The Girl in the Photograph (31 page)

I open the gate. Mama’s red Corcel is parked in front, with the chauffeur inside.
He’s reading a newspaper.

“Waiting for Lorena?” I ask.

“For over half an hour. She asked for the car but then went out and hasn’t come back,
she must have forgotten, she lives in outer space. I think I might as well go.”

“Are you going to her mother’s? Can I have a ride? I have to pick up some clothes
there.”

I get in beside him. A gray-haired mulatto man with the air of someone who has been
waiting not half an hour but half a century. Outer space. My grandmother used to talk
a lot about people who lived in another world. The lunatics. Lorena didn’t see just
one flying saucer in the sky, but a whole squadron of them in formation.

“Have you worked for the Vaz Leme family a long time?”

“Oh, so long I’ve lost track. I used to carry Loreninha on my lap. Before being a
chauffeur I used to drive the tractor on their farm.”

This man, for example. Would he be interested in joining the group? Obviously he’s
become complacent. His armchair is far more modest than that of his employers, but
it’s still an armchair. He’d want nothing to do with us. And his son?

“Do you have any children?”

“A girl about your age, miss, and a boy a little older.”

“What does he do?”

“He works at the Mercedes-Benz office. He’s doing real well,
too. My late employer had a cousin who worked there, he helped my boy get started.
Yes, I’m very happy with my son. At the end of the year he’ll be promoted and then
he plans to get married, he’s engaged.”

My eyes are fixed on the little plastic baby hanging from the rearview mirror. Its
face leers so mockingly that I can’t stop staring at it.

“And are you happy with your daughter too?”

He takes a minute to answer. I see his mouth harden.

“This fad you young girls have, this liberation business. She’s gotten entirely too
free for my taste. Just lately she’s decided to study again, she’s taking one of those
short-term courses to get her high-school degree.”

“And isn’t that good?”

“I only know that before I’m laid to rest I want to see my girl married, that’s all
I ask God for. To see her married.”

“Guaranteed, you mean. But she could study, learn a profession and get married besides,
couldn’t she? Wouldn’t she be even more guaranteed that way? If her marriage doesn’t
work out, she’ll be alone and unemployed. Older, with children, see.”

The leering baby shakes with laughter as the car hits a bump. I discover that it’s
not his masturbating that nauseates me but his shiny, satisfied little face.

“Miss Lorena talks that way too, but you’re from rich families, you can afford such
luxuries. My daughter is a poor girl, and the place for a poor girl is at home with
her husband and children. Studying will just make her worry her head while she’s doing
her laundry at the washboard.”

The living-room chairs covered in plastic. The television. The soap opera about rich
people and the soap opera about poor people, the poor ones more sincere but with more
problems. Partially solved in the final episodes when virtue is rewarded. Although
two of the cynical characters go unpunished, there were too many people. The conformity
to the status quo only darkened by the ambition to own a new car and a bigger TV,
a colored one—oh, but wasn’t it a scheme of that sort that I was yearning for a little
while ago when I was looking at Cat? My face grows red as I imagine myself dragging
Miguel to look at store windows during the spring clearance sales. Closing him in,
using up his strength and patience with the junk of everyday life, refusing him an
encouraging word on the day he is disenchanted,
a negative presence, no! If I am to fail as so many have failed, let the winds blow
my airplane with all the force in their cheeks onto the sharpest peak of the cliffs,
all the passengers saved except for a young Bahian coed who was plunged into the abyss.
End of story.

“And what if she marries some no-good and later starts walking the streets because
she doesn’t know how to do anything else? Have you thought of that? I’m sorry to speak
so harshly but you’ll be responsible before God if you start telling her ‘get married
right away honey or your Daddy won’t die happy.’ If you believe in her, I’m sure she’ll
want to show you she deserves your confidence, she’ll be responsible. If not, it’s
because she hasn’t any character, she wouldn’t amount to anything either married or
single.”

There, I’ve made my speech. I get out and slam the car door. He’s a bit confused.

