The Girl in the Photograph (32 page)

The woman giggled hiding her mouth in her pink apron. Her face bore a resemblance
to that of the plastic baby.

“He has a doctor’s degree in pleasure, that’s what!”

I fill my mouth with almonds. At the Banquet of Inconveniences this faithful servant
will sit at the head of the table. With my fingertip I test the blue canine tooth
of the Chinese porcelain dragon bristling on the marble table. On the smaller table,
the little silver tree with four enamel-framed photos hanging from its branches like
oval fruit: the small snapshot of a pale dark-haired man wearing the expression Lorena
wears in her mystical moods. On the parallel branch, Mama in a wide straw hat, holding
a pair of garden shears, a bouquet of jasmine at her breast. Just below, on a smaller
branch, a picture of Lorena as a little girl, laughing her tinkly laugh, hee-hee-hee.
On the neighboring branch, a sulky little boy with a crew cut, Romulo or Remo? Only
the four on the tree. And the other brother?

“Come on, she’s calling,” advises the maid. She grows formal once more as a remote
bell sounds the second time. “Not that way, that door leads into the office. Haven’t
you been here before?”

“Everything looks different.”

Corridors and salons as the tunnel narrows and darkens, becoming more secret. An entrance
leads into a shadowy bedroom. Bedroom? For the first time I am entering a veritable
alcove, where I can see no windows but only curtains, and the languid draperies of
a canopy sustained by four slender bed-posts. I come closer. The draperies descend
in soft gathers composing a sort of vaporous cocoon enveloping the gilt-backed bed.
Stuffiness and perfumes. Half hidden among the sheets and embroideries, she rests
upon the piled-up pillows, two cotton pads covering her eyes. The lamp on the bedside
table is lighted; outside the sun explodes but in here it’s night.

Her voice is humid, cottony. “Sit down, dear. Where’s Lorena?”

“She’s probably on her way.”

“Today I need her very much. Today I need all of you, you know what happened, don’t
you? He was my friend, my brother. Half of me died with him. Oh God.”

“I can come back some other time, Mama. No problem.”

Delicately she removes the cotton pads from her eyes and puts them into a silver dish
beside the bottle of rose water. With effort she raises her eyelids.

“I like so much the way you call me Mama. You see, I’m losing everything, people dying
and disappearing. And you come to me and say
Mama
. I always liked you, Lia. I often tell Loreninha, ‘It’s such a relief to know you
have a friend like her nearby.’ “

I laugh to myself. Relief? I sniffle and sneeze because I can’t blow my nose on the
handkerchief I didn’t bring, oh, I’m allergic to this perfume.

“I’ve caught a miserable cold.”

“How painful to think that he’s dead, that that smile, that gaze so strong and at
the same time so sweet … ‘Well then?’ he’d ask me. And I’d answer in the same tone,
‘Well then, Dr. Francis?’ Oh God, my dear friend, above all else my friend. I’m alone
again. Completely alone.”

She is crying and I search for but cannot find anything to say as she cries in silence.
She was wearing a white suit when we met, a flannel suit that Lorena would call
impeccable
. It was on a Sunday, she had come to bring half of a roast turkey with walnut stuffing,
which Ana and I devoured while Lorena nibbled on a wing. She had just had a facelift
and was euphoric. But can this be that attractive lady? She has melted like a chocolate
icecream sundae, more cream than chocolate. I draw back on the little bench; she is
trying to see the maid who was behind me but isn’t any longer.

“Do you want something?”

“Oh, Bila’s disappeared. Just push that button there, four servants and none of them
to attend when I call, all four sit around talking in the kitchen, push again, they
don’t hear. Oh God. He seemed so steadfast, do you understand? Everything could fall
apart, go to ruin. But not him. As though he were immortal. So refined and at the
same time authoritarian, powerful. Rough and yet genteel. I’ve only known of one other
man like him and that was in a novel. A novel by Cronin. The character was like him,
but people like that don’t really exist. Dr. Francis. I didn’t even see him dead,
nobody told me. He had played tennis that afternoon, he played tennis marvelously,
even participated in tournaments. I can imagine him with the racquet in his hand,
his movements so energetic, elastic, all of him had such energy and elasticity. Oh
God, Oh God. My dear friend. ‘Well then?’ he would ask me. ‘Well then, Dr. Francis?’
“

The tears run, dripping down her stretched face which hasn’t the slightest wrinkle.
But her hands are gnarled like exposed roots of a plant pulled up from the ground,
oh! the desire I have to be anywhere but here. I’ll think about Miguel, Miguel rhymes
with farewell, a poor rhyme but so rich, I’m coming! The Mediterranean Sea. Democratic
and Popular Republic of Algeria. The ocean, what color will this ocean be?

