Then the two men started talking to each other. At first Cidinha didn’t understand a word. It seemed like a game. They were talking too fast. And the language seemed vaguely familiar to her. What language was that?
It suddenly dawned on her: they were speaking flawless Pig Latin. Like this:
“Idday ouyay eckchay outway atthay ettypray irlgay?”
“Uresay idday. E’sshay away abebay. Itsway inway ethay agbay.”
They meant: did you check out that pretty girl? Sure did. She’s a babe. It’s in the bag.
Cidinha pretended not to understand: understanding would be dangerous for her. That was the language she used, in childhood, to keep adults away. The men went on:
“Iway annaway angbay atthay irlgay. Owhay outbay ouyay?”
“Emay ootay. Onnagay appenhay inway ethay unneltay.”
What they meant was that they were going to bang her in the tunnel . . . What could she do? Cidinha didn’t know and trembled in fear. She hardly knew herself. Moreover she’d never gotten to know herself on the inside. As for knowing others, well, that was even worse. Help me, Virgin Mary! help me! help me!
“Ifway eshay utspay upway away ightfay eway ancay illkay erhay.”
If she put up a fight they could kill her. So that’s how it was.
“Ithway away ifeknay. Andway obray erhay.”
Kill her with a knife. And they could rob her.
How could she let them know she wasn’t rich? that she was fragile, the slightest gesture would kill her. She took a cigarette from her purse to smoke and calm down. It didn’t help. When was the next tunnel coming? She had to think fast, fast, fast.
Then she thought: if I pretend I’m a prostitute, they’ll change their minds, they don’t like whores.
So she hiked up her skirt, made sensual movements — she didn’t even know she knew how, so little did she know herself — unbuttoned the top of her blouse, letting her cleavage show. The men suddenly shocked.
“E’sshay azycray.”
She’s crazy, they meant.
And there she was gyrating like a samba dancer from the slums. She took some lipstick from her purse and smeared it on. And started humming.
Then the men burst out laughing. They thought Cidinha’s antics were funny. She herself feeling desperate. And the tunnel?
The conductor came. He saw the whole thing. Didn’t say a word. But he went to the engineer and told him. The latter said:
“Let’s take care of it, I’ll turn her in to the cops at the first station.”
And the next station came.
The engineer got off, spoke to a soldier by the name of José Lindalvo. José Lindalvo wasn’t one to play games. He boarded the car, spotted Cidinha, grabbed her roughly by the arm, gathered her three suitcases as best he could, and they got off.
The two men roaring with laughter.
At the little blue and pink station was a young girl holding a suitcase. She looked at Cidinha with scorn. She boarded the train and it departed.
Cidinha didn’t know how to explain herself to the police. There was no explanation for Pig Latin. She was taken to the jail and booked. They called her the worst names. And she was stuck in the cell for three days. They let her smoke. She smoked like a madwoman, taking long drags, stamping out her cigarettes on the concrete floor. There was a fat cockroach creeping along the floor.
Finally they let her go. She caught the next train to Rio. She’d washed her face, she was no longer a prostitute. What worried her was this: when the two men had talked about banging her, she’d wanted to be banged. She was utterly brazen. Andway I’mway away utslay. That’s what she’d discovered. Eyes downcast.
She arrived in Rio exhausted. Went to a cheap hotel. Soon realized she’d missed the flight. At the airport she bought a ticket.
And she wandered the streets of Copacabana, she miserable, Copacabana miserable.
Then on the corner of the Rua Figueiredo Magalhães she saw a newsstand. And hanging there was the newspaper O Dia. She couldn’t say why she bought it.
A bold headline read: “Girl Raped and Murdered on Train.”
She trembled all over. So it had happened. And to the girl who had scorned her.
She started crying on the street. She threw away that damned newspaper. She didn’t want the details. She thought:
“Esyay. Atefay isway implacableway.”
Fate is implacable.
