Winter

It has been cold in the last few weeks here. Cold because it had been summer in Brasil when I left, and it was so hot on the trails in the fishing village that I would stop in the shade, nauseous, and when I would arrive on the beach I would drink a half liter of water from the pipe which was fed by the waterfalls.

I ride my sister's mountain bike from the ridge on which she lives to the center of town or to the university. For three days it was 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and I liked that there were no degrees as there was nothing to think about.

It was tough to leave. For many months I had been dreaming about space and sanity. São Paulo drove me crazy, and it didn't make it any better that I didn't trust the woman who I and everyone else called my girlfriend. She was a product of her city--a very big city, larger than any city I have ever visited and more vast and suffocating a place than I have ever seen or imagined. Yet there were nice things about her, how at times her Bahian side would come out. How at times she would be calm. How at times she would cook for me. How at times she would just hold my hand when we walked. How at times we could just sit on the beach together.

But it wasn't simple. She was also very bitter about men. She had chased professional men and was left empty. There might have been gringos, I don't know. I was too busy with my work to ask and I didn't care to discuss the matters. Men cheat in São Paulo, and women, to balance the books, cheat as well. I don't know if she cheated on me, but my gut instinct shouted that I could not trust her. You cannot drown this instinct, especially when it cries loudly, especially when it enters your dreams. You cannot drink cachaça to make it feel better or make it go away.

I had ridden in the mountains and I had spent a lot of time alone. When a man labors a lot by himself and has to worry about his own survival, when the beauty of the desert and the mountains isn't a movie or a view from a bus but is a lonely and solitary beauty that can kill him in his sleep or during the day or in a snow storm or in the wind and when a man devours images with his eyes, when a man eats up the whole field of his vision with his eyes, just so he can gauge the distance to the next river, to the next ridge, over the mountain, so he can see a place to camp free from the wind, so he can see some place where water might, just if he is lucky, just might form, when a man labors in such a way his soul becomes bleached and cold but it also becomes innocent when it comes to people. He misses people and he misses a good woman. A man in nature wants a good woman to comfort him. When he comes back from the wilderness, that's what he wants.

I looked severe in some photos as I was riding in Patagonia. It's weary, tough going. It's that simple. You spend a lot of your time suffering, a lot of your time worrying. Not the type of worry in a chair, worry on a drive to work, worry in the airport. No, worry that as you ride you won't find water. Worry that you run out of sunlight. Torment that the damn flies won't stop biting your face and your feet and your arms and your legs as you set the tent in the wind as the wind bends the frame of the polls. I think about how I smoked cigarettes to keep away the flies. It's been two weeks since I last smoked a cigarette, but thinking of the desert and thinking of that cigarette at the end of the day alone in the desert I deeply want to smoke a cigarette. But it wouldn't be the same thing and wouldn't feel and mean the same way to me.

It's been two weeks since I've had a drink. It's been longer since I've been drunk. It was a Monday and I was rattled when I went off for my run to the park. I had bought a ticket for the 15th of January after a bad fight with Amanda. We were in the kitchen and I had been drinking, then she had been drinking. I don't remember very clearly. But I wanted to dance. I didn't want to waste the night. I wanted to go out and dance. I found myself in bed because I was exhausted but I knew that if I could get out to the street I could walk to the samba club and all would be good and redeemed and we could dance late into the night. Yet she crawled into bed and began to take my clothes off. She got on top of me and began to ride me and I looked into her eyes and they were manic and depraved. I felt disgust. All the blood went away from my penis, and she looked at me as if she wanted to tell me it was OK I couldn't keep it up, but I felt disgust like I wanted to vomit and I threw on my shorts and left her naked on the bed and slammed the door. At the base of the stairs was a porcelain parakeet I had bought her for the Christmas that she doesn't celebrate and it gave an electronic chirp as I passed. She called me her periquito. I picked up the green bird from the mantle and smashed it to the ground. I felt very bad because it was her Christmas present and she hadn't shown the present to all of her friends yet. I felt ashamed I had smashed the periquito. I looked for a plastic bag and gathered the pieces. I began to wash dishes. She came downstairs and asked me what had happened. I could not tell her I thought she was a whore and wanted to vomit. She asked me what was in the trash. She opened the plastic bag and saw the shattered periquito. She asked me what had happened, why the rage? How could I, at one moment, make love to her, and then next storm out? Why was the periquito shattered and in a plastic bag in the garbage? She told me I was maluco, crazy.

