The Girl in the Photograph

by Lygia Fagundes Telles

  “The moon. I land softly on the moon.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “Pregnant? A baby, Bunny? Ah, I want this baby. Give him to me, for God’s sake, give him to me. I want this baby, hanh? He said he wants to be born, I just now heard his little voice, he’s so happy, I want to be born, he said. We’ll get rich. I’ll buy an island, it’s really easy to buy an island in Brazil. There’s so much land …”

  “Why don’t you join the Mafia? You could give me a yacht. A helicopter. I could go buzzing around …”

  “Let’s sail around the world, Bunny. Fabulous guests …”

  “Is Jackie coming?” I ask and he stares at me, innocent. “Jackie Onassis, stupid. She coming? Shit, Mrs. Onassis.”

  He frowned and gave a long sigh.

  “We were lovers. She’s very hairy, she has hair even on her chest,” he confided, pulling me closer by the hand to divulge more secrets. “I discovered something impressive, she has six toes on each foot.”

  I want to laugh but then I remember. What will I say? By this time he’s already peeled ten loaves of bread and is breaking the toothpick he used to clean his teeth into a thousand little pieces. His eyes have turned to ice cubes. I’ll have to tell him a really good story. My rich old aunt arrived with my big-busted cousins and forbade me to go out from pure caprice. The oldest and horridest one acting snotty, “Mama, Mama, my cousin is prettier than me, waanh, waanh!” They covered my head with so much garbage that when the messenger came, the one with the cornet, all he could see on the hearth was a mound of ashes. “Besides your moustached daughters, is there no other damsel in your palace who could be the owner of this slipper?” Then the aunt pushed her daughters forward. “None, good sir. In reality we only have a bastard ragpicker in the kitchen but obviously she could never wear such finery. Come on, my treasures, cut off your toes and the slipper will fit you perfectly!”

  “What time is it? The time, I have to know the time.”

  “My heart is so full of happiness, so-o-o full …”

  I’ll go without any makeup I’ll be ready in ten minutes. Fine. He thinks no makeup is great. The natural look. “Unadorned beauty,” Lorena says. Everything has to be unadorned and pure with her, she has a mania for purity OK OK, I’ll go unadorned. I’ll come in and he’ll look at his watch. But isn’t your watch fast dear? He doesn’t even answer me he just keeps tapping the watch face with his fingernail, he has sickening fingernails with cuticle invading them all. Freckles on his fingers. A mess. “My watch is never fast.” Soul of a watchmaker he must have been born in Switzerland. He takes advantage and winds it, rrk, rrk. “Where were you?” Well, what happened was, I ate some meat pies in the roominghouse and ended up in the emergency ward, a monstrous case of food poisoning, I almost died. He’ll want to know which emergency ward. What medicine I took. Who attended me. Details, little details. Come on. All of them.

  “A pain in the ass,” mumbled Ana, sliding off the bed. She turned on the light in the bathroom and shrank back from the mirror. She blinked dizzily and turned her frenzied eyes away from her reflection, burying her hands in her hair.

  Chapter 5

  They answered. Nobody at the window to call me? Nobody. “Sorry, wrong number,” says the opaque voice, all wrong-number voices become opaque. Just think, if Lião would write in an opaque tone like that. She’s far too clear, the experts want obscurity in the language, a certain fog subtly confusing the silhouette of the words. Screens between the lines garnishing (I love that word, garnishing) the mystery of the letters. And the unmysterious letters busily coupling with the Devil. Is there orgasm? The Devil comes and goes by crooked routes, braiding the hair of his lovers up in inextricable knots. Who will come braid mine? Oh Lord. She said she tore it all up. It’s probably better, poor thing. Nobody will ever read that the entire city smelled of peaches. The phone again? Some terrorist asking for her. Some fiancé asking for Crazy Annie, it’s impressive the way Annie collects fiancés. Before this one she’s already had at least three. Fiancés and debts, she opens accounts in all the boutiques, piles of dresses. Pounds of costume jewelry. An obsession for covering herself with things that look nice in shop windows and magazines. And she doesn’t need any of them with that marvelous face. She could dress like the Greek women, a light tunic and nothing more.

