The Complete Stories (53 page)

Brasília is the Wedding March. The groom is a northeasterner who eats up the whole cake because he’s gone hungry for several generations. The bride is a widowed old lady, rich and cranky. From this unusual wedding that I witnessed, forced by circumstances, I left defeated by the violence of the Wedding March that sounded like a Military March and commanded me to get married too and I don’t want to. I left covered in Band-Aids, my ankle twisted, my neck aching and a big wound aching in my heart.

Everything I have said is true. Or it is symbolic. But what difficult syntax Brasília has! The fortuneteller said I would go to Brasília. She knows everything, Dona Nadir, from Méier. Brasília is an eyelid fluttering like the yellow butterfly I saw a few days ago on the corner near my house. Yellow butterflies are a good omen. Geckos say neither yes nor no. But S. has a fear of geckos who are shedding their skin. What I am more afraid of are rats. At the Hotel Nacional they guaranteed they didn’t have rats. So, in that case, I stayed. With a guarantee, I often stay.

Working is fate. Look,
Jornal de Bras
ília
, you better include astrology in your paper. After all, we need to know where we stand. I am completely magical and my aura is bright blue just like the sweet stained glass in the church I mentioned. Everything I touch, is born.

It is daybreak here in Rio. A lovely and cold dry morning. How nice that all nights have radiant mornings. Brasília’s horoscope is dazzling. And whoever wants to, let them bear it.

It’s a quarter to six. I write while listening to music. Anything will do, I’m not difficult. What I was hoping to hear right now was a really astringent fado sung by Amália Rodrigues in Lisbon. Ah how I long for Capri. I suffered so much in Capri. But I forgave it. It’s all right: Capri, like Brasília, is beautiful. I do feel sorry for Brasília because it doesn’t have the sea. But the salt wind is in the air. I detest swimming in a pool. Swimming in the sea breeds courage. A few days ago I went to the beach and entered the sea feeling moved. I drank seven gulps of saltwater from the sea. The water was chilly, gentle, with little waves that were also agnus dei. I am letting you know that I am going to buy an old-fashioned felt hat, with a small crown and upturned brim. And also a green crocheted shawl. Brasília isn’t crochet, it is a knit made by special machines that don’t make errors. But, as I said, I am pure error. And I have a left-handed soul. I get all tangled in emerald-green crochet, I get all tangled. To protect myself. Green is the color of hope. And Tuesday could be a disaster. On my last Tuesday I cried because I had been wronged. But in general Tuesdays are good. As for Thursday, it is sweet and a little bit sad. Laugh all you want, clown, as your house catches fire.
Mais
tout va tr
ès
bien, madame la Marquise.
Except.

Could there be fauns in Brasília? That settles it: what I’ll do is buy a green hat to match my shawl. Or should I not buy one at all? I am so indecisive. Brasília is decision. Brasília is a man. And I, such a woman. I go bumbling along. I stumble into something here, I stumble into something there. And arrive at last.

The song I am listening to now is completely pure and free of guilt. Debussy. With cool little waves in the sea.

Does Brasília have gnomes?

My house in Rio is full of them. All fantastic. Try just one gnome and you’ll be hooked. Elves also do the trick. Dwarves? I feel sorry for them.

I’ve settled it: I don’t need a hat at all. Or do I? My God, what shall become of me? Brasília, save me for I am in need of it.

One day I was a child just like Brasília. And I so badly wanted a carrier pigeon. To send letters to Brasília. Does anyone get them? yes or no?

I am innocent and ignorant. And when I am in writing mode, I don’t read. That would be too much for me, I don’t have the strength.

I was on the plane with an older Portuguese gentleman, a businessman of some sort, but very genteel: he carried my heavy suitcase. On the way back from Brasília I sat next to an older gentleman who was such a good conversationalist, we had such a good conversation, that I said: it’s incredible how fast the time went and now we’re here. He said: the time went fast for me too. I’ll see that man some day. He’s going to teach me. He knows a lot of things.

I am so lost. But that is exactly how we live: lost in time and space.

I am scared to death of appearing before a Judge. Your Most Esteemed Honor, may I have permission to smoke? Yes, indeed ma’am, I myself smoke a pipe. Thank you, Your Eminence. I treat the Judge well, a Judge is Brasília. But I won’t sue Brasília. It hasn’t wronged me.

