The Girl in the Photograph. Lygia Fagundes Telles

it, dropped it in the glass and went back to her place, crawling painfully the same way she had come.

      “Everything was happy for you. Rich. But shit, when was I ever. I want only the present entering the future-past-perfect, is there such a thing as future-past-perfect? If I could just wash out the inside of my head. With a scrub brush. I’d scrub and scrub until I drew blood.”

      “They demolished the house, destroyed everything. Ducha said that there was nothing left, only the tree, they built a great big bitch of an apartment building on the lot. And the tree too, they were going to …” he murmured and began to sob again, his face in the pillow. “The jabuticaba tree. It never did anybody any harm, it just made jabuticabas, why? It was our friend, it gave us fruit. She ran away from the sanatorium and went straight to our house, everything was already demolished, all those bricks all over the ground, the doors. The doors were leaning up against a wall. I recognized the door to my room. The doors there, still standing with their handles. The locks,” he sobbed, twisting his hand as if to open the nearest one. “She grabbed the tree trunk and started screaming, screaming, I wanted to scream too when I saw her hanging onto our tree that was going to be cut down, I didn’t scream because if I did they’d put me in the asylum too, they put everybody in, you can’t. Don’t scream, Ducha, don’t scream Duchinha and I wanted to scream too because it was so horrible to see everything among the bricks that way. And my door. Don’t scream I said I’ll give you all of them, look at this big cluster, take it, it’s yours. Take it, Ducha, this bunch is ripe, here!”

      He extends to me his empty-full hands, the jabuticabas rolling on top of us, “Look what a lot, hide them, hide them,” he cries and we hide them under the sheet. I kiss his mouth shiny with juice which drips sweet.

      “Max, give me your childhood!”

      He gives me his tongue. I slide down and escape that’s not it. I wanted. My head scratch scratch. That way of massaging the back of your neck is so calming, Lorena knows.

      “Rub my neck, Max, start here, that massage. Harder, love. I wish I knew what time it was. I’ll say I got delayed in the. He’ll ask little questions. Pretentious dwarf. That pretentious dwarf. Bastard. Just some guy. Tell me, Max.”

      “The little Chinaman seated on a cushion he’d nod his head yes, yes. I had to climb up on the bench to get near him, does Isabel like me, Mr. Chinaman? And he’d put his finger to his forehead yes, yes. Always laughing nodding yes yes. Am I going to pass school this year, Mr. Chinaman? Yes, yes, yes. Eeeh, what a sonovabitch, don’t lie or I’ll beat you up, tell it right! Yes yes yes, he would answer wearing his little black cap. Is Mama going to get well? Yes yes.”

      “Harder, love. Right here by this bone. Don’t be sad because I’ll give you a house with doors, a jabuticaba tree, I’ll give it to you never mind. I’ll have money and I’ll divide it all, thousands of jabuticaba trees, nobody can cut them down, okay? There, rub harder there…. Shit, I’ll say I was run over. Just the shock.”

      “That sax, Bunny! Hear it? Uon, Uon, Uon. Fabulous.”

      The hell with that saxophone. And what about the family jewels? A whole bagful of jewels, who kept them? Crazy but smart. What about the jewels. Perfect teeth, beautiful teeth. Tradition of good milk. Fruit. Loreninha used to drink goat’s milk. “I used to drink milk like a little calf.” She grew up to be a dwarf-insect but her teeth. I believe her, she must never have drunk anything else. This one here nursed the goat dry too.

      “Tell me, Max. Talk to me, talk.”

      The bread is already bare. I’ll tell him I went with Lorena and that’s why I’m late. There to that place. I doesn’t matter now go to sleep. In January my darling. Now sleep. He would.

