The Girl in the Photograph (28 page)

The foam of the bath salts begins to crystallize on the surface of the tub. I hug
my legs and visualize myself running crazily like the woman in the Canticles, fainting
with passion as I search for my beloved with the legs like columns, he plays golf,
he must have muscular legs. At the right moment (he will intuit that moment) I see
him extend his knowledgeable hands. Refinement and cultivation in his fingertips polished
to the utmost, like those of a safecracker perfecting his tactile sense.
Tactile
with a
c
to impede precipitant haste; certain words should have their doorsteps as a measure
against uncontrolled people, watch your step! He is careful, oh indeed he is. So much
so that he already has both hands on my breasts without my even perceiving how they
got there. A first touch, the light twirling of the buttons to the left and to the
right. A pause. One more almostimperceptible movement and I’ll spring wide open, every
secret revealed.

“The treasure of a young girl is her virginity,” I heard Mama say more than once to
the young girls that worked in our house on the ranch. Since she never again gave
that warning, I calculate that the treasure was only valid for that time. And for
that
type of young girl, daughters of peasants or orphans. But what if I should come up
to her and say, I have a lover. Pale with alarm, she would stare wide-eyed for several
hours, it always takes her a while to adjust to new situations. “A
lover?
” I quickly look for a decisive argument, You don’t want me to remain a virgin the
rest of my life, do you? Of course not, she wouldn’t want that under any circumstances,
she’s made thousands of ironic allusions to girls who die virgins and turn into stars.
You wouldn’t want me to become a lesbian, if I don’t go to bed with a man, I’ll have
to go with a woman, won’t I? She shakes her head, terrified, no, no! Although catastrophic,
at this point she’s not thinking about
the worst
that could happen to me but rather a normal and healthy hypothesis: Why a
lover
and not
a fiancé!
I concentrate in order to exposit all of Lião’s theories against marriage. But my
arguments are terribly weak, I think marriage is the best thing in the world, I’d
marry M.N. in a thousand churches and courts. Oh Lord. In the end I give the lecture
with that so-sincere sincerity that seizes us when the grapes are sour. She starts
smoking one cigarette after another, a sign of insecurity. To show how up-to-date
she is, she rejoices in unrestrained youth, she’s super-liberal but she can’t help
mentioning a few of her perplexities: “For example, I can’t understand this gulf between
my generation and yours. Have centuries gone by, or only a few years? The scandal
it caused when my cousin had a baby four months after she was married, you’d have
thought the world was coming to an end. And how old do you think she is today? Forty-two!
Imagine if
now
anybody would so much as comment if one of your friends by chance—” she leaves the
sentence dangling, she’s just remembered that she’s said all this before, there’s
not a card-partner of her acquaintance who hasn’t thrilled to the differences between
her own times and those of her daughters. Granddaughters. Or nieces, in cases where
there isn’t a direct descendant. She grows quiet, thinking. Her expression starts
to wax dramatic when she visualizes me in bed with a man, the faces contorted in pleasure,
the moans WITHOUT MATRIMONIAL INTENT. Which is a bit like spying, isn’t it? She squeezes
her eyes shut. The sponge of bitter aloes begins to drip from her slow smile. Still
a child (she thinks of me as being about twelve) and with a
lover
, an old faun drooling his filthy spittle over her baby. Disappointment slowly is
transformed into rage, she paces back and forth with her arms
crossed because she can’t bear to sit still any longer nor to look at me.
Mea culpa, mea culpa
. “I’m an insensate woman, a frivolous creature. To leave my little girl in the midst
of people whom I don’t even know and go off to live with a man who ridicules and betrays
me as often as he can. If I didn’t drink my tea black, he would have killed me long
ago with a dose of arsenic in the sugar. A mother can’t separate herself that way
from an almost-adolescent girl, you’ve actually shown a lot of judgment, another girl
in the same circumstances …” the self-punishment grows less severe when she announces
that the romance with Mieux is truly liquidated. She wants now to live a retired life,
without worldliness, “completely centered around my little girl. God forbid that I
should ever marry again,” she’ll say, without recalling that she said the very same
thing and with equal emphasis right after Daddy was hospitalized. She allows that
my friends are partly responsible: “I find them very odd, those two girls who live
there. The pudgy one who looks like a lesbian and that other who is so vulgar. Could
they possibly be the right company for a young lady?” She squeezes the young lady’s
hand to signify her appreciation for my being truthful and not telling lies (she can
put her fears to rest on that point) and under the pretext of consoling me (because
he’s married) she consoles herself, nostalgic. “But if you’re happy, then so am I,”
she says and smiles that wan, melancholy smile to show her contentment. Every time
the present becomes distasteful to her (which is happening more and more frequently)
she takes refuge in the past. The memories collected without temporal order are always
the same ones. “Do you remember, dear?” I am playing at the fountain on the ranch
and I have a red flannel scarf tied around my neck because I have a sore throat. Daddy
snapped the shutter when I lost my balance and fell down on my bottom in the water.
Somebody (Ifigênia?) yells from inside the house, “That child will catch pneumonia!”
Now I’m riding on the back of Remo’s bicycle, my face so clear you can see the gap
left by the canine tooth that was pulled out the night before. The tooth swings on
the end of a string in a pendulum motion, “Where’s the tooth that was here? The cat
got it! … Where’s the cat?” My first bath in a silver basin, with gold chains and
bracelets in the bottom, through the water I see the gold destined to transmit its
shine to me. I told her I remembered this bath and she laughed, “Impossible, dear,
you were only eight
days old!” But I do remember it. I see the water and the tangle of gold shining in
the bottom, I would recognize that jewelry if it hadn’t all been melted down, the
thing that lasted the longest was the enormous chain that looped around and around
and around and one time around Mieux made off with it. My first day of school, when
I threw my lunch pail away and wouldn’t let go of the legs of the bed. She was wearing
a white linen dress and had pinned a little bouquet of jasmine to the neckline. “I
used to like that dress so much,” she repeats, reconstructing the dress and the rest.
She keeps on staring at me. “I should never have sold the ranch, I should have stayed
on there. I could have arranged for a male nurse, he wouldn’t have gotten worse the
way he did if he’d lived in the midst of the things he loved so much, his plants,
his animals. To die alone in that cold sanatorium, without anybody to hold his hand.
Romulo dead. Remo so far away he might as well be dead too. My little girl the lover
of a married man. And I in the company of a cynic who betrays and exploits me, oh,
what punishment, what punishment!”

