Bed of Nails
Translated by John Elliott
He wonders at how little they have changed. Through that dry old man sullenly sitting in a wheelchair, it is his brother Paris that he sees. He sees him at twenty, around the time of their last great fraternal fight. He doesn’t remember his own cracked lip, or the clumsy punches they exchanged, or even if there was any reason for them. His brother has remained in his memory as the one who, having given up the fight, threatened him from afar, running away and crying, with that ridiculous handicap of his of shrieking whenever he got excited. Paris screeched and stammered, his arm raised, searching for the right word that would most hurt him from a distance. A wish that was in itself contradictory, for wasn’t Paris the one screaming that nothing could ever hurt Adonis ?
They are, therefore, the same two brothers, but they´re old now. One or two features have become highlighted over the years almost into caricatures: Paris is thinner and more hunched, his nose pointier, whilst Adonis is stockier, thickset, redder, livelier, always ready. And then there is the fatal difference: Paris had been dead and forcibly revived, and all that he had gained from death was despondency and lack of patience for life. He already had plenty of these before dying, so that, in fact, he changed very little after the crisis, except in the eyes of others.
Adonis stands on the threshold, his right foot slightly forward. But he does not hesitate for very long, he immediately recognised, after twenty years, the crease between Paris’s eyebrows. He starts towards his brother as if he were gulping down bitter medicine. He stops short in front of the wheelchair, represses the desire to smooth his thinning hair - combed from right to left in arc-en-ciel, from ear to ear - and sits on the bedspread of tiny roses, choosing his words:
‘Well, then?’ he asks. ‘How’s it going?’
His sister-in-law comes in at that moment with a glass of milk.
‘He’s never forgotten, never forgiven,’ she says. ‘What you see there is all your own doing.’
She was referring to the dispute over the dining-room furniture. Their father dead, their mother dead, their aunts and uncles neatly out of the way, there was nothing left but furniture: in the living-room, in the bedrooms, the hall-stand. The inventory was made, there seemed to be no way to square the score, it couldn’t be divided up fairly. There was a crystal bowl, you see, there was a mirror, there was the picture frame with the small engraving, there were the portraits, how could some be kept and others lost? Adonis tossed a coin. The pine table and chairs blackened by use and time went to him, Paris gaping at the face of the fallen coin, dumbed by resentment at his brother’s levity. Adonis immediately sold all of his inheritance by weight, including the sentimental furniture. He said that he wanted to take a trip to the Far East. He was forty-five years old, and still lived like a young man, from this and that, with no obligations.
‘Paris’s colitis,’ said his sister-in-law, ‘comes from there. From his colitis came his heart trouble. From his heart trouble, the heart attack. And there you have him, in a wheelchair. One day I found him purple in the face, lying on the kitchen floor, panting, with a gash across his eyebrow…’
They considered Paris’s silent brow, while he lowered his head even further. Instead of the gash, all they could make out were his eyebrows, protecting him against all inspection.
‘But that’s exactly why I came here,’ Adonis interrupted. ‘First of all, to apologize. And then to tell Paris that I want to make it up to him as much as possible.’
‘To make it up to him, now…’ wailed his sister-in-law.
‘What do the doctors say?’
Quickly, his sister-in-law belittled all the physicians consulted, in their respective fields. One considered the heart, another recalled that the mind was the vital thing, she couldn´t even follow their lingo, but in the end what she could understand didn’t help much. It was mainly on the doctors´s faces that she read the meaning of her husband´s illness. She preferred the grave ones, who always politely called her Mrs., whatever the results of the tests. But others were deceiving little bastards, smiling and sadly shaking their heads all the while. When talking about these, she used to say:
‘A quack. I never went back.’
Paris shrugged . He still had a great sense of opportunity. He hadn’t spoken a word, hadn’t raised his head. His hands hung down from the arms of the chair. Adonis focused either on his sister-in-law’s face or on the part of the bedspread that his brother was staring at. From time to time, he looked around him, half smiling.
‘You know that I’ve been in the East, in China, India and Pakistan. I brought back an invaluable piece of furniture with me, which can perform real miracles in cases like this.’
It was the bed of nails belonging to the famous Fakir Mudami, proficient in all arts of suffering and self-mortification, who, although he had practically been canonised, methodically continued to carry out painful experiments on both himself and his disciples.
‘Twenty years later you come here to insult us in this way? After stealing the living-room furniture from us and being the cause of your brother’s misfortune, you come here and offer us a bed of nails?’
‘It’s not just a bed of nails, it’s the bed of nails that belonged to the Fakir Mudami, and it has unique healing properties. It’s been tried out by several of my patients and always with marvellous results.’
‘Your patients?’ Paris finally articulated. ‘What kind of racket are you involved in this time?’
And he was particularly clear. He often had difficulty in controlling the workings of his tongue, which would get entangled in his molars, or prior to using his tongue, when his head couldn’t figure out which words went with which things, but this one time his sentences could be written straight down on paper. And after he’d uttered them, he finally gulped down the milk that had been resting on the bedside table.
‘Trust me. This Fakir Mudami was my teacher for five years, he isn’t the sort of person who goes around swallowing swords whole. He’s a saint, a great man. He’s always gone on long fasts to purify himself, everybody marvelled at how he could still stand or pray in such uncomfortable positions. Comfort is the devil for the soul. His bed doesn’t prevent sleep, it just gives you a different kind of sleep, one that’s more spiritual. He´s a yogi, you know what that is? It’s…’
‘Eat this glass,’ Paris interrupted him. ‘If you’re such a fakir, you can eat glass.’
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘Do what I tell you and I’ll believe you.’
‘You don’t believe me, or else you wouldn’t ask me for proof.’
Paris picked up the glass and held it out towards his brother. His illness hadn’t altered his eye for detail. He noticed that there were pitch black hairs growing out of Adonis’s ears and this filled him with glee.
‘You don´t have to keep it,’ Adonis said. ‘If you’re not satisfied with the bed, you can give it back to me and that’s the end of it.’
‘Why don’t you just get out? Don’t you think you’ve had your fun?’ – his sister-in-law was extending a helping hand, meaning to take responsability for the empty glass. But Paris held on fast to it.
