The Girl in the Photograph Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Selected Dalkey Archive Titles

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  When it first appeared in 1973, during some of the worst years of the brutal dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985, The Girl in the Photograph (As Meninas) was hailed by the critics and the general public alike. Written by one of Brazil’s most respected writers, Lygia Fagundes Telles, it went through eleven editions in Brazil and was translated into a number of languages. Among the many jewels of Brazilian literature, The Girl in the Photograph stands out for being that rarest of literary birds, a serious work of art that has also had immense popular appeal. The passage of time has done little to diminish the novel’s power and relevance, not just for contemporary Brazil but, as American readers will discover, for those living in the United States of 2012, for our entire American hemisphere, and for our globalized and inter-connected world culture in general.

  Not limited to Brazil, the problems the novel takes up—political fanaticism and oppression, the erosion of civil liberties under right-wing governments, the prevalence of torture in cultures that claim, piously, to be above such practices, and the devastating effects of drug abuse, poverty, and alienation—are as alive and as prevalent today as they were in the early 1970s. Perhaps more so, if we are to be honest with ourselves. The intellectual and artistic icons of the 1960s are all here, with references to Marx, Malraux, Mayakovsky Jimi Hendrix, Ché Guevara, Lacan, Barthes, and Sartre abounding, along with the occasional nod to French Structuralism, American interventionism and cultural imperialism, the socio-political significance of “bricolage,” racism, underdevelopment, pop culture, abortion, sexual politics, and Liberation Fronts. So while The Girl in the Photograph is, in some respects, a brilliant if disturbing period piece, a lacerating study of Brazilian society under the heel of a violent and ruthless dictatorship aided and abetted by the government of the United States of America, it is also a cautionary tale of universal significance, a parable about the need for human solidarity, responsible behavior, equality, and justice for all.

  As such, The Girl in the Photograph operates on two narrative planes. One, the dominant one, deals with the private lives of three young Brazilian women living together in a boarding house run by Catholic nuns, a residence which, replete with the appropriate tangle of religion and politics circa the late 1960s, can be taken as a metaphor for Brazil itself. The other, less obvious one (but, for the author, much more dangerous, given Brazil’s grim political situation at the time of the novel’s appearance), functions as a thinly-veiled protest against the crimes committed by the leaders of the dictatorship and the abuse of power they exhibited in doing so. By early April of 1964, after President Goulart had been deposed, the Brazilian Congress, thoroughly purged of its liberal faction by right-wing supporters of the CIA assisted coup d’état, elected Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco as the new President. Shortly afterwards, on April 9, 1964, it then rushed to pass the infamous (for Brazilians) First Institutional Act, which, among other things, declared that a state of siege existed in Brazil, expanded the powers of the President to near dictatorial levels, and suspended Brazilian civil rights for a ten year period. Vowing to “follow the international leadership of Washington,” Castelo Branco, a staunch advocate of the “linha dura,” or “hard line,” as this related to the stifling of liberal thought and political action, created a nightmarish Brazil, a Kafkaesque horror-chamber of violence and repression, one in which a “book-burning mentality predominated—not only figuratively but literally. In Rio Grande do Sul, the commander of the Third Army, General Alves Bastos, ordered burned all the books which he branded as subversive. His capricious list of dangerous literature contained, it is reported, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black” (Burns 510, 511). And yet, against the very real threats of political imprisonment, torture, and even murder, Brazilian young people, along with many artists, writers, and intellectuals fought back. Protest songs, taking the form of folk music (also popular, and for not entirely dissimilar reasons, in the United States of this same period), became a powerful form of resistance, one especially effective in a land where half the people were still illiterate (Burns 513). All in all, the 1960s and 1970s were a dangerous time to be, as Telles was, a liberal supporter of democracy and democratic process in Brazil.

