The Girl in the Photograph (5 page)

“I goofed off this year. Cut classes. I ended up dropping all my courses, but I’m
still registered.”

“Fine, fine. And your book? They tell me you have a book almost ready. According to
our information it’s a novel, is that right?”

“I tore it all up, understand,” she says blowing smoke in my face. “The sea of useless
books is already overflowing. After all, fiction, who cares about it?”

I abandon the microphone. Tore it up? It isn’t really her vocation, poor thing. But
she used to enjoy writing her stories so much, in those big notebooks with the greasy
covers, wherever she went she’d take along those notebooks. The city smelling like
peaches, imagine. I offer her a cluster of grapes but she refuses. I don’t know what
to say to her. So precise when she talks but so sentimental when she writes, oh, the
moon, oh, the lake.

“You know the latest, Lião? A poetess from the Amazon is going to arrive, how about
that? She must be an Indian. She’s going to be your roommate, dear.”

“Why my room? You here in this penthouse and with a bathroom even, dammit. Indians
like baths. Ana Clara’s room would hold a whole tribe, too.”

“No, not there, imagine! The Indian maiden in her natural state, Ana Clara would be
too much of a culture shock, poor thing.”

“But by January isn’t she supposed to be married to the industrialist? Driving a black
Jaguar with red seats. A diamond the size of a saucer on her finger.”

“And a full-length leopard coat. Stiiiiinking chic!” I roll my eyes upward and imitate
Aninha when she adopts her
femme fatale
air. But Lião is still sober.

“Crazy Ana isn’t doing so well. She’s already doped up in the mornings now. And she
piles up debts something awful, there’s swarms of bill collectors at the gate. The
nuns are in panic. And that boyfriend of hers, the pusher—”

“Max? He’s a pusher?”

“Come on, you mean you don’t know?” mutters Lião, tearing a piece of fingernail from
her thumb. “And it’s not just speed
and pot, I’ve seen the needle marks time and again. She should be put into the hospital
immediately. Which wouldn’t do any good at this point, she’s so far gone. A wreck,
in short.”

I open my hands on the rug and examine my fingernails.

“It would be fantastic if the millionaire fiancé married her. I’ll put out the yenom
for the plastic surgery in the southern zone, he would only marry a virgin, she has
to become a virgin. Oh Lord.”

“You think a rich marriage is going to help anything?” Lião asks with a sad smile.
“You should be ashamed to think that way, Lorena. And will there even be a wedding?
Doesn’t the guy know how she gets her kicks? Instead of hoping for a miraculous wedding,
you should hope for a true miracle, understand? I don’t know why, but you Christians
have such a funny mentality.”

I go to the teakettle and fill the cups again, then stop halfway back. He sang while
on drugs, this half-hoarse voice, isn’t it doped? The twisted voice of someone who
cries for help but who doesn’t want to be helped.

“Yesterday she was so lucid. She says Mother Alix helps, she’s going to start in again
with her analysis. Who knows, eh, Lião?”

“Do you think at this point an analyst is going to help? It would have to be an analyst
of the Saint Sebastian brand, that one with the arrows, beautiful and good. Then she’d
fall in love with him and be saved through love, like in the comic books she adores
reading. And get her Jaguar and her leopard coat to boot.”

Lorena hands me the teacup with its handsome design of birds and flowers. The linen
tablecloth matches the cup, a tablecloth with an exuberant tropical pattern. The small
light-colored armchairs. The rare objects.

“Everything here is very attractive, very pretty. Are you still rich, Lorena?”

She became serious, relaxing from her exercises.

“Mieux’s so-called advertising agency came to nothing. With the interior-decorating
store, Mama spent money like crazy. And she keeps on spending, a thirst for novelty.
They remind me of those American millionaires in Europe in the twenties, you know?”

“I don’t know. I asked if you had money.”

“I take care of my part. Why? Do you need some, Lião?”

I pour more tea into my cup. Damn good tea. I jump over Lorena who has stopped pedaling
and is now doing her respiratory exercises, she has already explained to me that there
is solar respiration and lunar respiration.

“I think I’m going to, Lorena. For some operations far different from Crazy Ana’s.”

“Oh Lord. I feel so sorry for her.”

