IV
33
Dulce Veiga, I had to find Dulce Veiga.
I looked at my watch, not even eight A.M. I hadn’t gotten up at such an ungodly hour in at least ten years. Maybe twenty, possibly even thirty. Out of the blue, a memory flashed through my mind.
When we went to the border, at the beginning of the summer, my mother spent two days making bread, frying turnovers, killing and cooking chickens. Sensing abandonment, the dog yelped feebly from under the bed. Then father took out of the garage the old Chevy that looked like a bat while I stood there staring at the washed-out morning light in Passo da Guanxuma. The trip took an entire day, all the way to the Uruguay River. A little after noon, father found some shade by the side of the road, near a reservoir, mother spread a checkered tablecloth on the grass and opened the white napkins with the chickens, the turnovers, the bread. Coral vines, she’d say, maybe there are coral vines here.
As if I were starting out again on one of those journeys early in the morning, I placed my right foot on the floor and squeezed shut my eyes, full of sand. Now mother would come with the pot of nearly sugarless coffee, a piece of homemade sweetbread, hurry up, child, we’re waiting on you.
Now, now.
Nothing happened. Nothing besides a growing terror, when I remembered Rafic, the money, and what, I didn’t know how exactly, I had promised him: to find Dulce Veiga. She could be dead, living in Cristiana, Salt Lake City, Alcântara, or Jaguari, in an asylum, far away from everything. I didn’t want to think about it, I didn’t want to think about a lot of things, about anything at all.
I needed to know about Pedro so badly.
I took Lidia’s letter from the table, opened a drawer and put it away with the other mementos of him. They had been there for almost a year. Very little, almost nothing. The Bola de Nieve tape, a t-shirt with Sal Mineo’s face, some poems by Ginsberg and that postcard in sepia tones with the picture of a man huddling by the riverbank. I didn’t have to turn it over to remember what was written on the back, right beneath the caption Pont Neuf sur la Seine: Mélancolie. I closed the drawer, I couldn’t afford to remember. I had to find Dulce Veiga, keep that job, go on living. Even if I didn’t find her, even if Pedro never came back.
Life can’t be turned off, I thought. And you can’t rewind it either. The time machine hasn’t been invented yet. Nobody’s coming to my rescue. I’ve been inventing my own days for such a long time. I have to start somewhere.
I sat there repeating aloud these useless, obvious, mournful things. I wanted my mother, I wanted to learn how to get up early again, leave for the Argentinean border and never return. But I washed my face, brushed my teeth, lathered my cock for the hundredth time to eliminate the last vestiges of Dora, queen of frevo and oral sex. I brewed some coffee, sat down, put a sheet of paper in the typewriter. It was the best I could do.
I pushed the button of the mangled recorder. Hoarser than I remembered, a little breathy, as if she had just run up the stairs, Márcia’s voice filled the apartment.
“Obviously Márcia Fellatio is just a stage name, mostly to match the band’s name, the Toothed Vaginas. Our purpose is to give the traditional male, in a state of decadence, lacking the least bit of self-knowledge, first a suggestion of pleasure, and immediately after that another, of complete terror. We want to sound as frightening as a threat of castration, impotence, mutilation. But my real name is Márcia Francisca da Veiga Prado. Márcia F. to my friends.”
Besides cigarettes, coffee, and pauses to turn the tape, I stopped a few times to listen to the record. Jacyr had loved it, after all. And Filemon was quite capable of finding in it something like the Rimbaudian-echoes-of-a-generation-filtering-its-disillusions-among-the-ruins-of-all-ideologies-through-shrill-cries-and-dis-torted-chords-in-the-dissonance-typical-of-the-agony-of-the-end-of-this-millennium. Devoid of Christ, of course.
Not that Armageddon was that bad. It could even be called insightful, intriguing, indefinable, or any other of those journalistic adjectives beginning with in. The problem was that it made me feel like listening to Mozart. I started looking for the allegro of that Concerto no. 23, which always made me feel like opening windows, taking a shower, shaving, and rushing down the stairs, as if I were twenty and had a limousine always waiting for me, down in the drive.
Suddenly, inspired perhaps by the spirit of Wolfgang Amadeus, I remembered that I had Alberto Veiga’s phone number. Maybe he knew something. I took out the card and dialed. Just six digits, probably Higienópolis. He must live a comfortable life. After all, he had supported Márcia’s post-graduate studies in rock through the junkie underground of the first world for years. The voice of a man answered, thick with sleep, cranky.
“May I speak with Alberto Veiga?”
“Who is this?”
“He doesn’t know me.”
“If it’s about the play, you can forget it, pal. The audition is over. I am going to play Arandir.”