Better Than to Burn
(“Melhor do que arder”)
She was tall, strong, hairy. sister Clara had dark hair on her upper lip and deep black eyes.
She had entered the convent at her family’s insistence: they wanted her sheltered in God’s embrace. She obeyed.
She carried out her duties without complaint. Her duties were manifold. And there were the prayers. She prayed fervently.
And she confessed every day. Every day the white host that crumbled in her mouth.
But she began to tire of living only among women. Women, women, women. She chose a friend as her confidante. She told her she couldn’t bear it any longer. The friend counseled her:
“Mortify your body.”
She began sleeping on the cold stone floor. And castigated herself by wearing sackcloth. It was no use. She got violent fevers and chills, had scratches all over.
She confessed to the priest. He ordered her to keep mortifying herself. She did.
But whenever the priest touched her mouth while giving her the host she’d have to stop herself from biting the priest’s hand. He noticed, didn’t say a word. There was a silent pact between them. Both mortified themselves.
She could no longer look at Christ’s half-naked body.
Sister Clara was the daughter of Portuguese parents and, in secret, shaved her hairy legs. If anyone ever found out, she was in for it. She told the priest. He went pale. He imagined how strong her legs must be, how shapely.
One day, at lunchtime, she began to cry. She didn’t tell anyone why. Not even she knew why she was crying.
And from then on she was always crying. Though she hardly ate, she was gaining weight. But there were purplish circles under her eyes. When she sang in church, she was a contralto.
Until she told the priest in the confessional:
“I can’t bear it any longer, I swear I can’t bear it any longer.”
He said meditatively:
“It’s better not to marry. But it’s better to marry than to burn.”
She requested an audience with the mother superior. The mother superior fiercely reprimanded her. But Sister Clara stood firm: she wanted to leave the convent, she wanted to find a man, she wanted to get married. The mother superior asked her to wait another year. She answered that she couldn’t, that it had to be now.
She packed her few things and took off. She went to live in a boardinghouse for young women.
Her black hair grew abundantly. And she seemed in the clouds, dreamy. She paid for the boardinghouse with the money her northern family sent. Her family didn’t approve. But they couldn’t let her starve to death.
She made her own quaint dresses out of cheap fabric, on a sewing machine lent by another girl at the boardinghouse. The dresses had long sleeves, high collars, went below the knee.
And nothing happened. She prayed often for something good to happen to her. In the form of a man.
And indeed it did.
She went down to the corner bar to buy a bottle of Caxambu mineral water. The owner was a handsome Portuguese man who was enchanted by Clara’s demure manner. He didn’t let her pay for the Caxambu water. She blushed.
But she went back the next day to buy some coconut sweets. She didn’t pay for those either. The Portuguese, named Antônio, got up the nerve to ask her to the movies. She declined.
The next day she went back to have some coffee. Ant
ônio promised he wouldn’t touch her if they went to the movies. She accepted.
They went to see a movie and didn’t pay any attention to it. By the end, they were holding hands.
They began meeting for long strolls. She, with her black hair. He in a suit and tie.
Then one night he said to her:
“I’m rich, the bar makes enough money for us to get married. How about it?”
“Yes,” she answered solemnly.
They got married in church and at City Hall. In church the person who married them was the priest who had told her marrying was better than burning. They had a steamy honeymoon in Lisbon. Antônio left his brother in charge of the bar.
She came back pregnant, satisfied, happy.
They had four children, all boys, all hairy.
But It’s Going to Rain
(“Mas vai chover”)
Maria Angélica de Andrade was sixty. And her lover, Alexandre, was nineteen.
Everyone knew the boy was taking advantage of Maria Angélica’s money. Maria Angélica was the only one who didn’t suspect.
Here’s how it started: Alexandre was the pharmacy delivery boy and rang Maria Angélica’s doorbell. She opened the door herself. And came face to face with a tall, strapping youth who was incredibly handsome. Instead of taking the medicine she’d ordered and paying for it, she asked him, half-startled by her own boldness, if he wanted to come in for some coffee.
