The Girl in the Photograph (23 page)

“It doesn’t make sense, Lião. If you’re a leftist, you have to accept these renovations
that are part of the picture. It’s the New Church rising up from the ruins of the
old one, let’s have unrepressed priests, contented ones. Latin America needs to make
more love than other Americas. The tropics!”

“I can’t explain it, Lorena, but the Church has opened her legs too wide. What saves
her are priests like those who battle out there, I almost cry from admiration, shit,
how they fight. They’re the only thing in the whole structure left alive.”

She unwrapped the sandwich, took a vigorous bite and put the scattered objects back
in her bag.

“To pack a machine gun is OK, but get married,
verboten
. Is that it?”

Lia recovered and ate the piece of ham from the front of her sweater where it had
fallen and stuck. She can’t talk, her mouth is too full. I reroll the faded hems of
her pantlegs. And these dusty black socks, where in the world did she get them? Ah,
Lia de Melo Schultz. Pure prejudice of Dona Diu mixed with the Nazism of Herr Schultz.
A priest making love? To the gas chambers with him! As if we were in the dawn of time,
when Jehovah separated the water from the land, the darkness from the Light, the Good
on one side and the Evil on the other. And the twilight area?

“In the twilight remains love which transgressed, dear. The zone where it’s neither
night nor day but penumbra, halftones. Silence. The zone of those who prefer to stay
quiet. Homosexuals belong there, adulterers, the incestuous, those of tenebrous love,
isn’t it a splendid classification? From my own little head. Priests who want women
fit in there, too. Ambiguity, fear.”

Slowly Lia wadded up the wax paper into a ball and placed it beside the overflowing
ashtray. She hauled off her sweater. Lorena looked at her cotton undershirt which
she had put on inside out.

“Boy, are you square,” muttered Lia. “Square and romantic, which comes to the same
thing.”

“Your shirt’s on inside out,” Lorena advised.

And wished she hadn’t. It was very probable that the right
side was even yellower. She waited, eyes lowered, while her friend undressed.

“But look, Lena, if they get tangled up with women they’ll be even more fearful, that
is, they’ll have more problems. Why marry? If they don’t want a political cause, there
are thousands of other causes around needing full-time attention. I think priests
have never been needed so much as now. People going crazy, dying, ‘I want to confess,
I want to take communion!’” she yelled shaking her arms and legs in convulsions. “And
the bastards abandoning their career. Fantastic, see. Is that Chopin? Change it, I
want something happy. I’m happy, Lena. But what are you doing?”

Bent over the other’s neck, Lorena was trying to undo the knot in the string which
held the little silver fish and the bell. “Just a minute, dear, wait, I have a silver
chain I never wear, this string is ugly, wait, I’ll change it. But these priests,
eh?”

“Our Indians catching syphilis, kids dying of overdoses, slums and rats, multiplication
of whores and scarcity of bread. And
now
, of all times, these guys worry about declaring a
nihil obstat
to screw.”

Finally the knot came loose. Lorena went to get the chain and rang the little bell.

“It looks so pretty, Lião. Wait a minute, don’t move, I want to put a little cologne
on your neck, that horrible string left a mark, imagine. This is a delicious perfume,
it makes you feel so fresh. Smell.”

With a certain resignation, Lia bared her neck and scratched her nose, thinking, “I’m
allergic to perfume.” She scowled:

“You can’t believe how enthused I am over these priests who are fighting the problems.
Action, Lena, because we’ve had too much contemplation already. To go out, talk until
your mouth is dry, walk until your bones poke through your skin, take the curses,
the doors slammed in your face, the stones hurled at you, and still continue without
fainting, keep on even in the midst of the misunderstanding and hostility, keep on
till you die, didn’t they choose to live that way? Are they soldiers of Christ or
not? Did Christ stop to relax in a hammock? I picture Christ as a dry dusty man in
broken sandals, plodding over the roads like a demented person, facing hunger, thirst,
sarcasm and mud, even the disciples doubting, getting fed up. And Him? I can’t explain
it, Lena, but I turn into ground glass when I hear this business
about priests sitting down on the job. And stop that, will you, I’m allergic, I can’t
breathe with all that perfume. I have to go.”

She took the chain, kissed it. She kissed Lorena and stuffed her sweater into her
bag, then slung the bag over her shoulder.