Adonis stood up suddenly, quite relieved. This was the end to a visit that hadn’t promised much right from the start. But he had won the game: he had tried to help his brother and sister-in-law, and they had refused. Two years ago, on coming back to Lisbon, he had insisted, at least twice. The first time, they’d been rude to him on the phone. His sister-in-law had pretended not to recognise him. Adonis? We don’t know any Adonis here! Hang up, go to hell! He had let a few months pass. In a period of idleness forced upon him by lack of work, he had made another attempt at reconciliation. And this is how it was to end. He had come round, made an offer, and they were throwing him out. It was done with.
Paris, in his wheelchair, thought of laughing diabolically over victory, but he lost his nerve. He sat there almost smiling, the empty glass in his hand, clawless. He felt sorry. It would have been a good vindictive ending, if reality were what we hoped it would be. But he was tired and sleepy and he wanted to pee and all this was already too much of a burden for him ; to have to laugh diabolically at his brother - the clown, the cheat, now posing as some kind of fakir – was more than he could muster.
For a long time Paris and his wife had discussed the Adonis phenomenon. Everything about him seemed repellent. Paris delved deep into the past to uncover the various forms of deceit of which his brother was guilty and himself, the victim. There had been obvious lies, such as this one of having studied under the Fakir Mudami for five years, there had been lies only uncovered by chance, bumping into someone in the street who casually contradicted what Adonis had tried to make him believe, there had been omissions, dissimulations, inventions, falsifications of facts and words - Paris had later discovered that their parents’ furniture wasn’t made of pine, such a vile wood, as Adonis had claimed in order to run it down, but of cherry, which was much more valuable. It certainly hadn’t been enough to pay for the trip to India, but the intention had been despicable and it was the intention that killed.
Paris maintained that Adonis lied because he was evil, revelled in creating unrealistic expectations, addicted to the pleasure of watching the other’s desolation, but his wife, who didn’t know him so well, or perhaps merely to contradict the sick man, said that she knew for a fact that Adonis often wasn’t even aware that he was lying. It was a trait of his individuality, like being hairy or short-legged. It was still, nonetheless, grievous and hurtful for all concerned. Both for himself, who lived in a world of fantasies, and for others, who found themselves forced not to take him seriously. Above all, Paris saw no great difference between lying out of malice or lying unwittingly, since the results were the same. It was trust that was at stake here. Trust that had been shaken to the core.
After this conversation, Paris fell into a state of lethargy. He stopped eating and didn’t say a word for days. His wife was worried, railed at him, threatened him. If he didn’t eat, he would die. And he would open his mouth a little, make an effort to swallow, close his hollow eyes, and throw up. He couldn’t do it. The doctor came with the drip, they kept an eye on him and thought that he was once again about to die. His heart, however, stood firm, at the helm. It beat regularly, indifferent to Paris’s suffering.
Christmas came, New Year’s Day went by, and Paris improved. He would sit up in bed, chatter to his wife and a neighbour who liked sick people and illnesses. Towards the end of an afternoon that had been just as inactive as all the others, the neighbour having left with a host of recommendations, Paris asked his wife:
‘Have you got my brother’s phone number anywhere? I feel that I could talk to him now about the bed.’
His wife stared at him as if she were now seeing him for the first time.
‘Have you gone mad? What bed?’
He was, of course, referring to the bed of the Fakir Mudami, who, all things considered, had seemed to him to be an innocent and kindly man. He had managed, in this period that others thought of as one of death, and had actually been reflective, to disengage the personality of the fakir from that of its author, Adonis - and to believe in one, whilst detesting the other. It can’t, however, be said that Paris and his wife had exhausted all therapeutic possibilities. One knows all about the calvary of those who, disheartened by the incompetence of official medicine, hand themselves over to all kinds of pious deceptions that work better on the psyche than on the kidneys proper. Paris was not among them. He had considered himself to be paralysed, although he wasn’t, for he was perfectly capable of getting out of bed and sitting in the chair, or getting out of the chair and lying in bed; and he had claimed to be incurable, although nobody had made such a prognosis. Death would be welcomed as immense relief. First and foremost for him, whose curiosity about the absolute sleep was simultaneously a blessing and a curse.
Paris could not explain how on earth the idea had wormed its way into his mind of seeking out his brother and reclaiming the Fakir Mudami’s bed of nails. The long fast that he had forced upon himself, the sleepless nights spent ruminating, remembering Adonis’s offences, had brought him impassively to consider himself quite close to this saintly man who slept on nails in order to get some rest. This was what Paris felt above all else: the impossibility of forgetting his body, while remembering it gave him no pleasure and was of no use. A dead weight. Paris’s ascetic rib had probably been born with him. Who knows if he wasn’t already performing exercises in self-control, hunched into very uncomfortable positions in a corner of his mother’s womb, in that very same womb where Adonis was later to wallow, spreading himself belly up, filling the whole space?
Around Christmas, insensible and half-dead in his narrow double bed, Paris had seen the Fakir Mudami’s bed of nails, in the sweet early hours of the morning, hovering above the chest of drawers. He had seen it quite clearly, rotating one way and then the other, presenting itself from every angle before Paris’s half-closed eyes, as a product in some shop window. It was made of rough, dark wood and had the form of a gigantic clothes brush, almost square, closer to a ferule. Instead of bristles, there were nails, placed very close together, their pointed ends flattened by hammer blows, forming a concave metal sheet, the surface that greeted the skin and bone of the fakir’s back.
By mid-January, Paris had mustered enough courage to ask one more time for his brother’s phone number. His wife looked at him in such a way that Paris thought it best to keep quiet and began searching furtively around the house, whenever his wife went out shopping. The number wasn’t in her diary by the phone. It wasn’t in the drawers of the bedside-table, nor was it in the old writing-desk in the living-room, which already had one foot in the grave, one of its lopers missing and the other one jammed, turning its title of writing-desk into a polite euphemism, rather like using the expression of interior decorator to describe the handyman who comes to lay the tiles. Wheeling himself feverishly around the house, Paris had sifted through all the likely hiding-places. One afternoon he remembered the phone-book. There was an Adonis, but he wasn’t Moreira. He decided to phone, perhaps considering it possible that all the Adonises in Lisbon were friends with one another. The number had been changed, directory enquiries didn’t know his brother’s whereabouts and Paris found himself forced to ask his wife.
