What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?: A Novel Read Free Page B

the furniture, dribbling piss on the rug, if they gave me a glass of milk I would have spilled it on the counter, Mr. Couceiro wasn’t throwing stones at me, wasn’t ordering me to
    —Get lost
    he’d say hello to the trees, recall the Japanese, he showed me his corporal’s uniform which the rice paddies had stained, three days and three nights up to his neck in the water and they gave up because they were tired lad, he looked at me the way my mother looked at my father
    —Do you wear this, Carlos?
    not even disillusioned, humble when the light of the lamp
    caught him, he had no eyes, wrinkles above and below and instead of eyes small spheres of light, Dona Helena
    the doctor’s wedding ring was tapping the pen on the desk top
    — What’s your mother’s name?
    and there was no dove bobbing on the plane tree
    with me in her arms
    —Look at what I’ve got here Couceiro
    a hidden floor, plants in paint cans, the curled-up doormat that I always tripped on, bedrooms boxed inside one another
    the dining-room table ended at the bed
    where the doorknobs turned uselessly, you would grab any one of them and it would stay in your hand, a porcelain ball and a rusty shaft, tiled panels in need of repair, Mr. Couceiro coming from the antipodes where a radio was playing, not the one I broke, an older one next to the patched-up couch, Mr. Couceiro with a cane, in line with a current of air that was puffing out his shirt
    —Just like the monsoons in Timor, lad, all those fallen palm trees
    Dona Helena with indignant clicks of her tongue whirled as if someone had been attacking me and went off with me in her arms into the trenches of the pantry, gave me some pears in syrup, gave me some cookies, showed me the music box and the little waltz started up
    —You scared him and he started crying who’s going to quiet him down now?
    all I have to do today is think about them
    they have practically no feeling it’s so hard to make them get to feel again with a little luck medicine sometimes
    and I remember all the notes, I find myself repeating them if I go soft, I don’t have two mothers, my mother’s name is Dona Helena, she showed me the music box again, sat down on the couch beside the sewing machine, exiled Mr. Couceiro far away to the radio
    the needle moved along the dial and foreign languages whistling, scratching, it stopped where the priest was saying the six o’clock rosary, icy echoes in the chapel, half from his prayers and half from the women, they paused and the women would begin and
    the priest would stop, after the heroin the voices would mingle, the sewing machine
    back and forth sewing me up, I tried to cry out and my throat closed up on me, the lamp to heat the spoon slid along the mat, I couldn’t get the needle out, a tiny drop of blood appeared and trickled down, Mr. Couceiro concerned
    —What’s wrong with him?
    my mother Dona Helena and my father Mr. Couceiro he started crying it’s all your fault who’s going to quiet him down now try entertaining him with your Japanese your buffaloes the months you spent up to your neck in a rice paddy tomorrow when he comes back from the hospital don’t bother him leave him alone talk to him about trees turn on the radio rosary for him
    in the back of the apartment a balcony facing the Anjos church, a stretch of river and almost never any ships, I was sitting on the flowerpot with the lemon and the syringe, I tightened my fist the way Rui had taught me to find the vein, he would come with a ring or a bracelet or the money from last night’s show toward payment for the washing machine or repairs on the stove
    —Don’t worry about it, it’s your father who’s paying
    my father’s name is Mr. Couceiro, my mother’s Dona Helena, the clown who Rui thought was my father isn’t my father I swear, I don’t know anything about him, I don’t know him, my father went away or maybe I didn’t have one or maybe he vanished into thin air and materialized years later so I