here,” said Sister Priscilla with an optimism that spread to Lorena, who was hanging onto her mother’s arm. Her mother, in turn, was hanging onto Mieux’s. She turned to him with a perplexed face, at that time she used to consult him even to find out if she should take an aspirin or not. “Give me your opinion, dear. Won’t I spend too much? This is awful,” she complained, repulsed by the scent of jasmine mingled with that of urine. Mieux winked at Lorena. He became euphoric when he had an opportunity to show off his prestige: “It will be the most darling thing in the world, I already have some ideas. I want this bathroom pink, it’s important for her to feel as though she’s in a nest when she undresses for her bath,” he said throwing his cigarette butt into the cracked toilet bowl. He slammed the door behind him and sniffed his handkerchief. “I visualize this room in pale yellow; I have the wallpaper. A gold bed there in that corner. The bookshelf and table on that wall. Here in this space, a builtin wardrobe. Over there, a mini-refrigerator and a little bar, hm, Lorena?” He picked a playing card up off the floor; it was a queen of spades, which he stuck upright in a crack in the door. And as Mama had gone on ahead and Sister Priscilla was busy closing the window, he seized the opportunity to run his hand over my ass.
“Anything happen?” I ask Lião who has come back at a run.
Panting, she kicked a wad of newspaper which Cat tore up.
“Is the offer of tea still on? I’ll take you up on it after all. One more phone call like that one and I’ll go completely insane.”
I quickly remove my pajamas and put on my black ballet leotard. I hear Lião coming up the stairs, step by step. When she’s happy she comes up them in three jumps, poor thing, flunking all her classes because she cut so many. Her lover in prison, her allowance gone, she gives over half of it to her famous group. Oh Lord.
“Can I turn that down?” she asks, going straight in the direction of the record player.
She turned it down so far that Jimi Hendrix’s voice sounds like that of a little ant under the table. I light the electric ring, do two more exercises to develop the bustline, and spread the cloth on the table. The cups, the plates. I bring my little bread basket with its red ribbon woven into the straw, going all the way around until the ends meet in a bow. I pause to admire the graceful pattern of the tablecloth with its big leaves in a hot green tone, through which, half-hidden, peers the Asiatic eye of an occasional orange. The pleasure I take in this simple ritual of preparing tea is almost as intense as that I take in hearing music. Or reading poetry. Or taking a bath. Or or or. There are so many tiny things that give me pleasure that I’ll die of pleasure when I get to the bigger thing. Is it really bigger, M.N.?
“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,
