The Complete Stories (40 page)

But when it’s a matter of life itself—who comes to our rescue? for each one stands alone. And each life must be rescued by that each-one’s own life. Each one of us: that’s what we count on. Since Dona Maria Rita had always been an average person, she thought dying wasn’t a normal thing. Dying was surprising. It was as if she wasn’t up to the act of death, for nothing extraordinary had ever happened to her in life up till now that could suddenly justify such an extraordinary fact. She talked and even thought about death, but deep down she was skeptical and suspicious. She thought you died when there was some disaster or someone killed someone else. The old woman had little experience. Sometimes she got palpitations: the heart’s bacchanal. But that was it and even that dated back to girlhood. During her first kiss, for example, her heart had lost control. And it had been a good thing bordering on bad. Something that recalled her past, not as facts but as life: a sensation of shadowy vegetation, caladiums, giant ferns, maidenhair ferns, green freshness. Whenever she felt this all over again, she smiled. One of the most erudite words she used was “picturesque.” It was good. It was like listening to the murmur of a spring and not knowing where it came from.

A dialogue she carried on with herself:

“Are you doing anything?”

“Yes I am: I am being sad.”

“Doesn’t it bother you to be alone?”

“No, I think.”

Sometimes she didn’t think. Sometimes a person sat there being. She didn’t have to do. Being was already doing. You could be slowly or a bit fast.

In the row behind them, two women were talking and talking nonstop. Their constant sounds fused with the noise of the train wheels on the tracks.

As much as Dona Maria Rita had been hoping her daughter would wait on the train platform to give her a little sendoff, it didn’t happen. The train motionless. Until it had lurched forward.

“Angela,” she said, “a woman never tells her age, that’s why all I can say is it’s a lot of years. No, with you, Angela—can I use your first name?—with you I’m going to let you in on a secret: I’m seventy-seven years old.”

“I’m thirty-seven,” Angela Pralini said.

It was seven in the morning.

“When I was a girl I was such a little liar. I’d lie for no reason.”

Later, as if disenchanted with the magic of lying, she’d stopped.

Angela, looking at the elderly Dona Maria Rita, was afraid to grow old and die. Hold my hand, Eduardo, so I won’t be afraid to die. But he didn’t hold anything. All he did was: think, think and think. Ah, Eduardo, I want the sweetness of Schumann! Her life was a life undone, evanescent. She lacked a bone that was hard, tough and strong, that no one could cross. Who could be this essential bone? To distance herself from the sensation of overwhelming neediness, she thought: how did they get by in the Middle Ages without telephones or airplanes? Mystery. Middle Ages, I adore ye and thy black, laden clouds that opened onto the luminous and fresh Renaissance.

As for the old woman, she had checked out. She was gazing into the nothing.

Angela looked at herself in her compact. I look like I’m about to faint. Watch out for the abyss, I tell the woman who looks like she’s about to faint. When I die I’ll miss you so much, Eduardo! The declaration didn’t stand up to logic yet possessed in itself an imponderable meaning. It was as if she wanted to express one thing and was expressing another.

The old woman was already the future. She seemed ashamed. Ashamed of being old? At some point in her life there certainly must have been a mistake, and the result was that strange state of life. Which nevertheless wasn’t leading her to death. Death was always such a surprise for the person dying. Yet she took pride in not drooling or wetting the bed, as if that uncultivated form of health was the merited result of an act of her own will. The only reason she wasn’t a grande dame, a distinguished older lady, was because she wasn’t arrogant: she was a dignified little old lady who suddenly looked skittish. She—all right, she was praising herself, considered herself an old woman full of precociousness like a precocious child. But her life’s true intention, she did not know.

