The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao

by Martha Batalha

  José appeared towards the end of the week. Euridice sat up in her chair and felt an urgent need to face the cash register. There was José, there was that gaze of his.

  Except that this time, the gaze was directed at another girl. José walked into the store with Odete, who lived a few blocks away. He helped the girl with her shopping, carefully selecting the fruit. He picked the best bananas, apples, and figs while Odete chose potatoes and onions. The two didn’t even seem to notice there were other people around them and in reality there weren’t, because as soon as they had finished paying, Euridice was reduced to a hand that gave them their change. José did glance at Euridice for a second, but only to say with his eyes: About the other day, that was just a joke. José and Odete walked out into their own world, leaving Euridice standing amid the damaged apples and split figs that had gone unchosen.

  It hurt so badly that Euridice lost all desire to talk to her sister, read her books, or make mistakes in her homework. She looked like a wind-up doll, with lifeless eyes, an expressionless mouth, and a slouched body, fulfilling its obligations mechanically and silently. Euridice couldn’t see beyond her own sadness, to the point that she forgot she even had a sister.

  And to the point that she did not hear the stir that announced Guida’s flight one Monday night. Euridice only snapped out of her daze upon hearing her mother’s screams the next morning. ‘My Guida has run away! My Guida has run away!’ Dona Ana belted out, kneeling in front of her daughter’s empty closets.

  Seeing her mother struggle with Guida’s flight, seeing her father embrace her mother in an attempt to absorb her sadness, seeing how her sister was not to be found in the corner of her bedroom or any other part of the house, Euridice felt as though her heart was being shoveled out of her chest. For her, running away was worse than dying. With death, or sudden death, at least, one leaves without knowing and without a chance to say goodbye. When running away, the person is fully aware they are going, but they don’t bother to say farewell.

  How had Euridice failed to notice that Guida was about to run away? Why hadn’t she tried to talk to her sister? Why hadn’t her sister tried to talk to her? Their parents had never forbidden her from seeing Marcos, and had even permitted her to go to the cinema with him, so why had Guida run away? Who would explain to her all the things she didn’t know from that point on?

  Euridice had no answers to these questions. She only had an answer for one thing: Could Guida have left because of our fight? She needed to find some logic to it all, she needed a definitive response, and she decided that yes, part of the reason for Guida’s flight was their argument, so she shared much of the responsibility for her sister’s disappearance.

  The family wasn’t sure what to do with Guida’s bedroom. Dona Ana left the door closed, but later Senhor Manuel opened it because the closed door gave the impression their daughter was still there. The open door also caused discomfort, since it was possible to see the bookshelf that Guida had left empty when she took her Young Ladies’ Library series with her. There was also the matter of the bed. Senhor Manuel thought the bed ought to be dismantled, but Dona Ana insisted on leaving the mattress there: what if Guida decided to show up again, where was she to sleep? It was decided that the bedroom door would remain open a crack. When Euridice walked through the hall, she craned her neck to keep an eye on the room, as though her sister might sprout forth from the mattress. Guida hadn’t taken the magazines she used to read in the living room. They remained there for a while, as though they were an extension of the missing girl. No one looked through them, no one threw them away. One day a picture frame with her sister’s photo appeared in the living room. Senhor Manuel and Euridice didn’t need to ask who had placed it there.

  At first, the family managed to cope with their sadness because they had hope. Each day, they waited for the postman, as the letter Guida hadn’t left when she ran away could very well show up in the mail. Twice a day, Senhor Manuel would run to the pharmacy to check whether his daughter had left a message via the only telephone in the neighborhood.

  News from Guida never arrived, and the family stopped waiting. From that point on, Senhor Manuel and Dona Ana no longer cried, but were never again seen laughing. Euridice could see how vulnerable her parents were, and she wanted to protect them. She felt she needed to bring them twice the amount of happiness she had before. She promised never to fight again, never to exile herself from the family as Guida had done. She would be the best daughter of all, an exemplary girl, even if this girl were completely in tune with The Side of Euridice that Didn’t Want Euridice to Be Euridice.

