The Girl in the Photograph

by Lygia Fagundes Telles

  The final chapter, then, lends itself to being read as a political allegory, one that shows the dire consequences that result when a society—any society—decides to abandon its most vulnerable, most disadvantaged citizens and to lavish benefits instead on its elites, its most powerful and politically connected figures. No society that wishes to be a democracy can do this and survive—a point that, while obviously applicable to late 1960s and early 1970s Brazil under its military dictatorship, also speaks directly to American readers in 2012, as their own country struggles against a rising tide of reactionary and oligarchic politics, ever-growing corporate power, and the plutocratic rule of the ultra-wealthy that threatens their own democracy. While men, Telles’s story suggests (Remo, for example, lives on, after accidently killing his brother), will continue to play important roles in this struggle for social, political, and economic reform (in Brazil and worldwide), that struggle’s potency and viability is being conspicuously enhanced by the ever-stronger participation of women like Lorena. As The Girl in the Photograph makes clear, the pro-democracy, pro-justice activism of women must be encouraged and supported by all concerned.

  In 2012, when, with Dilma Rousseff, Brazil now has its first woman President (something the United States has not yet been able to achieve), and when women occupy many seats of political power in Brazil, this reading of Lorena’s characterization seems more prescient that it might have back in 1973, during some of the grimmest years of the flagrantly patriarchal dictatorship. Interestingly, however, this use of strong female characters to embody the future of Brazil does not begin with Fagundes Telles; indeed, it dates back, in Brazilian literature, at least to the nineteenth-century, and writers as diverse as Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, José de Alencar, Domingos Olímpio, Aluízio Azevedo, and Machado de Assis, though it has continued on unabated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with such authors as Graciliano Ramos, Clarice Lispector, Nélida Piñon, and Regina Rheda.

  Much more than a novel set during the Brazilian dictatorship, The Girl in the Photograph is very much a portrait of our times, and the issues it discusses and the questions it explores should resonate deeply with American readers, who, in numerous ways, will see much of themselves and their own culture in it. Telles’s novel will speak to women readers especially, though it will also speak to the men who love them, and to everyone who loves democracy and seeks freedom and justice for all, as opposed to the privileged few. Although it can certainly be read as an important Brazilian novel, it can also be read in a broader, hemispheric context, as an American novel with much to say to the United States of America in 2012. Yet The Girl in the Photograph will also be read as a work of fiction that does much to strengthen ties between the United States and Brazil, as well as between these two nations and their New World neighbors. Improved inter-American relations are going to play a major role in New World affairs during the twenty-first century, and writers like Lygia Fagundes Telles are making vital contributions to this mutually beneficial experience.

  Finally, a word of praise must go out to the novel’s translator, Margaret A. Neves, who has given us a translation as fluent and as natural in English as it is in its original Brazilian Portuguese. This is a major accomplishment when one considers how deeply entwined are the interior monologues which characterize the three women, and by which their stories are interwoven. A careful and discerning reader and a skilled writer (as all good translators must be), Neves manages to keep the three monologues separate, distinct, and vital, and to reproduce for the English reader the many shifts in tone, semantic fields, and stylistic twists and turns that characterize the original text.

  EARL E. FITZ

  VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

  Works Cited

  Burns, E. Bradford. A History of Brazil, 2nd edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

  “Ana Clara, don’t squint!” said Sister Clotilde, about to snap the photo, “Quick, Lia, tuck in your blouse! And don’t make faces, Lorena, you’re making faces!” The pyramid.

