As for the girl, she lives in an impersonal limbo, without reaching the worst or the best. She just lives, inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. Actually — why should she do anything more? Her existence is sparse. Yes. But why should I be feeling guilty? And trying to rid myself of the weight of not having done anything concrete to help the girl? That girl — and I see that I’m almost into the story — that girl who slept in cheap cotton underwear with rather suspicious faint blood stains. To fall asleep on cold winter nights she curled in upon herself, receiving and giving herself her own paltry warmth. She slept with her mouth open because of her stuffed nose, she slept exhausted, she slept dead to the world.
I have to add a little something that’s very important for understanding the narrative: that it’s accompanied from beginning to end by a very slight and constant toothache, something to do with chipped enamel. I also guarantee that the story will be accompanied by the plangent violin played by a thin man right on the street corner. His face is narrow and yellow as if he’d already died. And maybe he had.
All this I’ve explained at great length for fear of having promised too much and then giving only the simple and the small. Since this story is almost nothing. The thing to do is to start all of a sudden just as I jump all of a sudden into the icy water of the sea, a way of facing with suicidal courage the intense cold. I’m about to begin halfway saying that —
— that she was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her. If she were an expressive creature she would say: the world is outside me, I am outside me. (It’s going to be hard to write this story. Even though I don’t have anything to do with the girl, I’ll have to write out all of myself through her amidst frights of my own. The facts are sonorous but between the facts there’s a whispering. It’s the whispering that astounds me.)
She never figured out how to figure things out. So much (explosion) that she had nothing to say for herself when the boss of the pulley-distribution firm rudely warned her (a rudeness she seemed to be asking for with that dumb face, a face just asking to be slapped), rudely that he was only going to keep Glória, her co-worker, because as for her, she made too many typing mistakes, besides invariably dirtying the pages. That’s what he said. As for the girl, she thought that to show respect she needed to say something and spoke ceremoniously to her secretly beloved boss:
— Forgive me for the trouble, sir.
Mr. Raimundo Silveira — who by now had already turned his back — looked around a bit surprised by the unexpected politeness. And something in the typist’s almost smiling face made him say less rudely, though grudgingly:
— Well, you don’t have to leave right away, you might even stick around a while.
After receiving this warning she went to the bathroom to be alone because she was all shaken. She mechanically looked at herself in the mirror atop the filthy and cracked sink, full of hairs, which matched her own life so well. It seemed to her that the dark and tarnished mirror didn’t reflect any image. Could her physical existence have vanished? This illusion immediately passed and she made out her face entirely distorted by the cheap little mirror, her nose as huge as a clown’s papier-mâché nose. She looked at herself and lightly thought: so young and already rusted.
(Some people have got it. And some people don’t. It’s very simple: the girl didn’t. Didn’t have what? Exactly that: she didn’t. If you see what I’m saying, fine. If you don’t, that’s fine too. But why am I bothering with this girl when what I want more than anything is purely ripe and golden wheat in summer?)
When she was little her aunt to punish her with fear told her that the vampire-man — the one who sucks people’s blood by biting them in the flesh of the neck — has no reflection in the mirror. She reckoned that it wouldn’t be so bad to be a vampire because the blood might give a touch of pink to her sallow complexion, she who didn’t seem to have any blood unless one day she might have to spill it.
The girl had slumped shoulders like those of a darning-woman. She’d learned to darn as a child. She might have come farther in life if she had devoted herself to the delicate task of mending, maybe even mending silk. Or luxurious fabrics: nice shiny satin, a kiss of souls. Little darning mosquito. A grain of sugar carried on an ant’s back. There was something slightly idiotic about her, but she wasn’t an idiot. She didn’t know she was unhappy. That’s because she believed. In what? In you, but you don’t have to believe in anyone or anything — you just have to believe. That sometimes gave her the state of grace. She’d never lost faith.
(She makes me so uncomfortable that I feel hollow. I’m hollow of that girl. And the more uncomfortable she makes me the less she demands. I’m angry. So enraged I could smash cups and dishes and break windows. How can I avenge myself? Or rather, how can I make up for it? I’ve got it: by loving my dog who has more food than that girl. Why doesn’t she react? Can’t she grow a backbone? No, she is sweet and obedient.)
She also saw two enormous, round, bulging, and inquisitive eyes — her gaze was that of someone with a broken wing. Some thyroid issue, eyes that asked. Who was she asking? God? She didn’t think about God, God didn’t think about her. God belongs to those who manage to get him. God appears when you’re distracted. She didn’t ask questions. She guessed that there were no answers. Was she dumb enough to ask? And get a “no” right in her face? Maybe the empty question was just so that someday nobody could say to her that she’d never even bothered to ask. Since there wasn’t anyone to answer she herself seemed to have answered: that’s how it is because that’s how it is. Is there another answer in the world? If anyone knows a better one speak up and tell me, I’ve been waiting for years.
