Authors: Patricia Melo
I woke up with my heart racing, hearing the sound of an engine. I looked toward the sky and saw the airplane flying low, thinking it was doing aerial photography.
I don't really know how it all happened. Suddenly, an explosion, and the plane plunged like a kingfisher into the Paraguay.
The nose of the single-engine plane was underwater in the narrowest and most irregular part of the Paraguay, an unnavigable shallow stretch where one of the wings had buried itself. Dark smoke was coming from the engine.
I removed my pants and sneakers and swam to the aircraft. The water level was a little above my waist. As soon as I climbed onto the fuselage I spotted the pilot, a large guy, young, with a bony face. Blood was gushing from the wound to his forehead.
I forced open the right-hand door, partially out of the water, and went inside. I told the pilot not to worry, I'd take him to my van and we'd find help using my cell phone. You're very lucky, I said while I undid his safety belt, very, very lucky, dropping out of the sky and still being alive.
That was the moment when he bought it, just as I was saying he was a fortunate guy. First he emitted a muffled sigh, almost a moan. I checked his pulse. Nothing.
A feeling of terror swept over me.
Water was starting to rise into the plane. I opened the right-hand door to keep us from being dragged away, uncertain if my reasoning was correct.
Panting, swallowing water, I swam back to the riverbank, now fearing the piranhas. I tried to turn on the cell phone in my pants pocket, but couldn't get a signal.
I returned to the plane, went into the cabin and sat down
in the copilot's seat. I stayed there for some minutes hearing the water beat against the fuselage, pondering what to do. Maybe the best thing would be to take the youth away from the river. Still, there wasn't the slightest chance that I could carry him to the van. He was heavier than me and probably weighed eighty kilos. I could have dragged him, but the idea of dragging a corpse bothered me.
It also occurred to me that it would make no difference if I left him there for the rescue team.
From the road I could call the police. They'd arrive in less than three hours.
I checked the young man's pulse. That was when I noticed the leather backpack hanging by a strap behind the seat.
Inside I found an unmistakable package, one of those you see on television in stories about drug busts. A compact mass, white and crumbly, wrapped in heavy plastic and sealed with adhesive tape. I made a small hole in the wrapping and tested the powder by rubbing it on my gums. I was no expert in the subject, but I wasn't a novice either. Even my tongue went numb. My throat too.
I sat there, thinking about the police station I'd have to pass on the way to Corumbá. The thought of a pile of money made me take less than a minute to decide.
I don't know who said that a man by himself isn't honest for long, but it's the gospel truth.
Driven by the same impulse, I also took the pilot's wristwatch, and got the hell out of there.
A year earlier I was telemarketing manager in a boiler room in São Paulo, responsible for the sale of exercise equipment, the kind that you fold up, put under the bed, and never use again. I had sold worse things, like credit cards, water filters, and weight-loss girdles. I was living at my limit, bloated with coffee, running back and forth in the aisles like a frightened rabbit, preparing reports and coordinating sales teams by radio, always with the feeling that I wouldn't be able to deliver the goods.
Part of my job description was to teach new operators to use PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and Outlook, a long and demanding training process that invariably served to trigger my migraine attacks. I had just finished instructing a very young and inexperienced employee, and on her very first day at the phone desk, in the morning, when I went to monitor her initial calls, I saw that she was having trouble pronouncing the words. And this after going through the ordeal of training. What's that in your mouth? I asked.
And then she showed me the piercing she'd put in the tip of her tongue the day before.
What killed me was her expression. She smiled, ill at ease, as if she'd done something naughty. Or as if it was possible to work like that, lisping, spitting the words at people who don't want to talk to us, who hang up in our faces when they realize it's about sales. You're selling something? So long,
they say. I'm not interested. I don't want to buy anything. And they slam the phone down in our faces. And her, my employee, with a stud in her tongue.
How are you going to communicate with our customers? I asked.
She smiled, embarrassed, tossing her head back.
All I remember is a wave of hatred rising in my body and the slap I gave her.
Everyone believed I was a tense kind of guy but under control. I thought so myself.
The first thing that occurred to me at that moment was that we never understand how a responsible, hard-working citizen pulls a gun and kills a driver in a traffic argument. Actually, it's very simple. It happens in the same way that I struck my employee. The gun is there, in the glove box. Suddenly some young guy cuts you off at an intersection, you jump out of the car and put a bullet in his forehead. It's that simple.
I immediately took the girl to my office. She was frightened, me even more so. Drink some water, I said, sit here, use this handkerchief. I apologized in every way possible. But I wasn't able to forgive myself, much less understand how I'd been capable of acting like that with the girl. She remained quiet, her eyes on the floor. Like a dog that's been swatted. She had just the one torn suit, which she had shown up wearing ever since the first day of training. A clean and threadbare girl. Pale. She looked like a bottle of water. Empty. You've seen plenty of her type around, very common. With a cheap purse, waiting at the bus stop, pushing buttons in elevators, selling tickets at the movies. That day, she was trying not to burst into convulsive sobs in front of me. Can I go to the bathroom? she asked. The two of us there, facing each other, and I didn't know what to do. Forgive me, I said. A
thousand pardons. I offered my bathroom, managers have that privilege, but she preferred to use the employees'. She returned five minutes later, without the piercing, no makeup, and asked permission to go back to her desk.
The next few days were terrible. It was as if the two of us had committed some crime. The atmosphere between us was so heavy that she could barely manage to say good morning to me. I even avoided going by her desk out of remorse and embarrassment. I waited for her to denounce me. In bed at night, I couldn't sleep, thinking about the possibility. But she didn't inform on me.