We are in the middle of the world cup. There is an African country that is poor and ignorant and lost to Yugoslavia 9 to zero. But their ignorance is different: I heard that in that country the black boys either win or they die. Such helplessness.

I know how to die. I have been dying since I was little. And it hurts but we pretend it doesn’t. I miss God so badly.

And now I am going to die a little bit. I need to so much.

Yes. I accept,
my Lord
. Under protest.

But Brasília is splendor.

I am utterly afraid.

FINAL STORIES

Beauty and the Beast
or The Enormous Wound

(“A bela e a fera ou A ferida grande demais”)

IT BEGINS:

Well, so she left the beauty salon by the elevator in the Copacabana Palace Hotel. Her driver wasn’t there. She looked at her watch: it was four in the afternoon. And suddenly she remembered: she’d told “her” José to pick her up at five, not factoring in that she wouldn’t get a manicure or pedicure, just a massage. What should she do? Take a taxi? But she had a five-hundred-cruzeiro bill on her and the cab driver wouldn’t have change. She’d brought cash because her husband had told her you should never go out without cash. It crossed her mind to go back to the beauty salon and ask for change. But—but it was a May afternoon and the cool air was a flower blooming with its perfume. And so she thought it wonderful and unusual to be standing on the street—out in the wind that was ruffling her hair. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been alone with herself. Maybe never. It was always her—with others, and in these others she was reflected and the others were reflected in her. Nothing was—was pure, she thought without understanding what she meant. When she saw herself in the mirror—her skin, tawny from sunbathing, made the gold flowers in her black hair stand out against her face—, she held back from exclaiming “ah!”—for she was fifty million units of beautiful people. Never had there been—in all the world’s history—anyone like her. And then, in three trillion trillion years—there wouldn’t be a single girl exactly like her.

“I am a burning flame! And I shine and shine all that darkness!”

This moment was unique—and she would have in the course of her life thousands of unique moments. Her forehead even broke out in a cold sweat, because so much had been given her and eagerly taken by her.

“Beauty can lead to the kind of madness that is passion.” She thought: “I am married, I have three children, I am safe.”

She had a name to uphold: it was Carla de Sousa e Santos. The “de” and the “e” were important: they denoted class and a four-hundred-year-old Rio family. She lived among the herds of women and men who, yes, who simply “could.” Could what? Look, they just could. And to top it off, they were slick because their “could” was just so greasy in the machines that ran without the sound of rusty metal. She, who was a powerful woman. A generator of electric energy. She, who made use of the vineyards on her country estate to relax. She possessed traditions in decay but still standing. And since there was no new criterion to sustain all those vague and grandiose hopes, the weighty tradition still held. Tradition of what? Of nothing, if you had to pry. The only argument in its favor was the fact that the inhabitants were backed by a long lineage, which, though plebeian, was enough to grant them a certain pose of dignity.

She thought, all tangled: She who, being a woman, which seemed to her a funny thing to be or not to be, knew that, if she were a man, she’d naturally be a banker, a normal thing that happens among “her” people, that is, those of her social class, which her husband, on the other hand, had attained after a lot of hard work and which classified him as a “self-made man” whereas she was not a “self-made woman.” At the end of the long train of thought, it seemed to her that—that she hadn’t been thinking about anything.

A man missing a leg, dragging himself along on a crutch, stopped before her and said:

“Miss, won’t you give me some money so I can eat?”

“Help!!!” she screamed in her head upon seeing the enormous wound in the man’s leg. “Help me, God,” she said very softly.

She was exposed to that man. She was completely exposed. Had she told “her” José to come to the exit on the Avenida Atlântica, the hotel where the hairdresser’s was wouldn’t have allowed “those people” to come near. But on the Avenida Copacabana anything was possible: people of every sort. At least a different sort from hers. “Hers”? “What sort of she was she for it to be “hers”?

She—the others. But, but death doesn’t separate us, she thought suddenly and her face took on the aspect of a mask of beauty and not human beauty: her face hardened for a moment.

The beggar’s thoughts: “this lady with all that makeup and little gold stars on her forehead, either won’t give me anything or just a little.” It struck him then, a bit wearily: “or next to nothing.”