  Chapter 1

  I sit down on the bed. It’s too early to take a bath. I flop onto my back, hug the pillow and think about M.N., the best thing in the world isn’t drinking the milk from a green coconut and then peeing in the ocean, Lião’s uncle said it was but he doesn’t know, the best thing is to imagine what M.N. will say and do when my last veil is removed. The last veil! Lião would write, she becomes sublime when she writes, she began her novel by saying that in December the city smells of peaches. Imagine, peaches. December is peach season, that’s true, sometimes one finds peach pits on the streetcorners with the smell of an orchard about them, but to conclude from that that the entire city is perfumed is just too sublime. She dedicated the story to Ché Guevara with a very important-looking quote about life and death, all in Latin. Imagine Latin entering into the Guevarian scheme. Or maybe it does? Suppose he liked Latin; don’t I? The delicious hours I used to spend lying on the ground, my hands crossed under my head, Latinizing as I watched the clouds. Death combines with Latin, nothing goes together so well as Latin and death. But to accept that this city smells like peaches, that’s going too far. Que ciudad será esa? he would ask, thoroughly perplexed. Tercer mundo? Yes, Third World. Y huele a durazno? Yes, in the opinion of Lia de Melo Schultz, it smells like peaches. Then he would close his eyes, or what used to be his eyes, and smile where his mouth used to be. Estoy bien listo con esas mis discípulas. Well, that’s her problem, mine is M.N., an M.N. naked and hairy, much hairier than I, he’s very hairy, kind of like a monkey. But a beautiful monkey, his face so intellectual, so rare, the right eye slightly smaller than the left, and so sad, all one side of his face is infinitely sadder than the other. Infinitely. I could keep repeating infinitely infinitely. A simple word that extends itself through rivers, mountains, valleys infinitely long, like the arms of God. The words. The movements renewing themselves like the smooth new skin of the snake breaking through from under the old. It isn’t slimy; I touched one once at the farm, it was green and thick but not slimy. And M.N.’s gestures also new, it isn’t true that it will be the same as the other times, he will come with a clean skin, inventing or invented down to the last minutiae. If God is in details, the sharpest pleasure, too, is in small things, you hear that, M.N.? Ana Clara told me about a boyfriend she had who would go crazy when she took off her false eyelashes, the bikini scene didn’t have the slightest importance but as soon as she started to remove her eyelashes, it was glory. The naked eye. Verily I say unto you, the day will come when the nakedness of the eyes will be more exciting than that of the sex organs. Pure convention, to think sexual organs are obscene. What about the mouth? Unsettling, the mouth biting, chewing, biting. Biting a peach, remember? If I wrote something, it would be a story entitled “The Peach Man.” I watched it from a streetcorner as I was drinking a glass of milk: a completely ordinary man with a peach in his hand. As I looked on he rolled and squeezed it with his fingers, closing his eyes a little as if he wanted to memorize its contours. He had hard features and his need of a shave accentuated their lines like charcoal shading, but the hardness dissolved when he sniffed the peach. I was fascinated. He stroked the fuzz of its skin with his lips, and with them, too, he went over the whole surface of the fruit as he had done with his fingertips. Nostrils dilated, eyes narrowed. I wanted him to get it over with, but it seemed he was in no hurry; almost angrily, he rubbed the peach against his chin, rolling it between his fingers as he hunted for the nipple-point with the tip of his tongue. Did he find it? I was perched at the café counter but I could see it as if through a telescope: He found the rosy nipple and began to caress it with his tongue tip in an intense circular movement. I could see that the tip of his tongue was the same pink as the nipple of the peach, and that he was already licking it with an expression near suffering. When he opened his mouth wide and bit down to make the juice squirt sharply out, I almost gagged on my milk. I still go tense all over when I remember it, oh Lorena Vaz Leme, have you no shame?

&
nbsp; “No,” says the Seducer Angel out loud. Quickly I light an incense tablet, oh perverse mind. I’d like to be a saint. As pure as this perfume of roses that enfolds me and makes me drowsy, Astronaut used to get sleepy too when I would light the incense. And he would stretch the same way I do; I learned how to stretch from watching him. Worthless cat, what’s become of you? Hmm? He used to give daily lessons in lasciviousness and indolence, but he would never repeat his movements, all ballet dancers should have a cat. The cunning. At the same time, the abandon. The scorn for things that were really to be scorned. And that calculated obsession. Made entirely of dangerous delicacies, my cat. Or was he a demon? During the pauses between lessons, he would stare at me, so much more conscious than I in my unconsciousness, how could I know? I didn’t even know M.N. yet, I didn’t spend hours and hours woolgathering, Lord, how I’ve wool-gathered lately. Only Jesus understands and pardons, only He who went through everything like us, Jesus, Jesus, how I love You! I’m going to play a record in your honor, I offer music just like Abel offered the lamb, of course, a lamb is much more important, but Jesus knows I have a horror of blood, my offerings will have to be musical ones. Jimi Hendrix? Listen, my beloved, listen to this last little tune he composed before he died, he died of drugs, poor thing, they all die of drugs, but hear it and I know you’ll lower Your hand in blessing upon his sweat-stained, dusty Afro hair, dear Jimi!…

  With an elastic leap, Lorena threw herself onto the gilded iron bed, which was the same color as the wallpaper. She practiced a few dance steps, raising her leg until her bare foot touched the iron bar of the bedstead, and jumped down onto the blue stripe of the jute rug. She straightened up, shook her hair back and, looking straight ahead, moved forward by balancing herself on the stripe until she got to the record player.