She didn’t take kindly to his insistence. What was he after? What idea was this about the fakir? What fresh madness would she have to put up with now? Raising her voice, his wife surprised even herself with her final disjunctive: either Paris gave up the idea of his brother and the fakir or else he would have to give her up. She would go and live with the woman next-door. She would continue to bring him his meals, but she would refuse to live under the same roof as a madman in pursuit of a bed of nails.
Faced with Paris´s silence, and his most intent staring at the bedspread of roses, his back to the window as was his habit, his wife packed her bag and headed for the door. Before leaving, she threw him a small scrap of crumpled paper, which landed by the foot of the bed. Paris did not look at the paper for long, although he understood that the transaction was probably costing him too dear. He dialled the number and heard Adonis’s voice on the answering machine, introducing himself as a naturalist doctor and iridologist and asking callers to leave their numbers. This Paris did, in a curt, grudging voice.
Adonis showed up the next day, appearing triumphant to Paris´s eyes. When his brother sat down in the worn-out armchair, Paris was already regretting being who he was.
‘What about the bed?’ he asked.
It was kept in a warehouse out of town, where the lively naturalist had stored the rare treasures from his travels. That was where he kept the thousand-bead rosary from the Sufi Abdullah and the sword that had killed Rami, the dervish, who had fallen on the blade by divine decree, in a dancing ecstasy. He told him that he had brought medicinal herbs in large sacks, but that now they were rotting away and losing their virtues, owing to the dampness of the nearby forest.
‘You don’t happen to have any storage space, do you? It’s just that everything’s getting ruined… They’re extremely rare plants, it’s a pity. I have few patients, people are healthier nowadays, it seems. They eat more vegetables, drink milk, it all has consequences.’
Before he knew it, Paris was promising his brother the free space in the cupboard of the adjoining room for his exotic herbs. In exchange, Adonis would bring the bed.
‘But you need training,’ he said. ‘Don’t think that just anybody can allow themselves the luxury of sleeping on one of those things. I’ll have to stay with you for a few days, until you get used to it. What’s happened to your wife?’
That evening, Adonis was to move into his brother’s house, with the bed and the plants. There were also some kitchen utensils solely designed for the concoction of potions, and these would be coming too. Even while agreeing to this, Paris was regretting it. It had always seemed to him that his brother won, ever since he was born, he had won every time. During the night, he thought of a way to get rid of him, whilst at the same time keeping the bed. During the night, it all became clear. He would tell his brother:
‘I don’t have any room for you after all, nor for your things. My house is just big enough for me and the fakir’s bed.’
He told him exactly that the next morning, to which Adonis replied:
‘I understand. Don’t worry, I’ll bring the bed today and give you the instructions.’
But he still sat for a while drinking some herbal tea that he had made, and, after a ritual silence, he crossed his short legs and expounded:
‘This Fakir Mudami is a funny fellow. He drinks like a fish, disobeying all the rules of his religion, and fasts. He sleeps on the bed of nails, alone, but he has more than twenty children throughout the neighbourhood. And he prays, days and nights on end, after beating his disciples.’
‘He’s a hypocrite!’ shouted Paris.
‘I don’t know about that. That wasn’t what he seemed to me. God isn’t always good either, is He? But what He does is always good.’
Paris felt that he was beginning to get some feeling back in his legs. Feeling froze him. He thought, but very quickly, about the devil. About Adonis and the devil. He closed his eyes.
‘You will be damned. You can´t say such things’.
Adonis’s effect on Paris, fifty years ago, or today, had always been the same. One of them lied and the other acted as a minor inquisitor. One of them omitted the truth, the other pointed the finger. One of them invented a story, a heresy, the other played the moral philosopher. Paris, who didn’t believe in anything other than the prison of his body, faced with his brother Adonis, who was being quite banal about God, surprised himself by acting almost like a preacher. Adonis had an effect on him, whilst he had no effect on Adonis.
Adonis smiled, adjusted his cream-coloured socks, which were breathing calmly through the small holes in his shoes, and was silent. On the way out, dragging with him two light burlap sacks with his herbs, he said that he would be back soon ; he just had to find someone to help him carry the bed. He said that, although small, the bed was heavy. And that Paris would have to be careful not to put it at the intersection of electric currents, for this could alter its properties.
He left Paris in the throngs of disbelief. If he could, without hurting himself, have banged his head physically against the walls, blaming himself for his naivety, his gullibility, his absolute stupidity, he would have done so. But all he noticed himself doing was beating his hand slowly against his chest, absent-mindedly, without managing to stop turning over and over in his mind all the contradictions uttered by his brother: first, the fakir fasted and prayed until the community marvelled at his resistance, then, after all, he was a drunkard, who could barely stand up; and now the saintly man was being transformed into a foul-tempered fornicator who fathered babies by the dozen and beat his disciples. What virtues could the bed of such a man have? Paris was finally arriving at the real question, in roundabout ways and through dispersed reflection - and he raised his head, in suspense - he would have cocked an ear - to the noise of the right question:
‘What illness does he think I have, to suggest such a cure?’
It was no longer the bed that he was after. He wanted to know, once and for all, what Adonis thought of him. He rang, listened to the recorded message, and left one of his own. He waited for Adonis and the fulfilment of his promise. Adonis had disappeared. Paris was discovering in himself unprecedented resources to search for his brother. Unbeknown to his wife, he paid his neighbour, to go to Adonis´s house and leave a note for him under the door. He rang Adonis’s neighbour, whose number he had got from directory enquiries, saying that it was an emergency and asking her to call his brother. All to no avail. At night, he rang every half hour, until three or four in the morning.
His wife came back home, but kept herself at a distance. Paris could hear her dragging the furniture around and sewing at her old faltering machine. It wasn’t a sound that kept him company, but rather it irritated him, since he couldn’t get used to a noise that wasn’t regular. It was something that happened from time to time, and this exhausted his expectations.
