The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

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The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 Page 37

by Laura Furman


  When he was all packed up, he came into the kitchen with a present for me. As he walked down the stairs, Marta, who seemed to be aware of his every movement, leaned over the banister and gave a street-boy whistle to attract his attention. When he looked up, she called him vile names in several languages, so that by the time he reached us, his face and ears were suffused in red. Her voice penetrated right into the kitchen, where he, always shy of anything scatological, pretended that neither he nor we could hear it. Courtly and courteous, he presented me with one of the drawings of myself—but La Plume and I didn’t even have time to thank him before Marta came whirling in. Instinctively, though not aware at that time of its value, I held my drawing close for protection.

  She too was carrying a drawing; it was the one he had given her on her birthday. She held it under his nose: “Here, you ridiculous animal!” She tore it across—once, twice, three times—and threw the pieces on the floor. With a terrible cry, he crouched down to gather them up, while she tried to prevent him by stamping her high-heeled shoes on his fingers. He didn’t seem to notice when he got up that there was blood on his hands. La Plume, clasping her cheeks between her hands, showed it to him, but he was concerned only that it should not stain the pieces of drawing that he was clutching in the same way I did mine. Marta was laughing now, as at a victory—was it over the blood? Or the torn drawing? My aunt said, “Children, children,” in her usual way of trying to soothe tempers, but I did not feel that those two were children, or that there was anything childlike about their quarrel.

  It was only when Marta had left us that he let go of the pieces of the drawing and laid them down on the table. “Let me see your hand,” La Plume said, but he impatiently wiped the blood off on his sleeve and concentrated on holding the drawing together. Although torn, it was still complete with nothing missing; he smiled down at it, first in relief, then in pure joy, and invited us to admire it with him—not Marta looking out of it with her insolent eyes but the work itself: his, his art.

  He left the next day and I never met him again. I did see the drawing again: in spite of its damaged condition some collector had bought it, and it was often reproduced in books of twentieth-century art and also appeared in a book devoted to his work. Whatever we heard of Kohl himself was mostly through the lawyer, whom my aunt had engaged to recover some family property (she never got it). We learned that Kohl had rented a large studio in Zurich, in which he both lived and worked. He allowed his dealer to bring visitors, but hardly spoke to or seemed to notice them. He never attended any of his exhibitions, nor did he give interviews to the art magazines that published articles about his work. He was always working, his only recreation an evening walk in a nearby park. He had a maidservant to cook and clean for him, a village girl fifteen or sixteen years old whom he often drew. The lawyer thought he also slept with her. Otherwise there was only his work; during his few remaining years, he grudged every moment away from it. When he died, in 1955, his obituaries gave his age as sixty-four.

  Marta stayed in the house till my aunt left, and after that she took a room elsewhere. She moved often, not always voluntarily. Once or twice she landed on La Plume's doorstep, having had to vacate her room in a hurry. She never said why, but my aunt guessed that it may have been for the same reason that she herself had had to give notice to Miss Wundt.

  We don’t know what she lived on. Her clothes looked thin and worn; there were buttons missing from her little jacket, and its fox-fur trimming was mangy. But she was always in a good mood and talked in her usual lively way. She heartily ate the food my aunt prepared for her—too heartily, like someone who really needed it—but she never tried to borrow money from us. Once she asked me to take her to the cinema, not for the feature film, only to see a newsreel she had been told about. When it came on, she nudged me—“Look, look, that's him! Mann!” It was a shot of an international banquet, with speeches in a language I couldn’t identify under giant portraits of leaders also unidentifiable. It may have been Mann, but many of the other delegates could have been he, big and tall and cheering loudly as they raised and then drained their glasses in toasts to the speakers at the head table. She was convinced it was Mann—“The donkey,” she laughed. “Can you imagine—he wanted to marry me. What a lucky escape,” she congratulated herself. I had to leave, but since the ticket was paid for, she stayed on to see the feature film and to wait for the newsreel to come around again.

