The Girl in the Photograph (2 page)

At the same time, however, the reader of 2012 will likely note something else about
the women of Telles’s novel; they are all
dependent on, and even subordinate to, the men in their lives. This is obviously (and
satirically so) true of Lorena, whose monomaniacal preoccupation with a married man
who has little or no interest in her borders on the absurd; but it is also true, in
more sinister fashion, of Ana Clara, whose dependence on drugs is equaled only by
her dependence on Max, her junkie lover. Sadly, the reader watches as Ana Clara’s
twin addictions, to drugs and to Max, lead inexorably to her destruction. If Ana Clara’s
is the most poignant of the three stories, Lia’s offers the clearest possibility of
something different, a new, more progressive kind of liberation. Yet even here, Lia,
portrayed throughout as a kind of Brazilian Rosa Luxemburg and otherwise so in command
of her own body and mind, cannot, seemingly, escape being at least emotionally subservient
to Pedro, her political prisoner lover. Upon his release from prison, moreover, Pedro
decamps, alone, for Algeria, where he will renew his revolutionary activities. Once
again separated from her lover, and by the same brand of male dominated politics that
had segregated them in the first place, Lia will do anything, submit to any humiliation,
in order to join him. Lesbianism also emerges in Telles’s text, first in a comic mode,
as Lorena’s fretful mother worries that, if her daughter cannot soon find a man, she
may end up preferring women as love objects, but also as a serious topic of discussion,
one relating to the important questions of freedom, women’s solidarity and female
eroticism. And, not surprisingly, some of Telles’s female characters suffer from what
we might, today, term body image issues.

An attorney, a venerated writer, and a long-time commentator on issues germane to
Brazilian and world culture, Telles asks
us here to consider the true nature of “liberation”—its political contexts, yes, but
its emotional and intellectual ones as well. More presciently, she also asks us to
eschew relationships in which one person is subservient to another person, to a particular
ideology, or to a single system of thought. True liberation, Telles suggests, is much
more complex and far-reaching than commonly thought, and, running the gamut from the
workplace to the bedroom and from the kitchen to the political arena, she takes pains
to show that it must be germane for women and men alike. For real social and political
progress to occur, in Brazil or anywhere else, women must liberate themselves from
their status as chattel and as second class citizens while men must, in turn, liberate
themselves from the silly, outdated ideas and ways of thinking that have convinced
them they are somehow innately superior beings. To move forward, Telles’s reader comes
to feel, men and women will have to learn to work together for their common good,
though the attaining of this admirable goal will require that both genders make drastic
changes in the ways they see themselves and each other.

There are, in fact, very few male characters in the novel, and those who do play a
role are feckless and destructive in the extreme. Max, Ana Clara’s drug-addled lover,
epitomizes this tendency. Other men populate the storyline but do so primarily as
vague presences, imaginings or impressions held by the women, figments of their hopes,
dreams, and desires. The character known as M. N. (Marcus Nemesius) is the prototype
of this approach to male characterization for Telles, though most of the novel’s other
male presences, like Ana Clara’s ultra-wealthy but nameless betrothed, or Lia’s fellow
revolutionary and
paramour
, Pedro, are of
this same type. The case of M. N. stands out, however, because of his real name, which
evokes the idea of nemesis, and because he is, as becomes clear from his disregard
for Lorena, who wastes her time pining away for him, in all respects antithetical
to her best interests. The “love” she wants, or needs, to believe she feels for him
is imprisoning without being in the least liberating, exhilarating, or fulfilling.
One suspects that something similar could be said of Lia’s commitment to, or infatuation
with, Pedro. Like the broad spectrum of women (and men) she represents, Lorena is
a prisoner not merely of the idea of “love,” but to a particularly fatuous, materialistic,
and superficial kind of love: a “love” not based on true comradeship and solidarity
but produced and sustained by a self-serving web of political and cultural lies, a
weakness for self-deception, and by a mind-numbing flood of market-generated fantasies.
In Telles’s characterization of Lorena, in some ways the novel’s most important character
(given what her story symbolizes and the class she represents), the reader sees how
a callow young woman of means can grow from an unthinking and self-centered obsession
with shallow notions about “love” that are both debilitating and enslaving to an awareness
of others and a commitment to strength and courage that are both healthy and socially
valuable.

