things about themselves and a world they didn’t yet understand, but about which they had very precise ideas; ideas soon forgotten and replaced by others, as fabulous as the dreams that lulled them to sleep. To them, adult life seemed distant, pleasant and luminous – nothing like the brutal world they were plunged into that morning.

  They dropped their bikes on to the turf by the lake’s edge: one of them carefully, the other just letting it fall to the ground.

  The darker-haired boy tore off his clothes, threw them on to the bike and kicked off his shoes, while the pale-faced youngster undid his shirt buttons and took it off, unbuckled his belt and pulled his trousers down. He carefully folded all his clothes. He was still tucking his rolled-up socks into his shoes when his friend raced towards the water in his underpants, shouting to his companion to catch him, calling him a slowcoach, hey slowcoach, and then diving in, clumsily but powerfully.

  The lighter-skinned boy went over to the bushes where they kept the inner tube they used as a buoy. He squeezed it: still hard. He carried it to the water’s edge, threw it in. He joined his hands in front of his body, lowered his head, and waded into the lake, almost without a sound.

  The water was as warm as the day, so the two boys swam for a good while.

  Then the thin boy lay back on the inner tube, arms and legs dangling, and floated around. He could hear the noises his friend made as he dived, came up, went under once more, then came back to the surface, swam a few strokes and dipped down, popping up again quickly, talking all the time, shouting phrases or asking questions that at first the other boy answered. Then, cradled by the warm waters, he became immersed in his own thoughts. His friend’s voice and all the other sounds faded away.

  He floated along in silence. All he could see was the blue sky above.

  But hadn’t the Russian astronaut said the opposite?

  ‘I can see the Earth. It’s wonderful. It’s blue.’

  How could it be blue? the thin boy wondered. The Earth, not the sky? Was that because of the oceans, or the seas? The continents aren’t blue. Aren’t mountains black, jungles green and deserts white? That’s how they appear to us down here. And on the maps. How could the Russian astronaut have seen a blue planet, when the concrete buildings, the bridges, the viaducts, are all as grey as ashes? What about the tracks of red and brown earth? And the tarmac roads? He must have seen them all from above. Railway lines, ports, avenues, landing strips, cities, Amazonia, Siberia, the North Pole, Australia, Mongolia, the Himalayas and the Sahara; everything. He saw it. The Russian, the astronaut, saw it all down here, this morning, as no man had ever seen it before. And he said: blue. The Earth is blue. So what we’ve been learning until now in our geography classes is wrong. Just like the maps made before Columbus were wrong. In those days they said the world was flat and ended in an abyss, didn’t they? What else that we learn today is going to make people laugh at us five hundred years from now? Will all the planets and places we know now seem insignificant, as happened with the world after Pedro Alvares Cabral reached Brazil? He used maps made by the Phoenicians, who were here long before 1500. What if the same thing is happening today?

  What if there are secrets the scientists know but we cannot even suspect? That the governments hide from us the way the Portuguese sailors hid their maps from their enemies? Perhaps the Russians have the real maps of the heavens. What about the Americans? Do they have real maps of the heavens too?

  ‘I can clearly see tall mountains and areas in shadow …’

  If as they said on the radio the Russian astronaut circled the Earth in an hour and forty-eight minutes, thought the boy, he must have seen day and night at the same time.

  ‘… the forests, islands, and ocean shores. I can see the sun, the clouds …’

  If Japan is twenty-four hours ahead of us, on the far side of the Earth, that means it’s already tomorrow there. So the Russian travelled from the future back into the past. But that’s impossible. He can’t do that. Or can he? How can he? If I go into the future, can I meet myself as I am today, the light-skinned boy wondered. Or as I was today? Me, today, now, as I am at this moment, will I be able to see how I will be? What I will be?

  ‘… and the shadows the light casts on my beloved, distant Earth.’

  So says the Russian. The Russian astronaut. Major Yuri Gagarin, aged twenty-seven. That was what they said he said on the radio. It could be a lie. Father Thomas is always telling us that the Russians lie in order to conquer the world. That’s what he says in every Latin class: the Communists lie. But the other teacher, Lamarca, says it’s the Americans who lie, the boy remembered. Because they want the riches from our soil, our gold, oil, our monazite sands …

  Paulo swam underwater as quietly as he could towards Eduardo. He could see his body from underneath the buoy, and played the joke on him he knew he hated: tipping over the inner tube, he pulled his friend’s underpants down.

  Eduardo went under, swallowed a mouthful of water, and came up spluttering.

  Paulo swam quickly towards the shore, laughing and making whooping sounds like the Red Indians after they had defeated the invading palefaces in the Westerns they saw in the Sunday matinees at the Cine Theatro Universo. Eduardo recovered, muttered something and swam a powerful crawl to try to catch his friend.

  Paulo ran a few metres out of the water, still laughing, and then came to a halt.

  He waited.

  His furious friend was getting close.

  Very close.

  Paulo laughed again, enjoying himself. This was his favourite trick. He knew he was quicker and more nimble than Eduardo, he knew how to dodge much better – being shorter was an advantage, so that when he swerved to left or right he could bend and slip through Eduardo’s open arms.

  Disconcerted, unable to dart in and out like his friend, Eduardo still kept up the chase, his feet slipping now and then on the wet grass and mud, while Paulo raced on, never once losing his balance.

  All of a sudden, Paulo tripped over something and fell head first.

  It was a body.

  A blonde woman, her arms and legs splayed out, filthy with blood and mud.

  Her left breast had been chopped off.

  All Eduardo could see in the rough wall the policeman had pushed him up against was a chink in the stones and the black ants emerging from it in a busy, orderly line. The ants climbed up towards the gri
lle high above his head, through which the afternoon heat and occasional distant street sounds seeped: the wheels of a cart and the iron shoes of a mule on the paving blocks, the voices of two women walking past on the far pavement, the long, muffled wail of a crying child, or perhaps of someone being held in the police station basement.

  The three cops stank. Eduardo was sweating. He wanted to believe it wasn’t out of fear.

  ‘I saw first,’ he repeated.

  ‘But I was the one who tripped over the body,’ Paulo explained, yet again.

  They were standing with their backs to each other. Paulo was facing the opposite wall. The police took turns to ask the same questions.

  ‘Why were you with her?’

  ‘How come she went there with you?’

  ‘Who called her?’

  ‘I already told you, we don’t know her!’

  ‘Sir, neither Paulo nor I know who she is.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘Whose penknife is it?’

  ‘How many times did you stab her?’

  ‘How did you get her down there?’

  One of the cops laughed. Eduardo thought he heard them whispering together.

  ‘I already told you, and so did Eduardo, we don’t know her.’

  ‘We didn’t know who she was. I never saw her. We never saw her.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘How many stabs?’

  ‘What d’you mean, you didn’t know her?’

  ‘How many times did you stab her with your penknife?’

  ‘It’s not Eduardo’s penknife, it’s mine.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘It’s my penknife, but we never did anything to her, we don’t know her; never, nothing.’

  ‘Everybody knows her, you monkey.’

  ‘I’m not a monkey.’

  ‘Shut your mouth! Only speak when I ask a question, monkey.’

  ‘I’m not a monkey! And there’s no reason I should answer any questions!’

  ‘D’you want to feel my fist, monkey?’