The Girl in the Photograph (20 page)

She would strike a movie-star pose, what was the name of that actress her mother liked
so much? Rita Hayworth. She pronounced it Hi-worch. Her father was absentminded and
didn’t remember actors’ names, but there was one he had never forgotten: Claude Rains.
“An unpleasant old man,” her mother would complain under her breath. “Actors should
be young, handsome.”

“Later you have a word with Mineiro. About the passport. Is this your street? I can’t
read the sign.”

“The next one, go on a little further. What about the Corcel?”

“Tomorrow morning it will be outside your door, with the compliments of the revolution.”

“Bugre, Bugre, this cap and this news, see. But where are you going? It’s here,” she
advised leaning over to kiss him good-bye. She thought about asking if Miguel had
mentioned her but grabbed her bag and book and asked only if she could keep the pack
of cigarettes.

“Take the matches too. And this green handkerchief, isn’t this yours?”

She went in protecting her head with the bag; the rain had grown heavier.

“What weather,” she said to herself shaking the rain off in the vestibule of the big
old house.

“Lia? Is that you, Lia?” asked Mother Alix opening the door of her office. “Come in
for a second, dear. Sit down here beside me. Would you like some coffee? It’s fresh,
see if it has enough sugar.”

Lia left her bag and book on the floor. She smiled helplessly, wanting to be alone,
to think and plan.

“Insomnia, Mother Alix?”

“No, lots of work. What a lovely cap.”

“Yes, isn’t it? A present from a friend.”

“With your hair pulled back that way you look just like a sailor. And a German sailor
at that, you have your father’s eyes.”

“That’s what my friend said, a sailor girl,” I answer drinking the coffee. Too hot.
Too sweet. “Did you have a letter from my mother?”

“A long one. I like your mother very much.”

I gaze at the clock in the form of an 8 hanging on the whitewashed wall. The sound
it makes is antique too.

“In my house there’s a clock just like that one.”

“Do you miss home, Lia?”

“I can’t explain it, but my home is kind of like this coffee, sweet and hot. My mother
used to smother me with so much love, at times I used to wish she loved me less. My
dad pretending to frown, aunts and uncles always coming and going, battalions of cousins.
Coziness, little parties. I remember them all, I
love them all, but I don’t want to go back. Is that missing home? My time there came
to an end. Here another phase began and now a third period is about to start; so I’ll
have these two to look back on. Is that the same as missing them?”

“Perhaps. When I was a novice, I used to think about my people, I knew I wouldn’t
go back but I kept on thinking about them so much. Like when you take a dress out
of a trunk, a dress you’re not going to wear, just to look at it. To see what it was
like. Afterwards one folds it up again and puts it away but one never considers throwing
it away or giving it to anyone. I think that’s what missing things is.”

I crush my cigarette out in the ashtray decorated with roses, Sister Priscilla paints
china. So many things I have to see about, oh, this news. Algeria. Crazy, wild, Algeria?
Algeria. And here I am hearing about the dress. I meet Mother Alix’s steel-gray eyes,
isn’t it the dress she’s talking about? a poem Lorena recited to me once, I’ll have
to say good-bye to the rose-pink shell. But wherever I go, and no matter how much
time passes, I know I’ll never forget her incenses. Her recitations, her music. A
thousand years from now I’ll still be able to see her, pale and skinny in her black
leotard, lying on her back, pedaling in the air.

“I’ll have another cup,” I say taking the thermos bottle.

She pulls her white headdress over her ears, isn’t her head too small for her body?
I try to imagine her as a young woman putting on the habit for the first time, a gray
life behind the veil that shields her head like a helmet. But why
gray life?
Didn’t she put more than half a century of the greatest possible love into her work?
So there’s nothing gray about it. A Christian Soldier, how does the hymn go?…
Onward, Christian soldiers
… Half a century thinking the same thoughts.

“And how are your studies, child? Did you cancel your registration?”

“Well, things have taken another direction, see. I’m going on a journey. Mother Alix.
Outside the country. That’s all I can say for now, soon I’ll be hauling up my anchor,
see, I’ve got my cap on already,” I say and for some reason am moved. “I won’t forget
your patience toward me, I know I’m aggressive. Complicated. You must have wanted
to throw me out in the street at times, but you opened the door to me instead.”

