The Girl in the Photograph (24 page)

Lorena leaned her head on the gate and followed her friend with her eyes. She pulled
up her loose shirt and scratched her stomach vaguely, her fingers descending in circles
to her navel. The tenuous triangular shadow which showed through her white panties
claimed her interest briefly. She smiled at the little bird that flitted through the
tip of the pine tree and perched on the wall of the house next door. With childish
respect she dropped a curtsy: “Good morning, Mister Brown. Good morning, Mister Smith.
How is your father? My father is very well, thank you. And your mother? Oh, my mother
is a cat. A very little cat. So sorry.”

In the silence of the sun-filled garden there echoed a woman’s sunny laugh. Lorena
made her way painfully over the sharp stones, her hands cupped over her breasts, ah!
the breasts of statues. Especially those seminude mountains belonging to the four
bronze ladies seated at the foot of the pedestal, the old man in a vampire’s cape
perched on top. In the Praça das Rosas. And the rosy full-blown udders swollen with
milk at the due times. Milk from the ranch, so foamy and white. The moonlit nights,
milky white too. But when the moon went behind the clouds, the old man’s canine teeth
grew long and sharp, and he would come down to caress the erect nipples of the exposed
breasts, shouldn’t I? You should, they reply silently, offering the bronze blood from
their necks. She smiled the smile that the statues must smile. And caressed the retracted
nipples of her own almost nonexistent breasts, sighing. She would like to be a cow.
A
cow with a humid muzzle and rosy teats, washed clean like the cows on the farm. A
big spotted cow. “Look at the hindquarters on this one,” Daddy would say patting Snowdrop’s
rump lovingly. “Hindquarters,” thought Lorena leaning against the pitanga tree. She
cleaned the sand from the soles of her feet. How much more dignified
hindquarters
than
ass
. “Has this one been bred yet?” he would ask and the cow would answer with a tender
moo, chewing a green cud, green spittle, green shit,
verde que te quiero verde!
She would moo mossily when M.N. rested his face against her green-dripping muzzle:
“My beloved.” The pastoral love of a cow surrounded by bulls on all sides. And virgin,
a cowbell around her neck in case of emergency, clang, clang, clang! A novitiate heifer.
Ana Clara’s first man was a German who farted like a bull when he threw himself on
top of her, like an SS falling on top of the enemy during a silent bayonet attack.
But hadn’t she later said that her first lover had been that philosophy professor,
a black beard and a feather touch? “In short, with Crazy Ana everything’s delirious
anyway.” She thought about Lia with her first lover, staring at the ceiling and smoking,
horrible, horrible. “I can’t explain it,” she began, and explained in detail that
she had chosen her partner coldly, the way one would choose a toothbrush, this one’s
fine, let’s go to bed. “And then, Lia, what did he do?” Lia was sewing a zipper into
some jeans that should have been washed long ago. “Well, we lay in bed smoking and
looking at the ceiling. We talked about so many things, see.” Unbelievable. “But it’s
unbelievable, Lião, the first time and everything so cold,” she exclaimed. Lia regarded
her with a tired expression and bit off the last available scrap of fingernail. “Why
cold? I wanted to know what it was like and took the necessary measures. What’s cold
about that? One doesn’t have to get hysterical. He’s a nice guy. A medical student,
one of our group. The other day we had a Coke together, he’s going to get married.”
I watched Lia sewing in the zipper with her big aggressive stitches, she sewed in
the same tone she spoke, with irritation. “Strange, though,” I ventured and she gave
me a sarcastic look. “As simple as drinking a glass of water. How would you expect
it to be?”

I was washing my combs in hot water with a few drops of ammonia, I’ve already showed
them countless times that combs should be washed this way but did they pay any attention?
Ana Clara puts an ancient plastic comb, all yellowish, into her Dior
purse and Lião insists on black combs, always suspect because they don’t show the
dirt. The only solution is to go into their rooms, collect their sinister combs and
wash them along with mine. I gave such a lovely one to Lião, it even had inlaid mother-of-pearl
on the handle. I warned her that it had belonged to my great-aunt. She thanked me
profusely, stuffed it into her bag of lost-and-found articles and I never laid eyes
on it again. You’ll see, it broke in half the minute she raked it through that hair,
Bahians have very stiff hair. “But how would you expect it to be?” she asked and I
answered that I expected it to be like in her novels, just imagine if any of the characters
in that peach-scented city would go to bed with a man as a mere act of liberation.
And for the first time, too. I see now that I lost a good opportunity to keep my mouth
shut. She ended up destroying her manuscript, poor little thing. She knows now that
it’s not included in any law or article thereof that an intelligent woman
must
write books. I think I’m very intelligent—but did I keep on writing poetry?

