The Girl in the Photograph

by Lygia Fagundes Telles

  “Oh Lord,” groaned Lorena rolling herself up in the towel. She jumped out onto the bathmat and rubbed her feet on it to dry them. She could see her unreal reflection in the steam-covered mirror. Was she loved? No, certainly not. But she would continue loving, loving, loving, until—not until she died, no, until she came to life with love. She went to the phonograph and turned up the volume. The harsh, intractable sound grew stronger. She turned the button farther and the music expanded, pushing back the furniture, the walls. Dizzy with a fit of laughter, she doubled up, ah, the desire to run naked through the door, grab people and dance with them, play at boxing, make love, eat, oh, how hungry she was!

  “How hungry I am!” she yelled, pinching the felt duck perched on the bookshelf. “Quack, quack,” she said along with the duck. She took a small sip of milk and sighed. It would be nice to be able to like other things, bloody steaks, soups with fish and octopi swimming between ropes of onions at volcano temperature, blop, blop, blop. Setting down her glass she dressed in a white bikini and a too-big shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and after perfuming herself with lavender and dusting her feet with talcum, she gathered onto a plate things that appealed to her appetite: an apple, a raw carrot scrupulously cleaned, some soda crackers and a triangle of cheese. She settled herself on the sunbathed marble step, opened her napkin on her lap and set the plate to one side. Viewing the garden through the iron grillwork of the stairway she began to chew on the carrot. Would sex afford her as much pleasure as the sun? “I stay here taking the sun because I can’t take the man I love,” she thought chewing more energetically. And Ana Clara? The things she was taking, were they to substitute the leopard coat? The Jaguar? Suppose it were simply because she didn’t know the sun, childhood, God? “Everything I had and still have; it’s so sad to go looking outside for what should be within one.”

  A little red ant passed by about a centimeter from Lorena’s foot. It was carrying a piece of leaf cut out with a certain symmetry along its undulating edges, the sail of a sailboat getting its balance during a difficult crossing. She leaned over to see it better. Now the ant had stopped to talk with another one which was coming from the opposite direction. It set its bit of leaf aside, put its hands on its head, gesticulated elaborately, looked for the leaf in panic, couldn’t find it again, gave up and went back rather dizzily along the same route it had come. To what animal would Ana Clara correspond? A fox? She calculated things, lied, always wanted to be the smartest but in reality she was as unconscious as a grasshopper. Why did she have to go and get pregnant right before her famous marriage, why? If it were at least the fiancé’s. And I’m the one who has to arrange the yenom. And go along to hold her hand when the time comes. I’ve said more than once that intimacy is the enemy of friendship, this intimacy which exaggerates the banalities of the everyday. She heard me, agreed, and immediately afterward asked to borrow my bathing suit. To love my neighbor as I love myself, in this case, Crazy Ana. “I’m not just crazy, I’m insane,” she said in one of her rare moments of good humor. “I’m going from gray moods to black.” “The black sheep are the most beloved ones,” I replied. “Mother Alix has a real passion for you.” Then she looked at me in silence. And her eyes, which are usually shifty, met mine straight. Without a trace of irony (quite the contrary, she was very serious) she squeezed her Agnus Dei through her clothes. It should have been pinned to her bra, but as she doesn’t wear a bra she pinned it to one of the bikini straps. “Mother Alix gave it to me,” she said. “It’s a fragment of the vestments of a nun who became a saint.” I asked her what nun that was. “I don’t know,” she muttered as she put on her false eyelashes, an operation which demands total attention because her hands tremble awfully. She was going to a nightclub and came to borrow some perfume from me. She poured it over herself with such abandon that I had to open the window in spite of the cold night. “Cat got into my room and swept her tail over my dresser, she broke my perfume, my mirror and my bottle of eyedrops, can I take yours?” All a lie. The next day I went to see if she wanted to go to the movies. She wasn’t in, but there was the bottle of perfume, the mirror and the empty eyedrop bottle. A mountain of dirty clothes rolled up under the bed. Her jewelry, real and fake, scattered everywhere. A long green satin dress hanging on the wardrobe door. The chaos of shoes escaping through the opening of the large bottom drawer. A black wig and a leather jacket on top of the chair. The makeup box dumped out onto the bed, she must have been looking for something she didn’t find. On the walls, pictures of herself with a very important person. I was moved to see she had tacked up over the head of the bed the Chagall print that I had given her the night before, a green angel blessing a purple sinner who knelt in a patch of blue. Mother Alix’s rosary was also displayed but the presence of the Seducer Angel hovered in the room. Vulgarity and beauty were mixed together in the poster shot she had had taken of herself in a skin-tight bikini and black stockings, a pose more aggressive than sensual. I called Sebastiana and gave her the bundle of clothes to wash. While you’re here you could give this floor a sweeping, I said, but the woman couldn’t take her eyes off the poster. Ana’s beauty illuminated her face; her faded countenance was renewed by the impact. “Is she an actress?” she wanted to know. “More or less,” I answered and thought, If I were only half that pretty, M.N. would already have come up these stairs a hundred times. Into my shell, like the pearl in the oyster, isn’t that poetic? “We need to think of another plan,” he answered when I invited him to have some tea with me. Why another plan? Don’t my friends always come up, both boys and girls? We study, listen to music, discuss things, what’s the problem? He smiled his M.N. smile. “That’s different.” On account of this distinction I was somewhat consoled.

