The Girl in the Photograph (18 page)

“I’ll get you a chamber pot. I have a friend who’s got a china
chamber pot with gilt edges and angels, see. If she’ll take the fern out of it I’ll
borrow it for you.”

He pulled up a chair and straddled it.

“I moved everything myself, everybody else gave the orders but it was only me who
did any work. This place was a dump, I emptied three wastebaskets already and there’s
still that one. There are even mice, look there at the bugger’s tunnel,” he whispered,
pointing at a mouse hole in the angle of wall and floor. “He’s smart, too. Made me
run after him like a damn fool and then quietly retired to his private quarters.”

“Probably a cop disguised as a mouse.”

“When I came out of the movies yesterday they asked me for my identification. I was
so scared, Rosa. Don’t you get scared?”

Lia ran her tongue over her gnawed fingernail. She did not answer at once.

“Fine. Tomorrow I’ll bring a stronger bulb. And a calendar without a Coke ad. Where
did this marvel come from?”

“Shit, I have no idea.”

Going to the window, the young woman tried to open the Venetian blinds but the cord
was stuck. She peered through a crack between the worm-eaten slats.

“The inside court. Do you know what’s across from us?”

“A tailor shop, I spoke to the old man when I got here. Neat, Rosa. You see the wire
netting down there? In case of an emergency, it’s perfectly possible to jump onto
it and get away through the old man’s window.”

“And he’s a super-squealer, if we stick our heads in the window he’ll grab us by the
neck, like this,” she said pulling Pedro by the collar of his pullover sweater.

Locked together, they pulled and jerked in a short, fierce fight and separated laughing.
He examined the bite on his wrist and she gathered her hair, which he had pulled loose,
at the nape of her neck.

“Gee, you’re strong! I think I would have gotten beat up if you’d kept on,” he muttered
examining his arm.

“Look, Pedro, I know a nun you can look at and say, wow, there couldn’t be a nicer
little grandma. You should read the anonymous letters she writes everybody. I just
hope she doesn’t discover the address of the Federal Security Police, she’s almost
blind.”

“Anonymous letters? How super! Have you gotten one?”

She tapped her fingers against the cracked glass of the window.

“We’ll cover this with newspaper. Got any glue?”

“None, not a drop. No Scotch tape, no paper, nothing.”

“Tomorrow I’ll bring some stuff. Did Bugre leave any money?”

“He said tomorrow. All I hear from everyone is tomorrow,” he groaned scratching his
head. “I don’t have change for cigarettes, even.”

After offering him her pack, Lia stared up at the glass globe with its timid aura
of light.

“A trap. The bugs go in and can’t get out again. And even if they do, there’s the
spiderwebs outside, an even worse death. Death without a battle, annihilation. Inside
a spider’s guts.”

“They could get out the way they got in, couldn’t they?”

“If they could, they wouldn’t be in there dead.”

“But the politicized ones got away.”

Lia was cleaning the typewriter keyboard with the green cambric handkerchief. She
wiped off the table, rubbing energetically at the more intransigent spots, and then,
throwing the blackened square into her bag, looked about for an ashtray. Smiling,
she flicked her ashes onto the floor.

“I have a friend who’s so fanatic about cleanliness and order that I’m picking up
her habits. Wherever I go she comes after me with a little ashtray in her hand,” she
added taking a newspaper cutting out of a book she had brought. “Do you read French?”

“I read a little English.”

She scanned the clipping, and turned to Pedro.

“This is an interview with André Malraux about Guevara. Do you know who Malraux is?”

“A writer, isn’t he? Who just died a while back?”

“The one who died is André Maurois, he’s of no interest. This is Malraux, a very important
guy, see. His novel was one of the most fabulous things I ever read,
Man’s Fate
. It’s available in translation.”

