The Girl in the Photograph (14 page)

“Shit I guess I need it. But I have to pay, everybody’s already impatient, nothing
but problems, who wants to hear mine? Nobody. Only Mother Alix who is a saint. ‘I’m
listening my child, you can tell me anything you like, it will do you good.’”

Slowly Ana Clara went back to rolling and unrolling a lock of hair around her finger.
“It does do me good, it does. She’s the only one who listens without thinking of money
the only one. Even Kleber. Dying to get his hands on me the dirty prick. How can I
respect somebody like that?”

“How can I?” she demanded pounding the mattress. Fools. All of them were dirty pricks
and fools. Lighter fluid would be better because any fluid was better than. Super-expensive.

But she needed to talk. At times she was driven almost mad by the desire to talk,
to tell someone about her agonies, her nightmares. And paying by check for the privilege.
Pure masochism. “Because I keep talking about the things that hurt
me most, rubbing salt in the wounds, remembering what I did and didn’t do. And paying
in gold for the self-torture.”

The nightmares. Some kept coming back like that one about the flowers. Enormous blossoms
of all colors, opening and closing their petal-portals, come in, come in! She would
dive to the bottom of the stem which got narrower like a tunnel, and there a liquorous
river flowed. She would drink the river until coming to a red cherry speared on a
toothpick, which she would bite and then double over in pain, bleeding red liqueur.
Then she’d pull out the piece of wire, it was her heart speared on a piece of wire.
“I ate my heart,” she would discover in amazement. “There, fine, now it won’t hurt
any more.” But then the whole glass would overflow with red cherries, thousands of
them, multiplying, speared on the ends of wires. “My sacred Heart of Jesus. My Heart
of Jesus.” Wasn’t it my mother praying? She used to pray to die. “Take me, dear Heart
of Jesus, take me. Or take him.” She was taken. Because Jorge lived on in the best
of health. Was it Jorge or Bingo? Or it could have been Aldo. Or the old harelip,
at the the time I didn’t know what a harelip was. He used to sell the lottery tickets
printed with animals for numbers. The colored picture was in a frame that had no glass.
What glass could contain that dark red heart skewered on the dripping thorns? “She
was taken. All the others were left. Or did they die too? Who knows, it doesn’t make
any difference.” The old harelip had a name tattooed on his chest.

“I want something to eat, Bunny.”

“Okay, so sleep.”

The needle rose quivering and hovered over the record. From the street came a vague
wave of sounds, filtered pastily through the closed Venetian blinds. When the needle
settled once again on the disc, Ana Clara relaxed from her tense position: She hated
that music but even so it was better than listening to herself. She turned her listless
gaze to the lamp. The cone of light penetrated the thick smoke. Around it, the shadows
were lengthened by the light gray curtain hung to cover an entire wall, a satiny metallic
canvas stoically defending the privacy of the room. Max fumbled among the sheets.

“You there, Bunny?”

We used to shake everything and the dust would settle to cover it again, we’d shake
clothes, hair, broom and food. Ready to move in next September. Ten apartments per
floor, details
available from the watchman in the basement. Lime and cement and the cold smell. She
had nightmares too, little pinhead shaking out the dish towel and saying she had been
dreaming so peacefully, “I was walking along and all of a sudden I fell into a barrel
of soft cement, and went sinking down and it got into my ears my mouth. And then Ana
all of a sudden it wasn’t cement any more it was even worse it was a septic tank.
A septic tank. I woke up and had to wash myself like crazy to get rid of the stink.”
Adamastor. That one was Adamastor. His dry hands hammering in the nails. Carrying
the boards mixing cement. He would press one brick on top of the other and it would
ooze out escaping through the crack.

“I have to go. He’s there with his bread all peeled waiting for me.”

“Who?”

“That guy. He’s already torn up a whole loaf of bread, he loves to sit and peel the
crust off the bread. He’s a Corinthian fan too. Him and Lião. What are Corinthians?
Lorena asked, she doesn’t even know what soccer is—let alone the teams. Have you ever
tried to explain soccer to the goddess Diana? So. I can’t stand it either, nothing
but blacks. But I know who the Corinthians are. Their colors are black and white,
like Lião, black and white combined. He’s waiting for me there at the table. My fiancé.”

“You have a fiancé, Bunny?”

“Yeah. He’s a pain in the ass but he has yenom.”

“Is he as handsome as me?”

“He’s a dwarf. His body is all covered with scales, the scales start here on his belly
and go upward, and when they get here, under his armpits, see—?” she continued, her
hands advancing. “Here, see? here there’s lots of scales.”

He shook with giggles. Together they rolled over, laughing.