Chapter 3

      Like this it’s easy to keep my mouth shut, but what if I’m put to the test some day? I hope that doesn’t happen because I won’t resist; if they squeeze my little finger the slightest bit I’ll talk. I am the delicate type. Sensitive. Cousin to that little lizard spread out on the windowpane: Through the flesh you can see the shadow of the butterfly wing it has just swallowed. Lião knows that she can’t count on me, of course, but if she invited me I’d go running right after her. Bank of Boston. Too much, to rob a bank with a name like that. I’d wear an American sailor suit with emblems and all, Lião can’t even bear to look at these emblems but wouldn’t that kind of detail add a special touch to the scenario? The news would come out in Time, isn’t the bank in Boston? At least I’d love to say, “This is a holdup!” The shooting, that would be the boring part. Death, violent death. Romulo with the hole in his chest spouting blood, such a small hole that if Mama put her finger over it, eh, Mama? He didn’t mean it, how could Remo guess that the Devil had hidden the bullet in the chamber of the shotgun. A shotgun almost bigger than he was. To this day I don’t know how I managed to run with it, I don’t know. Don’t cry, little brother, don’t cry, it’s not anybody’s fault, not anybody’s. Papa removed the bullets, didn’t he? But there was one that the Devil. Remo dear, it’s all over. Past. But sometimes, you see, I need to remember. You galloping about on a wild donkey, disheveled, your eyes burning. You catching flies to throw into Romulo’s orange juice. Hiding moths in my bed. Remo a diplomat? The eloquent voice, the gestures. The subtle expression, that’s the perfect word, there couldn’t be a better word to describe Remo’s official expression: subtle. At parties for kings and queens, at the right-hand side. Or is it the left? Protocol. How can a person change so much? Romulo and I were the delicate ones, remember? People used to take such care of us. Like that plant, Sleepy-Mary, sleep, Mary, we used to order it, and even before we touched its leaves they would close up like eyes. I was born in such violent times. Orpheus managed to charm the savage beasts with his lyre and I couldn’t even charm Astronaut. True, a cat is a cat, but how I’d love to deliver my message of love and equilibrium to the world—without becoming part of it, naturally. Stay on the outside: MAINTAIN SAFE DISTANCE, says the bus belching so much smoke out its rear exhaust that I can’t stay behind it. I detest driving, changing gears. Buzzing around, Annie says. Cogs slipping into place. Intrigues. Far better to stay watching the well-lighted living room of an apartment there in the distance, its inhabitants so inoffensive in their routine. They eat and I don’t see what they’re eating; they speak and I don’t hear what they say, total harmony without sound or fury. If one approaches the slightest bit one smells odors. Hears voices. A little closer and one is no longer a spectator, one becomes a witness. Open your mouth to say “Good evening” and you pass from witness to participant. And it’s no good making a face like a dissolving cloud as you shove off because by this time they’ve pulled the cloud inside and quickly slammed the guillotine-window. Loose ties? They become tentacles. Ah, the joy of being here all alone. Alone. Like eating a sweet cluster of grapes in secret. “And the engine of the world, forced back, minutely re-composing…” Ah, I need to memorize that. Carlos Drummond de Andrade. My poetry. My music. Occasionally (oh Lord, the occasions could be fewer) my friends. The presence-absence of M.N. Of my dead ones. Romulo, my brother. Daddy. The velvet recollection of Astronaut.

      Grapes, there must still be a bunch in the refrigerator, see there? Pink ones. I wash my grapes; Mama sent an enormous crate. I distributed nearly all of them. “I abandoned my little girl in a nuns’ roominghouse, in a chauffeur’s room over the garage, and went to live with a man who stabs me in the back,” she said to Aunt Luci on one of her days of chastisement that run from Monday through Sunday. Number one, imagine Mieux wielding a dagger, poor thing. Let me laugh. The most he can handle are those little plastic toothpicks for spearing olives. Number two, this is no longer the chauffeur’s room. Neusa’s name lies buried beneath the rose-colored ceramic tile, the faded walls of the bedroom with the obscenity written in red pencil are permanently hidden beneath the yellow-gold wallpaper; the room has become a shell. Outside things may be black but in here all is rosy-golden. “You need to have an iron constitution to tolerate this city,” says Lião, who crosses it regularly in her blue sneakers. But I don’t jump in the stream, nor do I want to. Classes, movies, a short time at the sports club (a closed one), a luncheonette or two, some shopping at my very special stores. The yenom