The Girl in the Photograph (4 page)

“Russian?”

“No, from Iran, dear. The best caviar in the world. My brother Remo sent a can.”

“I’m moved. But I’ll grab something on the corner.”

Here there’s the soup, the de-sexed meat the nuns fix, but still it’s better than
the things she eats in the street. And she doesn’t even take baths any more, poor
thing. Before, she would fill up my bathtub and soak so happily; one day she even
asked for the bath salts.

“You’ve changed, Lião.”

“For the worse?” she asks, unfolding the handkerchief and blowing her nose.

Like an open drainpipe. Animals are so much more decent about these things; I never
saw Astronaut blow his nose in public. Too many holes, too many secretions. Oh Lord.
Eating pastries at the café, what madness. But if she came with us, she’d end up poisoning
our time together, she adores saying ironic things that M.N. pretends not to understand,
so solid. So safe. “More wine, Lião?” The wine she accepts. Also the lobster, she
pronounces it
loster
. But she pointedly remembers the statistics about the children dying of hunger in
the Northeast, she gets carried away on this subject of the Northeast. I don’t know
how long we’ll have to carry these people on our backs; it’s horrible to think that
way but, as I’ve thought before and still think, if God isn’t there He probably has
His reasons.

“Oh, I’m a monster. Monster. I want so much to be different, so much.”

And this tendency to be petty. Oh my Saint Francis, my Saint Theresa,
son tan escuras de entender estas cosas interiores
.

“I’ll give it back tomorrow,” says Lião putting the handkerchief away in her bag.

She won’t, of course. And if she did I wouldn’t take it, a handkerchief is like a
toothbrush, you can’t lend them. Exactly like Ana Clara who still hasn’t learned this
simplest of things: One doesn’t lend
personal items
.

“Lia, Lia!” calls Sister Bula from the window of the big house. The voice of a forest
gnome coming out from inside a tree trunk. She wants to yell “Telephone for you!”
She places one hand beside her ear and pretends to crank the handle; the
phones in her day had to be wound up. Or was she born even earlier? She must be two
hundred years old.

Lião is afraid. Ana Clara also pretends to be indifferent but if she doesn’t take
tranquilizers she starts walking around in a delirium again. Without the slightest
ceremony she opened my box of tissues and took over half of them, she goes around
with great piles of tissues to clean herself after making love. The right thing would
be to take a bath afterwards; it’s logical, hygienic and poetic to run naked to the
shower. Or in the country to duck under a waterfall,
shuaaaaaaaaaa!
But to put yourself back together like a hurried chambermaid—! Certain gestures and
words of Ana Clara’s, poor thing. The details give her away. It’s all in the details:
her origins, her faith, her happiness. God. Especially her origins. “I know nothing
about mine,” she said to me once when she was drunk. “And I don’t want to, either.”
That daisy down there could say the same thing: I know nothing about my roots. And
her? Neither father nor mother. Not even a cousin. She has no one. From the looks
of it, all of Bahia must be related to Lião but Ana Clara is the opposite in terms
of family. Not even an auntie to teach her that everything one does before and after
the act of love should be harmonious. Is it unaesthetic to masturbate? Not exactly
unaesthetic, but sad. During the time when Lião was doing thousands of surveys, she
did one on the university coeds; how many masturbated? Incredible, the results among
the virgins. Incredible. “We are coming out of the Middle Ages,” she said examining
her papers. “The inheritance from our mothers and grandmothers, see. Added up with
the adolescent habits, it gives us this alarming percentage. Do you masturbate too?”
she asked, pinning the black eye of the Inquisition on me.

