The End

by Fernanda Torres

  It was riddled with doubt that Padre Graça began that morning’s service, praying for the soul of a great-grandmother of seven, grandmother of fifteen, mother of four, and widow of one. Although sad, the relatives seemed resigned to the departing of their matriarch. They were practicing Catholics and made an effort at mass. He briefly forgot his current discontent with his job. Afterward, he thanked those present and confessed, “I came here without hope, I leave with it redoubled.”

  The following services reduced that morning’s communion to ash. A teenager, a young mother, and a loving father. Of the five deceased, only the old woman that morning and an old man at sunset followed the natural logic, the order that should prevent mothers from burying their children, babies from being deprived of their mothers’ love, and fathers from being absent in hours of need. Once again dismayed at the number of times God appeared to have been asleep on the job, Padre Graça succumbed to pessimism. I’m God’s undertaker, he muttered to himself.

  As the day was dying, he bitterly climbed the stairs of the chapel on his way to room 10. At one point he slowed his pace, certain that he was incapable of offering any comfort. I’m the one who needs consoling. Who will do it for me? That was when the opportunity, the idea, the temptation arose. It was a priest’s duty to remain firm precisely when the flock was at its most vulnerable. Vulnerability in the face of death was auspicious for revelation. His mistake lay in his passive benevolence. What good was mercy? Catholicism should elect firmness as its ally. I am a priest, he thought, but I castrate myself by donning the skin of a sheep. May I show no kindness. I will be ruthless, virile, Roman, warlike, and rapacious. The terrible side of the divine being. May the Old Testament be my guide.

  And, certain of his new conviction, he stalked into room 10 at a quarter to five that Tuesday afternoon, stopped on the doorstep, and bellowed his cruel question, “Who’s next?”

  Padre Graça fell silent and stood there, holding the door, not sure if it was the beginning or grand finale of the service. Proximity to the end should have inspired a heightened awareness in the living, but there was no sign of such elevation here. The stupefied looks of those within earshot expressed only their disapproval. Padre Graça’s eyes came to rest on an elegant elderly woman who was looking at him in dismay. It was Irene. The next to go. Padre Graça regretted his outburst, gave a little nod, and left without closing the door. He walked down the stairs to the front office. There was no one left to pray for. The day was over. So was his career.

  It was the last straw. Irene had no reason to stay there listening to the affronts of a prayer boy to the dead, wasting precious minutes of her life to bury a man who had been born old. I have to go, Rita! Where’s Cézar? Why didn’t he come to help you? What marriage is this, where you can’t make the sacrifice?

  But before she could say it the gravediggers came for the coffin. Irene accompanied them. She walked through the lanes to one end of the cemetery, where they buried Álvaro in a simple grave.

  As she passed through the gates of Tartarus on her way out, she hurried to a taxi. Collapsing into the back seat, she turned her head to one side and watched the traffic through the window, the hustle and bustle of the living. She examined her own hands, the hands of an old woman, her visible veins and wrinkled skin. She was over seventy, but she didn’t see herself like that. She missed her father doting on her, her mother’s face, the house in Cosme Velho. How good it had been to feel safe, and how hard to lose her certainties. Adolescence had taken away her grace, school her innocence, and men her sweetness. No one recognized the princess in her anymore, just her, there, in a traffic jam on Rua São Clemente.

  The burial, the wake, it hit her all at once.

  How much time did she have left? She didn’t need much. She was tired, had no plans, and wouldn’t mind departing. Not even her daughter needed her anymore; in fact, they rarely saw each other. The last thirty years had been devoted to absolute solitude, a lack of romantic prospects, not depending on anyone. She had managed. She didn’t long for a partner anymore, anxious to complete every stage in life: dating, studies, work, family, children. She had done it all as best she could.

  That night she had a dream.

  She was on the beach. The sun was setting behind Morro dos Dois Irmãos, the weather was pleasant, the sea calm. Álvaro was kneeling before her in swimming trunks, his back in silhouette against the orange sky. He was slim, strong, and good-looking. He smiled at Irene.

  “I’m glad you came. I’m glad, Irene.”