I interrupted him:
“I’m not an actor, just a journalist.”
His mood improved instantly.
“At your service.”
“Tell him it’s the guy who wrote about Dulce Veiga.”
The voice moved away from the telephone. It murmured something I couldn’t hear to someone nearby. Then, before I could even turn Mozart down, another male voice came on. He sounded comatose too. Maybe they slept together, I thought, Arandir and Alberto Veiga.
I began to identify myself.
“You don’t have to say anything else. I know very well who you are.”
“Thanks for the flowers.”
“Thank you. It’s the least I could do for someone with such beautiful memories of my unforgettable Dulce Veiga.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Could we talk in person?”
“Whenever you like.”
The time to take a shower, stop by the paper, turn in Márcia’s interview, preferably before Castilhos came in, I thought. He’d already be apprised of Rafic’s maneuvers and armed with some poetic irony in English.
“How about this afternoon?”
“Absolutely, your wish is my command. Come on down to the rehearsal. That way you can check out some scenes from our play. You also must meet Marco Antonio, the best new artist in recent years. He’s going to take the Brazilian stage by storm. Who knows, maybe you’ll be inspired to interview him.”
Maybe, I sighed.
“My most ambitious, most revolutionary work. I need the support of the press more than ever. You know, an artist is nobody without the media to make his work known.”
“I just did an interview with your daughter.”
I detected a certain tension in the long pause on the other end.
“Oh, right. Little Márcia has inherited her mother’s talent.”
“Her father’s too.” I couldn’t resist.
Alberto Veiga began to expound on his daring & radical conception of something or other by Nelson Rodrigues, I thought of Darlene Glória as Sister Helena wailing, Herculano, this is a dead woman speaking to you!, I jotted down the address and hung up. I didn’t think he’d be able to shed any light whatsoever on Dulce Veiga’s whereabouts. And if even he, her ex-husband and the director of the show that hadn’t taken place, didn’t know anything, then—then I was fucked. I’d become hummus in Rafic’s hands.
Mother, I called.
I turned Mozart up, but that very sad adagio had already begun. While I was showering I couldn’t imagine any limousine waiting for me. At best, a bus with a miraculously vacant seat.
34
Before going to the newsroom I stopped by the archives and took out the folder with the pictures of Dulce Veiga.
I wanted to see if the man holding hands with her in the club was really Rafic. The picture wasn’t there anymore. But the others were, just as I had left them. Strange, I thought. And went on to the newsroom.
There were stacks of telegrams on my desk. None offered a free vacation for two to Punta del Este, Madagascar, Camboriú, or Salvador as the case might be. They were all from old Dulce Veiga fans—far more than I had imagined—praising the memoir, wanting to know more. Rafic must be gloating over the success, already duly reported by Castilhos. I cursed the hour I’d gotten involved in that crazy story.
Then I noticed the roses on Teresinha O’Connor’s desk. Sort of obscene, overblown as they were, they looked fake, impossibly open in the mephitic air of that newspaper. I touched the petals with my fingertips. And gave a start, as if I had touched a thorn.
“Xangô accepted the offer,” a voice said.
It was Pai Tomás. Beneath the unbuttoned shirt, I saw the green and yellow beads of a ritual necklace against his black chest.
“What did you say?”
He didn’t seem to hear.
“Have you already had lunch?” he asked.
“Not yet, I just came by to drop something off for Castilhos.”
“You can give it to me, I’ll make sure he gets it.” He took from my hands the recorder, the envelope with the interview, and a confused note requesting that a photographer be sent to Márcia’s house and explaining what had happened with Rafic. “When you have lunch, eat mutton and give thanks. Xangô likes that.”
I was going to ask why mutton and not fried chicken, grilled fish, or pork and beans. But he was already gone, the envelope in his hands. From the other end of the newsroom, as he arranged everything in the middle of Castilhos’ chaos, he bowed and said something that sounded like:
“Okê arô!”
I stared at Teresinha’s calendar, still on the previous day. I turned the page and took a peek at today’s. It said, “Everything originates within me and to me it returns.”
In the elevator I ran into Castilhos. Even though he smoked, he smelled of soap. Alma de Flores, I recognized it. I couldn’t look him in the eye.
“The piece is on your desk. I also left you a note.”
“Rafic already told me everything.”
Everything what?
He flicked his cigarette in the air. The ash got in my eyes. As I blinked, rather pissed, Castilhos recited:
“. . . then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.”
“Shelley,” I ventured, and got into the elevator. “Percy Shelley.”
Before the metal door closed I heard him say:
“Wrong. It’s John Keats, young man. ‘When I Have Fears.’”