  In one final attempt to discover Guida’s whereabouts, Senhor Manuel went to the chief of staff’s office at the city hall.

  ‘Tell His Excellency that the father of his son Marcos’s girlfriend is here.’

  An hour and a half passed. The Portuguese man squeezed his cap, just as Marcos had done on the day they’d met. He looked straight ahead, resigned. Around lunchtime, a woman returned with a response.

  ‘Senhor Godoy sent me to tell you that he has no son named Marcos.’

  ‌

  ‌Chapter 5

  Now that both sides of Euridice have been introduced, it’s easy to understand why this woman takes one step forward then another step back. Why she begins projects but is then not able to stand up to her husband. Why she didn’t tell Antenor to go fly a kite when he began laughing during the Night of the Grand Banquet. And why, on the day of the Legendary Fight Over the Sewing Workshop, which followed the Great Flu, Euridice didn’t raise her voice to say My hands are mine and mine alone and I’ll do whatever I want with them, and I want to use them to sew dresses and to point my finger in your face and tell you that my hands are mine alone and I’ll do whatever I damn well please with them.

  Euridice didn’t use her hands to declare her independence, but to cover her downcast eyes. She knew that her husband was right, according to all that was good and reasonable, and according to the reasonable person she had promised to be after Guida ran away.

  On the day of their fight in her workshop, Antenor’s voice grew louder, and Euridice’s softer. Her protests became weaker and weaker, and Zélia, who began listening in to the argument seated quite comfortably on her sofa, soon had to put her ear up against the wall to hear the last few words. Even so, she couldn’t manage to make out how it all ended.

  She didn’t need to wait long to find out. Alleging health problems, Euridice announced that she was giving up sewing, passing her client list and unfinished orders off to Dona Maricotinha. The announcement led to protests on all sides, since the clients were worried about becoming voodoo dolls when the time came to try on clothes made by Dona Maricotinha alone, and Dona Maricotinha complained about so much extra responsibility. She would have to neglect her own clients to meet the demands of Euridice’s. Dona Maricotinha left out that her many clients added up to a row of zeros. But she was sure to mention that the work would affect her blood pressure, and demanded payment worth two months’ of Damiana’s salary, to ensure they could complete all the orders.

  Euridice didn’t argue. The next day she showed up with the money, in a gesture so selfless that it made Dona Maricotinha regret not asking for more in exchange for neglecting her zero clients. The two women said goodbye, Euridice shut the door, and a pall fell over the Gusmao-Campelo household.

  There was, of course, the creak of bathroom sinks and showerheads in the mornings. The whistle of the kettle declaring the hot water was ready for the coffee, the rustle of newspaper pages at the kitchen table. There was the echo of footsteps in the hallway, headed for school or to work. But none of these noises belonged to Euridice. The woman spent hours sitting and staring at the bookshelf in the living room. Maria grew worried. It had been more than a week since Euridice had told her the serving trays were dirty, the napkins were folded wrong, the orange juice was full of pulp, or that she had waited too long to slice the pineapple.

  Cecilia and Afonso also noticed
their mother’s silence.

  ‘Mama, look at the project I did about the Etruscans. See this part with the map? I copied it from the history book all on my own.’

  ‘It’s wonderful, son.’

  ‘Mama, I finished reading Graciliano Ramos’s Barren Lives. It’s really a sad book.’

  ‘You’re right, it is, Cecilia.’

  But Euridice didn’t climb up on the stool to grab the encyclopedia and show Afonso the Etruscans’ castles. She didn’t climb up on the stool to grab the autographed copies of her Graciliano Ramos books, or tell Cecilia that Anguish was an even sadder story.

  Euridice was a wife who knew how to behave. A woman dedicated to the home and to her children, and who now went to bed at the same time as her husband did, and didn’t wake up early to entertain herself at the sewing machine. A wife who sat quietly at his side as he watched TV, and offered him her forehead to kiss when he left the house and arrived home from work. She was everything Antenor had always wanted. Yes, everything he’d always wanted.

