The Girl in the Photograph. Lygia Fagundes Telles

      She marches off, and from the way she’s shaking her head, I imagine she’s smiling. She crosses the garden like a soldier on parade, knapsack beside her, socks falling down, let them fall!—one, two, one, two! She opens the gate sharply, heroically, a gesture of one not merely choosing his path, imagine, too prosaic, but rather assuming his very destiny. Long before she reaches the corner her socks have slipped all the way down. Oh Lord. And Mama herself furnishing transportation for the guerrilla operation. She would probably have one of those attacks if she knew.

Chapter 2

      “Bunny! Hey, Bunny, are you asleep?” he asked. He shook her by the shoulders. “What’s the matter with you that you don’t move?”

      Ana Clara made an effort to open her eyes wider. Around her left eye was smeared a charcoal-colored ring as if she had been socked. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles and the eyeliner spread over her other eye also. Sleepily she turned toward the dense cone of smoke projected by the light of the lamp and kissed the young man’s shoulder, disguising her yawn in a lovebite.

      “I’m almost fainting, love. So good, Max.”

      “Then why do you go cold that way? Hanh? It’s as if I were making it with a penguin, ever see a penguin?”

      She twisted and untwisted a lock of hair around her Finger.

      “It’s just that today I’m not too brilliant.”

      “I wish you’d tell me the day you are brilliant,” he muttered sitting up in bed.

      “Max, I love you. I love you.”

      With fingers bent forward clawlike he scratched his head, his sweat-shiny chest, then his head again.

      “But you don’t like to make love, Bunny. It’s important to make love, hanh?”

      “I’m kind of hung up. I need to talk to my analyst, this last treatment got me all screwed up again.”

      “Tell him that when you make love you close up like an oyster when somebody squeezes lemon over it. Wow, would I like to eat some oysters with white wine, nice and cold,” he said stretching his arms.

      “Oysters make me sick, I can’t stand to look at them. Horrible things.”

      He searched through his pants heaped on the floor beside the armchair. From the pocket he took a pack of cigarettes and shook it until a small tissue-paper packet fell into his hand.

      “A nice little dose for Bunny and one for me, hanh? You’ll get in gear with this.”

      I pull the sheet up to my neck. What does he mean, get in gear. If only I could. Get in gear get in gear and climb the walls from getting in gear and if only my head would stop scratch scratch thinking those damn things. Shit, why does my head have to be my enemy? I only think thoughts that make me suffer. Why does this goddamn head hate me so much? That’s what no analyst ever explained to me this head business. It only leaves me in peace when I’m high the bastard. And that dumb ass waiting for me peeling the crust off his bread with his fingernail until there’s nothing left but the soft inside part, just like a rat. It’s my head he’s peeling scratch scratch. Bastard.

      “I can’t stay very long today love,” I say.

      He picks up the empty glasses from the floor, winks his eye and goes to the kitchen taking the glasses and the ice bucket. He opens the refrigerator. I hug the pillow. Sleep sleep. Sleep until I crack in two from sleeping without a single dream because dreams are just another pain in the ass. There are some good ones. Those. Why can’t I ever sleep as long as I want to? Why is there always somebody poking at me, let’s have a nice little screw, let’s have some fun screwing? But what do they mean fun. I love you Max. I love you but I don’t feel a thing with you or with anybody else. It’s a long time since I’ve felt anything. Locked up. There was another word he liked to use what was it? This Hachibe. How will I feel anything with that scaly bastard when I don’t with this one that I love? He’s already sitting there with the bread in his hand, there’s always one wanting to screw me and another one waiting for me at some table. I go from bed to table and from table to bed. Blocked now I remember blocked. “Is it only with me you’re so cold?” he asked. That scaly son of a bitch. Pretentious dwarf. “It’s because I’m a virgin, dear. You must excuse me but I’m a virgin and virgins can’t get turned on like—.” Then he looked at me in his indecent way and laughed. All dental plates. Shit it isn’t just me. Even with money and everything he didn’t do too well as far as teeth go. Poor childhood poor shoulders poor hair. I am five feet ten inches tall. A model. A beautiful model. What more do you want? Bastard. Shit if this head would just leave me alone for awhile. I’d like to have a pumpkin instead of a head, a great big orange pumpkin. Happy. Toasted pumpkin seeds with salt are good for belly worms I can still taste them and that pukey medicine too. I don’t want the seeds Ma I want the story. And so at midnight the princess turned into a pumpkin. Who told me that? Not you Ma because you didn’t re-count stories you only re-counted money. The little face so penniless counting and recounting the money which was never enough for anything. “It’s not enough,” she would say. It wasn’t enough because she was a fool who didn’t charge anyone. It’s not enough it’s not enough she would repeat showing the money that wasn’t enough rolled up in her hand. But give out enough, that she did. For my taste she gave out all too much. A whole crowd of lousy bastards asking and her giving out. The most important one was Dr. Cotton.

      “Max, you there? You know what my dentist’s name was? Dr. Cotton.”

      Max poured whiskey into his glass. He swished it around and the whitish deposit in the bottom slowly rose.

      “Cotton? Dr. Cotton?”

      I clutch the glass in my hand. When Lorena shakes her crystal paperweight the snow rises so lightly. It flutters softly around and then settles on the roof, the fence, and the little girl with the red cape. Then she shakes it again. “This way I have snow all year round.” But why snow all year round? Where is there any snow here? She thinks snow is the most. She’s sickening. I crunch the ice cube between my teeth.

      “Sometimes she sleeps with Donald Duck. She’s always squeezing his tummy, quack, quack. Sickening.”

      I push the piece of ice against the roof of my mouth with my tongue. In reality the sky is way up there without any pain. Hell starts immediately below with its roots. So many roots twining around each other. Solidarity.

      “He was forever changing the cotton in people’s cavities, weeks, months, years went by and there he was with the little bits of cotton in his tweezers, that’s why he got to be called Dr. Cotton.”

      “But you have good teeth, hanh? Don’t you, Bunny?”

      My beautiful. My innocent love.

      “Yes.”

      “So your Dr. Cotton was good.”

      Oh yes. Oh he was great. He would change the cotton while the hole got bigger and bigger. I grew up in that chair with my teeth rotting and him waiting for them to rot completely and me to grow some more so he could do the bridge. A bridge for the mother and another for the daughter. Bastard. Prick. The two bridges falling down in the order they appeared on the scene. First Ma’s who went to bed with him first and then. I went walking across the bridge / It shook before my eyes / Sister the water’s made of poison / He who drinks it dies. Who drinks it dies. She used to sing to put me to sleep but in such a hurry that I would pretend I was asleep so she’d go away faster. In the movies there was always a mother singing romantically to her children who hugged their stuffed animals. Grandmothers used to tell them stories too but where my grandmother might be is something I’d like to know. I wish I had a grandmother like Mother Alix. To have a grandmother like Mother Alix is to have a kingdom.

      “Can nuns be grandmothers, love? Answer me, can they?”

      His back is turned toward me, he’s choosing records. How gorgeous he is naked. Shit he makes