“You can find another analyst, that’s no problem. All it takes is money, you can be
treated by the best psychiatrist in the world.”

“Seven years. Seven years. I’m back to zero, everything I’ve said and done, everything’s
been lost as if in a shipwreck. With his death, I’m reduced to nothing as if—oh God,
how can I accept it? How can I accept it?”

He’s the one who probably hasn’t accepted it yet, I think and take advantage of the
opportunity to blow my nose on my shirttail, she’s closed her eyes. There won’t be
time, the office will have to wait until tomorrow. I’ll phone Bugre and explain, if
he can leave the message with Mineiro. Okay, a call will take care of that. A screwed-up
day. Loreninha might have come to hold up her end of things, mightn’t she?

“I gave myself to him entire, on a tray—past, present, he took it all. With his death
he gives it all back to me again. Those rocks. I had taken them all off one by one,
so many rocks piled
up on top of me, here on my chest. I took them slowly off, he would encourage me,
‘Come on, girl. Take a deep breath!’ at times he’d call me that, ‘
girl
.’ ‘What’s the trouble, girl?’
Girl
” she repeated covering her mouth into which tears are running. “Now the rocks have
fallen back in place, heavier than before, there are even more of them. How can I
go to someone strange, who doesn’t know about anything, and repeat it all again? …
seven years. He could tell how I was feeling just from the way I walked, at times
I would decide, today I’ll bluff, I want to pretend I’m cured, ‘I’m fine, Dr. Francis,
today I’m just fine!’ He would just look at me, that penetrating stare that could
pass right through one. And then I’d burst into tears because that was exactly the
thing I needed to do, to cry. I’m back to zero.”

I’d sure like to know who picked up my
Writing Degree Zero
which I haven’t even read yet. Mayakovsky and Lorca I’ll give to Bugre. Malraux,
the Beauvoir and Sartre go to Pedro, he’ll be thrilled. Eliezer can keep the Brazilian
authors, analyze Indianism down to the last feather, it’s necessary, it’s necessary.
The history of philosophy and the dictionaries can go to Loreninha. Psychology books
for Ana Clara, who knows, she might still get unkinked and finish her courses. Crazy
Annie. Even Mother Alix, who’s been the faithful keeper in person, is beginning to
get a bit neurotic; neurosis is contagious. Like a spark in dry straw. The whole thing
burns up.

“God knows that if it wasn’t for him, I would already have thrown myself out that
window.”

I look in the direction she points, only now can I manage to visualize a window behind
the draperies. Lorena is the type who withdraws into her shell too, but she likes
fresh air.

“How can a Christian lady talk like that? Aren’t you a Christian?”

The tears have started again, more slowly, running from the corners of her eyes and
infiltrating her hair.

“He was my father, my brother, my lover. In the spiritual sense, you do understand
me, I hope?”

“Perfectly.”

“Everything I had and lost. I was thinking, the terrible thing about life is that
things end. Everything ends. On my ranch we used to have a sugarcane grinder, the
children loved to drink the juice we’d squeeze. Roberto, my husband, used to like
to choose the sugarcane himself. It would go into the grinder so green and
fresh, it would go in alive and come out the other side a dry pulp, all smashed to
bits. Not a drop of juice, only pulp. Life does the same thing to us, my dear. Just
the same. And people do their part in grinding us up. I ask myself how she could possibly
have been so cruel.”

“Who? Who was cruel?”

“Those viper’s eyes. The nurse. A snake-in-the-grass!”

“Who, Mama?”

She took a handkerchief from under the pillow and let it hang suspended from her fingers.
A handkerchief as soft and transparent as the canopy hangings.

“You’re from Bahia, aren’t you, Lia? I think that’s why you’re so polite, Bahians
are especially polite. Do you study Law too, dear?”

“Social Sciences.”

