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!’
I’ve still got the tapes, fifteen of them (in total, around 140 episodes), in the false bottom of my wardrobe, but I’ve no way of watching them. Who has a videocassette player these days?
Today I watch this stuff on the internet. And just like when I was a boy, I try to identify the exact moment a person dies. When their eyes fog over? When their jaw slackens? When their leg muscles become limp? When the monitor beep goes biiiiiiiiii and what’s left of the heart is a straight green line on a black background? When the people in the street stop their yelling? When somebody starts to pray, or cry? When is it that someone dies, exactly? Is it when the camera is switched off ?
The last video I watched was on YouTube. The title: ‘Dies after being clubbed in the head in street brawl. Violent scenes!’ – In media res: a skinny guy, wearing a football shirt (blue, number 10), fish knife in his right hand, up against two huge fat guys. One carries a club, the other has nothing. The set: the narrow, sunlit streets of a poor neighbourhood. In the background, a house painted pink.
The three study each other, they step forward, and then step back again. The skinny guy lifts his leg like a Thai boxer, like a flamingo. The people watch on. Motorbikes go by. Various cries, sounds of fear and humour.
men: Get out of here, boy! Yeh! Yeh . . . Yeeeaaah!
women: Out, out . . . Aaah!
Leaping backwards, the skinny guy dodges two blows of the club, then launches himself at the unarmed fat man, but the guy with the club protects his companion, forcing the skinny guy to retreat. The unarmed man grabs a loose chunk of kerbstone and chucks it, and when the skinny guy panther-jumps backwards again, the guy with the club seizes his chance: one, two blows at empty space, at the ground, the third striking the skinny guy’s arm. Now the skinny guy advances again, fish knife poised, other arm raised in self-defence, until the fat man with the club lands one, two blows on skinny’s back.
men: Get out of here, man! Get out, man!
The skinny one charges, leaping in an attempt to bury his blade in the neck of the fat guy with the club. That’s how Achilles killed Hector.
A motorbike passes in front of the camera. The cameraman gets out of the way and without meaning to points the lens upwards. Satellite dishes and the sky, sky floating on sky, blue, clear, quiet. A few clouds. A couple of seconds of the most conventional beauty there is and here down below the skinny guy is running, he’s fleeing. His Achilles lunge has failed.
men and women: Aaah . . . eh-eh-eh-eh!
He no longer has the fish knife in his hand. Now three men are chasing him, another fat guy has joined the first two. A blow to the ground with the club. The skinny guy runs, another blow to the ground, he gets to a corner and hesitates, a misstep, and the fat guy with the club is upon him. A blow to the neck. Skinny collapses. Face down on the ground. Motionless. Another blow to the back. Shrill screams. Everyone stops watching. In the background, a small yellow house. A sign on the front says: building materials for sale. Is he dead?
(Enter a boy. About eleven. Wearing a backpack, yellow Bermuda shorts, moss-green T-shirt.) The boy wags his index finger at the three killers, who leave in a hurry, but don’t run. The boy looks at the prone body, circles it, crouches to get a look at the skinny guy’s face. He waves his arms like someone telling the referee to hurry up and blow the final whistle.
boy: He’s dead . . . ! He’s dead . . . !
End of video.
These are peaceful times, the TV tells us. My generation never went to war, that’s why we don’t really understand the mature work of poets. That’s why we love the brutality of posthumous things: we’re not on intimate terms with death. That was my first reason to love Sr Mendes. He saw the Second World War. His wrinkles are concrete like the ruins of Europe, where the boys born in 1934 played. Kids of eleven, twelve years of age, invaded and conquered the bombed-out city blocks, Sr Mendes told me. In 1945 and 1946, the entire continent was ruled by a government of children. Gangs of kids infested the devastated cities. He was already almost twenty, but his younger brothers loved finding abandoned machine guns and cannons in the woods neighbouring the small farm where they lived. It was a party.