Alexandre was taken aback and said no, thanks. But she insisted. She added that there was cake too.
The young man hesitated, visibly embarrassed. But he said:
“If it’s just for a minute, I’ll come in, because I have to work.”
He went in. Maria Angélica didn’t realize she was already in love. She gave him a big slice of cake and coffee with milk. As he ate uncomfortably, she watched him enraptured. He was strength, youth, the sex long since left behind. The young man finished eating and drinking, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Maria Angélica didn’t consider it bad manners: she was delighted, she found him natural, simple, enchanting.
“I have to go now ’cause I’ll get in trouble with my boss if I take too long.”
She was fascinated. She noted the scattering of pimples on his face. But that didn’t affect his good looks or his masculinity: hormones were raging in there. That, yes, was a man. She gave him a huge tip, way too much, that surprised the young man. And she said in a sing-song voice and with the mannerisms of a romantic girl:
“I’ll only let you go if you promise you’ll come back! Today even! Because I’m going to order some vitamins from the pharmacy . . .”
An hour later he was back with the vitamins. She’d changed clothes, and was wearing a sheer lace kimono. You could see the outline of her panties. She made him come in. She told him she was a widow. That was her way of letting him know she was available. But the young man didn’t get it.
She invited him to tour her nicely decorated apartment leaving him speechless. She took him to her bedroom. She didn’t know how to make him understand. So she said:
“Let me give you a little kiss!”
The young man was taken aback, he tilted his face toward her. But she quickly reached his mouth and nearly devoured it.
“Ma’am,” said the boy nervously, “please control yourself! Ma’am, are you feeling all right?”
“I can’t control myself! I love you! Go to bed with me!”
“Are you crazy?!”
“I’m not crazy! I mean: I’m crazy about you!” she shouted at him as she tore the purple covers off the big bed.
And seeing that he’d never understand, she said to him, dying of shame:
“Go to bed with me . . .”
“Me?!”
“I’ll give you a big present! I’ll give you a car!”
Car? The young man’s eyes glittered with greed. A car! It was all he desired in life. He asked her suspiciously:
“A Karmann Ghia?”
“Yes, my love, whatever you want!”
What happened next was awful. You don’t need to know. Maria Angélica — oh, dear God, have mercy on me, forgive me for having to write this! — Maria Angélica let out little shrieks during their lovemaking. And Alexandre had to stand it feeling nauseated, revolted. He became a rebel for the rest of his life. He had the feeling he’d never be able to sleep with a woman again. Which actually happened: at the age of twenty-seven he became impotent.
And they became lovers. He, on account of the neighbors, didn’t live with her. He wanted to live in a luxury hotel: he had breakfast in bed. And soon quit his job. He bought wildly expensive shirts. He went to a dermatologist and his pimples cleared up.
Maria Angélica could hardly believe her luck. What did she care about the servants who practically laughed in her face.
A friend warned her:
“Maria Angélica, can’t you see that boy’s a gold-digger? that he’s using you?”
“I won’t let you call Alexandre a gold-digger! And he loves me!”
One day Alex did something bold. He told her:
“I’m going to spend a few days away from Rio with a girl I met. I need some money.”
Those were awful days for Maria Angélica. She didn’t leave the house, didn’t bathe, hardly ate. Only out of stubbornness did she still believe in God. Because God had abandoned her. She was forced to be grievously herself.
Five days later he returned, full of swagger, full of joy. He brought her a tin of guava preserves as a present. She started eating it and broke a tooth. She had to go to the dentist to get a fake tooth put in.
And life went on. The bills were mounting. Alexandre demanding. Maria Angélica anguished. When she turned sixty-one he didn’t show. She sat alone before her birthday cake.
Then — then it happened.
Alexandre said to her:
“I need a million cruzeiros.”
“A million?” Maria Angélica gasped.
“Yes!” he answered annoyed, “a billion in old cruzeiros!”
“But . . . but I don’t have that kind of money . . .”