  “Jimi, Jimi, where are you?” she asked, examining the pile of records on the bookshelf. She was wearing a pair of soft pajamas, white with yellow flowers, and around her neck was a chain with a small gold heart. She held the record by the tips of her fingers. “And you, Romulo? Where are you now?”

  Squeezing her damp eyes shut, she placed the record on the turntable. Softly, she raised the needle and guided it as if it were the beak of a blind bird seeking a dish of water. She let it fall.

  “Lorena!”

  The voice was coming from the garden. Quickly she pulled her hair together, wound it up at the back of her neck, and stood on tiptoe. Opening her arms, she walked on the spiral stripe of the carpet, tense as an acrobat on a highwire.

  “Lorena, come to the window, I want to talk to you!”

  She hesitated dangerously, her right foot planted on the stripe, her left suspended in the air. Only when she managed to put the left one down in front of the other without losing her balance did she relax; she had made it across the wire. She bowed deeply to both sides, her arms arched backwards, her hands touching like the tips of half-opened wings. She waved her thanks to the audience as she moved back slightly, smiling modestly downward. But she thrilled to catch a flower in the air, kissed it threw it triumphantly to the grandstand and went whirling toward the window. She waved to the young woman who was waiting, arms crossed, in the middle of the driveway. Bringing her hands to the left side of her chest, she sighed loudly and said:

  “My dear, welcome! Look what a lovely day! It’s spring, Lião, primavera. Vera, truth, prima, first, naturally, the first truth. Hum? On a morning like this I have to hold onto myself, otherwise I fly right off, look at the daisies, they’ve all opened!” She pointed to the flower box under the window. “How sweet. Good morning, my little daisies!”

  “Lorena, do you think you could listen to me for a minute?”

  “Speak, Lia de Melo Schultz, speak!”

  With a brusque motion, Lia pulled her heavy white socks up to her knees. Her leather tote bag slid to the ground but she kept her eye attentively on the socks, as if she expected to see them slip downwards immediately. She picked up the bag.

  “Do you think your mother could lend me the car? After dinner. Let’s say about nine, understand.”

  Lorena leaned out the window and smiled.

  “Your socks are falling.”

  “Either they strangle my knees or they keep slipping. Look at that. When they were new, this elastic was so tight my legs would get purple.”

  “But what are you thinking, dear, wearing socks in this heat? And mountain-climbing boots, why didn’t you put on your sandals? Those brown ones match your bag.”

  “Today I have to walk all over the place, dammit. And if I don’t wear socks, I get blisters.”

  Probably on the soles of her feet. Super-hick. The only thing worse than blisters is bunions, like Sister Bula’s. Bunions must come from onions, there was once an old lady with bumps on her feet like onions, and her grandchildren inherited the deformity, bumps, onions, bunions. Oh Lord. Spring, I’m in love, and Lião talking about blisters on her feet.

  “I’ve got some great socks, I haven’t even worn them yet, you want them?”

  “Only if they’re French, see?”

  “They’re Swiss.”

  “I don’t like Switzerland, it’s too clean.”

  And they won’t even fit her, imagine, she must wear size twelve. How can she possibly wear socks that make her ankles even thicker, the poor thing has legs like an elephant’s. Even so, she’s thinner, political subversiveness is thinning.

  “Lião, Lião, I’m in love. If M.N. doesn’t phone, I’ll kill myself.”

  I’m much too annoyed to stand here listening to Lorenense sentiments, oh! Miguel, how I need you. I speak softly but I must be breathing fire.

  “Lena, listen, I’m not joking.”

  “Well, am I? What’s the hurry? Come on up and listen to Jimi Hendrix’s last album. I’ll make some tea, I have some marvelous biscuits.”

  “English?” I ask. “I prefer our biscuits and our music. Enough cultural colonialism.”