A fortnight had passed since Adonis’s last visit, and then it was three weeks. When almost a month had gone by, Paris gave up waiting. It happened almost instantly, overnight. Paris went to bed obsessively preoccupied, going over and over his thoughts, making plans, noting down his complaints for the next conversation he would have with his brother, and woke up after ten hours of deadly sleep feeling calm, clear, happy. Deactivated. That afternoon, he turned towards the window and felt some curiosity about what was happening in the street. He saw a woman in high heels chasing after a little boy who was running away from her, laughing, out of the sidewalk and into the busy road, where a tram was passing at that very moment. He saw the driver´s gesture, the ticking-off that the boy was given, as he laughed and squirmed, a tiny tot, in his mother’s arms. Paris´s attention was drawn to a blind violinist, with his money-box hung round his neck, an object of derision for two boys, one white and one black, who, pretending to assist him, would rob him of his coins. The rickety sound of the violin reached his ears, as it played a kind of fado with a hint of waltz, and he pitied the puzzled blind man listening, his head tilted to one side, to the wild commotion of the passers-by, surprised by the lack of alms-givers. He saw buses passing by. He heard cars hooting and arguments between drivers. A van stopped to unload some kitchen stoves. The queue was growing longer. From above, Paris could see the arms of the drivers, gesticulating at the pair of unflustered lads carrying the goods to the shop, chatting away to each other. At the door, unmoving, stood an Indian in a blue overall, taking in the scene, in silence, his right hand on his cheek. From inside the shop came another one, very similar, who stood beside him. Then he said something, and they both went back into the shop. By then, the angriest driver was already leaving his car and making his way to the van, which he proceeded to shake energetically. The two Indians came out again, watched, went back in. One of them came out again to chase away two street dogs, one very fat and the other very long, who got up, pretended to move away, waited for him to go in and sat down again, a couple of yards further on. Paris was having a wonderful time. He considered calling his wife and sharing with her such Lisbon specialities. But the terms of their relationship were not the best, and it would take more than a simple street scene to change them.
Paris slept badly that night, full of vivid images from the outdoors. In his sleep, he never managed to recapture the humble pleasure of being curious about ordinary things. Everything appeared to him to be monstrous, threatening, and the street was a huge river of rubbish and dust, along which the wind blew, carrying with it newspapers, plastic bags, the odd cotton cap, cardboard boxes.
The next morning, Adonis rang the doorbell. He had come to bring the bed of nails and say goodbye. He was going back to India.
‘To do what?’ asked his brother.
Adonis complained that he had no place in the West. He also said something about the millennial wisdom of other civilisations, with those tufts of hair peaking out of his ears and his short legs crossed, fiddling with the elastic of his cream-coloured sock. Paris imagined that he was involved in some sort of trafficking, possibly drugs, or women, something sordid and dangerous.
They set to thinking where the bed of nails should be installed. His wife, who occupied the rest of the house, had not come in to greet Adonis. This was a sign that the fakir´s bed would have to find its own space in Paris´s room. Which was cramped and had just the essential furniture.
‘We can stand it over there, upright, against the wall.’
Adonis swiftly went to the stairs to call the boys.
‘Bring the bed up!’ he shouted down.
When he saw the two dark, slender youths who seemed to be doing favours for his brother, Paris´s heart sank. Trafficking in young boys, was he? No, it wasn’t possible, not even for him, to sink that low. Adonis gave them precise instructions. Pass through on your right, lift it another foot or so, carefully, put your right side down first, hold it underneath with both hands, lean it against the wall at a thirty-degree angle. Paris, in his wheelchair, his first curiosity now satisfied, looked at the window. Once the operation of wedging the bed of nails in between the chest of drawers and the cupboard had been completed, Adonis said:
‘So, what do you think?’
‘Thank you,’ said Paris. ‘I think it looks all right.’
The bed was not as he had imagined and seen it. It was a simple slab of chipboard, crumbling at the corners, with a few new steel nails scattered here and there. It was clearly something that had been knocked up in a hurry by Adonis himself, perhaps even at that supposed warehouse out of town, where he kept the rosary, the herbs and the sword.
‘I’ll give you the instructions now, because in everything there is a right way and a wrong way. To make good use of the Fakir Mudami’s bed of nails, you can choose one of two methods: either you learn to levitate, so as not to touch the nails with your back - which takes time - or you control the pain. To control the pain, you have three types of exercises: relaxation, concentration and imagination. First you breathe in, one, two, three, four, five, six and try to relax every part of your body…’
The youths, standing in the doorway, looked alternately at Adonis and his brother. Paris, now prey to the worst suspicions, imagining the horrors that Adonis must have committed in both East and West, pretended to be listening and agreeing to everything he said, not daring to look at the boys. One of them said:
‘Excuse me, Mr Moreira, but we’re off to have a cup of coffee,’ and he did up the shirt that he had on unbuttoned over his undershirt.
Adonis did not interrupt his explanations, he only nodded to indicate that he had heard. The idea was, therefore, by means of all these exercises, to achieve a state of such spiritual concentration that physical pain would not cease to exist in itself, but would completely lose its negative value and come to represent a trophy for the sufferer. But no twenty-minute abstract would transform Paris into a yogi. This was what his brother told him, already on his feet, in a hurry to leave and get on with his life. He scrawled a telephone number on the back of an envelope, in a childish handwriting, and held it out to his brother:
‘Look, this is the man who can help you. He lives nearby, up the street.’
‘Everything´s covered in pigeon shit over there,’ said Paris to a passing fly.
That´s how he dismissed his brother. Adonis didn’t even turn round, he was already late for the boys. Paris was left with the envelope in his hand and realised that it was an unpaid electricity bill. He smiled.
Placed upright and leaning against the old damp wall, the slab of chipboard with its sparse, shiny, half-twisted nails looked like the remains of something else. The back of a cupboard, the base of a bed, the bottom of a chest of drawers, something incomplete to which other things should be joined in order to be what they are. Paris tried not to look. He turned his wheelchair to the window and sat there feeling the light on his face. Before he knew it, he was breathing in, one, two, three, four, five, six.
