ENCONTROS (3/3)

 Back at the hotel, after Henrica and Anselmo's banquet, Roberta called her mother in Rio to find out about her son; then she took a shower and lay in bed in her nightgown --- the air conditioning turned up to maximum --- waiting for Johnny to come and fuck her, in vain. After snorting two lines of cocaine, which she took from her suitcase, she went down to the hotel bar and started drinking one whiskey after another, claiming that she "needed to reflect." In her room, she looked at Johnny's guitar on the sofa: distorted trash and noises stretched out in the primitive vacuum of rhythm and blues, jazz, rock (Blue Note, Wall Street and all those Jews from New York). She thought about Elvira, remembered the book, remembered Adorno and the Cultural Industry; Heidegger, Hitler, the Vril energy: "The Parisians need gas," Artaud wrote to Hitler... from the asylum. She opened the book where she had left off and read until bedtime. He remembered K's book. It seemed strange to him to start reading one before finishing the other. He thought of young K, there in front of him, shirtless, tanned and full of energy, talking a lot: eggs, eggs, eggs! He thought of K's own eggs, of the energy produced in his testicles rising up his spine, until it became "Speech" --- he masturbated for almost half an hour.

When Johnny returned from the hotel bar, Roberta was asleep, dreaming turbulently --- she woke up when he shook her:

‘’It’s time. Dinner at Celsão and Solange’s house, remember?’’

At seven o’clock at night, the taxi was waiting at the door. In front of the hotel, there were tables from bars and restaurants; in the background, a beautiful stretch of sea shrouded in darkness blew its wind incessantly through the women’s hair and the coconut trees. She sat in the back seat. The taxi left: destination: Beach Place Suites, Pituba.

ROBERTA

(the humidity in the air, the sea wind, the night sea breeze, the heat, gave Roberta’s agitated thoughts an illusion of incisiveness that she had only experienced indirectly throughout the day, reading Elvira’s book and talking to K; at that moment, in the kitchen of the apartment with Solange, they were making coffee while fertilizing the subconscious with their accounts of recent events, and so on)

No, my friend --- not exactly promising much, and for some time now perhaps tending towards a calm and gradual capitulation. I knew Johnny before this existential crisis of his: a charming, intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive man; but the life of a top jazz musician is still fueled by dust and whiskey, just like in the old days, I always have to pull him out of some black hole in my soul, enter it with my tympanic membrane and, sharing a spiritual labyrinthitis, roll with him back and forth, until I bring him back to reality. Besides, he spends more time in New York than in Rio, and I don't have the money to go there every year; and even when he pays for my tickets, it's a pain --- I don't always feel like going.

Besides, you know: I have those other lovers.