I climb the stairs slowly so as to feel the warmth of the stones on my feet. A butterfly
lands on the banister well within my reach. I take it by the wings but it trembles
so hard I let it go. It flies off in confusion as though it has been imprisoned for
a hundred years. On my fingers, the silvery powder. So brief, everything. I was holding
happiness thus a minute ago but it struggled so hard I opened my fingers before it
hurt itself, one can’t force it. If I’d squeezed a little harder there wouldn’t be
powder left, but its soul. I go into my shell. Yes, M.N. I chose you because you won’t
ask me if it’s the first time. Nor smoke looking at the ceiling, you know I’m super-complicated
about sex, careful, careful! Neither will you say that you’re grateful to have been
chosen. Grateful. Abominable. Oh Lord. I’ll kill myself if M.N. speaks of gratitude
or so much as glances toward the ceiling. I want fervor, fervor, you know what that
is? True, he hasn’t manifested very much, but couldn’t that be because he’s self-controlled?
Controlled, of course, a gentleman can’t show his excitement. “My fiancé has a real
hard-on for me,” said Ana Clara one night when she went on one of her binges, her
C-grade vocabulary comes out when she’s really exuberant. I have a particular dislike
for that expression but here it is appropriate: One could say that M.N. desires me,
but doesn’t have a hard-on for me—
that is the question
. If I had those breasts.

He must think I’m unhealthy, his hands protect me more than they caress. As if I were
made of porcelain. “Be careful with those porcelain objects!” Mama warned the movers.
And the rude, hurried men unexpectedly forgot their haste and began to cushion with
straw and cotton the transparent ballerinas from the china closet where the bibelots
were kept. The watered-down blood of the end of a breed. If I ever had a child by
a man as white as I am, it would disappear among the white of the sheets, look at
my baby! I would say to the people who searched, where, where? It would have to be
placed oh a black sheet.

I stretch my hands to the sun which beats through the window. Fragile nails. Weak
fingers. M.N.’s are energetic even in respose, the square nails very well-brushed,
gynecologists wash their hands more than anyone else. The sensibility of the fingertips
that are so familiar with our private parts. That understand our roots so perfectly.
I am perturbed when I think of this but it’s exactly this thought that gives me the
sweet sensation of security: I’m in good hands.

Chapter 8

I sit on the bed and watch the room revolve. I’m motionless I’m the axle. “Sit here
this is the axle of the world,” Jorge used to say sticking up his middle finger. Bastard.
Rotten with syphilis, now I know it was syphilis. He must be dead too. He used to
wake me up screaming. “Coffee! I want coffee!” My mother in bed, vomiting into a towel.
“I think you’re going to have a little brother.” Halfwit. Ah, very kind all halfwits
are nothing but kindness. The prick would shake me awake and I had to get his breakfast
before sunrise because his shitty job was way off at the other end of the world. I’m
coming I’m coming you asshole. I could never sleep as long as I wanted because there
was always somebody shaking me awake, get up, get up! I’d love to sleep for five days
and wake up in that Turk’s office, what’s his name? That analyst. Shit I forget. Never
mind. I’d like to talk about the swamp with my mother’s face in the black water. I
get away as fast as I can, swimming hard, I don’t know how to swim but I keep on swimming,
pulling plants and slime up from the bottom, they rub against me and clog up my mouth,
let me go! I shake my hands and free myself of the gelatinous creatures, leaves, fish.
I know that just ahead I’ll see the swimming pool, it’s right up there, see it? I
dive head first into the clean water and wash my whole body, laughing with Lorena
who’s swimming alongside me. I know how to swim, I say and she shakes her head and
makes faces, saying pool-blue, pool-blue. I want to laugh at her faces but I clap
my hand over my mouth, I’ve lost my bridge. My bridge! I lost my bridge, Ma! I scream
running my tongue over the place where it should be, there’s only the gum slippery
with slime. She saw, she saw. I start to struggle in the water because I can’t manage
to stay afloat any more, I sink with the plants tangling about my feet let go!

