The Girl in the Photograph. Lygia Fagundes Telles

about these things; I never saw Astronaut blow his nose in public. Too many holes, too many secretions. Oh Lord. Eating pastries at the café, what madness. But if she came with us, she’d end up poisoning our time together, she adores saying ironic things that M.N. pretends not to understand, so solid. So safe. “More wine, Lião?” The wine she accepts. Also the lobster, she pronounces it loster. But she pointedly remembers the statistics about the children dying of hunger in the Northeast, she gets carried away on this subject of the Northeast. I don’t know how long we’ll have to carry these people on our backs; it’s horrible to think that way but, as I’ve thought before and still think, if God isn’t there He probably has His reasons.

      “Oh, I’m a monster. Monster. I want so much to be different, so much.”

      And this tendency to be petty. Oh my Saint Francis, my Saint Theresa, son tan escuras de entender estas cosas interiores.

      “I’ll give it back tomorrow,” says Lião putting the handkerchief away in her bag.

      She won’t, of course. And if she did I wouldn’t take it, a handkerchief is like a toothbrush, you can’t lend them. Exactly like Ana Clara who still hasn’t learned this simplest of things: One doesn’t lend personal items.

      “Lia, Lia!” calls Sister Bula from the window of the big house. The voice of a forest gnome coming out from inside a tree trunk. She wants to yell “Telephone for you!” She places one hand beside her ear and pretends to crank the handle; the phones in her day had to be wound up. Or was she born even earlier? She must be two hundred years old.

      Lião is afraid. Ana Clara also pretends to be indifferent but if she doesn’t take tranquilizers she starts walking around in a delirium again. Without the slightest ceremony she opened my box of tissues and took over half of them, she goes around with great piles of tissues to clean herself after making love. The right thing would be to take a bath afterwards; it’s logical, hygienic and poetic to run naked to the shower. Or in the country to duck under a waterfall, shuaaaaaaaaaa! But to put yourself back together like a hurried chambermaid—! Certain gestures and words of Ana Clara’s, poor thing. The details give her away. It’s all in the details: her origins, her faith, her happiness. God. Especially her origins. “I know nothing about mine,” she said to me once when she was drunk. “And I don’t want to, either.” That daisy down there could say the same thing: I know nothing about my roots. And her? Neither father nor mother. Not even a cousin. She has no one. From the looks of it, all of Bahia must be related to Lião but Ana Clara is the opposite in terms of family. Not even an auntie to teach her that everything one does before and after the act of love should be harmonious. Is it unaesthetic to masturbate? Not exactly unaesthetic, but sad. During the time when Lião was doing thousands of surveys, she did one on the university coeds; how many masturbated? Incredible, the results among the virgins. Incredible. “We are coming out of the Middle Ages,” she said examining her papers. “The inheritance from our mothers and grandmothers, see. Added up with the adolescent habits, it gives us this alarming percentage. Do you masturbate too?” she asked, pinning the black eye of the Inquisition on me.

