The Girl in the Photograph (34 page)

“And you, Lia? Are you in love with someone? You needn’t reply if you don’t want to.”

I’m laughing as I answer, it took her a long time to ask.

“No problem with me, see. I have a lover, he needs me and I need him, he’s traveling
just now but we’ll be together again soon.”

She gazes at me as though from a distance, shaking her handkerchief lightly as if
to shoo away flies. She sprinkles cologne over her forehead and neck.

“I think I’d die of distaste if my son Remo or Loreninha … I want my funeral to be
unadorned, simple. She even knows the dress I want to wear. The makeup, we’ve planned
every detail. The coffin will stay open only if I’m looking extremely well; if not,
nobody will have the
pleasure
of seeing me dead. Before I used to panic at the idea of him poking through my papers,
those old yellow papers that I hate so, a death certificate records your age, it records
everything. Just imagine the radiant face he’d make upon discovering my true age,
he’s always wanted to discover it but I didn’t let him. I never let him. Dead, I’d
be defenseless, do you understand what I mean? But now I can die in peace, my dear
little girl will take care of everything, that perverse cynic will never humiliate
me again!”

The maid comes in on a gust of air. I breathe like a condemned man inside a gas chamber.

“I’ve been calling for hours! All right, all right, I know. Bring some tea at once,”
she orders waving the hanky in the girl’s direction. Turning back to me: “This new
flirtation of Lorena’s, isn’t he married, by chance?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“That’s strange, you’re such close friends,” she murmurs covering
her eyes with her hands. “Everything’s so strange, isn’t it? Why is it that in front
of Dr. Francis I wasn’t ashamed of being old? I didn’t have the slightest shame, I
wanted to look pretty, yes, elegant, but I wasn’t ashamed the way I was in front of
other people. With certain people I sometimes want to hide myself as if I’d committed
a crime, hide my age like a criminal hides the victim, a terrible panic that they’d
discover it, spread it around. Isn’t that odd? Certain people make me even more ashamed,
as if I were naked in a display window. Now with you I’m completely at ease, with
you, with Loreninha. My dear little girl. I’ve lost so many things but I still have
my daughter, now we can live together again.”

“But will she live with you? Come back under your wing? I know you’re the perfect
mother, mine is too, but just for that very reason one has to cut the umbilical cord,
see. Otherwise it gets rolled around one’s neck and ends up strangling one. Castrating.
Forgive me, but I think this is the most mistaken idea in the world. If one’s child
is mature, he has to fly away from the nest as quickly as he can so as not to become
what we know so well … oh, I think I’m talking too much.”

I roll down my shirtsleeves. She’ll vampirize her daughter whose blood is already
as watered-down as that of the gazelles on the rug.

“This apartment is enormous, dear. She’ll have an entire section all to herself. Why
don’t you come and live here too? I’d have the greatest pleasure.”

I don’t even answer. Oh Lord, as Lorena says in moments of affliction. I look with
more sympathy at the man with the movie-actor pose, pipe and cloud of smoke.

“That little tree with the photos, is the boy Remo or Romulo?”

“Remo. Romulo couldn’t be there.”

“No?”

“He died when he was a baby, dear.”

“A baby?”

“He wasn’t even a month old, he didn’t even live that long. The doctors said that
he had no viability. A heart murmur.”

I jump up with a wild desire to pull down these drapes, rip everything open and let
in the light of day. But is it still daytime?

“Wait a minute: Remo shot him when they were playing,
wasn’t that it? A shot in the chest, he would have been about twelve, wasn’t that
what happened? Thousands of times Lorena told me the story in detail, he was blond.
He was wearing a red shirt, you lived on the ranch.”

She is smiling a sad smile, looking at the ceiling.

“My poor little girl. She never knew her brother, she’s the youngest. She was still
a little girl when she started to invent this, first only to the servants who would
come and ask me, I didn’t even deny it, I covered up, where was the harm? She continued
to talk, at school, at parties, the problem began to get more serious. Oh God, the
discomfort I would feel when they wanted to know if … I didn’t want them to think
she was lying, she was always such a truthful child. The doctors calmed us, it wasn’t
so grave, it would pass with time, an overactive childish imagination, probably when
she became an adolescent … It didn’t pass. Roberto was always so confident, so secure,
he would reassure me, it’s nothing. I spoke to Dr. Francis, he had a talk with Loreninha,
found her intelligent, sensitive. Do you understand what I mean, dear? He didn’t give
it the slightest importance.”

