The Living and the Dead

Enrique is, by no doubt, dead by now

His flesh has leathered on the bones and he has long since sunk into the auburn tropical mud like a drunken sailor. His hair, that awkward Irish red that blended with the freckled caramel of his skin is still clinging to his skull. Tenacity.

They say that lives don’t truly end until the last person who knows you passes over. Tenacity. Memory like nails and hair growing into legend in the days and weeks and years that proceed from the funeral.

Meantime, Enrique is getting more and more comfortable in his grave.

Enrique is, indeed, dead by now.

But that summer, Enrique was alive. The tropical sun and the lung of the sea teased him from his hospital bed. And as if to be polite, as if not to taunt him with our bronzed skin and brazen health, we didn’t go there. We didn’t visit him. We didn’t want him to witness the crime of our vivacity. We didn’t want to stand trial for the crime ourselves.

Instead, we spoke of him on meeting one and another, at parties, at restaurants, on the beach. We always spoke of him. After we had greeted, after we had introduced our companions, we spoke of him, early in the conversation, a few solemn sentences to acknowledge his struggle, some rumors we had heard(rumors that would inevitably return to us—slightly colored-- a few days or weeks later when we encountered another of his friends). 

And after that acknowledgement, that brief exchange, we would settle into the cacacha and the laughter. The sun would melt our bodies and we would sink into the sand or we would be carried away by the spin of the music or the lurid wanderlust of the gay male gaze. And we would, without self-consciousness, leave Enrique to his bed to sleep and slowly die.

It was easy in the loud company of my friends to close the door on Enrique’s illness. It was the right thing to do. He needed his rest. It was best to take the party down the long hospital hallway, down the stairs, down the street. Beneath the glitter of a cheap string of lights at a beach barraca we would encamp. Our voices would get lost there in the pulse of ocean waves. There we would not disturb Enrique’s fragile dreams. We would not disturb our own.

But when I was alone, Enrique haunted me. 

On the balcony overlooking the cacophony of the streets of Rio, I would meditate on his existence. I would imagine him in his hospital bed, his mother beside him, measuring the hours like labor. And it was all quite bright and clear. I could see his fingers gripping a talisman. I could smell the nurse as she bent over him: ammonia, bergamot, and sweat. I could hear the television in the corner ridiculing him, the histrionic characters swooning with exaggerated ambitions, unrestrained lusts, and deafening regret. 

But this vigil was no soap opera, and Enrique--dear heart, humble soul--was not some inflated character without dimension. Bravely smiling at his mother, making uneasy conversation to fill these days of inevitability, Enrique was the complex soul that I had met 5 years earlier.

“Eu sou feio.” I am ugly, he had said to me when we first met. And it was true. With his large nose and the jumble of genes that informed his physiognomy, he was ugly. He was short. His eyes were widely placed on his too small head, and there was an asymmetry to his features that, while not repulsive, could not be called attractive. 

But this assertion was not made in a pitiable fashion. “Eu sou feio,” he had told me as a testament to his sexual charisma, pointing to his boyfriend Rafael, who, 15 years his junior was by anybody’s standards strictly beautiful. “You see?” he said to me grinning and smiling across the table at his boyfriend. Enrique had pronounced himself hideous, and then he had laughed.

Enrique respected the dead. The spirits that move through the jungles and streets of Brazil whispered to him. The inaudible rhythms to which they dance he could feel in his living bones. “Atenda!” he had said to me, “They are congregating there.” He did not point but instead gestured to the place with a subtle nod of his head. “Don’t look at them. They don’t wish to be disturbed.”

And the shadows of the jungle trail were deepening, the broad leaves expanding like the treacherous wings of some emerald breed of bat, filling in the spaces of the dimming sky. Enrique walked in front of me with solemnity and silence. His manner or the mood or something else made me shiver, the sweat of our hike turning clammy and cool in the hollow of my back.

But I looked over my shoulder when we had passed--Lot’s wife--into the forest alcove that he had indicated. I saw the candles burning in the mossy earth. I saw the feathered sacrifice that hung from the trunk of a tree. I saw the blood, almost black running down the bark. And in the shifting shadows of the jungle twilight I imagined I could see the glare of a spirit now offended. 

“And now Enrique,” I asked the air, “now that you are slowly fading from this world, what do the spirits say to you? What advice for dying?” 

From my balcony I could see what I imagined was a hospital, its roof straining to hold a cross above the residential high-rises that surrounded it. I did not know if this was the hospital of Enrique’s repose. It did not matter. The mystery of where he was at that moment seemed an appropriate prelude to the mystery of where he would be going. The vapors of the tropical day were settling into the vapors of the tropical night. From my balcony, I watched the sunset over Ipanema.

A few hours later, I left the building and walked the 10 or so blocks to the bar in Copacabana where I was meeting Fernando and Leila. Leila had been promoted to a new position with the government and would be soon moving back to Brasilia. It was a Bon Voyage party, and in Brazil all arrivals and departures must be celebrated with a clamorous affair. There was sure to be much drinking, much laughter, and a sizzling conversation that crackled with the fever of life. 

The whole of the city was alive that summer night. Each café I passed along my way was crowded with fervent revelers. The light from the bars poured into the street and glinted off the glasses transforming the beer into gold. The music and the laughter got lost in each other, like two lovers entwined and reeling on the dance floor in search of a bed. There was nothing one could do but smile.

I found Fernando and Leila colonizing a long table at the edge of the sidewalk. There were two or three others there already that I did not know. So I sat further down on one side where Fernando and I could still talk but which permitted me a broader view of the crowd. The table slowly filled. The volume increased as Leila in animated voices told a riotous version of her revelation to her current boss that she would soon be his supervisor. The tale had just culminated in a thunder crack of general laughter when Marcelo arrived. 

“What?” he asked, and without pausing added, “Oh well, I will laugh out of respect for laughter.”

Marcelo greeted me across the table. We grasped hands and he winked at me in the way he had of separating his affections for the individual from his affections for the group. “Tudo bem?” he asked, and his eyes shimmered in generous feeling. 

“Tudo,” I replied.

“I heard Enrique’s father has come up from Sao Paulo to see him,” Marcelo told me. And we silently concurred that this was an ominous portent. 

“Is he staying for a while?”

There was a pause, as if Marcelo were trying to decide if my question was in reference to Enrique or his father.  We all stay too long and leave too early.  

“I don’t know,” Marcelo admitted. “Mauricio spoke to Enrique’s sister. His illness is not improving.” 

The waiter, efficient and courteous, had arrived to integrate Marcello into the party. “Favor, uma vodka caiparihna.” And with that our conversation about our friend Enrique came to an end.

While we were here at the bar, a mob of boisterous characters, ruffians carrying the ball of conversation through the mud of this makeshift stadium, Enrique, not with us, was not alone. Enrique’s illness—for it was never called anything else except his “illness”—was now his companion. It was the lover he sat with at table and slept with every night. It was his comfort I imagined. It was the clear voice of a spirit encouraging him to stop, to look, to not pass reverently by but to join that congregation in some jungle alcove.

Enrique is dead. I heard the news this morning. His cold flesh is moldering in the dense tropical ground.