by João Almino
– Mother wants me to spend more time with my brothers. But I don’t have anything in common with them. They irritate me. My problem with Antonio goes way back. When we were kids he was always right. He got good grades. He already had sensible opinions. And he turned into a serious reserved fellow, with few friends. Moderate even in drink. I’ve never seen him drunk. Guga, however, is a depressive intellectual. The two of them make demands of me. Antonio thinks I’m a lazy bum. Guga, that I’m stupid.
– Guga is a pompous ass, Aida answered. I don’t know Antonio but, from what you say, I don’t even want to meet him. He must be unbearable.
– My relationship with my mother has never been easy either. When I was a boy I provoked her to such a degree that she actually hit me. She didn’t like me, at least not as much as Antonio and Guga. Antonio did everything she wanted. And Guga was an imp, he did exactly what he wanted and she never even found out.
While talking, I contorted myself to frame the photograph above, # 30. Aida is looking down toward the water or into the depths of her soul. While I was exploring her shapes, outlined in the right corner of the photograph, I saw the plastic bottles and glass shards strewn on the ground and the other pieces of trash that fill the background of the photograph and that were left, who knows, on other romantic afternoons. Aida captured my insecurity in that afternoon’s transparent air. Or could she have captured it looking at my feet, more precisely at my restless tennis shoes, whose toes are visible in the foreground? She listened to me with thoughtful attention. She punctuated my sentences with deep inspiration, as one who wants to conquer fatigue and sadness. I’d never had a confidant, man or woman. With Aida beside me, I finally laid bare my defenses. Her ears cradled my fears and hesitations and my head was a dustbin of confidences.
31. The kite or the meaning of life
Aida complained of back pain as we sat at a table in an inter-quadra bar. Our life stories didn’t need to prove anything, have a happy ending or a meaning greater than themselves. If I could only feel this very sensation from time to time, I would have clear evidence that Guga was resoundingly wrong: life was worth living. The sunny, mid-July, winter afternoon went by in several glasses of beer, sweethearts holding hands, children on bicycles, dogs beside their owners, maids, street vendors . . . Using a wide-angle lens, I took a photograph of a boy flying a kite.
That night I gave Aida a flower arrangement with carnations in the center. Antonieta and her boyfriend came over for dinner. Aida said they liked me. I saw little of them but Aida spoke often with Antonieta on the phone and they sometimes went out together.
Tânia arrived alone. The big shock for all of us that night was that she had separated from Paulo Marcos and was only just now telling us the news.
– What happened? I asked.
– Nothing. Life.
– You couldn’t possibly have separated for no reason.
– My dear, anything’s possible.
She didn’t seem shaken by the separation. On her face she wore the joy, and sometimes also the fatigue and irritation, characteristic of the expecting. Her belly was barely noticeable. She hadn’t had an ultrasound yet but she sensed it would be a girl.
– I’ve never seen you looking so well. You look wonderful, calm . . .
The serenity she saw in me ended when the triangle-on-the-wall-girl, the one who had contacted me at the exhibition, called in the middle of dinner. It might be blackmail, but after a week of procrastination and nights of sleeping poorly there was no way to escape.
– How did you get my phone number?
– With Aida’s name from operator assistance.
I was startled. She knew too much about me, and I could already imagine her involving Aida in her blackmail. I made an appointment for the next day after work, in a corner bar at 403 South. At best, she might only want an explanation. After all, she’d never authorized me to show that photograph. Guga’s argument, which I’d earlier refuted, would serve as my defense: the triangles were all the same. Despite appearances, none of them was hers.
– Who was it? Aida asked.
– A client. A sweet-fifteen birthday party.
Later, Tânia grabbed me by the arm and pulled me aside:
– I know it’s early to talk about this, but I want you to be the godfather at my daughter’s baptism.
She didn’t mention Paulo Marcos. It was as if the child were only hers.
– And if it’s a boy?
– I thought a lot about it. Boy or girl, you have to be the godfather.
That gesture of friendship was worth the sacrifice of going to church, and I was sure I’d be a good godfather.
Considering everything that had happened since I went out with Aida for our walk at South Lake Point, I thought the photo of the boy flying a kite came to define that day’s atmosphere and the phase I was going through. That was the kind of photo I liked now. I had tired of taking photographs of politicians. I abandoned the triangles and scorned photographs of weddings, baptisms, or birthdays that I was taking for money.
The boy raises a kite under a blue sky. The kite soars, a four-colored diamond. The boy looks with fascination into the sky while running across the grass bordered by philodendrons and snake plants. Just as a book enlarges or shrinks according to the perceptions and imagination of the person reading it, there will be people who don’t see anything but a child in that photo, a child like so many others running between apartment buildings. But there will also be someone who imagines the extraordinary lightness of the soaring kite, its graceful movement, who notices the parallelism of the primary colors between the kite and the landscape, between the diamond kite and the discernible lines drawn by the grass and the cement . . . There will also be someone who sees the joy and freedom in that boy’s confident, absorbed gaze. I thought about calling that photo, # 31, simply “a happy day” or “an almost perfect day,” an “almost” which I owe to the telephone call from the girl-of-the-triangle-on-the-wall.