  And he kissed her. Then they stayed there like that, arms around each other. A little further along, in front of the country club wall, a circle of people were watching them. It was her analysis group. They were talking about her but she couldn’t hear what they were saying. Álvaro asked if everything was okay and turned his wife’s head so she’d be looking at him when she answered. Álvaro had become Álvaro. He was flaccid, bald, shriveled, and couldn’t get it up.

  Irene opened her eyes and couldn’t sleep anymore. The next day she took her daughter to the airport.

  Rita seemed proud to have completed the Herculean task. She talked about her father as children do after funerals, with great ceremony. In her words, Álvaro acquired a greatness he had never had in life. Napoleon, crowned with defeats. Irene listened—it was her job to listen. Children rarely take much of an interest in their parents’ suffering; they guard the role of victim jealously, unwilling to relinquish it for anyone. It was time for Rita to tally up her achievements and for Irene to appreciate her daughter’s maturity. She pretended to. When they parted, she hugged her daughter, remembered her as a baby—the future she’d imagined for her, the tears, the fears, the fights—then she looked at the woman in front of her. Rita had grown up, accepted a modest existence in an inland city, with a man who was mediocre, but solid, faithful, and present. She hadn’t taken any risks, nor had she wasted any time. She had enough of her father’s bovine passivity to be content with the boys’ soccer victories, the nine o’clock soap, and Carnival at the club. She was happy, much more than Irene. And from Irene she had inherited her pride. She bowed to domestic life, but not to her husband. She had been successful where Irene had failed; she knew how to control her impulses and to be satisfied with her dissatisfactions. Rita fulfilled the two great obligations of the modern world masterfully: to be young and active. She worked out at the gym every day, ate properly, and moisturized at night. She did the bookkeeping for her father-in-law’s clinic. She was solid, upright, pragmatic like her mother, simple like her father, and good at accounting. She had eliminated doubt. She had no aspirations beyond buying a new car, organizing Felipe’s and Marcelo’s birthday parties, and putting on Sunday barbecues. Irene looked down upon and admired her daughter’s achievements. At any rate, she had turned out a lot better than her atrocious adolescence had indicated.

  Rita’s skin had broken out in pimples, her hips had grown broader, and her belly, which was cute at four, was worrying at twelve. At the end of her fourth year, Irene had been called in to the school. They wanted Rita to repeat the year. The same thing had happened the following years. Decembers were spent trying to make up grades, shouting and sitting by her side for hours on end, drilling equations and irregular verbs. Rita liked to laze about watching TV and eating crackers with cream cheese. She wanted to be like the soap opera heroines and be kissed by the leading men. The worst was yet to come, when she abandoned the soaps and stopped bathing. She only bought secondhand clothes, walked around in flip-flops, and didn’t shave under her arms. She listened to Led Zeppelin at a volume the whole neighborhood could hear and answered all questions angrily. She abused her mother, making fun of her clothes and opinions. Irene was her archenemy. After flunking the first year of high school twice, she finished her studies at a school for adults, Fast, where there wasn’t even a roll call. She paid and passed. She didn’t try to get into university. All seemed lost. After graduating from Fast, to celebrate no one knew exactly what, her parents pa
id for her to take a vacation in Minas Gerais. Fifteen days in Ouro Preto in the company of some equally bizarre girlfriends. Irene thought she was crazy when she left the three of them at the bus station.

  Rita lost her virginity in Ouro Preto, at the age of eighteen, and came back a different person. She began to date Cézar and everything about her mellowed. Unlike her mother, Rita was terrestrial, satiable in love. She got married at twenty-one, after a long engagement, and went to live in Uberaba. She had two sons and now she had just lost her father. Her mother was still alive and well, thank God. Rita wasn’t given to speculation. She’ll die in peace, thought Irene, which is really something. And she hugged her daughter, this time with the respect she deserved.

  Rita disappeared through the gate and Irene found herself lost at the airport. She hadn’t traveled in a long time. Would she ever do it again? Irene was left alone with her frustrations. She decided to enjoy their company in public. She sat at a counter and ordered a coffee, to wait until the plane had taken off.

  “And why do you think you hit your daughter?”

