“Do you want to open the window, ma’am?” said a young man listening to Handel on his transistor radio.
“Ah!” she exclaimed in terror.
Oh no! thought Angela, everything was getting ruined, the boy shouldn’t have said that, it was too much, no one should have touched her again. Because the old woman, on the verge of losing the attitude which she lived off, on the verge of losing a certain bitterness, quivered like harpsichord music between smiling and being utterly charmed:
“No, no, no,” she said with false authority, “not at all, thank you, I just wanted to look out.”
She sat immediately as if the young man and woman’s consideration were keeping watch over her. The old woman, before boarding the train, had crossed her heart three times, discreetly kissing her fingertips. She was wearing a black dress with a real lace collar and a solid gold brooch. On her dark left hand were a widow’s two thick wedding bands, thick like they don’t make them anymore. From the next car a group of girl scouts could be heard singing a hymn to Brazil in high voices. Fortunately, in the next car. The music from the boy’s radio mingled with another boy’s music: he was listening to Edith Piaf who was singing “J’attendrai.”
That had been when the train suddenly lurched and its wheels sprang into motion. The departure had begun. The old woman said softly: Oh Jesus! She bathed in the waters of Jesus. Amen. From a lady’s transistor radio she learned it was six-thirty in the morning, a frigid morning. The old woman thought: Brazil was improving the signs along its highways. Someone named Kissinger seemed to be in charge of the world.
Nobody knows where I am, thought Angela Pralini, and that scared her a little, she was a fugitive.
“My name is Maria Rita Alvarenga Chagas Souza Melo—Alvarenga Chagas was my father’s last name,” she added to beg pardon for having to utter so many words just to say her name. “Chagas,” she added modestly, “refers to the Wounds of Christ. But you can call me Dona Maria Ritinha. And your name?, what’s your Christian name?”
“My name is Angela Pralini. I’m going to spend six months on my aunt and uncle’s farm. And you, ma’am?”
“Ah, I’m going to my son’s farm, I’m going to spend the rest of my life there, my daughter brought me to the train and my son is waiting for me with the horse cart at the station. I’m like a package delivered from hand to hand.”
Angela’s aunt and uncle didn’t have children and treated her like a daughter. Angela recalled the note she’d left Eduardo: “Don’t try to find me. I’m going to disappear from you forever. I love you more than ever. Farewell. Your Angela stopped being yours because you didn’t want her.”
They sat in silence. Angela Pralini let the rhythmic sounds of the train wash over her. Dona Maria Rita gazed once again at the diamond-and-pearl ring on her finger, adjusted her gold brooch: “I’m old but I’m rich, richer than everyone in this car. I’m rich, I’m rich.” She peered at her watch, more to see its heavy gold case than to check the time. “I’m very rich, I’m not just any old lady.” But she knew, ah she very well knew that she was just some little old lady, a little old lady frightened by the smallest things. She recalled herself, alone all day long in her rocking chair, alone with the servants, while her “public relations” daughter spent all day out of the house, not coming home until eight at night, and without even giving her a kiss. She’d awoken that day at five in the morning, everything still dark, it was cold.
In the wake of the young man’s consideration she was extraordinarily worked up and smiling. She seemed weakened. Her laugh revealed her to be one of those little old ladies full of teeth. The misplaced cruelty of teeth. The boy had already moved off. She opened and closed her eyelids. Suddenly she slapped her fingers against Angela’s leg, extremely quickly and lightly:
“Today everyone is truly, just truly nice! so kind, so kind.”
Angela smiled. The old woman kept smiling without taking her deep, vacant eyes off the young woman’s. Come on, come on they urged her all around, and she peered here and there as if to make a choice. Come on, come on! they pushed her laughing all around, and she shook with laughter, genteel.
“How nice everyone on this train is,” she said.