Or maybe it was tears, I didn’t quite catch it.
35
It was a big ramshackle building on a side street of Bexiga, almost under the overpass. I peeked through the bars of the ticket booth, there was no one behind the placard that read: “Don’t ask me to give away the only thing I have to sell.” The only signs of recent life in that dark hole were a TV guide with Lilian Lara on the cover, a pack of cigarettes, and a brimming ashtray.
The door was only half-closed. The waiting room, full of black and white photographs of Cacilda Becker, Glauce Rocha, Sérgio Cardoso, Margarida Rey, Jardel Filho, was also empty. Everything smelled of mold but, perhaps because of the photographs, because of the torn gilding on the burgundy velvet of the chairs and curtains, there were still remnants of nobility in the air.
This was always the saddest thing. In everything, that memory of past, more glorious times, hidden there in the theater, in the flower beds of Avenida São Luís, in the windows of the Luz railway station, in the offices of the Diário da Cidade, in the surviving mansions of Avenida Paulista, everywhere. Times, I thought, better times. And bumped into my own image reflected in a cracked mirror. My hair was beginning to thin out. Automatically, as I’d been doing for the past few years, I quickly looked away. I, too, had known better times.
I rubbed my palms together and pulled the curtains aside.
Only the stage was lit. Quietly, to avoid drawing attention to myself, I sat down on a chair in the back. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I made out half a dozen silhouetted heads like a Chinese shadow play, in the first row. On a platform in the center of the stage, two men faced each other. One of them, very young and muscular, had a newspaper in his hands. The other, much older, was shaking his disheveled gray hair—and a revolver. He was shouting:
“‘No, I’m not jealous of my daughter. I’m jealous of you. Yes, I am!
Always. I haven’t spoken your name since your engagement. I swore to myself I would only speak your name to your corpse. I want you to die knowing that. My hatred is love. Why did you kiss a man on the lips? But I shall speak your name. I shall speak your name to your corpse.’”
The gray-haired man pointed the revolver at the muscular one. I shut my eyes, nothing happened. When I opened them again, he was yelling at one of the Chinese shadows.
“Stomp on the floor. Shout, darling. Make some kind of noise when I shoot.”
The shadow whined:
“It’s just that—it’s so exciting, I completely forgot.”
“Great, but make some kind of noise. Otherwise I lose the atmosphere.” The man turned to the other, still immobile. “I’m going to repeat the cue. I speak, shoot, then you fall down. Here we go: ‘But I shall speak your name. I shall speak your name to your corpse.’”
He pointed the revolver. A shout came from the row of Chinese shadows. The muscular young man fell to his knees, covering his chest with the newspaper. I saw that it was the Diário da Cidade. The man pointed the revolver again. The shout was heard again. The youth fell flat on the floor, raising a cloud of dust and tearing the newspaper. The gray-haired man screamed, “‘Arandir!’”
He dropped the revolver, sank to his knees and pulled the other man’s body onto his lap. He caressed his hair for what seemed an outrageously long time, then cried again:
“‘Arandir! Arandir!’”
I thought they’d stop there. I knew very well the end of Kiss on the Pavement, the father-in-law mad with jealousy, confessing his accursed love. Now the light would dim in a very slow fade-out on Arandir’s corpse, until it went out completely. Frenetic applause, if there was an audience, after a certain shocked hesitation.
But they didn’t stop.
The gray-haired man remained on his knees, immobile, in the same position, his arms outstretched as if embracing Arandir. Except that instead of continuing to be dead, Arandir got up and walked to a platform farther away, a little higher up. There, completely naked, lay another, even more muscular young man, his face turned to the back of the stage. Standing next to him, Arandir held out his hand dramatically.
“Kiss me,” the naked guy pleaded, with a slight accent I couldn’t identify. “By everything you hold sacred, kiss me. On the lips.”
I thought Arandir was just going to bend down and kiss him, but no. Ever so slowly, with provocative gestures, like a striptease, he first took off his shoes, then his socks, his shirt, his jeans. I thought he’d stop at his underwear, but he took those off too, and threw the crumpled clothes on the gray-haired man’s platform. As naked as the man lying on the floor, but neither as muscular nor hairy, Arandir knelt down and put his arm around him. He ran his hand over the other man’s thighs, stomach, bulging pectorals.
Without moving, still frozen on the floor as if he were embracing Arandir, the gray-haired man shouted:
“Pinch his nipples a little, till they’re nice and hard.”
Arandir obeyed. He stopped only to raise his hand to the neck of, I figured, the accident victim. Then he took the victim’s face in his hands and turned it toward the light. I recognized him instantly: the naked man lying on the floor was the Argentinean who lived in my building.
