The Complete Stories (28 page)

Once the highway was empty again, Missy darted out as if emerging from a hiding place and stole up to the fountain. The rivulets of water ran icily into her sleeves up to her elbows, tiny droplets glistened, caught in her hair.

Her thirst quenched, stunned, she kept strolling, eyes widened, focused on the violent churning of the heavy water inside her stomach, awakening little reflexes throughout the rest of her body like lights.

The highway climbed quite a bit. The highway was lovelier than Rio de Janeiro, and climbed quite a bit. Missy sat on a rock beside a tree, to admire it all. The sky was incredibly high, without a cloud. And there were many little birds flying from the chasm toward the highway. The sun-bleached highway extended along a green chasm. Then, since she was tired, the old lady rested her head on the trunk of the tree and died.

The Solution

(“A solução”)

Her name was Almira and she’d grown too fat. Alice was her best friend. At least that’s what she told everyone woefully, wanting her own vehemence to compensate for the lack of friendship the other woman devoted to her.

Alice was pensive and smiled without hearing her, typing away.

The more nonexistent Alice’s friendship was, the more Almira’s grew. Alice had an oval, velvety face. Almira’s nose was always shiny. Almira’s face held an eagerness she’d never thought to hide: the same she felt for food, her most direct contact with the world.

Why Alice put up with Almira, no one understood. The two were typists and coworkers, which didn’t explain it. The two ate lunch together, which didn’t explain it. They left the office at the same time and waited for the bus in the same line. Almira always looking after Alice. The latter, distant and dreamy, letting herself be adored. Alice was small and delicate. Almira had a very wide face, sallow and shiny: her lipstick never stayed on, she was the sort who ate off her lipstick without meaning to.

“I just loved that show on Ministry of Education Radio,” Almira would say trying somehow to please. But Alice took everything as if it were her due, including the Ministry of Education opera.

Only Almira’s nature was delicate. With that whole big fat body, she could spend a sleepless night over having spoken a poorly chosen word. And a piece of chocolate could suddenly turn bitter in her mouth at the thought that she’d been unfair. What she never lacked was chocolate in her purse, and alarm at what she might have done. Not out of kindness. It might have been feeble nerves in a feeble body.

On the morning of the day it happened, Almira left for work in a rush, still chewing on a piece of bread. When she reached the office, she looked over at Alice’s desk and didn’t see her. An hour later she showed up with bloodshot eyes. She didn’t want to explain or answer Almira’s nervous questions. Almira was practically crying over her typewriter.

Finally, at lunchtime, she begged Alice to have lunch with her, her treat.

It was precisely during lunch that the incident occurred.

Almira kept wanting to know why Alice had shown up late and with bloodshot eyes. Dejected, Alice barely replied. Almira ate eagerly and kept pressing the issue, her eyes welling with tears.

“You fatso!” Alice said suddenly, pale with rage. “Can’t you just leave me alone?!”

Almira gagged on her food, tried to speak, started stammering. From Alice’s soft lips had come words that couldn’t go down with the food in Almira G. de Almeida’s throat.

“You’re a pest and a busybody,” Alice exploded again. “So you want to know what happened, do you? Okay I’ll tell you, you pest: what happened is that Zequinha took off for Porto Alegre and he’s not coming back! happy now, fatso?”

Indeed Almira seemed to have grown even fatter in those last few seconds, and with food still stuck in her mouth.

That was when Almira started to snap out of it. And, as if she were a skinny girl, she took her fork and stabbed it into Alice’s neck. The restaurant, according to the newspaper, rose as one. But the fat woman, even after the deed was done, remained seated staring at the ground, not even looking at the other woman’s blood.

Alice went to the emergency room, which she left with bandages and her eyes still bulging in fright. Almira was arrested in flagrante.

A few observant people remarked that there’d always been something off about that friendship. Others, friends of the family, recounted how Almira’s grandmother, Dona Altamiranda, had been a very strange woman. No one remembered that elephants, according to experts on the subject, are extremely sensitive creatures, even on their thick feet.

In prison Almira behaved in a docile and cheerful manner, melancholy perhaps, but cheerful all the same. She did favors for her companions. At last, she had companions. She was responsible for the laundry, and got along very well with the guards, who occasionally snuck her a chocolate bar. Just like for a circus elephant.