“But I never thought …”

“So think!” I say sticking my face through the window. “And something else—if you
don’t want to get ground to bits in an accident, yank that baby off the rearview mirror.
Who put it there? I can’t explain it, but that thing has terrible vibrations. I knew
two people that had trinkets just like it in their cars. One drove off a bridge into
the river and the other was sandwiched between two trucks. Both they and their cars
got pulverized, fire, shipwreck, everything. Only the plastic babies were found, laughing.
Intact.”

I’m laughing too as I go into the apartment building.

“Yes?” said the butler opening the door a crack.

Lia straightened the pile of books under her arm.

“I’m a friend of Lorena’s. I came to pick up a suitcase of clothes.”

“Isn’t she coming?”

“I have no idea, see. Her mother’s expecting me.”

With an evasive gesture he pointed to a chair in the shadowy vestibule. His gaze once
again floated indifferently on the stagnant surface of his eyes. He closed the door
and studied Lia slowly, hesitating.

“I don’t know if she’ll be able to receive you today.”

“But I called yesterday morning, she said for me to come.”

“Your name?”

“Lia. Lia de Melo Schultz. Schultz, my father is German, I can speak German.”

He turned his back on her and walked away without a sound over the rug-strewn marble
floor. Why do the king’s servants end up bigger turds than the king himself? thought
Lia tucking in her shirttail. Her fingers explored the empty belt loops—who might
be wearing her belt? She smoothed back her hair. Examining her inflamed thumb, she
moistened it with her tongue where the nail was bitten down to the quick. On the wall,
the tall mirrors reflected her from all angles. How to get sick and tired of yourself.
Quickly she bent forward until she was below the level of their frames, settling herself
on the rug. How could Narcissus get free, enslaved by his own reflection? She grinned.
Lorena was fond of mirrors too, just like her mother. How did the lorenense philosophy
go? Being was the stagnation of existence. “If I want to
exist
I can’t even
be
in the mirror,” she added to herself, interested in the pale-brown and blue pattern
of the rug. Once accustomed to the gloom, she could see the twisting design more clearly:
A tiger pursued a gazelle until pouncing on it in the next two sections, digging claw
and tooth into its flank, from which flowed a filament of bright-blue blood. Other
pursued and wounded gazelles multiplied over the wool and silk of the miniature Oriental
tapestry. No matter how fast they ran—and run they did!—they were all condemned. She
stroked the terrified head of one that was jumping out of a thicket and searched among
the leafy intricacies and arabesques for a different route the gazelle might take
to escape the imminent tiger: It would have to jump off the rug. The enthusiasm with
which men created or destroyed the element of fatality in all they touched! And then
attributed responsibility to the gods. “You are free,” she whispered into the panicked
ear of the gazelle.
Now
it was free. It was
still
free. She covered the attacking tiger with her book and lay down on her back. The
chandelier with its crystal prisms was another fatality hanging there from the ceiling.
And the wall clock inside its long black-and-gold case. The pendulum was in the shape
of a lyre but the hands were aggressive arrows. “Only our numbers count,” they advised
sternly, pinning down their target. The energetic beat of the mechanical heart inside
the case. What a magic thing time was. Time of Algeria, suddenly it had become the
time of Algeria. What would it be like? Improvisation. Adventure. Certain
only the desire to fight, to survive. Certain, the diary. “I want everyone to know
that nobody in the world ever loved his country or his people more,” she would write
in the introduction. Words already bled dry by the politicians in their campaigns.
But she would use them to express a new sentiment. A live one. She’d talk to Miguel
at length about that: If the New Left didn’t unite with the other groups they would
all end up so divergent and weakened that when a common language was attempted, nobody
would understand anybody else. “The Church is already living out its Tower of Babel,”
she remembered tapping her cigarette ash into the tiger’s eyes. “Are we going to follow
in its footsteps? I ask for a brick and they throw me a rafter. Fractionalized, divided.
How to organize the masses in such a confused state?”