Meanwhile the clouds are white and the sky is all blue. Why so much God. Why not a little for men.
She’d been born with a rap sheet and now looked like the daughter of nobody in particular apologizing for taking up space. In the mirror she distractedly examined close up the blotches on her face. In Alagoas they were called “panos," they said it was something to do with the liver. She concealed her panos with a thick layer of white powder and if that made her look whitewashed it was better than looking drab. All of her was a bit grimy since she rarely washed. During the day she wore a blouse and skirt, at night she slept in her underwear. A roommate never knew how to tell her she smelled stale. And because she didn’t know how, she left it at that, since she didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Nothing in her was iridescent, though the parts of her skin between the blotches had a slight opal glow. Not that it mattered. Nobody looked at her on the street, she was cold coffee.
And that’s how time passed for the girl. She blew her nose on the hem of her underwear. She didn’t have that delicate thing called charm. I’m the only one who finds her charming. Only I, her author, love her. I suffer for her. And I’m the only one who can say this: “what do you ask of me weeping that I wouldn’t give you singing?" That girl didn’t know she was what she was, just as a dog doesn’t know it’s a dog. So she didn’t feel unhappy. The only thing she wanted was to live. She didn’t know for what, she didn’t ask questions. Maybe she thought there was a little bitty glory in living. She thought people had to be happy. So she was. Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon.
There are a few facts to relate and I myself still don’t know what I
’m informing on.
Now (explosion) with a few rapid strokes I’ll sketch the girl’s previous life before she stood before the bathroom mirror.
She was born with rickets, a legacy of the backlands — the rap sheet I mentioned earlier. By age two her parents were dead of the bad fevers of the backlands of Alagoas, there where the devil lost his boots. Much later she went to Maceió with her sanctimonious aunt, her only relative in the wide world. Every once in a while she’d remember something she’d forgotten. For example her aunt rapping her upside the head because, her aunt imagined, the crown of the head must be an essential point. She always used her knuckles to rap that head with its bones weak from a calcium deficiency. She hit her but not only because the beatings gave her great sensual pleasure — the aunt who hadn’t married since the idea disgusted her — she also considered it her duty to see the girl didn’t end up like all those girls in Maceió standing on street corners with lit cigarettes waiting for men. Though the girl had shown no signs of turning into a hooker. Since even the fact of becoming a woman didn’t seem to belong to her vocation. Puberty came late because even weeds long for the sun. She’d forgotten the beatings because if you wait a while pain ends up going away. What hurt more was being deprived of her daily dessert, guava preserve with cheese, the only passion in her life. Wouldn’t you know that punishing her that way became her sly old aunt’s favorite method? The girl didn’t wonder why she was always being punished but you don’t have to know everything and not knowing was an important part of her life.
That not-knowing might seem awful but it’s not that bad because she knew lots of things in the way nobody teaches a dog to wag his tail or a person to feel hungry; you’re born and you just know. Just as nobody one day would teach her how to die: yet she’d surely die one day as if she’d learned the starring role by heart. For at the hour of death a person becomes a shining movie star, it’s everyone’s moment of glory and it’s when as in choral chanting you hear the whooshing shrieks.
When she was small she’d dearly longed for a pet. But her aunt thought that an animal was one more mouth to feed. So the girl invented that all she could do was breed fleas since she didn’t deserve the love of a dog. From the contact with her aunt she’d acquired a drooping head. But the piety didn’t stick: once the aunt died, she never again entered a church because she didn’t feel anything and the deities were strangers to her.
Since life’s like that: you press a button and life lights up. Except she didn’t know which button to press. She didn’t even realize she lived in a technical society in which she was a dispensable cog. But one thing she’d upsettingly discovered: she no longer knew what it was to have a father and mother, she’d forgotten the taste. And, if she thought about it, she might say she sprouted from the soil of the Alagoas backlands like an instantly molded mushroom. She talked, yes, but was extremely mute. Sometimes I manage to get a word out of her but it slips through my fingers.
Despite her aunt’s death she was sure it would be different with her, since she’d never die. (Being the other man is my passion. In this case the other woman. I shiver squalid just like her.)
Things that can be defined are starting to fatigue me a bit. I prefer the truth that is in the foreboding. When I rid myself of this story, I’ll return to the more irresponsible realm of only having slight forebodings. I did not invent this girl. She forced her being upon me. She wasn’t retarded by any means, she was as helpless and trusting as an idiot. The girl who at least didn’t have to beg for food, there is a whole subclass that’s even more lost and hungry. I alone love her.
Later — who knows why — they’d come to Rio, unbelievable Rio de Janeiro, her aunt got her a job, finally died and she, now on her own, was living in a tenement in a room with four salesgirls who worked at the Lojas Americanas.