She was alarmed: since she practically never walked down the street—she was chauffeured from door to door—she started thinking: is he going to kill me? She was distraught and asked:

“How much do people usually give?”

“However much they can and want to,” answered the shocked beggar.

She, who never paid at the beauty salon, the manager there sent her monthly bill to her husband’s secretary. “Husband.” She thought: her husband, what would he do with the beggar? She knew what: nothing. They don’t do anything. And she—she was “them” too. All that she could give? She could give her husband’s bank, she might give him their apartment, her country house, her jewelry . . .

But something that was a greed in everyone, asked:

“Is five hundred cruzeiros enough? That’s all I have.”

The beggar stared at her in shock.

“Are you making fun of me, miss?”

“Me?? No I’m not, I really do have the five hundred in my purse . . .”

She opened it, pulled out the bill and humbly handed it to the man, nearly begging his pardon.

The man bewildered.

And then laughing, showing his nearly toothless gums:

“Look,” he said, “either you’re very kind, ma’am, or you’re not right in the head . . . But, I’ll take it, don’t go saying later that I robbed you, no one’s gonna believe me. It would’ve been better if you gave me some change.”

“I don’t have any change, all I have is that five hundred.”

The man seemed to get scared, he said something nearly incomprehensible, garbled from his having so few teeth.

Meanwhile his head was thinking: food, food, good food, money, money.

Her head was full of parties, parties, parties. Celebrating what? Celebrating someone else’s wound? One thing united them: both had a vocation for money. The beggar spent every cent he had, whereas Carla’s husband, the banker, accumulated money. His bread and butter was the Stock Market, and inflation, and profit. The beggar’s bread and butter was his round gaping wound. And to top it off, he was probably afraid of healing, she guessed, because, if it got better, he’d have nothing to eat, that much Carla knew: “if you don’t have a good job by a certain age . . .” If he were younger, he could paint walls. Since he wasn’t, he invested in that big wound with living and pestilent flesh. No, life wasn’t pretty.

She leaned against the wall and decided to think carefully. It was different because she wasn’t in the habit and she didn’t know thought was vision and comprehension and that no one could order herself to do it just like that: think! Fine. But it so happened that deciding to posed an obstacle. So then she started looking inside herself and they actually started happening. Only, she had the most ridiculous thoughts. Like: does that beggar speak English? Has that beggar ever eaten caviar, while drinking champagne? They were ridiculous thoughts because she clearly knew the beggar didn’t speak English, nor had he ever tasted caviar or champagne. But she couldn’t help watching another absurd thought arise in her: had he ever skied in Switzerland?

She grew desperate then. She grew so desperate that a thought came to her made of just two words: “Social Justice.”

Death to the rich! That would solve things, she thought cheerfully. But—who would give money to the poor?

Suddenly—suddenly everything stopped. The buses stopped, the cars stopped, the clocks stopped, the people on the street froze—only her heart was beating, and for what?

She saw that she didn’t know how to deal with the world. She was an incompetent person, with her black hair and her long, red nails. She was: as if in a blurry color photograph. Every day she made a list of what she needed or wanted to do the next day—that was how she’d stayed connected to the empty hours. She simply had nothing to do. Everything was done for her. Even her two children—well, her husband was the one who had decided they’d have two . . .

“You’ve got to make an effort to be a winner in life,” her late grandfather had told her. Was she, by any chance, a “winner”? If winning meant standing on the street in the middle of the bright afternoon, her face smeared with makeup and gold spangles . . . Was that winning? What patience she needed to have with herself. What patience she needed in order to save her own little life. Save it from what? Judgment? But who was judging? Her mouth felt completely dry and her throat on fire—just like whenever she had to take tests in school. And there was no water! Do you know what that’s like—not having water?

She wanted to think about something else and forget the difficult present moment. Then she recalled lines from a posthumous book by Eça de Queirós that she’d studied in high school: “Lake
T I B E R I A S 
shimmered transparently, covered in silence, bluer than the heavens, ringed entirely by flowering meadows, dense groves, rocks of porphyry, and pristine white lands among the palms, beneath the doves in flight.”

She knew it by heart because, as a teenager, she’d been very sensitive to words and because she’d desired for herself the same shimmering destiny as Lake
T I B E R I A S 
.

