Chapter 28
The man didn’t respond to my revealing of the whole scheme, probably too ashamed to face the dread of his deeds. In his eyes I saw he didn’t consider my life worth squandering any further drop of saliva. Before leaving the building, he exchanged some additional words with Fátima, who listened attentively and replied with gestures that accompanied her speech.
I laid back down on the mattress and stared at the roof. It resembled the makeshift clinic that I had been put into. The holes scattered along the asbestos roof tiles reproduced the same patterns, the walls the same bricks, and the room the same crookedness of those found in the clinic.
I heard a noise, a muffled groan coming from my left. When I yanked my face around, in hope of finding someone familiar, I found only red bricks riddled with holes.
Of course I hadn’t been taken back to the clinic. Because then Renato had been shot but was alive, and now he was dead.
Fátima had sat down on a bench next to the door. A few minutes after the departure of the man, when all went silent, she started making gestures, shaking her head, and even outpouring whole sentences as though in the middle of an argument. But her gaze was hooked to the ground.
Sweat drops rolled down her temples, glimmering against a light shaft passing across her face, as she argued against a stranger in her head.
She didn’t look at me. Not even once.
It was difficult to look over Fátima’s stout features. Her gentle touch and nursing practices opposed the idea of someone who intended to deliver my life to the worse kind of people in Rio. And now, next to the door outside, she had placed a guard on me, safely away from my crippled body, but close enough to keep watch.
Then it occurred to me that she might not be so certain of the result of my captivity. As someone who dwelled in Gloria Santa, she might have been obliged by local, unwritten rules to obey corruption calls in Rio—just as Renato had done—and help manage its affairs, because otherwise it would be her life at stake.
If that was the case, I might have a chance to change her mind.
She pursed her lips and shook her head, waving as though wiping off an idea, and went silent again. Outside she had readopted a calm posture, even though her intense breathing, followed by eyes flicking side to side, gave away the quarrel inside her head.
She shifted, yet again, over the bench.
It was my chance.
“I need water,” I said.
Fátima stared at me, eyes glazing, and swallowed hard, back to reality.
I pushed myself up to sit straight and motioned my hands, but instead of pretending to hold a gun, I waved it closer to my mouth so as to simulate a sipping.
She looked across the room towards a small freezer, which had just hissed on. The freezer had a brownish tint where the white paint bloomed into rust.
“Please,” I insisted.
Fátima uttered in Portuguese, jerked her hands in the air, and handed me a jug of water.
I gulped it down.
“Let me go, Fátima. Let me run away. I know you have a good heart,” I said in earnest, looking into her eyes. Not so much on the intent of actually establishing a conversation as to fulfill my own desire of speaking. Besides, messages can be also told through signs. Even though she didn’t understand me, I was certain she would be able to capture the desperation in my voice, and the calling for help in my eyes.
She stepped away from me, flared her nostrils, and held her breath only to suddenly dish out a torrent of sounds and hand signs, which combined to her face sprinkled with sweat drops, produced the image of a woman in panic.
From her pants’ back pocket, Fátima pulled out a phone.
She swiped its screen, her face glinting against the gadget. Through the light reflected on her cheeks I saw all the possibilities contained inside that small piece of plastic and metal, that small window, by which I could make my word of despair reach US authorities.
Fátima gave me her back as she gazed at the phone. She stepped even further away from me, heading for the door. She sensed my longing for it. Her fingers rapped over the screen, typing in a message to someone who might come rescue her from the abyss where she teetered. The abyss that set us apart.
The recipient of her message was unknown, but after getting to know her by her acts and reactions, I felt capable of foreseeing who they might be. Drug dealers or the police, both faces of the same corrupted medal.
My knees had been injured, my body had gone faulty and dry and lacking substance, but as I observed the glint of the key that could release me from all cuffs and set me free—first virtually, and second physically—I felt the specks of my resolve mustering around my feet and climbing up my bones, offering the last remnants of fuel to spur myself.
I lurched forward to perch upon Fátima’s back, my hands grasping the phone after going round her swollen belly. She shouted, startled, but then concentrated her strength on getting rid of me. She wiggled and jerked and wavered back and forth, her elbows jostling through the air to find my ribs. We battled for the treasure she had in her hands.
I lost the fight for the phone. Fátima, even though shorter, was stronger and better fed than I was. But I didn’t give up. I still had a war to win, the last one, the last chance,