  “Nothing,” murmured Lorena taking a long amber necklace from the bookcase. She put it around her neck; it came down almost as far as her knees. She wound up the music box and looked at the print on the cover: Dante and Beatrice on the bridge. He was moving away a bit to let her pass, his eyes afire, his right hand clutching his heart. “I am Beatrice, blessed and beautiful, trailing my gown of purple.” On the bridge, no longer Dante but M.N. wrinkled and rent asunder with love, “Lorena!” She glimpsed in the corner of the mirror the small surprise snapshot that Sister Clotilde had taken of them in front of the gate: She was between Ana Clara and Lia, all three laughing a sunburned laugh. “Don’t squint, Ana Clara, and Lorena, stop making faces, you’re making a face!” A pyramid. The poet H.H. had described it: “Inside the prism, the base, the vertex of its three continuous pyramids,” she recited, lowering her eyes to her own reflected image.

  If she were a couple of pounds lighter she would look the same age as the young Beatrice, about nine and a half. And M.N. with his wife whose hips and breasts overflowed his hands. “Shrew. Witch,” she whispered closing her eyes. She shook her head, thinking “polluted little mind,” and ran to the drawer where she kept the incense, nothing like a little Jaipur Rose to purify the atmosphere. “I’m giddy, silly.” But if M.N. would take her more seriously? Incredible, but when others took us seriously we became serious ourselves. She took a deep breath of rose-perfumed smoke. “An ancient perfume. Wakes. Death could be just that, incense and music. Jazz, it’s jazz that combines with death in a state of hopelessness and sin. She went to the record player and turned up the volume, which kicked her ears like a wild horse. “I can’t explain it,” Lião would say if she came in right now. And she would spend twenty minutes explaining why this kind of music destroys character. But what does she want me to listen to? L’International? She was probably singing it full blast right now along with some terrorist group, groupons-nous et demain … Demain. Tomorrow, the weather forecasters had announced, would be 102 degrees in the shade with thunder late in the afternoon. To band together was to conspire and perspire. She had a revulsion for sweat. She might be hollow sometimes, but would politics fill the gap? She really didn’t believe in communism or in anything like that, and there was no point in pretending to, as most people did. She hated the game of make-believe. “If I hardly have time and energy to take care of myself, imagine.” A tiny garden with three or four plants, closed in by walls on all sides. And then the extra jobs, like dusting the books which Sebastiana hadn’t dusted. There’s more dust lately, according to Bulie, the dust of the living and the dust of the dead. The color of the cloth changes, yellow for the living and purple for the dead, I saw the driver of a funeral hearse dusting off a coffin with a piece of royal-purple flannel; the coffin must have traveled a long way. The family was waiting, and he dusting and re-dusting the lid of the coffin. The Moon-Eyed Demon probably dresses in black but Death wears royal purple. With a gold-lamè rose tucked in his wig, ah, M.N., when I looked through the glass door and saw you pass by all in white, with gloves and mask, I almost fainted. Too much, that part when he approaches the table, silent and camouflaged. The field of a hysterical battle of lights, machines. The instruments. Thousands of preparations, is everything ready? And Death, smiling, with his gilded rose and his arms crossed.

  “You traitor,” whispered Lorena examining the little hole in the spine of the book. She opened it and blew at the hole, which undulated inward through the pages. “Now where? Where?” she asked herself and closed her eyes, no, it wasn’t Romulo she was thinking about, it was the bookworm. Subtle creatures, bookworms. Labyrinths, galleries.

  She turned toward the calen
dar which hung on the wall, a long silk banner with the months printed on it. This was the Solar Year. “Never has the sun been so close,” she thought throwing the window open. A good time for making love, but not for revolution because very hot weather in underdeveloped places made one limp. Took the starch out of the fiber. “Lião understands that perfectly, the hotter the Third World is, the Thirder it gets.”

