The Girl in the Photograph

by Lygia Fagundes Telles

  “When I get old I’m going to write my memoirs,” I say. “The problem is that the delirious thoughts, so beautifully disheveled, end up meticulously combed. Triumph of the norms of conduct.”

  She’s in the bathroom washing her hands, after each thing she does, she washes her hands.

  “In my time all the young girls had their diaries. But you girls nowadays can tell everything to your boyfriends, your analysts. Why bother with diaries?”

  She probably likes to wash her feet too. At night, before the midnight sprint, plak, plak, her toes spread wide, free of the oxfords, choosing the boards that creak less in the floor which is creaky by nature. Oh Lord. It’s no wonder Sister Bula’s eyes water all the time, with the things she must see or guess at through her keyhole. The parade: Lião with her tennis shoes carrying the weight of the world. What’s in those packages, pamphlets? Bombs? Next, Crazy Ana with her golden shoes and drunken step, her heel catching on her long neckscarf à la Isadora Duncan. Pretty soon, this one here appears with her cotton-and-lace nightgown, her feet too big for any subtlety whatever among the squeaking boards, ah, the inspiration of the ancient convents with their subterranean passages. Closing the sequence, Cat with her velvet paws, her swollen belly dragging on the floor, where would be a good nest to unload the kittens? The order of entrance on the scene subject to variations, with the effect unaltered. Bulie wiping her eyes on the hanky-bed-sheet and leaning tremulous over the windowsill, she wants to see me chaste and tranquil, hope of salvation, “You’re all right, my child?” And the child possessed by demons, wide-open in the night and begging for help in Morse code, tum-tum, tum—tumtum. Horrible, horrible. The solution is immediately to write another anonymous letter to Mother Alix, who will read it and tear it up, magnificently above and beyond everything. Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordiam tuam.

  “Well, I must go now. Anything else?”

  I want to ask her pardon.

  “Take some fruit, Sister. Before long another fruit basket will arrive from Mama’s house, I’ll never eat it all. Throw me a banana, would you?”

  She scrutinized the bunch, frowning.

  “They’ll only be at their best two days from now. Every fruit has its right day” she added and instead of looking at the bananas she looks at her own hands. “It shouldn’t be eaten either before or after.”

  A light cloud settles on her posthumous face. Neither before nor after, poor thing. I quickly turn her attention to me.

  “My loverboy thinks I’m too green.”

  “Green?” She hands me a fig which she is holding by the stem. “How old is he? Isn’t it that boy, Fabrízio?”

  “It’s another one, Marcus Nemesius. His father was a Latin scholar, all the children have declinable names, isn’t that neat? Rosa, Rosae. Servus, Servi.”

  Like excreta, excretae. I bite into the almost-obscene fig. The cloud is still there. She has hidden her hands in her pockets. When unoccupied, she becomes sad.

  “We’re lovers. I’m expecting his child.”

  “Silly girl!” she exclaimed laughing.

  At least I managed to make her laugh. I run and fill her pockets with fruit.

  “Do you know any medicine for the disease of love? I’m sick with love.”

  “Dr. Humphreys’ Marvel Curative Liniment. It cures whatever’s wrong with you, put some compresses on the chest, beside the heart. Good-bye!”

  On the stairway she meets Lião.

  “Can I come in?” she asked, already inside the room.

  She went to the cluster of bananas and pulled off two.

  “They’re green, dear,” Lorena advised.

  Lia shrugged her shoulders. “One of her recipes? I heard her mentioning compresses, see.”

  As if she had caught a butterfly by its wings, Lorena held up the stem of the fig. She looked around her. Where to put it? Not in the ashtray, it would mix with the ashes and create an odor. Getting a plate, she collected the banana peels which Lia had been holding cupped in her hand. She knelt in front of her friend and carefully rolled up the bedraggled hems of her blue jeans, then tied the laces of her canvas shoes. Inspecting the black turtleneck pullover, she thought, “That’s one I haven’t seen,” and looked with interest at the cap.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “A present from a friend. Your mama’s car is there in front, the hard part is finding the key.”

