The Girl in the Photograph

by Lygia Fagundes Telles

  “Jewels!” I cry shaking Max, who looks at me but goes back to sleep. “Max, I’m going to marry a scaly man but I’ll never abandon you, you hear me Max? I can marry a thousand scaly guys but I’ll never abandon you, never, never!”

  “Go to sleep,” he says and his spittle runs like a thread of honey into his beard. I kiss his hand, his chest. I kiss the little gold medallion all tangled up in its chain, what saint was it? The medallion, his neck. But I won’t leave you. Wherever I go I’ll take you with me and protect you. Protect you. I’ll buy a beautiful house shit you can keep it. We’ll do a rehabilitation treatment with milk, we’ll take care of ourselves, no problem. When the scaly one gets to be a bore I’ll divorce him. Half the factories and free free. I fall down on the rug and cry out in pain what did I hit my back on?

  “You gave me aspirin, Max. I think it was aspirin, I’m completely sober, look.”

  Now he has the hiccups. Maybe his feet are cold I cover his feet he has statues’ feet with the toenails cut straight across like statues have. If he were thrown naked in the middle of all my mother’s bums he would stand out so sharply. He could pull a stocking over his head and use hair pomade and he wouldn’t ever get rancid, ever. But to hide my mark—! The eschatological mark, Lião talks so much about eschatology there was a play we went to see and she was thrilled. She says it’s a vision of the end of the world, eschatology, I don’t know. Their world, mine’s another one. I work so hard to make the mark disappear but do you think it. Only on the stage on the stage it’s real neat for the guy to teach the ragpicker girl how to speak like a noblewoman, that guy in the tweed suit what was his name. All lies. As long as you don’t have a bag of gold, good pronunciation makes no difference because Loreninha comes along and discovers. Damn her. An insect.

  “Next year, Max. Next year we stop, hear? You’re going to drink only milk. Enough. Believe in me, Max, never again, you hear? Max say you believe me for God’s sake!”

  “Ow, Bunny, that hurts.”

  “Say never again, come on, say never again!”

  “Never again, never — hic!” he said, his whole body twitching with an especially strong spasm.

  I press my mouth against his and blow until the hiccups pass. He struggles and then relaxes smiling at me or at someone in back of me I think he’s seeing his mother now he makes that face when he sees his mother. I start to cry but I’m not sad what I am is stimulated like that roach that swam across the soup pot bubbling like a volcano and made it to the other side in one piece, it made it, didn’t it? I’ll make it to the other side too, and I’ll even come back to get you. We’ll have money my love and you’ll give up this dangerous dirty work I’m so scared they’ll catch you Max. What if they catch you. Lião said they’re really tightening up their security I’m afraid.

  “Wake up, Max, I’m scared, I don’t want you to take risks any more, and stop selling to little kids. Help me, Mother Alix, I don’t want things this way any more, I don’t, you hear Max? Let’s start over again, we’ll practice sports, sports hour, come on, let’s go,” I order grabbing his ankles. “Move those legs, let’s swim a little, look there, the Japanese boy timing you. Let’s pedal, quick, one-two, one-two, harder! One-two!”

  I kiss his feet and use them to dry my tears that won’t stop falling. I started out crying softly and now I’m sobbing at the top of my lungs I hate to cry because it ruins my face which has to be in order, I bet everything on it, right? But now I have to cry, there’s a wind but I howl louder, oooooh! I roll over in the clouds and swing down on a piece of dental floss that turns into a seesaw, there’s a girl made of white porcelain on the other end when I go up she goes down. Dressed like springtime, what garden has she been visiting? She takes flowers from the basket in her lap and they have wire supporting their heads no, not those flowers! Not these, I say and she begins to sing: I went walking along the bridge / It shook before my eyes / Sister the water’s made of poison / He who drinks it dies. But I won’t drink it, not me, I already know, not me! I yell and she goes dancing off to meet her sisters who come down the lawn hand in hand. They’re so white and airy in their china dresses, one saying I am Summer. Another in a hood saying. The music is made up of Lorena’s bells and speaks of the joys of each season ah, I want these statues in my garden. “We are the four Sisters, the four Seasons of the year!” Now the hooded one is close by me and she takes off her hood. She smiles. Her four front teeth are missing. I hide my face in the sheets but I hear the laughter of the big toothless ant with its slit for a mouth. If I could. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all, says the dwarf who passes by, winking at me. I pull his beard and we roll over and over blissfully happy oh how I love you. I grab the cigarette from his hand and rise like the smoke inside the conical lampshade. Happiness is this it’s to prepare yourself, calculating things step by step. And afterwards throw your crutches in the trash can. A good word, to structure.