Suddenly she tried to regain her composure, pretended to clear her throat, got ahold of herself. It must have been hard. She feared she had reached a point of not being able to stop herself. She reined herself in severely and trembling, closed her lips over her innumerable teeth. But she couldn’t fool anyone: her face held such hope that it disturbed any eyes that saw it. She no longer depended on anyone: once they had touched her, she could be on her way—she radiated on her own, thin, tall. She still would have liked to say anything at all and was already preparing some sociable head movement, full of studied charm. Angela wondered whether she’d manage to express herself. She seemed to think, think, and tenderly find a fully formed thought that might adequately couch her feelings. She said carefully and with the wisdom of the elders, as if she needed to act the part in order to speak like an old woman:
“Youth. Darling youth.”
Her laugh came out somewhat forced. Was she going to have a nervous breakdown? thought Angela Pralini. Because she was so marvelous. But she cleared her throat again austerely, drummed her fingertips on the seat as if urgently summoning the orchestra to prepare a new score. She opened her purse, pulled out a little square of newspaper, unfolded it, unfolded it, until she turned it into a large, regular newspaper, dating from three days before—Angela saw from the date. She began to read.
Angela had lost over fifteen pounds. On the farm she’d gorge herself: black bean mash and collard greens, to gain back those precious lost pounds. She was so skinny from having gone along with Eduardo’s brilliant and uninterrupted reasoning: she’d drink coffee without sugar nonstop in order to stay awake. Angela Pralini had very pretty breasts, they were her best feature. She had pointy ears and a pretty, curved mouth, kissable. Deep dark circles under her eyes. She made use of the train’s screaming whistle as her own scream. It was a piercing howl, hers, only turned inward. She was the woman who drank the most whiskey in Eduardo’s group. She could take 6 or 7 in a row, maintaining a terror-stricken lucidity. On the farm she’d drink creamy cow’s milk. One thing united the old woman with Angela: both would be met with open arms, but neither knew this about the other. Angela suddenly shivered: who would give the dog its final dose of deworming treatment. Ah, Ulisses, she told the dog in her head, I didn’t abandon you willingly, it’s because I had to escape Eduardo, before he ruined me completely with his lucidity: a lucidity that illuminated too much and singed everything. Angela knew that her aunt and uncle had antivenom for snake bites: she was planning to go straight into the heart of the dense and verdant forest, wearing tall boots and slathered in mosquito repellent. As if stepping off the Trans-Amazonian Highway, the explorer. What animals would she encounter? It was best to bring a rifle, food and water. And a compass. Ever since she’d discovered—but really discovered with a note of alarm—that she would die some day, then she no longer feared life, and, because of death, she had full rights: she’d risk everything. After having gone through two relationships that ended in nothing, this third was ending in love-adoration, cut off by the inevitability of the desire to survive. Eduardo had transformed her: he’d made her have eyes on the inside. But now she was looking outward. Through the window she saw the breasts of the land, in mountains. Little birds exist, Eduardo! clouds exist, Eduardo! a whole world of stallions and mares and cows exists, Eduardo, and when I was a little girl I would gallop on a bare horse, without a saddle! I’m fleeing my suicide, Eduardo. I’m sorry, Eduardo, but I don’t want to die. I want to be fresh and rare like a pomegranate.
The old woman pretended to be reading the newspaper. But she was thinking: her world was a sigh. She didn’t want others to think she’d been abandoned. God gave me health so I could travel alone. I’m also of sound mind, I don’t talk
to myself and I bathe by myself every day. She gave off the fragrance of wilted and crushed roses, it was her elderly, musty fragrance. To possess a breathing rhythm, Angela thought about the old woman, was the loveliest thing to have existed since Dona Maria Rita’s birth. It was life.
Dona Maria Rita was thinking: once she got old she’d started to disappear to other people, they only glimpsed her. Old age: supreme moment. She was an outsider to the world’s general strategy and her own was paltry. She’d lost track of her more far-reaching goals. She was already the future.
Angela thought: I think that if I happened upon the truth, I wouldn’t be able to think it. It would be mentally unpronounceable.
The old woman had always been slightly empty, well, ever so slightly. Death? it was odd, it played no part in her days. And even “not existing” didn’t exist, not-existing was impossible. Not existing didn’t fit into our daily life. Her daughter wasn’t affectionate. In compensation her son was incredibly affectionate, good-natured, chubby. Her daughter was as brusque as her cursory kisses, the “public relations” one. The old woman didn’t feel quite up to living. The monotony, however, was what kept her going.
