The Girl in the Photograph Read online

  “Green.”

  I take the pale green one, which is third down in the pile, from the box. So delicate, the handkerchiefs Remo sent from Istanbul, farewell, my little hanky. Lião is capable of cleaning her big old shoes with you but think about the “if” for hankies: dust is just as noble as tears. It won’t be moon dust, so white and fine, earth dust is heavy, especially that on my friend’s shoes. But never mind, BE A HANDKERCHIEF. I drop it into space. It opens lightly like a parachute which Lião grabs impatiently.

  “Are you depressed, Lião? Existential anguish?”

  “Exactly. Existential.”

  Oh Lord, she’s furious with me. She’s changed so much, poor thing. Meaning Miguel is still in prison? And that Japanese guy. And Gigi. And others, they’re all going, what madness. Suppose she’s next? Ana Clara did see somebody suspicious looking hanging around the gate; Aninha lies all the time, of course, but that could be true. Yes, Our Lady of Fatima Roominghouse, a name above investigation. But whenever nuns or priests come onto the horizon, everyone’s ears perk up.

  “I’ll give it back tomorrow,” she says, folding the handkerchief.

  “Not at all, keep it. Would you like another one?”

  I throw her the pink handkerchief which doesn’t open as the green one did. Why does my heart stay closed too? Romulo in Mama’s arms, I looked for a handkerchief and couldn’t find one, a handkerchief to wipe up all that blood bubbling out. Bubbling out. “But what happened, Lorena!” A game, Mama, they were playing and then Remo went to get the shotgun, Run or I’ll shoot, he said taking aim. All right, I don’t want to think about this now, now I want sunshine. I sit in the window frame and stretch my legs toward the sun.

  “I get red, and I want to get tan, look at me, Fabrízio told me my nickname in the Department is Fainting Magnolia, can you imagine?”

  “And the old guy? Nothing yet?”

  I count to ten before answering, grrrrr! Why does she call M.N. old? First of all, he is not old. Second, she knows I’m the complicated type, with me things just can’t be resolved so fast. Third—what was the third thing? I am making an effort to seem unshakable.

  “He said he’d call me for dinner. Want to come?”

  “What I need is a western movie.”

  Imagine, the movies. A danger zone, there are thousands of danger zones where his wife or his cousin … I think the best place for us to meet is in the hospital because if the world is big, that hospital is even bigger. Is Dr. Marcus Nemesius in? I ask and the head nurse speaks to the subordinate nurse who speaks to the subordinate subordinate, who in turn speaks to another one far on down the line, the one who escaped the current, her shoes white, her memory white. “By any chance are you the one who’s waiting to see Dr. Melloni?” she comes and asks after two and a half hours. No, not that doctor. By any chance I’m waiting for Dr. Marcus Nemesius, is he in? “He just left,” she answers. “Won’t another doctor do?”

  “If he doesn’t phone, let’s go together, Lião. I’ve got yenom enough for caviar.”

  “Russian?”

  “No, from Iran, dear. The best caviar in the world. My brother Remo sent a can.”

  “I’m moved. But I’ll grab something on the corner.”

  Here there’s the soup, the de-sexed meat the nuns fix, but still it’s better than the things she eats in the street. And she doesn’t even take baths any more, poor thing. Before, she would fill up my bathtub and soak so happily; one day she even asked for the bath salts.

  “You’ve changed, Lião.”

  “For the worse?” she asks, unfolding the handkerchief and blowing her nose.

  Like an open drainpipe. Animals are so much more decent about these things; I never saw Astronaut blow his nose in public. Too many holes, too many secretions. Oh Lord. Eating pastries at the café, what madness. But if she came with us, she’d end up poisoning our time together, she adores saying ironic things that M.N. pretends not to understand, so solid. So safe. “More wine, Lião?” The wine she accepts. Also the lobster, she pronounces it loster. But she pointedly remembers the statistics about the children dying of hunger in the Northeast, she gets carried away on this subject of the Northeast. I don’t know how long we’ll have to carry these people on our backs; it’s horrible to think that way but, as I’ve thought before and still think, if God isn’t there He probably has His reasons.