  “We’ll play tennis, Max love. I always wanted to learn, remember?”

  “I’m hungry,” he moaned, eyes closed. “Boy, am I hungry.”

  She drew up her legs and rested her chin on her knees, flicking ashes on the sheet. “I want to learn to ride, too. Jumpers, I love those red coats, too much. Foxhunting, are there still foxes?” Spectacular, the control over the horse. A control of nerves. She extended a trembling hand. A detoxication treatment in a chic clinic, Lião pronounced it detoshication. Ana Clara chuckled. She’d take both of them to the beach house, actually she liked those two dummies a lot. Yes, she did. She held out the other hand with the cigarette. A good treatment and no more problem. In reality, what tremor could stand up to a Porsche in the garage? A Renoir in the drawing room? Eh? Were there still any Renoirs for sale?

  “Max, are there any Renoirs for sale?”

  She’d put an ad. Wild about ads. She laughed. Half for a joke, half to snub people. “Shock the bastards. ‘South American millionairess wishes to buy Renoir painting, preferably of the demoiselles such-and-such with honey-blond hair gathering flowers in the country.’ ” Bathers with pink heels, did feet exist with heels like that? Lorena says he painted the French middle class but if middle-class meant those velvets and flowers then that’s the class for me.

  “We didn’t come to get up-tight, hanh?” he said drawing a circle with one finger in the air. “See color on reverse. Where’s she going, the nut?”

  Ana Clara opened her legs and ran her hands over her naked body. When they reached her abdomen she rolled them into fists and pounded herself furiously, eyes fixed on her pubis. More expense, more problems. She let her hands fall in a last weak blow. To get pregnant by a guy who’s broke. And now he’s sleeping like an angel. Well, he won’t be asleep for long.

  “Max, wake up, I want to talk. I want to talk!”

  “Be careful, Duchinha, the green ones are poisonous. She flies on the wind, so wild …”

  When he was a little boy he used to go pick mushrooms with his sister but where? Where could there be so many mushrooms. Frogs’ umbrellas. The building site was so humid they used to sprout from between the piles of lime-covered brick. The vines and weeds. And the white mushrooms remember? It was fun to shred them up in your fingers sink your nails into those velvety domes that let you tear them apart without resistance. And to step on the red ants but not on the roaches. They would crunch under your feet and the silent pasty insides would squirt out as if from a used-up tube. They were broad-chested and could swim well in a brisk crawl vupt vupt. But they shivered with fear when hunted. The white bald heads of the mushrooms would shiver too. Only the big snub-nosed ant was arrogant, its mouth a slit torn from ear to ear. It was leering leering with its big distended mouth the bastard. Thinking she could come back again, so treacherous. Sometimes it was only the size of a marble. And then suddenly in the black glass a face would start to appear, it would grow incredibly fast beneath the black turned-up nostrils.

  “Shit I guess I need it. But I have to pay, everybody’s already impatient,
nothing but problems, who wants to hear mine? Nobody. Only Mother Alix who is a saint. ‘I’m listening my child, you can tell me anything you like, it will do you good.’”

  Slowly Ana Clara went back to rolling and unrolling a lock of hair around her finger. “It does do me good, it does. She’s the only one who listens without thinking of money the only one. Even Kleber. Dying to get his hands on me the dirty prick. How can I respect somebody like that?”

  “How can I?” she demanded pounding the mattress. Fools. All of them were dirty pricks and fools. Lighter fluid would be better because any fluid was better than. Super-expensive.

  But she needed to talk. At times she was driven almost mad by the desire to talk, to tell someone about her agonies, her nightmares. And paying by check for the privilege. Pure masochism. “Because I keep talking about the things that hurt me most, rubbing salt in the wounds, remembering what I did and didn’t do. And paying in gold for the self-torture.”

  The nightmares. Some kept coming back like that one about the flowers. Enormous blossoms of all colors, opening and closing their petal-portals, come in, come in! She would dive to the bottom of the stem which got narrower like a tunnel, and there a liquorous river flowed. She would drink the river until coming to a red cherry speared on a toothpick, which she would bite and then double over in pain, bleeding red liqueur. Then she’d pull out the piece of wire, it was her heart speared on a piece of wire. “I ate my heart,” she would discover in amazement. “There, fine, now it won’t hurt any more.” But then the whole glass would overflow with red cherries, thousands of them, multiplying, speared on the ends of wires. “My sacred Heart of Jesus. My Heart of Jesus.” Wasn’t it my mother praying? She used to pray to die. “Take me, dear Heart of Jesus, take me. Or take him.” She was taken. Because Jorge lived on in the best of health. Was it Jorge or Bingo? Or it could have been Aldo. Or the old harelip, at the the time I didn’t know what a harelip was. He used to sell the lottery tickets printed with animals for numbers. The colored picture was in a frame that had no glass. What glass could contain that dark red heart skewered on the dripping thorns? “She was taken. All the others were left. Or did they die too? Who knows, it doesn’t make any difference.” The old harelip had a name tattooed on his chest.