“Sell your apartment, then, and sell your Mercedes, get rid of your driver.”
“Even so, it wouldn’t be enough, my love, have mercy on me!”
The young man lost his temper:
“You miserable old hag! you disgusting whore! Without a billion, I won’t go along with your indecency anymore!”
And in an impulse born of hatred, he left, slamming the door.
Maria Angélica stood there. Her body ached all over.
Then she slowly went to sit on the living-room sofa. She looked like a casualty of war. But there was no Red Cross to rescue her. She sat still, mute. Without a word to say.
“Looks like,” she thought, “looks like it’s going to rain.”
VISION OF SPLENDOR
(“Visão do esplendor”)
.
Brasília
Brasília is constructed on the line of the horizon. Brasília is artificial. As artificial as the world must have been when it was created. When the world was created, a man had to be created especially for that world. We are all deformed by our adaptation to the freedom of God. We don’t know how we would be if we had been created first and the world were deformed after according to our requirements. Brasília does not yet have the Brasília man. If I said that Brasília is pretty they would immediately see that I liked the city. But if I say that Brasília is the image of my insomnia they would see this as an accusation. But my insomnia is neither pretty nor ugly, my insomnia is me myself, it is lived, it is my astonishment. It is a semicolon. The two architects didn’t think of building beauty, that would be easy: they erected inexplicable astonishment. Creation is not a comprehension, it is a new mystery. — When I died, one day I opened my eyes and there was Brasília. I w
as alone in the world. There was a parked taxi. Without a driver. Oh how frightening. — Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, two solitary men. — I regard Brasília as I regard Rome: Brasília began with a final simplification of ruins. The ivy has yet to grow.
Besides the wind there is something else that blows. One can only recognize it by the supernatural rippling of the lake. — Wherever people stand, children might fall, and off the face of the world. Brasília lies at the edge. — If I lived here I would let my hair grow to the ground. — Brasília has a splendored past that now no longer exists. This type of civilization disappeared millennia ago. In the 4th century BC it was inhabited by extremely tall blond men and women who were neither Americans nor Swedes and who sparkled in the sun. They were all blind. That is why in Brasília there is nothing to stumble into. The Brasilianaires dressed in white gold. The race went extinct because few children were born. The more beautiful the Brasilianaires were, the blinder and purer and more sparkling, and the fewer children. The Brasilianaires lived for nearly three hundred years. There was nothing in the name of which to die. Millennia later it was discovered by a band of outcasts who would not have been welcomed anywhere else: they had nothing to lose. There they lit fires, pitched tents, gradually digging away at the sands that buried the city. These were men and women, smaller and dark, with darting and uneasy eyes, and who, being fugitives and desperate, had something in the name of which to live and die. They dwelled in ruined houses, multiplied, establishing a deeply contemplative race of humans. — I waited for nightfall like someone waiting for the shadows so as to steal out. When night fell I realized in horror that it was no use: no matter where I was I would be seen. What terrifies me is: seen by whom? — It was built with no place for rats. A whole part of us, the worst, precisely the one horrified by rats, that part has no place in Brasília. They wished to deny that we are worthless. A construction with space factored in for the clouds. Hell understands me better. But the rats, all huge, are invading. That is an invisible headline in the newspapers. — Here I am afraid. — The construction of Brasília: that of a totalitarian State. — This great visual silence that I love. My insomnia too would have created this peace of the never. I too, like those two who are monks, would meditate in this desert. Where there’s no place for temptation. But I see in the distance vultures hovering. What could be dying, my God? — I didn’t cry once in Brasília. There was no place for it. — It is a beach without the sea. — In Brasília there is no way in, and no way out. — Mama, it’s lovely to see you standing there in that fluttering white cape. (It’s because I died, my son). — An open-air prison. In any case there would be nowhere to escape. Because whoever escapes would probably go to Brasília. — They