Read Online If I Close My Eyes Now by Edney Silvestre - Free Book Online

granddad was like that.’
    ‘The one you used to call Nonno ?’
    ‘No, Nonno was the Italian, my father’s father. The crazy one was Portuguese, my mother’s father. He ran away from home, vanished for days on end, went on benders, sang in the street. My mother was ashamed of him.’
    One of the customers staggered out of the bar. Shortly afterwards, so did the other one. The white-haired old man stayed at the counter. He was drinking a clear liquid that the bar owner served him in a small glass. Paulo thought it must be cachaça , white rum.
    ‘Did the crazy grandfather visit your house a lot?’
    ‘The Portuguese? He lived with us in São Paulo. When my father was transferred to the interior, my mother sent him to her sister’s house in Rio. He died there. I can’t recall exactly what of. I can’t remember his name either. I think it was Vicente, but I always called him Granddad. He took me to the district once.’
    ‘The red-light district?’
    ‘Yes. My mother was furious when she found out.’
    ‘Were they naked?’
    ‘The whores? I don’t remember. I was still a kid.’
    ‘You don’t remember whether the women were naked or not?’
    ‘No, I don’t think they were.’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Paulo with a sigh. ‘They can’t have been. If you’d seen a naked woman, you wouldn’t have forgotten it.’
    The bar owner began closing the long wooden shutters. The old man came out. The boys got ready to follow him, but he simply walked over to one of the benches and sat down. He took a small notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. He read through a few pages, then wrote something down. He put the notebook away, and from another pocket took out a rolled-up cigarette and a box of matches. He lit it, inhaled deeply, blew out the smoke, drew on it again.
    Paulo yawned. He felt very sleepy.

    The tip of the pen closed the semicircle of the last letter, a consonant, descended slightly to the left, underlined part of the surname. Lifted from the paper, it crossed the letter ‘t’. Moving to the end of the signature, the pen made two dots on the right, one above the other. Finished.
    ‘The reason for you being absent from school, signed by your father,’ said Eduardo, holding out the school notebook to his friend. ‘You can go to class again tomorrow with no worries.’
    Paulo examined the text and the signature. Perfect.
    ‘It’s exactly the same. It’s no different to the one above.’
    Eduardo smiled.
    ‘I did the one above as well.’
    He might be hopeless at football, skinny, clumsy, ugly, a weirdo, a swot – the boys who always chased after him in every new town his father was transferred to could say what they liked about him, but none of them could forge anyone’s handwriting and signature as well as he could.
    It was a skill he had acquired on boring, lonely afternoons, copying his mother’s florid signature, then the small dots above and below his father’s writing, and later the circles and slants he discovered on the envelopes of the letters his relatives wrote. It was a slow, unintentional process that had no real goal or time limit. He only realized how good he was at it when he’d forged the notary public’s signature on his own birth certificate, flourish for flourish, when he presented it in order to enrol at school in the previous town.
    His talent, kept secret from everyone apart from his one real friend, had yet again proved useful. It made no sense for them to be cooped up in school on such a fine morning, listening to each teacher’s blah-blah, one lesson after another. They both understood this the moment they met outside the school gate. They simply looked at each other, and didn’t even bother to get off their bikes. They headed straight for the lake. Time enough the next day to present the reasons for their absence, with their parents’ signatures.
    Eduardo stretched his arms. He was tired. Another late night, thanks to the old man. The worst of it was they hadn’tachieved