The Girl in the Photograph

by Lygia Fagundes Telles

  “Lia de Melo Schultz!” I say.

  She has arrived. The window of her room has just lit up, ah, Lião, I think your presence has never been so welcome. If it weren’t so late, and if Annie weren’t in her present state, I’d shout with all my strength, “Lia de Melo Schultz!” And you’d shout back, “Present!” I put on my sandals, change my shirt, and cover up Ana Clara’s feet which have come uncovered. Then I go out the way I learned from Astronaut, leaving the solid mass of my body behind and taking only its rarefied equivaient. I can’t see the moon, only a sky scorching with stars. The brighter ones are wearing low necklines, palpitating. Virgins? let me laugh. Even the daisies are agitated, their exposed crowns shaking in the wind. I scratch at the window blind. She opens it and as I jump in my heart contracts. This will be the last time I jump through her window into this room. I almost trip over the yellow leather suitcase. I pick it up. Very heavy.

  “Packed? Already?”

  Lião closes her notebook on the table, she’s been writing. The diary? Oh Lord.

  “Don’t you recognize Mama’s suitcase? I was with her for hours. The death of the analyst who was very refined, the break with the lover who was very gross, so much drama,” says Lião and suddenly stares closely at me.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Nothing, see. It was a session that would finish even a professional,” she mutters grinning. “I like her. Very refined, very refined.”

  I take the peppermint out of my mouth in order to talk.

  “If you only knew, Lião. Imagine: I was reading about the stars, feeling very poetic, when I heard this uproar on the steps and a scream so blood-curdling my book jumped up to the ceiling, guess who it was. She was hanging over the banister, shouting that somebody had stabbed her in the chest with a fencing foil. In short, high as a kite. Complete madness. And talk about filthy! Her clothes had mud on them, charcoal, some very suspicious stains. And the smell. I gave her an immersion bath, even her hair was foul.”

  Lião is laughing so hard I can’t finish. I wait. Going to her bag, she takes out a ball of twine and starts tying together the small piles of books lined up on the floor. She lights a cigarette and uses it to burn the twine loose after tying each knot.

  “And then what?”

  “I put her to sleep in my bed. Oh, and purple bruises on her breasts and arm. Horrible breath, poor little thing, she must have vomited beforehand.”

  “But wasn’t she at the country home of some VIP?”

  “Good grief, country home! When I asked her she gave me one of those delirious answers you already know, mixing me up with her boyfriend; she cried, laughed. And tomorrow morning at eight o’clock sharp I have a final exam, the strike is over, an exam in Social Legislation. I know it pretty well, but I should at least have taken a look at one or two points, and did I? The problems fell on me in clusters today. One can go smoothly along for ages and ages and then all of a sudden.”

  Lião ties another stack of books together and begins her caged-in pacing back and forth.

  “I came back in Mama’s car, a fabulous idea because I got my list of things almost finished, I did all sorts of errands, told friends good-bye—” she says and stops in front of me. “Everything’s speeded up so much, Miguel has already left.”

  “Left?”

  “He should be there by now. That means that I’ll be going sooner than I expected, I want to get the earliest reservation possible, I’ve got everything ready, I’m tingling. All I needed was a suitcase and Mama gives me this one, I’ll travel with a millionaire’s bag, oh, Lena! Two more days and I disembark in Casablanca. Then Algiers.”

  “Lião, Lião, you’re kidding! And what about our farewell party? We were going to have a farewell party!”

  “There’s no time. One day we’ll throw a party because the time for celebration is coming, but now I’ve got to pack up and take off for the airport, oh, am I scared. I’m no bird,” she mutters picking up the suitcase. She places it on the table. “When I came down from Salvador, the stewardess, a very refined girl as Mama would say, advised over the microphone that due to technical difficulties something-or-other was going to happen and therefore we should all put out our cigarettes and tighten our seat belts. I didn’t understand what was going to happen but after the due to technical difficulties the airplane parted soul from body. I had the worst case of diarrhea the world has yet known.”

  Lorena makes a panicked face, laughs and sits down on the newspapers piled up on the floor. She sighs as she takes a peppermint lozenge from her pocket.

  “So you’re really going. I know you’ve been talking about it, the trip the trip, but I thought it was more vague, almost a joke. Ah, Lião,” she sighs. Then, taking heart: “I’ll go to see you off at the airport, naturally.”

  “Better not, Lorena, no good-byes,” I say and look at her snow-white sandals, so white they could have come from the store this instant. “I’m going to leave with the greatest discretion, even my coat is black, Mama gave me a fabulous coat, she says she went all over Europe in it, a cache-misère, she explained. Isn’t that neat? Except that in my case it really will be hiding a misery much bigger than all the philosophic mothers dream of, oh, Lena. If I don’t go crazy first, I’ll send you letters from over there, postcards, diaries.”

  “I don’t think you’ll write. Or come back either.”

