Sr Mendes thinks I’m his wife. He speaks to me like he spoke to her, and even calls me ‘petal’ and ‘my angel’. His wife, Lígia, has been dead for twenty years – he knew this perfectly well until he turned eighty-eight.

There were three guests at his birthday party: me, one of his daughters and one of his grandsons (he has one son, four daughters, and four grandkids, no great-grandkids). We sang, clapped our hands. The birthday song echoed metallically in the almost empty apartment. The extra verse: It’s snippy, it’s snappy, now it’s time now it’s time now it’s time. Ba . . . dum . . . Our three voices and his, crackly, trying to sing along. Sr Mendes no longer had enough strength to clap, his throat couldn’t hold a tune, his lungs were weak. His grandson, who’s twenty, blew out the candles on his cake. Two candles: 8 and 8. Sad to see, but every birthday party can be mistaken for a funeral. Hip hip . . .

Silence. Sr Mendes, his grandson and his daughter smiled, all three for different reasons. I went to fetch a knife to cut his diabetic cake. Sr Mendes asked, with that raspy voice of his, where Lígia was. Did Lígia make the cake? Where’s Lígia? I came back from the kitchen saying something or other and the old man’s mind put my voice in his dead wife’s mouth, my face on the memory of her dead face. He looked at me and opened his false teeth wide:

sr m: My angel, did you make the cake?

His grandson and daughter raised their eyebrows at me: play along, it’s his birthday and nobody wants to repeat morbid news, especially not ‘Mum’s been dead for twenty years’. I said yes, I’d made the cake, which wasn’t a lie. The old man answered with an ah! and asked for a slice.

Ever since, I’m Lígia.

Sr Mendes went blind in his right eye when he was young, but his left can see perfectly. His hearing is fine. He hardly takes any pills: four in the morning, one in the afternoon and four at night. He isn’t confined to his wheelchair: sometimes he gets up and walks around the apartment, supported by a mahogany cane. Genuine mahogany, he says. He likes to go out on the balcony and take the sun.

Before he turned eighty-eight, Sr Mendes knew perfectly well that I was a man called Alex, thirty-three years old, thick beard and short hair. I’ve seen lots of photos of his wife, pictures of when she was old and young: I look nothing like her. I never met the dead woman, never heard her voice, but I’m almost certain it didn’t sound like mine. My voice is deep and throaty. I’ve got a few feminine traits, but the old man would have said something if he thought I was a fruit. He hates fruits. Nothing wrong with being homosexual – or so he often says when we’re watching TV – but a fruit, no way! The TV is always on in Sr Mendes’s house.

Now I’m Lígia because I’m Lígia. There’s no escaping it. I denied it, the old man re-denied it, I tri-denied it, he cross-denied it so many times that all that was left was a tired, defeated, affectionate yes: I’m Lígia! I’m Lígia . . .

sr m: I know, petal, I’m not all that old.

I’ve known Sr Mendes for three years. I have no nursing training. I learnt how to bake a diabetic cake on the internet. I don’t get paid to look after him. We both live in the same building, in lower Copacabana, me in No. 104 and him in No. 404. The other apartments are occupied by semi-high-class prostitutes, impoverished students, transvestites and other old people. There are dozens, thousands of old people in Copacabana. It’s a neighbourhood waiting for death. The old people here will be forgotten like the great armies. Who knows the names of all the soldiers who invaded Poland, or who landed on Omaha Beach? By a coincidence that no longer matters, I found myself in Sr Mendes’s apartment. (Pause.) Soon I was visiting him every day.

The first year was an extremely lengthy vigil: I was certain the old man, who was eighty-five then, could die at any moment. Those were anxious months. I’d often dreamt he’d died and I hadn’t been there to see it. A man should witness another man’s death, the exact moment, at least once in his life. If he doesn’t, he’ll die thinking that life amounts to no more than a stage illusion.

I have lots of deaths saved in my memory, but I saw all of them from a distance, through the TV screen. When I was younger, I collected VHS tapes of accidents, street brawls, sudden heart attacks in restaurants, shoot-outs. I bought the tapes from a newspaper kiosk on Rua Sá Ferreira. The owner was a collector of violent scenes and on a tall rack, behind the porn films and magazines, he’d hidden a whole world. There were dozens of tapes, with no covers or labels, which he got from the hands of black marketeers. Amateur recordings, for the most part, but also films made by war correspondents, videos stolen from police files and a few rare gems: the complete works of serial killers who liked to record their crimes, videos filmed by soldiers on the battlefield, every type of visual perversion. Autopsies, torture sessions, botched police operations, rapes, armed robberies, kidnappings, disgraceful orgies, suicides, revenge killings.

If a customer not in the know, rifling through the porn magazines, came across the tapes and asked what they were, the kiosk owner would say they were blanks, and not for sale. We, the initiates, knew the code. There was a ritual to be followed: we’d enter the kiosk in silence and, after a few motionless moments, ask, ‘Where can I catch the fourteen-zero-four?’, a bus that in those days didn’t exist, or if it did, didn’t go through Copacabana. Then the kiosk owner would say, ‘That one goes to Pavuna, on the north side,’ and produce the catalogue (a school exercise book with the number ‘1404’ stamped on the cover), which was divided into three sections: sex, death and miscellaneous.

I only bought death tapes. The fatal shooting of a transvestite (gunshots to their made-up face) in Kansas, in 1987. A passed-out drunk, stabbed in the neck, Nilópolis, 1991. A pregnant woman dying in childbirth, the anguished cries of her husband (I think in Russia, 1995). A hostage-taker shot in the head by an elite sharpshooter, blood spurting all over the hostage, Georgia, 1994. A man throwing himself from a building in Montevideo, 1996. Scenes from the Sook Ching massacre in Singapore. Franz Reichelt jumping from the Eiffel Tower with his parachute and smashing himself to a pulp on the ground, 1912. Video suicide note, a teenager from New Jersey blames his parents and pulls the trigger, 1997. Video suicide note, a boy in Santa Catarina puts on lipstick and swallows poison, 2000. Someone getting run over in Viña del Mar, 1989. A beating in São Paulo, 1995. An old man dying peacefully in bed in a home (somewhere in England, 1990) after recording a hello to his grandson, a soldier fighting in Iraq. And then a woman’s voice: ‘Oh my God! Grandpa! Ooooh, my God!’