“With your tongue,” he wailed. “Kiss me, for the love of God.”
Arandir bent over. He gave him a lingering kiss on the lips. I thought they were going to fuck right there, but the Chinese shadows clapped. Bravo! someone cried. On the lower platform, the gray-haired man was sobbing, his face buried in Arandir’s underwear.
I got up to leave. Maybe I really was kind of square, but this was beginning to look pathological to a guy who. The chair creaked, the gray-haired man dropped the underwear, looked in my direction and shouted:
“Who’s there? This scene is secret, I don’t want any of Antunes’ spies around here.”
“I’m the guy from the newspaper,” I said. It was becoming my password of choice to placate the dramatic temperaments of the Veiga family. He came down from the stage, walked toward me. Of course it was Alberto Veiga himself. Going a thousand miles an hour:
“You arrived just in time. This is the great moment in the play, the scene Nelson Rodrigues didn’t dare write. Did you notice the accident victim’s lines? The syncopated punctuation following the rhythm of breathing in colloquial speech—all mine.” He pointed to the stage, where the two naked men were still embracing.
“A gay pietà, that’s what I want. A gay pietà desperately erotic at heart. Like an archetype of Eros and Thanatos. Ecstatic, eternal. And poor Aprigio there, collapsed in the middle of the stage, in the midst of life, of the crime he’s committed, smelling Arandir’s impossible youth. That’s the final message: love is just a mirage. Those who haven’t given up looking for it, like Aprigio, are left with the comfort of sniffing at the remains of the youth he himself has killed.”
Very daring, I commented.
“At this point I draw on some passages from the pathetic diary of Roland Barthes’ last days. When he renounces the love of young men, and definitively opts for the love of hustlers.” He screamed, “‘Hustlers are all I’ll have left!’” And without a pause, “You’ve read Barthes, of course.”
“The pleasure of the text,” I said.
“The pleasure is all mine,” Alberto shook my hand. The heads in the first row were all turned toward us. He clapped his hands. “Let’s take a break, everybody. Go get coffee down at the corner, practice your lines. Marco Antonio and Arturo stay.”
Marco Antonio and Arturo, I supposed, were Arandir and the Argentinean-hustler-from-my-building, that is, the accident victim. The Chinese shadows began to move. They actually looked more Peruvian than Chinese. The skinny girl with glasses, batik skirt, and Indian bag must be playing the role of the daughter Selminha.
“I don’t want to take up your time.”
Alberto Veiga was dragging me toward the stage.
“But my time is all yours. Were you able to decode the illusion of the imagérie in the final scene? The love scene between Arandir and Arturo actually only happens in poor Aprigio’s eroticized mind. It’s not real, but mythical. Like the phantom that eternally haunts frightened heterosexuals: the possibility of love among males. The love Aprigio is experiencing is impossible, and the love that happens between the other two an archetype of death, pure fantasy. But where is true love between men or women, if indeed it exists?”
In a closed drawer, I felt like saying. On the back of a postcard, under a bridge on the Seine: mélancolie.
“There’s more, much more. When Marco Antonio begins to take his clothes off, in a cloud of dry ice, the kind of music you hear during strip numbers in gay clubs comes on. Donna Summer, something like that. Pure illusion, desire. Mad, perverse desire, hallucinatory desire. A desire that dares not violate the established boundaries. A desire that’s never sated, except in solitary fantasy or death itself. This is the essence of Nelson Rodrigues, of contemporary society, of Brazil, and the kind of theater I want to make.”
“Very daring indeed,” I repeated. “It never occurred to me.”
“Are you the guy who called this morning?” Arandir asked.
“Yeah.” Alberto Veiga’s theory and those sweaty hunks standing naked in front of me were making me dizzy.
“I know you,” the Argentinean guy said. Among the curly hairs, darker toward his belly button, his rosy nipples were still hard.
“I’m sorry,” Arandir continued. “I thought it was for the audition.”
Alberto Veiga butted in:
“It’s true. I was auditioning for Arandir. I wanted a completely new face. A real man, a hunk of beef. I had over fifty candidates, Arturo here placed second. Perfect physique, too bad about the accent. It was only when I wondered how to take advantage of a talent like his that I got the idea of the gay pietà.”
Arturo’s talent, as anyone could see, was truly huge.
He asked:
“Don’t you leeve in my beelding?”
“On the top floor.”
Alberto was circling around the three of us. Me and the two naked guys.
“Small world, things are always kind of magical. Then you already know each other? Not in the biblical meaning, I imagine.”
“We’ve never spoken,” I said.
“You’re muy close,” the Argentinean said.
