The Powerful Pinch
My brother woke up around 5am to thundering bangs shaking the walls and echoing throughout the house, followed by angry shouts. I woke up about four hours later in the room next to his, completely unaware of any commotion. In that blissful bridge between dream and reality, I sat up and checked my phone. The first thing I saw was a message from my brother:
“Entao mano.. acordei cedo pra ir trabalhar e escutei gritos vindo de baixo. Aparentemente o Adrien bateu na porta do Cesar pra pedir pra ele parar de fazer barulho. O Celso ficou puto com o Adrien por isso e encheu ele de porrada. O Adrien apareceu sangrando no meu quarto pra pedir remedio de wounds, eu ja tava saindo pro trabalho. Tipo, o Celso e perigoso, a gente precisa mudar rapido dai, serio msm.”
(“So man… I woke up early to go to work and heard screams coming from downstairs. Apparently, Adrien knocked on Cesar's door to ask him to stop making noise. Celso got angry with Adrien for that and beat the crap out of him. Adrien showed up bleeding in my room to ask for bandages, I was already leaving for work. Like, Celso is dangerous, we need to move out from there, seriously.”)
I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t still dreaming. Then I replied with a “Holy fuck.” I couldn’t understand why our landlord (Celso) would beat up one of our roommates (Adrien) because he asked another roommate (Cesar) to be quiet in the middle of the night. But our landlord is an alpha-male, beer-bellied bigot with anger issues, so I didn’t find it hard to believe. I had heard him losing his shit before, and know that the barrier between anger and aggression is only waist-high. Besides, since Adrien is not what Celso might consider an alpha male (as a scrawny man who likes to cook and doesn’t prioritize sex over everything else), I thought it likely that our landlord (who once made fun of my brother for having a Funko Pop collection, saying that in his time he had girls’ panties hanging on his walls, not toys) would discriminate against him.
At least that's what went through my head as I went through my morning routine: taking a shit while scrolling through Instagram and eating oatmeal with chocolate protein shake while watching YouTube.
At 11:50 am, my mom called, and I told her the whole story. Her first response was incredulity. “No, Celso wouldn’t do that.” My parents are friends with him and have known him for years. They would rather believe my brother was exaggerating than that our landlord was a maniac who assaulted his tenants. Still, her disbelief did little to comfort me.
As I ate lunch in a hurry so I wouldn’t be late for my ethics class at Concordia, which started at 1:15 pm, I looked over my shoulder and kept my ears up like a gazelle in the wild, afraid my landlord would jump out of nowhere and beat me to a protein-shake oatmeal. Every footstep activated my fight or flight response—though I knew “flight” was the most likely. Luckily, I got to leave home intact.
On the Metro ride to campus, all I could think about was my brother’s words: “Celso is dangerous, we need to move out.” In class, as we had a wrap-up discussion about what we learned in the course, all I could see in my mind was Adrien bleeding on my brother's doorstep, framed by the light coming through the doorway, shaken by the attack, terrified at the prospect of living in that house. The more I thought about it, the more I hated Celso. How could he do that to his own tenant? Why would he protect the guy making noises in the middle of the night? And why the hell was he there so early, given that he lives on the other side of Montreal? These questions and that image consumed me while my classmates discussed the need to embrace our subjectivity and stay with the trouble.
But I didn’t want to stay with the trouble. I wanted to get the hell out of there before I was next.
At 1:05 pm, shortly before class, I texted my brother asking him to meet me after work so we could go to Café Zezin and enjoy the good side of Brazil (food) and forget the bad side (toxic dudes like our landlord). At 3:30 pm, after my class ended and my brother left work, I waited at one end of the Peel station until he emerged from the crowd of bored passengers-to-be. That was when he told me the details.
Along with the bangs on the wall, my brother heard the landlord shouting bichinha (a homophobic slur) over and over again. Another one of our roommates (Mr. Pin) stepped out of his room while rubbing the sandman’s crust from his half-closed eyes, his gray beard flattened on one side, then went downstairs to check the commotion. When he returned, he told my brother Celso had beaten up Adrien and walked back into his room, washing his hands of the whole thing. Flabbergasted, my brother went into his room and closed the door. Not long after, he heard a knock.
Adrien was standing in the hallway in his underwear, one hand on his bruised head and the other on the side of his belly, which was bleeding from a loose flap of skin. After asking for some bandages, my brother asked him what had happened and whether he was okay.
“He pinched me,” Adrien said with a French accent.
They had a brief debate about whether or not to call the police, then Adrien disappeared into the kitchen in search of something to clean himself with, and my brother went back into his room to finish getting ready for work, still unsure whether this was all just a vivid dream.
As my brother told me this story, I stared at the Metro tracks and saw our landlord holding Adrien in a chokehold from behind while pinching the side of his belly, twisting the skin until it ripped. I imagined Adrien screaming, begging for mercy, while Celso called him a bichinha over and over again. Thinking about the strength needed to break the skin with a pinch made me shudder.
Then we spent the whole ride through the green, orange, and blue lines complaining about our landlord and sharing our bewilderment. As the doors opened and people streamed in and out of the Metro, all we could do was agree on how fucked up the whole situation was in our landlord-hating echo chamber. We planned to move out as soon as possible.
All the while, the deadly pinch haunted me. I could feel the pain, the horror, the desperation.
As I bit into a pastel at Café Zezin, pulling the melted cheese with my teeth until it snapped, I couldn’t help but wonder whether that was what Adrien’s skin looked like during the savage pinch—stretching to the breaking point. That cheesy deliciousness and the guaraná’s sweet delight did little to drive away the cruel pinch from my mind. That was all my brother and I could talk about. We shared our indignation, frustration, and trepidation.