He wonders at how little they have changed. Through that dry old man sullenly sitting in a wheelchair, it is his brother Paris that he sees. He sees him at twenty, around the time of their last great fraternal fight. He doesn’t remember his own cracked lip, or the clumsy punches they exchanged, or even if there was any reason for them. His brother has remained in his memory as the one who, having given up the fight, threatened him from afar, running away and crying, with that ridiculous handicap of his of shrieking whenever he got excited. Paris screeched and stammered, his arm raised, searching for the right word that would most hurt him from a distance. A wish that was in itself contradictory, for wasn’t Paris the one screaming that nothing could ever hurt Adonis ?
They are, therefore, the same two brothers, but they´re old now. One or two features have become highlighted over the years almost into caricatures: Paris is thinner and more hunched, his nose pointier, whilst Adonis is stockier, thickset, redder, livelier, always ready. And then there is the fatal difference: Paris had been dead and forcibly revived, and all that he had gained from death was despondency and lack of patience for life. He already had plenty of these before dying, so that, in fact, he changed very little after the crisis, except in the eyes of others.
Adonis stands on the threshold, his right foot slightly forward. But he does not hesitate for very long, he immediately recognised, after twenty years, the crease between Paris’s eyebrows. He starts towards his brother as if he were gulping down bitter medicine. He stops short in front of the wheelchair, represses the desire to smooth his thinning hair - combed from right to left in arc-en-ciel, from ear to ear - and sits on the bedspread of tiny roses, choosing his words:
‘Well, then?’ he asks. ‘How’s it going?’
His sister-in-law comes in at that moment with a glass of milk.
‘He’s never forgotten, never forgiven,’ she says. ‘What you see there is all your own doing.’
She was referring to the dispute over the dining-room furniture. Their father dead, their mother dead, their aunts and uncles neatly out of the way, there was nothing left but furniture: in the living-room, in the bedrooms, the hall-stand. The inventory was made, there seemed to be no way to square the score, it couldn’t be divided up fairly. There was a crystal bowl, you see, there was a mirror, there was the picture frame with the small engraving, there were the portraits, how could some be kept and others lost? Adonis tossed a coin. The pine table and chairs blackened by use and time went to him, Paris gaping at the face of the fallen coin, dumbed by resentment at his brother’s levity. Adonis immediately sold all of his inheritance by weight, including the sentimental furniture. He said that he wanted to take a trip to the Far East. He was forty-five years old, and still lived like a young man, from this and that, with no obligations.
‘Paris’s colitis,’ said his sister-in-law, ‘comes from there. From his colitis came his heart trouble. From his heart trouble, the heart attack. And there you have him, in a wheelchair. One day I found him purple in the face, lying on the kitchen floor, panting, with a gash across his eyebrow…’
They considered Paris’s silent brow, while he lowered his head even further. Instead of the gash, all they could make out were his eyebrows, protecting him against all inspection.
‘But that’s exactly why I came here,’ Adonis interrupted. ‘First of all, to apologize. And then to tell Paris that I want to make it up to him as much as possible.’
‘To make it up to him, now…’ wailed his sister-in-law.
‘What do the doctors say?’
Quickly, his sister-in-law belittled all the physicians consulted, in their respective fields. One considered the heart, another recalled that the mind was the vital thing, she couldn´t even follow their lingo, but in the end what she could understand didn’t help much. It was mainly on the doctors´s faces that she read the meaning of her husband´s illness. She preferred the grave ones, who always politely called her Mrs., whatever the results of the tests. But others were deceiving little bastards, smiling and sadly shaking their heads all the while. When talking about these, she used to say:
‘A quack. I never went back.’
Paris shrugged . He still had a great sense of opportunity. He hadn’t spoken a word, hadn’t raised his head. His hands hung down from the arms of the chair. Adonis focused either on his sister-in-law’s face or on the part of the bedspread that his brother was staring at. From time to time, he looked around him, half smiling.
‘You know that I’ve been in the East, in China, India and Pakistan. I brought back an invaluable piece of furniture with me, which can perform real miracles in cases like this.’
It was the bed of nails belonging to the famous Fakir Mudami, proficient in all arts of suffering and self-mortification, who, although he had practically been canonised, methodically continued to carry out painful experiments on both himself and his disciples.
‘Twenty years later you come here to insult us in this way? After stealing the living-room furniture from us and being the cause of your brother’s misfortune, you come here and offer us a bed of nails?’
‘It’s not just a bed of nails, it’s the bed of nails that belonged to the Fakir Mudami, and it has unique healing properties. It’s been tried out by several of my patients and always with marvellous results.’
‘Your patients?’ Paris finally articulated. ‘What kind of racket are you involved in this time?’
And he was particularly clear. He often had difficulty in controlling the workings of his tongue, which would get entangled in his molars, or prior to using his tongue, when his head couldn’t figure out which words went with which things, but this one time his sentences could be written straight down on paper. And after he’d uttered them, he finally gulped down the milk that had been resting on the bedside table.
‘Trust me. This Fakir Mudami was my teacher for five years, he isn’t the sort of person who goes around swallowing swords whole. He’s a saint, a great man. He’s always gone on long fasts to purify himself, everybody marvelled at how he could still stand or pray in such uncomfortable positions. Comfort is the devil for the soul. His bed doesn’t prevent sleep, it just gives you a different kind of sleep, one that’s more spiritual. He´s a yogi, you know what that is? It’s…’
‘Eat this glass,’ Paris interrupted him. ‘If you’re such a fakir, you can eat glass.’
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘Do what I tell you and I’ll believe you.’
‘You don’t believe me, or else you wouldn’t ask me for proof.’
Paris picked up the glass and held it out towards his brother. His illness hadn’t altered his eye for detail. He noticed that there were pitch black hairs growing out of Adonis’s ears and this filled him with glee.
‘You don´t have to keep it,’ Adonis said. ‘If you’re not satisfied with the bed, you can give it back to me and that’s the end of it.’
‘Why don’t you just get out? Don’t you think you’ve had your fun?’ – his sister-in-law was extending a helping hand, meaning to take responsability for the empty glass. But Paris held on fast to it.