“There was a story about Death that climbed up on an old fisherman’s back and never
got off again, the fisherman had to be his horse,” Max remembered, lightly caressing
her nipple.

“And then what?”

“That’s it. The cook we used to have knew so many stories. Come on, Bunny, come with
me and I’ll show you a diamond the color of your hair, I’ll show you gardens, temples!
I’ll show you the sun and my house painted all white, I’ll take you to Afghanistan,
come on. The prices there are ridiculous. I’ll buy you coconut palms, camels. Want
a camel, Bunny? I’ll give you one, you can go for rides on it, hanh?”

“You said you rode on a swan once, remember? Remember, Max? You said you rode on a
swan once, what swan was that? Huh? Answer, tell me what swan. Answer or I’ll punch
you.”

“I rode a pig.”

She made a fist and hit him on the chin. A drop of blood ran from his lip and lost
itself in his beard. When he touched his chin and saw the blood, he turned over on
his chest, shoulders heaving with sobs.

“You broke my tooth! You broke my tooth!”

“I did not, liar!”

“You did too!”

Balanced on her knees, she pulled him by the hair in order to see his face, which
he hid in his hands.

“Max, stop it. Open your mouth, come on, open that mouth!”

Leaning on his elbows, he shook his head, jaw clamped, eyes shut. He growled in refusal,
unh-unh, but couldn’t resist being tickled. She bent over him.

“You dummy. You scared me, you dummy. Next time you scare me that way, I really will
break your tooth, you hear?” Using a corner of the sheet she cleaned his lip. “Does
it hurt, love? I swear if I really had broken one of your teeth I just don’t know.
You can hit me, come on, here, right here!” She turned her stomach toward him. Placing
his thumbs together he opened his hands like wings and placed them on her body.

“The moon. I land softly on the moon.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Pregnant? A baby, Bunny? Ah, I want this baby. Give him to me, for God’s sake, give
him to me. I want this baby, hanh? He said he wants to be born, I just now heard his
little voice, he’s so happy, I want to be born, he said. We’ll get rich. I’ll buy
an island, it’s really easy to buy an island in Brazil. There’s so much land …”

“Why don’t you join the Mafia? You could give me a yacht. A helicopter. I could go
buzzing around …”

“Let’s sail around the world, Bunny. Fabulous guests …”

“Is Jackie coming?” I ask and he stares at me, innocent. “Jackie Onassis, stupid.
She coming? Shit, Mrs. Onassis.”

He frowned and gave a long sigh.

“We were lovers. She’s very hairy, she has hair even on her chest,” he confided, pulling
me closer by the hand to divulge more secrets. “I discovered something impressive,
she has six toes on each foot.”

I want to laugh but then I remember. What will I say? By this time he’s already peeled
ten loaves of bread and is breaking the toothpick he used to clean his teeth into
a thousand little pieces. His eyes have turned to ice cubes. I’ll have to tell him
a really good story. My rich old aunt arrived with my big-busted cousins and forbade
me to go out from pure caprice. The oldest and horridest one acting snotty, “Mama,
Mama, my cousin is prettier than me,
waanh, waanh!
” They covered my head with so much garbage that when the messenger came, the one
with the cornet, all he could see on the hearth was a mound of ashes. “Besides your
moustached daughters, is there no other damsel in your palace who could be the owner
of this slipper?” Then the aunt pushed her daughters forward. “None, good sir. In
reality we only have a bastard ragpicker in the kitchen but obviously she could never
wear such finery. Come on, my treasures, cut off your toes and the slipper will fit
you perfectly!”

“What time is it? The time, I have to know the time.”

“My heart is so full of happiness, so-o-o full …”

I’ll go without any makeup I’ll be ready in ten minutes. Fine. He thinks no makeup
is great. The natural look. “Unadorned beauty,” Lorena says. Everything has to be
unadorned and pure with her, she has a mania for purity OK OK, I’ll go unadorned.
I’ll come in and he’ll look at his watch. But isn’t your watch fast dear? He doesn’t
even answer me he just keeps tapping the watch face with his fingernail, he has sickening
fingernails with cuticle invading them all. Freckles on his fingers. A mess. “My watch
is never fast.” Soul of a watchmaker he must have been born in Switzerland. He takes
advantage and winds it,
rrk
,
rrk
. “Where were you?” Well, what happened was, I ate some meat pies in the roominghouse
and ended up in the emergency ward, a monstrous case of food poisoning, I almost died.
He’ll want to know which emergency ward. What medicine I took. Who attended me. Details,
little details. Come on. All of them.

