Black Lies, Red Blood

Thirty-eight

“We’ve sewed on your ear,” someone said.

He assumed it was a doctor, a man in his fifties, with tired, greenish brown eyes, a thin mustache, and puffy cheeks, who was leaning over him. His eyes were fixed on him the way doctors’ eyes do.

Anders Brant had a feeling that the doctor had been talking to him for some time, he could faintly recall someone repeating his name, a hand on his shoulder, a vague odor, antiseptic, but also onion.

“My ear?”

The doctor nodded, smiled a little, probably pleased at having made contact.

Brant closed his eyes. His head was aching, pounding. He remembered Monica, sank bank into the darkness, his body felt heavy as lead, formless, as if it didn’t belong to him. He exerted himself to the utmost to remember anything other than the whore he had bought.

Someone was moistening his lips.

“Señhor Andrés?”

A hand on his chest. Worry, thought Brant, they’re worried. He was not able to open his eyes.

“Ivaldo?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“A bus. You stepped out into the street, the Pituba bus came.”

Geography came first. A map of Salvador slowly appeared in his mind.

“Ondina, Barra, Sete Portas,” he mumbled.

“No, Pituba.”

The map became clearer and clearer. Memories flowed up and merged like dream sequences: Largo Santana. A boy came up and asked for a chicken bone. When he was refused, he spit on the food and ran, rounding the church in the middle of the square and disappearing down toward the sea; a demonstration on a square, a man separated from the group, he spoke without amplification but his voice sounded surprisingly strong; the mussel gatherers, their sinewy backs against the light, the shouts and laughter across the banks and how he loved life then.

“You gave us money. Why?”

Money. It costs money. What does it cost to sew on an ear? I have to ask. The darkness came back, the map disappeared, the memories were eradicated.

“Vanessa,” Anders Brant mumbled.