  “Oh, I’m a monster. Monster. I want so much to be different, so much.”

  And this tendency to be petty. Oh my Saint Francis, my Saint Theresa, son tan escuras de entender estas cosas interiores.

  “I’ll give it back tomorrow,” says Lião putting the handkerchief away in her bag.

  She won’t, of course. And if she did I wouldn’t take it, a handkerchief is like a toothbrush, you can’t lend them. Exactly like Ana Clara who still hasn’t learned this simplest of things: One doesn’t lend personal items.

  “Lia, Lia!” calls Sister Bula from the window of the big house. The voice of a forest gnome coming out from inside a tree trunk. She wants to yell “Telephone for you!” She places one hand beside her ear and pretends to crank the handle; the phones in her day had to be wound up. Or was she born even earlier? She must be two hundred years old.

  Lião is afraid. Ana Clara also pretends to be indifferent but if she doesn’t take tranquilizers she starts walking around in a delirium again. Without the slightest ceremony she opened my box of tissues and took over half of them, she goes around with great piles of tissues to clean herself after making love. The right thing would be to take a bath afterwards; it’s logical, hygienic and poetic to run naked to the shower. Or in the country to duck under a waterfall, shuaaaaaaaaaa! But to put yourself back together like a hurried chambermaid—! Certain gestures and words of Ana Clara’s, poor thing. The details give her away. It’s all in the details: her origins, her faith, her happiness. God. Especially her origins. “I know nothing about mine,” she said to me once when she was drunk. “And I don’t want to, either.” That daisy down there could say the same thing: I know nothing about my roots. And her? Neither father nor mother. Not even a cousin. She has no one. From the looks of it, all of Bahia must be related to Lião but Ana Clara is the opposite in terms of family. Not even an auntie to teach her that everything one does before and after the act of love should be harmonious. Is it unaesthetic to masturbate? Not exactly unaesthetic, but sad. During the time when Lião was doing thousands of surveys, she did one on the university coeds; how many masturbated? Incredible, the results among the virgins. Incredible. “We are coming out of the Middle Ages,” she said examining her papers. “The inheritance from our mothers and grandmothers, see. Added up with the adolescent habits, it gives us this alarming percentage. Do you masturbate too?” she asked, pinning the black eye of the Inquisition on me.

  Two blond bees, the kind that only make love and honey, landed on my foot, first one and then the other. I shoo them gently away, the gesture must be gentle so they don’t feel rejected, you hear, M.N.? If you don’t want me, you should treat me like this, run along, my little bee! run along. Before flying off, the larger of the two rubs his two front legs together, as if he were washing his hands, and then strokes himself all the way down to his yellow-striped abdomen. You can’t see exactly where his hand stops, but what if Lião were to research the habits of bees, Tu quoque, bestiola? Bestiola means insect. And bees? Anyway she asked me and if I didn’t answer with absolute clarity it was because I could never exactly describe that afternoon so long ago. Masturbation? That? Thirteen years old, piano lessons. The Happy Farmer. I participated so fully in the happiness that the bench wobbled back and forth, the rhythm getting faster and faster. My chest bursting, my genitalia rubbing against the cushion with the same vehemence as my hands hammering the keyboard without hesitation, without error. I never played as well as I did that afternoon, something which seems completely extraordinary to me today. I dismounted the bench as one would a horse. At dinnertime, Mama kissed me, quite moved: “I heard you pr
acticing the piano while I was stirring the guava jam; you played divinely!” I smiled down at my plate: my first secret. Romulo threw a ball of soft bread at me and Remo put a wasp in my hair, but when we went out on the veranda I felt as luminous as a star. And if Romulo hadn’t frightened me with a sheet, I could have walked on air for over two minutes. The second time was on the farm, too, when I was taking a bath. Also accidental. I got into the empty bathtub, lay down in the bottom and opened the faucet. The hot jet pelted onto my chest with such violence that I slipped, exposing my belly. From there, the water passed to my abdomen; when I opened my legs and it hit me right on, I felt, stunned, the old artistic exaltation, stronger this time although I wasn’t playing a piano. I closed my eyes when Felipe crossed and recrossed my body with his red motorcycle, Felipe, the one with the black jacket and motorcycle. I hid my face in my hands, wanting to run away and at the same time glued to the bottom of the bathtub with the hot water rising higher, it was already covering me, the bubbles breaking on my chin, why didn’t I open the drain? Satiated or unsatiated, my mouth (I?) asked for more. It penetrated me in waterfalls, it filled my nose, there, I’m going to drown! I thought with a jump. I leaped up and fled. Was it love? Was it death? All one single thing, I replied in a verse. I used to write verses then.