On the way back to our place, as we walked through the half-empty parking lot between a Metro (the grocery store) and a Dollarama, my brother and I discussed what to do if push came to pinch.
“We need to have each other’s backs,” my brother said. “If Celso comes at one of us, the other needs to help. We can beat him if it’s two to one.”
“He has no reason to attack us, though,” I said, hoping I was right.
“You never know. We might do something to bother him without realizing it. We have to be prepared. We know what he’s capable of now.”
We also planned to ignore Celso from now on, but without antagonizing him. We wanted nothing to do with a bully, but we also didn’t want to give him a reason to bully us.
Those last few steps under a brisk, cloudy sky towards the big bald Brazilian’s house spawned sweat under my arms, tracing a cold line down to my waist. There was no way to know whether he’d be there, but the possibility was terrifying. I began to question the feasibility of ignoring someone without antagonizing them as my feet carried me closer to the crime scene. What if he talked to us? Wouldn’t he be angry if we didn’t reply? And if anger overtook him again, wouldn’t he charge at us with his index finger and thumb poised like pliers? A sucker punch scared me half as much as the skin-tearing pinch.
As we went through the back and up the spiral steps of the fire exit to the second floor, I could feel my heart beating. I was torn between moral integrity and physical preservation. Being friendly with someone who had recently done something so cruel, so utterly evil, felt like a sin, but having my skin wrenched out of my body by a wrathful pinch would feel so much worse. I could live with a heavy conscience, but a pinch like that would traumatize me forever.
“If anything happens,” my brother said halfway up the stairs, “we stand together.”
Reaching the balcony, I immediately saw Celso’s bald head through the window in the back door. He was standing in the hallway, still unaware of our presence. My brother and I exchanged a look. I assume the same thought went through both of our minds: Is it too late? Should we go back, wait for him to leave?
But no, we couldn’t run forever. Sooner or later, we would have to face him. I had to make a choice then and there: Would I implicate myself in this act of brutality by pretending nothing happened, or would I risk falling prey to a ferocious pinch?
I took a deep breath and opened the door leading into the kitchen, determined to ignore my landlord if he greeted us, and ready to run into my room and lock the door shortly after. Then I saw, at the end of the hallway, only a few meters away from Celso, Adrien. He was moving things back and forth, seeming completely unconcerned about his assailant’s proximity.
My brother and I exchanged a bewildered look before hurrying into our rooms. I sat on my bed as my mind went over the plausible explanations, but nothing made sense. Had Celso apologized and Adrien forgiven him? That seemed too soon and too unlikely. If someone pinched my skin off, I would carry that hate to the crematory. Maybe Celso had kicked him out and was watching to make sure he left. Maybe the tension had stretched so long that, by the time we walked in, it was no longer visible on Adrien’s face. But that also seemed unlikely. No matter how much it stretched, I imagine that tension would never really snap off—unlike Adrien’s skin.
Then there was a knock on my door, and my brother walked in with a smile on his face. As he looked at me, his brown eyes expressed amusement and a hint of guilt.
“So…” he said, “I was wrong.”
After calling Mr. Pin aside and asking him why the hell Celso and Adrien were standing next to each other, considering what had happened between them, my brother learned what had truly happened.
I still don’t know who’s to blame. In the drowsiness of early morning and the shock of sudden shouts and bangs, either Mr. Pin said the wrong name or my brother misheard him. Either way, Cesar became Celso, completely changing the culprit in my brother’s mind. Also, either due to Adrien’s broken English or, again, my brother’s disoriented state of mind, the word “bit” turned to “pinched.” The oddness of the fight move did not improve, but at least the mental image was much less distressing.
After talking to Celso and Adrien, the rest of the pieces fell into place.
The second time Adrien knocked on the door to ask Cesar to stop yelling, saying he wanted to sleep, Cesar was possessed by anger and attacked Adrien. The two fought in the hallway, pushing and punching each other, hitting the walls and waking the whole house—except me. At some point, Adrien wrapped his arm around Cesar’s neck and pulled his head down near his waist. That was when Cesar went full zombie and sank his teeth into the side of Adrien’s belly. The fight ended soon after. Then Adrien went upstairs to ask my brother for help.
Celso was nowhere near the house at that point. He arrived much later, only after hearing about the fight. He then kicked Cesar out, giving him a few days to find another place, while Celso moved Adrien upstairs and slept on the living room couch near his door. Not wanting to involve the police, he stood guard for a few days to keep the peace and prevent further cannibalistic incidents.
As I heard this, I wanted to strangle my brother, perhaps pinch him until skin and flesh came off in my fingers. But all I did was laugh. We laughed for a long time.
In my relief, I failed to realize that we were still living under the roof of a bigot with anger issues, or that I had been so pathetically gullible as to allow my reality to be shaped by one perspective, or that the true attacker would still live in the same house for a few days. Nothing had changed, not really. Still, I allowed myself to laugh, because the alternative was to confront a reality that couldn’t be altered by a silly misunderstanding. I had no choice but to stay with the trouble.
Alex Affonso is a Brazilian-Canadian writer with an MA in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University. His work appears in Greebo, LBRNTH, yolk, Fathom, The Dalhousie Gazette, and more. During his two years at Concordia, Alex was the creative nonfiction editor for issue #24 of Headlight and the managing editor for issue #25. Now, he's surviving as a grade 12 teacher at Kells Academy.
