The Girl in the Photograph

by Lygia Fagundes Telles

  “The Golden Calf is installed in the public square and you talk to me about spirituality. Its worshippers are not spiritual because they are its worshippers, see. They have before them the unattainable example of pleasure, comfort, glittering luxury, and grow desperate. These crimes and accidents happen because of their desperation, the masses are without hope and don’t even realize it. So they climb telephone poles, shoot each other at random, drink kerosine and gasoline, all out of sheer affliction. Fear. I used to be the same way, disoriented. Now I know what I want to do.”

  “Something violent too?”

  I can’t stay in my chair, I get up. I assume the risk.

  “No, Mother Alix. I confess that I’m changing, violence doesn’t work, what works is the union of all of us to create a dialogue. But since you speak of violence, let me show you something,” I say and look for the press statement I took to show Pedro and forgot. “I want you to hear part of the statement of a botanist before the tribunal, he had the audacity to distribute pamphlets in a factory. He was arrested and taken to the police barracks, listen to what he says. I won’t read the whole thing:

  “‘There they interrogated me for twenty-five hours, as they shouted, “Traitor to your country, traitor!” Nothing was given me to eat or drink during this time. Afterwards they carried me to the so-called chapel: the torture chamber. Then a ceremony was initiated. It was frequently repeated and took from three to six hours each session. First they asked me if I belonged to any political group. I denied it. So they wrapped wires around my fingers, beginning the electric torture: they administered shocks to me, weak at first and then becoming stronger and stronger. Next, they obliged me to strip off my clothes; I was nude and unprotected. First they beat me with their fists and then with clubs, principally on my hands. They threw water on me so that the shocks would have more effect. I thought I would die then. But I kept resisting and I also resisted their beatings which opened a deep wound in my upper arm and elbow. Sergeant Simões and Lieutenant Passos put a live wire into the wound. They forced me to apply the shocks on myself and on my friends. In order for me not to scream, they stuck a shoe into my mouth, or, at other times, fetid rags. After some hours, the ceremony reached its high point: They hung me on a perch, tied my hands in front of my knees, behind which they had placed a broom handle, the ends of which were supported by tables. I remained hanging in the air. They then inserted a wire into my rectum and fixed other wires in my mouth, ears, and hands. The following days, the process repeated itself with greater duration and violence. The blows they gave me were so strong that I imagined them to have broken my eardrums; I could not hear well. My wrists were raw due to the handcuffs, my hands and genitals completely black due to the electric burns.’ Etcetera, etcetera.”

  I fold up the piece of paper. Mother Alix faces me, an affable expression in her gray eyes.

  “I know about this, my child. This boy is called Bernardo, I’ve been in close contact with his mother, we went together to speak to the Cardinal.”

  Now it’s me who doesn’t know what to think. Very special, as Lorena would say. Never has anyone suggested to me so strongly the union of fire and ice as she does. She had grown pale but now her color has returned, the little veins crisscrossing each other on the surface of her cheek in a fine net, as if made of hair, broken here and there, the almost-lost ends searching for each other and joining hands until they form one transcendent and indefinable Whole like the One being who unites the universe. A universe which is that of her infancy, humanity’s own infancy.

  “Good night, Mother Alix. I enjoy talking with you very much.”

  “Take care, Lia. I don’t want you to suffer, be careful, I beg you.”

  “I’m very strong.”

  “No, Lia. You’re all so fragile, child. You, Lorena. Almost as fragile as Ana Clara. Whatever happens, don’t stop sending me news. You can count on me.”

  “I’ll send you my diary, Mother Alix. Instead of letters a diary of my travels!”

  She goes with me to the door.

  “May I give you an epigraph? It’s from Genesis, will you accept it?” she asks and I smile. “‘Go from thy country and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, to the land that I will show thee.’ …That’s what you’re doing,” she added. She hesitated an instant. “It’s what I did.”

  Chapter 7

  Sister Clotilde came in triumphantly with the bouquet of daisies and the bag of fruit.

  “I bought oranges, melons and apples. And bananas, too, look what a lovely bunch.”

  I interrupt my bicycle exercise but continue to lie on the floor. With my fingertips I blow her a kiss.