“Dr. Hachibe. His name is Dr. Hachibe,” I say wiping my face which is dripping sweat.
I dry my hands. “That analyst of mine.”

Max leaps out of bed and hops on one foot, laughing and groaning. “My leg’s asleep,
Bunny! Completely asleep, completely!”

I drink from his glass. Dammit. Another dwarf dressed in red flashes by, chuckling.
Or is it the same one? I chuckle too. It doesn’t matter.

“Change that record, Max. All those Negroes howling.”

With the tips of his fingers he lifts another record from the pile. Lorena’s gesture.
He likes Bach too. The Mademoiselle with the little watch must have worked in both
their houses, teaching the same things. The tiny gold heart on a chain must have been
removed at night so as not to strangle the little girl. They don’t even need to talk
and they recognize each other from a distance like the Christians from the catacombs
passing each other in the public square. They can mix with others yet they don’t mix.
She can utter indecencies and not be indecent, become a whore without being a whore.
A ring with a coat of arms. This one here has his ring too, God only knows where he
put it. But he has one. The family life. I suffered so much because I didn’t have
one but now. Still, it’s all over, the decline has been setting in for a long time,
I could see that in the album.

“The nha-nha has a photo album in her trunk. Velvet cover, silver clasp. All the ancestors
posing in sepia. She pretends to be indifferent but that’s all she thinks about. She
couldn’t rest until she had showed me every single one.”

But the woodworms came and attacked them so subtly, they went through the taffetas
of the skirts, the English flannels of the trousers, and arrived at the respective
asses. In sepia. Very slowly they began to gnaw the bottoms, Nha-nha says “bottoms”
puckering up her lips. Fine. The bastards gnawed the bottoms and got down to the bones,
shit, the appetite woodworms have! Time for the bones. If she put her little ear against
the trunk she could hear the scratch-scratch of the woodworms burping, also in sepia.
The color of the times.

“Gimme a light,” he says collecting the matches from the box which has spilled over
his chest.

“Her mother lives with a gigolo. Lorena’s mother, that little skinny girl that talks
nha-nha-nha. The widow robbing cradles in order to throw away her money. But even
so.”

“An old American hag wanted me to live with her and travel all over the world in a
golden yacht but her face was enough to
stop a clock, her nose was on one side, look, like this! Her mouth was over here,
everything crooked, look. Look, Bunny!”

“She’s in love with a doctor. An old guy. He’s married, lots of kids, really awful.
But when he disappears she goes nuts. Her brother is a diplomat. ‘Remo, my brother,’
she says every two minutes. He sends her divine presents, the guy has taste. When
he was a kid he killed his younger brother.”

“He killed who?”

“His brother. He had a shotgun and he aimed, boom. Liquidated his brother.”

“What a sinister story, Bunny.”

“Never went to bed with anybody.”

“The brother?”

I pound him on the chest. He defends himself by crossing his arms, rolling over with
laughter.

“It’s her, it’s her who never went to bed with anybody,” I repeat and for each
her
I give him a harder punch. “All excited with her little hummingbird voice, ‘my loverboy.’
Loverboy. Silly combination of lover with boyfriend. She says she’s contemplative-passive.”

“Does she prefer other women?”

“Don’t be ignorant, love. Contemplative is one who contemplates, don’t you know that?
There’s the active and the passive who is so passive the birds make nests in his hair.
She recites nude in her room. She goes wild over poetry and Latin.”

“Aren’t you friends?”

I want to say
yes
but now I can’t. Or can I? Isn’t that what friends are for? To tell us everything.
Unflinching honesty.

Ana Clara sat up on the bed, closed the cigarette in the palm of her hand and dragged
on it, thinking. Didn’t she like her? She did. She liked her a lot. So.

“She’s a snob, she thinks she’s really something. But she’s my friend all right. Who
else gets me out of trouble? Not you. Not that asshole either, it’s her. My friend.
She thinks I’m beautiful, she has the greatest admiration for me. She thinks my eyes
are extremely special. Do you think my eyes are extremely special? Max, I’m talking
to you, pay attention!”