The Girl in the Photograph

by Lygia Fagundes Telles

  “Such nonsense,” mutters Sister Bula closing the magazine. I blow on the cuticle of my thumb where the scissor point has left a half-moon of blood, and choose a blues record.

  “Did you read it all?”

  “I don’t know why they waste so much paper on such nonsense,” she adds putting away her glasses. She dries her eyes on the sheet-sized handkerchief which would absorb the mucus of a battalion. “These people act as if sex were the most important thing in the world.”

  And isn’t it? Or one of the most important. In one night alone Crazy Annie had dozens of orgasms, which is a lie, naturally. But what about the others? The conversations I hear, people talk about their sex lives so much. Some of them are a bit mad, obviously they should talk to a doctor. It must be an exaggeration, not natural.

  “Dear, do you suppose you could put on some Chopin music? One of those Nocturnes, perhaps? These singers of yours tire one a little, don’t they. I used to think you girls were fighting, so much shouting. I’m used to it now. Sometimes I ask myself, do the words make sense?”

  And how. The words are trivial, but in triviality is tragedy. How could it be otherwise: The grass in the garden is just grass, the soup in the soup bowl is not concealing any mystery, and the hummingbird is the very negation of mystery. But if we’re in a state of grace, we can intuit all sorts of things spreading fanlike in a variety of directions: Dona Guiomar’s cards. The jack of spades means marriage if it comes close by the seven of diamonds, which is bad news when coupled with the five of clubs, which in turn means a journey when linked to the king of hearts, which becomes a death sentence without appeal when it comes arm in arm with the queen of spades—oh! circumstances. Lião gets furious if I mention fortune-tellers, I’m wild about them. She says there’s no such thing as destiny, there’s nothing at all because we’re free, completely free. “I can’t explain it but if I go to jail one day, my being jailed will prove my freedom.” I didn’t see, it was suffocatingly hot, almost a hundred degrees in the shade and Lião in the mood to explain Sartrean doctrine to me. She kept talking to herself about the nausea she felt for nineteenth-century literature with all its characters destined either to Good or to Evil like trains running fatally down the rails they had been placed on, “There are no rails!” So fine, let me laugh. That old black magic, he sang when he was condemned to the gas chamber, an old condemnation, the day he was born he was already marked, if we escape the fire we can’t escape our signs. I ventured to speak of signs and she accused me of being a half-assed Christian: “How can a Christian believe in that stuff?”

  “I’m a Pisces.”

  The nun was looking at the ceiling.

  “I read that young people need violence to channel their complexes. Did you see the other day where a fourteen-year-old boy dumped gasoline on his grandmother’s wheelchair and set fire to it, she was fried like a piece of bacon. They say it’s necessary. So we have to wait for these young people to get tired of so much violence, what else is there to do? When they get tired of it, they’ll be old like we are.”

  “Smart,” whispered Lorena rubbing the soles of her feet on the rug as she looked for the Chopin record. “One more glassful,” she chuckled, “and I’ll get an explanation for the generation gap!” Bringing the bottle she refilled the wineglass which the nun offered her amid weak protests, “I’ll be tipsy!” The protest was transformed into an ah! of beatitude as the first chords of the Nocturne sounded.

  “Do you prefer to read or write, Sister? Write diaries, for example. Letters …?”

  “Neither, dear. My eyes have gotten worse …” she answered turning toward Lorena with an expression of faded innocence. “And your brother, is he still in Italy?”

  “North Africa. North Africa!”

  “I heard you, Lorena. Is that Romulo?”

  “Romulo is dead, this is Remo.”

  If he comes back, he remembers, thought Lorena opening her hands palms-up in a gesture of oblation. He had analysis, took courses, made love to beautiful women, fathered beautiful children, traveled, more women, more children, more cars. If he comes back he remembers. All he has to do is look Mama in the face, she’s transparent. The face engraved on Veronica’s handkerchief.

  “Attendite et videte!” she exclaimed stretching her arms frontward to exhibit her open-book hands. “Do you think I’m crazy, Sister?” she asked, bending toward the nun’s ear.

  “Do I think what?”

  Lorena smiled. She folded her hands together and stared at her fingernails. Even Remo’s fingers, too heavy for the piano, got slenderer and lighter, until they could have been Romulo’s fingers if Romulo had lived. Yes, it was better for him to stay on in his exile, sending presents, cards, pictures. Immense houses surrounded by green lawns stretching into the distance. The children in their colored knits always running after some dog. The shining car parked nearby. Ana Clara chattered so much about a Jaguar, poor thing. The Jaguar was so outdated. She should take a refresher course in the showroom where Remo always bought the latest models, he had a passion for machines. “If he comes back, he remembers.” Meetings with him should be in faraway places outside the country, like that time in Venice. The museums, the shops. Ruins and wine. “Mama will buy a gondola yet,” he said as he helped take packages out of the trunk of the car. And kissed Lorena’s only purchase, a small antique beaded purse she had discovered in the jumble of a bazaar. Daytimes and evenings bursting with commitments, yes, other countries were a necessity. Other people. Here, in the first available hour he would start to talk loud and fast. Mama would start to laugh stridently, both trying to cover up the murmuring sound rising from the grayish bottom. The river. In summertime, the water would grow so warm it would seem impossible it could turn into the icy flood of winter. Even then the two of them would swim in it, purple and panting. Remo, the daring one, would yell, “Wanna feel hotter? Go wash your butt in the waa-a-a-a-ter!” Under the surface, Remo’s black hair was still black, but Romulo’s blond curls turned grayish. The color of ashes.

