and I’ll know where you are, everybody should wear a bell around, like goats do.” Softly, Lia rang the small bronze bell. She smiled at her friend as she tried to untie a black ribbon from around her neck.
“I’ll put it here with my good-luck charm that my mother gave me. I need to write a long letter to Mother, and another to my father, they’re opposite types. And alike at the same time. When I don’t write, each goes off and cries in a corner, hiding from the other.”
How they longed to see their daughter receiving her diploma. Getting engaged. Engagement party in the parlor, wedding in the church, hoop-skirted bridal dress. Rice as they dash away. The grandchildren multiplying, everybody together in the same house, that enormous house, there were so many bedrooms, weren’t there? “The apartment-building curse has reached us here, too,” my father wrote in his last letter. “Our neighborhood is being invaded but we will resist. When you get back and find only one last house in the whole city, you can come in, it’s ours.”
“If my love phones, want to come and have dinner with us?”
Lia watches me. What are you thinking about, Lião? She pats me on the head and goes out with the air of somebody who carries the weight of the world on her shoulders. I turn up the volume of the record player. Get out of here, he screams hoarsely. I peer out the window. She gallops down the steps with her three leaps and is now exactly where she was before coming up. Yet she hesitates as though she had forgotten to say something important, doesn’t she remember? She opens the bag, looks inside. Indifferently chews the nail of her little finger, and picks up a pebble. She throws it high in the air.
“Is it the car, dear? Don’t worry, did you know Mama gave me one? I didn’t even go to get the check, imagine. You can keep a key, I hate to drive, eeh, the faces people make when I drive.”
Her attention is completely fixed on a point behind me, which moves farther away and loses itself like the pebble she threw into the air. I make faces, I can make great faces, neither Remo nor Romulo knew how to make faces like I did but Lião is only interested in the far-off point, which seems to have returned and fallen down inside her. Her face ripples like the surface of a well when the stone falls in.
“Don’t park by the gate, leave it on the corner. If you go out, leave the key on the shelf. In one of your boxes there.”
“In the silver one shaped like a clover, dear.”
She knows I know she’s involved in a tangled plot, but she also knows I respect her secret. The stone reposes in the depths of the compliant waters. Requiescat in pace. I motion her to come closer:
“Who was it had a compliant hymen?”
At last she laughs like she used to in the good old times, wrinkling her sunburned face.
“Go on, give in, Lena.”
“But isn’t that what I’m wanting to do?” I ask, and deep inside I answer myself, I don’t think I am, really. The joy I feel in the midst of so much promiscuity, both sexes giving themselves without love, desperately, in affliction. And me, virgo et intacta. I open my arms. What a marvelous day.
“If Ana Clara turns up, tell her I need the money I loaned her.”
“Yenom, Lião, yenom!” I scream and raise my right arm, fist closed in the antifascist salute.
She clamps her cigarette between her teeth, closes her hand and makes an obscene gesture.
“The finger, Lião? Is that the finger?”
She marches off, and from the way she’s shaking her head, I imagine she’s smiling. She crosses the garden like a soldier on parade, knapsack beside her, socks falling down, let them fall!—one, two, one, two! She opens the gate sharply, heroically, a gesture of one not merely choosing his path, imagine, too prosaic, but rather assuming his very destiny. Long before she reaches the corner her socks have slipped all the way down. Oh Lord. And Mama herself furnishing transportation for the guerrilla operation. She would probably have one of those attacks if she knew.
“Bunny! Hey, Bunny, are you asleep?” he asked. He shook her by the shoulders. “What’s the matter with you that you don’t move?”
Ana Clara made an effort to open her eyes wider. Around her left eye was smeared a charcoal-colored ring as if she had been socked. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles and the eyeliner spread over her other eye also. Sleepily she turned toward the dense cone of smoke projected by the light of the lamp and kissed the young man’s shoulder, disguising her yawn in a lovebite.
“I’m almost fainting, love. So good, Max.”
“Then why do you go cold that way? Hanh? It’s as if I were making it with a penguin, ever see a penguin?”
She twisted and untwisted a lock of hair around her Finger.
“It’s just that today I’m not too brilliant.”
“I wish you’d tell me the day you are brilliant,” he muttered sitting up in bed.
“Max, I love you. I love you.”
With fingers bent forward clawlike he scratched his head, his sweat-shiny chest, then his head again.
“But you don’t like to make love, Bunny. It’s important to make love, hanh?”
“I’m kind of hung up. I need to talk to my analyst, this last treatment got me all screwed up again.”
“Tell him that when you make love you close up like an oyster when somebody squeezes lemon over it. Wow, would I like to eat some oysters with white wine, nice and cold,” he said stretching his arms.
“Oysters make me sick, I can’t stand to look at them. Horrible things.”
He searched through his pants heaped on the floor beside the armchair. From the pocket he took a pack of cigarettes and shook it until a small tissue-paper packet fell into his hand.
“A nice little dose for Bunny and one for me, hanh? You’ll get in gear with this.”
I pull the sheet up to my neck. What does he mean, get in gear. If only I could. Get in gear get in gear and climb the walls from getting in gear and if only my head would stop scratch scratch thinking those damn things. Shit, why does my head have to be my enemy? I only think thoughts that make me suffer. Why does this goddamn head hate me so much? That’s what no analyst ever explained to me this head business. It only leaves me in peace when I’m high the bastard. And that dumb ass waiting for me peeling the crust off his bread with his fingernail until there’s nothing left but the soft inside part, just like a rat. It’s my head he’s peeling scratch scratch. Bastard.
“I can’t stay very long today love,” I say.
He picks up the empty glasses from the floor, winks his eye and goes to the kitchen taking the glasses and the ice bucket. He opens the refrigerator. I hug the pillow. Sleep sleep. Sleep until I crack in two from sleeping without a single dream because dreams are just another pain in the ass. There are some good ones. Those. Why can’t I ever sleep as long as I want to? Why is there always somebody poking at me, let’s have a nice little screw, let’s have some fun screwing? But what do they
