The Girl in the Photograph

by Lygia Fagundes Telles

  The circular stairway is dark. Somebody is coughing, halfsuffocated. Pedro will feel the cold in my light sweater but he can drink some coffee and tomorrow look his girl friend in the face, oh, Miguel, how I need you. How that boy needed me. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll write well. It could happen. I’ve thought about a diary, that might be simpler, something plain. Lorena advises me to write in unadorned language, she finds me baroque. I am baroque, from head to toe, I admit it. Draperies and stars. Genialities without genius, is that it, Miguel? An honest diary. Dry, telling about my work without bragging, without any glory. Until I get arrested and die in obscurity, only with the name I chose: Rosa. I need some fresh air at once, I’m getting so emotional. I open the door of the building and a burst of rain and wind hits me in the face, the rain comes in bursts, like gunfire. Gunfire isn’t a good word but backwards … erifnug? Rosa was hit in the chest by erifnug is less serious. I run to the corner, we arrive at the same time, Bugre and I. The car is the color of the night.

  “Well, Bugre?”

  “Everything was postponed, more important things are happening. And some good news for you. Is your watch working? I lost mine, can you lend me yours? Leave it there in the glove compartment.”

  She took off her wristwatch. “Good news for me? Tell me, Bugre.”

  “Wait a minute, I can’t see, have you got a handkerchief?”

  The windshield wiper, stuck, could not remove the heavy mist; it would travel halfway in its appointed semicircle across the glass and return tremblingly, like the antenna of a crippled insect, too weak to fulfill its function. The right-hand wiper only vibrated; it didn’t move at all.

  “Want me to drive?”

  “It’s better now. Light me a cigarette, OK? They’re in the glove compartment. Oh, that cap, get it out, it’s yours. You can wear it.”

  She unrolled a black rib-knit cap.

  “Mine? But how gorgeous, Bugre! This hair has been driving me crazy.”

  He took the cigarette and looked at her in the mirror.

  “You look like a sailor, Rosa. That’ll be useful on your trip.”

  “What trip?”

  He shifted gears and turned to look at her.

  “Miguel is on the list of prisoners to be exchanged for the ambassador.”

  “On the list?” slowly she raised her head. “Miguel on the list?”

  “Your man is about to embark. Algeria. One of the top guys on the list, I wish I was in his place. The news will be out tomorrow, you’d better get your passport in order.”

  “Algeria?” she thought. She stared at the water drizzling in broken spasms over the windshield, forming pools near the wiper rods. Algeria, Algeria. For a long moment she pressed the handkerchief against her eyes, then sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Miguel? In Algeria? We’re going to be together? Too much, Bugre, too much! I can’t explain it but I’m so stunned! We’re going to be together, is that it? I’ll have to get together the money, excuse me, yenom! Is it expensive, the ticket? Never mind, that’s not important, I’ll talk to my folks, the gens lore-nensis will help too, obviously. Algeria!”

  I stifle my tears and laughter.

  “And get your passport ready right away, the operation has to be quick. Now I’m going to take you home, I have something else to do, tomorrow we’ll talk. A good journey, sailor girl!”

  She opened her mouth and breathed carefully, afraid of inhaling too deeply. With one finger she wrote the word “journey” on the white moisture-coated window, thinking of arriving in Algiers. As she started to wipe it off, the middle letters ran together into a smear, leaving only the jo and the y. Joy … Quickly she erased them with the handkerchief.

  “Oh, Bugre. My head is whirling. I’d been having horrible thoughts, I don’t know. But how did all this happen, what’s going on?”

  “It’s a long story, Rosa. I’ll tell you about it later. Just enjoy your good news for now. You’re going to have a hard life.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “A lot of work. But you’ll have good contacts. No problem with your family?”

  “After crying for three days my mother will get busy raising money to send me, she’ll want to protect me from dying of hunger in foreign parts. My father is a sentimental German, but he’s contained, he understands. I may even send them a photo of me in a bridal gown to guarantee good family relations, I’ll force Miguel to pose as the groom, ah! they’ll be so proud showing off their picture in a silver frame on the parlor table.”