The next day I bought a ticket to Portland. It cost me about $1400 but it allowed me to count the days, it allowed me to think up something to say. I think I had 10 days, maybe 8 days, but it was enough. In those days I tried to tell her I was going. Earlier I had a deadline of shipping myself off to Alaska in the dead of winter. But I could not secure that job. This time I had no reason for leaving other than my wanting to leave.

It was drawing very near my departure date and I still didn't tell her. Yet three days before my departure, she told me she would go to South Africa. She would leave in late February. I would stay until late February, I decided. That way I could say goodbye to my two roommates and to Amanda and there could be a going away party and there would be reasons and explanations. You cannot just pickup and leave. There must be a going away party. There must be goodbyes.

Yet two days later I would spend another $350 to change the ticket once again. She said she would go to Las Vegas and live with the parents of the boyfriend of Rosana, her best friend. I told her Las Vegas was a very poor choice for anyone to live. I told her it was a nightmare that she wanted to leave Brasil to learn English. I told her I had sacrified much to live with her in such a city. I told her I was not able to write in the madhouse we lived in. I told her I had not ridden to the Amazon. She told me I was sick and needed a doctor. I began to read Scott at the kitchen table. She stormed out in a cocktail dress.

I eventually texted her and I didn't get any response. I felt doom and dread. It never feels good to lose your woman, and it feels worse when she goes and gives herself to another. It's bad to be with a bad woman and it's tough when she's tied to the culture you put so much faith in and it's tough when you live there and the language and your home and your place and they're all on her side too, that's all tough and a big bad lump to swallow, a big, heavy kick to the balls.

I thought maybe I should just go then. Pack up as I had done in September, get all the gear out and get into a hostel and be safe, be safe for a few days before the heat would get bad. But I walked to the SESC, a cultural center I used to get outside the house and I went there to read Scott, to write, to clear the head. On the way there I thought I saw Amanda in her dress, crying and kissing a tall gringo. My body tensed and I feared I would do the worst. I had attacked two guys in clubs earlier and I had gotten lucky I walked away. But this time it was in front of a subway station and as I approached I knew I would kill him and I saw whatever I was doing going away and into some haze. Maybe I would run after I killed him, maybe I'd get on the subway and with my passport get on a plane or maybe I could get a bus and get out to Paraguay and maybe I could make it out before they could pin the murder.

I walked up to the couple and it wasn't her. God damn looked like her from afar.

She was drunk when she texted me. I didn't want to join her because I didn't know what I'd do if I saw her. I told her I'd meet her. But 20 minutes later she said she was coming home. I could speak to her then.

She never came home. I went to see a film and when I arrived it wasn't there. I walked back home and it was raining and I walked and felt a great release and emptiness. I could just leave. Whenever I wanted I could leave. I could leave São Paulo and no one could make me stay. No could make me feel guilt to stay. I could go and I could get the hell out of there.

I hadn't drunk that day. It wasn't a day to drown sorrows that had already taken care of themselves.

I had already felt this ache before. One day when I could still pay rent I gave her 500 reis and she went for a small box in her wardrobe and opened it and inside was a huge cache of rubbers. She put the money inside and closed the box and told me it would be safe inside. I felt the ache when she asked me if I knew what an "orgia" was. Yeh, I told her, I knew about those. I felt the ache when she told me of a term I might not have heard, something couples did, "swinging." Yeah, I knew what that was too.

I walked in the rain to the supermarket. I didn't need to know much, I didn't know if she was home, but I had waited the day out and wanted to go to sleep. I picked a nice bottle of cachaça and some ground beef and some tomato sauce. I could cook dinner for whoever was home, I could do something human and friendly on my last night. I walked into the night and the rain laid upon my shirt and the top of my head. I opened the bottle and began to drink and felt distant.

She was in her panties and bra and was sleeping on her stomach, sleeping heavily. It was only nine in the evening. I asked her if she was drunk and she barely responded. I looked at her ass and knew I never wanted it again, never again.