  Although the action of her novel is set in the 1960s, not long after the dictatorship subverted the democratically elected but left-leaning government of João Goulart, its significance far outstrips its time and place. The novel’s unrelenting emphasis on the deeply intertwined inner lives of the three young women involved, and the degree to which their lives reflect the turbulent times in when they were coming of age, make The Girl in the Photograph, if anything, more powerful and affecting today than at the time of its publication. With the rise of Brazil in our Western hemisphere and on the contemporary world scene, it is clear that its own journey from liberal democracy to dictatorship and, now, its admirable effort to become a model democracy for the twenty-first century, can be taken as a sobering lesson about the absolute need for responsible, socially-conscious conduct, not only in one’s private life but in one’s public, or civic, life as well. Readers everywhere, but perhaps most especially those in the United States, should take heed of this lesson as they go about trying to save their own society and their own democracy in 2012. As a close and engaged reading of The Girl in the Photograph makes chillingly clear, the same issues, forces, and conflicts are very much in play.

  Each of the novel’s three women, Lorena, Ana Clara, and Lia—rendered far more complexly than they might otherwise be by the story’s interlocking interior monologues—embodies, though in a different way, both of these narratives planes. The result is a very complicated narrative web—one that offers, however, a panoramic view of 1960s Brazil, a nation caught up in the throes of change and one which is, in 1964, about to be consumed by the repressive and anti-democratic forces within it. Indeed, the reader interested in inter-American comparisons will find much to ponder here.

  The privileged scion of an old and wealthy São Paulo family, Lorena, who is determinedly virginal, also indulges in sexual fantasies concerning a tryst she burns to have with a married man, one Dr. Marcus Nemesio, whose initials, M. N., recur throughout the narrative, and whose perverse presence in Lorena’s feverish mind amounts to something very like an obsession.

  A child of poverty and despair, Ana Clara has quickly risen on the prevailing social and economic ladder, although for the most meretricious of reasons; born a great beauty in the favelas, or slums, she has, upon her discovery by the fashion industry, been transformed into a highly paid model, a young woman whose material fame and fortune cannot mask the despair that eats away at her. Although outwardly the epitome of what it means for many young women—in Brazil and elsewhere—to “make it” in a consumer society, she is vitiated by her drug addition and tormented by her enervating sense of emptiness. Desiring most of all to “wallow in pleasure” (151), she effectively allows herself, commodity-like, to be purchased by a wealthy fiancé, even as she ever more desperately carries on a pitiful, and ultimately ruinous, relationship with Max, another drug addict and a dealer as well. Dramatically illustrating as it does the utter waste of two young lives, the ill-starred relationship between Ana Clara and Max constitutes one of the novel’s most tragic elements.
And it requires no stretch of the imagination to read the pair of them, too, as symbols of Brazil under the dictatorship; as the people who, supposedly benefitting from the “economic miracle” that accompanied the early years of the regime—and that, according to the generals, justified its stringent measures—were, in reality, only suffering from it.

  Finally, there is Lia, the young revolutionary whose story differs from those of Lorena and Ana Clara in that it has a very distinct social and political dimension to it. The racially mixed daughter of an apostate Dutch Nazi who, having abandoned Nazism, fled to Brazil, Lia is a convincing and sympathetic character. She is also the key player in what more than one reader will regard as the novel’s funniest moment, mordant humor being a quality of Telles’s work that her many admirers do not fail to applaud. When the sexually liberated (but not, as in the case of Ana Clara, pathologically promiscuous) Lia encounters a pitiful and sexually uncertain young man, she is so bemused by his multiform innocence that, in a moment of carnal magnanimity, she decides to instruct him in the art of lovemaking—an art which, as the text makes clear, he is far from mastering. But because this key scene takes place in the very office where the resistance is being plotted, and because the specific identity of the young man in question is less important, arguably, than his gender, it reveals itself to be more politically charged than one might expect. An engagé, albeit somewhat naïve intellectual, the appealing Lia commands the reader’s attention for most of the novel.