  “Nothing?” screamed Lorena, making a pantomime gesture to Sister Priscilla who appeared in the window of the house. The nun opened her arms and returned the code, like a sailor signaling from the bridge of a ship. “Nothing.” She concluded the message by clasping her hands to her chest in an expression of regret. With a pallid wave Lorena thanked her and bit on the largest bead of the amber necklace. “If he hasn’t called by this time then he isn’t going to.” Better to think about the day’s routine: bath, exercises. The right order would be to do exercises beforehand but she must have low blood pressure, she needed hot water for the initial stimulus, however short-lived. Oh Lord. Lunch with her mother, how would she find her? Terrible, naturally. Mustn’t forget to ask for the car keys, every other day Lia wanted to borrow the car, luckily her mother was totally absentminded, she never remembered she had just loaned it to her. “May God prevent Lião from getting machine-gunned inside it.” The university. Fabrízio must be there stirring up the student strike. She might grab him to go to the movies, Greta Garbo festival, eeeh, how she adored that woman. The suffering and pleasure of knowing exactly how to portray the eternal woman, she who was ephemeral. “Lorena, the Brief,” she thought frowning. But the neurotic little poetess must be freed from her hang-ups by now. “Ah, my friend, love a prostitute but not a neurotic, because the former may turn into a saint, but the latter—!” To mount behind him on the motorcycle and clutch him around the waist, smelling the leather of his jacket, the man-animal trembling in the wind, “Want to go, Fabrízio? My allowance is untouched, we’ll dine like princes, Portuguese codfish and fado music.” She would cry buckets, thinking the whole time of M.N., who in turn would be thinking about his oldest son with acute existential doubts, he has five children.

  She twisted the necklace around her head, looping it until it became a diadem of beads about her eyebrows. If one of the nuns went to the drugstore, she would send for some hand cream and Modess, Lião had finished off the supply. The two of them used up everything, all the stock of paints and varnishes, and never replaced anything: soap, dental floss, cotton, etc. “and then when I need something I don’t have it. And neither do they.” Nail-polish remover was a perfect example, Ana borrowed the full bottle and it came back with two drops in the bottom. Ether too? What madness. She’d have to do something. But what? Was to be understanding also to be convenient? A rigorous treatment might help Ana Clara. But did she want to be treated? “She only thinks of her sew-up job and her rich executive. Plastic surgery of the vagina.”

  “My best angle,” she muttered turning her profile. The necklace was slipping down over her eyes. She hooked it over her ears. The social structure. According to Lia, all responsibility lay with the social structure, she had delivered a one-woman seminar on this structure. “I see dear, I see. I agree completely. But what about Ana Clara?” Outside the context of structures was the perplexed piety of Mother Alix. “And this fiancé? Isn’t he going to take any measures either?” Lorena wondered. There was Annie duly classified in the kingdom of words and in the Kingdom of God, was that enough? “I’m in control, I’ll stop when I want to,” she retorted. Imagine. The reins had slipped from her hands ages ago. She had opened them to let go. But was anyone in control of things? Lia herself, who was always climbing stumps to deliver her speeches, was she still holding those reins? “She lost her lover flunked her courses because she cut so often, messed everything up. “She doesn’t even take baths any more. And in this heat, too,” Lorena thought, reminding herself to buy a deodorant. She found it depressing to resort to deodorant, what really worked was soap and water. “But if she doesn’t have time, see.” She lay down on her back on the rug. “I see, Lia de Melo Schultz, I understand, Ana Clara Conceição. I understand everything because I’m overflowing with love, Lord Jesus, save my friends. Save my mother who is so gling-glong. My poor brother with his cars, his women and his guilt, you sit at the right hand of the Father, but do you ever forget? Save my brother and same M.N. in his fouled-up marriage, if it will make him happy, oh Lord. Don’t let Fabrízio get mixed up with the poetess, don’t let him wreck his motorcycle, save everybody, peaceful and delirious, hangmen and hanged. Save my cat.

  Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. Ite, missa est—I recite, opening my hands palms up. Two salvers empty to receive grace. Which one day is-to-come. Jesus, I love You. Oh and I almost forgot, save Lião’s friends, they’re in prison or soon will be, save these children so strong and yet so fragile, we’re all so very fragile. I go to the Kleenex box and dry my eyes.

  “Lorena!”

  The girl crawled on all fours to the bed and lay down. Placing her arms along her body, she raised her legs straight up, toes pointed. Then she brought her legs farther forward, hips supported by her hands. When her feet touched her head with its hair spread fanlike on the mattress, she freed her hands and slapped herself on the buttocks.

