— Yes, ma’am.
So Madame Carlota told her that in the Mangue, in her little cubicle, she’d put lovely decorations on the walls.
— Did you know, my love, a man’s smell is good for you? Healthy. Have you ever smelled a man?
— No ma’am.
Finally, after licking her fingers, Madame Carlota told her to split the deck with her left hand, got it, you sweet little thing?
Macabéa divided the pack with a trembling hand: for the first time she was going to have a destiny. Madame Carlota (explosion) was a high point in her existence. It was the vortex of her life and it had been funneled in order to discharge into that great lady whose shiny rouge gave her skin the smoothness of plastic. Madame Carlota suddenly stared:
— But, little Macabéa dear, what a horrible life! May my friend Jesus take pity on you, my child! How awful!
Macabéa blanched: it had never occurred to her that her life was that bad.
Madame got everything right about Macabéa’s past, even saying that she’d hardly known her father and mother and was raised by a relative like a wicked stepmother. Macabéa was shocked by the revelation: up till now she’d always thought that what her aunt had done was educate her to make her a nicer girl. Madame added:
— As for the present, dearie, that’s horrible too. You’re going to lose your job and you’ve already lost your boyfriend, poor little thing. If you can’t pay me, don’t worry, I’m a lady of means.
Macabéa, little accustomed to getting anything for free, refused the offer but with a heart full of gratitude.
And then (explosion) it suddenly happened: Madame Carlota’s face lit up all illuminated:
— Macabéa! I’ve got great news! Listen carefully, my flower, because what I’m about to tell you is very important. It’s something very serious and very happy: your life is going to change completely! And even more: it will change the minute you step out of this house! You’ll feel completely different. You can be sure, my little flower, that even your boyfriend will come back and ask you to marry him, he takes it all back! And your boss will tell you that he’s thought about it and isn’t going to fire you!
Macabéa had never had the courage to hope.
But she now heard Madame Carlota as if hearing a celestial trumpet — while her heart beat furiously. Madame was right: Jesus was finally taking some interest in her. Macabéa’s eyes were opened wide as if by a sudden voracity for the future (explosion). And I too am finally beginning to hope.
— And there’s more! You’re about to come into a lot of money brought in the night by a foreign man. Do you know any foreigners?
— No ma’am — said Macabéa already losing heart.
— Well you will. He’s blond with blue or green or brown or black eyes. And if you weren’t in love with your ex-boyfriend, this foreigner would fall in love with you. No! No! No! Now I’m seeing something else (explosion) and though I can’t see it very clearly I’m also hearing the voice of my spirit guide: this foreigner is apparently named Hans, and he’s the one who’s going to marry you! He’s got lots of money, all foreigners are rich. If I’m not mistaken, and I’m never mistaken, he’s going to give you lots of love and you, my poor little orphan, you’ll wear satin and velvet and even get a fur coat!
Macabéa began (explosion) to quiver because of the painful side there is in excessive happiness. All she could think to say was:
— But you don’t need a fur coat in the heat of Rio . . .
— Then you’ll have it just to dress up. It’s been a long time since I had such good cards. And I’m always sincere: for example, I just frankly told that girl right before you that she’s going to get run over, she even cried a lot, did you see her red eyes? And now I’m going to give you a charm that you should wear right under your bra where you hardly have breasts, poor thing, right against you skin. You don’t have a bust, but you’ll start to fill out and get a body. Until you put on a little weight, stuff some cotton into your bra to pretend like you’ve got some shape. Look, my pet, I’m afraid Jesus makes me charge for the charm because everything I earn as a card-reader I give to an orphanage. But if you can’t, don’t pay, just come pay me when everything comes to pass.
— No, I’ll pay, ma’am, you got everything right, you are . . .
She was practically drunk, she didn’t know what she was thinking, it felt like someone had given her a good knock on her head with its sparse hairs, she felt as disoriented as if an unhappiness had befallen her.
Most of all she was learning for the first time what others called passion: she was passionately in love with Hans.
— And what do I do to grow more hair? — she dared to ask because she already felt completely different.
— Don’t get your hopes up. But anyway: wash your hair with Aristolino soap, don’t use hard yellow soap. I won’t charge you for that advice.
Even that? (explosion) her heart beat, even more hair? She’d forgotten Olímpico and could only think of the foreigner: what luck to get a man with blue or green or brown or black eyes, you couldn’t go wrong, the range of possibilities was vast.
— And now — said Madame Carlota — leave and go after your marvelous destiny. And even though another client is waiting I gave you extra time, my little angel, but it was worth it!
In the sudden gush (explosion) of a vivid impulse Macabéa, half ferocious, half clumsy, planted a cracking kiss on Madame Carlota’s cheek. And she felt again that her life was already getting better, right then and there: because it was good to kiss. When she was little, since she didn’t have anyone to kiss, she’d kissed the wall. When she caressed someone else she was caressing herself.