Adonis stood up suddenly, quite relieved. This was the end to a visit that hadn’t promised much right from the start. But he had won the game: he had tried to help his brother and sister-in-law, and they had refused. Two years ago, on coming back to Lisbon, he had insisted, at least twice. The first time, they’d been rude to him on the phone. His sister-in-law had pretended not to recognise him. Adonis? We don’t know any Adonis here! Hang up, go to hell! He had let a few months pass. In a period of idleness forced upon him by lack of work, he had made another attempt at reconciliation. And this is how it was to end. He had come round, made an offer, and they were throwing him out. It was done with.
Paris, in his wheelchair, thought of laughing diabolically over victory, but he lost his nerve. He sat there almost smiling, the empty glass in his hand, clawless. He felt sorry. It would have been a good vindictive ending, if reality were what we hoped it would be. But he was tired and sleepy and he wanted to pee and all this was already too much of a burden for him ; to have to laugh diabolically at his brother - the clown, the cheat, now posing as some kind of fakir – was more than he could muster.
For a long time Paris and his wife had discussed the Adonis phenomenon. Everything about him seemed repellent. Paris delved deep into the past to uncover the various forms of deceit of which his brother was guilty and himself, the victim. There had been obvious lies, such as this one of having studied under the Fakir Mudami for five years, there had been lies only uncovered by chance, bumping into someone in the street who casually contradicted what Adonis had tried to make him believe, there had been omissions, dissimulations, inventions, falsifications of facts and words - Paris had later discovered that their parents’ furniture wasn’t made of pine, such a vile wood, as Adonis had claimed in order to run it down, but of cherry, which was much more valuable. It certainly hadn’t been enough to pay for the trip to India, but the intention had been despicable and it was the intention that killed.
Paris maintained that Adonis lied because he was evil, revelled in creating unrealistic expectations, addicted to the pleasure of watching the other’s desolation, but his wife, who didn’t know him so well, or perhaps merely to contradict the sick man, said that she knew for a fact that Adonis often wasn’t even aware that he was lying. It was a trait of his individuality, like being hairy or short-legged. It was still, nonetheless, grievous and hurtful for all concerned. Both for himself, who lived in a world of fantasies, and for others, who found themselves forced not to take him seriously. Above all, Paris saw no great difference between lying out of malice or lying unwittingly, since the results were the same. It was trust that was at stake here. Trust that had been shaken to the core.
After this conversation, Paris fell into a state of lethargy. He stopped eating and didn’t say a word for days. His wife was worried, railed at him, threatened him. If he didn’t eat, he would die. And he would open his mouth a little, make an effort to swallow, close his hollow eyes, and throw up. He couldn’t do it. The doctor came with the drip, they kept an eye on him and thought that he was once again about to die. His heart, however, stood firm, at the helm. It beat regularly, indifferent to Paris’s suffering.
Christmas came, New Year’s Day went by, and Paris improved. He would sit up in bed, chatter to his wife and a neighbour who liked sick people and illnesses. Towards the end of an afternoon that had been just as inactive as all the others, the neighbour having left with a host of recommendations, Paris asked his wife:
‘Have you got my brother’s phone number anywhere? I feel that I could talk to him now about the bed.’
His wife stared at him as if she were now seeing him for the first time.
‘Have you gone mad? What bed?’
He was, of course, referring to the bed of the Fakir Mudami, who, all things considered, had seemed to him to be an innocent and kindly man. He had managed, in this period that others thought of as one of death, and had actually been reflective, to disengage the personality of the fakir from that of its author, Adonis - and to believe in one, whilst detesting the other. It can’t, however, be said that Paris and his wife had exhausted all therapeutic possibilities. One knows all about the calvary of those who, disheartened by the incompetence of official medicine, hand themselves over to all kinds of pious deceptions that work better on the psyche than on the kidneys proper. Paris was not among them. He had considered himself to be paralysed, although he wasn’t, for he was perfectly capable of getting out of bed and sitting in the chair, or getting out of the chair and lying in bed; and he had claimed to be incurable, although nobody had made such a prognosis. Death would be welcomed as immense relief. First and foremost for him, whose curiosity about the absolute sleep was simultaneously a blessing and a curse.
Paris could not explain how on earth the idea had wormed its way into his mind of seeking out his brother and reclaiming the Fakir Mudami’s bed of nails. The long fast that he had forced upon himself, the sleepless nights spent ruminating, remembering Adonis’s offences, had brought him impassively to consider himself quite close to this saintly man who slept on nails in order to get some rest. This was what Paris felt above all else: the impossibility of forgetting his body, while remembering it gave him no pleasure and was of no use. A dead weight. Paris’s ascetic rib had probably been born with him. Who knows if he wasn’t already performing exercises in self-control, hunched into very uncomfortable positions in a corner of his mother’s womb, in that very same womb where Adonis was later to wallow, spreading himself belly up, filling the whole space?
Around Christmas, insensible and half-dead in his narrow double bed, Paris had seen the Fakir Mudami’s bed of nails, in the sweet early hours of the morning, hovering above the chest of drawers. He had seen it quite clearly, rotating one way and then the other, presenting itself from every angle before Paris’s half-closed eyes, as a product in some shop window. It was made of rough, dark wood and had the form of a gigantic clothes brush, almost square, closer to a ferule. Instead of bristles, there were nails, placed very close together, their pointed ends flattened by hammer blows, forming a concave metal sheet, the surface that greeted the skin and bone of the fakir’s back.
By mid-January, Paris had mustered enough courage to ask one more time for his brother’s phone number. His wife looked at him in such a way that Paris thought it best to keep quiet and began searching furtively around the house, whenever his wife went out shopping. The number wasn’t in her diary by the phone. It wasn’t in the drawers of the bedside-table, nor was it in the old writing-desk in the living-room, which already had one foot in the grave, one of its lopers missing and the other one jammed, turning its title of writing-desk into a polite euphemism, rather like using the expression of interior decorator to describe the handyman who comes to lay the tiles. Wheeling himself feverishly around the house, Paris had sifted through all the likely hiding-places. One afternoon he remembered the phone-book. There was an Adonis, but he wasn’t Moreira. He decided to phone, perhaps considering it possible that all the Adonises in Lisbon were friends with one another. The number had been changed, directory enquiries didn’t know his brother’s whereabouts and Paris found himself forced to ask his wife.