She feels so sorry for everyone. No doubt she felt sorry for me when I told her I
tore up the novel. Isn’t it just a way of hiding her feeling of superiority? Isn’t
feeling sorry for others a way of feeling superior over others? I tore up the novel,
I said. And she was silent. I drink the warm tea. She’s a good girl. Ana Clara is
a good girl too. I’m a good girl.

“How’s the collection coming?” I ask examining the bells arranged on the shelf.

“My brother Remo promised me one of those Bedouin ones from Tunisia, he’s there now,
living in a gorgeous house in Carthage, can you imagine? Carthage still exists, Lião.
Delenda, delenda!
But it still exists.”

The other day, all excited, she asked to come to one of the group meetings, this same
Lorena who stands there ringing her little bells, ting-ting, tang-tang, tong-tong.
She imagines our meetings are sort of like debating festivals: She would go with this
leotard, boots and a red turtleneck to break the monotony of black. The intellectuals
with their little films on the Vietcong. So much hunger, so much blood on the screen
made from a sheet. So terrible to see so much death, dammit. How can it be, my God,
how can it be? Revolt and nausea. “Sartrean nausea,” murmurs an inexperienced guest.
Who shuts up when she feels the icy stares fixed on her in the dark. Silence again,
only the exasperated buzzing of the projector, the enjoyment is prolonged, there’s
miles of film waiting in the little cans. The lights come on, but the faces take some
time to light up, how awful. Whiskey and paté to relieve the atmosphere. Considerations
about the probable names on the next lists. The films go back into their respective
cans while little by little the people go back to their respective houses. Those who
don’t have transportation ask for rides in the available cars going their way. They
are good-humored, the intellectuals. There are even a few jokes.

But, in all justice, they’re watchful. Above all, informed. They should be, going
to meetings all the time. They know you were imprisoned and tortured, a courageous
boy this Miguel, one needs to have courage, bravo, bravo. They know Sylvia Flute-player
was raped with an ear of corn, the cop knew about the episode in the novel, somebody
told him and he found it amusing. “Cooked corn or raw?” his helper asked him, and
he went into detail. “Dried corn, with those pointed kernels!” The intellectuals are
too moved to speak, they only continue shaking their heads and drinking. It’s fortunate
that the whiskey isn’t a national brand. Some of the more fanatic ones get irritated
with the tone of the meetings; after all, it wasn’t held only for the wine and cheese
when the news is the worst possible: Eurico still hasn’t been found; he was arrested
just as he disembarked and up to now nobody knows anything about him. He disappeared
just like a science-fiction character, when the metallic man emits a ray and the guy
dissolves, gun and all, and only a grease spot is left in the place. Jap left a briefcase
in his brother’s house; he said he would come to get it the next day.

“This one’s Greek, Lião. Listen what a divine sound.”

I told her I tore up my book and I might as well have said I had torn up a newspaper.
She doesn’t like what I write. Nobody does, it must be absolute shit. But do people
know what’s good? Or what’s bad? Who knows? And is it valid? I shouldn’t have torn
it up. But I know it by heart, maybe I could use the text in a diary, I’d like to
write a diary. Simple, direct style. I’d dedicate it to him.

“Perfect. Perfect,” she repeats and picks up the bag. “Don’t forget about the car,
Lena.”

“Lia de Melo Schultz, if you say that one more time, I’ll kill myself. Look, keep
this little bell, put it around your neck. When we lose track of each other, you go
ding-a-ling and I’ll know where you are, everybody should wear a bell around, like
goats do.” Softly, Lia rang the small bronze bell. She smiled at her friend as she
tried to untie a black ribbon from around her neck.

“I’ll put it here with my good-luck charm that my mother gave me. I need to write
a long letter to Mother, and another to my father, they’re opposite types. And alike
at the same time. When I don’t write, each goes off and cries in a corner, hiding
from the other.”

How they longed to see their daughter receiving her diploma. Getting engaged. Engagement
party in the parlor, wedding in the church, hoop-skirted bridal dress. Rice as they
dash away. The grandchildren multiplying, everybody together in the same house, that
enormous house, there were so many bedrooms, weren’t there? “The apartment-building
curse has reached us here, too,” my father wrote in his last letter. “Our neighborhood
is being invaded but we will resist. When you get back and find only one last house
in the whole city, you can come in, it’s ours.”