I feel slightly nauseated, the chocolate? I hold my stomach and stare at the rug,
this one is solid color. Honey-beige. But what is this? That whole story she told
me so painfully, oh, Lorena. Oh, Lorena. What a meaningless thing, why? Why? I keep
thinking and come closer to the cocoon where she sleeps wideawake, her eyelids hardly
concealing her burning eyes. What if she’s lying? What if the real version is Lorena’s?
Didn’t she say it? Neither the doctors nor her husband, nobody gave Lorena’s story
the slightest importance. Why not? Because she was the sick one, the sick one was
the mother altering the tragedy in self-defense, much easier to imagine that the son
died as a baby and return him to limbo, he had no viability. The young boy in the
red shirt, chest pierced by his brother’s shot, is subtracted from death and reduced
to a baby with a heart murmur. Hm? I look for a fingernail, aren’t they ever going
to grow out? I bite on a remnant that comes loose with a pain as sharp as a stabbing
thorn. At the same time, Lorena with that fixation on the truth, complicating even
the smallest matters. “And the dream machines?” she asked, her little face growing
as secret as this alcove. The striped pullover was his, wasn’t it? He must have existed.
I know so much about him, it’s as if he had been my
own brother. And now. I need to see her photo album urgently, the
gens lorenensis
must all be there from beginning to end. Either way, how sad. “Who knows but what
Mama might give you his clothes?”

“Back to zero, my dear. I had a facelift but crying the way I have been it must have
gotten ruined. My sister Luci discovered a Scandinavian cream made with turtle oil,
it must be excellent, turtles live for centuries,” she adds raising herself up on
her elbows. “Oh God, that’s the terrible part, that things come to an end. Everything
comes to an end.”

Chapter 11

With a soft gesture Ana Clara pushed back the ringlets of hair plastered to her forehead.
She buttoned her coat collar high at the neck and, clutching her purse tightly against
her chest, started up the steps. She tripped and fell to her knees. As she put out
her hands to catch herself, she screamed: The ground was boiling with cockroaches.
The biggest of them stood up on its hind feet, its chest stiff in a fencing tunic,
foil in hand:
En garde!
She bent over, laughing because the roach was laughing too behind its wire mask,
was it a joke? She peered at it more closely, then tried to hide her chest but it
was too late: The foil pierced her from one side to the other. Blood spurted from
the heart crowned with thorns, squirting into her mouth so violently that she choked
on it. When she tried to breathe she doubled up, coughing.

“No more, no more,” she groaned.

“Take it easy, dear. Lean on me,” Lorena ordered, taking her by the arm.

The horse. The roach was left behind making a spiral dive into the collard greens.
She picked up its foil that it had dropped on the ground, pinned her collar shut with
it, and mounted the white horse. She laughed as they galloped through the starry countryside;
there were so many stars she could see the crystals sparkling on the shelves. She
patted the horse’s neck. It smiled. Lorena? It was Lorena. Her body relaxed.

“It’s so good here.”

“Didn’t I say you’d like it? I’m going to turn on the hot water,” advised Lorena.
“Come on, lift up your head.”

She obeyed. Giggling weakly, she curled up in the bottom of the bathtub. “Shit, if
you only knew.”

With one arm Lorena supported the trunk of Ana Clara’s body, using the other to lather
her breasts with the soapy bath sponge.

“Where did you ever get so dirty, Annie? Incredible. You were dirty as an armadillo,
dear. There was even mud in your ear, can you believe it?”

Ana Clara spoke with difficulty, voice thick and jaws clenched. She opened her eyes
and began to laugh again.

“A bath? Are you giving me a bath?”

“Come on, wash the southern zone now. Here,” ordered Lorena guiding her hand. “Come
on, rub hard right here. No, don’t let go of the sponge! Oh Lord.”

“I have to go. What time is it?”

“Be quiet, Annie! Don’t splash me, hold still, it’s still early, dear. Come on, rub.”

“Give me some whiskey.”

“All right but first rub the sponge here. That’s it.”

“Sober. Scratch scratch, I’m completely sober. I get mad as a bitch because my head.
Scratch scratch.”

“Eucalyptus perfume, smell it? Isn’t that a delicious smell, it’s eucalyptus.”

“Eucalyptus.”

Now Lorena was soaping her hair.

“Close your eyes and don’t open them until I say.”

“I want my purse.”