“A pain in the ass,” mumbled Ana, sliding off the bed. She turned on the light in
the bathroom and shrank back from the mirror. She blinked dizzily and turned her frenzied
eyes away from her reflection, burying her hands in her hair.

Chapter 5

They answered. Nobody at the window to call me? Nobody. “Sorry, wrong number,” says
the opaque voice, all wrong-number voices become opaque. Just think, if Lião would
write in an opaque tone like that. She’s far too clear, the experts want obscurity
in the language, a certain fog subtly confusing the silhouette of the words. Screens
between the lines garnishing (I love that word,
garnishing
) the mystery of the letters. And the unmysterious letters busily coupling with the
Devil. Is there orgasm? The Devil comes and goes by crooked routes, braiding the hair
of his lovers up in inextricable knots. Who will come braid mine? Oh Lord. She said
she tore it all up. It’s probably better, poor thing. Nobody will ever read that the
entire
city smelled of peaches. The phone again? Some terrorist asking for her. Some fiancé
asking for Crazy Annie, it’s impressive the way Annie collects fiancés. Before this
one she’s already had at least three. Fiancés and debts, she opens accounts in all
the boutiques, piles of dresses. Pounds of costume jewelry. An obsession for covering
herself with things that look nice in shop windows and magazines. And she doesn’t
need any of them with that marvelous face. She could dress like the Greek women, a
light tunic and nothing more.

“Nothing,” murmured Lorena taking a long amber necklace from the bookcase. She put
it around her neck; it came down almost as far as her knees. She wound up the music
box and looked at the print on the cover: Dante and Beatrice on the bridge. He was
moving away a bit to let her pass, his eyes afire, his right hand clutching his heart.
“I am Beatrice, blessed and beautiful, trailing my gown of purple.” On the bridge,
no longer Dante but M.N. wrinkled and rent asunder with love, “Lorena!” She glimpsed
in the corner of the mirror the small surprise snapshot that Sister Clotilde had taken
of them in front of the gate: She was between Ana Clara and Lia, all three
laughing a sunburned laugh. “Don’t squint, Ana Clara, and Lorena, stop making faces,
you’re making a face!” A pyramid. The poet H.H. had described it: “
Inside the prism, the base, the vertex of its three continuous pyramids
,” she recited, lowering her eyes to her own reflected image.

If she were a couple of pounds lighter she would look the same age as the young Beatrice,
about nine and a half. And M.N. with his wife whose hips and breasts overflowed his
hands. “Shrew. Witch,” she whispered closing her eyes. She shook her head, thinking
“polluted little mind,” and ran to the drawer where she kept the incense, nothing
like a little Jaipur Rose to purify the atmosphere. “I’m giddy, silly.” But if M.N.
would take her more seriously? Incredible, but when others took us seriously we became
serious ourselves. She took a deep breath of rose-perfumed smoke. “An ancient perfume.
Wakes. Death could be just that, incense and music. Jazz, it’s jazz that combines
with death in a state of hopelessness and sin. She went to the record player and turned
up the volume, which kicked her ears like a wild horse. “I can’t explain it,” Lião
would say if she came in right now. And she would spend twenty minutes explaining
why this kind of music destroys character. But what does she want me to listen to?
L’International
? She was probably singing it full blast right now along with some terrorist group,
groupons-nous et demain … Demain
. Tomorrow, the weather forecasters had announced, would be 102 degrees in the shade
with thunder late in the afternoon. To band together was to conspire and perspire.
She had a revulsion for sweat. She might be hollow sometimes, but would politics fill
the gap? She really didn’t believe in communism or in anything like that, and there
was no point in pretending to, as most people did. She hated the game of make-believe.
“If I hardly have time and energy to take care of myself, imagine.” A tiny garden
with three or four plants, closed in by walls on all sides. And then the extra jobs,
like dusting the books which Sebastiana hadn’t dusted. There’s more dust lately, according
to Bulie, the dust of the living and the dust of the dead. The color of the cloth
changes, yellow for the living and purple for the dead, I saw the driver of a funeral
hearse dusting off a coffin with a piece of royal-purple flannel; the coffin must
have traveled a long way. The family was waiting, and he dusting and re-dusting the
lid of the coffin. The Moon-Eyed Demon probably dresses in black but Death
wears royal purple. With a gold-lamè rose tucked in his wig, ah, M.N., when I looked
through the glass door and saw you pass by all in white, with gloves and mask, I almost
fainted. Too much, that part when he approaches the table, silent and camouflaged.
The field of a hysterical battle of lights, machines. The instruments. Thousands of
preparations, is everything ready? And Death, smiling, with his gilded rose and his
arms crossed.