Atlantic Hotel. João Gilberto Noll

leaned over the edge of the bed. The almost invisible bloodstain was still there. A gunshot… why not?

      Yes, I would kill too, and earn a cell and free board from the state. Maybe resume drawing, which I gave up in adolescence. Draw all day long if the other prisoners let me. At night I’d fall asleep so that the next morning I could awaken and continue the interrupted line from the day before.

      Maybe that way I’d get back to finding joy in just killing time. Eva, a blonde I’d been mixed up with for the last few months, was always telling me, “What you need is a normal occupation.”

      When alone with myself, in front of the mirror, I’d started saying, “Unoccupied, that’s what they call you.”

      “Unoccupied!” I shouted inadvertently.

      And my heart beat faster, fearing the whole hotel had heard and would come knocking on my door with that human curiosity I usually did whatever I could to avoid.

      A few minutes passed and nobody knocked. I picked up the phone. The woman at reception had already arrived. With a languid tone, suggesting complicity, she asked what I wanted. I said I wanted her; I was dying of stress.

      “I beg you to come to my room this instant.”

      “Sure, I’ll come take a look to see what’s going on, sir…and what should I call you, sir?” she asked.

      “Love. Call me Love, the Word Incarnate,” I replied.

      It wasn’t long before she was there, unbuttoning her blouse, offering me her plump breasts, which I began to gobble, bite, taste. I said that this time I wanted to fuck her face-to-face and, lying on top of her, suck those magnificent tits.

      “This time I’ll get you pregnant, and as soon as you give birth I’ll come get the kid and take him with me,” I said breathlessly.

      By the time I finished speaking she was sitting on the edge of the bed; I was standing. As she brought me closer to her mouth, with ravenous flair she said, “No, no, our son is this right here.”

      “All right, go ahead, be good to him,” I said, dripping from every pore.

      When the receptionist left the room, I sat down on the bed. I felt as if she’d taken something from me. I felt flatter, half-scared, one small noise was enough to send me to the bathroom to see if there was somebody hiding there. On my way into the bathroom I saw how panicked I would look to any intruder.

      I left the bathroom slowly, trying to normalize my breathing. I opened the curtains, looked up, and saw a bit of the sky of that blue day. I took off my blazer.

      I turned to face the room. Once again I noticed the bloodstain on the carpet. I switched on the radio. A friend from adolescence, one I hadn’t seen in more than twenty years, a singer, was talking about his passion for Schubert. Then he sang one of Schubert’s Lieder. When it was over, the interviewer tried to ask something but the singer said no, he had nothing else to say, only that he owed his decision to become a singer to Schubert. I sat back down on the bed.

      I glanced at the time: eight thirty. It took some effort to get up; my legs hurt. I slipped my blazer on and went to the bathroom, steadying myself on things, feeling a sort of disability—the image of a convalescent getting ready to leave the hospital came to mind.

      In the mirror I saw deep circles under my eyes, skin all scaly, parched lips. I slid my tongue along an inflamed cavity in one of my teeth, figuring it wasn’t doing me any good to stay here enumerating the signs of my body’s deterioration. The time to leave had come.

      I turned on the faucet, splashed water on my face, hair, neck. An alarm clock rang in the distance. Right after that, a school bell rang. The nervous horn of a car. And in the background, the muffled rumble of Copacabana.

      When I appeared before the woman at reception, I noticed that something intrigued her. She squinted and asked why I’d suddenly taken on this aged look.

      “Well, in fact,” I replied, “I can’t hide that a few minutes ago something happened that left me this way.”

      “What was it?” she asked, startled.

      “Look, my angel, I think I’m about to go find out,” I replied, trying to recompose the swaggering air I usually maintain around women I’ve taken for a roll in the hay.

      She gave me back the money corresponding to the two days I’d advanced for arriving without bags. I said goodbye, and told her we’d see each other again one day, feeling completely ridiculous.