“You like Carlos Gardel.”
“And you, Nara León.”
That was enough, I thought, perhaps it was enough, yes. One ambiguous, complicitous, sly gesture or word and Alberto would immediately interrupt the rehearsal and the four of us—me, Arandir, Arturo, and Alberto, too many a’s for my head—would end up at his apartment. I recklessly imagined some very sick things. But I was a straight-shooting guy, I wasn’t a homosexual, so I said I needed to talk about Dulce Veiga. In private, I stressed. Arandir picked up the crumpled clothes and headed down to the main floor. Arturo disappeared behind the curtains, humming si crucé por los caminos como un paria que el destino se empeñó en deshacer.
He had such a gorgeous ass that, for a moment I, too, doubted that Arandir had never seen him before that kiss.
36
When Dulce Veiga disappeared, she and Alberto had been separated for almost two years, practically since Márcia’s birth. They had been married for ten years, which he referred to as “the happiest of my life.” He didn’t reveal the reasons for the separation, but it was apparent that, while Alberto increasingly embraced his homosexuality, Dulce had started drinking, doing drugs, taking bizarre lovers. Following a phase of recriminations and accusations—“that space of inevitable rancor,” he said, “when love is over and hasn’t had the time to turn into something else, also good”—the show was a way of publicly sealing their friendship. And beginning, perhaps, another kind of marriage. Less passionate, more artistic.
The last time Alberto had seen Dulce Veiga was in the early morning hours the day the show was to open. He held the door of the apartment for her to enter, with Márcia in her arms, but declined to go in himself, have a drink—it was always cognac—talk. He regretted not having done so to this day. Perhaps that night, a few hours before disappearing, all Dulce needed was to vent her feelings with somebody. But he was exhausted, the past few weeks they’d been rehearsing until two or three in the morning. Working with her was becoming increasingly difficult, she showed up late all the time, couldn’t memorize the new lyrics, felt persecuted. At times she cried a lot, without apparent reason, repeating that she wanted something else, something else. Everyone was patient and affectionate with her: they were sure that the show would be a great success because Dulce, in spite of her feelings of insecurity, was singing better than ever.
Early that morning, in the hallway of the building on Avenida São João, Alberto kissed her forehead and turned to leave. Before entering the elevator he looked back once more and found her very thin, very pale, very sad. Leaning against the door, a little hunched over, Dulce Veiga held the sleeping baby in one arm, a cigarette in the other hand. She’d been smoking nonstop lately. Alberto even thought about going back, having that cognac with her after all, listening to Billie Holiday or Bessie Smith, “Me and My Gin,” which she listened to all the time. But the elevator came, he left. That was the last image he had of her. Standing at the apartment door, holding her daughter, a cigarette between her fingers, Dulce seemed afraid to go inside. And find—what?
The following night, the theater packed, he first called her apartment, nobody answered. Then he called Lilian Lara, with whom Dulce left Márcia at times, when she didn’t take her to the rehearsal. “This child loves music,” she used to say. Márcia was at Lilian’s, but not Dulce. She’d left the baby, Lilian told him, saying that she was going to the hairdresser’s to have a manicure and a facial, something like that, women’s stuff. And that she sounded good, positive about the show, her daughter, even life. Then Alberto went to her apartment, he had a key, and nobody was there.
Pinned to that green velvet armchair she liked so much was a hasty note to him. Dulce said that she was tired of everything, she couldn’t take it any longer, she didn’t want to hurt the people who loved her, she was disappearing forever, no use looking for her. She also asked Alberto to take good care of Márcia, do what he could to send her to school in England, as they had agreed. It was a short, scrawled, desperate note. Just the thought of it, Alberto said, and he seemed sincere, “Just the thought of it makes me feel like crying.”
He still had it. In a box, with other small things. A bottle of perfume, a glove, an earring, a box of powder, like mementos of someone already dead. I could see the note, if I cared, I could see everything. All I had to do was go to his apartment, he’d take advantage of the opportunity to invite Marco Antonio and Arturo, show me some photos, some videos, talk more about his work. To which, he said, “I devoted all of my wounded soul after Dulce chose the shadows.” But, he assured me, there was no clue in that note. Or in the apartment, the day she disappeared, in any other place or with anybody else. If I wanted to, I could also talk to Lilian Lara, who had been her closest friend. Alberto was sure it wouldn’t do any good. He himself, and many others—“she was very, very, very much loved,” he said—had done their utmost to find her, over the past twenty years.
To no avail. Nobody knew anything about Dulce Veiga.