  “Lorena! A letter from overseas for you! The handwriting is your brother’s.”

  With two fingers, Lorena opened the damp curtain of hair that fell to her shoulders. She spied the nun in the garden, busy pulling out the trailing weeds that sprang up in the daisy planter with all the force of springtime. Sitting down on the top step, she leaned her forehead against the iron grillwork and swallowed her biscuit before answering.

  “I’m expecting a telephone call, Sister. Didn’t anyone call me?”

  Sister Bula suspiciously examined the small roots she had just pulled up. She dropped them, cleaned her hands on her apron and raised her sun-creased face. Her eyes were watering abundantly. Removing her handkerchief from her pocket, she wiped them, and took advantage of the opportunity to blow her nose. Pensively she stared at the greenish snot in the handkerchief. She folded it, bent over the planter, and pulled out a larger tuft which came with a ball of dirt.

  “She’s ruining the planter,” breathed Lorena as she folded her napkin as carefully as the nun had folded the handkerchief. On its white cloth were embroidered in red thread the initials of the Roominghouse: O. L. F. R. Cross-stitch. The letter O was the most painstakingly done. But the rather crooked L was too close to the F, which, to compensate for the defect, left the R marooned off on a pinkish aureola where the dye of the thread had run.

  “Terrible weed to get out,” muttered the nun, bending her body backward. “His Holiness the Pope said that vice increased in the world just like this weed, we pull it out, pull it out, and before you know it it’s sprouted up again.”

  “You do your gardening just like you embroider,” I say, fingering the R so much paler than the other letters, bleeding out and vanishing in the middle of the rosy blotch. Like a fatal wound. Ah, Romulo, Romulo. The blood running down from the hole that Mama tried to stop up with the palm of her hand, his red shirt growing paler, shrinking back before the blood which was so much stronger. “What happened, my son!” she gasped and the sound of her voice was white. I answered for him and my voice too seemed to come out of a snow-filled, sunless landscape. I listened to myself as if I were another person: “Remo shot him but he didn’t mean to, they were playing sheriff, they were near the tool shed and Romulo was running toward the river, I think he w
as going to dive in when Remo aimed and yelled stop! Romulo stumbled, grabbing his chest, and came toward us, it was an accident, they were only playing, it was an accident!” She didn’t hear me. “What happened, my son!” she repeated in a whisper, sitting on the ground with his head in her lap. She made a rocking movement backwards and forwards, holding him delicately but the hand which covered the wound was tensely energetic. What if I went to get a cork? A cork. Romulo’s face was transparent wax. His smile transparent, humid. His teeth paled. He smiled as if he were asking us to excuse him for dying.

  I face the sun until it blinds me, no, I don’t want to, not now, I was so happy thinking only about letters and suddenly they began to compose into something, so dangerous when they get together. But at bottom they are careless. Childish. A, B, H, M, O, … so rare X. The Z, an amnesiac king in decline, his twin brother S with all the cunning of an usurper. I put my finger on the eviscerated F that Sister Bula embroidered, letters too get stabbed in the guts, shot in the chest, socked, punctured, kicked—letters too are thrown in the ocean, in the abysses, in garbage cans and drains; they get falsified and decomposed, tortured and jailed. Some die but it doesn’t matter, they come back in another form, like dead people.