  When Kohl died, it was reported in the newspapers that he had left the pictures remaining in his possession to a museum in New York and the rest of his estate to his maidservant. The lawyer told Marta that, if she could produce her marriage certificate, she would have a strong case for challenging the will. But she had no marriage certificate any more than she had a birth certificate, nor could she remember where the marriage had been registered, or when, in fact it seemed she couldn’t remember if there had been any legal procedure at all. Whenever she spoke of Kohl, it was in the same way she did of Mann: congratulating herself on a lucky escape. She loved recalling the occasion when she had torn up his drawing—“Did you see his face?” she said, amused and pleased with herself. It turned out that this drawing was the only piece of work he had ever given her—just as the drawing he had given me was the only one of the many I sat for. I asked her, what about the poems that he had written to her? She tossed her hair, which was still red but now too red, a flag waved in defiance: “Who can remember every little scrap they once had?… Anyway, they were all a lot of rubbish. Other men have written much better poems to me.” She admitted not having kept those either; she had had to move so often, everything had just disappeared.

  And then she herself disappeared, and no one knew what had happened to her. We went to ask at the last address we had for her, but the mention of her name caused the landlady to shut the door against us. Years, decades have passed, and in all this time there has been no trace of Marta. I have stopped even speculating about her, though when my aunt was still alive we often did so, and there were conclusions that we did not like to mention to each other. Marta may have been run over or collapsed in the street and been taken to a hospital and died there, with no one knowing who she was, whom to contact. She may have—who knows?— drowned herself in the Thames on some dark night, maybe tossing the red flag of her hair, congratulating herself on having fooled everyone by never learning to swim.

  I no longer live in London. Some years ago, I had some money trouble that finally led me to reluctantly sell Kohl's drawing. The sum I got for it was astonishing; it not only relieved me of my difficulties but gave me a sort of private income for a few years. I felt free to go where I liked, and since I had no one else close to me after La Plume, I was free in every way. I decided to go to New York. I had heard that there was a museum with one whole room dedicated to Kohl's work, and I went there the day after my arrival. Then I could not keep away.

  All his drawings were on one wall, while the paintings took up the rest of the room. The drawings were mostly of Marta, some of me, and a few of other girls my age, one of them probably his maidservant. Although there was absolutely no resemblance between any of us, what we had in common was a particular and very evanescent stage of youth; and it must have been this that elicited his little gasps of joy, his murmurs of “Sweet,” and these marvelous portraits. But when I saw myself on the wall of the museum, I had the same feeling I had had while I was sitting for him: that I was not just a type or prototype for him, that it was not just any girl, some other girl, to whom he was responding but me, myself./was the person at whom he had looked so deeply and with such delight, and in a way that no one ever had or, in fact, ever did again.

  My decision to move to New York—where I have lived ever since— may have come partly and at first from a desire to remain close to the museum displaying his work. But although I can never get enough of studying the drawings, I can rarely bring myself to look at the paintings. They are no longer meaningless—everyone knows now how to interpret those savage,
searing colors dripping off the canvas—but I still try to avoid them, even turning my back on them, unable to face what he faced, at night and in secret, through all the years we knew him. And I still wonder that, while he was possessed by these visions of our destruction, he was at the same time drawing—“Sweet, sweet”— what is now displayed on the other wall: girls in bloom, flowers in May.

  Frances de Pontes Peebles

  The Drowned Woman

  from Indiana Review

  IT WAS the summer of the year Juscelino Kubitschek was elected as president of the Republic, the summer when the drought in the farmlands got worse. The summer when someone mysteriously opened all of the birdcages at the Madalena Market, and for an entire Saturday morning canaries and parrots and sabiás flew free in the square as the vendors waved their hats and makeshift nets and tried to reclaim the birds. It was the summer when my grandmother's nurse washed ashore in front of our beach house. She wore a flowered dress and her shoes were missing. Her body was bloated and stiff, and one of her arms stood straight up in the air. No one knew what had happened to her.

