Already with a tummy and full of caprices, Valentina decided to schedule our always delayed honeymoon. It would be in Sydney during her vacation from television, but I was embarrassed to ask for a new license. Valentina insisted, put me in cold waters, made me see that I was not his employee, I was his partner.
I sat down with David, showed him my new laptop, talked about the inflexibility of the women in general, he made me feel free to travel, even gave me a guide of good places in Surry Hills. And he took the opportunity to say that soon if I did not care, he would probably outsource some of my tasks. I only got it on my way back from the honeymoon, when I found a young editor at a table in front of mine and half a dozen of his articles framed on the walls. Already for some time, as I learned, David trained the boy to write not in the way of others, but in my way of writing for others, which seemed wrong. Because my hand would always be my hand, those who wrote for others were like my gloves, just as the actor transforms himself into a thousand characters, to be a thousand times himself. To an apprentice, I would not refuse to lend my paraphernalia, that is to say, my books, my experience and some technique, but David intended to convey to him what was more than my property. So as not to bother me, I decided to ignore the boy's texts, and I would sit with my back to his back because it is impossible to create with a stranger staring at our face.
But one night when I was alone in the agency, wandering my eyes on the walls of the room, I came upon a newspaper article in a baroque frame, and the title "When Jesus meets Buda" seemed familiar. I went to look, and it was a recent matter signed by the president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, for whom I had never written, and it could only be the boy's thing. I read the first line, I re-read and I stopped, I had to take the plunge. I would not know how to introduce that article other than those words. I closed my eyes, I thought I could guess the next sentence, and there it was, just like that.
I covered the text with my hands and removed my fingers millimetre-by-millimetre. I opened the words letter-by-letter as a poker player filing cards, and it was precisely the words I expected. Then I tried the most unexpected words, neologisms, archaisms, the fucking hell, brilliant metaphors that occurred to me suddenly, and what else I conceived was already there imprinted under my hands. It was distressing, it was like having an interlocutor who did not stop taking words from my mouth, I was in agony. It was like having a plagiarist who preceded me, to have a spy inside the skull, a leak in the imagination. I looked at him biasedly, I thought to challenge him man to man, squeeze him against the wall, but soon another boy was hired, and another, and to all of them David managed to impose my style, almost leading me to believe that my own style, in the beginning, was also a result of his manipulation. When I was surrounded by seven writers, all in striped shirts like mine, with reading glasses just like mine, all with my hair, my cigarettes and my cough, I moved to a small room that was serving as a storage room, behind the reception room. There I regained my taste for writing because the articles for the press depressed me, I already had the impression that I was imitating my emulators. I began to create autobiographies, in which David supported me, claiming to be a merchandise with great repressed demand.
Famous artists, politicians, and crooks knocked on my door, but I could afford to meet only characters as obscure as myself. Clients who reminded me of those at the time from the three-by-four room, except the ones rich enough to pay for the extortionary allowance David stipulated, as well as costing the book for distribution between relatives and friends.
Kinds like the old zebu breeder from the countryside, whose memories I rewrote with a lot of sex, transatlantic, cocaine and opium, giving him some comfort in a hospital bed. The man was in the very last, and barely had the strength to autograph a copy of his Passional Inventory, which I took to the meeting of anonymous authors in Kuala Lumpur.
I selected the best passages for public reading, but my peers demanded that I read it from end to end. If I did not have a celebrity to sign it, there were plenty of them in the story, and as I related the movie stars, first ladies, jet set ladies, and one prince the old man had taken to bed, I heard the commotion and the laughter in the audience. My production was then copious, and on the eve of leaving for Malaysia, I had undertaken to put into a book the Brazilian adventures of a Russian executive, who was now waiting for me at the agency.
But I was lazy, I had gone to the office by the Paulista Avenue, slowly, I came looking at the girls on their bicycle, I stopped at a Starbucks to drink a coconut, I almost slept on the counter, and when I arrived the Russian had just left, I spent some time at the reception, without knowing what to do, and David's sharp voice crossed the walls.
"But the idea of distributing oranges was from the governor... Then you would have to number all the horses... Of course, no one gets herpes on the phone... ok, dude If you want, I'll arrange a replica... then let it go, bye!"
But coming back to when I arrived from Kuala Lumpur-Shanghai-Seoul, the receptionist wanted to announce me to David but did not need to, I was too lazy, it was the time zone, it was the jet lag. I just wanted to go home.
I turned the key, nobody in the room, water dripping in the kitchen. I went through the hallway, the bedroom door was closed, I twisted the handle without making a noise. The afternoon sun was already coming down, leaking the blinds and projecting like a railing on the floor and the bed cover. The bathroom was open, the light was on. Curled up in a white towel with her feet apart, Valentina threw her head forward, almost touching the floor, as in a kind of penance.
She brushed the nape of her neck, pulling her brown hair down the root, and I could see her legs, her arms, her bare shoulders, that brunette skin that covered all over her body, except her breasts and under her panties. However, looking at Valentina so suddenly and so closely, I once again wondered. My first doubt, whenever I was travelling, has Valentina gained lushness in my absence, or if in my thoughts she had faded. She raised her face, now red, saw me in the mirror and hesitated.
"You went through the terrace?" she said exasperatedly.
"No, I stole the key," I replied.
"You're crazy, my husband can come at any moment!"
"Your husband is in Kuala Lumpur."
"It can not be, I've been waiting for him since yesterday!"
"His plane crashed."
I took a step forward and leaned against her, barefoot she barely past my chin, and for a long time, we stared in the mirror, I squeezed her hips as she always liked.
Until she softened, her head hanging to the right, her mouth half open, her eyes closed with her eyelashes trembling. After the kiss, when she let her lips drop from mine, she would say she was sleepy. She dropped her lips from mine, leaned against the sink, stared at me with her eyes still closed and rubbed them.
"I'm dying of sleep," she said.
She passed me like a somnambulist, her steps sluggish but straight, and she lay limp in the bed, the white towel resting on her body. And the sun invaded the room, and the shadows of the blind stamped a cage on the towel over the body on the bed. Valentina pretended to sleep, waiting for me to rub my tongue against her neck.
It took me a few seconds, on purpose, considering that the towel was a perfect mould of her body. If carefully removed from the body, it could, in theory, build another Valentina.
At last, I knelt on the floor and rubbed my tongue behind her neck, which smelled of soap.
Suddenly she jumped out of bed, I thought she was going to start her husband's play again, but no. It was a mother's instinct foreseeing that something had happened to the boy downstairs, in the playground or in the building's garage, for only minutes later his cry came into the apartment. Valentia was already in her sweater and jeans on the bedroom door, "What happened? What happened?" Nothing had happened, some boy had beaten my boy and the nanny had brought him from school earlier. Stamped on the bed, those who pretended to sleep now were me, but I could fell that the boy had gained a few more pounds. My son was obese.