Evolution of a Myopia

(“Evolução de uma miopia”)

If he was clever, he didn’t know it. Being clever or not depended on the instability of other people. Sometimes what he said would suddenly spark in the adults a satisfied and knowing look. Satisfied, because they had kept secret the fact that they found him clever and didn’t coddle him; knowing, because they were more aware of what he’d said than he himself was. That’s why, then, whenever he was considered clever, he also got the uneasy feeling of being unaware: something had escaped him. The key to his cleverness also escaped him. Since at times, trying to imitate himself, he’d say things sure to provoke that swift move on the checkerboard again, since he had the impression of an automatic mechanism on the part of his family members: as soon as he said something clever, all the adults would glance at each other, with a clearly suppressed smile on their lips, a smile suggested only by their eyes, “oh how we’d smile right now, if we weren’t such good teachers”—and, as in a square dance in a Western movie, they’d have each somehow switched partners and places. In sum, they understood each other, his family members; and they understood each other at his expense. Besides understanding each other at his expense, they misunderstood each other permanently, but as a new kind of square dance: even when misunderstanding each other, he felt they were beholden to the rules of a game, as if they’d agreed to misunderstand.

Sometimes, then, he’d try to reproduce his own best lines, the ones that had provoked a move on the checkerboard. It wasn’t exactly to reproduce his past success, nor was it exactly to provoke the silent moves of the family. But rather an attempt to possess the key to his “cleverness.” In this attempt to discover laws and causes, however, he was failing. And, whenever he repeated a good line, this time the others met it distractedly. His eyes blinking with curiosity, at the onset of his myopia, he’d wonder why he had managed to move his family once, and not again. Was his cleverness judged according to other people’s lack of discipline?

Later, when he substituted the instability of other people with his own, he entered a state of conscious instability. When he became a man, he maintained the habit of blinking suddenly at his own thought, while also wrinkling his nose, which made his glasses slip—expressing in this twitch his attempt to substitute the judgment of other people with his own, in an attempt to deepen his own perplexity. But he was a boy with a knack for statics: he’d always been able to keep his perplexity as perplexity, without its being transformed into another sentiment.

That he didn’t hold his own key, he’d grown used to knowing this while still a boy, and he’d start blinking so rapidly that, when his nose wrinkled, it would make his glasses slip. That nobody held the key, was something he gradually discovered without disappointment, his calm myopia demanding progressively stronger lenses.

Strange as it might seem, it was precisely due to this state of permanent uncertainty and due to his premature acceptance that nobody held the key—it was through all this that he grew up normally, and while living in serene curiosity. Patient and curious. A little nervous, they said, referring to the tic with his glasses. But “nervous” was the name the family had been giving to the instability of the family’s own judgment. Another name that the instability of the adults gave him was “well-behaved,” and “easy.” Thereby giving a name not to what he was, but to the varying needs of those moments.

Now and then, in his extraordinary bespectacled calm, something happened inside him that was shining and a bit convulsive like an inspiration.

It happened, for example, when they told him that in a week he would spend a whole day at a cousin’s house. This cousin was married, didn’t have children and adored them. “A whole day” included lunch, a snack, dinner, and coming home half-asleep. And as for the cousin, the cousin meant extra love, with its unexpected advantages and an incalculable eagerness—and all this would allow special requests to be considered. At her house, everything that he was would have a guaranteed value for a whole day. Over there love, more easily stable because it was just for a day, wouldn’t leave any margin for instabilities of judgment: for a whole day, he’d be judged as the same boy.

During the week preceding “the whole day,” he started off trying to decide whether to act naturally with his cousin. He attempted to decide whether to say something clever as soon as he arrived—with the result that he’d be judged clever for the whole day. Or whether, as soon as he arrived, he’d do something she would judge “well-behaved,” which would make him the well-behaved boy for the whole day. Having the possibility of choosing what he would be and, for the first time throughout a long day, made him adjust his glasses constantly.

Gradually, during the preceding week, the sphere of possibilities kept expanding. And, with his ability to handle confusion—he was meticulous and calm when it came to confusion—he ended up learning that he could arbitrarily decide to be a clown for a whole day, for example. Or that he could spend the day in a very sad mood, if he so decided. What put him at ease was knowing that his cousin, with her childless love and especially with her lack of experience in dealing with children, would accept whichever way he decided that she should judge him. What also helped was knowing that nothing he was that day would really change him. Because prematurely—being a precocious child—he was superior to other people’s instability and to his own. Somehow he floated above his own myopia and that of others. Which gave him a lot of freedom. At times merely the freedom of a calm incredulity. Even when he became a man, with extremely thick glasses, he never managed to become aware of this kind of superiority he had over himself.

