The only place where they could live was a prison to them. That’s what she saw, stubborn, comparing the water of the fish to São Geraldo — and giving the first nudge with her elbow to Mateus who kept wanting to leave.
Even in his city, Mateus Correia was still an outsider, a man who from every place would take whatever benefited him. He was constantly rushing around on the street but always calm and elegant. His flanks were frigid, and so were his legs and neck — the result perhaps of that muteness with which he’d lock himself in for his hour-long bath. He’d come out cold, his gray hair fragrant. His flat nails turning livid would dig into his big hand: in the pocket of his jacket a perfumed kerchief. The air of a lawyer or engineer — such was his air of mystery. She took no interest in her husband’s business — but how he dressed up!
A continuous training. He was masculine and servile. Servile without humiliation like a gladiator who hired himself out. And she, being a woman, would serve him. She’d wipe his sweat, smooth his muscles. It demeaned her to live by dint of Mateus’s comings and goings and his exercises, spreading out shirts that the dust of the city would immediately soil, or feeding him meats and wines. But she couldn’t help being fascinated by that meticulous order, which seemed long since to have surpassed any justification, except to waste the months preparing him for combat.
Awaiting the day someone would at last crush her colossus — and, with horror, she’d be free. Whenever he’d return to the hotel, his wife would be surprised to see him still on the loose. There everyone seemed to live illicitly anyway, from extraordinary occupations. Mateus Correia for example was: an intermediary.
This function made him enigmatic and satisfied: he’d eat little in the morning, kiss her, his mouth through the coffee smelling of toothpaste and morning nausea. He wore rings on his fingers like a slave.
And after helping him get ready, she’d stay seated at the table, watching him move around. Everything was Mateus Correia now. Mateus’s baths. Mateus’s brushes. Mateus’s fingernail scissors. Never had a more secretly exterior life been seen than his: she was stunned while watching him. She wouldn’t even have to get to know him better.
And he was very witty too. “Sometimes I die laughing, mama,” she’d write in her free time. Ana had moved to her sister’s farm.
Lucrécia herself had been caught up by some gear of the perfect system. If she’d thought that by allying herself with an outsider, she’d shake off São Geraldo forever and tumble into fantasy? she’d been mistaken.
She’d tumbled in fact into another city — what! into another reality — the only reason it was more advanced was because it was a big metropolis where things had already been so mixed up that the inhabitants, either lived in an order superior to them, or were trapped in some gear. She herself had been caught by one of the gears of the perfect system.
Perhaps badly caught, with her head upside-down and one leg sticking out.
But from her position, maybe even a privileged one, she could still watch quite well. Standing, at the door of the hotel. Seeing the thousands of hired gladiators crossing back and forth. And while those statues were passing by — the rats, real rats, with no time to lose, were gnawing at whatever they could, taking advantage of the situation, shaking with laughter. What did you do this summer? they were asking suffocating with laughter, did you go dancing? In good conscience you couldn’t say that the gladiators had gone dancing. To the contrary, they were extraordinarily methodical.
Already with a desire for a superior order, Lucrécia hoped to go two or three more times to the theater, waiting for the moment she’d reach a hard-to-count number, like seven or nine, and could add this sentence: “I used to go to the theater all the time.”
Sitting with the audience, while the “ballet” was continuing on stage; the darkness was being cooled by fans. She had joined a people and, being part of that nameless crowd, was feeling both famous and unknown. Beyond the box, beyond the darkness, she could make out a ballroom — another ballroom — another ballroom — fleeing. In the hallways, the tips of toes arriving late, hands drawing back curtains, and breathless the people adding themselves to the darkness . . . she herself excited by the fans, perspiring in her first married lady’s black dress — “I got married in the summer,” as it should be.