“If my love phones, want to come and have dinner with us?”

Lia watches me. What are you thinking about, Lião? She pats me on the head and goes
out with the air of somebody who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders.
I turn up the volume of the record player.
Get out of here
, he screams hoarsely. I peer out the window. She gallops down the steps with her
three leaps and is now exactly where she was before coming up. Yet she hesitates as
though she had forgotten to say something important, doesn’t she remember? She opens
the bag, looks inside. Indifferently chews the nail of her little finger, and picks
up a pebble. She throws it high in the air.

“Is it the car, dear? Don’t worry, did you know Mama gave me one? I didn’t even go
to get the check, imagine. You can keep a key, I hate to drive, eeh, the faces people
make when I drive.”

Her attention is completely fixed on a point behind me, which moves farther away and
loses itself like the pebble she threw into the air. I make faces, I can make great
faces, neither Remo nor Romulo knew how to make faces like I did but Lião is only
interested in the far-off point, which seems to have returned and fallen down inside
her. Her face ripples like the surface of a well when the stone falls in.

“Don’t park by the gate, leave it on the corner. If you go out, leave the key on the
shelf. In one of your boxes there.”

“In the silver one shaped like a clover, dear.”

She knows I know she’s involved in a tangled plot, but she also knows I respect her
secret. The stone reposes in the depths of the compliant waters.
Requiescat in pace
. I motion her to come closer:

“Who was it had a compliant hymen?”

At last she laughs like she used to in the good old times, wrinkling her sunburned
face.

“Go on, give in, Lena.”

“But isn’t that what I’m wanting to do?” I ask, and deep inside I answer myself, I
don’t think I am, really. The joy I feel in the midst of so much promiscuity, both
sexes giving themselves without love, desperately, in affliction. And me,
virgo et intacta
. I open my arms. What a marvelous day.

“If Ana Clara turns up, tell her I need the money I loaned her.”

“Yenom, Lião, yenom!” I scream and raise my right arm, fist closed in the antifascist
salute.

She clamps her cigarette between her teeth, closes her hand and makes an obscene gesture.

“The finger, Lião? Is that the finger?”

She marches off, and from the way she’s shaking her head, I imagine she’s smiling.
She crosses the garden like a soldier on parade, knapsack beside her, socks falling
down, let them fall!—one, two, one, two! She opens the gate sharply, heroically, a
gesture of one not merely choosing his path, imagine, too prosaic, but rather assuming
his very destiny. Long before she reaches the corner her socks have slipped all the
way down. Oh Lord. And Mama herself furnishing transportation for the guerrilla operation.
She would probably have one of those attacks if she knew.

Chapter 2

“Bunny! Hey, Bunny, are you asleep?” he asked. He shook her by the shoulders. “What’s
the matter with you that you don’t move?”

Ana Clara made an effort to open her eyes wider. Around her left eye was smeared a
charcoal-colored ring as if she had been socked. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles
and the eyeliner spread over her other eye also. Sleepily she turned toward the dense
cone of smoke projected by the light of the lamp and kissed the young man’s shoulder,
disguising her yawn in a lovebite.

“I’m almost fainting, love. So good, Max.”

“Then why do you go cold that way? Hanh? It’s as if I were making it with a penguin,
ever see a penguin?”

She twisted and untwisted a lock of hair around her Finger.

“It’s just that today I’m not too brilliant.”

“I wish you’d tell me the day you are brilliant,” he muttered sitting up in bed.

“Max, I love you. I love you.”

With fingers bent forward clawlike he scratched his head, his sweat-shiny chest, then
his head again.

“But you don’t like to make love, Bunny. It’s important to make love, hanh?”

“I’m kind of hung up. I need to talk to my analyst, this last treatment got me all
screwed up again.”

“Tell him that when you make love you close up like an oyster when somebody squeezes
lemon over it. Wow, would I like to eat some oysters with white wine, nice and cold,”
he said stretching his arms.

“Oysters make me sick, I can’t stand to look at them. Horrible things.”

He searched through his pants heaped on the floor beside the armchair. From the pocket
he took a pack of cigarettes and shook it until a small tissue-paper packet fell into
his hand.