That lasted a week. On the eighth day, the girl didn't show up. Seeing her chair empty, I had a bad premonition. Soon afterward, someone from her family called and we learned she had thrown herself from the tenth floor.
At the funeral, from a distance I saw her husband with spiked hair and an exotic appearance, with rings in his ear and nose, their two-year-old daughter in his arms.
It wasn't because of me, I know. She already had her eye on the abyss. I merely provided the impulse for her to jump.
Just who was that girl? my boss asked when he returned from a trip and heard the news. Days later, the story of the slap was known by all the salespeople, who refused to listen to my orders or talk to me. The news spread like a virus throughout the building and beyond. Workers on other floors, for other firms, turned away in the elevator or in the cafeteria where I had lunch every day. And they whispered when I passed by. It was because of him, they said. The slap. I became a kind of celebrity. The guy who slapped. I was the plague, the devil. Someone wrote on the bulletin board: “Out, heartless monster!”
I have no choice, the general manager said when he fired me.
I quickly went into a tailspin. I couldn't get out of bed and was taking so many sleeping pills that I was like a machine that they turned on and off.
You look awful, my cousin Carlão said when, by chance, he visited me in São Paulo. And by chance he invited me to spend some time with him.
That was how I moved to Corumbá. By chance.
One point one kilos, according to the bathroom scale. They say in the States it would be worth twice as much, three times as much in Europe, but I had no plans to take it further. Or the courage. Actually, I didn't give a shit about money. I just wanted enough to not have to work for some time longer.
I weighed the drugs twice more to make sure of the amount.
I returned everything to the backpack, climbed on a chair, opened the cover that allows access to the crawl space, and placed the pack behind the water tank.
My room is on the outskirts of Corumbá and belongs to the son of the chief of the Guató tribe, who neither speaks Guató nor knows how to canoe.
The space is larger than my previous address, a hovel looking out on Highway 26A, where there was nothing but toads and scrub. It was hard for me to get used to that place, with flies buzzing around, mud, and backlands people with nothing to offer except brotherhood. I felt empty there, at night with my eyes closed, I couldn't forget the noise in São Paulo or my office on Avenida São Luiz with its peeling walls lit by the neon sign of the fitness center across from my window.
I sometimes still dream about my salesgirl who committed suicide, her pale face, and wake up at the sound of the slap, as if someone were attacking me. But now I think of
São Paulo as a kind of atomizer that transformed me into something tiny, weak, and breakable, capable of slapping my employee in the face. A true sickness, that city. Like those that attack soldiers when they put on a uniform and head off to war. Or subordinates, when they follow orders. Not that you like being on the battlefield or obeying orders. It's more a question of consistency; after all, you're there to accomplish certain things. You've got to adjust. And fast, we fit in. It could have been worse, I think. I could have killed a driver in traffic. Cooked the books. Stolen money. Or thrown myself from the tenth floor. In any case, I had fallen into the well, sunk, and rotted like a tomato dropped on the ground at an outdoor market. I had barely gotten away. It was in those terms that I thought about that city. I promised myself never to return to that life. Never again, over.
It was Rita, my cousin's wife, who helped me out of the hole. The first time I saw her, she was sunbathing in a bikini, near the gasoline pump, and already at that moment I could sense sparks of electricity coming from her body to burn mine. She was twenty-six and sold cosmetics door to door. She wasn't pretty. But there was something about her face that pleased everybody at first sight. When Carlão spoke to me about her the first time, saying that for her he had left his wife and daughters, he spoke precisely of that aspect of Rita, her curiosity, her smile, her laughter, and he described her very well. Her nose was a bit large; her hair was dyed; her feet small and bony; but you didn't pay attention to any of that when you were beside her.
When Carlão went shopping or traveled, she would come down to the pump and keep me company. She would come up to my room with fresh coffee. We would go swimming in a nearby lake. This place is the end of the world, she said. Last stop. Just look where you ended up. Take one more
step, you'll drop into the beyond. If you go in the wrong direction, you'll wind up in Bolivia.
We sometimes remained quiet, side by side, smoking and gazing at the empty highway, until one day she asked me who the girl was who called me every day. Our faces were so close together that I could almost smell the coffee on her breath. My girlfriend, I said. And Sulamita is the name of a person? she asked. I thought it was some kind of mineral found in the region. Aluminum phosphate, those things. I laughed. She remained serious and said she was falling in love with me.
I moved out the next day. I didn't want any problems with my cousin.
Now there I was, unemployed and with a kilo of cocaine hidden in the crawl space.
Before taking a shower, I went downstairs, crossed through the hallway beside the bicycle shop, and offered the fish to the old Indian woman, the bike shop owner's mother. Serafina was her name.
There were other Guatós in the neighborhood. I saw them there, with their slanted eyes, their flip-flops, playing football in the late afternoon, doing labor of every kind, bodywork on cars, security, cleaning. They were no longer accustomed to life on the island from which they had been expelled by the army and to which they were later able to return when priests in the region began raising a fuss to defend them. Serafina preferred the city after her husband was hospitalized with heart problems.
The only problem was living with her son, she said, now that the old chieftain had died. The family lived crowded into two rooms. Serafina slept in the kitchen with her three grandchildren, jammed against the couple's bedroom. There were small mattresses leaning against the walls and clothes
drying behind the refrigerator. Grease from the bicycle shop was gradually making its way into the house and up the walls.
The daughter-in-law wasn't part of the tribe and got irritated when the old woman spoke Guató. Their mother would slap the little Indians for any reason, and now and then would hit Serafina, who would be expelled onto the sidewalk as punishment.