  “You’re a saint.”

  “Don’t I wish.”

  With her arms hanging limply inside the sleeves of her habit, she bows her head and becomes pensive, looking inside herself. What she sees must not be encouraging.

  “Would you really like to be one?”

  She smiles her yellowish-green smile, her dentures are a vague vegetal shade. She sniffs the daisies, her face still uninspired.

  “When I was an adolescent I wanted to be Saint Theresa, she was my model. I did everything she did, I even painted little oil pictures, do you believe it? I didn’t manage to have the fever, my health was always excellent. Later I wanted to be Saint Theresa D’Ávila.”

  Harder really. I stare at the ceiling.

  “Las Moradas.”

  “Have you read it?” she asked clasping her hands in enthusiasm. “I used to know it almost by heart. ‘No es pequeña lástima y confusión, que por nuestra culpa no entendamos a nosotros mismos, ni sepamos quién somos.’ ”

  Her lead-gray apron reaches down to her well-turned ankles. She has a slender waist. Naked she must look a lot better.

  “Many nuns are no longer wearing habits, haven’t you thought of doing that? Your legs are pretty, Sister.”

  “‘Teribles son las ardiles y mañas del Demónio para que las almas no se conozcan ni entiendan sus caminos.’ ”

  I stick my first two fingers against my forehead and make a face, which is lost because she’s looking inside herself again, even deeper. Confusión y lástima. She opens her mouth and inhales, surfacing.

  “Ah yes, I was telling you I wanted to imitate the two Theresas. I didn’t have the candor of the first nor the intelligence of the second. I learned the lesson, it’s foolishness to copy others. The state of grace of a soul resides more in a state of unconsciousness than in anything else. I very much like the primitive painter before he discovers he’s primitive,” she adds examining the small purse Annie left on the table. The clasp is open and from the top of it escapes a fine eyeliner pencil.

  “This friend of yours, for example. Couldn’t she be closer to God than we who live for that ideal?”

  Oh Lord. If she keeps it up I’ll kill myself.

  “Isn’t that the phone, Sister? I’m expecting a call.” She listens. She hugs the tray she brought against her chest and fixes her almond-eyed gaze on me: neither sweet nor bitter. The sleeves of her habit end in points, like wings: a bird not of the earth nor of the sky. Battles of conscience, poor little thing. She knows it is less serious to make love with a woman but still she must burn with remorse.

  “It’s next door. There’s a phone that’s always ringing somewhere in the neighborhood and nobody answers.”

  I close my book and lean my head against it. More war than peace, Mr. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. If one added up all the wars in the world, just imagine. Some day I’ll defend that thesis in International Law: Peace Is an Abnormality.

  “He was murdered.”

  “Who, Lorena?”

  “This neighbor who doesn’t answer the phone. Mama adores stories about crime, the other day she told me about a horrible crime that was committed in France. By a priest.”

  “Priest?”

  “It was quite a while ago. He murdered his pregnant lover in the forest, cut her open and removed the fetus, baptized it very properly and
then buried woman and child under an oak tree. He even fixed a cross of little sticks on top of the grave. What I wonder is, what did he name the child?” I say, catching an orange as it rolls to the floor, she’s arranging the fruit on the tray.

  “It wasn’t a priest who commited the crime, it was a demon. A demon took possession of his soul.”

  “But not completely, Sister. He baptized the fetus and then put up a cross over the grave, remember. It must be on account of crimes of this kind that the church used to tolerate pederasty in olden times. If he’d had a lover …” I say and am already sorry.

  It’s getting late on the planet. The silence is so complete I can hear her gestures as she arranges the fruit in a pyramid. I am exhausted but I start pedaling again, it’s necessary to do something. It would be marvelous to sing if I had a decent voice. Oh Lord.

  “Is that all right, Lorena?”

  She tries to balance the apple on the top of the pyramid. I want to stroke her big scuffed shoes, parked at right angles. She’s all right angles, poor thing. Who invented the tale that she was a lesbian? And why did I believe it? Why do I always believe the worst? I cross my legs in Oriental fashion and sit up on the rug.