  “No, don’t talk like Mama, shit, if you’d heard her. In spite of her suffering and whatnot she wanted to know if I had anyone. I spoke of a man and that magic word resolved everything, thank goodness, I wouldn’t pollute you after all. She asked if you were still a virgin. ‘Unfortunately,’ I almost said. She was happy to learn this but unhappy at the same time, it’s more complicated than it seems, why is it that to this day, you being the marvel that you are, nobody …”

  Now Lorena giggles, covering her mouth and I laugh with her, the same conspiratorial laugh. Two infidels enjoying their unfaithfulness.

  “Tell me some more. Did she mention Ana Clara?”

  “Naturally. She believes in bad company, she doubts everyone, even the nuns could exercise their influence, see. Then, turning the page: The man you’ve been hanging around with, by chance isn’t he married? By chance I answered that I didn’t know and she was most alarmed, how could I not know? More tears etcetera, and after tea and presents I said good-bye with the greatest gratitude. End of story.”

  “Federico García Lorca,” Lorena murmurs looking at the black-and-white poster thumbtacked to the door of my wardrobe. She crushes the peppermint between her teeth, breathing through her mouth. “How marvelous-looking he was.”

  “It’s yours. You’re going to inherit books, too, I’m leaving them all behind, I’ll only take three or four. Say, is your alarm clock working? I loaned mine to somebody who didn’t bring it back and I have to get up at the crack of dawn,” I say approaching the bookshelf. “But tell me, why didn’t you go to visit Mama? I did the best I could to hold things together, I was very refined, but the dear little girl was very much missed.”

  Lorena bent over to examine the mounds of books that spilled over the shelves onto the rug, forming a sinuous trail to the bed. She peered under the bed and pulled out a green knit blouse and two more large stray books.

  “I could say that Annie ruined my plans but that’s not true, I had the whole evening free to go and didn’t because I was waiting for a phone call from M.N. I left a decisive note for him at the hospital.”

  “Did he phone?”

  “No. Only Mama, she talked with me for five hours right after you left. She wants me to move in this week, can you imagine?”

  “And are you going to?”

  Prudently Lorena sniffed the blouse, spreading it out on the floor. She rolled it up with the socks that were among the newspapers.

  “I have to, Lião. The psychiatrist, Mieux, and of course the drama of getting old. It’s sinister, this drama, all of a sudden she seems a hundred. She needs me.”

>   “Fine. But get out as soon as you can, see. Say you’re in need of your shell, a vacation in your shell, and take off. Is she likely to marry again?”

  “It depends, dear. I know exactly how it’ll be, it was the same way with my grandmother. Granny would get dolled up and so on, but every time something really unpleasant would happen, she would assume her old age until the displeasure passed and she would gradually resolve to get in shape again. This happened several times, she’d fall and get up again, fall and get up again. During one of these falls …” Lorena sighed. “Oh, now I remember, there was a nursery rhyme my nanny used to sing, listen, listen:”

  She straightened herself, cleared her throat and, after taking the lozenge out of her mouth, sang in her weak, polite voice.

  “Theresa fell upon the floor,

  There came three gentlemen

  All gallantly with hat in hand

  To help her up again.”

  I squat down and sing with her in the most serious tone I can manage:

  “The first her noble father was,

  The second was her brother,

  But to the third she gave her heart,

  For she would have no other.”

  We laugh softly, hunched together.

  “My aunts thought that rhyme was a sacrilege, on account of the third gentleman,” I say and have a happy surprise, my cap! I thought I’d lost it. I yank it down over my ears. “But look, about Mama. I’d love it if tomorrow she’d bathe herself in those perfumes and go running out—”

  “On the tips of her toes!”

  “That’s it, on the tips of her toes.”

  Lorena goes back to sucking her peppermint. She starts piling up the papers.

  “I’ve seen Mama go to pieces and recuperate three times, poor little thing. The first, when Romulo, my brother, died. The second, when Daddy was hospitalized, she suffered more on the day he was hospitalized than on the day he actually died. The third time was when she had to sell the ranch. She recovered all three times, of course. This is the fourth, dear.”

  “Well, then she’ll recover again,” I decide as I kneel in front of Lena. I shake her by the shoulders, she seems to have become a child again, oh, if she goes back to live with her mother she’ll be even more of a child. “You’ve got to live your life in your own way and not the way other people decide, oh Lena, Lena, I can’t explain it, but that story of Time devouring his children, wasn’t it the god Cronus? He would give birth to them himself and then devour them all. But the truth is, it’s not Time that swallows people but a mother like yours. A little like mine, too. Pay attention: Get out and she’ll dedicate herself to another cause, to charity, God, who knows, maybe she’ll even adopt a child. My mother adopted one, she’s radiant back home with a little girl whom she kisses and punishes as much as she wants. But at any rate, yesterday I took some measures, I can embark in peace.”

  “Measures? What measures, Lião?”

  She’s extremely excited, she must be thinking about M.N. I grab her as though I were taking hold of an insect, by the ears.

  “Oh, forget that guy, forget him! All you two ever do is exchange little notes, letters, as if one lived on Venus and the other on Mars, ridiculous. It’s fright, he’s quaking with fright. This very minute I’m trembling just to think about getting into an airplane, but it’s healthy to be afraid of airplanes, we’re land animals, perfectly all right. But fear of loving?”

  “He can’t stand the idea of other people suffering, dear. His wife, gobs of kids. The problem of remorse.”