“I’ll give it to you but now close your eyes, come on, do as I say. What I’d like
to know is where you’ve been. Where were you?”

“At a party.”

“What party? Wait, let me rinse off the soap,” said Lorena circling the other’s waist.
“Be careful, Annie!”

She rolled her up in a towel and guided her into the bedroom. Ana Clara shuddered,
pointing at the window.

“Who’s that peering in there?”

“Where? That’s just the curtain, dear. Calm down, there’s no one there, the two of
us are alone. The nuns have all gone to bed, calm down.”

“Mother Alix! Mother Alix!”

“She’s coming. Lie down, wasn’t that a lovely bath?”

Lorena rubbed the towel over Ana’s hair, staring at the purple bruises on her breasts
and arms. She opened a box of talcum powder.

“Annie, Annie. Where can you have been?”

“He got arrested,” mumbled Ana Clara opening her eyes. She clenched her fists and
folded her arms across her chest. “He got arrested.”

“Who? Who got arrested?”

Dry, tearless sobs racked her. Her speech became more painful.

“Scratch-scratch. It’s all right, I’ll say—” She raised herself up and then fell back
again on the bed. “God came and lighted on my chest, right here, right here. He flew
away, the little bird was God. He came and then.”

I wrap my red bathrobe around her and brush out her hair, which shines like live coals,
cut short this way it’ll dry fast. But what madness! Madness. Imagine if Mother Alix.
From the floor I collect her filthy clothes, they look like she’s been wallowing in
a swamp. And those purple spots? And the frightful odor of vomit mixed with day-old
perfume, oh Lord, Lord, Lord. Country estate, indeed. I take the bundle of clothes
to the hamper, a good thing tomorrow is Sebastiana’s day. The coat I’ll send to the
dry cleaner’s. I place her shoes side by side, isn’t that curious? They’re hardly
dirty. As if she’d been walking upside down, poor little thing.

“Ana, who got arrested? You said somebody got arrested.”

Her head rolls back and forth on the pillow as she clutches her hair, pulling it.
Her words come out stonily:

“Max disappeared, disappeared! Loreninha, help me,—Max.”

“Ana, talk softer, do you want the nuns to wake up? Do you want Mother Alix to see
you in this state? Is that what you want?”

“Max disappeared. He’s not there, I waited.”

“Well, he probably went on a trip. Doesn’t he travel a lot?”

“Yeah.”

“So he’s probably traveling, silly.”

“I waited.”

“You went on a binge, is what you did. Where have you been, anyway?”

Now she is giggling, cheeks pink, slightly crossed eyes shining.

“If you only knew.”

“Knew what? I don’t know but I can guess. You’re going to quit these binges, do you
hear? You’re going to have to develop some sense.”

“I don’t want sense.”

“It’ll have to be pounded into you this time, dear, whether you want it or not. Mother
Alix is getting tired, everybody’s tired.”

“The big ant was laughing the bastard. Then the cockroach got there and the championship
race started. Max was first the Japanese. That guy. What’s his name that Japanese?
That guy. That Japanese guy!”

“I don’t know dearie. I only know that I was reading about the stars when Miss Depressed
and Depressing Ana tumbled into my arms.”

“I was with God, He was here. It doesn’t matter any more the things that then I said
no no and He came and there was a sort of light everything lighted up in my head and
He let me fly so high, with His hand holding mine. Very chic. Enough Max! Max is it
you?”

“It’s Lorena, dear. Your feet are like two ice cubes, let me rub them. Be still, Ana!
Now your name is Ana Bacchante. Bacchante and Dilettante. Do you know what a bacchante
is? Those nymphs who danced in the cortège of Bacchus. I’m going to crown you with
grape leaves. Rotten chic, eh?”

“Give me a whiskey, I want a whiskey.”

Lorena massaged her feet and covered her with a quilt.

“Lorena. Lorena Vaz Leme. Nha-nha-nha.”

“Ana, be quiet or I’ll call Mother Alix! Stop laughing, nothing’s funny.”

“I want a whiskey, Leninha. Just one, gimme. I promise I promise.”

“I’ll pour some into your tea, I’m going to make some nice hot tea,” said Lorena covering
her with the quilt which she had thrown to the floor. “If I ever have to work for
a living I’m going to be a
femme de chambre
. I think it’s the one thing I do perfectly. In another life I must have worked in
a castle for a courtesan very much like Ana Clara Conceição.”