Onstage legs and feet were dancing without Lucrécia Neves Correia’s quite understanding. From the intimate incomprehension of Market Street, she’d passed to public incomprehension. She tried her best to pick up other people’s facial expressions and those terms with which Mateus’s world would display knowledge of the finer points, the professional part of things. She was always tapping imaginary specks of dust from her dress and this precious gesture betrayed great insights. But, despite her efforts, she managed to watch the “ballet” merely fascinated. Not to mention that from afar it was impossible to make anything out except with binoculars. Over her neckline her husband’s binoculars were blinding her face.
Telling herself with hitherto unknown care: you have to forget the dancer.
Because the just-married woman was trembling possessed by love for the dancer. Don’t leave me, she was saying fanning herself ceremoniously. Mateus Correia was offering her bonbons — he bought her everything, and Lucrécia was already starting to get irritated with this man who had taken her because it gave him pleasure to have a young and flighty woman — the dancer, in elastic and languid movement, filled her with surprise, ripped open a vein of blood in her mouth: she mixed it into the sweetness of the bonbon, cleaning her teeth with her fingernail.
Her lack of sensuality was a heartily repugnant sensuality, her mouth full of blood, loving the dancer. Above all what was he giving himself to? she was remembering — in him she was seeing herself again on a rainy night, trying to point things out — as he himself was horrifyingly attempting.
He was the dancer of that city.
But if she could read Perseu’s face, Ana’s, Felipe’s, and even Dr. Lucas’s — she couldn’t read the dancer’s, it was a face that was too clear.
What was he giving himself to? she felt forewarned. Though she still understood the dancer’s performance better than the city’s other demonstrations. If he was awakening the old commitment in her, she was now out of time, her skirts caught by some gear of the perfect system. At the same time nobody would take her away from there, she had the right to be in a box: this was her time. The extraordinary guarantee.
Soon intermission was lighting up the whole theater, the dancer disappearing in a leap, the whole city applauding. Then she was getting up with Mateus, safeguarded, dragging her hips like a peacock. The breathing of the people was filling the ballrooms with heat, each thing proliferated by the mirrors in the middle of the night. In an advanced city each bit of news was spread by radio, each gesture multiplied by mirrors — care was taken to make something of the movements achieved.
All this, however, was at the beginning of the marriage.
Because later she learned to say: I really liked it, the show was good, I had such a nice time. The superior order. It was so well danced, she learned to say moving eyebrows, and freed herself forever from so many insurmountable realities. This is the most beautiful square I’ve ever seen, she’d say, and then could cross with security the most beautiful square she’d ever seen.
That’s how it was. What a quick hunt. She’d go out to shop, walking in the shade looking at the dentists’ signs, the bolts of cloth on display; up to the store was close, past it was “far”: she was making calculations in the new landscape, comparing it with São Geraldo’s.
Oh, you couldn’t even compare them. A bit further they were repaving a street, and the perfected tools were heating up in the sun. In a few days the paving wouldn’t be so up-to-date. And even more perfected instruments would come along to work on it. Several passersby were looking at the machines. Lucrécia Neves Correia too. The machines.
If a person didn’t underst
and them, he was entirely out of it, almost absent from this world. But if he did understand them? If he did he was entirely inside, lost. The best approach would still be to leave, pretending not to have seen them — that’s what Lucrécia did, resuming her shopping.
Back again, at the entrance into the dining room on Mateus Correia’s arm, having to fake happiness despite being so happy: bananas for dessert. What a terrible noon in the city: irons simmering: I married in the summer! everyone eating every dish on the menu. It was allowed, the crisis still hadn’t broken out. Then her husband was leaving, his mustache, the newspaper. No one to knock on the door and deliver a message: I don’t mingle with people at the hotel, she thought all haughty in the room with the blinds closed where she was trying to sleep because Mateus wanted her to fatten up even more, even more, even more.
Oh, she couldn’t even sum up Mateus, sitting beside him in the ice cream parlor.
He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat. And he’d let the nail of his pinky finger grow longer than the others. With a wide brim and a long nail — Mateus? No, he wasn’t ruthless. But things had arranged themselves in such a way that it seemed to her urgent to get on his good side and make him pity her. How she’d flatter him! a sycophant, that’s what she was. Also because she wanted more presents.