“And our lunch, Lião? Weren’t we going to have lunch together today? I’d love to offer
you a marvelous lunch, strawberries with cream, remember? We haven’t had lunch together
for ages.”

“Another day. Come to the gate with me.”

“Wait, take some yenom, I’m loaded.”

“But that’s a lot,” I say as she thrusts a wad of bills into my bag.

“Offer a reading lamp in my name to your group.”

“A reading lamp?” I repeat and laugh. I feel almost ashamed to be so happy. “What
I’ll do is buy some stuff at the officesupply store, there’s nothing in our office
but trans-Amazonic poverty.”

We go down the steps hand in hand. She stops halfway down and lets out a yell. I look
at her bare feet, did she hurt herself?

“Lião! Later this afternoon how about a movie? There’s a werewolf film on.”

“No, today I can’t, see. I’ve got so much work to do. And I have to see about—” I
begin and stop in the middle of my sentence. Sister Clotilde is coming in our direction.
“Well, things.”

“Lorena! Barefoot on these rocks! Aren’t they hurting the soles of your feet?” she
cries in alarm.

Leaning harder on my arm, she turns to the nun and makes a martyred face.

“Horribly.”

Giggles. Comments from both about the beauty of the day. Lorena confesses that she
wants to
holler
on a day like this. I pick up a stone and squeeze it hard in the palm of my hand,
oh, it resists, I can squeeze until the end of time and it will stay intact. The happiness
I get from things that resist that way. I put it away in my bag, now it’s me who has
to holler at the sun, Miguel! World, we will save you. We will save you, I repeat
and my eyes are swimming in tears.

“Do you know if the grades are out?” asks Lorena in a stage voice.

It’s the signal. I bend my head to hear the secret she’s going
to tell me. Sister Clotilde waves a discreet good-bye and moves away with her loaded
shopping basket.

“Tell me.”

“Ana Clara is pregnant again.”

“The fiancé?”

“Better it were. But with the fiancé everything is platonic, she’s pregnant by Max,
the other one. She has to have an abortion urgently and then plastic surgery in the
southern zone, can you imagine? She’s in terrible shape, poor thing. On heroin, Lião.
I’ve seen the marks.”

“Last night she came in during the wee hours and got the rooms mixed up, she came
into mine. She went straight to my bed and started shaking me, I almost died of shock,
I thought it was the police.”

Lorena holds me by the waist. Her feet are hurting but she needs to punish herself.

“We have to do something, Lião. It’s madness, madness. She can’t go on this way.”

I look at the withered pitanga tree that never bore fruit. It looks dead. But there
in the heart of the stem it’s still alive. Lorena follows my gaze. She picks a leaf,
crushing it between her fingers, and sniffs it. Suddenly, she turns her back to me
and climbs up on my feet, “Carry me!” I hold her around the waist and, stuck together
like Siamese twins, we make our way slowly down the driveway, she guiding me because
with her head in front of mine I can’t see where I’m going. She is as light as the
scent of soap in her recently washed hair. It covers my face like a handkerchief flying
in the breeze. I think of Carla, why do I think of Carla? I squeeze her harder. She
laughs, she’s ticklish. We love each other, yes, we do love each other, this is love.
I can’t explain it, but I love Pedro too, and Bugre and Crazy Ana, I love them all.
I’m capable of caring for them all, principally Miguel. Her feet slip off mine, she
loses her balance. I almost fall on top of her.

“Come on, get down.”

She won’t obey, she wants to play more. I lift her up by the waist; in the air she
stiffens and strikes a ballerina’s pose. I deposit her in front of the gate.

“When I was a kid I used to walk for miles like that with Romulo.”

“Is that the diplomat?”

“Romulo died. The diplomat is Remo.”

“I’m always getting them confused.”

“Everybody does. You know that trunk I stored in the garage? Inside there’s an album
of old photographs, one day I’ll show it to you. The house on the farm was beautiful,
that very pure colonial style. It was a hundred and twenty-odd years old, can you
believe it?”

I open the gate. But there’s still something I have to do, what was it? I bow my head,
oh, I know.