The tenement was in an old colonial house on rough Acre Street amongst the prostitutes who served sailors, coal and cement warehouses, not far from the docks. The nasty docks made her long for the future. (What’s going on? Since it’s like I’m hearing the chords of a cheerful piano — could that be the symbol that the girl’s life might have a splendid future? I’m pleased by the possibility and will do everything I can to make it real.)
Acre Street. But what a place. The fat rats of Acre Street. That’s a place I don’t set foot because I’m terrified without any shame of that dark bit of nasty life.
Every once in a while she was lucky enough to hear a rooster singing his life out and remembered the backlands nostalgically. Where could a crowing rooster fit in those parched storehouses holding wholesale import-export goods? (If the reader possesses any wealth and a comfortable life, he’ll step out of himself to see how the other sometimes lives. If he’s poor, he won’t be reading me because reading me is superfluous for anyone who has a slight permanent hunger. Here I’m playing the role of a safety valve for you and from the massacring life of the average middle class. I’m well aware that it’s frightening to step out of oneself, but everything new is frightening. Though the anonymous girl in this story is so ancient that she could be a biblical figure. She was subterranean and had never flowered. I’m lying: she was grass.)
Of the suffocating summers of oppressive Acre Street she only felt the sweat, a sweat that stank. I think there was something wrong with that sweat. I’m not sure if she had tuberculosis, I don’t think so. In the dark of the night a man whistling and heavy footsteps, the howling of the abandoned mutt. Meanwhile — the silent constellations and the space which is time which has nothing to do with her and with us. So that’s how the days went by. The roosters crowing and the blood-red dawn gave fresh meaning to her withered life. In the morning there were chirping birds on Acre Street: because life sprouted from the ground, cheerful amidst the stones.
Acre Street for living, Lavradio Street for working, the docks to hang out on Sundays, the occasional whistle of a cargo ship that for some reason tugged at her heart, the occasional delicious though slightly painful rooster’s crowing. The rooster was coming from the never. It came from the infinite up through her bed, giving her gratitude. Light sleep because she had a cold for almost a year. In the early mornings she had fits of hoarse coughing: she smothered it with her flimsy pillow. But her roommates — Maria da Penha, Maria Aparecida, Maria José and just Maria — didn’t mind. They were too worn out by jobs no less arduous just because they were anonymous. One of them sold Coty face powder, if you can imagine. They rolled over and fell back asleep. The other girl’s cough actually lulled them into an even deeper sleep. Is the sky above or below? Wondered the northeastern girl. Lying there, she didn’t know. Sometimes before falling asleep she was hungry and got a little giddy thinking about a side of beef. The thing to do then was to chew paper into a pulp and swallow.
Anyway. I’m getting used to it but I still can’t get a grip. My God! I get along better with animals than with people. When I see my horse free and running through the field — I feel like leaning my face against his vigorous and velvety neck and telling him the story of my life. And when I pet my dog’s head — I know he doesn’t expect me to make sense or explain myself.
Maybe the northeastern girl had already concluded that life is extremely uncomfortable, a soul that doesn’t quite fit into the body, even a flimsy soul like hers. In her little superstitious imaginings, she thought that if by any chance she ever got a nice good taste of living — she’d suddenly cease to be the princess she was and be transformed into vermin. Because, no matter how bad her situat
ion, she didn’t want to be deprived of herself, she wanted to be herself. She thought she’d incur serious punishment and even risk dying if she took too much pleasure in life. So she protected herself from death by living less, consuming so little of her life that she’d never run out. This savings gave her a little security since you can’t fall farther than the ground. Did she feel she was living for nothing? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Only once did she ask a tragic question: who am I? It frightened her so much that she completely stopped thinking. But I, who can’t quite be her, feel that I live for nothing. I am gratuitous and pay my light, gas and phone bills. As for her, she sometimes occasionally on payday bought a rose.
This all happens in the year it is happening. And I’ll only finish this difficult story when I’m too exhausted by the struggle, I’m no deserter.
Sometimes she remembered a frightening out-of-tune song that girls sang dancing in a circle — she only listened without joining in because her aunt was calling her to sweep the floor. The girls with wavy hair in pink ribbons. “I want one of your daughters marré-marré-deci.” “I chose the one I wanted marré.” The song was a pale ghost like a rose that is madly beautiful but mortal: pale and mortal the girl was today the soft and horrifying ghost of a childhood without balls or dolls. So she’d pretend she was running through hallways with a doll in her hand chasing a ball and laughing a lot. Her chortling was terrifying because it happened in the past and only a rotten imagination would bring it into the present, longing for what might have been and wasn’t. (I warned that this was a cheap tearjerker, even though I refuse to show any mercy.)
I have to say that the girl isn’t aware of me, if she was she’d have someone to pray to and that would mean salvation. But I’m fully aware of her: through this young person I scream my horror of life. Of this life I love so much.
The Hour of the Star () Page 3
