Granta 121: Best of Young Brazilian Novelists Read online

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  In retrospect, it was rather childish, some kind of strained and awkward attempt at camaraderie: Nilo and the red-headed English major plotting how to catch the fox that kept on overturning the garbage cans outside the Goldsmiths residence hall where he’d been staying that summer. They weren’t exactly friends. Nilo didn’t have any friends. In those days, he had a certain distaste for the company of others. He was single-mindedly driven by tennis. He was always training, never went out. Whenever he ran into the red-headed guy, in the cafeteria, he kept to his usual telegraphic mode of making conversation, nothing too personal. At night, from the second floor, he’d watch the fox knocking over rubbish bins as it circled the building.

  One day, in passing, they happened to mention the fox and soon began discussing the best way to trap it. They considered spreading glue on the welcome mat. Stuffing a piece of meat with sleeping pills. Building one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions in which the fox’s paw would trip a mechanism that would knock over a line of dominoes, the last of which would propel a toy car that would drop onto the on/off switch for a fan whose wind would inflate the sail of a little boat that would, after crossing a puddle, slice through a wire with its saw-shaped prow, making the net plummet, and they’d capture the fox.

  One morning, Nilo bought a postcard. It depicted a generic scene of Piccadilly Circus, with the fountain and the statue of Eros in the background. In the picture, there was snow everywhere and the statue was shrouded in fog. Later on, after returning to his room, he took another look at the card. He regretted his decision. He’d chosen the wrong one.

  He flipped it over anyway and wrote a note to his fiancée. But he couldn’t decide whether or not to mail the postcard. He was getting sleepy. Feeling exhausted. He’d been training five to six hours per day. In his spare time, Nilo would go to see apartments and houses in the area around Kilburn. His days were numbered at the residence hall. His fiancée was arriving soon, and they’d have to find a larger place. His fiancée was a violinist. That year, she’d watched from the sidelines as he jumped from 492nd in the world rankings to 385th and then to 310th. But the win in Buenos Aires and what had come after – the sponsorship offer, the invitation to play in Europe, the temporary stay in London – had taken them both by surprise.

  One day he was jumping rope when a young man wearing a bandanna approached him. Whenever he didn’t go to train with his coach on the grass courts at West Heath Lawn, he’d use the university facilities. It was good, in a way, because then he didn’t have to cross the city. Goldsmiths was in New Cross and having to go all the way to Hampstead every day wasn’t exactly thrilling. It didn’t make any sense that the sponsors had set him up with this housing at Goldsmiths. It was an austere building with few amenities and not so conveniently located. Had the other housing options already been taken by better players? The bandanna guy asked if he wanted to hit a few. They walked out of the gym, chatting about rackets, grips. To warm up, they rallied, alternating between the far corners. When they started keeping score, he served a series of aces – the bandanna guy was pulled wide, skidded off the court.

  So Nilo decided to rein in his serve. Pace himself. Dragging the games out with easy rallies. Letting the other guy think he stood a chance of winning, so he’d give it his all.

  On the way back to the residence hall, he passed a line of trees and two other tennis courts. Someone called his name and Nilo recognized his red-headed neighbour waving from the stands overlooking one of the courts. Towel around his shoulders, he climbed the metal bleachers and sat down. He hadn’t known that his neighbour was interested in tennis. The redhead said that actually he didn’t have any interest in the sport. On the court, two girls were engaged in an aggressive match. The one with the ponytail and wine-coloured skirt spun her racket, stood at the ready. When the ball came: she slammed it violently, crying out. The red-headed guy said he had a theory. They sat in silence until Nilo asked: What’s your theory? The redhead explained that there was a way to tell how big the tennis players’ pussies were based on the way they cried out. It worked for every single girl. There was a science to it, he said. He could provide more details if Nilo wanted. When their attention turned back to the court, the player in the wine-coloured skirt was on the ground. She seemed to have fallen on her arm. She was sitting near the baseline, her racket lying halfway to the net. A small group had gathered around her.

  The following week, Nilo competed in a tournament in Brighton. The week after that, in Oxford. Then he went to Paris. He always spent most of his time at the hotel. Everything turned out as expected, the matches never really posing any serious challenge. In Paris, he struck up a friendship with the maid, who brought him extra towels without his having to ask. In the evenings, he called his fiancée. They talked about: the competition, the conservatory, his parents, her parents, metro stations, parks, the launderette.

  Back in London, he took a shower and headed down to the cafeteria. The meal service had already ended, but residents could still use the kitchen. The stove was next to a large window. Nilo heated up a can of Indian chicken curry. He thought about how he liked playing tennis. He’d spent most of his childhood and adolescence doing it.

  But suddenly he wondered if he’d go on liking it.

  Then he heard a noise. Through the glass, he saw the fox dragging plastic bags along the ground, scattering trash all over the entryway. He believed that if he managed to emulate what he most admired in the players he envied, he’d be able to create an uber-style. But nothing was really that simple.

  When he got outside, the fox was no longer there. Nilo took a walk around the building. He pissed in a bush. Two hippies passed by. To the sound of his urine splashing onto the leaves, he thought: If the fox got away, then pissing on the bush would even the score. A fox is not a pig. The fox is more elusive. A pig and a fox are not the same at all.

