I wasn’t sure if what I had seen, what I had heard, had been the pictures of dreams or the colors of reality.
Fátima finished cleaning Renato’s wound. When she started dressing it with gauze, the door slammed open. Two armed men walked in.
She got up, putting her hands together like she was pleading for mercy. The men who walked inside the room stared coldly at Fátima, their rifles pointed. They glanced at me and started a conversation between themselves. Fátima’s cry had been completely ignored.
One of the men, the smaller one with a black and red striped t-shirt, reached over for a stool by the door and sat next to Renato. The other one, fatter, shirtless, angrier, stood at the entrance, under the door frame, as a vigilant beast.
The black and red striped man gestured only once to Fátima, and she, following the direction of her hand, walked past the door without uttering a single word. But before she left the building, she glanced at me with sad eyes, and then I understood there was no hope left.
Only four days since I got to that clinic, but it seemed like a lifetime since I had written any sentences, since I had lived my life in a proper, regular way. And suddenly a yearning desire to write sprung inside me. I was sure my life was about to end. I faced the sureness of reaching the finish line, yet I had untold stories inside me, unfinished business and unsettled affairs, all of which would require a long time before resolution, time I couldn’t spare anymore. And writing them down was my safest, most durable option to settle them.
But writing was out of the question. Inside the makeshift clinic, with Renato and two drug soldiers, my thoughts set off and strayed into my former life. I had a catalog full of memories—friends, family, home. But the page that caught my attention was the one with Joanne: had my boss reported me as a missing person to the authorities? And while I tried to fathom whether she did, the man sitting on the stool clutched his pistol, waved it, and poked its grip in Renato’s wound.
Renato wriggled over his bed, but he did not wake up. The man increased the pressure on his shoulder, twisted his pistol inside the injury, and blood dripped down his skin. When Renato yelled, tilted his head up, fumbled his hand about his torso, I could tell he was in savage pain.
The black and red striped t-shirt man released the pressure on Renato’s shoulder, leaving him panting. The guard by the door stared at me. I felt the bare brick walls coming closer to crush me, the air thick and sticky under the weight of his sight, the evil of his look.
Renato groaned again, this time it was a high-pitched sound that dragged my eyes over to him. His voice became tangled with the din of iron scratching and grinding and chipping of his barely coated shoulder bones.
Under a heavy strain, Renato tried to resist the pain, aware that he would never be able to fight against those men. And while he endured his agony, the drug soldier by his side kept talking to him, repeating sound patterns that I understood as being the same sentences.
There wasn’t much I could do but to face the world through flooded eyes, and expect that the men would eventually redirect their evil to me.
The torture continued, and now instead of trying to shove his pistol grip into Renato’s flesh, the man started bashing, punching, and crushing his shoulder. Was there some kind of rule Renato had to follow? Maybe he couldn’t jerk away from any lunge, otherwise, instead of suffering hits to the body, Renato would take a bullet to his head.
He didn’t look at me. Not once. And it was not due to being ashamed he did so, he took his punishment as a brave man would. He must have wanted to be the only one in that room to feel the brutal punishment from the drug lords. He wanted to save me.
I couldn’t sit there and watch his beating, could not witness his suffering, every punch he received at his shoulder, each whipping from the pistol grip, I felt my nerves shudder just as much as his flesh ripped in agony.
His bedsheet got painted red, the ground around him spattered with blood. I swiveled my face to the other side. But not seeing Renato didn’t bring me any relief. The gruesome sounds produced by his joints on every hit and the moaning of his throat lashed out to my ears with even greater harshness. Each one of those noises were like bugle commands that recalled images from my memory, which always appear bigger, grosser, and bloodier than in real life.
Time dragged forward, if in seconds or hours I couldn’t tell. As Renato’s cry became unbearable, I felt my senses flick off. Seized by a numbness, I floated into the midst of terror and heat of Rio, and then faded away.
Chapter 18
I opened my eyes. The guard left his position under the door frame and sat on a stool in the corner of the room, Fátima was back at her work, cleansing, patching, and dressing Renato’s injuries. He seemed wretched and drowsy, probably under the effects of some tropical medicine.
Renato was alive. His injuries had been reopened and he had lost some blood, but he breathed.
A new pain settled in my body, a headache caused by the torture I had witnessed. I felt my tongue numb, my throat dry, but I didn’t dare make a sound, uncertain of what kind of reaction might come toward me.
Fátima’s aide, a younger lady with coiled hair that helped me a couple days ago, kneeled down to scrub the floor, but the coarse surface made it