  “But our music doesn’t move me, dearest. If your Bahians say that they’re desperate, I believe them, I think it’s great, but if John Lennon comes along and says the same thing, then I’m turned on, I become mystic. I am mystic.”

  “You’re silly.”

  “Silly, Lião? You said silly,” she repeats.

  She leans farther out the window and, in the middle of a laugh, turns sideways, puts her thumbs in her head, and wiggles her hands like ears, oh! it takes patience to put up with this girl.

  “Lorena, it’s serious. I need the car tomorrow,” I say.

  She doesn’t hear me. Suddenly she becomes angelic as she waves to somebody inside the big old house, Mother Alix? Mother Alix who opens the window and is exactly the same height, her hand raised in the manner of the Queen of England. But as soon as the nun goes away, she makes a worse face, the one she reserves for last. Oh, Miguel, “stay cool,” you said, and that’s what I’m trying to do. But at times I go hollow, don’t you see? I can’t explain it but it’s just too hard to go on in the routine, I wish I were in jail, in your place, why couldn’t I go in your place? I wish I could die.

  “The university is still on strike,” groans Lorena, yawning. “What have you got there? A machine gun?”

  She straightens up as if she were using one, squinting down the sights, shoulders shaken by the discharge, tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat … She aims at the house, tat-tat-tat-tat-tat, and fires at Sister Bula who pretends to play with Cat but whose attention is riveted on us. I am grinning because I know that Miguel would react exactly that way.

  “Loreninha, don’t start in, I don’t like this game. Are you going to get the car? I’ll give it back the next day, like the last time. No problem.”

  “You guys should kidnap M.N., Lião. Why don’t you kidnap M.N.? He could stay hidden under my bed per omnia seculum seculorum, Amen.”

  I light a cigarette. What do I care if I sleep beside the drunks, the whores, the live coal against my breast, yes it hurts, but if I knew you were free, sleeping beside the road or under the bri
dge—! Only free. I can’t stand other people’s suffering, understand. Your suffering, Miguel. Mine I could stand all right, I’m tough. But if I think about you I get flaky, I feel like crying. Dying. And we are dying. One way or another, aren’t we dying? Never have the masses been so far away from us, they don’t want anything to do with us. We even make them angry, the masses are afraid, oh, how afraid they are. The bourgeoisie resplendent at the top. Never have the rich been so rich, they can build houses with door handles of gold, not just the cutlery but the door handles too. The faucets in the bathrooms. All pure gold like the Greek gangster had them on his island. Intact. Watching out the windows and thinking it’s funny. There’s still the mass of urban delinquents left. Urban neurotics. And half a dozen intellectuals; the friendly sympathizers. I can’t explain it but the intellectuals make me sicker than the cops do, the cops at least don’t wear a mask. Oh, Miguel. I need you so badly today, I feel so much like crying. But I don’t cry. I don’t even have a handkerchief, Lorena wouldn’t think it was nice to blow my nose on my shirttail.

  “Lorena, lend me a handkerchief, I’ve got a cold,” I say, wanting to wipe my face which is wet with tears. Handkerchief, hell, what I want is the car. “I want the car, Lorena. Can I count on you?”

  “I have white, pink, blue and light green. Ah, and turquoise. Look how beautiful this turquoise one is. So, Lia de Melo Schultz, what color does Madame prefer?”

  I gaze at the box of handkerchiefs she brings. She keeps everything in little boxes covered with flowered cloth, this one has red and blue poppies on a black background. Plus the silver and leather boxes which sit on her shelf. And bells. Wherever her brother travels he sends her a bell. Other people collect stamps, or ties. Still others get in line to go to the movies. Maurício grinds his teeth until they break. He doesn’t want to scream so he grinds his teeth when the electric rod goes deeper into his anus. In the cartoon, the cat takes a walloping that makes its teeth and bones splinter. But in the next scene they glue themselves together and the cat comes back in one piece. It would be nice if it were like in the cartoons. Sylvia Flute-player. Gigi. Jap. And you, Maurício? When the electric rod goes deeper, you faint. Faint quick, die! We ought to die, Miguel. As a sigh of protest, we should all simply die. “We would, if it would do any good,” you said, remember? I know, nobody would pay the slightest attention. We could rip our hearts out, look, here’s my blood, here’s my heart! But some guy shining shoes nearby would say, What color shoe polish does the gentleman prefer?