The week preceding the visit to his cousin was one of constant anticipation. Sometimes his stomach would clench apprehensively: because in that house with no kids he’d be completely at the mercy of a woman’s indiscriminating love. “Indiscriminating love” represented a threatening stability: it would be permanent, and would surely result in a single way of judging, and that was stability. Stability, even back then, meant danger to him: if other people made a mistake in their first pass at stability, the mistake would become permanent, without the advantage of instability, which is that of a possible correction.

Something else that worried him beforehand was what he’d do for the whole day at his cousin’s house, besides eating and being loved. Well, there was always the solution of being able to go to the bathroom every once in a while, which would make the time pass more quickly. But, having some experience at being loved, it embarrassed him in advance that his cousin, a stranger to him, would regard his trips to the bathroom with infinite affection. In general the mechanism of his life had become a reason for tenderness. Well, it was also true that, as for going to the bathroom, the solution might be not going to the bathroom at all. But that would not only be, for a whole day, impossible so much as—since he didn’t want to be judged as “a boy who doesn’t go to the bathroom”—it offered no advantage either. His cousin, stabilized by her permanent desire for children, would be led, by his not going to the bathroom, down the wrong track of great love.

During the week that preceded “the whole day,” it wasn’t that he was suffering due to his own vacillation. Because the step most people never manage to take was one he’d already taken: he’d accepted uncertainty, and was dealing with the components of uncertainty with the concentration of someone peering through the lens of a microscope.

As, during the week, these lightly convulsive inspirations followed one another, they gradually started changing in stature. He abandoned the problem of deciding which elements to offer his cousin so she in turn could temporarily grant him the certainty of “who he was.” He abandoned these musings and started wanting to determine ahead of time how his cousin’s house would smell, how big the little yard was where he’d play, what drawers he’d open while she wasn’t looking. And finally he took up the matter of the cousin herself. How should he handle the love his cousin had for him?

However, he had neglected one detail: his cousin had a gold tooth, on the left side.

And that—when he finally entered his cousin’s house—that was what in a single instant threw his entire anticipated structure off balance.

The rest of the day might have been called horrible, if the boy was inclined to put things in terms of horrible or not horrible. Or it could have been called “dazzling,” if he were the type to expect that things are or not.

There was that gold tooth, which he hadn’t counted on. But, with the sense of security he found in the idea of a permanent unpredictability, so much that he even wore glasses, he didn’t become insecure because he encountered right from the start something he hadn’t counted on.

After that the surprise of his cousin’s love. It turned out his cousin’s love started off being obvious, unlike what he’d imagined. She’d greeted him with a naturalness that insulted him at first, but that soon after no longer did. She said right away that she was going to clean the house and that he could go off and play. Which gave the boy, out of the blue, a whole day, empty and full of sun.

At some point, wiping his glasses, he attempted, though with a certain detachment, a stroke of cleverness and made an observation about the plants in the yard. Since whenever he made an observation aloud, he was judged very observant. But his cool observation about the plants got the reply: “um-hmm” between sweeps of the floor. So he went to the bathroom where he decided that, since everything had failed, he’d play at “not being judged”: for a whole day he wouldn’t be anything, he simply wouldn’t be. And he yanked open the door with a surge of freedom.

But as the sun climbed higher, the more the delicate pressure of his cousin’s love started to make itself felt. And by the time he realized it, he was beloved. At lunchtime, the food was pure love, misguided and stable: under the doting eyes of his cousin, he adapted with curiosity to the strange taste of that food, maybe it was a different brand of oil, he adapted to a woman’s love, a new love that didn’t resemble the love of the other adults: it was a love begging to be fulfilled, since his cousin had missed out on pregnancy, already itself a fulfillment of maternal love. But it was a love without the prior pregnancy. It was a love begging,
a posteriori
, for conception. In short, impossible love.

For the whole day love demanding a past to redeem the present and future. For the whole day, without a word, her demanding of him to have been born from her womb. His cousin wanted nothing from him, except that. She wanted from the boy with glasses not to be a childless woman. On that day, thus, he met with one of the rare forms of stability: the stability of unrealizable desire. The stability of the unattainable ideal. For the first time, he, a being devoted to moderation, for the first time he felt attracted to immoderation: attraction to the impossible extreme. In a word, to the impossible. And for the first time he then felt love for passion.

And it was as if his myopia had disappeared and he was seeing the world clearly. The deepest and simplest glimpse he had of the kind of universe he would live in and inhabit. Not a mental glimpse. It was only as if he’d taken off his glasses, and myopia itself is what made him see. Maybe that had been when he picked up a lifelong habit: whenever his confusion grew and he could barely see, he’d take off his glasses under the pretext of wiping them and, without his glasses, fix his interlocutor with the reverberating stare of a blind man.