37
The air so clear outside. Not a cloud in the February sky. Standing in front of the theater, in the slightly less intense heat, almost five in the afternoon, I heard a kind of silence, which perhaps was inside me—a little gloomy from the moldy theater, a little dazed from listening to Alberto Veiga, a little drained, like the afternoon.
I leaned against the wall, lit a cigarette, stood there gazing at the overpasses. On the opposite sidewalk, dragging a bag of old newspapers in slow motion, was a beggar woman, her body covered with flour sacks. She looked like the image of Death in a medieval print, only without the scythe.
What about Saul, I had asked, who’s Saul. But Alberto, like Márcia, didn’t remember anyone by that name. He needed to go on with the rehearsal, he called Marco Antonio and Arturo, told them to take off their clothes, to repeat the gay pietà, this time with fury, as if they were dying to fuck each other, while saying that Pepito was a frustrated, wretched drunk who confused names, times, stories, and I decided to believe him.
The sun was shining on my white face. It felt good, after those hours buried in the dark theater, among dark memories. Maybe I should look for Pepito again, maybe go to Rio de Janeiro and talk to Lilian Lara. Maybe a number of dynamic & exciting things & etc., if I planned to keep playing Philip Marlowe. At the moment, what I really wanted was to consider the whole case closed. And stay there, leaning against the wall, doing absolutely nothing.
I put out my cigarette. I walked into the bar next door and ordered water. The low sun was shining on the image of St. Francis of Assisi, the bird perched on his shoulder, in a niche high up on the wall, surrounded by faded roses.
“Not much business today,” I said.
The Portuguese bartender with light-colored eyes sighed, leaning over the counter:
“It’s the goddamned summer, man. This time of year everybody goes to the beach.”
“Those who can afford it,” I said, and remembered Rafic, cabanas in Guarujá. He smiled, scratched his hairy arms. He had sweet eyes, and being stuck in the city made us brothers in misfortune, albeit on opposite sides of the counter. I’ve gotta see Portugal, I thought.
And once again, closing my eyes, I saw that sea of green waters, full of floating seaweed. I drifted beyond the surf to some point from where, looking back toward the beach, all I could see was a coconut palm and maybe a blonde in an antiquated two-piece, shouting in scratchy German, Ist es nicht aufregend dieses Leben? How long had I forgotten the meaning of this word which, as a child, had the taste of the sun on your face and bare feet? Holidays, I repeated, férias, vacaciones, urlaube.
“Are you in theater?” the Portuguese guy was asking. He must have thought I looked like a faggot.
“Yes,” I lied. And felt a mad urge to start recounting my glorious descent down the steps, crying, citizens of Thebes! and ordering the soldiers to tear Antigone away from the body of her beloved brother Polynices.
“We’re rehearsing a play right across the street.”
Not even during that time of censorship, persecutions, prohibitions, and torture, Alberto assured me, had Dulce gotten involved with communists. She liked to stay home memorizing lyrics by Dalva de Oliveira, Edith Piaf, Patachou, Marlene Dietrich, and didn’t have the faintest idea what was happening beyond the walls of her apartment. Somebody was lying. But I was the one who would have to account for those lies to Rafic. Maybe at one of those real artistic soirees, drinking Jack Daniel’s with Melinha Marchiotti.
“Must be a wild life,” the Portuguese guy was saying.
“More or less,” I sighed.
Across from the bar, the beggar woman stopped at the corner, as if she were trying to decide which way to go. She could keep going straight, I thought, walk under the overpass and down to the streets of Bexiga, where there were always plenty of leftovers outside the restaurants. But she could also turn right, toward downtown, there must be lots of paper on the corners of Avenida Ipiranga. Or turn left and take one of those streets that end up in Liberdade, sushi in the garbage. I took the water bottle and stood in the doorway, looking at the undecided beggar. I’d feel great if I had the courage to call her over and buy her a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and a Guaraná. She crossed the street but instead of walking directly beneath the overpass she went around and up on top of it, where only cars were allowed.
“Lots of parties, lots of women, lots of booze,” the Portuguese guy was repeating.
On the overpass, the beggar put down the bag of paper. Then, with both hands free, and a gesture that was too elegant for her, she took off her hood. She had blond, straight hair parted in the middle and cut at chin level. She held her arm up, her forefinger pointing to the sky, and turned her face toward me. Even filthy and with a scabby nose, her face still showed traces of its past beauty.
I cried:
“Dulce, wait for me, Dulce Veiga!”
I started running with the bottle in my hand. The Portuguese guy shouted something I didn’t catch. I lost sight of her for a moment, until I managed to cross the street, go around the concrete island under the overpass, and run up toward her. Ah, I’d take her home, give her a bath, get her to tell me all the obscure details of that crazy story, then we’d go to the opening of Márcia’s show together. Happy ending: in the back, Dulce would sing “Nothing More” beneath a deluge of roses and applause. In the forefront, Márcia and I holding hands, gazing into each other’s eyes. Credits rolling over the freeze-frame.
