If I Close My Eyes Now (33 page)

The man at the wheel got out, opened the rear door and signalled for him to enter.

The boy did so, struggling to clamber up into the car. He sat with his short legs on the seat and his feet dangling down, careful not to get anything dirty. He took off his black and green backpack, covered with stickers of cartoon characters he had never seen. He laid it beside him, took out a notebook and some coloured pencils, and began to draw. He couldn’t write or read, and would never learn to do so, but he didn’t know this, and thought that what he was doing was studying and so he did it conscientiously, drawing lines and shapes up and down, at the sides, making lines longer, rubbing some out, redoing the shapes, using another colour here and there, methodically and carefully completing scribbles that made no sense to anyone else.

The driver set off, slowly leaving behind the crowd of mothers and children hurrying towards the bus stops. The cracked pavements around the school were filled with narrow stores, a stationer’s with a cluttered window display, a couple of grocers, a Korean trinkets shop, a laundry.

Peering in the rear-view mirror, the driver saw with amazement how quickly the boy had become absorbed in his own world.

He thought of himself at that age, running through the unpaved streets and constantly evolving houses in the shanty town on the city outskirts, which flooded whenever there was heavy rain. Shouting all the time, flying kites or delivering the lunch tins his grandmother cooked in her dark kitchen, up and down the
favela
he didn’t even know was called that – to him it was simply the place his mother had brought him to and left him – a boy weighed down with lunch boxes, always shouting, shooing away the mongrels or calling to the customers, dodging and excusing himself to everybody in the alleyways because he was in a hurry to deliver the food, then fetch some more and deliver that too, and so on and on, until it was time to go to the school down the hill. Unable to sit still, he never took any interest in what the teachers were saying, but even so he listened and wrote down numbers and names, desperate to get out again and run home through the maze of shacks and cramped stores, although he didn’t realize they were tiny and cramped because he had never known anything different and because he had never been taken outside that neighbourhood. Until one day his mother did so, accompanied this time by a man he had never seen before, a man who beat him so that he would be quiet and stop shouting and laughing and running round the gardens of the big house where his mother and the man worked.

Then one day, without deciding to, he fell silent. He became a quiet boy, a quiet youth, a quiet soldier, the quietest among the military police recruits, a quiet corporal out on patrol, a quiet sergeant during the raids on drug dens, a quiet patient while he was recovering from the bullet wound that shattered his knee, a quiet retired soldier in his bare city-centre apartment, a silent security driver whom the other employees looked up to and called the Major, a rank he had never reached.

He didn’t feel sorry for the boy. He didn’t particularly like the boy. He didn’t particularly like anyone. Except for his daughter. Liking people, things, tastes, or whatever it might be, was not something that interested him. He was indifferent to others. To all others.

At least that was what he had convinced himself.

Normally he would not have picked the boy up. The VW hired to transport the children of the domestic employees in Jardim Paulistano was supposed to do that. He had already done his job earlier, when he took home the chubby boy who was as dark-skinned as his father, the owner of the car he was now driving. But the boss’s wife gave the order. In this case, an unusual order, as unusual as the day had been so far. As unusual as his feeling had been when he saw the housekeepers’ son at the school gate, pack on his back, so blond and pale-looking, so small, so … defenceless.

He followed the same route back as he had taken with the boss’s kid.

It didn’t take him long to reach Avenida Rebouças, with its usual annoying traffic. Switching on the radio, he heard the same news that had been in all the media since the start of that month: the Iraqi dictator had invaded Kuwait. With 60,000 soldiers, Saddam Hussein had seized a fifth of the world’s oil reserves. The driver changed station, but eventually gave up and switched the radio off, fed up with the same blah-blah, the recession brought on by the Collor government impounding all bank deposits, even savings accounts, with more than 50,000 cruzeiros in them. He loathed politics, the commentators irritated him, he didn’t much care for any kind of music, there was no football game on at that time of day. He preferred silence.