  Cat came up to the bag that Lia had left in the middle of the driveway. She sniffed the leather, distrustful, sat down somewhat sideways, because of her pregnancy, and stared at Lorena who was perched on the bedroom windowsill. This room and bath—Lorena was certain of this—had belonged to the chauffeur of the family who had owned the big house. Underneath, the garage with a car which was probably antiquated. Above, absolute master, the untidy and sensual chauffeur, lover of the housemaid whose name was Neusa, a name spelled out many times with a shaving brush or white deodorant stick on the bluetinted wall. Of her, there remained only a few hairpins pointing out from between the cracks in the floor. And the jasmine perfume in a broken bottle on the bathroom floor. “With a few small repairs, your daughter could be very comfortable here,” said Sister Priscilla with an optimism that spread to Lorena, who was hanging onto her mother’s arm. Her mother, in turn, was hanging onto Mieux’s. She turned to him with a perplexed face, at that time she used to consult him even to find out if she should take an aspirin or not. “Give me your opinion, dear. Won’t I spend too much? This is awful,” she complained, repulsed by the scent of jasmine mingled with that of urine. Mieux winked at Lorena. He became euphoric when he had an opportunity to show off his prestige: “It will be the most darling thing in the world, I already have some ideas. I want this bathroom pink, it’s important for her to feel as though she’s in a nest when she undresses for her bath,” he said throwing his cigarette butt into the cracked toilet bowl. He slammed the door behind him and sniffed his handkerchief. “I visualize this room in pale yellow; I have the wallpaper. A gold bed there in that corner. The bookshelf and table on that wall. Here in this space, a builtin wardrobe. Over there, a mini-refrigerator and a little bar, hm, Lorena?” He picked a playing card up off the floor; it was a queen of spades, which he stuck upright in a crack in the door. And as Mama had gone on ahead and Sister Priscilla was busy closing the window, he seized the opportunity to run his hand over my ass.

  “Anything happen?” I ask Lião who has come back at a run.

  Panting, she kicked a wad of newspaper which Cat tore up.

  “Is the offer of tea still on? I’ll take you up on it after all. One more phone call like that one and I’ll go completely insane.”

  I quickly remove my pajamas and put on my black ballet leotard. I hear Lião coming up the stairs, step by step. When she’s happy she comes up them in three jumps, poor thing, flunking all her classes because she cut so many. Her lover in prison, her allowance gone, she gives over half of it to her famous group. Oh Lord.

  “Can I turn that down?” she asks, going straight in the direction of the record player.

  She turned it down so far that Jimi Hendrix’s voice sounds like that of a little ant under the table. I light the electric ring, do two more exercises to develop the bustline, and spread the cloth on the table. The cups, the plates. I bring my little bread basket with its red ribbon woven into the straw, going all the way around until the ends meet in a bow. I pause to admire the graceful pattern of the tablecloth with its big leaves in a hot green tone, through which, half-hidden, peers the Asiatic eye of an occasional orange. The pleasure I take in this simple ritual of preparing tea is almost as intense as that I take in hearing music. Or reading poetry. Or taking a bath. Or or or. There are so many tiny things that give me pleasure that I’ll die of pleasure when I get to the bigger thing. Is it really bigger, M.N.?

