Peeling A Seeedless Moon

By Carlos Camacho

The restless Alistair Orzabal finds himself caught up in an unforgiving foreign city, where his persistent, ironic observations of the world around him serve to distract from his fears and protect him from his past. Abruptly, the drudgery of daily life is threatened by the emergence of hope, one that risks derailing the monotony of his reliably, safe life. The story permits a glimpse into Alistair Orzabal's strange yet intriguing mind. Written in the existentialist style of such books as Camus' L'etranger, this is about one individual trying to understand an absurd world. It highlights the inevitable experience of solitude and individuality, space and confinement – the slowness and boredom of an ordinary life of work and sociability that is filtered through the person's beliefs and traumas. Written with humor and a touch of sarcasm, it shines a light on life's uncertainty and delivers with it a sliver of hope for survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carlos Camacho
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463985007

Carlos Camacho

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Carlos Camacho, fluent in Spanish and English, also lived in Argentina and Australia. He formed his love for music and writing at a young age, graduated in psychology and philosophy, and presently lives in a coastal town north of Sydney with his wife and children. He works as a psychologist and produces music and a podcast. Carlos has recorded albums and written books of poetry and short stories, theatrical plays, and novels.

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Carlos Camacho

PEELING A SEEDLESS MOON

Copyright © 2019 Carlos Camacho

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All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

The author has made every effort to recreate events, localities and conversations accurately from his memories of them. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the anonymity of individuals and places, while identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations, and places of residence may also have been changed.

English Editor

Siobhan Gallagher

Additional Proofreading

Brian Cross

Spanish Translator

Adriana Castañeda Cáceres

Book Cover Art Work and Formatting

Sebastian Codruț Făgăraș

For Heather My Full Moon.

One is marvellously similar to the gruesome image of the fairy tale that is able to turn around its eyes and see itself.

Nietzsche

Every two minutes, headlights pass on the main street in front of my window. As a child, I’ve sometimes wished I could stay up all night counting the number of cars that drove by. It was better than counting stars. You couldn’t get warts all over your body.

I used to believe many things.

The night is serene, half-lit, and warm. At times, strange sounds and the echo of people’s voices reach my room. I have the television on without volume, and its light makes a faint shadow on one of the walls. I breathe in the cool air that occasionally creeps in through the window. It is still damp, as it usually is here, in summer. I feel well tonight, my headache has gone without me realizing, and I feel like having a cigarette, so I smoke and flick through my television channels. I look for sport but can only find Hollywood movies translated into Portuguese and American late-night news coverage. I turn it off. The fine, penetrating sound of electricity the television leaves behind fills my head with sleep. I lie down and call it a night.

The bed next door starts squeaking again, and the sensual giggles of the Laundry Woman fill the building with embarrassment and delight. I think of Natalia and her contagious laughter. We would lie on the bed next to each other, without speaking, feeling the cool evening air rush over our sunburnt bodies. She would stand to pour me a drink, and I would watch the outline of her naked body move slowly, lit by a warm moon. She would kiss me softly goodnight.

I drift into a dreamless sleep.

I snooze and rush to get ready for work. The heat has already begun to filter through the crooked blind. Sweat drops form on my forehead as I button my white office shirt. Grabbing my cigarettes and wallet, I run out to catch the 8.46 bus, my tie in my hand. I quickly calculate that if I get to the bus stop in time, I will reach the office only five minutes late. I could probably walk in with a cup of coffee in one hand and a piece of paper in the other and they would assume I had been there for a while.

I slam the door hard and it crosses my mind that Old Quiroga hasn’t fixed my door yet. I will need to catch up with him about it in the evening. I race down the stairs and bump into the Fat Woman and Nicho. He goes for my ankles again, barking like mad. I excuse myself and the Fat Woman mumbles something in Portuguese which I don’t understand, but I smile and keep walking down the stairs as fast as I can without running. As soon as I open the old door of the entrance of the building, the heat swarms over me. I keep my eyes half closed from the sunlight and feel my headache return, radiating up from the back of my neck.

