Sunday evening
About the roof repair, I have nothing new to report. The tiles were supposed to arrive yesterday; they did not. I rang that young man at the store to give him a piece of my mind, but he’s always so nice that I forget I called to quarrel. He told me the news about his mother (new boyfriend). We chatted for fifteen minutes, and it wasn’t until I hung up the phone that I realized I’d once again neglected to give him an earful. Meanwhile, the roof is still in shambles. It continues to leak, and of course now the walls are following suit—they’re covered in great big stains. Once the roof is done, I’ll need to fix the walls. One thing at a time. I can’t complain, though. All this leads to phone calls, conversations. If it weren’t for the roof tiles, I’d never have found out the boy’s mother has a boyfriend—it’s Celso, the one who drove a Ford Corcel when we were young. The boy at the store told me his mother is happy because she always had such a crush on Celso’s Corcel, and it’s just a shame the car’s long since been sold, she said. “All things in good time,” was what the boy told me on the phone. He was talking about his mother’s relationship, but a bit about my roof tiles, too.
Today I had lunch with my good friend. It’s been two months since he had that fall, in his hallway. My friend thinks it’s been more than two months, a lot longer, but that’s because he’s always in pain, etc. To this day, he can’t say how it happened—it wasn’t loose shoelaces this time, apparently. When he fell, my friend slammed his shoulder against the door and just lay there on the floor stunned, not knowing who he was or who that newly broken shoulder belonged to. The doctors gave him one of those slings that straps your arm against your body, and then they wrapped everything up so he couldn’t spread or even raise his wing.
After that my friend’s memory started to go. No one knows exactly why this happened—he didn’t hit his head on anything. My friend was terribly frightened because in the moment he tripped, he had time to realize he was going to hit the door on his way down, and that it was going to do some damage. He must have managed to duck his head and shield it from the impact, but he doesn’t remember. He says it must have been nothing more than a reflex. He protected his head, but the fright made him lose his memory.
My good friend is the one with uneven eyes. I’ve mentioned him here before by other names: my hunched-over friend, my friend whose parents were from Pernambuco, my toolmaker friend, my friend Suzy’s husband—they’re all one and the same. Right after his fall, when we spoke on the phone, he still remembered me perfectly, but a few minutes later he asked me, “Suzy, is that you, dear?” So I had to remind my friend who I was, and that Suzy was long gone.
After he fell and broke his shoulder, we had to go a few weekends without our get-togethers, without our precious lunches. My friend’s children came to take care of him and so it wasn’t right for me sandwiches, too.
