The Girl in the Photograph (15 page)

“You traitor,” whispered Lorena examining the little hole in the spine of the book.
She opened it and blew at the hole, which undulated inward through the pages. “Now
where? Where?” she asked herself and closed her eyes, no, it wasn’t Romulo she was
thinking about, it was the bookworm. Subtle creatures, bookworms. Labyrinths, galleries.

She turned toward the calendar which hung on the wall, a long silk banner with the
months printed on it. This was the Solar Year. “Never has the sun been so close,”
she thought throwing the window open. A good time for making love, but not for revolution
because very hot weather in underdeveloped places made one limp. Took the starch out
of the fiber. “Lião understands that perfectly, the hotter the Third World is, the
Thirder it gets.”

“Nothing?” screamed Lorena, making a pantomime gesture to Sister Priscilla who appeared
in the window of the house. The nun opened her arms and returned the code, like a
sailor signaling from the bridge of a ship. “Nothing.” She concluded the message by
clasping her hands to her chest in an expression of regret. With a pallid wave Lorena
thanked her and bit on the largest bead of the amber necklace. “If he hasn’t called
by this time then he isn’t going to.” Better to think about the day’s routine: bath,
exercises. The right order would be to do exercises beforehand but she must have low
blood pressure, she needed hot water for the initial stimulus, however short-lived.
Oh Lord. Lunch with her mother, how would she find her? Terrible, naturally. Mustn’t
forget to ask for the car keys, every other day Lia wanted to borrow the car, luckily
her mother was totally absentminded, she never remembered she had just loaned it to
her. “May God prevent Lião from getting machine-gunned inside it.” The university.
Fabrízio must be there stirring up the student strike. She might grab him to go to
the movies, Greta Garbo festival, eeeh, how she adored that woman. The suffering
and pleasure of knowing exactly how to portray the eternal woman, she who was ephemeral.
“Lorena, the Brief,” she thought frowning. But the neurotic little poetess must be
freed from her hang-ups by now. “Ah, my friend, love a prostitute but not a neurotic,
because the former may turn into a saint, but the latter—!” To mount behind him on
the motorcycle and clutch him around the waist, smelling the leather of his jacket,
the man-animal trembling in the wind, “Want to go, Fabrízio? My allowance is untouched,
we’ll dine like princes, Portuguese codfish and fado music.” She would cry buckets,
thinking the whole time of M.N., who in turn would be thinking about his oldest son
with acute existential doubts, he has five children.

She twisted the necklace around her head, looping it until it became a diadem of beads
about her eyebrows. If one of the nuns went to the drugstore, she would send for some
hand cream and Modess, Lião had finished off the supply. The two of them used up everything,
all the stock of paints and varnishes, and never replaced anything: soap, dental floss,
cotton, etc. “and then when I need something I don’t have it. And neither do they.”
Nail-polish remover was a perfect example, Ana borrowed the full bottle and it came
back with two drops in the bottom. Ether too? What madness. She’d have to do something.
But what? Was to be understanding also to be convenient? A rigorous treatment might
help Ana Clara. But did she want to be treated? “She only thinks of her sew-up job
and her rich executive. Plastic surgery of the vagina.”

“My best angle,” she muttered turning her profile. The necklace was slipping down
over her eyes. She hooked it over her ears. The social structure. According to Lia,
all responsibility lay with the social structure, she had delivered a one-woman seminar
on this structure. “I see dear, I see. I agree completely. But what about Ana Clara?”
Outside the context of structures was the perplexed piety of Mother Alix. “And this
fiancé? Isn’t he going to take any measures either?” Lorena wondered. There was Annie
duly classified in the kingdom of words and in the Kingdom of God, was that enough?
“I’m in control, I’ll stop when I want to,” she retorted. Imagine. The reins had slipped
from her hands ages ago. She had opened them to let go. But was anyone in control
of things? Lia herself, who was always climbing stumps to deliver her speeches, was
she still holding those reins? “She lost her lover flunked her courses because she
cut so often, messed everything up. “She doesn’t even take baths any more. And in
this heat, too,” Lorena thought, reminding herself to buy a deodorant. She found it
depressing to resort to deodorant, what really worked was soap and water. “But if
she doesn’t have time, see.” She lay down on her back on the rug. “I see, Lia de Melo
Schultz, I understand, Ana Clara Conceição. I understand everything because I’m overflowing
with love, Lord Jesus, save my friends. Save my mother who is so gling-glong. My poor
brother with his cars, his women and his guilt, you sit at the right hand of the Father,
but do you ever forget? Save my brother and same M.N. in his fouled-up marriage, if
it will make him happy, oh Lord. Don’t let Fabrízio get mixed up with the poetess,
don’t let him wreck his motorcycle, save everybody, peaceful and delirious, hangmen
and hanged. Save my cat.

Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. Ite, missa est
—I recite, opening my hands palms up. Two salvers empty to receive grace. Which one
day is-to-come. Jesus, I love You. Oh and I almost forgot, save Lião’s friends, they’re
in prison or soon will be, save these children so strong and yet so fragile, we’re
all so very fragile. I go to the Kleenex box and dry my eyes.

“Lorena!”

The girl crawled on all fours to the bed and lay down. Placing her arms along her
body, she raised her legs straight up, toes pointed. Then she brought her legs farther
forward, hips supported by her hands. When her feet touched her head with its hair
spread fanlike on the mattress, she freed her hands and slapped herself on the buttocks.

“They could be bigger. Incredible the way men like women with big asses.”

“Lorena, are you there?”

Did she bring a key? No, she didn’t. Sister Bula has medicine labels and handkerchiefs
in her pockets, not keys. By now she must have put her good ear to the door, wanting
to know who I’m talking to, some man? Curiosity and fear. Courage, dear sister, courage!
The eyes of an aged rabbit watering into the hanky-bedsheet. I somersault backwards
and land on the big cushion which I embrace with all the strength I don’t have. Then
she decides to knock. The little raps seem to be part of a code, in an old movie I
once saw a lustrous gangster knock that way on the don’s door, the fingernails (in
all probability varnished) scratching with utmost subtlety.

“Come in!” I yell. She comes in apologetically, she always enters a room with this
air of asking pardon for merely occupying space. She announces that she can’t stay
but installs herself and stays five hours. Sniffing the roses in the mug, she makes
a rapturous face, ah, delightful! Then stops in front of the Chagall print.

“You know I’m starting to like this picture of yours? It’s strange,” she says hiding
her hands in the sleeves of her habit. “A horse with a veil and a garland. Hmmm…”

It’s the hundredth time she’s made this comment and naturally she will add that the
blue is pretty.

“It’s a wedding, sister.”

“I know, but that mermaid … isn’t that a mermaid?”

“At a wedding you have to have one of everything.”

“The blue is pretty.”

I lift my legs toward the ceiling until my feet touch the light fixture.

“Look, Sister Bula, candle position. The wind blows and the flame bends backward,
farther backward, see? I can do it better on the floor.”

“All the blood will rush to your head, child. It could cause a hemorrhage.”

“It’s great for the circulation.”

“It must be good for hemorrhoids,” she murmured nostalgically, sighing. “Old age is
a disease, child. Everything aches. Some parts worse than others. God knows what He
does, praise be to God.”

“Amen.”

“From my room I could see that you got up so early. I thought you might need something.”

“I need to be alone.”

“Hmm?”

“And some more meat right here, a smaller bottom couldn’t exist. In sport clothes
it doesn’t matter so much, but in a long dress, just picture it!”

She doesn’t hear me. Her eyes are membranous, the eyes of those fish in the still
life that used to hang in our living room at the ranch house. Cooking pots, fish and
rabbits, all dead. A braided rope of onions hung from the table and only the golden
braid had a certain shine to it. “Juliet’s braid,” Daddy used to say.

“Such insomnia, child. I don’t like the night, only the daytime. I like the sun so
much. I wish I could live in a place where there was only sun. A place without night,
without pain.”

With the tip of my toe I make the lantern fixture swing back and forth. If I could
just stick my foot inside as far as the light bulb.

“It would be glory.”

“I’d like to live in a place where there was no death, where nobody got upset,” she
said, smiling as if she had just discovered such a place.

Now she is examining her wrinkled nails, invaded almost to their tips by cuticle so
dry it splits and shreds at the corners. She blots her watery eyes on the handkerchief.
She wants to be eternal. Little Sister Eternity.

“But a place like that
is
death.”

“Breath?”

Let me laugh, ha ha. I think it was this sly creature who wrote the anonymous letter
with thousands of denunciations. Lião a communist and manufacturer of bombs; Crazy
Annie, a drug addict rapidly turning into a prostitute; I, an indolent amoral parasite
living off my dissolute mother, a wicked old corrupter of young men. (“What can one
expect from a girl who has a mother like that?”) She has more bitterness toward Mama
than toward me: “An unscrupulous woman who hospitalized her mentally incompetent husband
and went to burn up his money with a lover who could be her grandson.” Which isn’t
true, Mieux isn’t that young, eeeh, if Mama ever found out. And that other letter
denouncing Sister Clotilde as being Sister Priscilla’s lover, very murky waters. Ana
went in to talk to Madre Alix and saw the letter on the table. Provided she wasn’t
lying, the letter demanded drastic measures to put a stop to such a terrible abomination.
And Mother Alix? Tranquil. She would never allow herself to be sucked into such a
whirlwind.

“Isn’t there a recipe for curing insomnia in your notebook?”

“Dozens, child. But they’re bad for my liver.”

Then keep on composing your marvelous letters, dearie. One for the manager of the
supermarket, another for the amusing ladies in the two-story blue house, yet another
for the breadman, the milkman, thousands of anonymous letters in the inspired hours
of insomnia, her eyes dripping, the callus on her finger growing larger, though the
finger itself is retracted out of
remorse or fear. Ceaselessly producing letter after letter, her handwriting disguised,
her style disguised, begone, Satan! And Satan seated on his rolled-up tail, licking
the stamps. There exists the principal Devil, king of all the rest. The others are
lesser demons, collaborators in the secondary work involving two-bit sins. These are
the ones which occupy themselves with me. “It is necessary to believe in the reality
of the Devil!” said the Pope. But Your Holiness, I don’t believe in anything else!
In olden times they lived in the deserts, rolling about under the sun, rubbing the
scalding sand over themselves, and riding on camels, but now the ideal dwelling place
is the human body. Never before have so many demons sported in so many bodies, which
like the desert are hot and have the advantage of being soft. Their favorite spot
is the womb, or rather, all the southern zone with ramifications in the privates.
I clasp my own. When M.N. enters they’ll come bounding out. Exorcism through love.

“
That which we think is reflected in three mirrors of the absurd
—” I read in the poetry book which I open at random, I consult poetry the way Daddy
used to consult the Old Testament, always at random.
Three mirrors of the absurd
. This one is mine. And the other two? If M.N. doesn’t make love with me urgently—I’ll
turn into a book!

“You speak so softly, Lorena. What?”

Oh dear Jesus, why doesn’t she use one of those marvelous contraptions. There’s a
little gray wire that comes out of the button in the ear and runs as far as the street
like a plastic-coated antenna, it makes things so much easier. Mama described the
crime in detail, she probably has an album of cut-out police articles just like Bulie
here has an album of medicine labels: The old pederast who was strangled by his young
boyfriend with the cord from his hearing aid, listening to Death approach over the
battery-powered wire, croaking hoarsely, what are you doing, love? And his love pulling
the knot tighter.

“After all, they’re too old.”

She puts her hand up to the small bump to which her ear is reduced beneath the veil.

“Crime!” I yell. “There’s been a lot of crime lately!”

“Out of all proportion, dear. It’s the bomb, it must be the bomb. In my time you didn’t
see even the slightest fraction of this violence. Even the medicine labels, you should
see the frightful things they say these days. What a difference! Before,
they were encouraging, delicate, it was a delight to read the instructions of medicines.
But these days—! So full of threats, so harsh.”

Boy Kills Brother at Play. Boy Kills Brother
—that could be the headline in the scandal-sensation newspaper. For the feature, the
testimony of the youngest sister, we print only the initials since those involved
are minors.
L.V.L. said that they were playing. Romulo was running, chased by Remo who suddenly
decided to get the shotgun. It was in the office where the rancher kept it, usually
unloaded. Once in possession of the gun, he shouted at the brother: “Run, Romulo,
I’m going to kill you!” and fired one shot, fatally on the mark, into the chest of
the victim. Although there was a large number of employees working on the ranch, none
of them witnessed the accident; only the younger sister saw the boy fall down bleeding.
Stunned, she ran to call the mother who was in the back of the immense old colonial-style
house. The rancher had gone to the capital that morning, only to return in the evening,
when amid shock and despair he learned of the tragedy that had befallen his household
.