Eduardo would listen to music to accompany his thinking. And he understood the dissonance of modern music, all he knew how to do was understand. His intelligence that smothered her. You’re a temperamental person, Angela, he once told her. So what? What’s wrong with that? I am what I am and not what you think I am. The proof that I am is in the departure of this train. My proof is also Dona Maria Rita, right there across from me. Proof of what? Yes. She’d already had plenitude. When she and Eduardo were so in love that while in the same bed, holding hands, they had felt life was complete. Few people have known plenitude. And, because plenitude is also an explosion, she and Eduardo had cowardly begun to live “normally.” Because you can’t prolong ecstasy without dying. They separated for a pointless, semi-invented reason: they didn’t want to die of passion. Plenitude is one of those truths you happen upon. But the necessary split had been an amputation for her, just as there are women whose uterus and ovaries are removed. Empty inside.
Dona Maria Rita was so antique that people in her daughter’s house were used to her like an old piece of furniture. She wasn’t a novelty for anyone. But it had never crossed her mind that she was living in solitude. It was just that she didn’t have anything to do. It was a forced leisure that at times became heartrending: she had nothing to do in the world. Except live like a cat, like a dog. Her ideal was to be a lady-in-waiting for some noble gentlewoman, but people didn’t have them anymore and even so, no one would have believed in her hardy seventy-seven years, they’d have thought her feeble. She didn’t do anything, all she did was this: be old. Sometimes she got depressed: she thought she was no good for anything, she was even no good for God. Dona Maria Ritinha didn’t have hell inside her. Why did old people, even those who didn’t tremble, evoke something delicately tremulous? Dona Maria Rita had a brittle tremor of accordion music.
But when it’s a matter of life itself—who comes to our rescue? for each one stands alone. And each life must be rescued by that each-one’s own life. Each one of us: that’s what we count on. Since Dona Maria Rita had always been an average person, she thought dying wasn’t a normal thing. Dying was surprising. It was as if she wasn’t up to the act of death, for nothing extraordinary had ever happened to her in life up till now that could suddenly justify such an extraordinary fact. She talked and even thought about death, but deep down she was skeptical and suspicious. She thought you died when there was some disaster or someone killed someone else. The old woman had little experience. Sometimes she got palpitations: the heart’s bacchanal. But that was it and even that dated back to girlhood. During her first kiss, for example, her heart had lost control. And it had been a good thing bordering on bad. Something that recalled her past, not as facts but as life: a sensation of shadowy vegetation, caladiums, giant ferns, maidenhair ferns, green freshness. Whenever she felt this all over again, she smiled. One of the most erudite words she used was “picturesque.” It was good. It was like listening to the murmur of a spring and not knowing where it came from.
A dialogue she carried on with herself:
“Are you doing anything?”
“Yes I am: I am being sad.”
“Doesn’t it bother you to be alone?”
“No, I think.”
Sometimes she didn’t think. Sometimes a person sat there being. She didn’t have to do. Being was already doing. You could be slowly or a bit fast.
In the row behind them, two women were talking and talking nonstop. Their constant sounds fused with the noise of the train wheels on the tracks.
As much as Dona Maria Rita had been hoping her daughter would wait on the train platform to give her a little sendoff, it didn’t happen. The train motionless. Until it had lurched forward.
“Angela,” she said, “a woman never tells her age, that’s why all I can say is it’s a lot of years. No, with you, Angela—can I use your first name?—with you I’m going to let you in on a secret: I’m seventy-seven years old.”
“I’m thirty-seven,” Angela Pralini said.
It was seven in the morning.
“When I was a girl I was such a little liar. I’d lie for no reason.”
Later, as if disenchanted with the magic of lying, she’d stopped.
Angela, looking at the elderly Dona Maria Rita, was afraid to grow old and die. Hold my hand, Eduardo, so I won’t be afraid to die. But he didn’t hold anything. All he did was: think, think and think. Ah, Eduardo, I want the sweetness of Schumann! Her life was a life undone, evanescent. She lacked a bone that was hard, tough and strong, that no one could cross. Who could be this essential bone? To distance herself from the sensation of overwhelming neediness, she thought: how did they get by in the Middle Ages without telephones or airplanes? Mystery. Middle Ages, I adore ye and thy black, laden clouds that opened onto the luminous and fresh Renaissance.