Lia blew on the little roll of ash, which came apart and gradually disappeared into
the rug. She smashed the cigarette out against the sole of her blue tennis shoe. They
were fated just like those gazelles, after every two, the third would be caught by
the neck, skip two more and the blood would gush out in a blue stream. “No!” she exclaimed
turning over on her stomach. The diary would be in a simple style like that of the
notes and memoranda in her notebook. She opened it at random. She had difficulty in
deciphering her own large sprawling handwriting. “Today, the twelfth, Lorena said
was bath day. I went into her shower and was almost boiled alive because the cold-water
faucet had something wrong with it. Next she offered me lunch, which means raw carrots,
a boiled egg and a glass of milk. If I hadn’t attacked the bananas, (I must have eaten
half a dozen) I could never have accomplished the thousands of things I did. On the
way out I met Depressing Ana who was coming in extremely depressed, she had had a
conversation with Mother Alix who must be losing her patience. She spoke in a whisper
to Lorena, she wanted to borrow some money. Then she asked to borrow a sweater. And
told me that she was in anguish, which is nothing new, either she’s riding high or
down in the dumps. Why does her slightly cross-eyed expression make me dizzy? After
picking up my passport—Algeria, Algeria!-—I went to the office and there found Pedro
and Elizabeth at work. They are in love, or rather, Pedro is ardently impassioned
but she seems very cerebral to me. And people like that fall in love in a different
way from the passionate ones like Pedro and me. She leads a feminist
movement and was composing an article about women’s jobs in our market. Why am I moved
by the thought that Pedro is going to suffer? Shit, he has to suffer. Drink kerosene
and gasoline because that’s how one builds personality structure, I believe. But in
my heart of hearts I get sentimental, I almost say, as Lorena would, ‘poor little
thing!’ From there I went on to Bugre’s apartment. Dil, Ivone, and Eliezer were already
there listening to music. Chico Buarque and Caetano. Bugre arrived and we started
to work. Four solid hours of extremely fruitful study. From economic theory to philosophic
idealism, from philosophic idealism to the crisis of physics in the beginning of the
century, from there to Hegel, all passing through the tortuous paths of folly, ignorance
and love for Brazil.”

Miguel is cerebral, thought Lia closing her notebook. But wasn’t that a good thing?
He averaged out with her, who was the excessive type, in the explosive moments at
least one head needed to be able to reason. Or not? I’m the stupid one if they catch
me with these notes. Why am I walking around with them?

“She’s just finishing her bath, she’ll see you right away,” announced a pink-aproned
maid entering the foyer. She collected Lia’s already-dead cigarette in an ashtray.

“Come into the living room. Isn’t Loreninha coming?”

Is that all anybody can ask around here? thought Lia as she followed the maid. She
piled her books on the floor of the living room, which was brighter and more spacious.

“I haven’t seen Lorena today. I can come back some other time, no problem.”

“But she wants to see you, wait just a little. It’s that today this house is in confusion.
The poor thing has hardly stopped crying, her eyes are all swollen up …”

“But what happened?”

“Dr. Francis died!”

“Who’s Dr. Francis?”

“Why, the doctor who treats her nerves! The funeral was yesterday, she didn’t know
a thing about it. Would you care for some fruit juice? Or do you prefer whiskey?”

“A little whiskey, straight. But listen, I only came to get a suitcase full of clothes,
can’t you take care of it?”

“Wait, miss. You talk to her a little, it’ll do her good.”

Without much enthusiasm Lia took the glass. In the first
stage, the dim foyer and the butler with his stagnant face. Now, the more important
waiting room with the relaxed little maid offering things to drink. Feeling herself
a visitor in ascension, Lia drew closer to the oil portrait dominating all one side
of the wall. Mama rejuvenated and revivified by a recent transfusion of fresh blood.
Lorena adored vampire films; well, there was her mother in a gauzy dressing gown,
her face very white, her eyes sepulchral. Even her hair was dense, like two black
clots hardening against her high forehead. The Countess Dracula.

“Do you like it?” the maid wanted to know, simpering with her hands in her apron pockets.
“It cost a fortune, that portrait.”

“It’s unsettling.”

“And it’s been two days since he showed up. Why, just today three women called asking,
‘Is the doctor in?’” the maid mimicked in a flutelike voice. “Well, after all, he
could be her son.”

I egg her on. “But is he a doctor?”