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Other titles by João Gilberto Noll available from Two Lines Press:
Quiet Creature on the Corner
Hotel Atlântico
© 1989 by João Gilberto Noll
Translation © 2016 by Adam Morris
Two Lines Press
582 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94104
ISBN 978-1-931883-61-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955682
Cover design by Gabriele Wilson
Cover photo by Cardinal/Getty Images
Typeset by Sloane | Samuel
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
This book was published with the support of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture / National Library Foundation (obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cultura do Brasil / Fundação Biblioteca Nacional) and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Contents
I went up the front steps of a small hotel on Nossa Senhora de Copacabana, almost on the corner of Miguel Lemos. As I ascended I heard nervous voices, somebody crying.
Suddenly, a bunch of people appeared at the top of the stairs, mostly men who looked like cops, perhaps some military police. And they started coming down with a gurney.
On it was a body covered by a patterned sheet.
I halted on a single stair, glued to the wall. A woman with a bleach-blonde dye job was coming down the stairs, crying. She had that tic—jerking her mouth in the direction of her right eye.
I regretted having walked into that hotel. But as I stood there, retreat only seemed another cowardly act I’d have to shoulder on my journey. So I pressed ahead.
When I found myself standing in front of a girl behind a counter, who was attending to guests, I couldn’t contain a sudden burst of laughter. I hadn’t guffawed like that since I was a kid. The girl surely must’ve thought I was some kind of relative or friend of the corpse, laughing from shock, and with a look of dismay she waited for me to finish cackling.
Someday I’ll end up in a coffin, too—so I took the girl’s hand as soon as I stopped laughing and kissed it. With her hand still between mine, she slackened her face, as if a gesture like a kiss on the hand were completely commonplace and even natural at a hotel reception desk. Her long expression opened into a faint smile: “Would you like to speak with a guest, sir, or would you like a room?”
“A room with a bathroom, double bed, TV, and a desk where I can lean on my elbows and think.”
“I have just the thing,” she said, her gaze already completely intoxicated.
“It wouldn’t be the room where the crime…” I ventured.
“I wouldn’t do that to you, sir…” She looked at my hands and asked, “Your bags?”
“I stored them at the airport.” It was the first thing that came to me.
“Oh, well, for guests without bags we ask for a three-day deposit,” she explained, with courtesy that tingled the back of my neck.
I filled out the registration card, lying that I was married—I pictured a woman waiting for me someplace in Brazil, and ventured that having her waiting would awaken the receptionist’s curiosity about me.
The girl at the reception desk had black hair, thick bangs; her hair came down past her ears. She looked like a flapper. And black eyes, big.
She pressed a bell and a boy appeared. The boy was dressed in a gray uniform with gold buttons. She asked him to take me to room 123.
Then she gave me one last disarming look. That was when I really started to get interested.
The boy guided me through a long, poorly lit hallway, stopped in front of number 123, opened the door with a certain gravity. I commented on the murder. He barely let out a humph. Asked if I had any baggage. I repeated that my bags were stored at the airport.
The boy closed the door. When I sat on the bed, I heard a hoarse moan, as deep as an animal’s.
Then came another moan, so I took a pillow and smashed it against my ears. I thought maybe I was just jumpy, full of palpitations. Then I tossed the pillow away and shook my head violently.
The moaning kept on. It was masculine and coming rhythmically. I touched myself—a little bit excited. I picked up the phone and waited for reception to answer. The flapper picked up.
“I’m the guy that just checked in, and I’d like a whiskey neat—but I’d like you to bring it yourself.”
She told me she’d be at my room in two minutes.
When she came into the room with the bottle of whiskey and a glass, I said I’d fallen for her in a matter of seconds. She said she didn’t believe me. I asked her to touch me and see for herself. She took hold and told me it had been a long time since she’d met somebody so ready to go. I was already unbuttoning her blouse.
As soon as I had her undressed, she got down on all fours atop the filthy green carpet immediately. I kneeled behind her. My mission: to mount from outside her field of vision. No touching above the waist, just anonymous haunches seeking each other out pathetically.
Late that night I went out to find someplace to eat. I raised the collar of my blazer and went whistling a made-up song. The month of June was ending and an incredibly cold wind blew through Copacabana.
On the corner of Barata Ribeiro, a newsstand displayed the paper with a headline about the extraordinary cold in Rio that year. As soon as I read the headline, I realized I’d lost my appetite and that a sort of nausea had installed itself inside me.
I went up the hotel stairway feeling an immense fatigue. Now the person at reception was a boy, who was listening to a battery-powered radio. I remembered to ask if they figured out who the killer had been in the murder at the hotel. He told me they’d given a suspect on the radio, a Uruguayan doctor.
Upon entering my room I noticed a nearly invisible bloodstain on the carpet. I crossed over it and threw myself on the bed with all my clothes still on. I didn’t even take off my shoes.
I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned; I stared at the light already peeking through a slit in the curtains. I thought about my departure, about how long I would last.
I got up and opened the curtain. What I saw wasn’t dawn, but fully ripened daylight. I hoisted the sash. The window looked out on the backs of various buildings. In one of the windows a woman was filing her nails. The smell of coffee in the air. Leaning on a sill, a boy watched a pigeon’s short flight. The pigeon landed in a gap in the wall meant for an air conditioner. I noticed there was a nest there, with a little baby pigeon inside. The pigeon that just landed, which must have been the mother, pecked her baby with her beak.
I drew the curtain. A countdown was in progress: I needed to get going.
But I decided to go back to bed. I kicked off my shoes. I felt that I was repressing a sense of hopelessness inside myself, because I had to get going soon—so I pretended to be calm, very calm.
If I feigned madness,