  “And it isn’t the worse, of course. This idea that just came to me,” I quickly add. “You are a person in the pluperfect tense. What tense do you suppose mine is?”

  “Don’t you know, dear?”

  “No.”

  “You’re too young, you haven’t found yourself yet.”

  Eeh, the classic bla-bla-bla, who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Lião gets raving mad when somebody starts philosophizing over this. “Work, see. Be useful, participate, and then see if you still have time to sit around admiring your own nave-all.” She says nave-all. I agree, Lia de Melo Schultz, I agree, but oh, the thousands of hours I’ve spent contemplating mine. What am I? Abundance Overflowing if only he would call me up and say “Hello.” Hellolorena.

  “Were you ever in love, Sister? Before taking your vows, of course.”

  She picks up some of the daisy leaves from the floor.

  “Don’t forget your carrots, they’re in our refrigerator.”

  Carrots. I would like to eat pure beauty and she offers me carrots.

  “I’d like so much to be pretty.”

  The silence. Every time I mention this there is a certain silence. And yet I keep mentioning it, ah, I need the charity of you all.

  “Why, dear, your type is so…”

  Special? I examine the palms of my hands.

  “When Mama was a girl, she had a friend who was very pure; she woke up one day with the marks of the Crucifixion on her hands. Isn’t that extraordinary?” I ask.

  But I don’t want an answer, I want to be alone. I like people but sometimes I have this voracious need to be free of all of them. Solitude enriches me: I become gracious, intelligent, not this ugly resentful girl who smirks out of the mirror at me. I listen to the same record two hundred and ninety-nine times; I remember poems; I do pirouettes, dream, invent; I open all the doors, and when I chance to look inside, happiness has installed itself in me.

  “It’s not the first case. Of the Crucifixion marks,” says Sister Clotilde straightening her body and grabbing the flowers like a sheaf of lances in her fist. She starts toward the bathroom, “May I?”

  She asks permission to go in as if she were running the risk of finding a man inside. I tell her by all means, there’s no need to ask permission. I fall onto my back. “This fruit has fire inside it.” Oh how horrible-marvelous to live. I listen to the water running from the faucet, penetrating the copper mug. An act of love. Will it run over?

  “This business of not eating meat, child. You’re pallid.”

  “I’m a vegetarian, dear.”

  Fervently I inhale the newborn air of the morning. I spread open my hands stretched toward the ceiling and my solar plexus opens too and whirls around like a sunflower. “‘What does the flower know of the root?’” I ask out loud. The poets have presentiments but they’re not right.

  Consolatrix afflictorum! I scream inside myself.

  The root is locked in the gilded monstrance draped with a golden cloth. The key is Truth, I ask only for truth and give truth in exchange. Is it so high a price? From what I can see, extremely high indeed. Who’s interested? They all look at me, pat me sympathetically on the head, and run off to buy their tickets for the Fantasy Train with its tunnels of painted cardboard and plastic passengers. It runs through landscapes made of artificial flowers and fake waterfalls, all a farce effected by a set of mirrors.

  “Ana Clara, too, she’s the color of yogurt,” said Sister Clotilde reappearing in the doorway. She dried her hands.

  “Even Lia, who used to look so ruddy, is losing her color. I don’t know what’s happening to you girls.”

  She knows very well, thought Lorena taking the tract on social legislation from the bookshelf. She shuffled it, making the long strips of paper that marked the pages rustle. She read the notations made on the end of one of them and, leaning out the window, looked into the garden. The Law blossomed spontaneously like those flowers sprouting in the middle of the brush. “But along came the caviling men and complicated everything with their faultfinding,” she thought pulling out another bookmark. After reading it carefully she tore it into pieces as small as confetti, which she blew from the palm of her hand. Did Jesus ever cavil? Of course not. Those who came along later made sly faces and invented the sed lex. Which in the end wasn’t that hard. Cavil, she had learned that word from Mother Alix. “That cat of yours is such a caviler,” she said pointing to Astronaut who, at that exact moment, began to clean his privates. I went to the dictionary: to carp, quibble, resort to trivial faultfinding. The expression was common in the Northeast, everything fitting: Mother Alix was from the state of Ceará.