  “Like the dead,” I say out loud and my heart becomes happy again. “Hallelujah!” I yell to Bulie. But she has already left; her hands are dirty and she must wash them at once. Were they good, the plants she was uprooting? Bad? She has taken the risk of judging and now she is afraid. She loves to garden and embroider. Mother Alix would have to be the marvel she is to permit her to take care of the yard and mark all the linen of the Roominghouse with these red initials. I roll around my finger the thread which is coming loose from one of the letters, which one? Our Lady of Fatima Roominghouse. The of is missing but it is understood. I bite into the last cracker and gasp, excited. That’s what I’ve been getting at: Thousands of things are understood, between the lines. The omitted side. I want the truth—M.N., my love, listen, understand this, I want the truth. And you suggest reticence. Omissions.

  “The open-hearted truth,” I say as I face the sun. I may have a sunstroke, smoke is coming out of my ears, but I must keep thinking, woolgathering, woolgatherings done under the sun are always more logical, ah, M.N., you don’t yet know the horror I have of lies. I wrote six pages on the crime of omission, I got an A in Penal Code and now you. “My wife shouldn’t know, of course.” Why of course? An evasive smile. Vagueness. Because she is a shrew, he should answer. All wives are shrews who long ago were fairy godmothers: When they spoke, pearls and roses would issue out of their mouths. But as time elapsed the roses became ambiguous miasmas of bad breath and belches, how can M.N. make love with a woman like that? Obese, cross-eyed, false teeth, Oh Lord, it would be glory if she wore false teeth. And ironic, worse than ironic, sarcastic. A grating voice. How does a gra-a-t-ing voice sound? Suspicious connections with owls and rooks, graaak! Aunt Luci talks that way. Mama said she used to be pretty, thousands of boyfriends and flirtations to burn, in short, she isn’t pretty any more but she goes on as if she were, poor thing. Someone should tell her, but who? She’s had plastic surgery even on her feet, she wears dresses the jeunesse dorée of her time used to wear, and makes those silly faces. She even insisted on radiating her charm on Fabrízio, we were at the movies and she began to display through the slit in her Oriental shift (she adores these shifts) a piece of knee. This particular piece had varicose veins. We got so depressed and yet she went right on, she had had plastic surgery to lift her breasts and she had to show off how great they were, ah! a fifteen-year-old. And the wretched doctors adding fuel to the fire, how about doing your earlobes next? But her voice which didn’t have plastic surgery has a bitter sound, her voice shows her real age and can’t hide a thing. What if M.N.’s wife is like Aunt Luci? Politely unhappy: “If you think I will give you a divorce, you are greatly mistaken, my dear.” She might be the kind who says my dear with her jaw hardened in a particular way, Mama falls into that category, in the heat of her arguments with Mieux she says my dear but means the opposite. Good manners? Yes, good manners, a rich family, she studied in exclusive schools. Which doesn’t mean that M.N. married out of financial interest; he used to be poor, he hinted to me he had been poor but unfortunately he did marry out of love. With the passing of time he began to discover the more serious sins of his beloved, vices characteristic of the bourgeoisie, according to Lião: avarice and pride. Greediness is another one; Lião has already proved in her research that bourgeois women in underdeveloped countries are the greediest: by thirty, they have layered waistlines and bottoms the size of the Jaraguá harbor. And so my love gradually closed himself up with his pipe and his Proust, the loneliness of a periwinkle snail, you can knock but I won’t open. But he must have opened a few times. Five children. Why so many children M.N.? It’s something that I really can’t understand, five children. “A difficult case,” said Madame Giomar the first time she dealt the cards, as the king of hearts appeared. She pointed to the queen of spades with her favorite finger and advised that he was very involved with another woman: “Look there, his wife.” I looked and must have nearly fainted, because she began trying to cheer me up out of pity. She predicted thousands of marvelous men who are supposed to love me until the end of time, all of them arriving in airplanes with black briefcases, James Bond style. Marvelous men, imagine, I could only think about my forbidden king. He has a god in him, though I do not know which god, oh, poet, wherever you are protect this poor love of mine. I know I should ask for protection from Ogum and Iemanjá but I’m sorry, Lião, no Afro-Brazilian deities, please. I can only commune with gods