A few blocks further on, he turned right into Rua Joaquim Antunes. This was the start of a neighbourhood with tree-lined streets and quite elegant houses, built in one of the first waves of urban development which, in the second decade of the twentieth century, displaced affluent families from São Paulo to what had once been small farms to the west of the city.

The streets were quiet; nobody was walking on the pavements. The people living in this area travelled around only by car. The stream of vehicles trying to avoid rush-hour traffic jams would only start later in the afternoon.

He drove on slowly, taking the roundabouts carefully so that the German car’s soft suspension did not sway too much and spoil the boy’s concentration.

He looked at him again in the rear-view mirror. For a split second, without realizing it, he was envious of him.

Happiness is easy. All you need is a piece of paper and a box of coloured pencils, he thought – almost at the same instant as the first bullet hit him.

His trained eye and brain immediately registered: a tall, hooded man in a dark-coloured parka, firing a long-barrelled Magnum with his left hand. He had jumped out of a black pick-up that had just blocked the path of the Mercedes-Benz. Two smaller cars were preventing any possible retreat backwards, and beyond them was a black saloon car. Other hooded figures were leaping out of the two smaller vehicles, running in his direction: one, two, three, four, five men, revolvers and pistols in their hands, none of them armed with anything more powerful. What are they doing, what do they want, he wondered, his right shoulder burning from the bullet that had whizzed through it. He put his weight on his left leg, straightening up and turning towards the back seat where the boy had stopped drawing and was peering at him quizzically, not comprehending what was going on. Shouting at the boy, forgetting he couldn’t hear a thing, shouting for him to get down, to lie flat on the floor of the car, at the same time as he sees the hooded men coming towards him, only one of them firing – the one who has the silver Magnum in his left hand, the big guy who came out of the black pick-up, it must be him, it has to be him, but the boy doesn’t move and the Major cannot reach him. He feels the impact of another bullet, this time in his left shoulder, it must be a crack shot who does not intend to kill him, if not he would have gone for the head, he had a clear enough sight for that, the Major reasons, leaning back still further but only succeeding in grabbing hold of the green and black backpack covered in cartoon stickers. Two hooded men open the rear doors of the Mercedes as he drops back into the front seat, reaching behind him for the Glock semi-automatic he keeps hidden under the seat, cursing himself for not doing this before, instead of trying to save the boy first, but the man in the dark parka is already alongside him, and quickly fires his .357 Magnum three times into his chest and the back of his head.

The boy is dragged out by the men from the smaller cars. They cover him with a sack, and pass him on to the driver of the pick-up, who carries him over to it and pushes him into the boot.

The giant with the long-barrelled Magnum .357 tosses a piece of paper on to the Major’s lifeless body. On it are written two long numbers. An arrow, drawn with a fountain pen, points from the first series of numbers to the second. On the other side of the paper, written with the same pen: We have your son.

The black saloon, specially adapted for invalids, and the two smaller cars turn tail and speed off along the road they came in on, exactly forty-two seconds earlier. At the first roundabout, they head off in different directions. The other men pile into the pick-up, which drives off down the street opposite.

The big blue German car is the only vehicle left in the empty street.

The coloured pencils lie scattered on the asphalt around it.

Edney Silvestre
is a Brazilian writer and well-known TV presenter and journalist. He lives in Rio de Janeiro. His first novel,
If I Close My Eyes Now
, has won several prestigious prizes in Brazil and has been published in eight territories to date. His second novel,
Happiness is Easy
, has just been published to great acclaim in Brazil and is available in translation as a Doubleday hardback and ebook.

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IF I CLOSE MY EYES NOW
A DOUBLEDAY BOOK:9780857521323
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448127344

Se eu fechar os olhos agora
first published in Brazil by Record, 2009

First published in Great Britain
in 2013 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Edney Silvestre 2009
English translation copyright © Nick Caistor 2013

Obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cultura do Brasil/Fundaçã
o Biblioteca Nacional

Edney Silvestre has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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