Angela was dreaming about the farm: there you could hear shouts, barks and howls, at night. “Eduardo,” she said to him in her head, “I was tired of trying to be what you thought I am. There’s a bad side—the stronger one and the one that dominated though I tried to hide it because of you—on that strong side I’m a cow, I’m a free horse that stamps at the ground, I’m a streetwalker, I’m a whore—and not a ‘woman of letters.’ I know I’m intelligent and that sometimes I hide it so I won’t offend others with my intelligence, I who am a subconscious. I fled you, Eduardo, because you were killing me with that genius head of yours that made me nearly clap both hands over my ears and nearly scream with horror and exhaustion. And now I’m going to spend six months on the farm, you don’t know where I’ll be, and every day I’ll bathe in the river mixing its mud with my own blessed clay. I’m common, Eduardo! and you should know that I like reading comics, my love, oh my love! how I love you and how I love your terrible incantations, ah how I adore you, slave of yours that I am. But I am physical, my love, I am physical and I had to hide from you the glory of being physical. And you, who are the very radiance of reasoning, though you don’t know it, were nourished by me. You, super-intellectual and brilliant and leaving everyone stunned and speechless.”

“I think,” the old woman said to herself very slowly, “I think that pretty girl isn’t interested in chatting with me. I don’t know why, but nobody chats with me anymore. And even when I’m with people, they don’t seem to remember me. After all it’s not my fault I’m old. But never mind, I keep myself company. And anyhow I’ve got Nandinho, my dear son who adores me.”

“The agonizing pleasure of scratching one’s itch!” thought Angela. “I, hmm, who never go in for this or that—I’m free!!! I’m getting healthier, oh I feel like blurting something really loud to scare everyone. Would the old woman get it? I don’t know, she must have given birth plenty of times. I’m not falling into the trap of thinking the right thing to do is be unhappy, Eduardo. I want to enjoy everything and then die and be damned! be damned! be damned! Though the old woman might be unhappy without knowing it. Passivity. I won’t go in for that either, no passivity whatsoever, what I want to do is bathe naked in the muddy river that resembles me, naked and free! hooray! Hip hip hooray! I’m abandoning everything! everything! and that way I won’t be abandoned, I don’t want to depend on more than around three people and for the rest it’s: Hello, how are you? fine. Edu, you know what? I’m abandoning you. You, at the core of your intellectualism, aren’t worth the life of a dog. I’m abandoning you, then. And I’m abandoning that group of pseudo-intellectuals that used to demand from me a vain and nervous constant exercise of false and hasty intelligence. I needed God to abandon me so I could feel his presence. I need to kill someone inside me. You ruined my intelligence with yours, a genius’s. And forced me to know, to know, to know. Ah, Eduardo, don’t worry, I’ve brought along the books you gave me so I can ‘follow a course of home study,’ as you wanted. I’ll study philosophy by the river, out of the love I have for you.”

Angela Pralini had thoughts so deep there were no words to express them. It was a lie to say you could only have one thought at a time: she had many thoughts that intersected and were multiple. “Not to mention the ‘subconscious’ that explodes inside me, whether I want it to or you don’t. I am a fount,” thought Angela, thinking at the same time about where she’d put her head scarf, thinking about whether the dog had drunk the milk she’d left him, Eduardo’s shirts, and her extreme physical and mental depletion. And about elderly Dona Maria Rita. “I’ll never forget your face, Eduardo.” His was a somewhat astonished face, astonished at his own intelligence. He was naive. And he loved without knowing he was loving. He’d be beside himself when he found out that she’d left, leaving the dog and him. Abandonment due to lack of nutrition, she thought. At the same time she was thinking about the old woman sitting across from her. It wasn’t true that you only think one thought at a time. She was, for example, capable of writing a check perfectly, without a single error, while thinking about her life, for example. Which wasn’t good but in the end was hers. Hers again. Coherence, I don’t want it anymore. Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder. I can only guess at it through a vehement incoherence. To meditate, I took myself out of me first and I feel the void. It is in the void that one passes the time. She who adored a nice day at the beach, with sun, sand and sun. Man is abandoned, has lost contact with the earth, with the sky. He no longer lives, he exists. The atmosphere between her and Eduardo Gosme was filled with emergency. He had transformed her into an urgent woman. And one who, to keep her urgency awake, took stimulants that made her thinner and thinner and took away her hunger. I want to eat, Eduardo, I’m hungry, Eduardo, hungry for lots of food! I am organic!