  “But what remorse?”

  Softly Lorena rolls onto her side, her head pillowed on the clothes she has collected.

  “In one of his letters—” she begins. She implores patience as a I lift my arms: “Wait, dear, let me tell you, in one of his letters he described how when he was a boy he found a periwinkle on the beach one day, one of those mother-of-pearl kind, the underside rolling up in spirals and ending in a ruffled crown, you know how they are? He took a piece of wire and poked the snail out through the bottom, it came out in pieces. Then he washed the shell, poured alcohol, ammonia and perfume into the opening, and left it in the sun to dry. Two days later it began to smell frightful, as if the dead snail were still inside. He poked at it again, more water, more soap, nail-polish remover, gasoline, he tried everything. The next day the smell was still there. Through the acetone, gasoline, alcohol, there was still that horrible stench. He ended up throwing the periwinkle back into the sea; he knew he’d never find another one like it, but he threw it back into the ocean.”

  Now Lorena has discovered some cigarette butts; she gathers them up and looks underneath the newspapers as though searching for something. An empty matchbox turns up. Continuing her housecleaning ritual, she sticks the butts into the box. I wait. And the metaphor of the periwinkle? Isn’t it a metaphor?

  “Then what, Lena? The periwinkle?”

  “Well, the smell of the periwinkle is like the smell of memory. The rest of his life he would smell that odor, can you imagine? His wife’s suffering, his children’s. His own suffering too, wasn’t it Tolstoy who said it? Man experiences only two kinds of suffering: physical pain and the pain of remorse.”

  “Perfect. If I understand it right, you’re the periwinkle, which isn’t much of a compliment, a very trashy metaphor. But if this periwinkle was such a rarity, with a crown and so on, he could have tried a little harder, couldn’t he? If he weren’t so selfish and comfort-loving. Much easier to throw the periwinkle into the ocean, by this time you’re in the middle of the Atlantic. Kaput. So don’t talk about this man any more, enough. You’re going to love Guga, we talked a great deal, he knows all the facets of the drama and is disposed to save you. Super-divine.”

  “But where did you see Guga?”

  “I stopped by the theater, he was experimenting with the guitar, he composed a fabulous song. He’s enthusiastic about the idea, enthusiastic.”

  “He is?”

  “Of course. If Mama presses too hard, he’ll even get married in a frock coat, he’ll go through anything. As able as you are, in six months’ time he’ll be taking two baths a day.”

  “Lião, are you crazy? You mean you gave him encouragement?”

  “Obviously. At times he smokes a little pot, but with a more or less balanced girl like you he won’t even take aspirin any more.”

  “More or less? Did you say more or less balanced, Lião?” repeats Lorena rolling over the newspapers.

  Slowly Lia took the clothes out of the open suitcase on the table. She smiled. They smelled just like Lorena’s closets. Very refined, very special, she thought unfolding a gray cashmere pullover, oh, wouldn’t that just fit Miguel? She rubbed it against her face, laughing. A little more contact with the gens lorenensis and she’d be branded on ears, nose, and throat. She turned to look at Lorena who had become still, dreaming among the newspapers. Had he really existed? This Romulo.

  A jet engine’s roar pierced the night and died away. The meowing of nearby cats grew fainter until it blended with the howling of a dog. Someone threw a rock at it and the dog ran away whining. The cats remained.

  “For the next twenty years I’ll be elegant in the wintertime,” said Lia trying on the red cashmere. She hugged herself. “I feel like a kitten, oh Mama, my very best wishes, may you rise up and sally forth again!”

  “Amen. Oh, I almost forgot,” said Lorena rolling up two pairs of jeans that she found under a chair. “Sister Bula was very happy to tell me that the new boarder is about to arrive, the medical student. Apparently she’s something of a genius. She comes from Pará, how about that?”

  “Pará?”

  “Santarém. I already told them she could have my shell,” she sighed, a light shadow passing across her face. She shook herself: “My maid can wash these tomorrow, you have to travel with everything in order.”

  “But those jeans are clean, Lena.”

  “No, dear, they’re not. Leave it to me, she launders divinely.” />
  “Look at the cache-misère! Isn’t it sumptuous?” asked Lia putting on the coat which was in the bottom of the bag. “And the scent, Lorena. The scent of riches.”

  “Softer, Lião, they’ll wake up. We’re shouting.”

  “Let them wake up! I’m too excited, I can’t talk any softer,” she retorted, coming nearer Lorena. “I visited Mother Alix today. She’s quite a strange woman.”

  “Strange, how?”

  “Quite strange,” repeated Lia looking at the garden. She brought her hand to her mouth and ran her tongue over her fingernails. “She reminds me of the ocean at Amaralina Beach back home in Bahia. I know that ocean better than my own hand, the color of the water at any given time of day, all the fish, the shells, the rocks, no surprises, see. But one afternoon while I was diving, a plant rolled itself around my foot. I brought it back to the beach. It was sort of blue, I’d never seen one like it, with smooth little leaves like tiny blue fish and meatcolored roots, so there must be other things like this plant under the water? I began to view the ocean with greater respect.”