  “Everything go all right?”

  “Perfectly,” said Lia.

  Methodically she piled up mimeographed sheets, loose cigarettes, a toothbrush, and half a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. She dumped out the rest of the odds and ends: a few coins, a black comb with shreds of tobacco accumulated between the teeth, a silver keychain and a little ball of dirty cloth. Lorena recognized her handkerchief as it rolled to a stop near her feet. She waited for the second handkerchief to appear, but from the bottom of the bag there came only breadcrumbs mixed with bits of paper. She sat down beside her friend and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Lia de Melo Schultz, I’m sad but you are happy.”

  “Very,” said Lia putting the keychain on top of the table. She knelt on the cushion, pulling off her cap, and her hair exploded enthusiastically into the air. “Something great has happened, see. The problem will be the yenom, but my father will help out and if you could, too—”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know yet, I’ll tell you later. It’s for a trip. A trip overseas, later I’ll tell you all about it. Oh Lena, I’m boiling over inside.”

  Lorena came closer. Sitting on the rug, she folded her legs and gazed at her bare feet.

  “Get your microphone and interview me.”

  Lia grasped the banana firmly and extended it toward Lorena’s mouth. “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

  “I do.”

  “Your name, please?”

  “Lorena Vaz Leme.”

  “A university student?”

  “Yes. Law.”

  “Do you belong to any political group?”

  “No.”

  “And by chance do you take part in the women’s lib movement?”

  “No, not that either. I am concerned only with my own condition.”

  “Am I speaking, then, with an alienated young woman?”

  “Please don’t judge me, just interview me. I can’t lie, I would be lying if I told you that I worry about women in general, I only worry about myself. I’m in love. He’s married, old, thousands of children. Completely head over heels in love.”

  “An indiscreet question, may I? Are you a virgin?”

  “Yes.”

  Asking permission, Lia peeled half of the banana she was holding. She bit off a large piece and breathed vigorously, her mouth full: “You mean you aren’t lovers. Would it be presumptuous of me to ask the reason?”

  “He doesn’t want me. He doesn’t try to see me any more, it’s been days and days since he called.”

  “But are we talking about an impotent man? A homosexual? If memory doesn’t fail me, I heard something about children, didn’t I?”

  “He is a gentleman.”

  “Ah.”

  “But if he sent for me, like the last of the Mohicans, I swear I’d go running, did you call? I’d go live with him in a cellar, un der a bridge, on the road, in a brothel, Lião, Lião,” she whimpered pushing the banana away, “I don’t want to play any more, I’m so unhappy.”

  Lia frowned, knitting her heavy eyebrows. She chewed in concentration. She started to reach for the wadded-up handkerchief which lay between the ashtray and the comb, but changed her mind. Cleaning her hands on the rug, she lightly stroked her friend’s hair.

  “I can’t explain it, but I bet it’s your fault. Didn’t you start talking about marriage? If you did, the guy got scared off, this mania you have about getting married. Virginity.”

  “Things got much worse after he started going to that church group.”

  “He’s goi
ng to a church group? If that’s the case he wants to save his marriage. You’re not going to have lover or husband. End of story.”

  “But who wants to get married?”

  “You. Oh yes you do, yes ma’am, that’s all you think about! Well, so let’s find a guy who’s free, dammit! What about Fabrízio?”

  “Who knows? He’s disappeared. He saw me with M.N. and I was pretty frank, you know I don’t like to deceive anyone.”

  Slowly Lia’s thumb came closer to her mouth. She started to bite her thumbnail, and suddenly snorted.

  “Pedro is too inexperienced, he’d never do. There’s our priest who’s probably inexperienced too, but with the advantage of his age, you’re an Oedipal case. A priest like you always dreamed of, marvelous. Dying to get hitched.”

  Lorena giggled silently, her shoulders shaking.

  “Is he really, Lião?”

  “It’s what he wants most in the world,” said Lia taking an apple from the tray and shining it on her pullover sleeve before biting into it.