I slide deeper into the bathtub. My eyes are swimming, I’ve become emotional, why
did I complicate the picture this way? I’m very much moved and I wasn’t supposed to
be moved at all. Better not to mention the fact that he’s married, if he isn’t married
she might have hope, and to deprive Mama of hope is the last thing in the world I’d
want to do. I’ll just say that I don’t have the
slightest
interest in marriage. She takes heart: “You don’t right now, but you will, all young
girls say that but when they start wanting children, then they want to marry too.
It always happens. So much more practical, Lorena. On trips, at hotels. And in your
life together! You have financial interests, dear. Who could be better than a husband
to administer one’s financial interests?” She remembers her own unadministered ones
(What, trust that irresponsible scoundrel? That futile turncoat?) and takes my hands
between hers, that’s the gesture she uses when she wants to speak to me
woman to woman
. “You are
established
, dear,” she says solemnly, she has incorporated the word
established
into her vocabulary but she doesn’t know exactly what it means in this context. “It’s
your decision. Do what your heart desires.” What my heart desires. What does my heart
desire? Eeeeeeh, Mama. My heart desires to stay with him even without being married,
without anything. She blinks stiffly because of her false eyelashes, my doll used
to blink exactly
the same way. “But if he doesn’t want to separate from his wife it’s because he’s
in love with her
, not with you!”

End of story, Lião would say. I wash the corners and curves of my ears where the Seducer
Angel has again distilled the dew of lasciviousness and envy. As if laziness weren’t
enough. I open the tap and watch the foam revive under the hot stream of water.
Anyone who through action, voluntary omission, negligence or imprudence causes detriment
to another, is obliged to repair the detriment. Not fulfilling his obligation, the
debtor is held responsible for loss and damage
.