  The baritone voice of Sister Clotilde dominated the buzzing noise of a low-flying helicopter.

  “It looks like a bathroom in the movies. I never saw a girl as painstaking as you.”

  “Disorder depresses me, Sister. Ah, if only I could order myself on the inside, everything calmly arranged in the drawers. Too much woolgathering.”

  She stooped to pick up something from the floor and opened the clothes closet. Lorena accompanied her movements by the small noises that the objects emitted when violated. “She’s curious, she wants to see if my clothes look like the clothes in movies too,” she thought examining the piece of notebook paper folded inside a book. The rough draft of a letter to M.N. A letter in verse, which she hadn’t sent, like so many other ones imagined and outlined. “My heart arrived bleeding, red sail on the crest of the wave …” she read and smiled at the little zebra holding a flower in its mouth she had drawn in one corner of the page.

  “My poetry is small in quantity but bad.”

  “What?”

  Oh Lord. This one must be going deaf too. Lia had said it, hadn’t she? The smaller orifices end up closing, in keeping with the principal one. Res accessoria sequitur rem principalem, she murmured turning to the nun. Her face lit up.

  “What if I keep repeating, I am marvelous-divine and he is hopelessly in love with me, I am marvelous-divine and he is hopelessly in love with me, I am marvelous-divine. And he.”

  “That’s it, dear. Positive thinking.”

  Lorena opened her book at random, read a passage about accidents occuring at the place of work, and then closed her eyes: She could repeat word for word what she had just read. Excited, she smiled. What about the things she saw with her eyes closed? Couldn’t they really exist? Why couldn’t delirium correspond to a reality? She stared at the daisies in the copper mug which the nun had placed on the table. Now their heads were pointing downward, their long stems without strength to support the blossoms which hung down, crowns of white petals. “Like timid brides,” she thought, moved. She took the mug to the shelf where the picture of her father was. “Help me, Daddy. I know he likes me. But enough? Wife, children, so many
people. I hate make-believe and he’ll want it to be that way, oh, Daddy, I can say I’ll resist, renounce him. But if he calls me I’ll go running without even touching the ground, I’ll get there two hours early, ‘my love’!”

  “In my grandparents’ house there was one just like this,” said Sister Clotilde polishing the gilded bars of the bed with a corner of her apron.

  I give her a dustcloth and she rejoices, she loves to work. I’ve already told her that Mama’s maid is forever coming around with her iron shoes and the efficiency of those fairy godmothers who tidy everything up by magic. But did she pay any attention? She needs to be doing something with her hands, big bony hands, the square nails cut straight across. She’s been here for hours and hours, what if she’s in love with me? A priest’s woman turns into a headless mule, what about a nun’s woman? The straight-cut nails. Her trademark. They need to be cut with the utmost care, such extremely important instruments, oh, for shame! Why do only things of this kind go through my perverted mind? So innocent to look at. A child.

  “Only one-third of us is visible, did you know that? The rest is unseen, the reverse side.”

  “Only one-third visible?”

  I turn the page. Still about accidents, bla-bla-bla-bla. I already know it. The summary must be just ahead, what to bet? There, bla-bla-bla-bla. I face her. She has stopped in suspense, the flannel stretched between her hands, ready to resume her movements of a shoeshiner on the bars of the headboard which shine like gold.

  “Only one-third, dear. I see your mantle, your face, your hands holding that cloth. Very little, isn’t it? And the rest? Where is the rest that I can’t see?”

  She looks satisfied with her high percentage of mystery.

  “The rest is everything, my girl. But it belongs to God.”

  Her heavy oxfords have taken on her physiognomy; the shoes of someone who knows her business. And does it well. Her toes point outward, feet open in the measured step of a stolid duck moving toward the water, plak, plak. Virgin? “Yes, in a way,” answered Lião rather reticently, she hasn’t done research in this area yet. The dash to Sister Priscilla’s room has to be barefoot. The whispers. The sighs, nuns must pant doubly hard when making love. Short sentences. Short breath, in the style of the little eighteenth-century pornographic books where the Abbess with a French name recounts to the novices her most secret memories.