“Discover today the supertrain of tomorrow.”
Selections from the Reader’s Digest
that she sometimes read in secret from Eduardo. It was like the
Selections
that said: discover today the supertrain of tomorrow. She positively wasn’t discovering it today. But Eduardo was the supertrain. Super everything. She was discovering today the super of tomorrow. And she couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand the perpetual motion. You are the desert, and I am going to Oceania, to the South Seas, to the Isles of Tahiti. Though they’re ruined by tourists. You’re no more than a tourist, Eduardo. I’m headed for my own life, Edu. And I say like Fellini: in darkness and ignorance I create more. The life I had with Eduardo smelled like a freshly painted new pharmacy. She preferred the living smell of manure disgusting as it was. He was correct like a tennis court. Incidentally, he played tennis to stay in shape. Anyway, he was a bore she used to love and almost no longer did. She was recovering her mental health right there on the train. She was still in love with Eduardo. And he, without knowing it, was still in love with her. I who can’t get anything right, except omelets. With just one hand she’d crack eggs with incredible speed, and she cracked them into the bowl without spilling a single drop. Eduardo was consumed with envy at such elegance and efficiency. He sometimes gave lectures at universities and they adored him. She attended them too, she adoring him too. How was it again that he’d begin? “I feel uncomfortable seeing people stand up when they hear I’m about to speak.” Angela was always afraid they’d walk out and leave him there alone.

The old woman, as if she’d received a mental transmission, was thinking: don’t let them leave me alone. How old am I exactly? Oh I don’t even know anymore.

Right afterward she let the thought drain away. And she was peacefully nothing. She hardly existed. It was good that way, very good indeed. Plunges into the nothing.

Angela Pralini, to calm down, told herself a very calming, very peaceful story: once upon a time there was a man who liked jabuticaba fruit very much. So he went to an orchard where there were trees laden with black, smooth and lustrous globules, that dropped into his hands in complete surrender and dropped from his hands to his feet. There was such an abundance of jabuticaba fruit that he gave in to the luxury of stepping on them. And they made a very delicious sound. They went like this: pop-pop-pop etc. Angela grew calm like the jabuticaba man. There were jabuticabas on the farm and with her bare feet she’d make that soft, moist “pop-pop.” She never knew whether or not you were supposed to swallow the pits. Who would answer that question? No one. Perhaps only a man who, like Ulisses, the dog, and unlike Eduardo, would answer: “
Mangia, bella, que te fa bene.
”
*
She knew a little Italian but was never sure whether she had it right. And, after what that man said, she’d swallow the pits. Another delicious tree was one whose scientific name she had forgotten but that in childhood everyone had known directly, without science, it was one that in the Rio Botanical Garden made a dry little “pop-pop.” See? see how you’re being reborn? The cat’s seven breaths. The number seven followed her everywhere, it was her secret, her strength. She felt beautiful. She wasn’t. But that’s how she felt. She also felt kindhearted. With tenderness toward the elderly Maria Ritinha who had put on her glasses and was reading the newspaper. Everything about the elderly Maria Rita was meandering. Near the end? oh, how it hurts to die. In life you suffer but you’re holding on to something: ineffable life. And as for the question of death? You mustn’t be afraid: go forward, always.

Always.

Like the train.

Somewhere there’s something written on the wall. And it’s for me, thought Angela. From the flames of Hell a fresh telegram will arrive for me. And never again will my hope be disappointed. Never. Never again.

The old woman was anonymous as a chicken, as someone named Clarice had said talking about a shameless old woman, in love with Roberto Carlos. That Clarice made people uncomfortable. She made the old woman shout: there! must! be! an! exiiit! And there was. For example, the exit for that old woman was the husband who’d be home the next day, it was the people she knew, it was her maid, it was the intense and fruitful prayer in the face of despair. Angela told herself as if furiously biting herself: there must be an exit. As much for me as for Dona Maria Rita.

I couldn’t stop time, thought Maria Rita Alvarenga Chagas Souza Melo. I’ve failed. I’m old. And she pretended to read the newspaper just to gain some composure.

I want shade, Angela moaned, I want shade and anonymity.

The old woman thought: her son was so kindhearted, so warm, so affectionate! He called her “dear little mother.” Yes, maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life on the farm, far from “public relations” who doesn’t need me. And my life should be very long, judging by my parents and grandparents. I could easily, easily, make it to a hundred, she thought comfortably. And die suddenly so I won’t have time to be afraid. She crossed herself discreetly and prayed to God for a good death.