It was quite a lovely journey.
The girls were pleased, Missy had started smiling again. And, though her heart was racing, everything was better. They drove past a cemetery, past a grocery store, tree, two women, a soldier, cat! signs—everything swallowed up by speed.
When Missy awoke she no longer knew where she was. The highway was now in broad daylight: it was narrow and dangerous. The old lady’s mouth stung, her frozen feet and hands were growing distant from the rest of her body. The girls were talking, the one in front had rested her head on the young man’s shoulder. Their belongings were constantly tumbling down.
Then Missy’s head started working. Her husband appeared to her in a sport coat—I found it, I found it! the sport coat had been on a hanger the whole time. She remembered the name of Maria Rosa’s friend, the one who lived across the street: Elvira, and Elvira’s mother was even crippled. The memories nearly wrenched a shout from her. Then she moved her lips slowly and murmured a few words.
The girls were talking:
“Well, thank you very much, I won’t accept a present like that!”
That’s when Missy finally started not to understand. What was she doing in the car? how had she met her husband and where? how did Maria Rosa and Rafael’s mother, their very own mother, end up in a car with these people? A moment later she was used to it again.
The young man said to his sisters:
“I think it’s better not to park in front, to avoid gossip. She’ll get out of the car, we’ll show her where it is, she’ll go by herself and tell them she’s supposed to stay.”
One of the girls of the house felt uneasy: she worried that her brother, being dense like a typical man, would say too much in front of his girlfriend. They didn’t visit their brother in Petrópolis anymore, and saw their sister-in-law even less.
“Right,” she broke in just before he said too much. “Look, Missy, go down that alley and you can’t miss it: at the red-brick house, you ask for Arnaldo, my brother, okay? Arnaldo. Say you couldn’t stay with us anymore, say there’s room at Arnaldo’s and you could even look after their boy sometimes, okay . . .”
Missy got out of the car, and for a while kept standing there but floating dizzily above wheels. The cool wind blew her long skirt between her legs.
Arnaldo wasn’t home. Missy entered the alcove where the lady of the house, with a dust rag tied around her head, was having breakfast. A blond boy—surely the one Missy was supposed to look after—was seated in front of a plate of tomatoes and onions and eating drowsily, while his white, freckled legs were swinging under the table. The German woman filled his dish with oatmeal, pushed buttered toast across the table to him. The flies were buzzing. Missy felt faint. If she drank some hot coffee maybe the chill in her body would go away.
The German woman examined her silently every so often: she hadn’t believed the story about her sister-in-law’s suggestion, though “from them” anything was possible. But maybe the old lady had heard the address from someone, maybe even on a tram, by chance, that sometimes happened, all you had to do was open the newspaper and see the things that went on. It was just that the story wasn’t very convincing, and the old lady had a sly look, she didn’t even hide her smile. Best not to leave her alone in the alcove with the cupboard full of new dishes.
“First I have to eat breakfast,” she told her. “After my husband gets home, we’ll see what can be done.”
Missy didn’t understand very well, because the woman spoke like a foreigner. But she understood that she was to stay seated. The smell of coffee gave her a craving, and a dizziness that darkened the whole room. Her lips stung drily and her heart beat completely independently. Coffee, coffee, she looked on, smiling and tearing up. At her feet the dog was gnawing at its own paw, growling. The maid, also somewhat foreign, tall, with a very slender neck and large breasts, the maid brought a plate of soft white cheese. Wordlessly, the mother smashed a hunk of cheese onto the toast and pushed it over to her son’s side of the table. The boy ate it all and, with his belly sticking out, grabbed a toothpick and stood:
“Mother, gimme a hundred cruzeiros.”
“No. For what?”
“Chocolate.”
“No. Sunday’s not till tomorrow.”
A flicker of light lit up Missy: Sunday? what was she doing in that house on the eve of the Sabbath? She could never have guessed. But she’d be pleased to look after that boy. She’d always liked blond children: all blond boys looked like the Baby Jesus. What was she doing in that house? They kept making her move from one side to the other for no reason, but she’d tell about everything, they’d see. She smiled sheepishly: she wouldn’t tell on them at all, since what she really wanted was coffee.
The lady of the house shouted toward another room, and the indifferent maid brought out a bowl, filled with dark mush. Foreigners sure ate a lot in the morning, Missy had witnessed as much in Maranhão. The lady of the house, with her no-nonsense manner, because foreigners in Petrópolis were just as serious as they were in Maranhão, the lady of the house took a spoonful of white cheese, mashed it with her fork and mixed it into the mush. Honestly, it really was foreign slop. She then started eating, absorbed, with the same look of distaste foreigners in Maranhão have. Missy watched. The dog growled at its fleas.
Finally Arnaldo appeared in full sunlight, the crystal cabinet sparkling. He wasn’t blond. He spoke with his wife in a hushed voice, and after a drawn-out discussion informed Missy firmly and carefully: “It’s just not possible, there’s just no room here.”
And since the old lady didn’t object and kept on smiling, he said it louder:
“There’s just no room, okay?”