The crazy noise of cars, brakes squeaking, horns beeping, and buses racing to their stops amazes me. I have yet to become accustomed. The heat and the city noise fuel my headache. Someone has called out my name – I think it is my name. I turn as I keep walking, and from the building I see the Laundry Woman wave at me. She shouts out Bom dia, good morning in Portuguese. I reply by moving my lips in silence with an scratchy wave of my hand and realize that I have left the window of my room wide open. It does not worry me, the blind is down, but if it were to rain, it wouldn’t be enough to keep the water out. It happened to me once before, and Old Quiroga turned into a wild bull over it.

I don’t want to jog to the bus stop as it would affect my head, so I take long, soft strides. I don’t know what time it is exactly, but I know the bus will race by any second.

That feeling of expectancy, when one is walking to the bus stop preparing to run any moment, creeps up on me. One calculates, depending on the distance, whether if the bus comes at a precise moment, one will reach the bus stop in time. I think, Just about now! If the bus comes tearing down, I’m safe to board it taking into account whether there are other people waiting, and the amount of time they hold the bus back. I finish thinking this when I see the bus turning onto the main street. It’s almost flying. The feeling of expectancy has left me with a blunt feeling of despair enacted by a stream of swear words. With such ease they leave my lips, I’m sure swearing is an instinct. I let my legs run while trying to keep my head still. I stop the thing, board it, sit down and feel my head thumping from the inside out.

The city looks busy today. Everyone seems to be in a hurry. At this time, only those who are running late are on the street. I’ve been in this time before, in fact, many times. I call it the Unknown Time. It is the time that is never known unless one is running late. It is really a time that should never be. Those who defy exactness and punctuality of the Everybody’s Time create such a time. It is as if time steps beside itself. I can catch up with myself by being behind the rest of the world. The city looks like a big panic attack created by those who find themselves in this time but do not wish to be here. The comfort of the Everybody’s Time is more reassuring for them. They look like a swarm of ants, running desperately around the ant hole.

I have never liked Mondays, like everyone else, but I hate Thursdays with more intensity. Payday. It reminds me of the little amount of money I work for, or my Exploited Status, as Miguel calls it.

A big, fat, sweaty woman strolls on the bus, she reminds me of a dinosaur. She has three bags in each hand full of fruit, plus a handbag over one shoulder and an umbrella hangs from one of her forearms. There are only two seats vacant on the bus. She chooses the one next to me.

I’ve never believed in probability. Whenever there is a fifty per cent chance in our favour, the fifty against us seems to be an all-powerful force. Almightiness is not a characteristic of God but of the fatalistic chances of life. As she sits, I am squeezed against the window. She tries to catch my eye and smiles. I force the muscles of my face to display a smile back. I like that about myself.

My main problem is not that I am squashed between flesh and metal but calculating the time until I am freed from the seat. At least two stops prior to mine. I can feel that she is dying to start a conversation. The mood of expectancy apprehends me again, and how I long for her to say something, anything so I can release myself.

It’s a bit hot, she utters as she taps her forehead with a handkerchief.

She has the physique of a dinosaur and the imagination of one too. I turn to her and huff air from my mouth to mimic feeling hot. She cannot help herself and asks another question, something about time. Her Portuguese accent is broad. I ask her to repeat herself.

She points to the tie in my hand.

You didn’t have enough time this morning to put it on?

As she speaks, I look at her eyes. They are small and glossy.

I fell asleep.

The Dinosaur laughs loudly and scares the old man in front of us.

I’m not that funny. I always think of myself as being serious. Appropriate is a better definition of my character.

She catches the last breath of her laughter and says, Too much sex will end up killing you.

She says it loud enough so the whole bus can hear. What am I supposed to say? So, I do what I do best – I fake-smile at her.

I catch her eyes once more, and I search for the person inside the mass of sweaty fat. How does she carry such weight? She doesn’t try to hide herself, for if you can’t see her, you can easily hear her. She surely must think that her body is someone or something that is not her. How otherwise could she accept such a grotesque bulk of flesh?