“I’m tied hand and foot, Lena, I can’t do anything to help Ana Clara. If I get involved
with drug addicts! Even if she were my own sister I couldn’t, wherever there are pushers
and addicts there are dozens of cops, they’re doing all they can to make it look like
we’re mixed up with drugs. I can’t take the chance. I know she’s sick but it’s a sickness
that makes me want to strangle the patient. They go down with their astonished faces,
they all sink one by one, you pull them by the arm, by the hair, yell, threaten, do
everything and they go on sinking like cement blocks thrown into a swamp. Even animals,
Lena, animals react, kick back. Not them. They sink with that empty expression, dead
inside. What is there to do?” I ask and pull on the gate, oh, how hard it is to do
what one wants. “I’m already late, Lena. My trip, millions of preparations.”

Lorena leans on the bars of the gate and groans, whether from pain or discouragement
I don’t know.

“I feel so sorry for her. I feel like an accomplice because I help her, there’s a
word for it in Penal Code,
connivance
. But how can I refuse? Mama already deposited the check for my car, I can give her
the yenom for the operations, there’s no problem. But I know it isn’t yenom that’s
going to help her, not now.”

“I’m going to need some too, Lena, the trip is coming up soon. What a pain to get
a passport, oh, how many papers. Requirements.”

“The other night she told me she had seen God.”

“There’s not a junkie who hasn’t. I think God is getting more popular, a good sign.”

The red Corcel flashes in the sun. A boy on a bicycle crosses the street. From some
yard a dog barks loudly. There’s a man in a dark suit standing under the tree on the
corner. Noticing he’s being observed, he takes a newspaper out and begins to read.

“What’s the matter, Lião? Why are you looking like that?”

“That man,” I say.

His wife comes out of the garage. She opens the door of the car. He gets in. I breathe
to the very center of the earth. Like a child, Lorena sticks her fingers through the
iron grillwork of the gate and hangs from the rusty curlicues.

“What if it’s true, Lião? That she saw God, like she said.”

“Have you seen Him?”

She grows tired of the position and now regards the red marks on her hands.

“Mama had a friend at school who woke up one day with the marks of the Crucifixion
on her hands. Romulo, my brother, heard about the story and the next morning shook
me awake, I have the marks, I have the marks! He showed me the impressions on his
hands. But my other brother Remo was smarter, it was Mercurochrome! Can you believe
it? I used to make enormous soap bubbles, neither Romulo nor Remo could make bubbles
as big as mine.”

A little yellow-spotted beetle is climbing up the sleeve of her cambric shirt. Already
I’m remembering her this way, barefoot with her little beetle and her virginity, puzzling
over the bubbles she used to blow.

“Oh God, this trip.”

“Bahia?”

“Farther, I told you, pay attention, Lena! Overseas. Later I’ll tell you the details,
now I can’t answer any questions.”

“We’ll have a going-away party, eh, Lião? Guga can come with his guitar, drums, I
have all kinds of liquor, shall we throw a party? You can invite all your friends.”

“My friends?
Verboten
, oh,
die Zeit entrinnt
,” I say and open the gate.

Crazy German. My father. Sometimes when he drank he would sing and then he seemed
like a god to me, only strange, because he sang in a strange language. And then he
became a stranger with all his prestige of war and exile. His strong soldier’s voice,
how did the song go?

“
Wie einst Lilli Marleen! Wie einst Lilli Marleen!
”

Lorena repeats the refrain, tapping out the rhythm enthusiastically. “Sing some more,
Lião, sing some more!” She tries to detain me, was I sure I couldn’t come to lunch?
How about a ride in the Corcel? An ice cream at the club? I go out and slam
the gate. Behind the iron fence she looks like a prisoner trapped in her garden. I
feel mildly sad but immediately I want to laugh. Points of view: Don’t I look like
a prisoner to her too?

“Ask Mama if she has any old clothes she wants to get rid of, we accept anything,
shirts, underwear, sweaters, whatever.”

She reaches through the gate and tucks in my shirttail.

“Of course she has. Maybe she’ll even decide to give Romulo’s clothes away. He was
only thirteen but he was so well-developed, you know my sweater with the blue stripes?
It was his. She put everything away, it’s so morbid,” she sighs pulling my chain with
the little fish outside my shirt. “And Mieux’s stuff? He buys shiploads of fabric
and then changes his mind, you can even make uniforms.”

“For revolutionaries without a revolution?” I ask.