We were drinking coffee with milk. Hot ham-and-cheese sandwiches. The happiness that
rushed through me when he said, “Let’s have some coffee, we’re freezing.” My knees
against his, our sandwiches so close that I could bite the one he
was blowing on. Hot steam came out of his mouth. I can’t explain it, I said, but if
you get arrested I’ll go and turn myself in too. He didn’t answer. He took the book
from his canvas bag and opened it on the tabletop. “This Malraux is very good, the
problem is you’ve marked the whole book up with these crosses, why did you do that?
You underlined everything, look there.” But Miguel, isn’t it my book? I asked and
he spread jelly over his bread. “Don’t talk like a Nazi, sweetheart. You have to think
of the other people who are going to read it, you can’t impose your taste on others.
You interfered with my reading,” he mumbled kissing me with his mouth smeared with
jam. Orange marmalade. I stare at the cigarette that has fallen off the matchbox where
I balanced it. It rolls, no longer burning, over the table.

“Bored, Rosa?”

“Let’s get to work.”

Inside the cluttered drawer there was everything but paper. Having succeeded in finding
a pencil, Pedro took a red-handled toothbrush out of the bottom. He aimed at the wastebasket
and threw the toothbrush but it hit the broom handle and glanced off, landing near
the window.

“I never did understand the billiard-ball effect,” he said and faced me. “I’d like
to ask you something, Rosa, can I? It’s something I want to know.”

“Sure.”

“Did you ever have an experience with a woman?”

“Yes.”

“Really? How super! And…?”

“I don’t understand what it is you want to know,” I say laughing inwardly because
I know exactly what it is he wants to know.

“Nothing extraordinary about it, Pedro. Very simple. It was in my hometown, I was
still in high school. We were students together and since we both thought we were
ugly, we invented boyfriends. When I remember! … how wonderful it felt to be loved
by boys, even boys who didn’t exist. We sent each other love notes, she pretended
her name was Ophelia and I was Richard, with the green eyes and a certain mockery
in his gaze, oh, how she suffered from that mockery. But a little suffering only added
to the fun. I don’t really know when Richard’s name
started disappearing and mine stayed on. I guess it was one night when I put on a
sentimental record and asked her to dance, may I have the pleasure? We started dancing
all in giggles but while we were twirling around something was changing, we grew serious,
so serious. We were so terribly ashamed, see. We held and kissed each other with such
fear. We used to cry with fear.”

“Were you happy, Rosa?”

I run my hand over his strong chin.

“It was a profound and sad love. We knew that if they suspected we’d suffer even more.
So we had to hide our secret like a robbery, a crime. So many alarms. We started to
talk alike. Laugh alike. So close it was as if I had fallen in love with myself. I
can’t explain it, but the first time I went to bed with a man I had the sensation
of loving a
strange being
. The Other. The mouth, the body, no, I was no longer one, we were two, the man and
me.”

“Did you think that was good?”

“When we want something, it becomes good. And I wanted to know what it was like in
order to be able to choose. I chose. But when I remember … Oh, why do people interfere
so much? Nobody knows anything but they all talk, judge. There are too many judges.
One night she called me up in tears, her family was about to make a scandal, I had
to disappear, or in other words, appear in the form of a boyfriend. Reinvent with
urgency a boyfriend, the boyfriend of the beginning of our game. I’d have to send
her letters, keepsakes from a fellow who wouldn’t be Richard any more, what name then?
I bribed the kid from the bakery to talk over the phone, we needed a voice for Ricardo,
we chose Ricardo for his name. We had to lie so much on account of other people that
we got contaminated with lying. We weren’t lovers but accomplices. We became formal.
Suspicious. The fun had gone out of the game, it went sour. Then she left her ficticious
charmer for a real one. As for me, I let myself be squired about by a cousin, there
was talk of an engagement.”

“And what about your family, Rosa?”

“My father was aware of everything but never said a word. My mother made a few guesses
and panicked, she wanted to marry me off to the cousin as quickly as possible. The
neighbor would have been OK too, an old man who played the cello. She did everything
she could to tie me down, but I packed my
necessaire
and came here.”

“What’s that?
Necessaire
?”

I open the newspaper article on the table and glance at my watch.

“One of my friends is always talking about preparing your
necessaire
—foolishness. It means pack your bag, your toothbrush kit. Let’s get to work?”

“I’m at your service, Rosa de Luxembourg.”

I take two chocolate bars from my bag, one for him and another. And the other for
him too, I decide. I throw him the second bar, I have to lose ten pounds, don’t I?
Then I grab my share back and now I can’t answer because my mouth is full. Miguel
in jail, no money, father and mother far away, all my friends disappearing around
me and I’m going to deny myself sugar?