She mentions that I should, in the future, let my girlfriend do most of the work. A repulsive picture penetrates my mind. I see myself squashed between her body and my bed. She wiggles her bloated ass with enjoyment, and I am suffocating in her fat. She laughs loud as she sucks me into her huge vagina until only my head sticks out. I try to push myself out, but there’s nothing to hold onto. Her entire body is made from gelatine.

Excuse me, I say, this is my stop. I free myself from her thigh and the window and stand on the seat. I jump over her as I apologise.

Have a nice day, she remarks.

Just when you think you know someone, they turn on you by saying something everyone else says.

You too, I reply in an equally mainstream fashion.

I arrive to work early for me today, barely ten minutes late. It’s not the same coming in at this time. I’m so comfortable strolling in on Mondays after everyone has talked about what they did over the weekend that, sadly enough, I find interesting what they say to me.

At lunch time, I go out with Miguel for a walk and a cup of coffee. We cover the weekend football, the new gun law, and a massacre in Curitiba within the first half hour of the lunch break. There isn’t more to add on these topics, and there weren’t any surprise score lines over the weekend playoffs. We spend the next three and a half hours talking about Miguel’s new girlfriend, a beautiful, coffee- skinned country girl seeking refuge in the city, and in Miguel’s arms. I have met her several times. She seems to be in love. Miguel and I smoke a couple of cigarettes and head back to the office.

At about six o’clock, I feel myself drifting off. This is the time I detest the most. There are still two hours remaining to be freed from the clock, and there is nothing to do. There is never anything to do. Even when doing something in this place it is always a futile experience. My only saviour is to observe the way the others go about coping with their futility. It’s such a disheartening choice. I see them worried about a cheque that bounced this morning. Does it really matter? I can’t see them being genuinely concerned about a cheque they are not going to gain any profit from. It is possible that they are aware of it and respond in an irrational manner to the absurd case.

At that moment Miguel rings me from his office, all of ten metres away. He saves the day with a generous thirty-five-minute conversation, mostly about the Country Girl. He again attempts to arrange me a date with the Country Girl’s cousin, an exquisite woman, according to Miguel, who has eyes for no one but me, even though she has never met me.

You don’t have to worry about her, asserts Miguel. She will not be indecisive about whether to sleep with you or not. I will advise her that she should.

I tell him that he is a wonderful man, but I cannot go out with him and his girls. He is amazed at my refusal and promises to arrange for me to sleep with one of his friends. I thank him and abruptly he starts talking about some problem with the finances that he found today, his voice changes and sounds highly professional. I look over and see the Boss standing by his side. I tell him over the phone that he enjoys making love to abnormal pigs of either sex and hang up. After the Boss leaves he rings me again and begs me to tell him how I knew of his well-kept fantasy.

Eight o’clock in the evening slithers its way into the present, but by the time it has reached me I feel wide awake again. I don’t know whether it’s because the day passes slowly in the monotony of the office, and I have become cornered in a mood that goes beyond sleepiness. Or the fact that I am aware that I am permitted to go home now and, therefore, my sleepiness is overcome with excitement.

I can comprehend the way a prisoner feels once he is allowed to walk out of the concentration camp. He may have been beaten and badly fed for years, confined to cold and darkness, but that first step outside the gate that arrested his life for so long disguises his ill health and sorrow with what he thinks is happiness. The sun stinging his eyes as he carries his battered body into the world feels good. For an instant, he forgets his dementia and slavery, not knowing that the bars and the walls have already been built within him.

The city is at dusk. How I enjoy walking the streets at this time. The beggars pack up for the day, some counting their earnings, some already intoxicated with joy and wine, while others collect the day’s discarded newspapers to build fires for the night and to soften the generous pavement. One of them approaches me as I light a cigarette. She doesn’t say a word. I offer her two cigarettes, she accepts them and tells me that God will pay me back. Her child asks her for one of them, but she stays silent and buries both cigarettes in her breasts. The noise of the traffic becomes louder at this time. People seem excited about leaving the walls of the office for the walls of their home. I can sense the dread in their eyes as they mindlessly run from one to the other, in the morning and at dusk. What great times these are to uncover the secrets of a human being. To