“I’ll kill myself if he doesn’t call,” I say opening my arms and going on tiptoe to the refrigerator. “I have some marvelous grapes and apples, dear.”
Lia sits down on the rug and begins to chew on a biscuit. She is as somber as a shipwrecked mariner eating the last biscuit on the island. She brushes the crumbs which have fallen into the pleats in her skirt, but why this skirt today? In spite of her exorbitant Bahian behind. I think she looks better in jeans.
“Problems, Lena, problems. Oh forget it—” she says, trying to placate her kinky hair with her hands. “Don’t forget to ask, you hear?”
I throw her an apple.
“I put a new tablecloth on the table in your honor, isn’t it beautiful?”
“Say it’s you who’s going to use it, understand.”
“What?”
“The car, Lena, stop dreaming, pay attention, you’re going to ask Mama for her car!”
I lie on my back and start pedaling. I can pedal up to two hundred times.
“This is an excellent exercise to fill out your legs, incredible how skinny my legs are. You’d have to pedal backwards to make yours smaller,” I say and hold back my laughter.
She bites into the apple with such fury that I feel my knee reflex jump.
“After dinner, Lorena. Don’t forget, after dinner, are you listening? Say it’s for you.”
Car, car. The Machine is sweeping away the beauty of the earth. Oh Lord. And we’re entering the Age of Aquarius, meaning, technology will dominate, more machines. Air transport, individual balloons and jets, the sky black with people. I want nothing to do with it. I’ll read my poets up in a treetop, there might be a tree left over.
“Yesterday I bought a gorgeous edition of Tagore,” I say, sitting down on the rug. I clasp my hands in front of my breast: “‘I watch through the long night for the one who has robbed me of sleep. I build up the walls of the one who has torn mine down. I spend my life pulling up thorns and scattering flower seeds. 1 long to kiss the one who no longer recognizes me.’”
She glances at me, chuckles slightly and said with her mouth full, “You don’t have to do that much, it’s enough not to want to steal your neighbor’s husband, understand, Madame Tagore?”
“But he doesn’t love her any more, dear. The love is gone, there’s nothing between them. They only belong to each other on paper.”
“You think that’s so little? I go along with that but you need to see if he does too. And what’s so original about that poem? All that is in the Bible, Lena. Don’t you read the Bible? Go look it up, it’s all there.”
I begin to pedal again, more energetically.
“I bought Proust, isn’t that high-class? M.N. has a passion for Proust. I’ll have to read it, but I confess I’m finding it slightly boring.”
“Yugghh. High-class novels are bad and high-class old-fashioned novels are worse. I never had the patience for them,” she says taking a cigarette out of her bag.
I run to get an ashtray and on the way back take the lid off the teakettle. The water is almost boiling, you should never let tea water come to a full boil, Daddy taught me. I turn off the burner and drop the tea leaves into the water. With my eyes closed I breathe in their perfume as I put the ashtray under Lião who doesn’t know what to do with her apple core. Holding an invisible microphone, I approach on my knees. She clamps the cigarette between her teeth.
“If you please, I’d like your opinion on certain problems our community is facing,” I say raising the microphone. “First of all, may we have your name?”
“Lia de Melo Schultz.”
“Profession?”
“University student. Social sciences.”
“And … may I ask about your present situation at that institution of learning?”
“I goofed off this year. Cut classes. I ended up dropping all my courses, but I’m still registered.”
“Fine, fine. And your book? They tell me you have a book almost ready. According to our information it’s a novel, is that right?”
“I tore it all up, understand,” she says blowing smoke in my face. “The sea of useless books is already overflowing. After all, fiction, who cares about it?”
I abandon the microphone. Tore it up? It isn’t really her vocation, poor thing. But she used to enjoy writing her stories so much, in those big notebooks with the greasy covers, wherever she went she’d take along those notebooks. The city smelling like peaches, imagine. I offer her a cluster of grapes but she refuses. I don’t know what to say to her. So precise when she talks but so sentimental when she writes, oh, the moon, oh, the lake.
“You know the latest, Lião? A poetess from the Amazon is going to arrive, how about that? She must be an Indian. She’s going to be your roommate, dear.”
“Why my room? You here in this penthouse and with a bathroom even, dammit. Indians like baths. Ana Clara’s room would hold a whole tribe, too.”
“No, not there, imagine! The Indian maiden in her natural state, Ana Clara would be too much of a culture shock, poor thing.”
“But by January isn’t she supposed to be married to the industrialist? Driving a black Jaguar with red seats. A diamond the size of a saucer on her finger.”
“And a full-length leopard coat. Stiiiiinking chic!” I roll my eyes upward and imitate Aninha when she adopts her femme fatale air. But Lião is still sober.
“Crazy Ana isn’t doing so well. She’s already doped up in the mornings now. And she piles up debts something awful, there’s swarms of bill collectors at the gate. The nuns are in panic. And that boyfriend of hers, the pusher—”
“Max? He’s a pusher?”
“Come on, you mean you don’t know?” mutters Lião, tearing a piece of fingernail from her thumb. “And it’s not just speed and pot, I’ve seen the needle marks time and again. She should be put into the hospital immediately. Which wouldn’t do any good at this point, she’s so far gone. A wreck, in short.”
I open my hands on the rug and examine my fingernails.
“It would be fantastic if the millionaire fiancé married her. I’ll put out the yenom for the plastic surgery in the southern zone, he would only marry a virgin, she has to become a virgin. Oh Lord.”
“You think a rich marriage is going to help anything?” Lião asks with a sad smile. “You should be ashamed to think that way, Lorena. And will there even be a wedding? Doesn’t the guy know how she gets her kicks? Instead of hoping for a miraculous wedding, you should hope for a true miracle, understand? I don’t know why, but you Christians have such a funny mentality.”
I go to the teakettle and fill the cups again, then stop halfway back. He sang while on drugs, this half-hoarse voice, isn’t it doped? The twisted voice of someone who cries for help but who doesn’t want to be helped.
“Yesterday she was so lucid. She says Mother Alix helps, she’s going to start in again with her analysis. Who knows, eh, Lião?”
“Do you think at this point an analyst is going to help? It would have to be an analyst of the Saint Sebastian brand, that one with the arrows, beautiful and good. Then she’d fall in love with him and be saved