At the end of the novel, when Ana Clara has returned to the boardinghouse, fatally
battered, beaten, and abused after having attended a “party” at the country estate
of her wealthy but (one feels) morally and ethically bankrupt “owner,” it is Lorena
who, growing up quickly, takes charge and makes the hard decisions that will begin
to set things right again. While in a strict sense, her conduct, too, at the end,
can be read as grotesquely comic, in
another way it can be seen as something much more serious and fraught with political
import, a moment of personal realization when a hitherto unconcerned and oblivious
female character/citizen realizes that things are unacceptably bad and that something
has to be done. By shucking off her earlier status as an unthinking child of privilege
and her silly infatuations with the kind of “forbidden” love epitomized by her obsession
with M. N., and by showing, in a moment of crisis, the kind of courage, character,
and leadership that she (and Brazil) needs, Lorena emerges, at novel’s end, as a symbol
of Brazil’s future, its social and political restoration as a democratic republic.
Indeed, her status at the end as a female harbinger of a better Brazil seems amplified
by the fact that her two brothers, aptly named Romulo and Remo, end up behaving more
like Cain and Abel and less like the founders of Rome. For students of Brazilian literature,
Lorena’s emergence at the conclusion of
The Girl in the Photograph
as a powerful, new force for change will recall the similar emergence of the impoverished
sertaneja
, Vitória, at the conclusion of her novel, Graciliano Ramos’s canonical
Vidas Secas
(1938;
Barren Lives
, 1965). If Ana Clara represents the damage done a society by acquiescence to the
seductive charms of substance abuse, mindless consumerism, and the ignoring of political
tyranny, and if Lia, another admirablydrawn character, represents the need for active
civic engagement and responsibility, then Lorena can be said to represent the need
for Brazil’s middle and upper classes to step up for justice and democracy as well.

The final chapter, then, lends itself to being read as a political allegory, one that
shows the dire consequences that result when
a society—any society—decides to abandon its most vulnerable, most disadvantaged citizens
and to lavish benefits instead on its elites, its most powerful and politically connected
figures. No society that wishes to be a democracy can do this and survive—a point
that, while obviously applicable to late 1960s and early 1970s Brazil under its military
dictatorship, also speaks directly to American readers in 2012, as their own country
struggles against a rising tide of reactionary and oligarchic politics, ever-growing
corporate power, and the plutocratic rule of the ultra-wealthy that threatens their
own democracy. While men, Telles’s story suggests (Remo, for example, lives on, after
accidently killing his brother), will continue to play important roles in this struggle
for social, political, and economic reform (in Brazil and worldwide), that struggle’s
potency and viability is being conspicuously enhanced by the ever-stronger participation
of women like Lorena. As
The Girl in the Photograph
makes clear, the pro-democracy, pro-justice activism of women must be encouraged
and supported by all concerned.

In 2012, when, with Dilma Rousseff, Brazil now has its first woman President (something
the United States has not yet been able to achieve), and when women occupy many seats
of political power in Brazil, this reading of Lorena’s characterization seems more
prescient that it might have back in 1973, during some of the grimmest years of the
flagrantly patriarchal dictatorship. Interestingly, however, this use of strong female
characters to embody the future of Brazil does not begin with Fagundes Telles; indeed,
it dates back, in Brazilian literature, at least to the nineteenth-century, and writers
as diverse as Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, José
de Alencar, Domingos Olímpio, Aluízio Azevedo, and Machado de Assis, though it has
continued on unabated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with such authors
as Graciliano Ramos, Clarice Lispector, Nélida Piñon, and Regina Rheda.

Much more than a novel set during the Brazilian dictatorship,
The Girl in the Photograph
is very much a portrait of our times, and the issues it discusses and the questions
it explores should resonate deeply with American readers, who, in numerous ways, will
see much of themselves and their own culture in it. Telles’s novel will speak to women
readers especially, though it will also speak to the men who love them, and to everyone
who loves democracy and seeks freedom and justice for all, as opposed to the privileged
few. Although it can certainly be read as an important Brazilian novel, it can also
be read in a broader, hemispheric context, as an American novel with much to say to
the United States of America in 2012. Yet
The Girl in the Photograph
will also be read as a work of fiction that does much to strengthen ties between
the United States and Brazil, as well as between these two nations and their New World
neighbors. Improved inter-American relations are going to play a major role in New
World affairs during the twenty-first century, and writers like Lygia Fagundes Telles
are making vital contributions to this mutually beneficial experience.