  We were finishing lunch when the body came ashore. Our cousin Dorany ran into our dining room.

  “They just found a dead woman on the beach,” he panted.

  He was in his swim trunks and bare feet. I remember there was sand stuck to the hairs on his chest. My father would have never allowed Dorany into the dining room like that under normal circumstances. He put down his napkin and slid out from behind the table where he and my mother had just begun their meal. In our house, the children ate first and always at a separate table. Our meals were simple. Lunch was meat, beans, and rice. Dinners were always some kind of soup: black bean, or vegetable, or chicken, with a cup of cold milk. We were not allowed to have sugar.

  Every once in a while my mother made us a plain yellow cake with a small swirl of chocolate in the center, which was a luxury. Looking back I realize we were well fed, even healthy.

  My fathers untouched serving of calf brains steamed on his plate. They were white and covered with tomato sauce, which looked to me like chunks of blood. My mother ate plain rice, steamed pumpkin, and black beans, all in separate piles on her plate.

  My brothers and I stared at my father expectantly. He looked confused. I squirmed to the rim of my chair, making my skirt hike above my knees.

  “Let's have a look, then,” he said slowly.

  With that we bolted from our chairs and ran from the house. My mother stayed behind. My father followed with Dorany at his side. He yelled at us to be careful crossing the road. It was a only a dirt path back then that separated our house from the beach, and the only car that passed was our own, but our father was concerned with decorum, not safety.

  Our house was in Boa Viagem, near Piedade. We spent our summer breaks—from December until after Carnaval in February—at this house. All of the respectable Recife families did this. Our house was between our aunt Annali's and aunt Gilmara's houses. It was five doors down from the Heracles’ house, and two doors down from the Brennand family's sprawling mansion that my father detested.

  “What a waste!” he muttered each time we passed it in the car.

  Back then, Boa Viagem was deserted except for those old homes. There were no high-rises, no Avenida, like today. We had to drive forty-five minutes just to find a bakery for fresh bread.

  My brothers and I were the youngest of all of our cousins, and I was the only girl among this pack of boys. My brother Edgar was thirteen, I was twelve, Artur was ten, and João only seven. By February the beach's solitude began to wear on Edgar and me, especially during Carnaval. All we could do during those three days and four nights was chase each other with firecrackers, and light sparklers in the dark at the edge of the water. In later years, when we wouldn’t go to the beach house anymore, we would finally spend Carnaval in the city. We would go to country-club parties and carry small vials of ether that my father bought for us. We would pour the ether into our handkerchiefs and sniff them throughout the night to make the room spin and the music play faster and faster.

  A boy we knew died from sniffing too much ether. Geraldo Coelho was his name. He sniffed it until he fell unconscious on the dance floor and his cousins had to carry him to their car and take him to the hospital. I remember him because he was the only person, outside of my brothers, who ever asked me to dance. Strapless dresses were in style back then, and all of the other teenage girls were wearing them. I begged my mother and she got the seamstress to make me one with a matching jacket so I could leave the house without my father noticing I had a strapless on. I looked so silly in that dress. One of the boys at the country club joked, “Hey, Lúcia, you’d better be careful in that dress—if you raise your arms it’ll fall right off!” Edgar punched him right in the face and Geraldo Coelho led me away from the brawl and onto the dance floor. He let me take a long sniff from his handkerchief and I couldn’t stop laughing.

  It was only when the ether wore off that I missed the silence of our old beach house Carnavals. But that summer, the summer when I was twelve, and it was February and I couldn’t yet appreciate the quiet of the beach, a dead body was a big attraction.

  A small crowd had already formed when we arrived on the sand. My aunt Annali stood sweating in her black dress and holding a rosary. Aunt Gilmara stood next to her, in an almost see-through linen robe, shaking her head. All of my older cousins, Annali's five sons, crowded at the edge of the water. The Brennand family and their servants huddled around the corpse. She lay on her side, with her bottom arm spread out on the sand. Her legs were bloated, and her skin was a pasty tan. Only the man who sold coconut water dared touch her, feeling for a pulse.