  Her story also stands out because it was, without doubt, the one that would have been the most perilous for Telles to develop under the dictatorship. Although Lia is clearly a fictional character, her story ties in with one of the most dramatic events of this turbulent period, the 1969 kidnapping by urban guerrillas of the American Ambassador to Brazil, Charles Burke Elbrick. In Telles’s novel, Lia’s lover and co-revolutionary, Pedro, is released from prison as part of the negotiations by which, in real life, Ambassador Elbrick was freed, unhurt, by the guerrillas after the Brazilian government acceded to their demands. Also connecting the two narrative planes, as well as the three young women involved in them, are a series of recurring motifs, chief among which are Lia’s need to use her friend’s car for an act of political protest, Ana Clara’s anguished desire to scratch out the pain she feels inside her head, and, for Lorena, the telephone call that never comes from the rich and connected married man, whom she believes, in her feverish fantasy world, would be her ideal lover.

  What is perhaps most intriguing in the novel is the extent to which the author uses women as the barometer of Brazil’s social, political, and psychological health in the second half of the twentieth-century. In a way that, though focused on Brazil, is also directly applicable to our globalized and interconnected world culture of 2012, The Girl in the Photograph emphatically suggests that no society will ever be truly healthy and strong until its women are. This point—more radical, perhaps, in 1973, when Simone de Beauvoir (whose name also turns up in the text) and others were involved in the early Women’s Liberation Movement, than in 2012, when more women than ever enjoy the rights and responsibilities so long denied them—turns up time and again in The Girl in the Photograph, and in many different forms. Even the outwardly comic scene in which Lia seeks to sexually “liberate” a young man, whose obnoxious post-coital prattle suggests that he is still an unenlightened prisoner of machismo, offers the attentive reader a more serious political message: namely, that in sex, as in so many other things (the planning of a more democratic society, for example), men need, and desire, the instruction of women. As Lia puts it, “Women are finding their way. The men will come along in good time” (112).

  At the same time, however, the reader of 2012 will likely note something else about the women of Telles’s novel; they are all dependent on, and even subordinate to, the men in their lives. This is obviously (and satirically so) true of Lorena, whose monomaniacal preoccupation with a married man who has little or no interest in her borders on the absurd; but it is also true, in more sinister fashion, of Ana Clara, whose dependence on drugs is equaled only by her dependence on Max, her junkie lover. Sadly, the reader watches as Ana Clara’s twin addictions, to drugs and to Max, lead inexorably to her destruction. If Ana Clara’s is the most poignant of the three stories, Lia’s offers the clearest possibility of something different, a new, more progressive kind of liberation. Yet even here, Lia, portrayed throughout as a kind of Brazilian Rosa Luxemburg and otherwise so in command of her own body and mind, cannot, seemingly, escape being at least emotionally subservient to Pedro, her political prisoner lover. Upon his release from prison, moreover, Pedro decamps, alone, for Algeria, where he will renew his revolutionary activities. Once again separated from her lover, and by the same brand of male dominated politics that had segregated them in the first place, Lia will do anything, submit to any humiliation, in order to join him. Lesbianism also emerges in Telles’s text, first in a comic mode, as Lorena’s fretful mother worries that, if her daughter cannot soon find a man, she may end up preferring women as love objects, but also as a serious topic of discussion, one relating to the important questions of freedom, women’s solidarity and female eroticism. And, not surprisingly, some of Telles’s female characters suffer from what we might, today, term body image issues.

