you never saw, but only heard: the sound of their every movement, every groan, every smashed glass, every bowel. The centrifugal pull of the city, the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together was compounded by the intimacy and enclosure of the apartment block, piling us magnificently one on top of the other until the end...‘ Saramago! Saramago!’ My vest stuck to my back. I hadn’ t changed it in three days and I stank. I should have taken a shower that morning, but I was running late so I just ran, ran, ran through the streets of Liberdade in my trainers, trailing my bag of tools and paints behind me. I went to the open window to breathe in the air, thick air that poured slowly into the hollows of my cheeks, touching the back of my throat and my lungs and gathering in the dip of my belly button, drowned in my own sweat, and the sweating air and the steam coming from beneath the bathroom door. Hanging outside the window, suspended high above the streets below was a green canary in a cage. Scattered over the window ledge were all kinds of nuts: little emerald pistachios hidden inside their shells, huge polished Brazil nuts and the dry husks of monkey nuts. On the pavement twenty-three floors below, there were empty shells and sometimes whole nuts, lapped up by stray dogs and pink vultures with labial heads. My ears popped as I let in the sound from outside. There was a moment of relief as the shower stopped and at last out came Saramago. He wore a towel wrapped around his waist underneath a brown belly which was papery and thin. He left a trail of water around his feet.‘ What do you need doing? I’ m sorry for coming in like this,’ I asked, gesturing towards the closed door.‘ It is ok. It is time I got this done. There is, how to say? Mould. Please paint over it. I have wanted this done for a long time. This was a long time coming, my friend.’ He spoke to me in broken English that betrayed his paulistino origins. He liked to talk in English. He liked the exotic sound of his voice as it fell off his tongue, and he felt as though it was no longer he, Saramago, talking but another who had taken over his body until he could no longer hear himself. He could speak with freedom. He sat down on a stool at the kitchen counter. His shoulders drooped around his chest as he slowly turned his fragile neck to observe me. I took out a tin of white paint from my bag, and opened it in just the same way as I had done the day before. The rust flaked into the pool of paint inside. The steam from the bathroom had lifted the plaster from the wall which fell away with each paint stroke. I spent the afternoon painting over the growing blooms of damp and spiralling, downy white mildew. Saramago disappeared into the bathroom, and came out wearing a white shirt and trousers cropped much too high above his ankles. He went to the window and fed a nut through the bars of the cage to his canary. Years ago he had worked on a cashew farm in the vast lands of the north. One day he left and never went back. Now he wrote songs, jingles for the radio station down the road.(‘ It was a dream and nothing more!’) He went there twice a month to record songs that would be played over and over to the 200 listeners of 84.5 FM Radio Amor Sem Fim, at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon. After he would come home, take a shower and feed his canary.‘ Have you ever seen the woman who lives in number 573?’ he asked me.‘ No, I can’ t say I have.’‘ She is a real beauty.’ He had passed her in the hall six months before, and followed her closely. He recognised her dark eyes, her slight reserved frame.‘ Would you do something for me? Take this package up to her room when you are done. It would make me happy to know she got it.’ His voice was filled with saudade, a slow and carefully reasoned longing. Such a feeling often occurs for someone in the present for whom you feel some kind of irreparable loss for the past or for the future. There is no real translation for it in English. It is inexpressible. Yet even his broken English could convey the sense, if not the word itself. I left at 5pm, taking with me the package, a thick envelope tied with string. Inside the lift stood a young Japanese couple, laughing at a video on a mobile phone. The numbers lit up for two floors, stopping for them to get out. Ting. The doors stayed open too long before closing again, eclipsing the couple before me as they disappeared down the long corridor. The lift rose once more and the door opened onto the twenty-sixth floor. Ting. The corridor was long and carpeted in pink. I knocked on room 573 as a teenage boy leaning against a low table eyed me carefully. A woman answered the door, with strong looking arms and a thick waist wrapped in a Japanese linen apron. She must have been in the middle of cooking because her hands were covered in dough, and she left a handprint of flour on the door handle.‘ I have been asked to give you this. Saramago sent me.’ She put her hand to her cheek, smudging dough across her face.‘ What is this?’ She replied, surprised, taking the package and ushering me inside. She had the same kitchen counter with a metal stool as all the other flats. On the wall ticked a loud Coca-Cola clock. Tick. Tick. Tick. She hadn’ t lived here long, and had taken the place of a girl who had moved into her boyfriend’ s room next door six months earlier. She had left behind a large green plant in a pot, too heavy to move, sitting on a pile of damp newspapers, and a large glass coffee table scattered with out of date TV magazines, covered with the faces and breasts of soap opera stars. She began to make coffee, forgetting about the dough all over her hands and coating everything with flour.‘ Where is he?’ she said.‘ He lives three floors down.’ Tick. Tick. Tick. The room was hot.‘ Can I get you a cup of coffee?’‘ Please.’‘ I saw him a few months ago, but thought it couldn’ t have been him.’ She clattered some cups as the coffee bubbled and steam rushed out of the pot. She poured a little into a cup for me, and I took a sip. The coffee was hot. Hisako; the long-lived child. Her name was Hisako and she made hot coffee. She told me how her grand-mother had moved here from Japan in 1928.‘ São Paulo needs more Japanese!’( she had read in the Osaka Mainichi Shinbun), so she and thousands of others sailed happily into Rio de Janeiro’ s Guanabara Bay with Sugarloaf gorgeously poised overhead. She had worked in the sushi restaurant downstairs for three months. The place was huge and red with coloured globes hung low from the ceiling over the tables. Flat fish tanks lined the walls filled with silver and orange coy carp and whiskered cat fish and grotesque shrimps crawling over pale blue stones and golden treasure chests. At night, it transformed into a karaoke bar and disco, when the lights and mirror balls would shine into the fish tanks, illuminating the red bodies of the lobsters as they pressed their faces to the glass. She worked late, and when she wasn’ t working she could hear the people going in and out, their voices carried on the up-draught of the building to her window. Saramago heard these same voices. She sipped from her coffee, and sat on the arm of the chair in the sitting room. Taking the package, she untied the string from the paper. The cup fell out of her hands, splitting in two on the floor.
*
I knocked on the door before easily pushing it open. The floor was covered in wet foot prints. Beneath the window, Saramago lay slumped, nut shells scattered around his body. The birdcage flapped open outside. His face and throat were swollen, grotesquely distorting his features and grey, yet still warm, bathed in the sunlight from the window. Life had been a slow and sumptuous torture. Everywhere cyanide. In bowls lined up along bars in town. Inside little shells that contain the poison within. Growing slowly from the caju fruit that crushes in your hand. Traces on the salted, roasted breath of your lover. Laughter came through the vent in the kitchen.
Anya Cowley