But we weren’t there yet, it wasn’t like that yet.
When I reached the top of the overpass, she had crossed to the other side. As if she were running from me, without knowing that I was her savior, the singer of her praise, her creator. I stood beside the passing cars, waiting for the first break to cross. I caught a glimpse of her through the cars as she began to take the newspapers out of the bag and toss them up in the air. The crumpled sheets hovered for a moment, then fell under the cars’ wheels, over her grimy cloak, on the other side of the street. Then, as I waited, she climbed onto the low wall of the overpass and stood there, swaying back and forth, as if she were on a horse or a seesaw. Like an amazon, a child. A madwoman—she was looking at me, laughing a toothless laugh. I shouted, look out, Dulce Veiga, you’ll get hurt, something like that, but I knew she couldn’t hear me over the noise of the constant stream of cars.
Before I could make a move, she jumped off the overpass.
No one screamed, the cars didn’t stop.
I wondered whether it would be faster to go back the way I had come, and cross the street, or cross right there, among the cars. Right at that moment a light at an intersection somewhere changed and the overpass was suddenly empty. I ran across, leaned over the edge, looked down at the cement sidewalk where she must be lying smashed, seventy feet below.
There was no one in the street. No trace of blood or body. Dead or alive, real or imaginary.
The wind continued to blow the newspapers everywhere. Wrapping itself around my legs, a page of the Diário da Cidade showed Dulce Veiga’s face. Smiling, far from everything, full of light. At that moment, maybe because I felt lost and everything seemed so crazy, I remembered the mystery, I remembered the shell divination ritual.
38
Across the table, covered with an immaculate tablecloth, Jandira first lit an incense stick and waved it between us. Then she closed her eyes and prayed:
“Blessed and praised be all the universal powers, all the cosmic powers. Blessed and praised be all the oduns of peace, happiness, and prosperity. Bless me Ifá, bless me Lodumaré.”
A motorcycle roared by outside, but not even that managed to dispel the fascination with which I stared at the objects around us, on the outside of the circle formed by the colorful beads of the ritual necklaces. Crystals, crucifixes, a lit candle, a glass full of water and chunks of sea salt, a doll dressed in yellow, a card with the image of a strong man in red and white with an ax in his hands. Everything in perfect order, without a speck of dust. Behind all that, she didn’t look like the Jandira I knew. Solemn, she shook the shells in her closed hands, reciting something that sounded like:
“Aroboboi Oxumaré aroboboi, Obá nixé kaô kabiesile, ogunhê patacorê Ogum, jace jace, ora iê iê fiderô mã, iê iê oh my Oxum, epa rei e kide rei Iansã, Oiá misolorum, eu eu Osanha asa, odê kokô ma iô, okê arô Olodomin ofá, lelú Iemanjá odô iá. Bless me Obá, bless me Ená, bless me Iná, bless me Jessu. Kobalaroê Exu kobá, bless me all of you gods.”
She cast the shells between us, in the middle of the circles formed by the ritual necklaces. She watched without saying anything, with the knowing face of someone who’d seen something I couldn’t see. I took the opportunity to glance around. The apartment was the size of mine, I couldn’t figure out how she and Jacyr managed to live in that space. But, like the table, everything was clean and tidy, poor but decent. The waxed floor gleamed. The maidenhairs and other ferns hanging in the windows filled the dark precipice of the inner courtyard with green. They had improvised a partition in the middle of the living room with an armoire. On the side facing us there was a collage of African orixás and Catholic saints with Buddha, Mother Theresa of Calcutta, Chico Xavier, the Pope, and movie and TV stars. I tried to decide whether the bare-chested guy—I needed glasses—was Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sam Shepard, and I was thinking that Shepard would be too intellectual for Jacyr’s taste, when Jandira said:
“Axeturá.”
I looked at the table. Some shells were scattered in small piles but, in the center of the circle, four or five of them formed a more or less straight line. Jandira’s eyes were completely crossed.
“The paths are much more open than you think, son. Only, they look crooked. But it’s along the crooked paths that you must walk, and things will come your way. All you have to do is listen to the paths and follow them.”
But will I, I started to ask. I think I wanted to know if in the end I’d be able to hear those paths, if they really were that crooked, maybe silent too.
Jandira cast the shells again. I lowered my head, peeked between my lashes. This time they all landed in the corner on my right. Except for two, alone in the opposite corner.
She asked:
“Do you know Logunedé’s story?”