I went downstairs and put my backpack in the small room and drank from the bottle and put the bottle in the backpack and went back in the kitchen and began to cook ground beef and tomato sauce. At 10:30 Maria came home from volleyball or a date and I was drunk and she asked me about my day and I told her distantly there had been a problem with Amanda, but she was used to this and told me it would be OK.

I remember going back upstairs and asking her about her day. I asked her what she had done. She told me she had never been treated as poorly by anyone as I had treated her that day. I understood her reponse. Whaever she did that day was justified. After all, she had received the worse treatment of her life.

I vaguely remember sleeping on a mattress downstairs in the spare room. It was a warm night and I slept shirtless on the mattress but by 5 in the morning I awoke and drank more before I returned to bed and cradled her in my arms.

She had her first driving lesson that morning and I woke her early to remind her. I had drunk a quarter liter of cachaça the night before and was dizzy. I read in Scott in bed and as she left for her driving class she leered at me and left.

I wrote for a few minutes in my journal. I made a reservation for the nearby hostel. It had been over 4 months since my last visit to the hostel and I was looking forward to its courtyard and its absence of anyone I had ever known. Clarisse, the cleaning lady, arrived and I kissed her and offered her coffee. I went upstairs to pack my things and in 20 minutes I was ready. I took the bottle of cachaça outside and wrapped it in the trash at the curb. I gathered the bags in the living room and Clarisse asked me if I was going away. I told I was doing something.

I rolled the bicycle outside and the tires were very underinflated. I pumped both of them, knowing that they would soon be deflated anyhow on the plane. I packed everything on the bike just like I was leaving a campsite. I left the tent on top of the wardrobe. I don't know why, but I left the tent behind.

When I reached the hostel I unloaded everything just as I has always done and I moved upstairs and in the same bed, just as I had left him in September, was Jorge, the Peruvian. He apologized for not coming to my party 4 months earlier. I asked him if he remembered Roberto, the Ecuadorian jiu-jitsu figher who shared the room with us last time.  Roberto had visited the house several times and had even come to a futebol game with Amanda and I.

I went to the market for ginger, instant coffee, papaya, yoghurt. As I walked from the market Amanda called and asked me where my things were. I told her they were travelling. I would see her in 10 minutes, I told her.

I arrived back home and unlocked the door and walked upstairs and she was sitting in bed. I asked her about her driving class and she said it was more difficult than she realized. I told her I had moved my things to the hostel and that I was trying to change my ticket to the earliest departure possible. I was losing my mind, I told her, and I didn't want to treat her so terribly anymore. She told me she no longer felt that I had mistreated her. She was angry but now she was calm. She didn't want me to go to the hostel and she didn't want me to change my ticket. I began to look at my watch and remembered my sitting on her bed in early September with my gear in the hostel and her calm words persuading me to stay. I asked her about her day yesterday and she told me she had continued drinking beers with her friends. For that long, I asked her? Only until 8, she insisted. But I was home at 8, I told her. Only until 9, she said. Mentira! I stormed out.

It is easy to leave when you know she has been disloyal. I don't really know what happened that Monday when she went out to drink by herself. But I know how she lies, and her performance was terrible.

I was able to rebook the ticket for the following night. I would not speak to her, but just leave. It was the only way. Her eyes and her voice were too powerful for me and she had gotten me to stay before.

I had spoken to a man from Minas Gerais that night and I felt like I had just become Brazilian, bitter and sober and grounded. Amanda called at 12:30 and I told her I was sleeping. She told me we could speak in the morning. I went to sleep and the sheet was too hot but when I pulled it off the mosquitoes got at me and when I covered myself in the sheet it was too hot.

The next day I got a box and tape and took the bike apart and placed it in the box and wrapped all the gear in a cocoon made from the ground pad. I thought again of saying goodbye to Amanda. 

I made friends with 4 Brazilians and talked nervously with them for an hour. The taxi arrived. On the way to the airport, Amanda sent me a text and she said she missed me. I told her I missed her too but to be patient. She said she wanted to talk again and that it would be very uncool if I were to leave without our talking anew.

I won't wear the wool shirt on the way back home tonight up to the ridge in the dark. The jacket will do just fine. I don't think I'll need the rain pants as well and maybe I won't even use the feet covers. I'll always need the gloves, though. The hands can get awful cold on a bicycle as they are the first things that hit the wind.