THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 67
it was something much more complex.
If he looked straight on, he forgot the
profile. If he looked at the profile, he
forgot the face. Too many levels. What
I think is that, besides the lighting and
the research, nothing’s more important
than time. Nothing.”
As Klaus spoke, I listened to a man
who was singing and playing a Casio
keyboard. One of the songs was about
an emergenza d ’amore. “And I will carry
you/In my pockets wherever I go/Like
a coin, an amulet/That I will cradle in
my hands.” I sat there listening, my eyes
red from the wine. The room seemed
to ripple, with its twinkly lights and
photos of actors and actresses (Mar-
cello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren) and
colorful ribbons dangling from the ceil-
ing. When the song ended and lifeless
applause sprang sporadically from
around the room, Klaus said that he
was leaving. That was how he said it:
“I’m leaving.” I didn’t understand what
he meant. Leaving to go where? He
was drunk. He apologized to me. He
tried to look me in the eye. “Will you
forgive me, Nadia? I can’t stay. I hope
you understand. I can’t stay any longer.”
Even today I can’t explain it. Good-
byes are like that, quick, and we never
know when they’ll actually happen.
T
hat night I left the restaurant and
walked to the Brigadeiro metro
stop. It was cold, and the city looked
like a giant space station, a forgotten
corner in the vastness of the heavens.
I remember, when I got to the sta-
tion, taking a while to find my metro
card in my bag. Then I put my head-
phones on. I went down the escalator.
It was late; there was hardly anybody
on the platform. Sitting on a bench was
a dirty homeless man. He moaned; the
corners of his mouth stretched to show
his teeth. The man was hunched over,
trying to keep himself warm. He looked
at the ground and rocked gently back
and forth. I opened my backpack and
pulled out an old sweatshirt. I placed it
on his lap, feeling a little ridiculous.
Soon my train arrived. That night,
I stayed up writing almost until morn-
ing. Once again, the story began with
Nadia waving from the single lighted
window, at the top of a low-rise build-
ing. But I changed just about every-
thing else. Instead of Moscow or a sea-
side town, the story was now set in the
city of São Paulo, in a sufficiently dis-
tant future. There were no more secret
letters. Nadia and Sasha were older, too.
Sasha stood waiting in the building’s
courtyard. He was just dropping by to
visit Nadia. They were friends who hadn’t
seen each other for a long time, or maybe
they had once been a couple. She said
that she liked living on the top floor, in
the highest apartment. The building used
to be taller, she said. Many years ago,
during the siege, a bomb took off the top.
A Chinese tailor lived on the ground
floor and took refuge there—he couldn’t
leave. Today, the tailor’s family owned the
building and rented out the apartments;
the price was low and the street secluded.
Sasha and Nadia walked down the
block to a sort of bar with a big win-
dow, on the top floor of another build-
ing. At first it appeared to be a residen-
tial building; there was no sign, and no
noise could be heard from the street. In
the dark, they climbed the stairs, turned
in to a corridor. A door opened. They
entered a smoky room with a bar and
people drinking and talking so quietly
that you couldn’t tell whether they were
real people or just projected images. The
window looked out on an overpass anda compact cluster of buildings and lights.
There was a red ball in the sky. Nadia
told Sasha about a trip she’d taken many
years ago, when she was still a child, to
the house of some friends of her par-
ents. It was the first time she’d ever left
the walled side of the city. Everything
was new. When she arrived, she was
given gifts: a doll, a seashell, a music
box. She’d never seen anything like it.
Later, she would tell Sasha the same
story again. I don’t think she realized
that she was telling the same story. Peo-
ple always tell the same stories, even
when they try to tell new stories. Sto-
ries are laid out in front of us, like ob-
jects, and over time we realize that
they’re all made of the same material,
a solid mass of stone and metal.
Nadia told the same story at dawn,
as she and Sasha tried to cross a wide
avenue. For a moment, she seemed to
catch a glimpse of herself from the out-
side, like an image beside Sasha. They
continued down the avenue, which grew
wider and wider and impossible to cross.
(Translated, from the Portuguese,
by Zoë Perry.)NEWYORKER.COM
Emilio Fraia on stories within stories.“Well, some of us were synchronized.”