  “I want something to eat, Bunny.”

  “Okay, so sleep.”

  The needle rose quivering and hovered over the record. From the street came a vague wave of sounds, filtered pastily through the closed Venetian blinds. When the needle settled once again on the disc, Ana Clara relaxed from her tense position: She hated that music but even so it was better than listening to herself. She turned her listless gaze to the lamp. The cone of light penetrated the thick smoke. Around it, the shadows were lengthened by the light gray curtain hung to cover an entire wall, a satiny metallic canvas stoically defending the privacy of the room. Max fumbled among the sheets.

  “You there, Bunny?”

  We used to shake everything and the dust would settle to cover it again, we’d shake clothes, hair, broom and food. Ready to move in next September. Ten apartments per floor, details available from the watchman in the basement. Lime and cement and the cold smell. She had nightmares too, little pinhead shaking out the dish towel and saying she had been dreaming so peacefully, “I was walking along and all of a sudden I fell into a barrel of soft cement, and went sinking down and it got into my ears my mouth. And then Ana all of a sudden it wasn’t cement any more it was even worse it was a septic tank. A septic tank. I woke up and had to wash myself like crazy to get rid of the stink.” Adamastor. That one was Adamastor. His dry hands hammering in the nails. Carrying the boards mixing cement. He would press one brick on top of the other and it would ooze out escaping through the crack.

  “I have to go. He’s there with his bread all peeled waiting for me.”

  “Who?”

  “That guy. He’s already torn up a whole loaf of bread, he loves to sit and peel the crust off the bread. He’s a Corinthian fan too. Him and Lião. What are Corinthians? Lorena asked, she doesn’t even know what soccer is—let alone the teams. Have you ever tried to explain soccer to the goddess Diana? So. I can’t stand it either, nothing but blacks. But I know who the Corinthians are. Their colors are black and white, like Lião, black and white combined. He’s waiting for me there at the table. My fiancé.”

  “You have a fiancé, Bunny?”

  “Yeah. He’s a pain in the ass but he has yenom.”

  “Is he as handsome as me?”

  “He’s a dwarf. His body is all covered with scales, the scales start here on his belly and go upward, and when they get here, under his armpits, see—?” she continued, her hands advancing. “Here, see? here there’s lots of scales.”

  He shook with giggles. Together they rolled over, laughing.

  “There was a story about Death that climbed up on an old fisherman’s back and never got off again, the fisherman had to be his horse,” Max remembered, lightly caressing her nipple.

  “And then what?”

  “That’s it. The cook we used to have knew so many stories. Come on, Bunny, come with me and I’ll show you a diamond the color of your hair, I’ll show you gardens, temples! I’ll show you the sun and my house painted all white, I’ll take you to Afghanistan, come on. The prices there are ridiculous. I’ll buy you coconut palms, camels. Want a camel, Bunny? I’ll give you one, you can go for rides on it, hanh?”

  “You said you rode on a swan once, remember? Remember, Max? You said you rode on a swan once, what swan was that? Huh? Answer, tell me what swan. Answer or I’ll punch you.”

  “I rode a pig.”

  She made a fist and hit him on the chin. A drop of blood ran from his lip and lost itself in his beard. When he touched his chin and saw the blood, he turned over on his chest, shoulders heaving with sobs.

  “You broke my tooth! You broke my tooth!”

  “I did not, liar!”

  “You did too!”

  Balanced on her knees, she pulled him by the hair in order to see his face, which he hid in his hands.

  “Max, stop it. Open your mouth, come on, open that mouth!”

  Leaning on his elbows, he shook his head, jaw clamped, eyes shut. He growled in refusal, unh-unh, but couldn’t resist being tickled. She bent over him.

  “You dummy. You scared me, you dummy. Next time you scare me that way, I really will break your tooth, you hear?” Using a corner of the sheet she cleaned his lip. “Does it hurt, love? I swear if I really had broken one of your teeth I just don’t know. You can hit me, come on, here, right here!” She turned her stomach toward him. Placing his thumbs together he opened his hands like wings and placed them on her body.