  “They could be bigger. Incredible the way men like women with big asses.”

  “Lorena, are you there?”

  Did she bring a key? No, she didn’t. Sister Bula has medicine labels and handkerchiefs in her pockets, not keys. By now she must have put her good ear to the door, wanting to know who I’m talking to, some man? Curiosity and fear. Courage, dear sister, courage! The eyes of an aged rabbit watering into the hanky-bedsheet. I somersault backwards and land on the big cushion which I embrace with all the strength I don’t have. Then she decides to knock. The little raps seem to be part of a code, in an old movie I once saw a lustrous gangster knock that way on the don’s door, the fingernails (in all probability varnished) scratching with utmost subtlety.

  “Come in!” I yell. She comes in apologetically, she always enters a room with this air of asking pardon for merely occupying space. She announces that she can’t stay but installs herself and stays five hours. Sniffing the roses in the mug, she makes a rapturous face, ah, delightful! Then stops in front of the Chagall print.

  “You know I’m starting to like this picture of yours? It’s strange,” she says hiding her hands in the sleeves of her habit. “A horse with a veil and a garland. Hmmm…”

  It’s the hundredth time she’s made this comment and naturally she will add that the blue is pretty.

  “It’s a wedding, sister.”

  “I know, but that mermaid … isn’t that a mermaid?”

  “At a wedding you have to have one of everything.”

  “The blue is pretty.”

  I lift my legs toward the ceiling until my feet touch the light fixture.

  “Look, Sister Bula, candle position. The wind blows and the flame bends backward, farther backward, see? I can do it better on the floor.”

  “All the blood will rush to your head, child. It could cause a hemorrhage.”

  “It’s great for the circulation.”

  “It must be good for hemorrhoids,” she murmured nostalgically, sighing. “Old age is a disease, child. Everything aches. Some parts worse than others. God knows what He does, praise be to God.”

  “Amen.”

  “From my room I could see that you got up so early. I thought you might need something.”

  “I need to be alone.”

  “Hmm?”

  “And some more meat right here, a smaller bottom couldn’t exist. In sport clothes it doesn’t matter so much, but in a long dress, just picture it!”

  She doesn’t hear me. Her eyes are membranous, the eyes of those fish in the still life that used to hang in our living room at the ranch house. Cooking pots, fish and rabbits, all dead. A braided rope of onions hung from the table and only the golden braid had a certain shi
ne to it. “Juliet’s braid,” Daddy used to say.

  “Such insomnia, child. I don’t like the night, only the daytime. I like the sun so much. I wish I could live in a place where there was only sun. A place without night, without pain.”

  With the tip of my toe I make the lantern fixture swing back and forth. If I could just stick my foot inside as far as the light bulb.

  “It would be glory.”

  “I’d like to live in a place where there was no death, where nobody got upset,” she said, smiling as if she had just discovered such a place.

  Now she is examining her wrinkled nails, invaded almost to their tips by cuticle so dry it splits and shreds at the corners. She blots her watery eyes on the handkerchief. She wants to be eternal. Little Sister Eternity.

  “But a place like that is death.”

  “Breath?”

  Let me laugh, ha ha. I think it was this sly creature who wrote the anonymous letter with thousands of denunciations. Lião a communist and manufacturer of bombs; Crazy Annie, a drug addict rapidly turning into a prostitute; I, an indolent amoral parasite living off my dissolute mother, a wicked old corrupter of young men. (“What can one expect from a girl who has a mother like that?”) She has more bitterness toward Mama than toward me: “An unscrupulous woman who hospitalized her mentally incompetent husband and went to burn up his money with a lover who could be her grandson.” Which isn’t true, Mieux isn’t that young, eeeh, if Mama ever found out. And that other letter denouncing Sister Clotilde as being Sister Priscilla’s lover, very murky waters. Ana went in to talk to Madre Alix and saw the letter on the table. Provided she wasn’t lying, the letter demanded drastic measures to put a stop to such a terrible abomination. And Mother Alix? Tranquil. She would never allow herself to be sucked into such a whirlwind.