And when there was a party?
Suddenly there’d be a party, invitations arranged without much of a right, they seemed to manage everything through prohibited means, everyone fending for themselves as best they could — the world was turning, she was choosing all sweaty the fabrics, Mateus giving advice, she, finally uncovering her arms, the beginning of her breasts. She entered the ballroom.
Arm resting on her husband’s, skirt dragging in the dust, lights, the women more beautiful than she, whose back was bare, and her placid arms also bare — finally she’d gained weight. And he! with a mustache, servile, dominating. It was at that moment that he was entirely unknown to her, within this already familiar lack of knowledge in which both understood each other. He was walking off to greet someone, Mateus! her mute voice crossing the ballroom, crossing the windows open to the moonlight, what did she care about the moonlight! — her gaze running amidst the noises of the skirts, what did she care about the dry moonlight, Mateus! because he was the blind guide but the guide — Mateus! who with his back to her was examining from head to foot another woman who wasn’t even naked.
Not to mention the mirror that was distorting him on his mustache. And revealing a new expression, conceited and extremely smooth . . . So charming that even she smiled. Mateus was fat and handsome. And dangerous? like an acrobat. He seemed to take care never to mix himself up with himself. He was the result, in the mirror, of the display of someone else. She, who had always wanted the true things, wood, iron, house, trinket. Sometimes people would say: I saw you with your father, ma’am; she’d rejoice offended.
And that’s how her husband asked her to dance, with a politeness that was making him even more unknown. And the great dancer of São Geraldo stumbling with her first steps . . . Stepping on his feet. Where was her importance? and the living room? and amidst all this she was so happy that she was suffocating. “I achieved the Ideal of my life,” she wrote to Ana.
“Have you ever seen so much food,” Mateus said as proud as if the party were his, that was how each one seized whatever he could, “you can tell it’s got something to do with the Government.”
“That’s true!” she retorted full of joy, amazing herself that Lucrécia from São Geraldo had climbed so high that she was mingling with people who ran a city, what! a country . . .
They were going back to the hotel by car — he sure knew how to spend money! she was fanning herself radiant. But he should let her sleep.
“I’m tired,” she informed him with a wife’s cunning.
And if the moonlight was starting up again with its dead silence, the universal surroundings were avoiding the true night; the intimate mode was reducing itself to the impersonal. Profoundly happy.
Only an old commitment was no longer being fulfilled. She could still see, and was seeing. She’d fallen however from the surface of things to the inside.
Sometimes it would rain, was calm, she’d say:
“Today’s Thursday, Mateus” — and everything was brought up-to-date.
He was incapable of saying an ugly word, and when in rage he’d let slip the beginning of one, she’d lean back in the chair laughing with her head lowered, laughing a lot — and her husband would look at her with surprise, flattered — angry and flattered:
“I didn’t even say anything,” he’d say laughing with modesty, she helping him to be a type, “I didn’t even say anything!” he’d exclaim, and his wife would laugh beneath the catastrophe.
Besides flattering him, the rest was scrutinizing him uselessly. Bewildered. Those creatures didn’t feel the slightest need to explain themselves — such was their mystery. With the clean nails of a man who knows about things and who drinks without getting drunk. And really very good to her:
“If you need anything, tell me, my girl.”
Lucrécia Neves would seize the opportunity:
“Speaking of which, well then I’ve been needing a dress with frills on the sleeves and skirt.”
He wouldn’t say no, ah, never: he’d give her everything. “I have everything I dream of,” she’d write her mother immediately, ready to jot down one more piece of information. Finally she imagined that he must surely have a mistress, since he was so masculine and mysterious! She started searching his pockets.
Until opening his desk drawer she found the envelope. She opened it with the help of steam and found inside the x-ray of two teeth.
