by Unknown
‘Our sexual frequency?’
‘Yes.’
I thought about the best answer for a few moments. I did that sometimes.
‘Yes, and no. On the one hand, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest, since I don’t feel like having sex with Júlio. In fact, I don’t feel like having sex with anyone. On the other hand, sometimes I think: I’m twenty-eight, they say women reach their sexual peak at thirty, and for someone who is almost at her peak, I’m not doing all that well. I think: if this is my peak, what’s it going to be like when I turn forty and start the downhill slide?’
‘And what makes you think the downhill slide starts at forty?’
‘Oh, Otávio, no one needs to tell me. I know it.’
‘You’re wrong. Ageing doesn’t mean going downhill, much less at forty.’
‘Pardon me, I wasn’t being fair, ageing is wonderful, I can hardly wait for my first grey hairs to appear.’
‘Very well, Laura. Let’s leave this subject for later. Now let’s go back to what we were talking about, which strikes me as important. You say you don’t feel like having sex with Júlio or anyone else. What about the man from the cinema? Would you have sex with him?’
Otávio always came out with this kind of question, it was in his manual. I observed him closely. Would I have sex with him? Quite probably, right there if he wanted to, just so he’d jot it down in his little notebook, just so he’d write in his report: conjugal sexual frequency, once a month; therapeutic sexual frequency, once a week. Me lying on that sofa, naked.
‘Oh, I’d have sex with him, right there on the sofa, I mean in the cinema, if he wanted to.’
I stared at him with a smile on my face. Otávio looked away. It was the first time he had ever looked away. A small victory. I straightened my skirt and kept smiling.
GRANTA
* * *
LETTUCE NIGHTS
Vanessa Barbara
TRANSLATED BY KATRINA DODSON
* * *
VANESSA BARBARA
1982
Vanessa Barbara is a journalist, translator and writer. Her publications include O livro amarelo do terminal (2008), winner of the Jabuti Award, the novel O verão do Chibo (2008), co-written with Emilio Fraia, and the children’s book Endrigo, o escavador de umbigo (2011), illustrated by Andrés Sandoval. She recently published a translation of The Great Gatsby. Barbara also edits the literary website A Hortaliça (www.hortifruti.org) and is a columnist for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. ‘Lettuce Nights’ (‘Noites de alface’) is an extract from her forthcoming novel.
When Ada died, the wash hadn’t dried yet. The trousers’ elastic waistbands were still damp, socks swollen, T-shirts hanging the wrong way out. A rag was left soaking in the bucket. Rinsed recycling bins in the sink, the bed unmade, open biscuit packets lying on the couch. Ada had gone away without watering the plants. The household things were holding their breath and waiting. Since then, the house without Ada has been nothing but empty drawers.
Otto and Ada were married in 1958, just as the town was transitioning between mayors. They bought a yellow house and decided not to have children, no dogs or cats, not even a pet turtle. They spent almost fifty years together: cooking, assembling massive puzzles of European castles and playing ping-pong on the weekends, until arthritis set in and made the game impossible. In the end it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between their tone of voice, their laugh, their way of walking. Ada was thin with short hair and liked cauliflower. Otto was thin with short hair and liked cauliflower. They wandered up and down the hallways and took out the rubbish together. Ada dealt with the various household details and did most of the chores while Otto followed her around telling anticlimactic stories. They were such good friends that Ada’s death left a silence in the hallways of the yellow house.
As time went on, Otto learned what to do with dead light bulbs but still didn’t have the heart to change out of his pyjamas. And so he stayed that way, wrapped in a plaid blanket even on hot days, missing Ada and taking care of household tasks, couch stains, dirty dishes. He was a quiet widower, reserved and hard-working. He saw his wife in these chores and it made him feel like never leaving the house. He had groceries delivered from the corner store and medicine from the pharmacy, led a peaceful existence and didn’t bother anyone.
The delivery boys cultivated this silence respectfully: they’d knock on the door as if they were entering a monastery, have Otto sign receipts and ask how he was doing for the sake of asking. They liked to turn their heads upward and remark: Looks like it’s going to rain later, better take the clothes off the line, it might cool down a bit and you’ll have to change out of those pyjamas. The weather’s crazy. How’s your sciatica? Otto would nod, half distracted, thinking about how the delivery boys acted differently when Ada was still around. Ada used to answer the door and would immediately have the boy from the pharmacy sitting down. Nico would open his backpack to show her something, and the two of them would go on chattering about very important subjects, so that sometimes Nico would end up forgetting to deliver their ointments, aspirin and blood-pressure medication.
Ada kept all the neighbourhood’s secrets. She knew every single neighbour’s life story and recounted them to Otto at dinner in a near whisper: Nico made next to nothing at the pharmacy; what he really wanted was to be a professional swimmer; he lived with his mother and spent all his free time at the gym. He swam very badly but had made up his mind to cross the Strait of Dover – even if it meant he had to go part-time at the pharmacy.
Whenever he laughed, he resembled a monkey, his mouth gaping wide open but without making a sound. Then one day he dived into the pool, and when he came up for air, he was laughing like that. ‘Everyone laughed,’ Ada recounted. ‘He went down again, came up and was still laughing. Everyone was laughing. But then he went under and didn’t come back up again. He hadn’t been laughing, he’d been drowning and nearly died.’ The moral of the story: ‘If you laugh with the same face as when you drown, better change your ways.’
Ada was central to the neighbourhood. She was the one who organized the block parties, who solved everyone’s problems and found work for those who needed it – even those who didn’t want help ended up with some odd job as a bagger at the market, caught off guard like someone who answers the door to a visitor on a Sunday morning.
After Ada’s death, the neighbourhood went into mourning for three days, during which time not even Teresa’s dogs barked. The postman stopped delivering the mail strictly out of a sense of propriety, since he usually made his rounds belting out songs like ‘Boy, Was That Guy Ugly’, and no one turned their radio up all the way, no one shouted into their cellphone, no one used their blender at two in the morning to whip up an avocado mousse. After this mourning period, the town returned to its usual commotion. Alone in that huge house, Otto became even sadder: every time the knife sharpener passed by, it reminded him how Ada wasn’t there any more; no longer would she jump up from the couch or rush to lean out the window, waving vigorously and laughing through her nose. Now, whenever Teresa’s dogs got out, he’d close his eyes and try to imagine Ada tripping over herself as she ran out into the street, shouting for everyone to save themselves while they could, absolutely terrified of the wild canines crashing into gates and leaving behind a trail of fleas, until Teresa caught up to them and restored order with the well-aimed swipe of a plastic bottle.
Otto had only really interacted with his neighbours through Ada and now was left stranded in that sea of collective insanity. He decided to go on sitting in the living room, with the blanket on his knees, silently watching the days go by. Without Ada there to explain all the stories, things happened incoherently. But little by little, Otto started overhearing a conversation there, a blender here, and began to understand his neighbours.
For example: there was the night the newly-weds watched a foreign film. It was a documentary about a mother camel, Ingen Temee, who gives birth to an albino camel. But she does
n’t take to her offspring and rejects it, so that the albino calf cries for the rest of the movie. In a heart-warming twist, a boy named Little Ugna decides to set off for the village to find a violinist who will play a beautiful song so that the mother camel will love her calf. It works. Little Ugna is very clever. Then Little Ugna’s father tells the people gathered how camels used to have horns, but one day they lent their horns to the deer to wear to a party. That’s why to this day camels always stare fixedly at the horizon (even while chewing cud), waiting for the day they’ll get their bony ornaments back.
The newly-wed young man slept through the documentary; you could hear him snoring, and the girl got a bit upset, but watched the whole movie. When it ended, she went to bed and didn’t speak to her husband the next day. Otto heard the man trying to get her to say something. ‘So, the albino camel was sad the whole time?’ But she washed the dishes without responding. ‘Little Ugna managed to find a violinist?’ But no sign of an answer. Eventually her anger subsided, as usual, and everything ended in a theatrical fight in which she screamed ‘Drop the knife!’ while he squirted lavender water at her. A couple of lunatics, Otto concluded, thinking back on ping-pong afternoons with Ada – the dented balls, extreme paddle manoeuvres, Otto shouting that it didn’t count because the ball had hit her finger. You can’t score when it hits your finger. It was one of the few rules they followed in ping-pong.