She didn’t take kindly to his insistence. What was he after? What idea was this about the fakir? What fresh madness would she have to put up with now? Raising her voice, his wife surprised even herself with her final disjunctive: either Paris gave up the idea of his brother and the fakir or else he would have to give her up. She would go and live with the woman next-door. She would continue to bring him his meals, but she would refuse to live under the same roof as a madman in pursuit of a bed of nails.
Faced with Paris´s silence, and his most intent staring at the bedspread of roses, his back to the window as was his habit, his wife packed her bag and headed for the door. Before leaving, she threw him a small scrap of crumpled paper, which landed by the foot of the bed. Paris did not look at the paper for long, although he understood that the transaction was probably costing him too dear. He dialled the number and heard Adonis’s voice on the answering machine, introducing himself as a naturalist doctor and iridologist and asking callers to leave their numbers. This Paris did, in a curt, grudging voice.
Adonis showed up the next day, appearing triumphant to Paris´s eyes. When his brother sat down in the worn-out armchair, Paris was already regretting being who he was.
‘What about the bed?’ he asked.
It was kept in a warehouse out of town, where the lively naturalist had stored the rare treasures from his travels. That was where he kept the thousand-bead rosary from the Sufi Abdullah and the sword that had killed Rami, the dervish, who had fallen on the blade by divine decree, in a dancing ecstasy. He told him that he had brought medicinal herbs in large sacks, but that now they were rotting away and losing their virtues, owing to the dampness of the nearby forest.
‘You don’t happen to have any storage space, do you? It’s just that everything’s getting ruined… They’re extremely rare plants, it’s a pity. I have few patients, people are healthier nowadays, it seems. They eat more vegetables, drink milk, it all has consequences.’
Before he knew it, Paris was promising his brother the free space in the cupboard of the adjoining room for his exotic herbs. In exchange, Adonis would bring the bed.
‘But you need training,’ he said. ‘Don’t think that just anybody can allow themselves the luxury of sleeping on one of those things. I’ll have to stay with you for a few days, until you get used to it. What’s happened to your wife?’
That evening, Adonis was to move into his brother’s house, with the bed and the plants. There were also some kitchen utensils solely designed for the concoction of potions, and these would be coming too. Even while agreeing to this, Paris was regretting it. It had always seemed to him that his brother won, ever since he was born, he had won every time. During the night, he thought of a way to get rid of him, whilst at the same time keeping the bed. During the night, it all became clear. He would tell his brother:
‘I don’t have any room for you after all, nor for your things. My house is just big enough for me and the fakir’s bed.’
He told him exactly that the next morning, to which Adonis replied:
‘I understand. Don’t worry, I’ll bring the bed today and give you the instructions.’
But he still sat for a while drinking some herbal tea that he had made, and, after a ritual silence, he crossed his short legs and expounded:
‘This Fakir Mudami is a funny fellow. He drinks like a fish, disobeying all the rules of his religion, and fasts. He sleeps on the bed of nails, alone, but he has more than twenty children throughout the neighbourhood. And he prays, days and nights on end, after beating his disciples.’
‘He’s a hypocrite!’ shouted Paris.
‘I don’t know about that. That wasn’t what he seemed to me. God isn’t always good either, is He? But what He does is always good.’
Paris felt that he was beginning to get some feeling back in his legs. Feeling froze him. He thought, but very quickly, about the devil. About Adonis and the devil. He closed his eyes.
‘You will be damned. You can´t say such things’.
Adonis’s effect on Paris, fifty years ago, or today, had always been the same. One of them lied and the other acted as a minor inquisitor. One of them omitted the truth, the other pointed the finger. One of them invented a story, a heresy, the other played the moral philosopher. Paris, who didn’t believe in anything other than the prison of his body, faced with his brother Adonis, who was being quite banal about God, surprised himself by acting almost like a preacher. Adonis had an effect on him, whilst he had no effect on Adonis.
Adonis smiled, adjusted his cream-coloured socks, which were breathing calmly through the small holes in his shoes, and was silent. On the way out, dragging with him two light burlap sacks with his herbs, he said that he would be back soon ; he just had to find someone to help him carry the bed. He said that, although small, the bed was heavy. And that Paris would have to be careful not to put it at the intersection of electric currents, for this could alter its properties.
He left Paris in the throngs of disbelief. If he could, without hurting himself, have banged his head physically against the walls, blaming himself for his naivety, his gullibility, his absolute stupidity, he would have done so. But all he noticed himself doing was beating his hand slowly against his chest, absent-mindedly, without managing to stop turning over and over in his mind all the contradictions uttered by his brother: first, the fakir fasted and prayed until the community marvelled at his resistance, then, after all, he was a drunkard, who could barely stand up; and now the saintly man was being transformed into a foul-tempered fornicator who fathered babies by the dozen and beat his disciples. What virtues could the bed of such a man have? Paris was finally arriving at the real question, in roundabout ways and through dispersed reflection - and he raised his head, in suspense - he would have cocked an ear - to the noise of the right question:
‘What illness does he think I have, to suggest such a cure?’
It was no longer the bed that he was after. He wanted to know, once and for all, what Adonis thought of him. He rang, listened to the recorded message, and left one of his own. He waited for Adonis and the fulfilment of his promise. Adonis had disappeared. Paris was discovering in himself unprecedented resources to search for his brother. Unbeknown to his wife, he paid his neighbour, to go to Adonis´s house and leave a note for him under the door. He rang Adonis’s neighbour, whose number he had got from directory enquiries, saying that it was an emergency and asking her to call his brother. All to no avail. At night, he rang every half hour, until three or four in the morning.
His wife came back home, but kept herself at a distance. Paris could hear her dragging the furniture around and sewing at her old faltering machine. It wasn’t a sound that kept him company, but rather it irritated him, since he couldn’t get used to a noise that wasn’t regular. It was something that happened from time to time, and this exhausted his expectations.