But Missy remained seated. Arnaldo half gestured. He looked at the two women in the room and got a vague sense of the comic nature of the contrast. His wife taut and ruddy. And past her the old lady shriveled and dark, with folds of dry wrinkles hanging from her shoulders. Faced with the old lady’s mischievous smile, he lost his patience:
“And I’m very busy now! I’ll give you some money and you take the train to Rio, okay? go back to my mother’s house, and when you get there say: Arnaldo’s house isn’t an old folks’ home, okay? there’s no room here. Say this: Arnaldo’s house isn’t an old folks’ home, okay!”
Missy took the money and headed for the door. When Arnaldo was just sitting down to eat, Missy reappeared:
“Thank you, may God help you.”
Out on the street, she thought once more of Maria Rosa, Rafael, her husband. She didn’t miss them the slightest bit. But she remembered. She headed for the highway, getting farther and farther from the station. She smiled as if playing a trick on somebody: instead of heading back right away, she’d take a little stroll first. A man walked by. Then a very odd and utterly unimportant thing was illuminated: when she was still a woman, men. She couldn’t manage to get an exact image of the men’s faces, but she saw herself in light-colored blouses with long hair. Her thirst returned, burning her throat. The sun flamed, sparkling on every white pebble. The Petrópolis highway is quite lovely.
At the wet black stone fountain, right on the highway, a barefoot black woman was filling a can of water.
Missy stood still, watching. Then she saw the black woman cup her hands and drink.
Once the highway was empty again, Missy darted out as if emerging from a hiding place and stole up to the fountain. The rivulets of water ran icily into her sleeves up to her elbows, tiny droplets glistened, caught in her hair.
Her thirst quenched, stunned, she kept strolling, eyes widened, focused on the violent churning of the heavy water inside her stomach, awakening little reflexes throughout the rest of her body like lights.
The highway climbed quite a bit. The highway was lovelier than Rio de Janeiro, and climbed quite a bit. Missy sat on a rock beside a tree, to admire it all. The sky was incredibly high, without a cloud
. And there were many little birds flying from the chasm toward the highway. The sun-bleached highway extended along a green chasm. Then, since she was tired, the old lady rested her head on the trunk of the tree and died.
The Solution
(“A solução”)
Her name was Almira and she’d grown too fat. Alice was her best friend. At least that’s what she told everyone woefully, wanting her own vehemence to compensate for the lack of friendship the other woman devoted to her.
Alice was pensive and smiled without hearing her, typing away.
The more nonexistent Alice’s friendship was, the more Almira’s grew. Alice had an oval, velvety face. Almira’s nose was always shiny. Almira’s face held an eagerness she’d never thought to hide: the same she felt for food, her most direct contact with the world.
Why Alice put up with Almira, no one understood. The two were typists and coworkers, which didn’t explain it. The two ate lunch together, which didn’t explain it. They left the office at the same time and waited for the bus in the same line. Almira always looking after Alice. The latter, distant and dreamy, letting herself be adored. Alice was small and delicate. Almira had a very wide face, sallow and shiny: her lipstick never stayed on, she was the sort who ate off her lipstick without meaning to.
“I just loved that show on Ministry of Education Radio,” Almira would say trying somehow to please. But Alice took everything as if it were her due, including the Ministry of Education opera.
Only Almira’s nature was delicate. With that whole big fat body, she could spend a sleepless night over having spoken a poorly chosen word. And a piece of chocolate could suddenly turn bitter in her mouth at the thought that she’d been unfair. What she never lacked was chocolate in her purse, and alarm at what she might have done. Not out of kindness. It might have been feeble nerves in a feeble body.
On the morning of the day it happened, Almira left for work in a rush, still chewing on a piece of bread. When she reached the office, she looked over at Alice’s desk and didn’t see her. An hour later she showed up with bloodshot eyes. She didn’t want to explain or answer Almira’s nervous questions. Almira was practically crying over her typewriter.
Finally, at lunchtime, she begged Alice to have lunch with her, her treat.
It was precisely during lunch that the incident occurred.
Almira kept wanting to know why Alice had shown up late and with bloodshot eyes. Dejected, Alice barely replied. Almira ate eagerly and kept pressing the issue, her eyes welling with tears.
“You fatso!” Alice said suddenly, pale with rage. “Can’t you just leave me alone?!”
Almira gagged on her food, tried to speak, started stammering. From Alice’s soft lips had come words that couldn’t go down with the food in Almira G. de Almeida’s throat.
“You’re a pest and a busybody,” Alice exploded again. “So you want to know what happened, do you? Okay I’ll tell you, you pest: what happened is that Zequinha took off for Porto Alegre and he’s not coming back! happy now, fatso?”
Indeed Almira seemed to have grown even fatter in those last few seconds, and with food still stuck in her mouth.
That was when Almira started to snap out of it. And, as if she were a skinny girl, she took her fork and stabbed it into Alice’s neck. The restaurant, according to the newspaper, rose as one. But the fat woman, even after the deed was done, remained seated staring at the ground, not even looking at the other woman’s blood.
Alice went to the emergency room, which she left with bandages and her eyes still bulging in fright. Almira was arrested in flagrante.