  “Now that it’s been proven that marriage doesn’t work, all the priests are wild to get married, dozens of resignation petitions. It’ll be the death-blow they deal the church, a mercy killing. Kaput.”

  With her fingertips, Lorena delicately brushed together into a pile the bits of debris scattered on the small area of rug where Lia had emptied her bag. She gathered the pile onto a mimeographed sheet but before emptying it she read: “Never again have we re-encountered liberty, since the day it was placed upon the earth,” wrote Marx in 1844. Sadly, reactionary rule and submission have been continually maintained in German history up to the present day.

  “It doesn’t make sense, Lião. If you’re a leftist, you have to accept these renovations that are part of the picture. It’s the New Church rising up from the ruins of the old one, let’s have unrepressed priests, contented ones. Latin America needs to make more love than other Americas. The tropics!”

  “I can’t explain it, Lorena, but the Church has opened her legs too wide. What saves her are priests like those who battle out there, I almost cry from admiration, shit, how they fight. They’re the only thing in the whole structure left alive.”

  She unwrapped the sandwich, took a vigorous bite and put the scattered objects back in her bag.

  “To pack a machine gun is OK, but get married, verboten. Is that it?”

  Lia recovered and ate the piece of ham from the front of her sweater where it had fallen and stuck. She can’t talk, her mouth is too full. I reroll the faded hems of her pantlegs. And these dusty black socks, where in the world did she get them? Ah, Lia de Melo Schultz. Pure prejudice of Dona Diu mixed with the Nazism of Herr Schultz. A priest making love? To the gas chambers with him! As if we were in the dawn of time, when Jehovah separated the water from the land, the darkness from the Light, the Good on one side and the Evil on the other. And the twilight area?

  “In the twilight remains love which transgressed, dear. The zone where it’s neither night nor day but penumbra, halftones. Silence. The zone of those who prefer to stay quiet. Homosexuals belong there, adulterers, the incestuous, those of tenebrous love, isn’t it a splendid classification? From my own little head. Priests who want women fit in there, too. Ambiguity, fear.”

  Slowly Lia wadded up the wax paper into a ball and placed it beside the overflowing ashtray. She hauled off her sweater. Lorena looked at her cotton undershirt which she had put on inside out.

  “Boy, are you square,” muttered Lia. “Square and romantic, which comes to the same thing.”

  “Your shirt’s on inside out,” Lorena advised.

  And wished she hadn’t. It was very probable that the right side was even yellower. She waited, eyes lowered, while her friend undressed.

  “But look, Lena, if they get tangled up with women they’ll be even more fearful, that is, they’ll have more problems. Why marry? If they don’t want a political cause, there are thousands of other causes around needing full-time attention. I think priests have never been needed so much as now. People going crazy, dying, ‘I want to confess, I want to take communion!’” she yelled shaking her arms and legs in convulsions. “And the bastards abandoning their career. Fantastic, see. Is that Chopin? Change it, I want something happy. I’m happy, Lena. But what are you doing?”

  Bent over the other’s neck, Lorena was trying to undo the knot in the string which held the little silver fish and the bell. “Just a minute, dear, wait, I have a silver chain I never wear, this string is ugly, wait, I’ll change it. But these priests, eh?”

  “Our Indians catching syphilis, kids dying of overdoses, slums and rats, multiplication of whores and scarcity of bread. And now, of all times, these guys worry about declaring a nihil obstat to screw.”

  Finally the knot came loose. Lorena went to get the chain and rang the little bell.

  “It looks so pretty, Lião. Wait a minute, don’t move, I want to put a little cologne on your neck, that horrible string left a mark, imagine. This is a delicious perfume, it makes you feel so fresh. Smell.”

  With a certain resignation, Lia bared her neck and scratched her nose, thinking, “I’m allergic to perfume.” She scowled:

  “You can’t believe how enthused I am over these priests who are fighting the problems. Action, Lena, because we’ve had too much contemplation already. To go out, talk until your mouth is dry, walk until your bones poke through your skin, take the curses, the doors slammed in your face, the stones hurled at you, and still continue without fainting, keep on even in the midst of the misunderstanding and hostility, keep on till you die, didn’t they choose to live that way? Are they soldiers of Christ or not? Did Christ stop to relax in a hammock? I picture Christ as a dry dusty man in broken sandals, plodding over the roads like a demented person, facing hunger, thirst, sarcasm and mud, even the disciples doubting, getting fed up. And Him? I can’t explain it, Lena, but I turn into ground glass when I hear this business about priests sitting down on the job. And stop that, will you, I’m allergic, I can’t breathe with all that perfume. I have to go.”

  She took the chain, kissed it. She kissed Lorena and stuffed her sweater into her bag, then slung the bag over her shoulder.

  “And our lunch, Lião? Weren’t we going to have lunch together today? I’d love to offer you a marvelous lunch, strawberries with cream, remember? We haven’t had lunch together for ages.”

  “Another day. Come to the gate with me.”

  “Wait, take some yenom, I’m loaded.”

  “But that’s a lot,” I say as she thrusts a wad of bills into my bag.

  “Offer a reading lamp in my name to your group.”

  “A reading lamp?” I repeat and laugh. I feel almost ashamed to be so happy. “What I’ll do is buy some stuff at the officesupply store, there’s nothing in our office but trans-Amazonic poverty.”

  We go down the steps hand in hand. She stops halfway down and lets out a yell. I look at her bare feet, did she hurt herself?

  “Lião! Later this afternoon how about a movie? There’s a werewolf film on.”

  “No, today I can’t, see. I’ve got so much work to do. And I have to see about—” I begin and stop in the middle of my sentence. Sister Clotilde is coming in our direction. “Well, things.”

  “Lorena! Barefoot on these rocks! Aren’t they hurting the soles of your feet?” she cries in alarm.

  Leaning harder on my arm, she turns to the nun and makes a martyred face.

  “Horribly.”

  Giggles. Comments from both about the beauty of the day. Lorena confesses that she wants to holler on a day like this. I pick up a stone and squeeze it hard in the palm of my hand, oh, it resists, I can squeeze until the end of time and it will stay intact. The happiness I get from things that resist that way. I put it away in my bag, now it’s me who has to holler at the sun, Miguel! World, we will save you. We will save you, I repeat and my eyes are swimming in tears.

  “Do you know if the grades are out?” asks Lorena in a stage
voice.

  It’s the signal. I bend my head to hear the secret she’s going to tell me. Sister Clotilde waves a discreet good-bye and moves away with her loaded shopping basket.

  “Tell me.”

  “Ana Clara is pregnant again.”

  “The fiancé?”

  “Better it were. But with the fiancé everything is platonic, she’s pregnant by Max, the other one. She has to have an abortion urgently and then plastic surgery in the southern zone, can you imagine? She’s in terrible shape, poor thing. On heroin, Lião. I’ve seen the marks.”

  “Last night she came in during the wee hours and got the rooms mixed up, she came into mine. She went straight to my bed and started shaking me, I almost died of shock, I thought it was the police.”

  Lorena holds me by the waist. Her feet are hurting but she needs to punish herself.

  “We have to do something, Lião. It’s madness, madness. She can’t go on this way.”

  I look at the withered pitanga tree that never bore fruit. It looks dead. But there in the heart of the stem it’s still alive. Lorena follows my gaze. She picks a leaf, crushing it between her fingers, and sniffs it. Suddenly, she turns her back to me and climbs up on my feet, “Carry me!” I hold her around the waist and, stuck together like Siamese twins, we make our way slowly down the driveway, she guiding me because with her head in front of mine I can’t see where I’m going. She is as light as the scent of soap in her recently washed hair. It covers my face like a handkerchief flying in the breeze. I think of Carla, why do I think of Carla? I squeeze her harder. She laughs, she’s ticklish. We love each other, yes, we do love each other, this is love. I can’t explain it, but I love Pedro too, and Bugre and Crazy Ana, I love them all. I’m capable of caring for them all, principally Miguel. Her feet slip off mine, she loses her balance. I almost fall on top of her.