August 21
I remember when I held Carolina on my lap, when she took her first steps, and learned her first words, when she came running with a hug as soon as she saw me, when I’d take her to the park in the block . . . Years passed—twenty years and five months to be exact—and she was here today, accompanying Laura. Marcela made a fuss over her again, this time more loudly. She gave several joyful barks and then growled as if she wanted to speak.
– You complained so much that you were behind on your work that I decided to come help Laura, Carolina said.
It occurred to me that Laura doesn’t want to be alone with me to avoid any embarassment.
– I also have good news for you. A São Paulo publisher wants to make a book about Paulo Antonio and since you’re considered his main photographer—those were his exact words—he wants your photos.
My work is finally being recognized from an unexpected direction and my goddaughter is sometimes acting as my agent. She promised to help me select the Paulo Antonio photos. With a few exceptions, this part of my files hasn’t been digitized yet. Many of the negatives, in some cases accompanied by contact prints, are kept in files. Among them are the ones I started to research for Eduardo Kaufman more than two decades ago.
– You’ve seen a lot. You’ve photographed politicians. You know the behind-the-scenes version of Paulo Antonio’s government . . . Carolina said. The nervous rustling of the sheets of paper disclosed the eagerness with which she was looking through the material.
She later asked me several questions that were difficult to answer about the politics of yesterday and today. I almost thanked her for entrusting such questions to an old man like me. I couldn’t answer just anything, because she valued my opinion. I remembered her mother, so passionate about politics and so sure of her points of view.
– I can’t see politics as the blue party against the red party, I answered, repeating one of Guga’s opinions. What interests me is a certain way of life.
I didn’t say “yes” or
“no” with regard to Paulo Antonio. And I took the opportunity to speak ill of Eduardo Kaufman.
– Have you seen Mauricio? I asked.
– To tell you the truth, no. We never run into each other.
I almost said, without beating about the bush, that Mauricio was a good catch and women don’t need to wait for a man’s initiative. I controlled myself. I only expressed how much I liked him.
My goddaughter said goodbye, promising to take me to a concert of a hot new band that’s recreating Northeastern music.
– You’re coming too, right, Laura? she proposed.
Laura promised she would, that she’d join the two of us. She found the band’s songs on the Internet so I could listen to them. Then we spent the morning, she and I, trying to put the photographs in some kind of order that will help me continue my Book of Emotions. I remembered one, taken from the window of Aida’s apartment that shows a fresh green spattered with the colors of the ipê.
– What an impressive memory, Laura said.
– What touches our hearts stays fixed in our memory. The rest is trash.
Laura was keenly interested in the photographs. Her voice seemed gentle and I started to smell her perfume again. It’s paranoia to think she might want to abandon me.
– I don’t want to hide anything from you, I said. You’re going to help me choose one or two photographs from a file that I’ve never shown to anyone.
They were photographs of Livia.
– Don’t even tell Carolina that I plan to include these photographs in the book. It will be a secret between us.
It felt good to have Laura’s complicity.
– They remind me of Helmut Newton’s work.
– He wouldn’t have chosen such a voluptuous model.
Lastly, I asked Laura to read me the story Carlos had brought. She didn’t trip over the Spanish and in a leisurely affectionate voice read the dialogue of those two characters, both named Jorge Luis Borges, a young man and an old man. They were sitting on the same bench in two different times and places, in front of the Charles River in Cambridge north of Boston, and in Geneva a few steps from the Rhône. The old man had lost his sight almost completely. Like me, he saw the color yellow, shadows, and lights. He told his other younger self what I’ll repeat here: that gradual blindness is not a tragedy; it’s like a slow summer sunset.
After Laura left, I still had that Northeastern music in my head and even whistled it for Marcela.
August 22
I’m not going to follow the order of the photographs I selected yesterday with Laura because, with or without photographs, I should comment on the unfolding of a story that has been pending.
[August 22]
32. Nude on the office desk and 33. Nude with earrings
– I’m desperate, the triangle-on-the-wall girl told me at the bar, two large draft beers on the table in front of us. I can’t find a job. I can’t stand this anymore. I desperately need money. I know you know Eduardo Kaufman. Do you think you can have him give me a job? You know it’s not easy at my age.
– Right, I answered, without adding anything more than a wrinkled brow.
– I made the best of my youth. I felt free. I did whatever I wanted.
Life is beautiful, I thought, relieved to hear those sentences free of regret and above all not to see a weapon pointed at me. Happiness means escaping through one of hell’s gates. The flames pushed me out the door and I left floating, as light as a balloon. We made promises. I promised that I would talk to Eduardo Kaufman, knowing that I wouldn’t do it, and she promised that she’d convince a friend of hers, a journalist, to write about my photo exhibit, which I didn’t believe. More than just an exchange of lies, it was one of pleasantries.
For the first time Aida asked me where I’d been and with whom. I tried to change the subject and got confused. I gave her the impression that I was hiding something and in fact I was. I wanted to spare her my explanations. Better to bury my past so that she’d be convinced once and for all that she alone completed me.