Something else that Otto noticed in those first few weeks was that Teresa’s house was being invaded by a nocturnal army of cockroaches. In the middle of the night, while lying in bed, he could hear his neighbour killing insects with her flip-flop. She’d already tried exterminating them in the living room, judging by the smell, but it hadn’t really worked because the pests adored Roach-B-Gone – he could almost hear them licking their chops and flocking in hordes to the house next door. All the better for him, who could muster neither the same readiness nor the same gusto for squashing them with a paper towel as when he used to say ‘Hand me your flip-flop’ while Ada fled behind the curtains.
At this point, Otto no longer went out into the backyard unless it was to hang clothes on the line. That was where Otto and Ada used to spend afternoons lying in the sun, reading cookbooks and doing crossword puzzles. Ada was always looking for the definitive recipe for breaded cauliflower, one in which it wouldn’t fall out of the breading when you fried it and that would keep it glistening and crispy. She never found it. She used to stretch out her legs ‘to get my fat rolls nice and toasty’ and go on talking about the lawn, the plants, the tulip bulbs she’d got as a gift from Teresa last winter. Otto and Ada’s yard was the biggest in town, a grassy field full of rusty tools, old buckets and tulips waiting to emerge. Ada loved the backyard. When Otto was with her, he loved it too; on his own, he hated the tulips as much as he hated the neighbours.
With the blanket over his knees, Otto had the sudden urge to go to the kitchen and cook up some tasty cauliflower, but it still felt too soon. So he stayed put, blinking his eyes vaguely. One after another, the sounds, smells and sights of the neighbourhood found their way into his living room (blender, Roach-B-Gone, mad dog), and he passed the time assembling these pieces into stories to tell.
GRANTA
* * *
TERESA
Cristhiano Aguiar
TRANSLATED BY DANIEL HAHN
* * *
CRISTHIANO AGUIAR
1981
Cristhiano Aguiar is a writer and essayist. Born in Campina Grande, Paraíba, he has lived in Recife, Berlin, Olinda, São Paulo and Berkeley. A visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, Aguiar is also a PhD candidate at the Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo. He was editor of the experimental literary magazines Eita! and Crispim. Aguiar’s first collection, Ao lado do muro, was published in 2006. He is currently working on his first novel and also on a collection of essays on contemporary Brazilian literature. ‘Teresa’ is a new story.
Birds come to rest on Teresa’s shoulders, but they do not sing. In the last few days, she has – always in the late afternoons – sat on the steps that lead into the building. Her feet together and hands clasped shut, she watches the street: ears alert to the sounds, to dirty eyes. No one seems troubled by the presence of the animals. The birds move little once they have come to rest. They adorn her face with a fine garland which they have carried hanging from their beaks. When her son arrives, it will already be that time of night when the traffic has started to ease up. He will take her by the hand, lead her to her room, switch on the light, put the only book that was saved into his mother’s lap and at last he will say:
‘Goodnight.’
The mud, the stones and an open hand. Two dogs are looking for something in the middle of the wreckage. The muzzle of one of the dogs nudges at the muddy fingers. On one finger it is possible to see the wedding ring, which the animal’s muzzle is touching now. It sniffs, sniffs, sniffs. Until its mouth opens.