  Or was she?

  No, no she wasn’t. He didn’t want a Euridice like that. Seeing his wife in a constant state of apathy, Antenor understood that what he thought he’d always wanted wasn’t what he really wanted. But what was it, then, that he wanted? He searched for answers during a night of insomnia. But insomnia and work at the bank didn’t mix, so he stopped looking for answers. What he knew for certain is that for the first time in their married life they had a bigger problem than the incident on their wedding night.

  Despite everything, or despite the nothingness that Euridice’s life had become, Antenor was a good husband. The son of a civil servant and a poet who never published a book, he had grown up in a house of few meals and a lot of mess. The only structure in his family’s life were the couplets and tercets his mother recited. A kiss that is a glory and a torment, a soul in search of the firmament, the vows and caresses of one who blasphemes. The heart suffers to exasperation, an affection that is simple and sacred, a man requires love and in his arms your body delicate. Maria Rita’s life was a stage of private performances, and while that life may have been tedious it was much better than that of her audience, composed of the six children she’d given birth to before the age of twenty-five.

  Feliciano would arrive from his government office in a state of wonder at his wife’s abilities, the way she managed to leave the house in even greater chaos than it had been early that morning. The living-room floor was littered with dirty diapers, orange peel, wooden trucks, crawling kids and filthy bibs. The beds remained in a permanent state of to be made. The kitchen was overrun with cockroaches, crawling over the bits of food stuck to the dishes. Seated on the only armchair that hadn’t been converted into a clothes hanger would be Maria Rita, wearing her oversized white camisole and holding a notebook of verses. Aside from her narrow eyes, the only thing she had inherited from her Tupi ancestors was a resistance to the rules of daily Western life.

  The couple always began fighting at 5.45 in the afternoon.

  ‘You don’t understand, I’m a poet, an artist! A free spirit who has been chained to this life.’

  ‘Maria Rita, I support your art, but this child has the rear of a baboon! And just look at our daughter’s hair, we need to cut it right up to the nape of her neck, there’s no way we’ll untangle the knots now.’

  Maria Rita would run to the bedroom to cry and her husband would be right behind to console her, since he couldn’t resist her honey-colored curls and heart-shaped mouth. After a bit of squabbling, they’d make up and return to the living room to pick up the children and the orange peel. Perhaps out of habit, perhaps out of hopefulness, around seven o’clock Feliciano would ask what was for dinner.

  ‘Bananas.’

  Everyone knew that Maria Rita wasn’t cut out for that life, and on the coldest day in August she decided that she wasn’t cut out for any life at all. The misunderstood poet killed herself with rat poison. Perhaps her greatest contribution to her family was to lock herself in the bedroom, so that her children couldn’t see her twisted body and her waxy face covered in white foam.

  The tragedy on Rua das Marrecas was known in detail only to Feliciano, who, arriving from work, found nothing strange about the children scattered across the living room but did wonder about the boy pounding ceaselessly on the bedroom door. After breaking down the door, Feliciano used his hands to cover the eyes of young Antenor, who needed all of two seconds to witness the scene that would haunt him forever. He was six years old.

  Two days later the Jornal do Commercio announced the death of Maria Rita, saying:

  The intelligent poetess Maria Rita Campelo was befallen by an insidious and obscure disease, and after a long period of painful suffering left this earth at 1.20 in the afternoon of the nineteenth day of this month. She was buried yesterday in the Cemetery of São João Batista with an extraordinary number of attendees, men, women, and children of all rungs of society. Feliciano Campelo, the beloved employee of the Mayor’s Office of Public Works, an exceptionally well-liked and well-regarded public servant, received the news of his beloved wife’s death with implacable courage.

  The only implacable thing about Feliciano after the death of his wife was his despair. Despair brought on by the absence of his wife’s honey-colored curls and heart-shaped mouth, despair on account of the six children who would now suffer even worse neglect, were Feliciano to raise them on his own.