Two blond bees, the kind that only make love and honey, landed on my foot, first one
and then the other. I shoo them gently away, the gesture must be gentle so they don’t
feel rejected, you hear, M.N.? If you don’t want me, you should treat me like this,
run along, my little bee! run along. Before flying off, the larger of the two rubs
his two front legs together, as if he were washing his hands, and then strokes himself
all the way down to his yellow-striped abdomen. You can’t see exactly where his hand
stops, but what if Lião were to research the habits of bees,
Tu quoque, bestiola
?
Bestiola
means insect. And bees? Anyway she asked me and if I didn’t answer with absolute
clarity it was because I could never exactly describe that afternoon so long ago.
Masturbation? That? Thirteen years old, piano lessons.
The Happy Farmer
. I participated so fully in the happiness that the bench wobbled back and forth,
the rhythm getting faster and faster. My chest bursting, my genitalia rubbing against
the cushion with the same vehemence as my hands hammering the keyboard without hesitation,
without error. I never played as well as I did that afternoon, something which seems
completely extraordinary to me today. I dismounted the bench as one would a horse.
At dinnertime, Mama kissed me, quite moved: “I heard you practicing the piano while
I was stirring the guava jam; you played divinely!” I smiled down at my plate: my
first secret. Romulo threw a ball of soft bread at me and Remo put a wasp in my hair,
but when we went out on the veranda I felt as luminous as a star. And if Romulo hadn’t
frightened me with a sheet, I could have walked on air for over two minutes. The second
time was on the farm, too, when I was taking a bath. Also accidental. I got into the
empty bathtub, lay down in the bottom and opened the faucet. The hot jet pelted onto
my chest with such violence that I slipped, exposing my belly. From there, the water
passed to my abdomen; when I opened my legs and it hit me right on, I felt, stunned,
the old artistic exaltation, stronger this time although I wasn’t playing a piano.
I closed my eyes when Felipe crossed and recrossed my body with his red motorcycle,
Felipe, the one with the black jacket and motorcycle. I hid my face in my hands, wanting
to run away and at the same time glued to the bottom of the bathtub with the hot water
rising higher, it was already covering me, the bubbles breaking on my chin, why didn’t
I open the drain? Satiated or unsatiated, my mouth (I?) asked for more. It penetrated
me in waterfalls, it filled my nose, there, I’m going to drown! I thought with a jump.
I leaped up and fled. Was it love? Was it death? All one single thing, I replied in
a verse. I used to write verses then.

Cat came up to the bag that Lia had left in the middle of the driveway. She sniffed
the leather, distrustful, sat down somewhat sideways, because of her pregnancy, and
stared at Lorena who was perched on the bedroom windowsill. This room and bath—Lorena
was certain of this—had belonged to the chauffeur of the family who had owned the
big house. Underneath,
the garage with a car which was probably antiquated. Above, absolute master, the untidy
and sensual chauffeur, lover of the housemaid whose name was Neusa, a name spelled
out many times with a shaving brush or white deodorant stick on the bluetinted wall.
Of her, there remained only a few hairpins pointing out from between the cracks in
the floor. And the jasmine perfume in a broken bottle on the bathroom floor. “With
a few small repairs, your daughter could be very comfortable here,” said Sister Priscilla
with an optimism that spread to Lorena, who was hanging onto her mother’s arm. Her
mother, in turn, was hanging onto Mieux’s. She turned to him with a perplexed face,
at that time she used to consult him even to find out if she should take an aspirin
or not. “Give me your opinion, dear. Won’t I spend too much? This is awful,” she complained,
repulsed by the scent of jasmine mingled with that of urine. Mieux winked at Lorena.
He became euphoric when he had an opportunity to show off his prestige: “It will be
the most darling thing in the world, I already have some ideas. I want this bathroom
pink, it’s important for her to feel as though she’s in a nest when she undresses
for her bath,” he said throwing his cigarette butt into the cracked toilet bowl. He
slammed the door behind him and sniffed his handkerchief. “I visualize this room in
pale yellow; I have the wallpaper. A gold bed there in that corner. The bookshelf
and table on that wall. Here in this space, a builtin wardrobe. Over there, a mini-refrigerator
and a little bar, hm, Lorena?” He picked a playing card up off the floor; it was a
queen of spades, which he stuck upright in a crack in the door. And as Mama had gone
on ahead and Sister Priscilla was busy closing the window, he seized the opportunity
to run his hand over my ass.

“Anything happen?” I ask Lião who has come back at a run.

Panting, she kicked a wad of newspaper which Cat tore up.

“Is the offer of tea still on? I’ll take you up on it after all. One more phone call
like that one and I’ll go completely insane.”

I quickly remove my pajamas and put on my black ballet leotard. I hear Lião coming
up the stairs, step by step. When she’s happy she comes up them in three jumps, poor
thing, flunking all her classes because she cut so many. Her lover in prison, her
allowance gone, she gives over half of it to her famous group. Oh Lord.