Yes! but all this was happier, the days were passing, months and months were passing, hours being lost — and behind it all that established law, the newspapers being published, a generation feeling secure — and so often it had been her turn to be the guilty one, both would be running late or missing the trolley, ah, and looking for and not finding a street? I got lost, Mateus dear, I don’t know the city, and being late, the hesitations, how often the hesitations like changes of light, and there was no need to force the union of one segment to another, it was enough to go to sleep in order to wake up the next day, sometimes later, sometimes earlier.
The main thing was not to leave your place out of impatience. To have a lot of perseverance indeed. And you’d finally reach, like now, a certain point. Brought by taxis, by waking up the next day quite a bit earlier, by indeterminately getting Mateus ready: all this had brought her to the point of eating little sour oranges, closing her eyes while the man was asking:
“My girl, don’t you think so.”
“Yes, yes,” she’d say restraining herself, the acidity drying her fingertips, dulling her teeth: “yes, yes!”
But he sure had seen the orange, that clever one! and was laughing:
“Sour oranges and limes decrease your passion” — the gladiator was laughing. And the grating noise was starting up again, each bristle withering. Because she had her nerves:
“You and your nerves.” But he’d forgive, the good, the mysterious Mateus, locking himself in the bathroom.
One night Lucrécia cried a little, while the exhausted warrior was dreaming beside her. The night calm, even pleasant, and the sky starry. Afterward she couldn’t even remember exactly when she’d fallen asleep, so that the next day came adding itself to her wealth.
Then she said with rage: I’m getting out of here.
In the hope that at least in São Geraldo “a street was a street, a church a church, and even horses wore bells,” as Ana had said.
With surprise she saw that that man wanted nothing more than to follow her and add himself to his wife’s city, he who didn’t belong to any city.
So it was that a few days later a car was bringing the couple back to the township.
Leaping from the taxi, she looked at a São Geraldo that was — noisy? people laughing offensively. The cacophony of a gear.
And unexpectedly the rain falling on the now unfamiliar city, dampening it in ashes and sorrows . . .
She standing holding her parcels, the drops running down her face. But suddenly spurred to action, running up the stairs, throwing the packages onto a chair — invading her old dusty room and opening like a gale the balcony window and looking.
The raincoats were going down Market Street.
And at dusk the woman sighted the hill in the pasture.
The black slope was rising in a fist over São Geraldo. The somber kingdom of the equines.
That’s how she stayed, upright, inexpressible. Both facing each other through the rain, merely forewarned. Ah! exclaimed the woman giving herself over in jubilation. She seemed to hear the hoof of a horse in swift blows.
But not much time had passed and she was realizing that it had been with extreme effort that the hill had answered her.
Taking advantage of her absence, São Geraldo had advanced in some sense, and she was already not recognizing things. Calling them, they would no longer answer — accustomed to being called by other names.
Other gazes, not hers, had transformed the township. She also was no longer looking at the trinkets, the ones at her back.
The presence of the maid was altering the structure of the second floor, strange hands would touch the little stuffed bird, Mateus installed like a king in Ana’s chair which was so simple.
And she putting off the moment to go for a walk by herself, forgetting him.
“When I can, I can; when I can’t, I can’t — that’s my motto!” Mateus Correia said one morning.
And that’s how she got to know him more and more.
She’d let herself be led by her husband as if she were the foreigner in São Geraldo. They’d go out together for a stroll, he tall, with strong hips, the mustache, and that rigid space into which he seemed to fit, the air around him almost palpable — and she with the ribbons she was stubbornly wearing, even regarding with distaste the sobriety that was in fashion. Her hat with a veil, and that constant running to keep up with him, running with her veil. Only when her husband died of a heart attack did she understand that strength, regulated and of a hurried slowness, the complete setting down when he’d sit, without abandoning his erect demeanor. But sometimes Mateus Correia would get diabolically happy, rub his hands and, without saying why he was so happy, exclaim:
The Besieged City Page 13