When he came to Brazil, in the 1950s, Sr Mendes changed his name. I found this out in the second year of our friendship. He disembarked in Santa Catarina, but soon moved to Rio. He worked in shops, didn’t get involved in the struggle against the dictatorship. He married Lígia, they had kids and, in the end, he dedicated all his energies to getting old. I don’t know what his name was before he emigrated, I never asked.
Today, three years after I befriended him to see him die, the idea of losing Sr Mendes has left me all mixed up. Sometimes I dream about his funeral and wake up half dead myself.
Sr Mendes plays the lottery twice a week, because that way he’s always on the brink of something big. He says the lottery forces us to think about the future. Normally I’m the one who goes to buy the tickets. He always plays the same numbers: 03, 04, 14, 27, 40, 41. Last year, he got four numbers right and won six hundred reais. He split the prize with me, because I don’t have a job.
It’s been four months since I became Lígia. I still call Sr Mendes ‘Sr Mendes’, but he hears something else, perhaps ‘my sweet’ or ‘Luciano’, which is his first name. Lígia, the dead woman, must have called him that.
I’ve got used to his rheumatic affections, his gnarly fingers suddenly in my hair, on my forearms, my shoulders. Sr Mendes’s fingers are like a moose’s horns, dark and crooked. The TV always on. He smiles at me and says he’s always loved me. On sunny days or when his glucose levels are high, he squeezes my thighs and whispers pornographies in his native tongue. It doesn’t bother me.
On days when I have a foreboding he’s going to die, I spend the night in his apartment. I make up a bed in the living room, but I don’t sleep: I stand beside the old man’s bed, keeping an eye on his breathing. Sr Mendes says he hasn’t dreamt since he lost his right eye. It was his right eye that knew how to dream. His left hasn’t seen as many terrible things, he once told me. I never asked what things his right eye had seen. What his left has seen, I know: Rio de Janeiro, Copacabana Beach, Lígia.
The TV always on. We’re sitting in the living room, Sr Mendes in his wheelchair, me on the sofa, watching the telenovela. Outside, Copacabana draws in the night. The city is like the old, it wasn’t lucky enough to die young. It’s growing, swelling, creating alleys, cancerous lumps, avenidas, backstreets, barbecue joints. At some point, even the most long-standing residents get lost in it, like Sr Mendes has lost himself in me. He looks at me and says I’m sweeter than sugar. For years he’s only been able to drink diet soft drinks and coffee with sweetener. I don’t answer. I scratch my beard and think about sugar. The TV always on. The neighbours complain about the noise. The foreigners have forgotten, but there’s so much coagulated blood in our sugar, so many slaves who lost their arms in the mills, so much cold sweat in our sugar-cane juice. I don’t know whether Sr Mendes cares.
I don’t know what his nickname in the army was. Nor how he lost his eye.
I imagine how they laughed at that prophet who said that one day all the slave quarters would disappear, because the diets of the future would recommend swapping sugar for saccharin.
Panic. Luciano closes his eyes and stops breathing for a few seconds.
sr m (with a sigh): Copacabana never ends. Copacabana is the world, petal, it never ends: you can walk – remember how we used to walk? – and walk and walk and reach the end of the beach without even realising you’re at the start of the same beach again. Remember? We went right around the world and didn’t even realise. What’s it called, that snake that bites its own tail?
I sigh too, from relief.
me: ‘Ouroboros’, Sr Mendes.
sr m: That’s right, uróboro. Copacabana uróboro . . . I don’t know what I’d do without you, my angel. I’d be lost. Copacabana is the entire world. Can you hear that jackhammer? The entire world is a building site. When they’ve finished, no one will be able to leave, my angel. (Pause.) My Copacabana.
six o’clock telenovela: Get out of here, girl, so I can take a shower! You, you’re the devil! Red nail polish? Ha ha.
sr m: Ha ha!
me: I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll be back in a second.
sr m: Do the lottery results come out today, petal?
me: I’ll be back in a second, Sr Mendes. Not till Wednesday.