  “Was your brother handsome?” asked Lorena.

  The nun blotted her overflowing eyes on her handkerchief and drank the last gulp of liqueur.

  “Not really handsome. But he was a fine boy. He went on a picnic with his schoolmates, I’ve told you. He was drowned in the ocean. When they recovered his body I was there, dear Lord Jesus, what a frightful thing, all those shrimps on top of each other, moving around in his eyesockets.”

  Lorena closed her eyes and thought about Romulo, his pale teeth, how could that be? How could teeth grow pale? And on his red shirt, increasing, the stronger red of his blood. Mama’s hand covering the hole which bubbled like a bottle of wine drenching a towel.

  “I thought a cork might take care of it.”

  “Years and years I went and couldn’t bear the sight of shrimp. Then I gradually forgot about it, one forgets…. Just the other night I ate shrimp casserole that Sister Clotilde made, I enjoyed it so much. Upon my word I didn’t even remember.”

  With a slow, reflective gesture Lorena corked the bottle of liqueur. Wasn’t it strange? Such a small, insignificant hole and all that blood. Her mother didn’t understand either. “What’s all this?” she kept repeating. We need to stop it up quick, put your finger over it, or better yet your hand, like this Mama, like this! Mothers fix everything, know everything, stop it up tight! And the blood kept running out. Underneath her hand, look there, the red shirt fading out, so much more powerful this other red, my God, so strong. I looked aside quickly because she was hiding the wound with the same shame as when she hid her breasts from us if we wandered into her room when she was getting dressed. “Don’t look, I don’t have my clothes on!” I allowed her time to dress her voice. And the wound. She was calmer than on that afternoon when he had cut his finger slicing the watermelon. “But what happened, Lorena!” she asked, hoarse. Only hoarse. They were playing, I guess Remo was the bandit, I only know that he got the gun and pointed it at him, it wasn’t his fault, Mama, rea
lly it wasn’t. Imitating her hushed voice, I offered to call the doctor almost in a whisper. Or Lauro. Do you want me to call for Jandira? She shook her head no, it wasn’t necessary. I stayed nailed to the spot, my mouth opening and closing, dry and soundless. Romulo’s mouth was opening and closing too, silent like the mouth of a fish thrown onto the sand where the water cannot reach it. He gradually relaxed. If he could have, he would have asked us to excuse him for dying.

  “Dreaming, dear?”

  I close Romulo and the bottle of liqueur behind the glassed-in door of the bar. Pull the curtains shut. And M.N. hasn’t phoned. And this Nocturne playing with that sun outside, ah! what I’d like to do is climb on the motorbike and zoom away, disembodied, free from thoughts, come get me, Fabrízio! Suppose I died in an explosion, M.N. would see the gory remains arriving, “Lorena!” Incinerated and deflowered.

  “I’m carbonizing with passion, Sister. Marcus Nemesius!” I scream. I throw my arms around her and place my lips next to her ear: “His father was a Latin scholar, all the children have declinable names, his sister is Rosa. Rosae like excreta, excretae.”

  She doesn’t understand, but she smiles. I go with her to the door. Her bones crack. Will I get old this way someday? I’ll kill myself first. I bow my head. She blesses me and prepares to go down the stairs. I turn off the record player. A sound of voices. The isle is full of noises. A few meows mixed in with the noises. How would you say meow in English? I open the dictionary.

  Chapter 6

  The small room was low-ceilinged and poorly lighted. In it were two very old desks, an ancient typewriter and a few straw chairs, two of which had holes in the seats. On the floor, a pile of folders and newspapers with a bundle of clothes on top. Tied together with a piece of twine, two pillows and a blanket. The blackish floor, full of cigarette burns, had been swept, as was indicated by the wastebasket overflowing with trash, a broom sticking up out of the middle. Over the broom handle had been thrust a roll of toilet paper.

  Lia took her bag from her shoulder and hung it on the nearest chair. She surveyed the dust-covered table, the rolled-up calendar half-visible behind the typewriter, the glass with a heel of coffee in the bottom. She unrolled the calendar: Occupying more than half the page was the colored photo of a blonde in a bikini, her fleshy mouth half-open to drink from a bottle of Coca-Cola. When Lia dropped it, it rolled up again as if it had springs. Her gaze turned to the grayish ceiling, specked with squatting flies, most of them dead among the old spiderwebs. She smiled. “Lorena would have a fine time here,” she thought. In the center of the globe-shaped light fixture was a thick spot created by accumulated insects which had entered and died imprisoned.

  “Very weak,” thought Lia examining her index finger with severity. She turned to face the young man who had just come in.

  “We need a stronger light bulb. Where were you?”