  She would strike a movie-star pose, what was the name of that actress her mother liked so much? Rita Hayworth. She pronounced it Hi-worch. Her father was absentminded and didn’t remember actors’ names, but there was one he had never forgotten: Claude Rains. “An unpleasant old man,” her mother would complain under her breath. “Actors should be young, handsome.”

  “Later you have a word with Mineiro. About the passport. Is this your street? I can’t read the sign.”

  “The next one, go on a little further. What about the Corcel?”

  “Tomorrow morning it will be outside your door, with the compliments of the revolution.”

  “Bugre, Bugre, this cap and this news, see. But where are you going? It’s here,” she advised leaning over to kiss him good-bye. She thought about asking if Miguel had mentioned her but grabbed her bag and book and asked only if she could keep the pack of cigarettes.

  “Take the matches too. And this green handkerchief, isn’t this yours?”

  She went in protecting her head with the bag; the rain had grown heavier.

  “What weather,” she said to herself shaking the rain off in the vestibule of the big old house.

  “Lia? Is that you, Lia?” asked Mother Alix opening the door of her office. “Come in for a second, dear. Sit down here beside me. Would you like some coffee? It’s fresh, see if it has enough sugar.”

  Lia left her bag and book on the floor. She smiled helplessly, wanting to be alone, to think and plan.

  “Insomnia, Mother Alix?”

  “No, lots of work. What a lovely cap.”

  “Yes, isn’t it? A present from a friend.”

  “With your hair pulled back that way you look just like a sailor. And a German sailor at that, you have your father’s eyes.”

  “That’s what my friend said, a sailor girl,” I answer drinking the coffee. Too hot. Too sweet. “Did you have a letter from my mother?”

  “A long one. I like your mother very much.”

  I gaze at the clock in the form of an 8 hanging on the whitewashed wall. The sound it makes is antique too.

  “In my house there’s a clock just like that one.”

  “Do you miss home, Lia?”

  “I can’t explain it, but my home is kind of like this coffee, sweet and hot. My mother used to smother me with so much love, at times I used to wish she loved me less. My dad pretending to frown, aunts and uncles always coming and going, battalions of cousins. Coziness, little parties. I remember them all, I love them all, but I don’t want to go back. Is that missing home? My time there came to an end. Here another phase began and now a third period is about to start; so I’ll have these two to look back on. Is that the same as missing them?”

  “Perhaps. When I was a novice, I used to think about my people, I knew I wouldn’t go back but I kept on thinking about them so much. Like when you take a dress out of a trunk, a dress you’re not going to wear, just to look at it. To see what it was like. Afterwards one folds it up again and puts it away but one never considers throwing it away or giving it to anyone. I think that’s what missing things is.”

  I crush my cigarette out in the ashtray decorated with roses, Sister Priscilla paints china. So many things I have to see about, oh, this news. Algeria. Crazy, wild, Algeria? Algeria. And here I am hearing about the dress. I meet Mother Alix’s steel-gray eyes, isn’t it the dress she’s talking about? a poem Lorena recited to me once, I’ll have to say good-bye to the rose-pink s
hell. But wherever I go, and no matter how much time passes, I know I’ll never forget her incenses. Her recitations, her music. A thousand years from now I’ll still be able to see her, pale and skinny in her black leotard, lying on her back, pedaling in the air.

  “I’ll have another cup,” I say taking the thermos bottle.

  She pulls her white headdress over her ears, isn’t her head too small for her body? I try to imagine her as a young woman putting on the habit for the first time, a gray life behind the veil that shields her head like a helmet. But why gray life? Didn’t she put more than half a century of the greatest possible love into her work? So there’s nothing gray about it. A Christian Soldier, how does the hymn go?… Onward, Christian soldiers… Half a century thinking the same thoughts.

  “And how are your studies, child? Did you cancel your registration?”

  “Well, things have taken another direction, see. I’m going on a journey. Mother Alix. Outside the country. That’s all I can say for now, soon I’ll be hauling up my anchor, see, I’ve got my cap on already,” I say and for some reason am moved. “I won’t forget your patience toward me, I know I’m aggressive. Complicated. You must have wanted to throw me out in the street at times, but you opened the door to me instead.”