Before I go to the bathroom, I go into Sr Mendes’ bedroom. I look at the double bed: it was his wife’s deathbed and will probably be his deathbed too. It’s made of mahogany. The wardrobe is mahogany as well. Genuine mahogany. I open the wardrobe. While I’m choosing, I gently bite my lower lip. I know this sensation, a burning planted right in the middle of my chest. I search the drawer, I know what I’m looking for. The old man has kept all of Lígia’s clothes.
figure in the mirror: Remember the first time you put on your mother’s bra? You were home alone, the only child of working parents. Ten, eleven years old. Natural curiosity, but you’d better be quick, they might be home at any moment.
You opened your mother’s drawer – the most terrible of crimes – and hurriedly chose knickers and a bra. White. You ran out of the room and locked yourself in the bathroom. A bathroom like this one, beige and bright.
You, a boy of ten or eleven, looked at yourself in the bathroom mirror and took off your clothes. Natural. You put on the knickers. You fastened the bra by pulling the clasp to the front, below your breast, then tugged it sideways until the cups were in place, like you’d seen your mother do lots of times. The bra was far too big and you giggled nervously.
The mirror looked like this one, with a solid wooden frame. Sr Mendes wouldn’t have such good taste: Lígia, the dead woman, chose this, you’re certain. The TV always on. In the other room he coughs and calls you.
sr m: Lígia! Lígia, my angel, help me get up . . .
figure in the mirror: You had to jump up and down to see the knickers you were wearing because the mirror was at sink height. From the waist up boys and girls look the same. Then the breasts grow. Complete silence outside the room. If Dad comes home and catches me like this, he’ll give me a beating. (Pause.) You look. You recognise yourself: that’s your belly, that’s your skin, as pink as a river dolphin, those are your shoulders. But the image in the mirror looks like a doctored photo: your face stuck onto a girl’s body. It looks like the blonde girl from school. You’re looking at the photograph of a centaur, a satyr, a mermaid, some creature of the devil or other.
When you got a little older, you’d pray to God and the most famous saints that the blonde girl, one of the few blonde girls at your school, would fall in love with you. You’d haggle with the saints: just kissing will do, no need for sex. But God, who’s smarter than all the saints, knew very well you needed sex. You dreamt of meeting a blonde girl lost, passed out, in the forest, you’d save her and sex. The school on fire, you’d bravely enter the burning building to save the blonde girl and sex. The female teachers would think it was natural. Later you got older still and started to watch the death tapes. Even now you’re terrified of killing someone. If you did, you’re certain you’d kill yourself next.
You started to throb down there. Today you know the name for it. It was the same erection that Lígia’s mirror reflects now, twenty years later. You’re wearing Lígia’s bra, Lígia’s knickers. Red. Sr Mendes kept all the deceased’s clothes. You got older, but you’re not dead. Your body got darker and fatter, hairier. Your beard has just a few grey hairs.
After that first time, whenever your parents left you alone you ran straight to your mother’s drawer. You wore all her clothes, you tried on blouses, dresses, trousers, hats, shoes, sandals. But you never put on make-up, or changed your hair. Your face was still yours and would always be yours, unblemished, a boy’s face. Remember the transvestite who was murdered, shot in the face, in Kansas? The effeminate boy who killed himself in Santa Catarina? He liked to put on make-up, he wanted to be a woman, referred to himself in the feminine. You watched the video. The boy died with his mouth red with lipstick, it left marks on the poisoned cup. (Pause.) You, after all, aren’t a –
sr m: Lígia, come quick, I’m not feeling well.