Madame Carlota had gotten everything right, Macabéa was stunned. Only then did she see that her life was miserable. She felt like crying when she saw her other side, she who, as I said, had always thought she was happy.
She stumbled out of the fortune-teller’s house and stopped in the alleyway darkened by the dusk — dusk which is the hour of no one. But she with dimmed eyes as if the last end of the day was stained with blood and almost black gold. So much richness of atmosphere received her and the first grimace of the night which, yes, yes, was deep and showy. Macabéa stood a little dizzy not knowing if she’d cross the street since her life had already been changed. And changed by words — we have known since Moses that the word is divine. Even for crossing the street she was already a different person. A person pregnant with the future. She felt inside her a hope more violent than any despair she had ever felt. If she was no longer herself that meant a loss that counted as a gain. Just as you can be sentenced to death, the fortune-teller had sentenced her to life. Everything suddenly was a lot and a lot and so wide that she felt like crying. But she didn’t: her eyes glistened like the dying sun.
Then as she stepped off the pavement to cross the street, Destiny (explosion) whispered swift and greedy: now, quick, it’s my turn!
And enormous as an ocean liner the Mercedes hit her — and at that very moment in some single corner of the world a horse as if in reply reared in a peal of neighing.
Macabéa as she fell still had time to see, before the car fled, that Madame Carlota’s prophecies were already coming true, since it was a very luxurious car. Her fall was nothing, she thought, just a shove. Her head had hit the curb and she stayed there, her face gently turned toward the gutter. And from her head a thread of blood unexpectedly red and rich. What I meant was that despite everything she belonged to a stubborn race of dw
arves that one day might reclaim the right to scream.
(I could still go back and rewind the last few minutes and happily start again at the point when Macabéa was standing on the sidewalk — but it doesn’t depend on me to say that the blond and foreign man looked at her. Because I’ve already gone too far and can’t turn back now. Luckily I at least didn’t and won’t speak of death and only of a hit-and-run.)
She lay helpless on the side of the street, perhaps taking a break from all these emotions, and saw among the stones lining the gutter the wisps of grass green as the most tender human hope. Today, she thought, today is the first day of my life: I was born.
(Truth is always an inexplicable inner contact. Truth is unrecognizable. So it doesn’t exist? No, for men it doesn’t exist.)
Returning to the grass. For that puny creature named Macabéa great nature showed itself only in the form of grass in the sewer — were she given the thick sea or the high peaks of mountains, her soul, even more virgin than her body, would go mad and her organism would explode, arms here, intestines there, her head rolling round and hollow at her feet — as you dismantle a wax dummy.
She suddenly paid a little attention to herself. Was what was happening a deaf earthquake? The land of Alagoas had opened in cracks. She stared, just for the sake of staring, at the grass. Grass in the great City of Rio de Janeiro. Random. Maybe Macabéa had once felt that she too was random in the unconquerable city? For her Destiny had chosen an alley in the dark and a gutter. Was she suffering? I think so. Like a hen with a half-severed neck running terrified dripping blood. Except the hen flees — as you flee pain — in panicked clucks. And Macabéa was struggling mute.
I’m going to do everything I can to keep her from dying. But what an urge to put her to sleep and to go off to bed myself.
Then it started to drizzle lightly. Olímpico was right: all she was really good for was raining. The fine threads of freezing water slowly soaked her clothes and this wasn’t comfortable.
I ask: was every story ever written in the world a story of affliction?
Some people sprouted in the alleyway out of nowhere and gathered around Macabéa without doing anything just as people had always done nothing for her, except that now at least they were glancing at her, which gave her an existence.
(But who am I to rebuke the guilty? The worst part is that I have to forgive them. We must reach such a nothing that we indifferently love or don’t love the criminal who kills us. But I’m not sure of myself: I have to ask, though I don’t know who can answer, if I really have to love the one who slays me and ask who amongst you slays me. And my life stronger than myself, replies that it wants revenge at all costs and replies that I must struggle like someone drowning, even if I die in the end. If that’s the way it is, so be it.)
Is Macabéa by any chance going to die? How should I know? And not even the people standing there knew. Though just in case a neighbor had placed beside her body a lit candle. The luxury of the rich flame seemed to sing glory.
(I’m writing about the meager minimum adorning it with purple, jewels and splendor. Is this how you write? No, it’s not by accumulation but by stripping naked. But I fear nakedness, since it is the last word.)
Meanwhile, Macabéa on the ground seemed to become more and more a Macabéa, as if reaching herself.
Is this a melodrama? What I know is that melodrama was the summit of her life, all lives are an art and hers inclined toward the great uncontrollable weeping like rain and lightning.
A thin man in a ragged jacket therefore appeared playing the fiddle on the street corner. I should explain that I saw this man once at dusk when I was a boy in Recife and the screeching and acute sound underlined with a golden line the mystery of the dark street. Beside the pitiful man was a tin can in which the coins of those who listened to him with gratitude for mourning their lives clattered dryly. Only now do I understand and only now has the secret meaning sprouted: the violin is a warning. I know that when I die I’ll hear the man’s violin and demand music, music, music.
