I still hadn’t opened my eyes. It was daylight. The bright sun shined through shut eyelids. I kept trying to remember what I had been through before getting to look at my surroundings, it’s always easier to understand our situations when we know what to expect.
The back of my neck throbbed, probably due to the strain of recent memories. A new moan reached my ears, a higher, longer one. Pure pain from someone else standing in the same room. I cringed and gripped the sheet over my torso as though I was the one in agony.
The screeching of the fan became unbearable, air wisping over my shins and aching as if opening gashes on them. Under a stifling heat, I pushed the bedsheets aside, maneuvered over the rickety bed that felt like a disgraced bed of nails—and opened my eyes.
Wood sticks were attached to red brick walls. On the ceiling were asbestos roof tiles painted with mold and dampness. I tilted my head to the right, towards a newborn sound, and noticed a plump woman hunching over a mat stretched on the corner of the room. Over it, a man was laying with his eyes shut.
It was Renato on profile.
My memories flooded back, most likely triggered by the bare brick walls that gave form to every house in the Gloria Santa slum. I remembered clambering its steps, my heart splitting in exhaustion, bullets hissing through the air, penetrating walls next to me.
I tried to call to the woman, but my voice didn’t come out. Instead of speaking, I moaned.
The woman faced me, her eyes gaping open as she cried something out in Portuguese, but she didn’t come toward me. She had a white cloth in her hands, soaked in water. After she rubbed the cloth on Renato’s shoulder, its white was swallowed by a dreadful red that resembled death. He was in a deep sleep.
My neck still aching, I grabbed the edges of the bed I was on and pulled myself up due to a sudden sense of urgency. A fiery pain trailed down my spine, spreading into my legs. As I raised myself up, my ribs popped, adjusting their positions—my head weighed back down. Had I not been able to see, I would swear an anchor had been hooked to my neck.
I felt dizzy, but endured the pain, and managed to sit by the edge of the bed. My bare feet felt the rough cement and dust on the ground. I looked at my jeans, blood stains over my thighs.
The fat woman kept glancing at me as she dipped and tapped the cloth on Renato’s shoulder. She repeated Portuguese words. I had a sense she wanted me to lay back down.
“How bad is he?” I asked her.
She replied with another Portuguese word, and shouted again. It became clear that any conversation between us would be impossible.
I tried to get up from the wooden bed to take a look at Renato, at his shoulders, to see how bad his wounds were. But when I tried to jolt myself up, I felt a pang lash out the nape of my neck as though a gash had been opened. I raised my fingers and realized someone had patched it up with rolls of gauze.
The fat woman rattled off more unintelligible words. I glared at her, the door slammed open and a younger woman came inside. She had big, natural curls, that bounced on every step.
“Please,” she said, “down, stay down.” She motioned with her hands to emphasize what she meant.
“Renato . . . how bad is he?” I asked.
The younger woman came closer.
“He bad, he bad,” she said with shaking hands.
Then she gingerly grabbed my shoulders to help me lay down. The aching in my head caused sparkling spots in my vision on every throb. I gave up resisting and reclined.
Once sprawled on the bed, the pain on my neck receded, but so did my strength. I struggled to stay awake, to keep glaring at the asbestos roof tiles, but before long I wasn’t able to keep my eyelids open, unconsciousness took hold of me. Renato was hurt, so was I—sleeping was my pain reliever.
Chapter 16
I hoped sleeping would help get rid of the dizziness and my miserable emotional state. But sleeping only shifted the realm of my suffering, from that of material to a dream-like trance. Asleep, I felt the same pain, same despair, and went through the same life threatening situations that menaced my conscious life—gunfights, machetes and beheading.
I gaped my eyes open, gasping. In the darkness of night, I found no light bulbs turned on inside the favela. My forehead still drenched in sweat under the unrelenting whir of the screeching fan. No signs of mold could be seen on the ceiling, because the night was pitch-dark and full of terror.
A cough came from the direction of my feet. I glanced up, and through the darkness I saw a figure of a bed and the silhouette of a man standing over it. Someone else had been put inside that room. Someone also in pain.
This must be a makeshift clinic tucked inside Gloria Santa.
Was I getting better? I sensed a portion of my energy, my resolve, had returned to me. The pain biting my neck had been reduced to a numbness running across my back. Any minor shift over the bed was a struggle, but I took that as a hint of improvement nonetheless.
I had no idea how many hours, days, I rested inside that building, nor how late it was. The deep night resembled of being past midnight. There were no human noises around, except the coughing next to my feet.
When I tried to get up from the bed, steps approached from outside. They scratched their feet over the ground and chatted. When they got closer to the
