him. How many times has he heard his father shout that people owe him money? Everyone owes him money, all the time. It’s as though the world were split in two: his father, alone, and the huge wave of debtors that persecutes him. What he can’t understand is why he declares it the way he does. There’s an element of complaint in it (as though the money he’s owed is a curse that can only be cast by yelling), but also a certain disconcerting pride that transforms the status of creditor into a privilege, a miraculous gift of the type that fate bestows on the heroes of apocalyptic films, like being fertile in a world sterilized by nuclear radiation, or the ability to speak or think on a planet populated by beasts. It’s really the money itself that he finds disturbing. He can never imagine friendship and money coexisting without feeling scandalized. It’s as though, by dint of some extraordinary cosmic misalignment, two radically foreign kingdoms have come together in an unknown territory, and it’s anybody’s guess what sort of unwonted plants and creatures will result. And since it’s impossible for him to grasp, he naturally starts to jump to conclusions.
His father said “a friend” to ease his mind, to alleviate the worrying effect of “owes me money,” the only charged and therefore true part of the sentence. But how can “a friend” share any reasonable sequence of events with the dark package that his father takes out of the drawer and puts in his pocket each of the three nights he goes out alone, leaving him in the eye of a storm of omens from which only sleep can free him? If “a friend” can’t share a phrase with “owes money,” what kind of phrase would it take to unabashedly unite “afriend” and “a revolver”? Because that’s what his father takes with him every time he goes to see the friend who owes him money, a revolver, an 1873 Colt Peacemaker six-shooter with a walnut handle, just like the one Montgomery Wood, the hero of
O dolar furado,
uses when he tries to avenge his brother’s murder. Which means his father is in danger. How did he not think of it earlier? That’s obviously why he goes out alone. He leaves the Hotel Gloria, travels the length of the city in a taxi—one of the demented race cars that serve as taxis in Rio de Janeiro—and, with his Colt 1873 at the ready, tiptoes into a gloomy, unfamiliar apartment where everything from the arrangement of the furniture to the location of every last light switch and bell, everything that could either serve his purpose or hinder it, is obedient to someone else’s will: that of the friend who owes him money. Which is to say his worst enemy, who won’t only not return his money but will make the most of his local advantage, will surprise him, split his head open with the sharp edge of a rock or a trophy, and leave him sprawled on the floor, drowning in his own blood. Sometimes, years later—long after the enigma has been solved, when there’s no longer anything to fear—he replays the scene to himself, more out of the peculiar inertia of internal fictions than anything else, and he’s flooded with a very potent retrospective terror that can change the past instantaneously, at the lightest of brushes, and he lies awake for hours, his eyes wide open, until, when he’s as exhausted as he was at eleven years old, he hears the frenzied cawing of the birds breaking the morning silence.
How much money can his father be owed? What sum could justify the ritual of those three sadistic nights: his being put to bed—almost like being locked away in a basement—and condemned to the nightmare of insomnia; his father spritzing himself with cologne and dressing and styling his hair so carefully; the revolver being put in his pocket. To say nothingof everything else, all of it as ominous and misshapen as a series of expressionist photograms: the taxi, the city in darkness, the apartment, the head split open by the corner of the trophy,
His father said “a friend” to ease his mind, to alleviate the worrying effect of “owes me money,” the only charged and therefore true part of the sentence. But how can “a friend” share any reasonable sequence of events with the dark package that his father takes out of the drawer and puts in his pocket each of the three nights he goes out alone, leaving him in the eye of a storm of omens from which only sleep can free him? If “a friend” can’t share a phrase with “owes money,” what kind of phrase would it take to unabashedly unite “afriend” and “a revolver”? Because that’s what his father takes with him every time he goes to see the friend who owes him money, a revolver, an 1873 Colt Peacemaker six-shooter with a walnut handle, just like the one Montgomery Wood, the hero of
O dolar furado,
uses when he tries to avenge his brother’s murder. Which means his father is in danger. How did he not think of it earlier? That’s obviously why he goes out alone. He leaves the Hotel Gloria, travels the length of the city in a taxi—one of the demented race cars that serve as taxis in Rio de Janeiro—and, with his Colt 1873 at the ready, tiptoes into a gloomy, unfamiliar apartment where everything from the arrangement of the furniture to the location of every last light switch and bell, everything that could either serve his purpose or hinder it, is obedient to someone else’s will: that of the friend who owes him money. Which is to say his worst enemy, who won’t only not return his money but will make the most of his local advantage, will surprise him, split his head open with the sharp edge of a rock or a trophy, and leave him sprawled on the floor, drowning in his own blood. Sometimes, years later—long after the enigma has been solved, when there’s no longer anything to fear—he replays the scene to himself, more out of the peculiar inertia of internal fictions than anything else, and he’s flooded with a very potent retrospective terror that can change the past instantaneously, at the lightest of brushes, and he lies awake for hours, his eyes wide open, until, when he’s as exhausted as he was at eleven years old, he hears the frenzied cawing of the birds breaking the morning silence.
How much money can his father be owed? What sum could justify the ritual of those three sadistic nights: his being put to bed—almost like being locked away in a basement—and condemned to the nightmare of insomnia; his father spritzing himself with cologne and dressing and styling his hair so carefully; the revolver being put in his pocket. To say nothingof everything else, all of it as ominous and misshapen as a series of expressionist photograms: the taxi, the city in darkness, the apartment, the head split open by the corner of the trophy,
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