As for the old woman, she had checked out. She was gazing into the nothing.
Angela looked at herself in her compact. I look like I’m about to faint. Watch out for the abyss, I tell the woman who looks like she’s about to faint. When I die I’ll miss you so much, Eduardo! The declaration didn’t stand up to logic yet possessed in itself an imponderable meaning. It was as if she wanted to express one thing and was expressing another.
The old woman was already the future. She seemed ashamed. Ashamed of being old? At some point in her life there certainly must have been a mistake, and the result was that strange state of life. Which nevertheless wasn’t leading her to death. Death was always such a surprise for the person dying. Yet she took pride in not drooling or wetting the bed, as if that uncultivated form of health was the merited result of an act of her own will. The only reason she wasn’t a grande dame, a distinguished older lady, was because she wasn’t arrogant: she was a dignified little old lady who suddenly looked skittish. She—all right, she was praising herself, considered herself an old woman full of precociousness like a precocious child. But her life’s true intention, she did not know.
Angela was dreaming about the farm: there you could hear shouts, barks and howls, at night. “Eduardo,” she said to him in her head, “I was tired of trying to be what you thought I am. There’s a bad side—the stronger one and the one that dominated though I tried to hide it because of you—on that strong side I’m a cow, I’m a free horse that stamps at the ground, I’m a streetwalker, I’m a whore—and not a ‘woman of letters.’ I know I’m intelligent and that sometimes I hide it so I won’t offend others with my intelligence, I who am a subconscious. I fled you, Eduardo, because you were killing me with that genius head of yours that made me nearly clap both hands over my ears and nearly scream with horror and exhaustion. And now I’m going to spend six months on the farm, you don’t know where I’ll be, and every day I’ll bathe in the river mixi
ng its mud with my own blessed clay. I’m common, Eduardo! and you should know that I like reading comics, my love, oh my love! how I love you and how I love your terrible incantations, ah how I adore you, slave of yours that I am. But I am physical, my love, I am physical and I had to hide from you the glory of being physical. And you, who are the very radiance of reasoning, though you don’t know it, were nourished by me. You, super-intellectual and brilliant and leaving everyone stunned and speechless.”
“I think,” the old woman said to herself very slowly, “I think that pretty girl isn’t interested in chatting with me. I don’t know why, but nobody chats with me anymore. And even when I’m with people, they don’t seem to remember me. After all it’s not my fault I’m old. But never mind, I keep myself company. And anyhow I’ve got Nandinho, my dear son who adores me.”
“The agonizing pleasure of scratching one’s itch!” thought Angela. “I, hmm, who never go in for this or that—I’m free!!! I’m getting healthier, oh I feel like blurting something really loud to scare everyone. Would the old woman get it? I don’t know, she must have given birth plenty of times. I’m not falling into the trap of thinking the right thing to do is be unhappy, Eduardo. I want to enjoy everything and then die and be damned! be damned! be damned! Though the old woman might be unhappy without knowing it. Passivity. I won’t go in for that either, no passivity whatsoever, what I want to do is bathe naked in the muddy river that resembles me, naked and free! hooray! Hip hip hooray! I’m abandoning everything! everything! and that way I won’t be abandoned, I don’t want to depend on more than around three people and for the rest it’s: Hello, how are you? fine. Edu, you know what? I’m abandoning you. You, at the core of your intellectualism, aren’t worth the life of a dog. I’m abandoning you, then. And I’m abandoning that group of pseudo-intellectuals that used to demand from me a vain and nervous constant exercise of false and hasty intelligence. I needed God to abandon me so I could feel his presence. I need to kill someone inside me. You ruined my intelligence with yours, a genius’s. And forced me to know, to know, to know. Ah, Eduardo, don’t worry, I’ve brought along the books you gave me so I can ‘follow a course of home study,’ as you wanted. I’ll study philosophy by the river, out of the love I have for you.”
The Complete Stories Page 39