Macabéa, Hail Mary, full of grace, serene promised land, land of forgiveness, the time must come, ora pro nobis, and I use myself as a form of knowledge. I know you to the bone through an incantation that comes from me to you. To scatter oneself wildly and yet behind everything pulses an inflexible geometry. Macabéa remembered the docks. The docks went to the heart of her life.
Macabéa ask for forgiveness? Because one always does. For what? Answer: that’s the way it is because that’s the way it is. Was that the way it always was? It always will be. And if it wasn’t? But I’m telling you it is. So then.
You could tell perfectly that she was alive from the constant blinking of her big eyes, from the thin chest that was rising and falling in perhaps difficult breathing. But who can tell if she wasn’t needing to die? Because there are times when a person needs a little bitty death and doesn’t even know it. As for me, I substitute the act of death for a symbol of it. A symbol that can be summed up in a deep kiss but not on a rough wall but mouth-to-mouth in the agony of pleasure that is death. I, who symbolically die several times just to experience the resurrection.
I find with joy that the movie-star hour for Macabéa to die has not yet come. At least I can’t guess if the blond and foreign man will come to pass for her. Pray for her and may everyone stop what they’re doing to breathe life into her, since Macabéa for now is adrift in chaos like the door swinging in an infinite wind. I could wrap it up by taking the easiest route, killing the infant-girl, but I want the worst thing of all: life. So let those who read me get punched in the stomach to see if it’s good. Life is a punch in the stomach.
For now Macabéa was nothing more than a vague feeling on the dirty cobble stones. I could leave her lying on the street and simply not finish the story. But no: I’ll go on to where the air runs out, I’ll go to where the great gale leaps away howling, I’ll go to where the void begins to curve, I’ll go where my breath takes me. Does my breath deliver me to God? I am so pure that I know nothing. I only know one thing: I don’t need to pity God. Or do I?
She was so alive that she moved slowly and drew her body into the fetal position. Grotesque as ever. That reluctance to give in, but that longing for the great embrace. She embraced herself longing for the sweet nothing. She was cursed and didn’t know it. She clung to a thread of consciousness and mentally repeated over and over: I am, I am, I am. Who she was, was what she didn’t know. She’d gone to seek in the very deep and black core of her self the breath of life that God gives us.
Then — lying there — she had a moist and supreme happiness, since she had been born for the embrace of death. Death which is my favorite character in this story. Was she going to say farewell to herself? I don’t think she’s going to die because she wants to live so much. And there was a certain sensuality in the way she’d huddled up. Or is it because pre-death resembles intense sensual throes? Because her face looked like a grimace of desire. Things are always days before and if she doesn’t die now she is like us on the day before her death, forgive me for reminding you because as for me I can’t forgive my clairvoyance.
A smooth, chilling, freezing and acute taste as in making love. Could this be the grace that you call God? Yes? If she was going to die, in death she would go from virginity to womanhood. No, it wasn’t death because I don’t want that for the girl: just a collision that didn’t even mean a disaster. Her effort to live seemed like something that, if she’d never felt it, virgin that she
was, she nevertheless intuited, because only now was she understanding that a woman is born a woman from the very first cry. A woman’s destiny is to be a woman. She had intuited the almost painful and whizzing moment of love. Yes, painful and such a difficult reflowering that she used for it her body and the other thing you call a soul and I call — what?
Then Macabéa said a phrase that none of the passersby understood. She said clearly and distinctly:
— As for the future.
Would she have longed for the future? I hear the ancient music of words and words, yes, that’s it. At this very moment Macabéa feels a deep nausea in her stomach and almost vomited, she wanted to vomit something that wasn’t her body, to vomit something luminous. A thousand-pointed star.
What am I seeing now and that frightens me? I see that she vomited a little blood, vast spasm, essence at last touching essence: victory!
And then — then the sudden rattling of a seagull, all at once the voracious eagle lifting to the high airs the tender lamb, the sleek cat mangling some dirty rat, life eats life.
Et tu, Brute?!
Yes, that’s how I wanted to announce that — that Macabéa died. The Prince of Darkness won. Finally the coronation.
What was the truth of my Maca? As soon as you discover the truth it’s already gone: the moment passed. I ask: what is? Reply: it’s not.
But do not mourn the dead: they know what they are doing. I was in the land of the dead and after such black terror I resurged in pardon. I’m innocent! Don’t consume me! I am not saleable! Woe to me, all is lost and it’s as if the great guilt was mine. May they wash my hands and feet and then — then may they daub them with oils sacred from so much perfume. Ah such will for happiness. I’m now forcing myself to laugh in a great burst. But I don’t know why I’m not laughing. Death is an encounter with oneself. Lying there, she was as big as a dead horse. The best thing is still this: not to die, because dying is insufficient, it doesn’t complete me, I who need so much.
The Hour of the Star () Page 8
