Getting back to the girl: the luxury she allowed herself was a sip of cold coffee before bed. She paid for the luxury by waking up with heartburn.
She was quiet (not having anything to say) but she liked noises. They were life. Whereas the silence of the night was scary: as if it were about to say a fatal word. At night cars rarely passed through Acre Street, the more they honked, the better she liked it. Besides these fears, as if they weren’t enough, she was also terrified of getting a bad disease down there — that, her aunt had taught her. Although her tiny ova so shriveled. So, so. But she lived in such sameness that at night she couldn’t remember what happened that morning. She vaguely thought from far off and without words this: since I am, the thing to do is to be. The roosters I mentioned earlier announced yet another day of fatigue. And the hens, what were they doing? Wondered the girl. The roosters at least sang. Speaking of hens, the girl sometimes ate a hardboiled egg in a snack bar. But her aunt had taught her that eggs were bad for the liver. So she obediently got sick, feeling pains on her left side opposite the liver. Because she was very impressionable and believed in everything that existed and everything that didn’t exist too. But she didn’t know how to dress up reality. For her reality was too much to be believed. Anyway the word “reality” meant nothing to her. To me either, by God.
When she slept she fitfully half-expected her aunt to knock her on the head. Or she strangely dreamed about sex, she who to all appearances was asexual. When she got up she felt guilty without knowing why, maybe because good things should be forbidden. Guilty and contented. Just in case she made herself feel guilty and mechanically prayed three Hail Marys, amen, amen, amen. She prayed but without God, she didn’t know who He was and so He didn’t exist.
I’ve just discovered that for her, besides God, reality too was very little. She could deal better with her daily unreality, living in sloooow motion, hare leeeeaping through the aaaair over hiiiill and daaaale, vagueness was her earthly world, vagueness was the insides of nature.
And she thought it was good to be sad. Not miserable, since she’d never felt that way because she was modest and simple but that indefinable thing as if she were romantic. Of course she was neurotic, that goes without saying. It was a neurosis that kept her going, my God, at least that: crutches. Every once in a while she wandered into the better neighborhoods and gazed at the shop windows glittering with jewels and satin clothes — just to mortify herself a bit. Because she needed to find herself and suffering a little is a way of finding.
On Sundays she got up early in order to have more time to do nothing.
The worst moment of her life was on that day at the end of the afternoon: she’d lapse into worried meditation, the emptiness of dry Sunday. She sighed. She missed being little — manioc flour — and thought she’d been happy. Actually even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful. She never complained about anything, she knew that’s just how things are and — who organized the land of men? Surely someday she’d deserve the heaven of the crooked where you only get in if you’re warped. Anyway it’s not about getting into heaven, she’s crooked right here on earth. I swear I can’t do anything for her. I promise you that if I could I would make things better. I’m well aware that saying the typist has a body full of holes is more brutal than any bad word.
(As for writing, a living dog is worth far more.)
Here I should record a joy. That the girl on a Sunday without manioc flour had an unexpected happiness that was inexplicable: by the port she saw a rainbow. Feeling the light ecstasy, she immediately longed for another: she wanted to see, like once in Maceió, the popping of mute fireworks. She wanted more because it really is true that when you give that sort an inch they want the whole mile, your average Joe dreams with hunger of everything. And he wants it but has no right to it, now does he? There was no way to — at least I can’t — obtain the multiplying shimmers in the drizzling rain of fireworks.
Should I say that she was crazy about soldiers? Well she was. Whenever she saw one, she thought with a shiver of pleasure: is he going to kill me?
If the girl knew that my own joy also comes from my deepest sadness and that sadness was a failed joy. Yes, she was happy inside her neurosis. War neurosis.
And she had a luxury, apart from her monthly visit to the movies: she painted her fingernails a tacky red. But since she bit them almost down to the quick the loud color was ruined immediately and you could see black dirt below.
And when she woke up? When she woke up she no longer knew who she was. Only later did she think with satisfaction: I’m a typist and a virgin, and I like coca-cola. Only then did she dress herself in herself, she spent the rest of her day obediently playing the role of being.
Would it enrich this story if I used some difficult technical terms? But there’s the rub: this story has no technique, nor style, it lives from hand to mouth. I who also wouldn’t stain for anything in this world with shimmering and false words a life as meager as the typist’s. During the day I make, like everyone else, gestures I don’t even notice myself. And one of the gestures I notice the least is this story of which I’m not guilty and which turns out however it turns out. The typist lived on a kind of stupefied nimbus, between heaven and hell. She’d never thought “I am I." I suspect she didn’t think she had the right, she was a fluke. A fetus tossed in the trash in a newspaper. Are there thousands like her? Yes, and who are just flukes. If I think about it: who isn’t a fluke in life. As for me, I’ve only escaped from being just a fluke because I write, which is an act that is a fact. That’s when I enter into contact with inner powers of mine, I find through myself your God. Why do I write? What do I know? No idea. Yes, it’s true, I sometimes think that I’m not me, I seem to belong to a distant galaxy because I’m so strange to myself. Is this me? I am frightened to encounter myself.
