The Girl in the Photograph. Lygia Fagundes Telles

design of birds and flowers. The linen tablecloth matches the cup, a tablecloth with an exuberant tropical pattern. The small light-colored armchairs. The rare objects.

      “Everything here is very attractive, very pretty. Are you still rich, Lorena?”

      She became serious, relaxing from her exercises.

      “Mieux’s so-called advertising agency came to nothing. With the interior-decorating store, Mama spent money like crazy. And she keeps on spending, a thirst for novelty. They remind me of those American millionaires in Europe in the twenties, you know?”

      “I don’t know. I asked if you had money.”

      “I take care of my part. Why? Do you need some, Lião?”

      I pour more tea into my cup. Damn good tea. I jump over Lorena who has stopped pedaling and is now doing her respiratory exercises, she has already explained to me that there is solar respiration and lunar respiration.

      “I think I’m going to, Lorena. For some operations far different from Crazy Ana’s.”

      “Oh Lord. I feel so sorry for her.”

      She feels so sorry for everyone. No doubt she felt sorry for me when I told her I tore up the novel. Isn’t it just a way of hiding her feeling of superiority? Isn’t feeling sorry for others a way of feeling superior over others? I tore up the novel, I said. And she was silent. I drink the warm tea. She’s a good girl. Ana Clara is a good girl too. I’m a good girl.

      “How’s the collection coming?” I ask examining the bells arranged on the shelf.

      “My brother Remo promised me one of those Bedouin ones from Tunisia, he’s there now, living in a gorgeous house in Carthage, can you imagine? Carthage still exists, Lião. Delenda, delenda! But it still exists.”

      The other day, all excited, she asked to come to one of the group meetings, this same Lorena who stands there ringing her little bells, ting-ting, tang-tang, tong-tong. She imagines our meetings are sort of like debating festivals: She would go with this leotard, boots and a red turtleneck to break the monotony of black. The intellectuals with their little films on the Vietcong. So much hunger, so much blood on the screen made from a sheet. So terrible to see so much death, dammit. How can it be, my God, how can it be? Revolt and nausea. “Sartrean nausea,” murmurs an inexperienced guest. Who shuts up when she feels the icy stares fixed on her in the dark. Silence again, only the exasperated buzzing of the projector, the enjoyment is prolonged, there’s miles of film waiting in the little cans. The lights come on, but the faces take some time to light up, how awful. Whiskey and paté to relieve the atmosphere. Considerations about the probable names on the next lists. The films go back into their respective cans while little by little the people go back to their respective houses. Those who don’t have transportation ask for rides in the available cars going their way. They are good-humored, the intellectuals. There are even a few jokes.

      But, in all justice, they’re watchful. Above all, informed. They should be, going to meetings all the time. They know you were imprisoned and tortured, a courageous boy this Miguel, one needs to have courage, bravo, bravo. They know Sylvia Flute-player was raped with an ear of corn, the cop knew about the episode in the novel, somebody told him and he found it amusing. “Cooked corn or raw?” his helper asked him, and he went into detail. “Dried corn, with those pointed kernels!” The intellectuals are too moved to speak, they only continue shaking their heads and drinking. It’s fortunate that the whiskey isn’t a national brand. Some of the more fanatic ones get irritated with the tone of the meetings; after all, it wasn’t held only for the wine and cheese when the news is the worst possible: Eurico still hasn’t been found; he was arrested just as he disembarked and up to now nobody knows anything about him. He disappeared just like a science-fiction character, when the metallic man emits a ray and the guy dissolves, gun and all, and only a grease spot is left in the place. Jap left a briefcase in his brother’s house; he said he would come to get it the next day.

      “This one’s Greek, Lião. Listen what a divine sound.”

      I told her I tore up my book and I might as well have said I had torn up a newspaper. She doesn’t like what I write. Nobody does, it must be absolute shit. But do people know what’s good? Or what’s bad? Who knows? And is it valid? I shouldn’t have torn it up. But I know it by heart, maybe I could use the text in a diary, I’d like to write a diary. Simple, direct style. I’d dedicate it to him.

      “Perfect. Perfect,” she repeats and picks up the bag. “Don’t forget about the car, Lena.”

      “Lia de Melo Schultz, if you say that one more time, I’ll kill myself. Look, keep this little bell, put it around your neck. When we lose track of each other, you go ding-a-ling and I’ll know where you are, everybody should wear a bell around, like goats do.” Softly, Lia rang the small bronze bell. She smiled at her friend as she tried to untie a black ribbon from around her neck.

      “I’ll put it here with my good-luck charm that my mother gave me. I need to write a long letter to Mother, and another to my father, they’re opposite types. And alike at the same time. When I don’t write, each goes off and cries in a corner, hiding from the other.”

      How they longed to see their daughter receiving her diploma. Getting engaged. Engagement party in the parlor, wedding in the church, hoop-skirted bridal dress. Rice as they dash away. The grandchildren multiplying, everybody together in the same house, that enormous house, there were so many bedrooms, weren’t there? “The apartment-building curse has reached us here, too,” my father wrote in his last letter. “Our neighborhood is being invaded but we will resist. When you get back and find only one last house in the whole city, you can come in, it’s ours.”

      “If my love phones, want to come and have dinner with us?”

      Lia watches me. What are you thinking about, Lião? She pats me on the head and goes out with the air of somebody who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. I turn up the volume of the record player. Get out of here, he screams hoarsely. I peer out the window. She gallops down the steps with her three leaps and is now exactly where she was before coming up. Yet she hesitates as though she had forgotten to say something important, doesn’t she remember? She opens the bag, looks inside. Indifferently chews the nail of her little finger, and picks up a pebble. She throws it high in the air.

      “Is it the car, dear? Don’t worry, did you know Mama gave me one? I didn’t even go to get the check, imagine. You can keep a key, I hate to drive, eeh, the faces people make when I drive.”

      Her attention is completely fixed on a point behind me, which moves farther away and loses itself like the pebble she threw into the air. I make faces, I can make great faces, neither Remo nor Romulo knew how to make faces like I did but Lião is only interested in the far-off point, which seems to have returned and fallen down inside her. Her face ripples like the surface of a well when the stone falls in.

      “Don’t park by the gate, leave it on the corner. If you go out, leave the key on the shelf. In one of your boxes there.”

      “In the silver one shaped like a clover, dear.”

      She knows I know she’s involved in a tangled plot, but she also knows I respect her secret. The stone reposes in the depths of the compliant waters. Requiescat in pace. I motion her to come closer:

      “Who was it had a compliant hymen?”

      At last she laughs like she used to in the good old times, wrinkling her sunburned face.

      “Go on, give in, Lena.”

      “But isn’t that what I’m wanting to do?” I ask, and deep inside I answer myself, I don’t think I am, really. The joy I feel in the midst of so much promiscuity, both sexes giving themselves without love, desperately, in affliction. And me, virgo et intacta. I open my arms. What a marvelous day.

      “If Ana Clara turns up, tell her I need the money I loaned her.”

      “Yenom, Lião, yenom!” I scream and raise my right arm, fist closed in the antifascist salute.