  “I don’t know. She came home drunk saying she needed money and got dressed to go out. It had just turned dark. I told her I wasn’t going to give it to her, but she opened my bag and took a wad of notes without asking. She did it in front of me and marched off down the corridor. I thought it was too much, so I stood in front of the door and ordered her to put the money back. She gave me a shove and tried to turn the key in the lock. I tugged on her hair and her head hit a corner of the door jamb. I don’t know what I did. I knocked the key out of her hand and slapped her, I think it was on the face… but… I don’t remember… I don’t remember. She’s always been ornery.”

  “What about you, Irene? Are you ornery?”

  Irene stared at the Holy Inquisition. The faces of those present showed explicit pleasure that she had accepted the role of defendant so readily. The group’s mirth grew with each of her failures. Irene had admitted that she was flawed and weak, making everyone else feel better about themselves. Vera’s question was a clear insinuation that the source of Rita’s hysteria was her. They were all waiting for the atonement, the mea culpa that, as the theory went, would free her of the psychological wounds that kept the door to happiness closed. The bubble. Irene would have to admit, before the jury, that Rita’s aggressiveness had its origins in her neurotic mother, her sexual frigidity and unacknowledged envy of everyone else.

  “The problem is that marriage of hers.”

  “She needs to get laid.”

  “Who? Mother or daughter?” laughed Roberta. Roberta, of all people, with a husband who beat her and a son who was a drug addict. What are you laughing at? thought Irene.

  “Do you think maybe Álvaro was a flop with you because you were a flop with him first?”

  “You’re all a flop. That’s why the girl is the way she is.”

  “You need to get laid, Irene. And by somebody who knows what he’s doing.”

  The last remark was delivered by the group’s alpha male, an attractive, seductive alcoholic. There were suspicions that he was having an affair with Vera. The analyst had undergone a big transformation; she had lost weight and started wearing skirts, high heels, and lipstick. The change had coincided with the arrival of Paulo, who never talked about himself and amused himself with everyone else’s psychodramas. Paulo liked to end attacks on Irene with ironic, always sexist remarks, wisecracks about the neediness of women and the glories of the penis.

  “You’re a classic case of a woman who isn’t getting enough,” he would say, suggesting that he would know how to resolve the problem, although he had no intention of doing so.

  Irene came out of the sessions in shreds. Vera had barely intervened. It was as if her therapist had left her naked in the savanna to be devoured by carnivorous lizards.

  When she left the elevator, she hid her face, which was swollen from crying. She decided to walk. Botafogo was so ugly. It didn’t used to be, but it was now. She didn’t want to go home. Álvaro’s mother was there because of her senile husband who’d accused her of adultery and was planning to put a bullet through her head. She was a good mother-in-law, quiet and discreet, but she’d been sleeping in the study for a month. She spent the day in the kitchen and the living room, cooking and watching TV. She liked cooking, which had been Irene’s salvation when the cook quit, the only tiny bit of respite among so many disasters. Rita was well on her way to flunking for the third time and even the dog was on its last legs at a veterinary clinic in Copacabana. He was old. He’d been Rita’s eighth birthday present, after the Monteiro Lobato fiasco. The animal could no longer see. He stank, limped, and had intestinal issues. He lived in a corner of the laundry room and it would have been a blessing if someone had called to say he’d gone to a better place. The night she’d had to jump out of bed to rush him to the pet hospital, unconscious, she had considered asking for him to be put down, but her Catholic upbringing had gotten the better of her. How good it would have been to hear that Major wouldn’t be coming back. But he did. So he could die by our side, said the mother-in-law, all choked up. The elderly are moved by anything. Irene wished she could throw him out the window, but she just smiled and pretended to be happy about the dog’s extra time.

  Now she was wandering aimlessly through Botafogo, with nowhere to go. If she could, she’d have shed her skin, left herself behind, changed her name, started all over again. Until the age of thirty, Irene had thought it was all a rehearsal. She observed what happened around her and went along with things, but when her daughter was no longer a baby, she realized that the future was defined early on. Rita was insecure, fussy, and fat, and not particularly bright. It had never occurred to Irene that her maternal dreams might not come true, not for her or for her offspring. She could admit that she had chosen the wrong man, profession, friends, but she had carried with her the arrogant conviction that she would make an example out of Rita. She had failed.