  An attorney, a venerated writer, and a long-time commentator on issues germane to Brazilian and world culture, Telles asks us here to consider the true nature of “liberation”—its political contexts, yes, but its emotional and intellectual ones as well. More presciently, she also asks us to eschew relationships in which one person is subservient to another person, to a particular ideology, or to a single system of thought. True liberation, Telles suggests, is much more complex and far-reaching than commonly thought, and, running the gamut from the workplace to the bedroom and from the kitchen to the political arena, she takes pains to show that it must be germane for women and men alike. For real social and political progress to occur, in Brazil or anywhere else, women must liberate themselves from their status as chattel and as second class citizens while men must, in turn, liberate themselves from the silly, outdated ideas and ways of thinking that have convinced them they are somehow innately superior beings. To move forward, Telles’s reader comes to feel, men and women will have to learn to work together for their common good, though the attaining of this admirable goal will require that both genders make drastic changes in the ways they see themselves and each other.

  There are, in fact, very few male characters in the novel, and those who do play a role are feckless and destructive in the extreme. Max, Ana Clara’s drug-addled lover, epitomizes this tendency. Other men populate the storyline but do so primarily as vague presences, imaginings or impressions held by the women, figments of their hopes, dreams, and desires. The character known as M. N. (Marcus Nemesius) is the prototype of this approach to male characterization for Telles, though most of the novel’s other male presences, like Ana Clara’s ultra-wealthy but nameless betrothed, or Lia’s fellow revolutionary and paramour, Pedro, are of this same type. The case of M. N. stands out, however, because of his real name, which evokes the idea of nemesis, and because he is, as becomes clear from his disregard for Lorena, who wastes her time pining away for him, in all respects antithetical to her best interests. The “love” she wants, or needs, to believe she feels for him is imprisoning without being in the least liberating, exhilarating, or fulfilling. One suspects that something similar could be said of Lia’s commitment to, or infatuation with, Pedro. Like the broad spectrum of women (and men) she represents, Lorena is a prisoner not merely of the idea of “love,” but to a particularly fatuous, materialistic, and superficial kind of love: a “love” not based on true comradeship and solidarity but produced and sustained by a self-serving web of political and cultural lies, a weakness for self-deception, and by a mind-numbing flood of market-generated fantasies. In Telles’s characterization of Lorena, in some ways the novel’s most important character (given what her
story symbolizes and the class she represents), the reader sees how a callow young woman of means can grow from an unthinking and self-centered obsession with shallow notions about “love” that are both debilitating and enslaving to an awareness of others and a commitment to strength and courage that are both healthy and socially valuable.

  At the end of the novel, when Ana Clara has returned to the boardinghouse, fatally battered, beaten, and abused after having attended a “party” at the country estate of her wealthy but (one feels) morally and ethically bankrupt “owner,” it is Lorena who, growing up quickly, takes charge and makes the hard decisions that will begin to set things right again. While in a strict sense, her conduct, too, at the end, can be read as grotesquely comic, in another way it can be seen as something much more serious and fraught with political import, a moment of personal realization when a hitherto unconcerned and oblivious female character/citizen realizes that things are unacceptably bad and that something has to be done. By shucking off her earlier status as an unthinking child of privilege and her silly infatuations with the kind of “forbidden” love epitomized by her obsession with M. N., and by showing, in a moment of crisis, the kind of courage, character, and leadership that she (and Brazil) needs, Lorena emerges, at novel’s end, as a symbol of Brazil’s future, its social and political restoration as a democratic republic. Indeed, her status at the end as a female harbinger of a better Brazil seems amplified by the fact that her two brothers, aptly named Romulo and Remo, end up behaving more like Cain and Abel and less like the founders of Rome. For students of Brazilian literature, Lorena’s emergence at the conclusion of The Girl in the Photograph as a powerful, new force for change will recall the similar emergence of the impoverished sertaneja, Vitória, at the conclusion of her novel, Graciliano Ramos’s canonical Vidas Secas (1938; Barren Lives, 1965). If Ana Clara represents the damage done a society by acquiescence to the seductive charms of substance abuse, mindless consumerism, and the ignoring of political tyranny, and if Lia, another admirablydrawn character, represents the need for active civic engagement and responsibility, then Lorena can be said to represent the need for Brazil’s middle and upper classes to step up for justice and democracy as well.