A few observant people remarked that there’d always been something off about that friendship. Others, friends of the family, recounted how Almira’s grandmother, Dona Altamiranda, had been a very strange woman. No one remembered that elephants, according to experts on the subject, are extremely sensitive creatures, even on their thick feet.
In prison Almira behaved in a docile and cheerful manner, melancholy perhaps, but cheerful all the same. She did favors for her companions. At last, she had companions. She was responsible for the laundry, and got along very well with the guards, who occasionally snuck her a chocolate bar. Just like for a circus elephant.
Evolution of a Myopia
(“Evolução de uma miopia”)
If he was clever, he didn’t know it. Being clever or not depended on the instability of other people. Sometimes what he said would suddenly spark in the adults a satisfied and knowing look. Satisfied, because they had kept secret the fact that they found him clever and didn’t coddle him; knowing, because they were more aware of what he’d said than he himself was. That’s why, then, whenever he was considered clever, he also got the uneasy feeling of being unaware: something had escaped him. The key to his cleverness also escaped him. Since at times, trying to imitate himself, he’d say things sure to provoke that swift move on the checkerboard again, since he had the impression of an automatic mechanism on the part of his family members: as soon as he said something clever, all the adults would glance at each other, with a clearly suppressed smile on their lips, a smile suggested only by their eyes, “oh how we’d smile right now, if we weren’t such good teachers”—and, as in a square dance in a Western movie, they’d have each somehow switched partners and places. In sum, they understood each other, his family members; and they understood each other at his expense. Besides understanding each other at his expense, they misunderstood each other permanently, but as a new kind of square dance: even when misunderstanding each other, he felt they were beholden to the rules of a game, as if they’d agreed to misunderstand.
Sometimes, then, he’d try to reproduce his own best lines, the ones that had provoked a move on the checkerboard. It wasn’t exactly to reproduce his past success, nor was it exactly to provoke the silent moves of the family. But rather an attempt to possess the key to his “cleverness.” In this attempt to discover laws and causes, however, he was failing. And, whenever he repeated a good line, this time the others met it distractedly. His eyes blinking with curiosity, at the onset of his myopia, he’d wonder why he had managed to move his family once, and not again. Was his cleverness judged according to other people’s lack of discipline?
Later, when he substituted the instability of other people with his own, he entered a state of conscious instability. When he became a man, he maintained the habit of blinking suddenly at his own thought, while also wrinkling his nose, which made his glasses slip—expressing in this twitch his attempt to substitute the judgment of other people with his own, in an attempt to deepen his own perplexity. But he was a boy with a knack for statics: he’d always been able to keep his perplexity as perplexity, without its being transformed into another sentiment.
That he didn’t hold his own key, he’d grown used to knowing this while still a boy, and he’d start blinking so rapidly that, when his nose wrinkled, it would make his glasses slip. That nobody held the key, was something he gradually discovered without disappointment, his calm myopia demanding progressively stronger lenses.
Strange as it might seem, it was precisely due to this state of permanent uncertainty and due to his premature acceptance that nobody held the key—it was through all this that he grew up normally, and while living in serene curiosity. Patient and curious. A little nervous, they said, referring to the tic with his glasses. But “nervous” was the name the family had been giving to the instability of the family’s own judgment. Another name that the instability of the adults gave him was “well-behaved,” and “easy.” Thereby giving a name not to what he was, but to the varying needs of those moments.
Now and then, in his extraordinary bespectacled calm, something happened inside him that was shining and a bit convulsive like an inspiration.
It happened, for example, when they told him that in a week he would spend a whole day at a cousin’s house. This cousin was married, didn’t have children and ador
ed them. “A whole day” included lunch, a snack, dinner, and coming home half-asleep. And as for the cousin, the cousin meant extra love, with its unexpected advantages and an incalculable eagerness—and all this would allow special requests to be considered. At her house, everything that he was would have a guaranteed value for a whole day. Over there love, more easily stable because it was just for a day, wouldn’t leave any margin for instabilities of judgment: for a whole day, he’d be judged as the same boy.
During the week preceding “the whole day,” he started off trying to decide whether to act naturally with his cousin. He attempted to decide whether to say something clever as soon as he arrived—with the result that he’d be judged clever for the whole day. Or whether, as soon as he arrived, he’d do something she would judge “well-behaved,” which would make him the well-behaved boy for the whole day. Having the possibility of choosing what he would be and, for the first time throughout a long day, made him adjust his glasses constantly.
Gradually, during the preceding week, the sphere of possibilities kept expanding. And, with his ability to handle confusion—he was meticulous and calm when it came to confusion—he ended up learning that he could arbitrarily decide to be a clown for a whole day, for example. Or that he could spend the day in a very sad mood, if he so decided. What put him at ease was knowing that his cousin, with her childless love and especially with her lack of experience in dealing with children, would accept whichever way he decided that she should judge him. What also helped was knowing that nothing he was that day would really change him. Because prematurely—being a precocious child—he was superior to other people’s instability and to his own. Somehow he floated above his own myopia and that of others. Which gave him a lot of freedom. At times merely the freedom of a calm incredulity. Even when he became a man, with extremely thick glasses, he never managed to become aware of this kind of superiority he had over himself.