The northeastern girl didn’t believe in death, as I’ve said, she didn’t think — since wasn’t she alive? She’d forgotten her father’s and mother’s names, which her aunt had never mentioned. (With excessive casualness I’m using the written word and that trembles inside me who fears moving away from the Order and falling into the abyss populated with screams: the Hell of liberty. But let me go on.)
Going on:
Every morning she turned on the radio lent by one of her roommates, Maria da Penha, turning it on as low as possible so as to not disturb the others, turning it on to Clock Radio, which broadcast “the right time and culture," and no music, just dripping in sound of falling drops — each drop a minute that passed. And especially this station used those drops of minutes to run ads — she loved ads. It was the perfect station because also amongst the drops of time it gave short teachings about things she might one day need to know. That’s how she learned that the Emperor Charlemagne was called Carolus in his own land. Admittedly she never found any use for this information. But you never know, patience always pays off in the end. She’d also heard that the only animal that doesn’t mate with its own offspring is the horse.
— That, young man, is indecent, she said to the radio.
Another time she heard: “Repent in Christ and He will give you happiness.” So she repented. Since she wasn’t quite sure for what, she repented entirely and for everything. The preacher also said that seeking revenge is a mortal sin. So she didn’t seek revenge.
Yes, patience always pays off in the end. Really?
She had what’s known as inner life and didn’t know it. She lived off herself as if eating he
r own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams. These dreams, because of all that interiority, were empty because they lacked the essential nucleus of — of ecstasy, let’s say. Most of the time she had without realizing it the void that fills the souls of the saints. Was she a saint? So it seems. She didn’t know that she was meditating because she didn’t know what the word meant. But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on the nothing. Except she needed others in order to believe in herself, otherwise she’d get lost in the successive and round emptinesses inside her. She meditated while she was typing and that’s why she made even more mistakes.
But she had her pleasures. On chilly nights, shivering beneath her thin cotton sheet, she liked to read by candlelight the ads she cut out of old newspapers lying around the office. Because she collected ads. She pasted them into an album. There was one ad, the most precious of all, that showed in full color the open pot of cream for the skin of women who simply were not her. Blinking furiously (a fatal tic she had recently acquired), she just lay there imagining with delight: the cream was so appetizing that if she had the money to buy it she wouldn’t be a fool. To hell with her skin, she’d eat it, that’s right, in large spoonfuls straight from the jar. Because she lacked fat and her body was drier than a half-empty sack of crumbled toast. She’d become with time mere living matter in its primary form. Maybe that was to protect herself from the great temptation to go ahead and be unhappy and feel sorry for herself. (When I think that I could have been born her — and why not? — I shudder. And it seems to me a cowardly avoidance the fact that I am not, I feel guilty as I said in one of the titles.)
In any case the future seemed like it would be much better. At least the future had the advantage of not being the present, for bad things there’s always something better. But there wasn’t any human misery in her. Because she had within her a certain fresh flower. Since, as strange as it may seem, she believed. She was only fine organic matter. She existed. That’s it. And me? The only thing known about me is that I breathe.
Although all she had inside her was the little indispensable flame: a breath of life. (I’m going through a little hell with this story. May the gods never make me describe a lazar because then I would break out in leprosy.) (If I’m delaying making the things happen that I already vaguely foresee, it’s because I need to take a few snapshots of the girl from Alagoas. And also because if there’s any reader for this story I’d like him to absorb this girl like a cloth soaking up water. The girl is a truth I didn’t want to know about. I don’t know whom to accuse but somebody has to have done it.)
Could it be that by entering the seed of her life I’m violating the secret of the pharaohs? Will I get the death penalty for speaking of a life that contains like all our lives an inviolable secret? I’m desperately trying to find in this girl’s existence at least one topaz of splendor. Maybe I’ll find it in the end, I still don’t know, but I have hope.
I forgot to say that sometimes the typist was nauseated by the thought of food. That came from when she was little and discovered she’d eaten fried cat. It frightened her forever more. She lost her appetite, all she had was the great hunger. It seemed to her that she’d committed a crime and that she’d eaten a fried angel, its wings snapping between her teeth. She believed in angels, and because she believed in them, they existed.
She’d never eaten lunch or dinner in a restaurant. She ate standing up at the corner bar. She had a vague idea that a woman who enters a restaurant must be French and of easy virtue.