  She puts her glasses away in their leather case, and places one hand over the other. My eyes fix themselves on her silver ring.

  “You girls seem so unmysterious to me, so open. Just when I think I’ve learned everything about each of you, I’m suddenly startled to discover I was wrong. I know very, very little. Almost nothing!” she exclaimed, spreading her hands wide in a gesture of amazement. “What, in the end, do I know? That you’re a militant leftist and that you’ve failed the year because you missed so many classes? That you have a boyfriend in prison, are working on a novel and planning a trip to I don’t know where? What do I know about Lorena? That she likes Latin, listens to music all day long and is forever waiting for a phone call from a man who never calls her. Ana Clara, there you are, Ana Clara. Since she seeks me out and confides in me, I should feel secure in the impression that I know all about her. But do I? How am I to separate reality from invention?”

  When she stops speaking, I hear the ticking of the clock. The mahogany chairs with the crocheted antimacassars on their backs, they were almost threadbare, those antimacassars. But they had been crocheted by Grandma Diu …

  “You’re too modest, Mother Alix. In reality you know us better than you think.”

  “You’re young girls, Lia. I wasn’t counting on really knowing you well. But being at a distance as I am, how can I be useful? And I wanted to be useful,” she repeated. The cloth of the mantle wrinkled, modeling the wrinkles that deepened on her forehead. “Ana Clara is the only one who really opened herself without reservation. But I feel just as useless before her as I do before you and Lorena, reduced as I am to a tape recorder, I accept the charge, I record what she tells me, but when I try to influence her, to change what needs changing, she slips through my hands like an eel! I plead, I demand. One day she is repentant to the bottom of her soul, she makes promises, plans. I begin to believe in her recuperation, you know I have unlimited faith in miracles.”

  She’s waiting for me to contest this view but I’m not going to swallow the bait. Not today, oh, how I want to enjoy my happiness all alone in bed, in the dark.

  “You’ve helped her so much, Mother Alix. Don’t I know? You’ve been her confessor, her nurse.”

  “And now, her denouncer. I’ve been talking to my cousin who is the director of a sanatorium. She can’t be hospitalized by force, she has to be in agreement. She’s already said she agrees, but then she changes her mind, thinks she’s cured, more promises, ostentatious projects. I’d like to have a talk with this fiancé.”

  I go to the window and look out at the night sparkling with rain. I want to go back to writing, after all, who’s to say? Whether or not I have talent. Lorena and Miguel weren’t very enthusiastic. They weren’t enthusiastic at all. But couldn’t they be wrong? I shouldn’t have ripped it up, a hasty move, hysterical. But that’s no problem. I can always rewrite it if I want. Lorena’s too sophisticated and Miguel is too cerebral, he scorns fiction.

  “Do you know him, child?”

  “Who?”

  “The fiancé. It seems he’s very wealthy, but she doesn’t love him, she loves the other one, Max. She talks a great deal about this Max, he’s an addict too. Complete chaos.”

  Seen from the back, with her veil and gray apron, she looks like a peasant woman, the very old-fashioned kind, too clean a model even for an academic painter. I take aim and flick my cigarette butt into the potted plant. Was that Lorena who peeked out the window?

  “So she goes into the hospital and gets detoxified. Splendid. After a week or a month, she’s released, she can’t stay in a hospital for the rest of her life. And then she starts all over again, you know it as well as I do. I don’t see any solution.

  “She wanted psychiatric help, I promised to pay for the treatment, she was supposed to see about a doctor but when I ask her which doctor she chose or when she’s going to start she gives me vague answers, postpones it, she’s incapable of making a decision. Yesterday someone came to deliver clothes she bought. I sent them all back, she can’t pay her roominghouse bill, I don’t even expect her to. More debts, and an insolent bill collector demanding a down payment. Good heavens!”

  This floor with its wide boards, so light-colored it’s almost white. In my house I used to love to lie on the floor while the grown-ups talked on into the night. It was good, to fall asleep to that sound of conversation.