“Ah yes, Social Sciences. I’m so happy to think you’re Lorena’s friend. My dear little
girl. So pure, so honest and sensitive. So refined. It’s not just that she’s my daughter,
but I know it’s hard to find a girl like her. When I committed this madness of marrying
again, when I fell in love with this man who has made me cry tears of blood, I asked
her opinion, ‘What do you think about it, daughter?’ And she took my hands between
hers and answered with that sweetness you’ve already seen, ‘Whatever Mama does will
be the right thing.’ She doesn’t even know the half of what’s happened to me, I don’t
want her to be hurt, to suffer. This boyfriend of hers, the latest one, do you know
him?”

“Only slightly.”

“I somehow got the idea he might be married, a reference Loreninha made, but I don’t
quite know … when I was a young girl I read a charming book, nobody reads it any more
but my mother’s generation delighted in it,
The Exemplary Girls
, by the Countess of Segur. Have you ever heard of it? When I see Loreninha with her
delicate old-fashioned air I remember that book.” She sighs, covering her eyes with
her handkerchief. “I don’t care too much for that other friend of yours, the redhead,
she was at a nightclub the other day with a very strange group of people. Undoubtedly
very pretty, but so vulgar. What’s her name?”

“Ana Clara.”

“That’s it, Ana Clara.”

“She’s a nice girl,” I say and flex my leg which has fallen asleep. I get up, I sit
down again. But why was the nurse cruel?

“You were telling me about the nurse, remember?”

She pushes back the sheet. One lace strap of the nightgown slides down, exposing her
breast. A dark wilted orchid, oh, can it still be daytime outside?

“The nurse who worked for him, Estella. A real snake-in-the-grass. I got there so
cheerful in my turquoise-blue dress, he loves that color, I arrived early thinking
that it would be a lighter session, without complaints or tears. I wanted to make
him laugh a little with me, say funny things. Have you ever had analysis? Before going
in one always thinks about the accumulation of things one’s going to say and then
one doesn’t say them but others instead, everything changes. But this time it was
going to be as I’d planned, enough lamenting! There’s the little anteroom where one
arranges oneself before and after the session, particularly after. The countless tissues
I’ve taken out of that box to dry my eyes! I always take a handkerchief in my purse
but sometimes I forget. Or lose them.”

I wait for her to tell me the story of the nurse, but it appears that the story will
be as Dona Lã, the retired fortune-teller, used to prophesy: Far in the future a distant
happiness … My mother was godmother to her child. On the dressing table is a picture
of
him
wearing sideburns and smoking a pipe. The pose of a movie actor blowing his discreet
puff of smoke. How absurd for a woman her age to fall for a type like that. What good
did all that analysis do? Seven years. And on top of everything else she falls in
love with the doctor who fades away without solving the problem, it remains present
and entire.

“I’d like to die. If I could just die without leaving the slightest trace, I hate
the idea of funerals, of people taking us by surprise. Only young people’s coffins
should stay open.”

“Young people’s and vampires’,” I say wanting to lighten the atmosphere.

No good. The low front does not offer the slightest visibility. “Due to technical
difficulties,” begins the stewardess in a cheerful voice just as the airplane loses
half its left wing. Everybody tightens their seat belts, fear, fear. I’m a land animal
and I’m going to have to go up in one of those. I’ll get drunk, if the damn thing
explodes I don’t want to be aware of it. Hell, fasten your seat belt.

“I have a horror of people who come in without knocking, or come up from behind to
surprise one—a horror of being unprepared, and that’s exactly what death does, it
doesn’t give us time. I consider it a betrayal!”

There’s something sinister about that lineless face, doesn’t it resemble one of those
shrunken heads, speared on a post? A mummy, see. And the nurse? Wasn’t there a nurse?
Now I have to find out what happened with this nurse, Lorena has the same habit of
leaving stories half-finished.

“Why was the nurse cruel?”

“She always hated me, always. A horrid woman, she doesn’t know how to dress or do
her hair, a viper who decided to get old. Is it my fault if I look younger? If I like
to take care of myself? She was green with envy of me, she was in love with Dr. Francis,
now I’m sure of it, she was passionately in love with Dr. Francis. I think she was
radiant over his death,
Neither mine nor anyone else’s! Isn’t
that a form of victory?”

Among the pillows of the divan I spy a gold-wrapped box, bonbons? I am almost drooling
as I stretch my hand toward it, “May I?”