Finally, a word of praise must go out to the novel’s translator, Margaret A. Neves,
who has given us a translation as fluent and as natural in English as it is in its
original Brazilian Portuguese. This is a major accomplishment when one considers how
deeply entwined are the interior monologues which characterize the three women, and
by which their stories are interwoven. A careful and
discerning reader and a skilled writer (as all good translators must be), Neves manages
to keep the three monologues separate, distinct, and vital, and to reproduce for the
English reader the many shifts in tone, semantic fields, and stylistic twists and
turns that characterize the original text.

EARL E. FITZ
                      

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

Works Cited

Burns, E. Bradford.
A History of Brazil
, 2
^nd
edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

Chapter 1

I sit down on the bed. It’s too early to take a bath. I flop onto my back, hug the
pillow and think about M.N., the best thing in the world isn’t drinking the milk from
a green coconut and then peeing in the ocean, Lião’s uncle said it was but he doesn’t
know, the best thing is to imagine what M.N. will say and do when my last veil is
removed.
The last veil!
Lião would write, she becomes sublime when she writes, she began her novel by saying
that in December the city smells of peaches. Imagine, peaches. December is peach season,
that’s true, sometimes one finds peach pits on the streetcorners with the smell of
an orchard about them, but to conclude from that that the
entire
city is perfumed is just too sublime. She dedicated the story to Ché Guevara with
a very important-looking quote about life and death, all in Latin. Imagine Latin entering
into the Guevarian scheme. Or maybe it does? Suppose he liked Latin; don’t I? The
delicious hours I used to spend lying on the ground, my hands crossed under my head,
Latinizing as I watched the clouds. Death combines with Latin, nothing goes together
so well as Latin and death. But to accept that this city smells like peaches, that’s
going too far.
Que ciudad será esa?
he would ask, thoroughly perplexed.
Tercer mundo?
Yes, Third World.
Y huele a durazno?
Yes, in the opinion of Lia de Melo Schultz, it smells like peaches. Then he would
close his eyes, or what used to be his eyes, and smile where his mouth used to be.
Estoy bien listo con esas mis discípulas
. Well, that’s her problem, mine is M.N., an M.N. naked and hairy, much hairier than
I, he’s very hairy, kind of like a monkey. But a beautiful monkey, his face so intellectual,
so rare, the right eye slightly smaller than the left, and so sad, all one side of
his face is infinitely sadder than the other. Infinitely. I could keep repeating infinitely
infinitely. A simple word that extends itself through rivers, mountains, valleys infinitely
long, like the arms of God. The words. The movements
renewing themselves like the smooth new skin of the snake breaking through from under
the old. It isn’t slimy; I touched one once at the farm, it was green and thick but
not slimy. And M.N.’s gestures also new, it isn’t true that it will be the same as
the other times, he will come with a clean skin, inventing or invented down to the
last minutiae. If God is in details, the sharpest pleasure, too, is in small things,
you hear that, M.N.? Ana Clara told me about a boyfriend she had who would go crazy
when she took off her false eyelashes, the bikini scene didn’t have the slightest
importance but as soon as she started to remove her eyelashes, it was glory. The naked
eye. Verily I say unto you, the day will come when the nakedness of the eyes will
be more exciting than that of the sex organs. Pure convention, to think sexual organs
are obscene. What about the mouth? Unsettling, the mouth biting, chewing, biting.
Biting a peach, remember? If I wrote something, it would be a story entitled “The
Peach Man.” I watched it from a streetcorner as I was drinking a glass of milk: a
completely ordinary man with a peach in his hand. As I looked on he rolled and squeezed
it with his fingers, closing his eyes a little as if he wanted to memorize its contours.
He had hard features and his need of a shave accentuated their lines like charcoal
shading, but the hardness dissolved when he sniffed the peach. I was fascinated. He
stroked the fuzz of its skin with his lips, and with them, too, he went over the whole
surface of the fruit as he had done with his fingertips. Nostrils dilated, eyes narrowed.
I wanted him to get it over with, but it seemed he was in no hurry; almost angrily,
he rubbed the peach against his chin, rolling it between his fingers as he hunted
for the nipple-point with the tip of his tongue. Did he find it? I was perched at
the café counter but I could see it as if through a telescope: He found the rosy nipple
and began to caress it with his tongue tip in an intense circular movement. I could
see that the tip of his tongue was the same pink as the nipple of the peach, and that
he was already licking it with an expression near suffering. When he opened his mouth
wide and bit down to make the juice squirt sharply out, I almost gagged on my milk.
I still go tense all over when I remember it, oh Lorena Vaz Leme, have you no shame?