A fortnight had passed since Adonis’s last visit, and then it was three weeks. When almost a month had gone by, Paris gave up waiting. It happened almost instantly, overnight. Paris went to bed obsessively preoccupied, going over and over his thoughts, making plans, noting down his complaints for the next conversation he would have with his brother, and woke up after ten hours of deadly sleep feeling calm, clear, happy. Deactivated. That afternoon, he turned towards the window and felt some curiosity about what was happening in the street. He saw a woman in high heels chasing after a little boy who was running away from her, laughing, out of the sidewalk and into the busy road, where a tram was passing at that very moment. He saw the driver´s gesture, the ticking-off that the boy was given, as he laughed and squirmed, a tiny tot, in his mother’s arms. Paris´s attention was drawn to a blind violinist, with his money-box hung round his neck, an object of derision for two boys, one white and one black, who, pretending to assist him, would rob him of his coins. The rickety sound of the violin reached his ears, as it played a kind of fado with a hint of waltz, and he pitied the puzzled blind man listening, his head tilted to one side, to the wild commotion of the passers-by, surprised by the lack of alms-givers. He saw buses passing by. He heard cars hooting and arguments between drivers. A van stopped to unload some kitchen stoves. The queue was growing longer. From above, Paris could see the arms of the drivers, gesticulating at the pair of unflustered lads carrying the goods to the shop, chatting away to each other. At the door, unmoving, stood an Indian in a blue overall, taking in the scene, in silence, his right hand on his cheek. From inside the shop came another one, very similar, who stood beside him. Then he said something, and they both went back into the shop. By then, the angriest driver was already leaving his car and making his way to the van, which he proceeded to shake energetically. The two Indians came out again, watched, went back in. One of them came out again to chase away two street dogs, one very fat and the other very long, who got up, pretended to move away, waited for him to go in and sat down again, a couple of yards further on. Paris was having a wonderful time. He considered calling his wife and sharing with her such Lisbon specialities. But the terms of their relationship were not the best, and it would take more than a simple street scene to change them.
Paris slept badly that night, full of vivid images from the outdoors. In his sleep, he never managed to recapture the humble pleasure of being curious about ordinary things. Everything appeared to him to be monstrous, threatening, and the street was a huge river of rubbish and dust, along which the wind blew, carrying with it newspapers, plastic bags, the odd cotton cap, cardboard boxes.
The next morning, Adonis rang the doorbell. He had come to bring the bed of nails and say goodbye. He was going back to India.
‘To do what?’ asked his brother.
Adonis complained that he had no place in the West. He also said something about the millennial wisdom of other civilisations, with those tufts of hair peaking out of his ears and his short legs crossed, fiddling with the elastic of his cream-coloured sock. Paris imagined that he was involved in some sort of trafficking, possibly drugs, or women, something sordid and dangerous.
They set to thinking where the bed of nails should be installed. His wife, who occupied the rest of the house, had not come in to greet Adonis. This was a sign that the fakir´s bed would have to find its own space in Paris´s room. Which was cramped and had just the essential furniture.
‘We can stand it over there, upright, against the wall.’
Adonis swiftly went to the stairs to call the boys.
‘Bring the bed up!’ he shouted down.
When he saw the two dark, slender youths who seemed to be doing favours for his brother, Paris´s heart sank. Trafficking in young boys, was he? No, it wasn’t possible, not even for him, to sink that low. Adonis gave them precise instructions. Pass through on your right, lift it another foot or so, carefully, put your right side down first, hold it underneath with both hands, lean it against the wall at a thirty-degree angle. Paris, in his wheelchair, his first curiosity now satisfied, looked at the window. Once the operation of wedging the bed of nails in between the chest of drawers and the cupboard had been completed, Adonis said:
‘So, what do you think?’
‘Thank you,’ said Paris. ‘I think it looks all right.’
The bed was not as he had imagined and seen it. It was a simple slab of chipboard, crumbling at the corners, with a few new steel nails scattered here and there. It was clearly something that had been knocked up in a hurry by Adonis himself, perhaps even at that supposed warehouse out of town, where he kept the rosary, the herbs and the sword.
‘I’ll give you the instructions now, because in everything there is a right way and a wrong way. To make good use of the Fakir Mudami’s bed of nails, you can choose one of two methods: either you learn to levitate, so as not to touch the nails with your back - which takes time - or you control the pain. To control the pain, you have three types of exercises: relaxation, concentration and imagination. First you breathe in, one, two, three, four, five, six and try to relax every part of your body…’
The youths, standing in the doorway, looked alternately at Adonis and his brother. Paris, now prey to the worst suspicions, imagining the horrors that Adonis must have committed in both East and West, pretended to be listening and agreeing to everything he said, not daring to look at the boys. One of them said:
‘Excuse me, Mr Moreira, but we’re off to have a cup of coffee,’ and he did up the shirt that he had on unbuttoned over his undershirt.
Adonis did not interrupt his explanations, he only nodded to indicate that he had heard. The idea was, therefore, by means of all these exercises, to achieve a state of such spiritual concentration that physical pain would not cease to exist in itself, but would completely lose its negative value and come to represent a trophy for the sufferer. But no twenty-minute abstract would transform Paris into a yogi. This was what his brother told him, already on his feet, in a hurry to leave and get on with his life. He scrawled a telephone number on the back of an envelope, in a childish handwriting, and held it out to his brother:
‘Look, this is the man who can help you. He lives nearby, up the street.’
‘Everything´s covered in pigeon shit over there,’ said Paris to a passing fly.
That´s how he dismissed his brother. Adonis didn’t even turn round, he was already late for the boys. Paris was left with the envelope in his hand and realised that it was an unpaid electricity bill. He smiled.
Placed upright and leaning against the old damp wall, the slab of chipboard with its sparse, shiny, half-twisted nails looked like the remains of something else. The back of a cupboard, the base of a bed, the bottom of a chest of drawers, something incomplete to which other things should be joined in order to be what they are. Paris tried not to look. He turned his wheelchair to the window and sat there feeling the light on his face. Before he knew it, he was breathing in, one, two, three, four, five, six.