“Loss and damage,” repeated Lorena searching for her reflection in the mirror. Through
the dense steam she could only see the dark spot which was her hair and a pinkish
section of knee emerging from the foam like a vague spongy plant. “This is a norm,
my love. A judicial standard. Through your negligence, I lost my happiness,” she thought
as she wrapped the towel around herself. She rubbed her feet on the bathmat and made
some faces, without much conviction, at the mirror. “I’m sad.” She powdered her body
with talc, spread the towel over the back of a chair, and put on her red bathrobe.
Suddenly she felt fascinating, ah, if M.N. could see her
now
. Running to fetch a book from the shelf, she took a letter from inside it and sat
down on the big cushion. The typewriter ribbon must have been nearly worn out; the
letters seemed to dissolve into the bluish onionskin paper.

“Loreninha.”

She smiled at the young man who had silently opened the door and was smiling at her
through the crack.

“Hi, Guga! Come in. I just finished my bath.”

“So I see.”

“Want to take one? If you do, help yourself.”

“Not now,” he said untangling himself from his canvas backpack. He sat down on the
rug beside her. “Are you going to hear the rock band play today? Down at The Shed?”

“I’m not in the mood, Guga. Are you going?”

“I don’t know yet. My brother’s the sax player, I’d only go on account of him. But
I’m not sure,” he answered crossing his legs and grasping his sandals by the toes.

She was looking at the little yellow sun embroidered on the front of his cotton T-shirt.

“Did you do that?”

“Yeah. Did it come out all right?”

“It’s wobbly,” she said leaning over to kiss his cheek. With her fingertips she smoothed
his beard. “I know how to embroider a beautiful duck, bring me a shirt and I’ll decorate
it for you.”

“This is my only one.”

“Your only one? Oh Lord. What poverty, poor Guga.”

“Want to adopt me? I’m looking for someone who wants to take me in. And love me.”

“Wait, I’ll go get some whiskey,” she said running to the record player. “Have you
heard Chico’s latest album?”

“I don’t think so, I’m really kind of out of touch, Loreninha. Or, to put it better,
in touch.”

She brought a bottle and a glass, and placed an ashtray near his hand which held a
lighted match. They fell silent, sitting side by side listening to the music.

“In touch, how?”

He smiled. “In touch. I stopped running around like a madman. I was acting insane,
studying without any desire, doing things without wanting to, everything forced, just
to prove myself. Now I don’t want to prove anything. I’m at peace with myself. That’s
what’s important, isn’t it?”

“Is that why you disappeared from school?”

“I stopped studying, Loreninha. I left home and quit school. We rented a basement,
me and some guys, each one gives so much per month. We’re living in a commune.”

“Eeeeeeh.”

“Why eeeeeh?”

“It never works out, dear. You’ll end up fighting, there’s always one that’s more
confused than the others and messes everything up. Even Jesus couldn’t stand the community
He set up, remember? ‘
Oh faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I suffer you?’
’ He exploded one day, He said that or something very like it. And He was Jesus, imagine!”

“So let’s form a community of two, can I live with you?”

She took his hand and kissed it.

“You’re a sweetheart but I’m in love already. And hopelessly, too,” she sighed making
a face. “How’s the theater?”

“I left that too. Was that theater? Everything so poorly done, so meaningless. I want
to live profoundly.”

She turned her eyes away from his feet, dusty and thin inside his loose sandals.

“But what do you call living profoundly? This protest? This marginalization?

Tranquilly he served himself another drink. His gestures were soft, his voice gentle.
He faced her:

“But who said I was protesting? I’m not protesting against anything, Loreninha. Not
even that. To protest is to take a stand, do something. Who wants to take a stand?
My little flower, all I want to do is things that give me satisfaction. I read, I
talk to others, I listen to music, I make music. I make love. Everything so simple.
I learned to think, that was an important discovery. To think.”

She jumped up and got a nail scissors.

“I’m enjoying this conversation very much, but while we’re talking just let me cut
your nails? Please, Guga, I’m asking
please
” she implored as she saw him draw back, hiding his hand inside his shirt. “It’ll
only take a second!”