  “I’ll kill myself if he doesn’t call,” I say opening my arms and going on tiptoe to the refrigerator. “I have some marvelous grapes and apples, dear.”

  Lia sits down on the rug and begins to chew on a biscuit. She is as somber as a shipwrecked mariner eating the last biscuit on the island. She brushes the crumbs which have fallen into the pleats in her skirt, but why this skirt today? In spite of her exorbitant Bahian behind. I think she looks better in jeans.

  “Problems, Lena, problems. Oh forget it—” she says, trying to placate her kinky hair with her hands. “Don’t forget to ask, you hear?”

  I throw her an apple.

  “I put a new tablecloth on the table in your honor, isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Say it’s you who’s going to use it, understand.”

  “What?”

  “The car, Lena, stop dreaming, pay attention, you’re going to ask Mama for her car!”

  I lie on my back and start pedaling. I can pedal up to two hundred times.

  “This is an excellent exercise to fill out your legs, incredible how skinny my legs are. You’d have to pedal backwards to make yours smaller,” I say and hold back my laughter.

  She bites into the apple with such fury that I feel my knee reflex jump.

  “After dinner, Lorena. Don’t forget, after dinner, are you listening? Say it’s for you.”

  Car, car. The Machine is sweeping away the beauty of the earth. Oh Lord. And we’re entering the Age of Aquarius, meaning, technology will dominate, more machines. Air transport, individual balloons and jets, the sky black with people. I want nothing to do with it. I’ll read my poets up in a treetop, there might be a tree left over.

  “Yesterday I bought a gorgeous edition of Tagore,” I say, sitting down on the rug. I clasp my hands in front of my breast: “‘I watch through the long night for the one who has robbed me of sleep. I build up the walls of the one who has torn mine down. I spend my life pulling up thorns and scattering flower seeds. 1 long to kiss the one who no longer recognizes me.’”

  She glances at me, chuckles slightly and said with her mouth full, “You don’t have to do that much, it’s enough not to want to steal your neighbor’s husband, understand, Madame Tagore?”

  “But he doesn’t love her any more, dear. The love is gone, there’s nothing between them. They only belong to each other on paper.”

  “You think that’s so little? I go along with that but you need to see if he does too. And what’s so original about that poem? All that is in the Bible, Lena. Don’t you read the Bible? Go look it up, it’s all there.”

  I begin to pedal again, more energetically.

  “I bought Proust, isn’t that high-class? M.N. has a passion for Proust. I’ll have to read it, but I confess I’m finding it slightly boring.”

  “Yugghh. High-class novels are bad and high-class old-fashioned novels are worse. I never had the patience for them,” she says taking a cigarette out of her bag.

  I run to get an ashtray and on the way back take the lid off the teakettle. The water is almost boiling, you should never let tea water come to a full boil, Daddy taught me. I turn off the burner and drop the tea leaves into the water. With my eyes closed I breathe in their perfume as I put the ashtray under Lião who doesn’t know what to do with
her apple core. Holding an invisible microphone, I approach on my knees. She clamps the cigarette between her teeth.

  “If you please, I’d like your opinion on certain problems our community is facing,” I say raising the microphone. “First of all, may we have your name?”

  “Lia de Melo Schultz.”

  “Profession?”

  “University student. Social sciences.”

  “And … may I ask about your present situation at that institution of learning?”

  “I goofed off this year. Cut classes. I ended up dropping all my courses, but I’m still registered.”

  “Fine, fine. And your book? They tell me you have a book almost ready. According to our information it’s a novel, is that right?”

  “I tore it all up, understand,” she says blowing smoke in my face. “The sea of useless books is already overflowing. After all, fiction, who cares about it?”

  I abandon the microphone. Tore it up? It isn’t really her vocation, poor thing. But she used to enjoy writing her stories so much, in those big notebooks with the greasy covers, wherever she went she’d take along those notebooks. The city smelling like peaches, imagine. I offer her a cluster of grapes but she refuses. I don’t know what to say to her. So precise when she talks but so sentimental when she writes, oh, the moon, oh, the lake.