She felt an unexpectedly murderous urge: to kill all the beggars in the world! Just so she, after the massacre, could enjoy her extraordinary well-being in peace.

No. The world wasn’t whispering.

The world was scre-am-ing!!! through that man’s toothless mouth.

The banker’s young wife thought she wasn’t going to withstand the lack of softness being hurled in her impeccably made-up face.

And what about the party? How would she bring it up at the party, while dancing, how would she tell the partner who’d be in her arms . . . This: look, the beggar has a sex too, he said he had eleven children. He doesn’t go to social gatherings, he doesn’t appear in Ibrahim’s society columns, or in Zózimo’s, he’s hungry for bread not cake, actually all he should eat is porridge since he doesn’t have any teeth for chewing meat . . . “Meat?” She vaguely recalled that the cook had said the price of filet mignon had gone up. Yes. How could she dance? Only if it were a mad and macabre beggars’ dance.

No, she wasn’t the kind of woman prone to hysteria and nerves and fainting or feeling ill. Like some of her little society “colleagues.” She smiled a little thinking in terms of her little “colleagues.” Colleagues in what? in dressing up? in hosting dinners for thirty, forty people?

She herself taking advantage of the garden in late summer had thrown a reception for how many guests? No, she didn’t want to think about that, she recalled (why without the same pleasure?) the tables dispersed over the lawn, candlelight . . . “candlelight”? she thought, but am I out of my mind? have I fallen for a scam? Some rich people’s scam?

“Before I got married I was middle class, secretary to the banker I married and now—now candlelight. What I’m doing is playing at living,” she thought, “this isn’t life.”

“Beauty can be a great threat.” Extreme grace got mixed up with a bewilderment and a deep melancholy. “Beauty frightens.” “If I weren’t so pretty I’d have had a different fate,” she thought arranging the gold flowers in her jet black hair.

She’d once seen a friend whose heart got all twisted up and hurt and mad with forceful passion. So she’d never wanted to experience it. She had always been frightened of things that were too beautiful or too horrible: because she didn’t inherently know how to respond to them and whether she would respond if she were equally beautiful or equally horrible.

She was frightened as when she’d seen the Mona Lisa’s smile, right there, up close at the Louvre. As she’d been frightened by the man with the wound or the man’s wound.

She felt like screaming at the world: “I’m not awful! I’m a product of I don’t even know what, how can I know anything about this misery of the soul.”

To shift her feelings—since she couldn’t bear them and now felt like, in despair, violently kicking the beggar’s wound—, to shift her feelings she thought: this is my second marriage, I mean, my previous husband was alive.

Now she understood why she’d married the first time and was auctioned off: who’ll bid higher? who’ll bid higher? Sold, then. Yes, she’d married the first time to the man who “bid the highest,” she accepted him because he was rich and slightly above her social class. She had sold herself. And as for her second husband? Her second marriage was on the rocks, he had two mistresses . . . and she putting up with it all because a separation would have been scandalous: her name was mentioned too often in the society pages. And would she go back to her maiden name? Even getting used to her maiden name, that would take a long time. Anyway, she thought laughing at herself, anyway, she tolerated this second one because he gave her great prestige. Had she sold herself to the society pages? Yes. She was discovering that now. If there were a third marriage in store for her—for she was pretty and rich—, if there were, whom would she marry? She started laughing a little hysterically because she had the thought: her third husband was the beggar.

Suddenly she asked the beggar:

“Sir, do you speak English?”

The man didn’t have a clue what she’d asked. But, forced to answer since the woman had just bought him with all that money, he improvised:

“Yes I do. Well aren’t I speaking with you right now, ma’am? Why? Are you deaf? Then I’ll shout:
Y E S
.”

Alarmed by the man’s ear-splitting shouts, she broke into a cold sweat. She was becoming fully aware that up till now she’d pretended there were no starving people, no people who don’t speak any foreign languages and that there were no anonymous masses begging in order to survive. She’d known it, yes, but she’d turned her head and covered her eyes. Everyone, but everyone—knows and pretends they don’t. And even if they didn’t they’d feel a certain distress. How could they not? No, they wouldn’t even feel that.

She was . . .