      Two blond bees, the kind that only make love and honey, landed on my foot, first one and then the other. I shoo them gently away, the gesture must be gentle so they don’t feel rejected, you hear, M.N.? If you don’t want me, you should treat me like this, run along, my little bee! run along. Before flying off, the larger of the two rubs his two front legs together, as if he were washing his hands, and then strokes himself all the way down to his yellow-striped abdomen. You can’t see exactly where his hand stops, but what if Lião were to research the habits of bees, Tu quoque, bestiola? Bestiola means insect. And bees? Anyway she asked me and if I didn’t answer with absolute clarity it was because I could never exactly describe that afternoon so long ago. Masturbation? That? Thirteen years old, piano lessons. The Happy Farmer. I participated so fully in the happiness that the bench wobbled back and forth, the rhythm getting faster and faster. My chest bursting, my genitalia rubbing against the cushion with the same vehemence as my hands hammering the keyboard without hesitation, without error. I never played as well as I did that afternoon, something which seems completely extraordinary to me today. I dismounted the bench as one would a horse. At dinnertime, Mama kissed me, quite moved: “I heard you practicing the piano while I was stirring the guava jam; you played divinely!” I smiled down at my plate: my first secret. Romulo threw a ball of soft bread at me and Remo put a wasp in my hair, but when we went out on the veranda I felt as luminous as a star. And if Romulo hadn’t frightened me with a sheet, I could have walked on air for over two minutes. The second time was on the farm, too, when I was taking a bath. Also accidental. I got into the empty bathtub, lay down in the bottom and opened the faucet. The hot jet pelted onto my chest with such violence that I slipped, exposing my belly. From there, the water passed to my abdomen; when I opened my legs and it hit me right on, I felt, stunned, the old artistic exaltation, stronger this time although I wasn’t playing a piano. I closed my eyes when Felipe crossed and recrossed my body with his red motorcycle, Felipe, the one with the black jacket and motorcycle. I hid my face in my hands, wanting to run away and at the same time glued to the bottom of the bathtub with the hot water rising higher, it was already covering me, the bubbles breaking on my chin, why didn’t I open the drain? Satiated or unsatiated, my mouth (I?) asked for more. It penetrated me in waterfalls, it filled my nose, there, I’m going to drown! I thought with a jump. I leaped up and fled. Was it love? Was it death? All one single thing, I replied in a verse. I used to write verses then.

      Cat came up to the bag that Lia had left in the middle of the driveway. She sniffed the leather, distrustful, sat down somewhat sideways, because of her pregnancy, and stared at Lorena who was perched on the bedroom windowsill. This room and bath—Lorena was certain of this—had belonged to the chauffeur of the family who had owned the big house. Underneath, the garage with a car which was probably antiquated. Above, absolute master, the untidy and sensual chauffeur, lover of the housemaid whose name was Neusa, a name spelled out many times with a shaving brush or white deodorant stick on the bluetinted wall. Of her, there remained only a few hairpins pointing out from between the cracks in the floor. And the jasmine perfume in a broken bottle on the bathroom floor. “With a few small repairs, your daughter could be very comfortable here,” said Sister Priscilla with an optimism that spread to Lorena, who was hanging onto her mother’s arm. Her mother, in turn, was hanging onto Mieux’s. She turned to him with a perplexed face, at that time she used to consult him even to find out if she should take an aspirin or not. “Give me your opinion, dear. Won’t I spend too much? This is awful,” she complained, repulsed by the scent of jasmine mingled with that of urine. Mieux winked at Lorena. He became euphoric when he had an opportunity to show off his prestige: “It will be the most darling thing in the world, I already have some ideas. I want this bathroom pink, it’s important for her to feel as though she’s in a nest when she undresses for her bath,” he said throwing his cigarette butt into the cracked toilet bowl. He slammed the door behind him and sniffed his handkerchief. “I visualize this room in pale yellow; I have the wallpaper. A gold bed there in that corner. The bookshelf and table on that wall. Here in this space, a builtin wardrobe. Over there, a mini-refrigerator and a little bar, hm, Lorena?” He picked a playing card up off the floor; it was a queen of spades, which he stuck upright in a crack in the door. And as Mama had gone on ahead and Sister Priscilla was busy closing the window, he seized the opportunity to run his hand over my ass.

      “Anything happen?” I ask Lião who has come back at a run.

      Panting, she kicked a wad of newspaper which Cat tore up.

      “Is the offer of tea still on? I’ll take you up on it after all. One more phone call like that one and I’ll go completely insane.”

      I quickly remove my pajamas and put on my black ballet leotard. I hear Lião coming up the stairs, step by step. When she’s happy she comes up them in three jumps, poor thing, flunking all her classes because she cut so many. Her lover in prison, her allowance gone, she gives over half of it to her famous group. Oh Lord.

      “Can I turn that down?” she asks, going straight in the direction of the record player.

      She turned it down so far that Jimi Hendrix’s voice sounds like that of a little ant under