  4

  One night, Nilo met up with the coach and his wife at a pub. He spotted them from a distance. They were leaning against the bar with a girl he didn’t recognize.

  As he got closer, he had the feeling he’d seen her somewhere before. He said hello. They were introduced. She was a friend of the wife’s.

  They asked if he wanted a drink. As he leaned forward to order a shot of whisky and an apple juice to chase it down, Nilo remembered who she was. The tennis player from Goldsmiths. He mentioned the coincidence and asked if her arm was all right. She said yes. It had taken a month to heal, but now it was better.

  A long conversation ensued. She recounted how as a teenager she had competed in a few tournaments. She’d considered going pro, but life had taken her in other directions. She’d studied English at university. She’d taken a diving course in New Zealand. That’s where her father and her grandparents were from, she said. Her great-great-grandparents were English. They’d emigrated around 1850 or so. Then, at the beginning of the century, she explained, her father had made the opposite trip and returned to England, just before the war. Another group joined them, more friends of his coach. She pointed, it was his birthday, the guy in the ridiculous sports coat. They discussed the coat, started referring to the birthday boy as ‘the guy in the ridiculous sports coat’. She switched from beer to whisky. Bursts of laughter broke out, toasts – he’d lost sight of his coach. She was talking about various streets, museums, parks, all the places he still hadn’t gone to and needed to visit. She showed him a picture. That’s my favourite park, she said. She was in the photo, from the waist up, eyes closed and leaning against a bridge. She told him she didn’t think she’d ever really stopped playing, stopped taking it seriously, she meant. But looking back on it, everything seemed to make sense. She’d started getting more involved with her classes at university. She’d met a girl who played tennis a lot better than she did. But it was impossible to know what really made the difference in her decision to give up trying to go pro. Maybe it hadn’t been either of those things at all. Like they say: I started getting into linguistics and
I was spending less and less time playing tennis, until it just got swallowed up entirely. Or maybe: I was meant to stop playing tennis precisely so I could start getting interested in linguistics – it was fate. Or it was that I had to stop being interested in tennis so that I could get to know another girl who was so much better than me and not be totally devastated by it. When I read about people who’ve died, I think to myself, so that’s how someone’s going to write about me some day? With one fact explaining another, and my every inspiration? As if anyone could know anything about a life. He’d had too much to drink and didn’t know whether he’d really been following it all, but everything came back to him on the bus ride home. He stuck his middle finger down his throat, tried to vomit, because he’d feel better if he vomited. He heaved, but couldn’t make anything come up. He leaned his head against the window and the pool in the university gym loomed larger at night. That was the impression he had, as he plunged in while everyone else was in their rooms sleeping, or out at parties, freshman mixers, smoke-filled apartments. He sat at the edge of the pool with his legs in the water. He couldn’t see to the bottom. It was as if somewhere on the other side, there was an inverse world in which a confused old man, a perfect stranger, was searching for him. It didn’t make any sense whatsoever. The gym was dark, but there were points of light outlining the pool. Its surface glittered coldly.

  The phone woke him up in the morning. It was an estate agent. He said there was an apartment Nilo had to see, close to Regent’s Canal. They agreed to meet at the place in two hours.

  Nilo emerged from the tube station. It took him a while to find the street, but soon he realized that he’d passed by it. Bergholt Mews. At the end of the block, there was some kind of garden with a tree in it.

  From a distance, he saw a man, probably the estate agent, a short guy with greying hair wearing a blue suit and gloves. The man handed Nilo the keys. He said he had to go – he was holding a handkerchief over his mouth, it looked as though he had a toothache. Without ever taking the handkerchief from his mouth, he instructed Nilo to leave the keys in the drawer of the table on the ground floor when he was done. If Nilo liked the apartment, the man said, he knew how to get in touch.

  The building had two storeys. The apartment was on the upper floor. Nilo walked up the stairs. The entry hall was dark but well maintained. He turned the key. Outlines of formerly hung paintings marked the wall in the hallway. He wandered around the living room, looked out the window. The place wasn’t very big, nor was it small. Everything was in perfect condition. The rooms felt nice and airy. The street outside was quiet.

  When he went back to the residence hall, he’d call his fiancée. Then he’d call the estate agent. But first he sat down in a corner of the living room. He couldn’t really say how long he’d been there, or when he’d started crying. Not a steady sort of weeping. It was a spasm, two or three sobs, as though some prolonged discontent had traversed his body and finally reached his throat. In two weeks, his fiancée would be in town. He probably wouldn’t be able to pick her up at the airport, he’d be training. They would agree to meet at the apartment. He’d take a shower in the locker room. Then start thinking about his fiancée: she’d have set down her luggage already, been through all the rooms, the kitchen, looked out the window in the laundry room, seen the yard, and now she’d be sitting at the dining-room table, in front of the meal, checking her watch. He wouldn’t have arrived yet, but soon he’d join her, and he’d tell her about the fox.