“Can I turn that down?” she asks, going straight in the direction of the record player.

She turned it down so far that Jimi Hendrix’s voice sounds like that of a little ant
under the table. I light the electric ring, do two more exercises to develop the bustline,
and spread the cloth on the table. The cups, the plates. I bring my little bread basket
with its red ribbon woven into the straw, going all the way around until the ends
meet in a bow. I pause to admire the graceful pattern of the tablecloth with its big
leaves in a hot green tone, through which, half-hidden, peers the Asiatic eye of an
occasional orange. The pleasure I take in this simple ritual of preparing tea is almost
as intense as that I take in hearing music. Or reading poetry. Or taking a bath. Or
or or. There are so many tiny things that give me pleasure that I’ll die of pleasure
when I get to the bigger thing. Is it really bigger, M.N.?

“I’ll kill myself if he doesn’t call,” I say opening my arms and going on tiptoe to
the refrigerator. “I have some marvelous grapes and apples, dear.”

Lia sits down on the rug and begins to chew on a biscuit. She is as somber as a shipwrecked
mariner eating the last biscuit on the island. She brushes the crumbs which have fallen
into the pleats in her skirt, but why this skirt today? In spite of her exorbitant
Bahian behind. I think she looks better in jeans.

“Problems, Lena, problems. Oh forget it—” she says, trying to placate her kinky hair
with her hands. “Don’t forget to ask, you hear?”

I throw her an apple.

“I put a new tablecloth on the table in your honor, isn’t it beautiful?”

“Say it’s you who’s going to use it, understand.”

“What?”

“The car, Lena, stop dreaming, pay attention, you’re going to ask Mama for her car!”

I lie on my back and start pedaling. I can pedal up to two hundred times.

“This is an excellent exercise to fill out your legs, incredible how skinny my legs
are. You’d have to pedal backwards to make yours smaller,” I say and hold back my
laughter.

She bites into the apple with such fury that I feel my knee reflex jump.

“After dinner, Lorena. Don’t forget, after dinner, are you listening? Say it’s for
you.”

Car, car. The Machine is sweeping away the beauty of the earth. Oh Lord. And we’re
entering the Age of Aquarius, meaning, technology will dominate, more machines. Air
transport, individual balloons and jets, the sky black with people. I want nothing
to do with it. I’ll read my poets up in a treetop, there might be a tree left over.

“Yesterday I bought a gorgeous edition of Tagore,” I say, sitting down on the rug.
I clasp my hands in front of my breast: “‘I watch through the long night for the one
who has robbed me of sleep. I build up the walls of the one who has torn mine down.
I spend my life pulling up thorns and scattering flower seeds. 1 long to kiss the
one who no longer recognizes me.’”

She glances at me, chuckles slightly and said with her mouth full, “You don’t have
to do that much, it’s enough not to want to steal your neighbor’s husband, understand,
Madame Tagore?”

“But he doesn’t love her any more, dear. The love is gone, there’s nothing between
them. They only belong to each other on paper.”

“You think that’s so little? I go along with that but you need to see if he does too.
And what’s so original about that poem? All that is in the Bible, Lena. Don’t you
read the Bible? Go look it up, it’s all there.”

I begin to pedal again, more energetically.

“I bought Proust, isn’t that high-class? M.N. has a passion for Proust. I’ll have
to read it, but I confess I’m finding it slightly boring.”

“Yugghh. High-class novels are bad and high-class old-fashioned novels are worse.
I never had the patience for them,” she says taking a cigarette out of her bag.

I run to get an ashtray and on the way back take the lid off the teakettle. The water
is almost boiling, you should never let tea water come to a full boil, Daddy taught
me. I turn off the burner and drop the tea leaves into the water. With my eyes closed
I breathe in their perfume as I put the ashtray under Lião who doesn’t know what to
do with her apple core. Holding an invisible microphone, I approach on my knees. She
clamps the cigarette between her teeth.

“If you please, I’d like your opinion on certain problems our community is facing,”
I say raising the microphone. “First of all, may we have your name?”

“Lia de Melo Schultz.”

“Profession?”

“University student. Social sciences.”

“And … may I ask about your present situation at that institution of learning?”