  He appealed to the heavens for help and help arrived, though not from the heavens. It came from a few blocks away in the form of Dalva, Feliciano’s sister. At thirty, she’d already passed the marriageable age, and had made herself useful by helping her parents in their general store on Rua do Carmo. Dalva offered to take care of the house and the children. After hearing her proposal, Feliciano only refrained from embracing his sister and crying in her arms because his was an era of few embraces and rare episodes of crying among men.

  That’s how the six children of Feliciano and Maria Rita began to comb their hair and brush their teeth every day. Dalva had found her true calling, which was being busy eighteen hours a day, and Feliciano returned to a life of routine, with dinners at 6.30 in the afternoon, comprised of food that had been cooked on the stove.

  Feliciano confided the details of his wife’s death to Dalva, including the two seconds witnessed by Antenor. The woman’s heart beat strongly for the boy, and while Dalva loved all the children more than anything else, from that moment on she loved Antenor even more. It was Antenor who was the first to be kissed upon arriving home from school, Antenor who got the best pieces of stewed chicken, Antenor whose clothes were mended before the other children’s. It was he whom Dalva watched over most closely at night when she went to the children’s room to check that everyone was asleep, and it was he who sat on her lap when she read one of the books with the green covers from the Stories of Monteiro Lobato, recently purchased by Feliciano.

  Now that he lived in a house with waxed floors and spotless bathrooms, homey aromas and white clothes, Antenor nearly forgot those two seconds on that fateful day. What he never forgot was his mother’s lawless life, her wild, impotent rages, her inconsequential fits of delirium and the selfishness of her leaving without thinking about her children on the other side of the bedroom door. As far as Antenor was concerned, there was nothing so useless as poetry.

  The life he would lead would be the opposite of Maria Rita’s. One day Antenor would marry, and his wife would be as wonderful as Dalva. Home and hearth would be the priority. He would give all of himself to the woman he married and would demand in return a life without a trace of the poetry or dreams that did nothing but drive his mother to madness.

  It was at that point that Antenor decided upon a wife who seemed absolutely normal – neither ugly nor beautiful, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short. A woman whose main qualities were hidden beneath the straw hat she wore as she strolled through the neighborhood. This Euridice has a head on top of those shoulders, Ante
nor thought to himself, without realizing that not only did Euridice have a head above her shoulders but that the contents of that head were well above the average.

  Antenor met Euridice on a perfect day one May. He caught the trolley to visit a cousin who lived in the neighborhood of Santa Teresa, and along the way he began to forget the ruckus and dust back in Lapa. Following a night of heavy rain, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the air was fresh and chilly as it entered his lungs. It seemed to Antenor that Santa Teresa was one of the few places in the city that was still pure, with few automobiles, few trolleys, and not a single skyscraper. Simple and effective, he thought, and he was still lost in thought when he caught sight of the girl framed by fruit crates on Rua Almirante Alexandrino. His aimless thoughts gave way to another consideration which had been percolating in his mind for some time: Could this be The Girl?

  He decided he was in need of some pears. He stepped off the trolley, chose some fruit and handed over his money to Euridice, looking at her for longer than was necessary to receive his change. Nothing in that girl prompted second thoughts. She wore her hair up in a bun, an apron over her gray dress, not a spot of make-up, and a gaze reserved strictly for adding up each bill. When Euridice gave nothing in return beyond his change, he began to show interest.

  ‘Is Rua Monte Alegre far from here?’

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘Do you think I could go on foot?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Euridice had passed the first test. It wasn’t as if she was feigning a lack of interest in Antenor. She had no interest in Antenor. But Antenor knew who he was. He was a young man of twenty-three, a graduate of the Colégio Pedro II, possessor of a technical degree in accounting, recently hired by the Bank of Brazil, with no ring on his finger and movie-star looks (this last part according to his Aunt Dalva). He couldn’t order a coffee, walk into a store, or buy the newspaper without having his hands and his looks examined by all the young women and mothers within sight. They weren’t interested in Antenor, but in the idea of Antenor. They put on their finest clothes and make-up, not so that Antenor might show interest in them, but that he might show interest in the idea of them.