  The girl was enrolled in a traditional school—Catholic and strict. She would be a lawyer or an economist, her mother predicted. When she was learning to read and write, however, her poor handwriting, difficulty reading, and inability to understand the basics of mathematics were a sign that things weren’t going the way they were supposed to. Her small learning problems soon took on catastrophic proportions, and to avoid having her repeat the year, her parents decided to change schools. They chose Jean Piaget. Irene sent her to an experimental institution in Jardim Botânico and went to parent meetings—talks on freedom and creativity, and the importance of discovery and the pleasure of learning as opposed to dictatorial teaching methods, which are top-down and shove subjects down the students’ throats. On the first day of class, she left Rita at the new school convinced that the problem wasn’t her daughter, but the system. Her certainty lasted less than a semester. In June, Rita received a terrible assessment from her teachers and school psychologists. If the school had report cards, she’d have gotten Ds. And to make matters worse she’d become agitated, rebellious, refused to eat sitting down, jumped about, and drew breasts and penises compulsively. The interminable homework of her former school vanished at Jean Piaget. Concerned, Irene made an appointment with the school psychologist. The psychologist explained that children should only do their homework if they were motivated to. Essays weren’t compulsory either. Irene laid out her arguments for discipline and her worries about Rita’s passivity, but none of it was of relevance to the psychologist. Something else was worrying her.

  “Here it is,” she said, pulling a piece of paper out of a pile of drawings. It was a doodle by Rita, a penis strung up by the glans with “Daddy” written beneath it. Beside it was a spiny creature, somewhat like a pink porcupine, flashing two angry eyes and a mouthful of sharp teeth. Underneath it said “Momy.”

  “Maybe some family therapy is in order,” she said, and ended the meeting.

  Wandering down Rua São Clemente, Irene tried to accept that she had lost control. She tried to s
eparate her own pride from whatever became of her daughter, but it was hard. She compared Rita’s development to that of friends’ children—her peers, all sane, strong, and healthy—and the inferiority of her offspring was a cause of suffering. I bred wrong, she thought. A knot in her throat forced her to stop. She sat on a low wall, dizzy and gasping in agony, feeling like she was suffocating. Where could she escape to? She remembered the club; she still had it in her to relieve her nerves with a swim.

  She swam two thousand meters without thinking a thing. She climbed out of the pool feeling better and showered in the changing rooms. Because she had left her membership card at home, she should have stopped by reception beforehand to get a stamped authorization to give to the lifeguard. But she had pleaded that they allow her to take care of the paperwork after letting off steam and they had agreed. Now she climbed the stairs to management, glad to have something to do, something else to put off going home. An athletic man of about fifty, tanned and helpful, took care of things for her. His name was Jairo. He criticized the club’s strict rules. A beautiful woman like Irene didn’t deserve to be treated like that. Irene blushed. She’d heard so few compliments that she barely remembered they existed, so that “beautiful” made her knees weak and jump-started her heart. She smiled, bright red, and lowered her eyes. She was fifteen years old again. She started going to the club on a daily basis, always forgetting her card. She would climb the stairs as soon as she passed through the turnstile, get her authorization from Jairo, and head for the pool, where she swam with cadenced strokes while fantasizing about rendezvous with her new object of desire. The title of manager gave Jairo the air of a king, and he began to accompany her to the swimming pool. Later, they arranged a set time to meet at the entrance, so she wouldn’t have to go upstairs. He would go with her to the turnstile and tell the staff to let her though. On the third week, Jairo asked Irene to start bringing her membership card, as he was being pressured from higher up. Nor did he see any reason for using silly pretexts to hide his desire to be with her. Irene almost passed out. She didn’t know what it was to be courted anymore and had turned her back on romanticism. Jairo had everything that Álvaro denied her. He was manly and straightforward. The afternoon she started bringing her card again, he insisted on walking her to her car afterward. He was leaning in the window, and Irene was about to start the engine, when, without warning, he slid his hand up the nape of her neck and took a handful of hair. He asked her to meet him at a bar on Rua Farme de Amoedo at six. Irene didn’t reply. Suddenly self-conscious, she put the car in reverse and almost took the barrier gate with her.