and spirits of other forests, so lovely the word forest. Do we have forests? Forest here is jungle. He has a god in him. But he’s forbidden, I understand, he is the verboten which at times stabs me like a stiletto. In Bahian language one might get around it but in German there is no hope, verboten, verboten, ah, what an unbending unrelenting language. If his wife were to die of leukemia. “I have children your age, Lorena; would you accept such an old widower for a husband?” I’d have to kneel at Lião’s feet, will you be the maid of honor? “Who wants to get married any more, Lorena? Who? Only priests and prostitutes. And one or two queers, understand.” I wanted to say, me, me! I would adore marrying M.N., a better idea couldn’t exist, I’d love to marry him, I’m fragile, insecure. I need a full-time man. With all the papers in order, I have great faith in papers, I get that from Mama. Now she shows off the old papers but it’s too late, the files aren’t in the drawers, they’re in her head. How she wanted to marry Mieux, how crazy she was about the idea. She went so far as to design the dress, she came to show me the pattern: “Isn’t it better to get married, to normalize our situation?” I agreed with my heart sinking, Of course, of course. And I remembered my conversation with Aunt Luci that started with her telling me the origin of Mieux’s nickname: At every party he used to tell the anecdote of the fellow who slept with his wife because there was no one better around at the moment, faute de mieux, on couche avec sa femme. And always doubling up with laughter as if he had said the funniest thing in the world. He extended the faute de mieux to other circumstances: he’d go to a restaurant, ask for French wine. Don’t have French? Then bring a Chilean wine, faute de mieux. The Chilean is all gone? Then bring a domestic one, faute de mieux. “So he got to be Mieux,” she finished up, revolted. So what, Aunt? What does it matter if he’s silly? If he’s what Mama wants, there’s no problem. He dresses well, loves parties, he’s her type. You can’t demand that he be a great thinker on top of everything else. Then my aunt pulled me closer and made the mysterious face that Mama makes when there’s no mystery: “That’s just it. He’s not at all silly, he’s very sharp. I have proof that he has been investigating at the banks, he had the nerve to go to our lawyer, all with the air of wanting to protect Sister. He found out about the houses, the real estate, he found out how much the ranch was sold for and where she invested the money, he found out everything. Un
disguised fortune-hunting. If your mother isn’t careful, she’ll end up in St. Vincent of Paula nursing asylum.” So I lost my voice when Mama, all radiant smiles, came to show me her design of a full-length dress in pale pink with lace panels on the bodice and sleeves. Mine would be identical, we’d go as twins, she had seen the pictures of some celebrity’s wedding and thought it would be glory for mother and daughter to go with bows in their hair and holding hands, Let’s play in the forest before Mr. Wolf comes! And Mieux waiting at the altar, hiding his devil’s tail in the tail of his frock coat. She gave up the idea only because she remembered that when they went to sign the papers the true difference in their ages would be known. Mieux pressuring her and Mama inventing thousands of pretexts not to get married after all, she procrastinated and pretended to be cynical, but she confided to me: “They make me sick, those old yellow papers we have to dig up at the notary public’s, Brazilians have a mania for documents, such things don’t exist in other parts of the world. I was never born!” We never mentioned the subject again, but one day I felt so sorry for her when I found, all folded up inside a Charles Morgan novel, the design for the wedding dresses. She loaned me this book, she wanted so much for me to read her beloved author. “I used to memorize entire passages of Morgan in my first youth,” she said. She had a first, a second, and even a fourth youth. Her fury when Mieux told her one day at the top of his lungs that we are only young once. Poor thing. Since nobody ever touches the novel, it guards the letters I write to M.N. And then don’t send, oh Lord. I wrote that my whole life converged in him and that from now on I would only radiate outward from him. “I want to tell you, too, that we human creatures live (or stop living) in function of the imaginings generated by our fears. We imagine consequences, censure, sufferings, that perhaps would never occur, and thus run away from what is more vital, more profound, more alive. The truth, my dear, is that life and the world always bow to our decisions. Let us not forget the scars left by death. Our fulfillment, that is what matters. Let us develop within us the forces that will make us fulfilled and true.”