There were things that she didn’t know what they meant. One was “ephemerides." And didn’t Mr. Raimundo ask her to copy from his lovely handwriting the word ephemerides or ephemeris? She thought the term ephemerides was absolutely mysterious. When she copied it she paid attention to every letter. Glória could do shorthand and not only earned more but didn’t even miss a beat with those difficult words the boss loved so much. Meanwhile the girl had fallen in love with the word “ephemerides."
Another snapshot: she’d never gotten a present. Moreover, she didn’t need much. But one day she saw something that for a brief moment she coveted: a book that Mr. Raimundo, who had a literary bent, had left on his desk. The title was “Humiliated and Offended." She grew thoughtful. Maybe for the first time she defined herself in a social class. She thought, thought and thought! She concluded that nobody had ever actually offended her, everything that happened was because that’s how things are and there was no struggle possible, struggle for what?
I ask: will she ever someday know love’s farewell? Will she ever someday know the swoonings of love? Will she take in her own way the sweet journey? I know nothing. What can you do with the truth that everyone’s a little sad and a little alone. The northeastern girl got lost in the crowd. In Mauá Square, where she caught the bus it was cold and she had no shelter to protect her from the wind. Ah, but there were cargo ships that made her long for who knows what. This only sometimes. Really she left her gloomy office, faced the air outside, dusky, and realized that every day at the same time, it was exactly the same time. Irremediable the great clock that worked in time. Yes, desperately for me, the same time. Well, so what? So what, nothing. As for me, author of a life, I can’t deal with repetition: routine divides me from my possible novelties.
Speaking of novelties, the girl one day saw in a corner bar a man so, so, so good-looking that — that she wanted to have him at home. It would be, like — like having a big emerald-emerald-emerald in an open jewel box. Untouchable. From the ring she saw he was married. How to marry-marry-marry a being who was only to-to-to be seen, she stammered in her thoughts. She’d die of embarrassment to eat in front of him because he was good looking beyond any person’s possible balance.
Since didn’t she want to rest her back for a day? She knew that if she said this to her boss he wouldn’t believe her ribs hurt. So she used a lie that was more convincing than truth: she said to her boss that she couldn’t work the next day because having a tooth pulled was very dangerous. And the lie worked. Sometimes only a lie can save you. So, the next day, when the four tired Marias went to work, she had for the first time in her life the most precious thing of all: solitude. She had a room all to herself. She could hardly believe that all this space was hers. And not a word was heard. So she danced in an act of absolute courage, since her aunt couldn’t hear her. She danced and twirled because being alone made her: f-r-e-e! She enjoyed everything, of this arduously obtained solitude, the radio as loud as it would go, the vastness of the room without the Marias. She got, as a favor, a little instant coffee from the landlady, and, as another favor, she asked her for some boiling water, drank it all licking herself and in front of the mirror so as not to miss any of herself. The encounter with herself was a good she had not yet known. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy in my entire life, she thought. She owed nothing to anyone and no one owed her a thing. She even allowed herself the luxury of boredom — a quite unusual boredom.
I don’t entirely trust her unexpected facility for asking favors. So did she need special conditions in order to become charming? Why hadn’t she always acted like this in her life? And even looking at herself in the mirror wasn’t that scary: she was happy but how it ached.
— Ah month of May, never leave me again! (Explosion) was her intimate exclamation the next day, May 7, she who never exclaimed. Probably because something had finally been given to her. Given by herself, but
given.
On that morning of May seventh, the unexpected ecstasy for her tiny little body. The open and glittering light of the streets went right through her opacity. May, month of bridal veils floating in white.
The following is just an attempt to reproduce three pages I wrote and that my cook, seeing them lying around, threw away to my despair — may the dead help me bear what is almost unbearable, since the living aren’t much use to me. I won’t even manage to match the attempt at artificial repetition of what I originally wrote about meeting her future boyfriend. It’s with humility that I’ll now tell the story of the story. But if anyone asks how it went I’ll say: I don’t know, I lost the meeting.
May, month of butterfly brides floating in white veils. Her exclamation might have been a foreboding of what was going to happen at the end of the afternoon of that same day: in the middle of the pouring rain she met (explosion) the first thing she could call a boyfriend in her life, her heart beating as if she’d swallowed a little fluttering and captured bird. She and the boy looked at each other in the middle of the rain and recognized each other as northeasterners, creatures of the same species sniffing each other out. He had looked at her wiping his wet face with his hands. And the girl, seeing him was enough to turn him immediately into her guava preserve with cheese.
He . . .
He came up to her with a singsong northeastern voice that moved her, asked her:
— And I beg your pardon, missy, can I invite you for a stroll?
— Yes, she hurriedly replied confusedly before he changed his mind.
— And if you’ll allow me, what’s your name, little lady?
The Hour of the Star () Page 4