  “At times I want to shake Annie, slap her, she makes me so mad. Oh, I know she’s sick, of course, but the disease itself makes me furious. Do you think an analyst would do any good at this late stage? She’s already had dozens of analysts, Mother Alix. Dozens. Some she went to bed with, the others she didn’t pay. Recuperable cases are recuperable. Period. The less crazy of the crazy, about like us. A neurosis that doesn’t call too much attention to itself because it fits in. As long as a neurotic is able to work and love in this reasonable madness, there’s no real problem. But when he goes beyond that very fine line, as fine as a strand of Lorena’s hair, when he steps over, he falls straight into the yellow waters. Kaput.”

  The steel-gray eyes are about to spill over, she likes poor Annie very much. And she’s smart enough to realize there isn’t much hope for her.

  “She hasn’t appeared since yesterday. She called to say she was at the fiancé’s country house.”

  “Fiancé. Pardon me, Mother Alix, but Ana is the product of this wonderful society of ours, there are thousands of Anas out there, some surviving the life they live, others falling to pieces. The intentions for helping them, etcetera, are the best possible, it’s not Hell that’s overflowing with the well-intentioned, it’s this city. I see you go out with other kind ladies, giving soup to the beggars. Good advice, blankets. They drink the soup, listen to the advice and go running to trade the blanket for a quart of rum because the next day it’s warmer, who needs a blanket? Everything continues the same as before, with one more drunken night furnished by the benefactor. A priest who is a friend of ours went to teach catechism to a little nine-year-old girl whose father sold her to a brothel and almost died from the beating he got from the proprietress’s hireling. He learned his lesson, oh, did he ever! Individual charity is romanticism, I came to that conclusion just recently. The priest is still working with us but within a different framework. ‘We forget ourselves, we relax,’ says Bela Akmadulina, ‘and everything slides backward.’ ”

  I go to the thermos bottle and pour myself more coffee but I wish I had a sandwich. Ham and cheese. A bee buzzes against the windowpane and suddenly its buzzing becomes more important than our conversation. Where could it have come from on a night like this? I wish I could write like bees make honey. And I almost break out laughing: The grasshopper of the fable was certainly silly with her singing
but the little ant with the broom in hand wasn’t much better.

  “I have so many things I want to say to you, my child. And I don’t know where to start. This political movement of yours, for example. I wonder if you’re safe?”

  “Safe? But who can be safe, Mother Alix? To all appearances you are very safe here beneath your bell jar, but you’re intelligent enough to know from what this bell jar protects you. Certain priests have broken the glass, like that one I was telling you about. By chance are they safe? No. And they’re not even worried about safety when they go to sleep on a bare mattress with no pillow or when they perform their Masses on an old crate turned into an altar.”

  She smiles. A sad smile which I am sorry to have provoked.

  “But I’m not in a bell jar, Lia. You’re wrong on that point just as you were wrong when you said I’d like to put you out in the street. God knows my greatest wish is to protect and keep you always, if that were possible. If I don’t involve myself, if I don’t come closer, it’s because I don’t want you to think I’m spying on you, interfering in what you do. The three of you would fly off all the faster.”

  There, she’s hurt. It’s this terrible habit I have of arguing. A Bahiana turned political subversive, what could anyone expect?

  “I can’t explain it, Mother Alix, but what I meant is that you, although apart from the world, fight in your own way, and I respect your fight. I even respect the fight of those who want to destroy us, yes ma’am I do, they’re doing what they think is right. Just as we are, weakened, betrayed, divided, you can’t imagine how divided we are. But we keep on. Those who are left have to run like dogs to pass the torch on to the next person, who takes it and runs to the one after who is continuing the race, see. From one to the other. It’s slow, but we’re not in such a hurry.”

  “Torch, Lia? You say torch, but what I see is one leading the other to violence, death. A trail of blood is what you leave wherever you pass. We have a Supreme Guide and violence has been eliminated from His transcendent scheme. Spirituality—”

  There you are, the victory of spirituality. I jerk loose a shred of fingernail which brings a piece of skin with it. Blood seeps out; I suck on my finger. A bullet, bam-bam in the chest, would hurt less.