I’m pregnant, you hear? Pregnant.”
“Hanh?”
She put her mouth close to his ear. “Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant.”
He raised his innocent eyebrows. Half of the whiskey in his glass ran down his chest. He put the glass on the floor and bent over her, reaching for her hands under the sheet. They were clenched tightly. He opened them slowly and kissed the palm of one hand, then the other.
“Let’s have this baby, Bunny. Let’s let him be born, let’s be very happy and he’ll be born happy …”
‘Maybe it’s twins.”
“Fabulous, twins! we’ll put them in one of those little double strollers, hanh? The two of them strolling along, we’ll call the Mademoiselle and she’ll come running, tick, tock, tick tock, ‘et alors, mon petit choux?’ If it’s a girl we’ll call it Celestial Mechanics, isn’t that a beautiful name? My professor of Celestial Mechanics was—Where did I learn that? I learned a whole hell of a lot of things but now I forget, tick tock, tick, tock, et alors?”
Ana Clara sat up on the bed, encircled her legs and rested her chin on her knees. Her green eyes squinted from the middle of the black circles. She turned sharply to Max who was trying to light a cigarette and shook him. The matches from the box spilled over him.
“Why did you have to go broke, why? Now I have to marry somebody else, you dummy. I want yenom, you know what yenom is? Lorena says that if you say things backwards it brings you luck. Now I have to. And still sober. I’m sober as a dog. I think you gave me aspirin. Why don’t you give me that little medallion you have around your neck? Our kid will want that medallion, will you give it to him?”
“Mama wouldn’t let me take it off, only when I want to sleep, there was a story about a baby that died because it was strangled by its little chain…. Ducha had one just like it.”
“Your sister? The one who went crazy?”
“Don’t talk like that about my little sister, don’t …”
“But shit, isn’t she in the nuthouse? So. You told me yourself.”
“My Ducha, my little Duchinha. So sweet, like a little flower.”
“But didn’t she lose her memory, Max? You said so, Max. You told me. Am I saying anything bad? Lorena’s father lost his memory too, he died in the sanatorium without remembering anything, the last time Lorena went to visit him he asked, ‘Who’s that girl?’ Am I saying anything bad?”
He shook his head and turned over onto his belly, his face buried in the pillow, his shoulders shaken by a dry sob. He covered his ears.
“I don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to!” he cried and laughed at the same time. Turning to look at the ceiling he chuckled between the tears that started to run down his face.
“One day we went to the zoo, oh! that animal, that animal that has a horn here, hanh?”
“Is she blond like you? Is she? Answer me, Max, I want to know what she’s like. Your little sister.”
Slowly he extended his arm in the direction of the record player. His hand opened in slow motion, one finger extended to touch something but without conviction, waiting for the something to come toward it.
“The rug.”
“What rug? I’m talking about your sister, your sister! So? Is she blond like you?”
“She would only sleep with the light on, she was afraid of having bad dreams. Say your prayers, Duchinha, say your prayers and tonight you’ll have good dreams, don’t you want to have good dreams? Say your prayers with me, come on, me voici, Seigneur, tout couvert de confusion et pénétré de doleur … douleur … ah … ah … ah … ah … d’avoir offensé un Dieu si bon, si aimable et si digne d’être aimé …”
“Was it the Mademoiselle who taught you that prayer? Answer me! Answer or I’ll throw this water on your head,” she threatened grabbing the ice bucket. “Come on, wake up! Answer me!”
He tried to protect himself with his hands, blowing through the water that flooded his face. Laughing, he struggled as two ice cubes slid down from the bucket onto his chest.
“The champion, look, the champion!” he yelled making swimming motions with his arms. “Time me, Shimoto! You damn Japanese, time me right! You’re cheating on the time, I can’t go any faster, watch him, Mama! I’m almost fainting, I’m dead tired … watch him, Mama, I’m almost there!”
Drying his chest and face, she dropped the wet cigarette into the glass and lighted another.
“Did you win, Max?”
He closed his eyes. With a giggle he gestured theatrically, crooning, “‘I saw in a crystal window … Upon a proud …’ I wanted to be a goddamn singer. ‘Then I saw a perfect Venus, in this doll!’ An idol. If you keep swimming like you are, you can within a year. The impressive thing was my wind.”
The wavering smoke wound itself tightly about the lamp, isolating the light which fell over the quiet bed. Again, he stretched out his hand, inviting the vague someone to come closer.
“Mama’s rug. The last one she made. It was green with some things on it like … everything sort of … I used to lie on it. Moss.”
“Was she pretty? Your mother. Tell me, Max, was she pretty?”
He made an evasive gesture and began to cry softly. Then he blew his nose on the sheet and laughed.
“Bobbi would come running from way far away and splash! jump into the pool. He would hop on top of me barking like crazy, he wanted to save me, all the time he was wanting to save me or Duchinha, nobody’s drowning, you dummy! Shimoto, tie up Bobbi because I can’t practice, crazy dog!”
Pulling herself laboriously across the bed she leaned over his body and took the bottle from the floor. She shook her glass until the cigarette butt came unstuck from the bottom. On the rug, an ice cube was melting, a solitary island in the middle of a pool of water. She grabbed it, dropped it in the glass and went back to her place, crawling painfully the same way she had come.
“Everything was happy for you. Rich. But shit, when was I ever. I want only the present entering the future-past-perfect, is there such a thing as future-past-perfect? If I could just wash out the inside of my head. With a scrub brush. I’d scrub and scrub until I drew blood.”
“They demolished the house, destroyed everything. Ducha said that there was nothing left, only the tree, they built a great big bitch of an apartment building on the lot. And the tree too, they were going to …” he murmured and began to sob again, his face in the pillow. “The jabuticaba tree. It never did anybody any harm, it just made jabuticabas, why? It was our friend, it gave us fruit. She ran away from the sanatorium and went straight to our house, everything was already demolished, all those bricks all over the ground, the doors. The doors were leaning up against a wall. I recognized the door to my room. The doors there, still standing with their handles. The locks,” he sobbed, twisting his hand as if to open the nearest one. “She grabbed the tree trunk and started screaming, screaming, I wanted to scream too when I saw her hanging onto our tree that was going to be cut down,