  GRANTA

  * * *

  VALDIR PERES,

  JUANITO AND

  POLOSKEI

  Antonio Prata

  TRANSLATED BY DANIEL HAHN

  * * *

  ANTONIO PRATA

  1977

  Antonio Prata was born in São Paulo. He has published nine books, including Douglas (2001), As pernas da tia Corália (2003), Adulterado (2009) and, most recently, Meio intelectual, meio de esquerda (2010). Prata also writes for television and contributes a literary column to the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. ‘Valdir Peres, Juanito and Poloskei’ (‘Valdir Peres, Juanito e Poloskei’) is a new story.

  At first, everybody on the street had the same purchasing power, and belongings per capita comprised a bicycle, a football, a box of Playmobil, some building blocks and other odds and ends. With the release of the sticker album for the ’82 World Cup, however, we did notice a slight change in the distribution of wealth: some got five little packs a day, others were entitled to ten, but really nothing that might threaten our socio-economic balance. When all was said and done, what with suffering at the lack of the rarest ones – Sócrates, Maradona and Paolo Rossi – and disdaining the duplicates – Valdir Peres, Juanito and Poloskei – we all learned the law of supply and demand, and we understood the pleasures and hardships of the middle class. Until the day Rodrigo showed up with the remote-control jeep.

  The father of Rodrigo, my neighbour in the house to the left, was a tennis player. From the ages of twelve to nineteen, he never lost a match, and people in the know said that he was going to be one of the greatest players of all time, but on his twentieth birthday he had a motorcycle accident, injured his shoulder and was never able to compete again. Since then he’d spent his days at home, smoking pot and listening to prog rock. The family was supported by his wife, an ophthalmologist. None of the neighbours had much confidence, then, when Rodrigo’s father called them up, each of them in turn, to talk business.

  Every night for a week, the same scene was repeated. He would receive the potential business partner in the TV room, offer them a beer and then strike up a chat about football, which seemed to be merely the warm-up to his main subject. Then, quite casually, he would ask the neighbour if they’d seen the Corinthians match the previous Sunday. Whatever the response, he would add: ‘Actually I didn’t see it myself, but I’m going to watch it now.’ The expression of curiosity on his interlocutor’s face was his cue to raise the cloth – an old towel on top of the television set, under which was hidden a rectangular silver object. ‘This is a video-cassette player,’ he’d explain, pointing at the novelty his brother-in-law had just brought back from the USA. ‘It records programmes and plays films that you can buy or rent on any street corner nowadays in the United States.’

  The demonstration would begin with the previous Sunday’s game, it would take in a few scenes from Star Wars and had as its climax, appropriately, Deep Throat, brought over by his brother-in-law from the same trip. ‘It won’t be long,’ he’d say, ‘before everyone will have a video-cassette player. Everyone! And what’s the most lucrative kind of film in this industry?’ the ex-tennis player would ask, fanning himself, none too discreetly, with the cover of the porn tape. If each of his neighbours were to come in with ten thousand cruzeiros (the price of a fridge in those days), they could open up an ‘adult films’ rental shop, and within the year, he swore, they would be rich.

  None of the inhabitants of the street took the bait. Some out of modesty, others because the idea had come from a guy who spent his days stoned, sitting in the living room of his house, listening to Jethro Tull and playing solos on air guitar. One night that week, I heard the father of Henrique, my neighbour from the house to the right, commenting to his wife: ‘Well, that gizmo is actually pretty cool, but it’s just one of those gringo things. Take it from me, the craze isn’t going to catch on here.’

  Rodrigo’s father, however, wasn’t discouraged: he managed to get money from his brother-in-law, raised a bit more from the bank, persuaded his wife to sell the car and opened the rental place. Six months later, at Christmastime, he wasn’t yet rich, but he did have enough money to give his son a 4×4 remote-control jeep.

  On the twenty-fifth of December, while the adults were eating the leftovers of the Christmas turkey, the children would be out on the pavement premiering the gifts they’d received the night before. I was focused on trying to detach the hair from a Playmobil figure, when I heard the buzzing sound – the sound a bee would make,
if it were the size of a cat. A metre away from us, facing us off like an animal all set to pounce, was the jeep, about forty centimetres long. It backed up, turned towards the left and began to circle us. When it had returned to where it had started from, Rodrigo appeared from behind a tree, the remote control in his hands and an undisguisable expression of pride on his face. He walked over to us, deep in concentration, the tip of his tongue poking out the side of his mouth, as he made the jeep do bootleg turns. When he was standing in front of us, he looked up from the controls, looked right at us with an air of infinite superiority, and just said: ‘It’s American.’

  We contemplated the toy in solemn silence, while Rodrigo contemplated the toy’s power over us. It was Henrique who had the courage to ask the question that was in the minds of everyone there: ‘Can I have a go?’ It was the cue Rodrigo had been waiting for. ‘No, you don’t know how to do it, you’ll break it.’ Having said that, he turned his back and walked off home, the car at his side, like a well-trained dog.

  The jeep would have been an isolated event on the street – the rise of one particular family, who would soon move to another neighbourhood, leaving behind them a few memories and a touch of envy – if Henrique’s father had not also begun to earn some money.