We chew, concentrating.

“Who mentioned her? Rosa Luxembourg,” I ask.

“Jango.”

“A fabulous woman. She was murdered by the German police right after the First World
War.”

There’s a malicious glint in Pedro’s eye.

“I heard your father used to be a Nazi. That true?”

I slap the table with far more irritation than I feel.

“He had a fling at it. But look, we’re not playing, I want you to get that through
your head. Here I’m Rosa and you’re Pedro. Period.”

“Just one more question, only one more, I promise!”

“You ask too many questions, see.”

“This Rosa de Luxembourg, was she pretty?”

“There wasn’t any
de
. No, extremely ugly. But come on. Malraux was an old-time revolutionary, he was in
China when things started. He participated in the Spanish Civil War, the French Resistance
etcetera, etcetera. As he got older, he started to get soft and ended up as one of
de Gaulle’s cabinet ministers. But before that he was pretty neat. Look how lucid
this comment on Guevara is, he considers Ché the greatest man of our time, but with
the wrong technique, and the proof of this is that he died in an ambush, a trap even
stupider than that light fixture up there. He was mistaken to think he was dominating
those villages around him, I can’t explain it but they were really controlled by the
Americans.”

“Slower, let me jot that down.”

He finds an old purple felt-tip pen and licks it with the tip of his tongue; his handwriting
is clear but his lips have purple spots. I put the clipping away. I’d like to put
him away too, somewhere safe, like the bottom of my bag, protected, Oh! I’m turning
into a sentimental old lady.

“Look at this, Pedro! Also, in Malraux’s opinion, the revolution in Latin America
will be of a Trotskyite character, it won’t be a revolution of the masses.”

“Hell, I think that way too.”

I light our last cigarette. He takes a drag and his hand trembles slightly.

“You could include the testimony of a Peruvian priest, Wenceslau Calderón de la Cruz,
isn’t that a lovely name?”

“Wenceslau who?”

“Calderón de la Cruz. He considers men like Guevara and Martin Luther King to be modern-day
saints.”

“I don’t like King,” he mutters.

“Leave it just Ché then, but think again about Martin Luther King. In olden times
saints were those who did the most penance, exercised the most charity, you know,
all that stuff. But everything’s changed. Today a Christian can’t gain salvation of
his soul without serving society
objectively
. I can’t explain it but anyone who fights with his entire consciousness in order
to help those in misery and ignorance, anyone who through his office or instruments
of work lends a hand to his neighbor, is saintly. The roads may be crooked, it makes
no difference. They’re still saintly.”

“At that point I could put something in about our priests, right, Rosa? You should
have seen Brother Christóvão, yesterday he came down with a bad cold but still he
went out in the rain to visit the little hookers down at the Maison Rouge, we almost
had to beat up the madam. Their ages vary between thirteen and sixteen, they’re only
recruited in that age span. He went from there to talk to that blonde who hustles
down by the cemetery gates, he takes them one by one, such a slow job, he has to use
up so much spit. And the things he hears in exchange!”

“Romanticism. But even so, a more logical romanticism than the request of all those
priests pouring into the Vatican. Marriage! A priest has to marry the Church! Otherwise
he won’t be a priest, he’ll want to do other things. A halfway priest is like a
halfway politician, garbage. A priest shouldn’t even be allowed to marry his own mother,
how can people respect them? I don’t attend Mass, mind you, but if I ever decide to
go back some day, I want to find a priest with a clean mind to give me communion.”

He chuckled. “So sex is dirty?”

“I can’t explain it, Pedro, but in the case in point it interferes tremendously. It
fragments. And the priest has to be whole, we’re the ones who are in pieces. Priests
who want to screw have no calling, they’re ambiguous, and ambiguities are abominable.”

“I’d bring halfway leftists to your attention too, God, what a shitty bunch.”

I’m cold and hungry. I pick up a piece of twine from the floor and use it to tie back
my hair.

“Sometimes I get so fed up with this group. And now with this business of the ambassador,
dammit. It’s fear.”