[August 22, night]
It was just my fantasy that she alone fulfilled me. When I found out Livia was moving to São Paulo, I thought first of the flowers of renunciation, one of my mother’s inventions when I was a child. With each renunciation or sacrifice I made, my mother taught me I should add a flower to a vase. Just thinking about Livia I would have to fill several vases. It occurred to me that I could gather all those flowers and give them to Aida in the porcelain vases with beautiful shapes and gold filigree that I was building in my imagination.
Then suddenly all the vases broke at once on an afternoon that winter. I’d decided to resist temptation, except I hadn’t foreseen that Livia would parade in front of me in a figure-hugging black dress.
– I’m dressed and undressed for the photographs, she said, with the nonchalance of one departing.
Saint Anthony detached himself from the monsters that carried him through the heaven of Bosch’s panel and dragged himself around earth, indifferent to the scenes of punishment. Or rather I didn’t think twice and, if I thought once, my anxious, confused mind barely managed to cooperate with the nervous speed of my hands. Over time, may Mother forgive me, I’d learned that renunciation and sacrifice weren’t always worthwhile. “You’ll be sorry someday,” I heard her threatening voice and I foresaw that she was right. But better to regret lust than cowardice. And what virtue could there be in cowardice? As a professional, I shouldn’t mix the act of photographing Livia with the desire I felt for her. I preferred to be unprofessional. I would pay with the price of irresponsibility, a low price for someone like me who didn’t have either a career or a reputation to lose.
It was four in the afternoon and we moved upstairs. Indifferent to the risk we were running, we took photographs on the desk of the department manager atop the papers with the President’s picture in the background. Should I throw caution to the wind? I did. And we stayed there a few minutes, Livia reclining over the manager’s desk. Pleasure isn’t measured by time but rather by intensity. Who ever said that what’s done in a hurry can’t be delicious?
We heard footsteps. I sat at the desk. Livia didn’t want to stop. She knelt and lowered her lips between my legs. I closed my eyes (may God protect us). I know I shouldn’t insert God in the story. It would actually be: may Violeta protect us! She simply opened the door, apologized, and left, unperturbed.
I developed the photographs and sent them to Livia—two of them are reproduced above. She was recorded in those photographs like a butterfly that embellished an afternoon. She passed through my garden flapping her wings and flew away. Perhaps she’d never return.
34. Partial view of happiness on an August day
A few days later, a Sunday, Aida suggested:
– Let’s go to the Garden of Salvation. I want to see my future.
I agreed. I wanted to see my future too. I wanted to see our future together.
Mauricio went with us and, already at the entrance to the Garden, he was blown away by the altar containing oriental images and the figure of a bearded, white-haired black man.
– This is Father Joãozinho of Angola, said a vestal virgin in a shy voice and fluttering dress of blue tulle.
I identified myself. My connections with the Garden of Salvation had been good for something, and particularly my feigned interest in the medium who was a professor of theology, the one who preached that chance didn’t exist and that everything, absolutely everything, was ordained until the end of time. He called me “brother” and “friend” and helped us be received by the Prophet-ess Iris Quelemém. We were taken to the worship hall where we should wait.
– We’re open to many divinities, preached a man in a brown uniform covered with medals and crossed with yellow and red sashes indicative of his hierarchical degree. Our philosophy particularly welcomes mediumistic religions: Allan Kardec’s Spiritism, Umbanda, Candomblé, the Eclectic Spiritualist Universal Fraternity, the Valley of the Dawn, the Religi
on of God and even others, like Santo Daime and the Union of the Vegetable. What we have in common is the recourse to mediums as a means to the relationship of possession, a sacred relationship that enables the embodiment of the spirits of gods and men in agents like us. Any questions?
– Allow me to say that I’m Catholic, Aida explained.
– It’s possible to be Catholic and attain the spirituality of this Garden. In fact, many who come here are Catholic. Others belong to Protestant or Evangelical denominations, including the Pentecostals. And people from other Christian sects that are neither Catholic nor Evangelic, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Seventh-Day Adventists, come here too.
Aida wanted to see the surgery room. Several chairs were set out in a semicircle in the “hospital” anteroom, where patients waited for a medium through whom a famous doctor would operate without incisions.
At last, Iris received us.
– Human interference in the heavenly bodies, she told us, can alter destinies foreseen by astrology. Men are able to send spaceships to destroy comets tens of millions of kilometers from earth. One day they’ll yet alter the orbits of other celestial bodies.
Then she took Aida to a small, dark room.
– You’re going through an ascendant phase in your professional activity and you’ll be successful in your plans for the future, she saw in her crystal ball. Your story on earth isn’t finished yet. You have living to do. In matters of love, with perseverance and wisdom, minor disturbances will be fleeting. They’ll culminate in a fullness never before achieved. Each person’s mission has a time to be completed; some are completed during their lifetimes, others only many years after they’ve died, sometimes even centuries later. That’s why I advise you to do what you believe in and deem necessary, calmly and without deadlines.
When Iris received me she passed on teachings that could be summed up this way: suffering is worthwhile. I liked believing in those teachings although I only came to understand them much later. Looking into her crystal ball, she prophesized: