The Girl in the Photograph. Lygia Fagundes Telles

Fainting Magnolia. The worst of all are these poor little breasts, oh! Is this envy? No, of course not, it’s a simple statement of fact. I want to see her cured, married to the millionaire although I know that when she becomes marvelously successful she’ll never pardon me. I saw her through her drinking sprees, held her hand during the abortions, loaned her thousands of things, half of them never came back. And what about the pile of money I’m going to loan (give) her for the sew-up job in the southern zone? Hard to forgive me for that. “Have we by chance met before?” she’ll ask, tapping her cigarette ashes on my head, she’s very tall. Not personally, Highness. I’m simply a college student in recess. Aside from the Department, I go to very few places and all of them unimportant. I remember that one day there arrived at Our Lady of Fatima Roominghouse a vague student and model loaded with baggage and debts but it wasn’t Your Highness, naturally. She was so mixed-up in the head that I panicked; if I let her into my life she’ll create problems. She forced her way in. God knows that I tried to avoid it but now it’s too late on the planet. “Getting late on the planet!” Daddy would say as he locked the door that opened onto the veranda. She opens my closets, borrows my things, uses my northern-zone sponge in the southern zone, and only doesn’t make off with my books because in reality what she likes to read are escape-fiction romances. And Little Lulu comics. She denies it, imagine, whenever possible she goes around with a Herman Hesse or a Kafka under her arm, both from my shelf, let it be said in passing. But only to show off. As for the rest, she installed herself in my bathroom and in me. I made myself practice true acts of Christian charity in order to accept her but now I miss her when she disappears. Ana the Depressing. Depressed and depressing. The lovers. The agonies. I taught her to breathe deeply, then to walk. By taking deep breaths and walking miles, the desire to work returns: salvation through work. But did she learn the lesson? Can analysis, affairs and diamond-buckled shoes change anyone? I think everybody continues the same way to the end. Mama used to make guava dessert, take care of the garden, and embroider little hand towels. She was gling-glong. Now she has facelifts, massages, sessions with her analyst and, principally, makes love to another man. The circumstances changed. But her? Just the same. She doesn’t relax with Mieux the way she used to with Daddy, of course. She play-acts. But she continues dissatisfied and catastrophic. More afraid than ever of getting old, because she already is old, poor thing. Gling-glong. I want to be different when I get older, the type of old lady with no makeup and a very white blouse, my ear trumpet raised, virgins end up going deaf, Lião has a story, the orifices close up. All of them? I see Lião as a mother, very fat and very happy, smiling rather ironically at her guerrilla past, the follies of youth, the follies of youth! Ana Clara, extremely made-up and affected, lying about her age and all the rest, her hands always clenched, she’s the hand-clenching variety of liar. Getting drunk in private. Oh, what I learned from her. I don’t drink but I could write a thesis on alcoholism and drugs. I never had a man and yet I know the arts and blunders of making love.

      “Ni ange ni bête,” Lorena murmured, bending her body and sliding deeper into the bathtub. She lathered her hair until it was enclosed in a thick helmet of soapsuds, then looked at her reflection in the mirror. With her fingertips she smeared the white suds downward until they reached her eyebrows. In a cap and mask like this M.N. performed operations. The yellow surgical gloves breaking the white, “Ah, how sensual!” If he could make love to her right in the operating room. She would go in on a stretcher like Ana Clara. In the background, the Seducer Angel in his immaculate robes, still immaculate. And masked. “Lena, give me your hand,” Ana Clara asked. She took her hand, constrained: She knew Ana Clara’s hands perspired terribly and she had a horror of sweat. A sweat as cold as the operating room, as cold as the spotlight. The doctor’s eyes were cold too in the narrow space between the cap and mask. Ana Clara’s white voice seemed to come filtered through layers of cotton: “One, two, three, four, five, six, ss—” The metallic struggle of the instruments tapping against each other. The weight of blood in the gauze. The ether smell dissolving into the air. Not to be.

      “Oh Lord,” groaned Lorena rolling herself up in the towel. She jumped out onto the bathmat and rubbed her feet on it to dry them. She could see her unreal reflection in the steam-covered mirror. Was she loved? No, certainly not. But she would continue loving, loving, loving, until—not until she died, no, until she came to life with love. She went to the phonograph and turned up the volume. The harsh, intractable sound grew stronger. She turned the button farther and the music expanded, pushing back the furniture, the walls. Dizzy with a fit of laughter, she doubled up, ah, the desire to run naked through the door, grab people and dance with them, play at boxing, make love, eat, oh, how hungry she was!

      “How hungry I am!” she yelled, pinching the felt duck perched on the bookshelf. “Quack, quack,” she said along with the duck. She took a small sip of milk and sighed. It would be nice to be able to like other things, bloody steaks, soups with fish and octopi swimming between ropes of onions at volcano temperature, blop, blop, blop. Setting down her glass she dressed in a white bikini and a too-big shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and after perfuming herself with lavender and dusting her feet with talcum, she gathered onto a plate things that appealed to her appetite: an apple, a raw carrot scrupulously cleaned, some soda crackers and a triangle of cheese. She settled herself on the sunbathed marble step, opened her napkin on her lap and set the plate to one side. Viewing the garden through the iron grillwork of the stairway she began to chew on the carrot. Would sex afford her as much pleasure as the sun? “I stay here taking the sun because I can’t take the man I love,” she thought chewing more energetically. And Ana Clara? The things she was taking, were they to substitute the leopard coat? The Jaguar? Suppose it were simply because she didn’t know the sun, childhood, God? “Everything I had and still have; it’s so sad to go looking outside for what should be within one.”

      A little red ant passed by about a centimeter from Lorena’s foot. It was carrying a piece of leaf cut out with a certain symmetry along its undulating edges, the sail of a sailboat getting its balance during a difficult crossing. She leaned over to see it better. Now the ant had stopped to talk with another one which was coming from the opposite direction. It set its bit of leaf aside, put its hands on its head, gesticulated elaborately, looked for the leaf in panic, couldn’t find it again, gave up and went back rather dizzily along the same route it had come. To what animal would Ana Clara correspond? A fox? She calculated things, lied, always wanted to be the smartest but in reality she was as unconscious as a grasshopper. Why did she have to go and get pregnant right before her famous marriage, why? If it were at least the fiancé’s. And I’m the one who has to arrange the yenom. And go along to hold her hand when the time comes. I’ve said more than once that intimacy is the enemy of friendship, this intimacy which exaggerates the banalities of the everyday. She heard me, agreed, and immediately afterward asked to borrow my bathing suit. To love my neighbor as I love myself, in this case, Crazy Ana. “I’m not just crazy, I’m insane,” she said in one of her rare moments of good humor. “I’m going from gray moods to black.” “The black sheep are the most beloved ones,” I replied. “Mother Alix has a real passion for you.” Then she looked at me in silence. And her eyes, which are usually shifty, met mine straight. Without a trace of irony (quite the contrary, she was very serious) she squeezed her Agnus Dei through her clothes. It should have been pinned to her bra, but as she doesn’t wear a bra she pinned it to one of the bikini straps. “Mother Alix gave it to me,” she said. “It’s a fragment of the vestments of a nun who became a saint.” I asked her what nun that was. “I don’t know,” she muttered as she put on her false eyelashes, an operation which demands total attention because her hands tremble awfully. She was going to a nightclub and came to borrow some perfume from me. She poured it over herself with such abandon that I had to open the window in spite of the cold night. “Cat got into my room and swept her tail over my dresser, she broke my perfume, my mirror and my bottle of eyedrops, can I take yours?” All a lie. The next day I went to see if she wanted to go to the movies. She wasn’t in, but there was the bottle of perfume, the mirror and the empty eyedrop bottle. A mountain of dirty clothes rolled up under the bed. Her jewelry, real and fake, scattered everywhere. A long green satin dress hanging on the wardrobe door. The chaos of shoes escaping through the opening of the large bottom drawer. A black wig and a leather jacket on top of the chair. The makeup box dumped out onto the bed, she must have been looking for something she didn’t find. On the walls, pictures of herself