imprisoned me in freedom. But freedom is only what can be conquered. When they grant it to me, they are ordering me to be free. — A whole side of human coldness that I possess, I encounter in myself here in Brasília, and it blossoms ice-cold, potent, ice-cold force of Nature. This is the place where my crimes (not the worst, but those I won’t ever understand in myself), where my ice-cold crimes find space. I am leaving. Here my crimes would not be those of love. I am leaving on behalf of my other crimes, those that God and I comprehend. But I know I shall return. I am drawn here by whatever frightens me in myself. — I have never seen anything like it in the world. But I recognize this city in the furthest depths of my dream. The furthest depths of my dream is a lucidity. — Well as I was saying, Flash Gordon . . . — If they took my picture standing in Brasília, when they developed the photograph only the landscape would appear. — Where are Brasília’s giraffes? — A certain cringing of mine, certain silences, make my son say: gosh, grown-ups are the worst. — It’s urgent. If it doesn’t get populated, or rather, overpopulated, it will be too late: there will be no place for people. They will feel tacitly expelled. — The soul here casts no shadow on the ground. — For the first couple of days I wasn’t hungry. Everything looked to me like airplane food. — At night I reached my face toward the silence. I know there is a hidden hour when manna descends and moistens the lands of Brasília. — No matter how close one gets, everything here is seen from afar. I couldn’t find a way to touch. But at least I had this in my favor: before I got here, I already knew how to touch from afar. I never got too discouraged: from afar, I would touch. I’ve had a lot, and not even what I touched, you know. That’s how rich women are. Pure Brasília. — The city of Brasília lies beyond the city. — Boys, boys, come here, will you, look who is coming on the street all dressed up in modernistic style. It ain’t nobody but . . . (Aunt Hagar’s Blues, Ted Lewis and His Band, with Jimmy Dorsey on the clarinet.) — That frightening beauty, this city, drawn up in the air. — For now no samba can spring up in Brasília. — Brasília doesn’t let me get tired. It pursues a little. Feeling good, feeling good, feeling good, I’m in a good mood. And after all I have always cultivated my weariness, as my richest passivity. — All this is just today. Only God knows what will happen in Brasília. Because here chance is abrupt. — Brasília is haunted. It is the still profile of a thing. — In my insomnia I look out the hotel window at three in the morning. Brasília is the landscape of insomnia. It never falls asleep. — Here the organic being does not decompose. It is petrified. — I would like to see scattered through Brasília five hundred thousand eagles of the blackest onyx. — Brasília is asexual. — The First instant of seeing is like a certain instant of drunkenness: your feet don’t touch the ground. — How deeply we breathe in Brasília. Whoever breathes starts to desire. And to desire is what one cannot do. There isn’t any. Will there ever be? The thing is, I am not seeing where. — I wouldn’t be shocked to run into Arabs in the street. Arabs, ancient and dead. — Here my passion dies. And I gain a lucidity that leaves me grandiose for no reason. I am fabulous and useless, I am made of pure gold. And almost psychic. — If there is any crime humanity has yet to commit, that new crime will be inaugurated here. And so hardly kept secret, so well-suited to the high plain, that no one would ever know. — Here is the place where space most resembles time. — I am sure this is my rightful place. But the thing is, I am too addicted to the land. I have bad life habits. — Erosion will strip Brasília to the bone. — The religious atmosphere I felt from the first instant, and that I denied. This city has been achieved through prayer. Two men beatified by solitude created me standing here, restless, alone, out in this wind. — Brasília badly needs roaming white horses. At night they would be green in the moonlight. — I know what the two wanted: slowness and silence, which is also my idea of eternity. The two created the picture of an eternal city. — There is something here that frightens me. When I figure out what it is that frightens me, I shall also know what I love here. Fear has always guided me toward what I desire. And because I desire, I fear. Often it was fear that took me by the hand and led me. Fear leads me to danger. And everything I love is risky. — In Brasília are the craters of the Moon. — The beauty of Brasília is its invisible statues.
Complete Stories Page 50