Luciano was buried in the São João Batista cemetery. Only a few people saw the coffin being lowered, fewer still saw him disappear under the earth and lime. Four of his five children left before the priest had finished talking. His daughter, the only one who went to her father’s last birthday party, stayed behind to take care of some paperwork in the cemetery’s office building. She barely looked at the coffin. She didn’t look at me either. The grandchildren didn’t come. A few liver-spotted friends, as old as L and with resigned looks on their faces (they’d be next), their legs soon getting tired. They pretended I wasn’t there too. But they went no further than sidelong glances and disgusted mutterings, nor could they: I was the one who’d given my years to the dead man. They’d all abandoned him, I’d stayed. When the grave was completely filled, only me, the gravedigger and a young woman I didn’t know, and who didn’t know the deceased, remained. She had thick thighs, was wearing sandals and seemed lost. She offered me her condolences and said, ‘Excuse me, madam, do you know the way out?’
A dreadful question to ask in a cemetery.
I pointed to the gravedigger, and she went over to him. I lit a cigarette and thought about the funeral. No one had made a speech, no one had spoken about the life of the dead man. I’d have liked to say that Luciano made every decision in his life like someone planning to move to Uruguay or Paramaribo or change their sex. Who chose their brand of margarine as though the decision would fundamentally alter their fate. But who lives like that? L died of old age, it wasn’t the fault of the margarine with omega 3 and 6, free of trans fats. I’d stopped smoking four years earlier, but I picked up the habit again because it’s pleasurable, because it’s better to be dying pleasurably.
I saw him die. I saw the exact instant. Luciano had a convulsion, fell from his wheelchair, and landed on the living-room floor, the TV on: ‘It was God who sent you here,’ four characters shouted with relief on the seven o’clock telenovela. I ran out of the bathroom, in bra and knickers, knelt beside him and watched on, wide-eyed, vigilant. I didn’t cry, I didn’t say a word. I wanted to see the exact moment when Sr Mendes would die. He looked at me, at my man’s face, free of make-up, at my centaur’s body. This hairy mermaid, this satyr, this creature of the devil. I think he recognised his wife’s underwear, the bra and knickers of Lígia, the dead woman. He tried to smile, but instead he shuddered and then died.
Before he did, he told me his nickname in the army was Ludwig. And he called me Lígia, and called me Alex, and asked for a kiss. I didn’t give him one.
The eyes of a man who’s suddenly become a corpse go foggy from an epiphany, that’s a fact. And anyone who witnesses another’s death feels a jolt of relief, like someone who finally remembers where they left the car keys or their voter registration card. My first thought was ‘People really do die.’ I want to think the same thing when I witness my own death.
On the day of the funeral, as I left the cemetery, I saw a sweaty old man eating popcorn. He looked like he was lost too, like he wasn’t from this city or even this day and age. He fixed his eyes on my made-up face, my hair combed in the fashion of little old ladies from Copacabana, and smiled as though he would melt, as though he was made out of refined sugar. I didn’t like that smile, it seemed offensive. I responded with a yell.
lígia: What do you want?
I was wearing a very pretty black dress, high heels, also black, Lígia’s clothes. The widow. I hadn’t shaved off my beard (nor am I going to), despite the heat. The sweaty old man stared at my calves (unshaven, no tights) and gave a perverted smile and my anger boiled up and I advanced in his direction, my high heels sinking into the cobblestones. He kept smiling. He apologised by shrugging his shoulders. He didn’t speak Portuguese. I drew my arm back to punch him and the old man said something in desperate French, maybe he hadn’t understood me, he hadn’t understood me! I bumped my flat breasts against him, almost nose to nose, and below his nose that same smile. I didn’t actually hit the old man, but neither did he try to defend himself. He didn’t even drop his bag of popcorn. He turned his back and walked away.
author’s note: The shots of Achilles’s lunge are taken from an amateur video on YouTube, its author unknown. The oral diptych is mine, photographed from the TV screen. The TV dialogue is, in fact, lines overheard on TV. The phrase ‘revertere ad locum tuum’ was scanned from the R. P. de Carrières edition of the Bible (Outhenin-Chalandre, 1835). I regularly play the lottery, my numbers are 03, 04, 14, 27, 40, 41. I’ve never won, I’ve never even got four numbers right.
Image © Sohrab Hura, Nine, 2023