She puts her glasses away in their leather case, and places one hand over the other.
My eyes fix themselves on her silver ring.

“You girls seem so unmysterious to me, so open. Just when I think I’ve learned everything
about each of you, I’m suddenly startled to discover I was wrong. I know very, very
little. Almost nothing!” she exclaimed, spreading her hands wide in a gesture of amazement.
“What, in the end, do I know? That you’re a militant leftist and that you’ve failed
the year because you missed so many classes? That you have a boyfriend in prison,
are working on a novel and planning a trip to I don’t know where? What do I know about
Lorena? That she likes Latin, listens to music all day long and is forever waiting
for a phone call from a man who never calls her. Ana Clara, there you are, Ana Clara.
Since she seeks me out and confides in me, I should feel secure in the impression
that I know all about her. But do I? How am I to separate reality from invention?”

When she stops speaking, I hear the ticking of the clock. The mahogany chairs with
the crocheted antimacassars on their backs, they were almost threadbare, those antimacassars.
But they had been crocheted by Grandma Diu …

“You’re too modest, Mother Alix. In reality you know us better than you think.”

“You’re young girls, Lia. I wasn’t counting on really knowing you well. But being
at a distance as I am, how can I be useful? And I wanted to be useful,” she repeated.
The cloth of the mantle wrinkled, modeling the wrinkles that deepened on her forehead.
“Ana Clara is the only one who really opened herself without reservation. But I feel
just as useless before her as I do before you and Lorena, reduced as I am to a tape
recorder, I accept the charge, I record what she tells me, but when I try to influence
her, to change what needs changing, she slips through my hands like an eel! I plead,
I demand. One day she is repentant to the bottom of her soul, she makes promises,
plans. I begin to believe in her recuperation, you know I have unlimited faith in
miracles.”

She’s waiting for me to contest this view but I’m not going to swallow the bait. Not
today, oh, how I want to enjoy my happiness all alone in bed, in the dark.

“You’ve helped her so much, Mother Alix. Don’t I know? You’ve been her confessor,
her nurse.”

“And now, her denouncer. I’ve been talking to my cousin who is the director of a sanatorium.
She can’t be hospitalized by force, she has to be in agreement. She’s already said
she agrees,
but then she changes her mind, thinks she’s cured, more promises, ostentatious projects.
I’d like to have a talk with this fiancé.”

I go to the window and look out at the night sparkling with rain. I want to go back
to writing, after all, who’s to say? Whether or not I have talent. Lorena and Miguel
weren’t very enthusiastic. They weren’t enthusiastic at all. But couldn’t they be
wrong? I shouldn’t have ripped it up, a hasty move, hysterical. But that’s no problem.
I can always rewrite it if I want. Lorena’s too sophisticated and Miguel is too cerebral,
he scorns fiction.

“Do you know him, child?”

“Who?”

“The fiancé. It seems he’s very wealthy, but she doesn’t love him, she loves the other
one, Max. She talks a great deal about this Max, he’s an addict too. Complete chaos.”

Seen from the back, with her veil and gray apron, she looks like a peasant woman,
the very old-fashioned kind, too clean a model even for an academic painter. I take
aim and flick my cigarette butt into the potted plant. Was that Lorena who peeked
out the window?

“So she goes into the hospital and gets detoxified. Splendid. After a week or a month,
she’s released, she can’t stay in a hospital for the rest of her life. And then she
starts all over again, you know it as well as I do. I don’t see any solution.

“She wanted psychiatric help, I promised to pay for the treatment, she was supposed
to see about a doctor but when I ask her which doctor she chose or when she’s going
to start she gives me vague answers, postpones it, she’s incapable of making a decision.
Yesterday someone came to deliver clothes she bought. I sent them all back, she can’t
pay her roominghouse bill, I don’t even expect her to. More debts, and an insolent
bill collector demanding a down payment. Good heavens!”

This floor with its wide boards, so light-colored it’s almost white. In my house I
used to love to lie on the floor while the grown-ups talked on into the night. It
was good, to fall asleep to that sound of conversation.