  My uncle Paulo parted the crowd and directed the male servants to turn the woman over. We saw that it was my grandmother Dulce's nurse Rita. Her flowered dress was twisted. The side of her face was covered in sand. The arm that had been under her, and turned outwards when she rested on her side, now stood straight up, stiff in the air. The fingers of her outstretched hand were separated and it looked as if she was reaching up toward the sun, begging to be rescued from dry land. My uncle Paulo tried to force Rita's arm down but it would not go. My father had turned his back on Rita after she had been rolled over, until Artur and João laughed out loud at the sight of her uplifted arm. He turned around, slapped each of them across the face, and told them to go to the house.

  My grandmother's wheelchair could not be pushed out onto the sand, so Aunt Gilmara's maid, a large woman who could lift three full buckets of milk at once, carried Grandmother Dulce out to the beach. My grandmother wore her best black dress and she looked like a doll bumping across the sand in the maid's arms, her tiny legs bobbing back and forth, making the embroidered beads of her dress swish and crunch against each other. Grandmother Dulce yelled over her shoulder at my mother, who held an umbrella over the old woman to protect her from the sun. When they reached the body my grandmother gasped, then covered her face with her hands and nodded, confirming that it was Rita.

  “Emília!” Grandmother Dulce barked at my mother, who was staring back at the house, “my rosary.” My grandmother proceeded to recite three Hail Marys while the maid who held her shifted in the sand. Everyone bowed their heads and mumbled the prayer, or pretended to. My uncle Paulo only moved his lips. My father looked down at the body, then shook his head impatiently. Only my grandmother's voice rose above the sound of the waves.

  “Edgar,” she cried when she finished, “call the civil police.” My father nodded gravely and accompanied my grandmother and her entourage back to the house without giving Rita a second look.

  The men dragged Rita's body farther up the beach so that the tide, which was steadily rising, would not wash it away. The crowd thinned out slowly, knowing that it would take the police hours to arrive. Aunt Annali and Aunt Gilmara went back to their respective houses. The coconut man went back to his stand at the top of the beach. My cousins and my brother Edgar slowly scattered, only after daring each
other to touch the corpse. The Brennand ladies went back to sunbathing and their servants went back to work. Soon it was only me and Rita under the hot sun.

  My grandmother Dulce was my father's mother. I always believed she was part Indian, because of her dark skin and her silence. When she did speak, her language betrayed her origins—she used perfect, precise, old-fashioned Portuguese. She gulped her vowels up into her nose and the back of her throat, and her sentences had a musical rhythm. On rare occasions she would suddenly seize my arm in her bird-of-prey grip and tell me random things.

  “Lúcia,” she would hiss from her wooden wheelchair, “when I came from Por-tu-gal we stayed in the first-class cabins,” or “you must learn to speak cor-rect-ly, girl,” and she often went on to say that she had not been tainted like the rest of us, that her language had been kept pure.

  My grandfather Chico had left her everything—the deeds to the houses, the furniture, the cars, even the title to his import business. Grandmother Dulce was the one who placed Uncle Paulo at the head of the business. Grandmother Dulce was the one who pressured my father, who was still a bachelor at forty, to get married and start a proper family or else she would cut him off. And she was the one who, in the months after Rita died, insisted I be sent away to a Catholic boarding school because, she said, I was an animal and had to learn manners.

  By the end of that summer at the beach house, I had punched a Bren-nand girl and knocked out her front tooth because she had called Rita a tramp. I had convinced Artur to help me steal our fathers car and take it for a ride into the city, where we could find Rita's grave and put flowers on it. I controlled the steering wheel and the gearshift but could not reach the pedals. Artur sat curled on the floor and pressed the clutch and the gas when I told him to. We only made it a mile down the road before my father caught up with us.

 

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