The Girl in the Photograph (16 page)

Was there a photo? No, but every paper has its artist and this one did a fine job
with his vigorously sketched reconstruction of the scene: The mother sitting on the
ground with Romulo on her lap, one of her hands holding up the trunk of his body,
the other hiding the wound. She is disheveled and in tears but even as she suffers
she somehow projects an inexorable calm, the calm of one to whom the worst has happened
and who knows that nothing worse can ever occur. A recognized artist, it wasn’t by
accident that his sketch was compared to the Virgin succoring the Dead Son. Giovanni
Bellini. Museum of Milan.

“In Milan there’s a square for deaf-mutes, they meet there every afternoon. Their
gestures create a rustling sound like foliage, I would close my eyes and hear them,
ssssss.”

“The most famous was the crime of Dona Brunilda, a rancher’s wife who was found without
her head,” says Sister Bula holding onto her own. “It was dreadful. For months and
months they looked for the poor lady’s head,” the nun went on, turning her uneasy
gaze toward the shelves.

“Did they find it?”

“Not at all. Neither the murderer nor the head. Everyone was saying it was the husband,
apparently she liked her daughter’s
music teacher, a very handsome young man who played the piano and wore a flower in
his lapel.”

A carnation. Shubert’s
Serenade
. Spells and perfumes. Strains of violin music when nobody was playing the violin.
A rustling of wings: the Seducer Angel in the shadow of the curtain.

“Somebody wrote an anonymous letter to her husband,” I say. Why do I think of my father?
Of Romulo? I lose the desire to joke. If only M.N. would say to me, “I love you.”
Or Fabrízio.

“Do you remember Fabrízio?”

“Fabrízio? That boy with the motorcycle?”

I run to the window, was that the phone? The empty windows. Empty garden. Her membranous
eyes question me. Virgin eyes too, no, I don’t want to be like that, not me! Ah, M.N.,
my love, my love. 1 pull the amber necklace tight around my neck and stick out my
tongue.

“If he doesn’t call or come see me, I’ll kill myself. I’ll be the first suicide case
to be canonized.”

She laughs her little gnome’s laugh, hah, hah, hih, hih.

“Ah, child, marriage would cure you. Why don’t you marry this Fabrízio?”

“I can’t. He has a mechanical leg.”

“He has what?”

I go to get a glass of liqueur.

“A mechanical leg.”

She shakes all over, coughing and laughing. Her gums appear, rosy plastic with enormous
sand-colored teeth in Indian file, why do dentists make false teeth so big? Prodigalities
to make up for the lost teeth? The Prodigal Son came back toothless and in rags, the
years topple heavily but teeth fall like the breadcrumbs that Hansel and Gretel scattered
in the forest, the poor things wanted to mark the way back. And the birds came and
ate up the crumbs, farewell warm hearth, farewell childhood. Why, my love, why so
many children? And to mix himself up in this church group, what do you intend to do,
save your marriage? Your marriage is rotting away, what is there to save? Naturally
it was she who had the idea, the witch. A gorgeous man, imagine if a witch would give
up easily. Five kids. She must be extremely fat. Thighs full of cellulite. Floppy
breasts. In short, a cow.

“Sister, I’m getting awful, awful. Pray for me.”

“Is this apricot? I like it better than that peppermint one. Pure nectar.”

I dilate my nostrils, squeezing my solar plexus. The smell of Sister Bula is stronger
than that of liqueurs and, cigars: dry flowers, with a vague touch of disinfectant
added, and something of the sea coming through pallid scales, ah, if I breathed in
now I’d die. I suspend my life in the air and hide under the pillow: Death is here
in yet another costume, staring at me with pickled eyes. I’m capable of killing myself-but
I don’t want to die.

“Playing hide-and-seek? Child, child!”

She drains the last drop from her glass, she’s wild about liqueur. I return her liqueurish
smile. Sister, dear Sister, promise you won’t send me a letter denouncing the Japanese
who runs the lunch counter for making sandwich filling out of my cat. Oh Lord.

“Another glass, Sister?”

She rests her hands on the armchair cushion, ready to get up. Now I don’t smell the
scent of sea and flowers, Death has disappeared and in its place is only an old woman,
deaf and virgin, who has lost Paradise because of some letters. To love my neighbor
as myself. I reach out my hand toward her. But suddenly she becomes distrustful, she
wants to leave, just my wanting to like her is enough to send her running away in
panic, she’s afraid of me as I was of her.

“I need to help Sister Priscilla grate coconut, she decided to make coconut candy
but she cut her finger, I must go,” she repeats.

“First try one of these biscuits, you haven’t tried these yet,” I say. When I come
back with the can she’s looking with great interest at her feet. Since she has short
legs, her feet don’t touch the floor and her legs hang in the air, like those of a
child in the visitors’ parlor.

“I must go, dear.”

But she doesn’t. Sister Priscilla is already grating her other finger, ah, how distant
the word from the act! If I didn’t talk so much about making love, if Ana Clara didn’t
talk so much about getting rich, if Lião didn’t run on night and day about revolution.

“It’s still early, Sister Bula. Here, this magazine came just yesterday,” I say offering
her the biscuits and the magazine.

She strokes the cover photo of a girl.

“But why do these girls always have to have their pictures taken with their legs apart
that way? Why do their legs have to be so wide open?”

“I agree, my dear. Wide-angle sex. Women have lived so long with the angle narrowed
that now they have an ax to grind, poor things.”

“Speak up!”

“Lião must have written ten papers explaining this, liberation through sex, dearie.
The easiest door, it’s very extensive,” I scream as I change the record.

Bach? 1 rest my cheek against the cover. M.N. my love, I want so much to go to bed
with you while listening to this prelude. I won’t ask for anything more, I’ll go away
forever but you
must
make love with me, it has to be you, do you hear? He doesn’t. I pick up a fallen
rose petal and put it in my mouth. I make it split apart with a kiss, and sticking
it to my lips I thrust the tip of my tongue out through the hole, the way we used
to play with flowers on the ranch. Want to see how well she can hear?

“Sister, oh Sister, I think I must be unbalanced, I think about sex so much.”

“Do you really?”

“All the time.”

If the Devil wanted to be agreeable, he would carry Bulie away on the breeze, and
by return breeze bring me M.N. We’d lock ourselves in my charming bathroom and if
Ana Clara or Lião turned up I’d call out, “Not now, dearest, I’m taking an immersion
bath that has to last two hours.” And turn on the tap.

“Ana Clara said she was going to be on the cover of a lot of magazines. I haven’t
seen anything yet. Have you, child?”

I carry my box of manicure instruments to the bed—I always keep this box close at
hand. Whenever I sense the beginning of liquid and uncertain conversations, I get
out my emery board and cuticle scissors so as not to waste time. Thus my nails are
in beautiful shape. I even gave myself a complete pedicure the other night while Lião
was rehashing Simone de Beauvoir. From Simone de Beauvoir to sex was only a step,
why the first sex, why the third sex, why the second. As always fatally happens, we
started talking about the act of sex itself. And the
spirit of Herr Karl hovered over everything. She grabbed my arm so hard I actually
winced. “You’re
not
going to tell me you’re still a virgin!” I breathed in; Yes dear, I am. So she bit
off the last fraction of fingernail that she had left on her favorite finger. Of course
it was all M.N.’s fault, “Incompetent bourgeois!” she muttered cutting something out
of a newspaper, she keeps folders and folders overflowing with newspaper cuttings
about politics. There was only one subtle way out: “It’s not every day one meets a
Guevara,” I said and her eyes softened. The Nazi eagle turned into a dove, coconut
palms swayed,
coqueiro de Itapoã, coqueiro!
Dona Diu smiled from her hammock. “When everything seems to be lost, when even Miguel
can’t manage to cheer me up, I think about Ché and there comes to me the certainty
that I
will
overcome. Sometimes, Lena, sometimes I think he had to die for me to be reborn.”
I agreed. But I would have gotten upset if she’d attributed the source of life to
him, is it the Gospel according to Mark? “Marvel not when I say to you, ye must be
born again.” I kept my mouth shut and went running to get whiskey to toast the revolution.
I felt light enough to fly; finally I had stopped thinking about M.N. And about this
whole dramatic affair of my virginity. I confess, from time to time I need to talk
about it, I bring the subject up and provoke people’s reactions with an awful urge
to be center-front stage. But then suddenly I feel so ashamed (though
shame
doesn’t really describe it) that I can’t stand the slightest reference, my problem,
I state emphatically,
DO NOT ENTER
. Whiskey for her and guaraná for me, I adore guaraná. When Lião saw the two bottles
together she looked thoughtful. “President brand, Lena? Our poor guaraná looks pretty
insignificant beside that.” I quickly explained that it was a present from Mama when
in reality
it was a present from M.N., these little lies that facilitate our mutual well-being
weren’t condemned by Pope John XXIII, a sainted Pope. Knowing I don’t drink, M.N.
offered me the bottle, “Wouldn’t your friends like some?” Greater delicacy couldn’t
exist. “The only thing those fools know how to do,” said Lião, serving herself a generous
shot. “The movies they see have a lot of class too,” I ventured but she didn’t even
hear me because she was already warming up for her principal lecture, in which the
decadence of the establishment is proved through the illustration of drug abuse. “I
can’t explain it but it’s a mistake to think that drugs
reflect an antiestablishment attitude, see. The last time I was in Salvador I almost
went crazy, I felt so sorry for them, there’s armies of junkies,” she sighed and her
eyes filled with tears. Mine did too, ah, it was too too sad. The Bahian so close
to the Indian in his state of innocence. I mentioned this very idea to Lião but I
must have been
gauche
because she stared at me half-sadly, shaking her head. “This tone of yours, Lorena.
This tone,” she repeated. Then, shrugging her shoulders, “I can’t explain it, but
…” and for hours she explained that the fastest way to kill the Brazilian Indian is
to try to civilize him. For a while I followed her speech but then I began to tire
of it. Yes, the Indian. I adore Indians. But can I help it if I always start thinking
about the nineteenth-century poet Gonçalves Dias and his noble savages? Now she was
talking about civilized vices. I got an opportunity to quote the verse, “Oh, Tupan,
what wrong have I done you / That from your fury you pluck for me a poisoned arrow?”
But Lião is not impressed with poetry. Unexpectedly she began a discourse on the fall
of the dollar and this time she was right in saying that she couldn’t explain because
she didn’t explain a single thing. If that was the kind of subject she wrote about
in her little leftist newspaper, the readers would be in fine shape. But fortunately,
her journalistic duties consisted of gathering material. I asked her what she was
doing in her spare time now that Miguel was in jail. “There isn’t any spare time,
see. I distribute pamphlets, direct a study group and translate books. As long as
some more important mission doesn’t come up,” she insinuated, tying her shoelaces.
The dirt had incorporated itself so completely into the canvas that even the most
ingenious chemical operation couldn’t get it out. But the laces were clean, mysteriously
clean. Wasn’t it strange they should be so white? Thinking about the shoelaces I asked
her if her friend was still incommunicado. “Which friend, Lena? So many of them are
incommunicado, an infernal crisis. We need money, people, everything. I almost lose
my mind with the tons of urgent things that need attention. But what can you do without
yenom, what? Even so, I don’t lose my faith. The structure for revolution is completely
intact, all we have to do is connect the little motor—us—with the central motor.”
She stood up and with her air of a political rally paced to and fro, holding forth
on the difficulties of organizing the workers, the great majority of whom were habituated
to servitude, misery, the inheritance
transmitted through generations of conformity. “Their fear, Lena. Fear of assuming
responsibility, it’s shitty enough to make you cry. We have a good group ready for
whatever happens, the problem is with the older ones and the intellectuals. Only about
half a dozen are worth anything. The rest sign their little manifestos, hold their
secret meetings, the secret smile of the Mona Lisa, glass in hand. Big deal.” I looked
at the glass she was clutching as energetically as an athlete carrying the baton in
a relay race. When Ana Clara takes hold of a glass, she raises her little finger with
the refinements of a truck driver at a wedding party but Lião closes her fist and
digs in her nails, that is, the places where her nails should have been. Better to
bite them all off, imagine her bothering to cut them. I returned to the shoelaces:
but why were they alone clean? Lião stopped talking and stared at me like someone
who has lost his way in the forest, made an enormous circle and suddenly discovered
that he is back where he started. Sitting down on the floor, she took out a cigarette
and rolled it between her fingers. “My friends are all in jail, I could be arrested
when I walk out of here—” she began softly. “Manuela is in a mental hospital, crazy,
and Jaguaribe is dead. And you worry about my shoelaces.”