“At times I want to shake Annie, slap her, she makes me so mad. Oh, I know she’s sick,
of course, but the disease itself makes me furious. Do you think an analyst would
do any good at this late stage? She’s already had dozens of analysts, Mother
Alix. Dozens. Some she went to bed with, the others she didn’t pay. Recuperable cases
are recuperable. Period. The less crazy of the crazy, about like us. A neurosis that
doesn’t call too much attention to itself because it fits in. As long as a neurotic
is able to work and love in this reasonable madness, there’s no real problem. But
when he goes beyond that very fine line, as fine as a strand of Lorena’s hair, when
he steps over, he falls straight into the yellow waters.
Kaput
.”

The steel-gray eyes are about to spill over, she likes poor Annie very much. And she’s
smart enough to realize there isn’t much hope for her.

“She hasn’t appeared since yesterday. She called to say she was at the fiancé’s country
house.”

“Fiancé. Pardon me, Mother Alix, but Ana is the product of this wonderful society
of ours, there are thousands of Anas out there, some surviving the life they live,
others falling to pieces. The intentions for helping them, etcetera, are the best
possible, it’s not Hell that’s overflowing with the well-intentioned, it’s this city.
I see you go out with other kind ladies, giving soup to the beggars. Good advice,
blankets. They drink the soup, listen to the advice and go running to trade the blanket
for a quart of rum because the next day it’s warmer, who needs a blanket? Everything
continues the same as before, with one more drunken night furnished by the benefactor.
A priest who is a friend of ours went to teach catechism to a little nine-year-old
girl whose father sold her to a brothel and almost died from the beating he got from
the proprietress’s hireling. He learned his lesson, oh, did he ever! Individual charity
is romanticism, I came to that conclusion just recently. The priest is still working
with us but within a different framework. ‘We forget ourselves, we relax,’ says Bela
Akmadulina, ‘and everything slides backward.’ ”

I go to the thermos bottle and pour myself more coffee but I wish I had a sandwich.
Ham and cheese. A bee buzzes against the windowpane and suddenly its buzzing becomes
more important than our conversation. Where could it have come from on a night like
this? I wish I could write like bees make honey. And I almost break out laughing:
The grasshopper of the fable was certainly silly with her singing but the little ant
with the broom in hand wasn’t much better.

“I have so many things I want to say to you, my child. And I don’t know where to start.
This political movement of yours, for example. I wonder if you’re safe?”

“Safe? But who can be safe, Mother Alix? To all appearances you are very safe here
beneath your bell jar, but you’re intelligent enough to know
from what
this bell jar protects you. Certain priests have broken the glass, like that one
I was telling you about. By chance are they safe? No. And they’re not even worried
about safety when they go to sleep on a bare mattress with no pillow or when they
perform their Masses on an old crate turned into an altar.”

She smiles. A sad smile which I am sorry to have provoked.

“But I’m not in a bell jar, Lia. You’re wrong on that point just as you were wrong
when you said I’d like to put you out in the street. God knows my greatest wish is
to protect and keep you always, if that were possible. If I don’t involve myself,
if I don’t come closer, it’s because I don’t want you to think I’m spying on you,
interfering in what you do. The three of you would fly off all the faster.”

There, she’s hurt. It’s this terrible habit I have of arguing. A Bahiana turned political
subversive, what could anyone expect?

“I can’t explain it, Mother Alix, but what I meant is that you, although apart from
the world, fight in your own way, and I respect your fight. I even respect the fight
of those who want to destroy us, yes ma’am I do, they’re doing what they think is
right. Just as we are, weakened, betrayed, divided, you can’t imagine how divided
we are. But we keep on. Those who are left have to run like dogs to pass the torch
on to the next person, who takes it and runs to the one after who is continuing the
race, see. From one to the other. It’s slow, but we’re not in such a hurry.”

“Torch, Lia? You say torch, but what I see is one leading the other to violence, death.
A trail of blood is what you leave wherever you pass. We have a Supreme Guide and
violence has been eliminated from His transcendent scheme. Spirituality—”

There you are, the victory of spirituality. I jerk loose a shred of fingernail which
brings a piece of skin with it. Blood seeps out; I suck on my finger. A bullet, bam-bam
in the chest, would hurt less.