TERESA: ‘After Prince Elias was lost from his family during a hunt, God took pity and sent a lion to raise the boy. In his heart the king was sure that his son was still alive somewhere, and so he sent his soldiers out to every corner of his realm. When Elias was already grown into a young man, a patrol discovered the lion’s den. The soldiers killed the animal and rescued the prince. However, nobody was able to make him remember to be a person: he didn’t relearn to speak and spent his time running around the gardens like the animals. In those days, there were giants. One of them had arrived in the kingdom and was destroying houses, estates, farms. To put an end to the destruction, he demanded that he be given sixty men every month as food. Word came to the king from the Lord via the prophet Nathaniel: he should send his only son to the giant, along with another fifty-nine men. The whole court was outraged, yet the king decided to carry out that divine will. Elias and fifty-nine men were taken to the lair of the monster, who lived in a mountain. As they entered, all of the men apart from Elias trembled and screamed at the arrival of the giant, who had one huge eye in the middle of his forehead. “Tiny little thing, tiny little thing,” asked the monster in a foul voice, “are you not afraid of me?” The prince snarled and threw stones at the giant, who cried: “Last will be your name! Can you not speak?” Because he did not speak, the giant decided that Last wouldn’t taste human. He decided to teach him the language of men, before eating him. The giant would devour two men each day, while he taught everything he knew, the learning and the sciences of the world, to Last. Sometimes, when he was unable to control himself, the giant would lick his student, saying: “Are there other little monsters in your land, Last?” When he had eaten the fifty-ninth man, the giant, to celebrate the fact that he was finally going to devour Last, drank two barrels of wine and passed out. Elias, quietly, left the mountain, uprooted a tree and crept back to where the giant lay and, setting light to one of its ends with the bonfire that warmed the giant’s lair, plunged it right into his only eye! The monster yelled: “Aaargh! Black-eyed, black-horned, black-mouthed ram! Who has dared to attack me?” as he beat on the walls of the mountain with his huge hands. Elias replied: “You were killed by the name you taught,” and he fled the mountain as the giant was buried under falling rocks.’
The mud, the stones and an open hand, buried. Two hungry dogs are looking for something in the middle of the wreckage. Above them, a yellowing mattress is hanging from the electrical cables. Houses in pieces: of one of them, all that remained were one and a half walls of white tiles. The muzzle of one of the dogs nudges at the muddy fingers. On the index finger it is possible to see the wedding ring, which the animal’s muzzle is touching now. It sniffs, sniffs, sniffs. Until its mouth opens.
Teresa waited for her husband for three years. Petrúcio left for São Paulo just months after they were married. The brides and wives of these men would wait, garlands in hand. Many feared that they would never return.
Sometimes, new suitors would prowl around the widow-brides. Some of these women would surrender thei
r breasts, in secret, out in their backyards; most of them, however, would remain unmoved – the garlands turned yellow. Teresa remained faithful and continued with her domestic life. She liked, every nightfall, to listen to her grandmother’s stories, as she helped her to husk the corn; on Saturdays, she would gather the children in the square and tell tales of the hills, of enchanted princesses and the miracles of the prophets. While her husband did not return, she continued to live with her parents. She helped with the household chores, she sewed, she went to Mass. Each month, he wrote her a slim letter. When those three years were over, Petrúcio returned with some money. He set up a little greengrocer’s shop in the centre of town and transformed the yard into a haberdashery store, which you reached by going down the sides of the house, and which he left in his wife’s care.
Teresa wondered, sometimes: has Petrúcio changed? As a joke, she’d say: ‘Hey, Southerner!’ and her husband would return the greeting with a smile that perhaps had a little awkwardness to it. The first week after his return, she asked him polite and appropriate questions about the life he’d had: where had he worked?, where had he lived?, had he left behind any friends? Their relatives behaved in just the same way. It wouldn’t be easy to say just what it was that might have changed. His sense of humour, always one of his greatest qualities, was just the same. His voice, only a little different, somewhat accented, something Southern. He remained a good catch: he didn’t drink cachaça and he was still a hard worker. Despite this, some people commented that his words and gestures were lacking in spontaneity, as though the past were slowly, but stubbornly, pulling Petrúcio’s arms towards a story hidden under the carpet, an unfinished story. Teresa believed it more every day: Petrúcio was pretending. As though he had forgotten himself and was in search of what had been lost on the journey, on the road. Sometimes, she thought he was afraid of something. One afternoon, when she was already pregnant, a car drove around the town and some strangers asked odd questions around the streets. Petrúcio, as it happened, had taken a sudden trip to the nearby towns. He came back a day after the visitors had left and for several days the couple exchanged few words.