  He wiped his hands on the seat of his jeans and shook his head.

  “The john is something else, Rosa, you should see it. It’s down at the end of the hall. You have to close your eyes and remember the Queen.”

  “I’ll get you a chamber pot. I have a friend who’s got a china chamber pot with gilt edges and angels, see. If she’ll take the fern out of it I’ll borrow it for you.”

  He pulled up a chair and straddled it.

  “I moved everything myself, everybody else gave the orders but it was only me who did any work. This place was a dump, I emptied three wastebaskets already and there’s still that one. There are even mice, look there at the bugger’s tunnel,” he whispered, pointing at a mouse hole in the angle of wall and floor. “He’s smart, too. Made me run after him like a damn fool and then quietly retired to his private quarters.”

  “Probably a cop disguised as a mouse.”

  “When I came out of the movies yesterday they asked me for my identification. I was so scared, Rosa. Don’t you get scared?”

  Lia ran her tongue over her gnawed fingernail. She did not answer at once.

  “Fine. Tomorrow I’ll bring a stronger bulb. And a calendar without a Coke ad. Where did this marvel come from?”

  “Shit, I have no idea.”

  Going to the window, the young woman tried to open the Venetian blinds but the cord was stuck. She peered through a crack between the worm-eaten slats.

  “The inside court. Do you know what’s across from us?”

  “A tailor shop, I spoke to the old man when I got here. Neat, Rosa. You see the wire netting down there? In case of an emergency, it’s perfectly possible to jump onto it and get away through the old man’s window.”

  “And he’s a super-squealer, if we stick our heads in the window he’ll grab us by the neck, like this,” she said pulling Pedro by the collar of his pullover sweater.

  Locked together, they pulled and jerked in a short, fierce fight and separated laughing. He examined the bite on his wrist and she gathered her hair, which he had pulled loose, at the nape of her neck.

  “Gee, you’re strong! I think I would have gotten beat up if you’d kept on,” he muttered examining his arm.

  “Look, Pedro, I know a nun you can look at and say, wow, there couldn’t be a nicer little grandma. You should read the anonymous letters she writes everybody. I just hope she doesn’t discover the address of the Federal Security Police, she’s almost blind.”

  “Anonymous letters? How super! Have you gotten one?”

  She tapped her fingers against the cracked glass of the window.

  “We’ll cover this with newspaper. Got any glue?”

  “None, not a drop. No Scotch tape, no paper, nothing.”

  “Tomorrow I’ll bring some stuff. Did Bugre leave any money?”

  “He said tomorrow. All I hear from everyone is tomorrow,” he groaned scratching his head. “I don’t have change for cigarettes, even.”

  After offering him her pack, Lia stared up at the glass globe with its timid aura of light.

  “A trap. The bugs go in and can’t get out again. And even if they do, there’s the spiderwebs outside, an even worse death. Death without a battle, annihilation. Inside a spider’s guts.”

  “They could get out the way they got in, couldn’t they?”

  “If they could, they wouldn’t be in there dead.”

  “But the politicized ones got away.”

  Lia was cleaning the typewriter keyboard with the green cambric handkerchief. She wiped off the table, rubbing energetically at the more intransigent spots, and then, throwing the blackened square into her bag, looked about for an ashtray. Smiling, she flicked her ashes onto the floor.

  “I have a friend who’s so fanatic about cleanliness and order that I’m picking up her habits. Wherever I go she comes after me with a little ashtray in her hand,” she added taking a newspaper cutting out of a book she had brought. “Do you read French?”

  “I read a little English.”

  She scanned the clipping, and turned to Pedro.

  “This is an interview with André Malraux about Guevara. Do you know who Malraux is?”

  “A writer, isn’t he? Who just died a while back?”

  “The one who died is André Maurois, he’s of no interest. This is Malraux, a very important guy, see. His novel was one of the most fabulous things I ever read, Man’s Fate. It’s available in translation.”

  We were drinking coffee with milk. Hot ham-and-cheese sandwiches. The happiness that rushed through me when he said, “Let’s have some coffee, we’re freezing.” My knees against his, our sandwiches so close that I could bite the one he was blowing on. Hot steam came out of his mouth. I can’t explain it, I said, but if you get arrested I’ll go and turn myself in too. He didn’t answer. He took the book from his canvas bag and opened it on the tabletop. “This Malraux is very good, the problem is you’ve marked the whole book up with these crosses, why did you do that? You underlined everything, look there.” But Miguel, isn’t it my book? I asked and he spread jelly over his bread. “Don’t talk like a Nazi, sweetheart. You have
to think of the other people who are going to read it, you can’t impose your taste on others. You interfered with my reading,” he mumbled kissing me with his mouth smeared with jam. Orange marmalade. I stare at the cigarette that has fallen off the matchbox where I balanced it. It rolls, no longer burning, over the table.

  “Bored, Rosa?”

  “Let’s get to work.”

  Inside the cluttered drawer there was everything but paper. Having succeeded in finding a pencil, Pedro took a red-handled toothbrush out of the bottom. He aimed at the wastebasket and threw the toothbrush but it hit the broom handle and glanced off, landing near the window.