I said no, and began to feel like smoking. Her eyes fixed beyond me, on something or someone that wasn’t there, Jandira began.
“Logunedé is a prince, almost a child. The son of Oxum, queen of the waters, and Oxóssi, king of the forests. For six months, Logunedé turns into a charmed princess and sleeps lying at the bottom of a boat in the middle of the river. In the meantime he also turns into a star. He leaves the princess there sleeping at the bottom of the boat, all alone, and goes wandering through the forest. Like a star, in search of his father Ilê.”
But wasn’t his father Oxóssi, I wanted to ask.
She took her eyes off that uncomfortable invisible thing behind me and fixed them on my face. So crossed that, at best, they might see the point where my eyebrows came together, at the bridge of my nose. The free territory preferred by nine out of ten blackheads and zits.
“Leave the sleeping princess, son. Turn into a star and go into the forest, Ilê is waiting for you.”
The oracle of Delphi has nothing on her, I thought. With the disadvantage that Apollo wasn’t anywhere around. Except for Schwarzenegger, or was it Sam Shepard? I needed glasses, besides needing to let go of the princess; and perhaps Jacyr, in addition to housecleaning, could rake in some cash decodifying oracles at the exit. Aside from the fact that, as far as forests were concerned, here there were only the sorry trees of Praça da República, Trianon, or Ibirapuera Park, and I kind of felt like a worm for thinking those things.
Celtic, druidic, shamanic, Jandira picked up the shells and cast them between us again. This time I looked quickly and counted, half were facing down, half up.
She said:
“Ejionilê.”
Huh, I said.
“When three white hairs grow on your chest, son, Oxaguiã heralds and brings peace.”
Just one more, then. Until yesterday morning, I remembered, although I would rather have forgotten, there were at least two. Visible, because hair is the kind of thing that never stops growing on a guy’s body. My concern wasn’t those two, or the three she announced, but rather the ten, the hundred future, uncontrollable white hairs. And besides them, the gray and hairy-chested guy I was slowly turning into, while life passed me by and nothing, nothing happened. Not even gold chains to show off among that gray forest.
She said:
“Time is such a powerful orixá there’s no horse, no spirit medium able to withstand its weight. That’s why it doesn’t incarnate, it just hovers around.”
Enigmas, that was all I encountered on my path. Insoluble enigmas, impenetrable sphinxes, insanity. Dulce Veiga falling off the overpass, a gay pietà, Virginia Woolf’s reincarnation, stuff like that. A phone rang in the distance, it must have been mine, could it be Pedro? I began to feel distressed by that Afro-Brazilian hermetism. I resolved to be more rational, even though out of step with the orixás’ time, which perhaps was like Lacan’s time.
“I need to find somebody. A person who disappeared many years ago.”
Jandira adjusted her turban, this one wasn’t silver or gold, like the others I had seen, but green and yellow. A green and yellow that made me think of the forests through which I should be wandering, transformed into a star, in search of Ilê. She shook the shells and cast them in the space between the ritual necklaces. One of them bounced out, toward me. I moved my chair back, afraid it would fall in my lap. I didn’t want it to touch me, that shell on the edge of the table.
“Don’t worry, you will find this person. She’s a friend of Ossanha, Oxum is watching over her. And you will find many other things, son, things you can’t even imagine. One day the star returns, enters the body of the princess, and the princess awakens. Listen to what your mother says, and follow the star without fear.”
. . . but what if the star suddenly disappeared from the horizon, if it had already died while its light still reached us, what if it wasn’t a star, but a pulsar, quasar, black hole, if it was Nemesis, the wandering killer planet beyond Pluto, what if it was out of reach like Vega, Canopus, Aldebaran, what if . . .
“Where’s Jacyr?” I asked distractedly.
“Out there, living, his saint is watching over him.”
Uh-huh, I said. I didn’t want to think about the Kenya Bar, one leg on the toilet, the other spread wide, and ten inches up the kazoo. Abruptly, I asked:
“How much is it?”
Jandira seemed uneasy.
“Whatever you can afford, son. I never charge anything for what I have learned for free. But I need to make an offering, the saint calls for one. Do you have any money?”
Black hen on the corner of Rua Caio Prado, white dove flapping around Praça Roosevelt, popcorn at the edge of the Minhocão expressway.
“Not with me. I’ll run next door and get it.”
“You can give it to me later. I already know what to do.”
I stuck a bill under the doll’s yellow lace skirt, from which other bills and checks poked out. I got up to leave. No great love, no letter, inheritance, or party.
Confusion, no connection, I thought. It sounded like a line out of a movie, and when I thought about movies, I also thought that taking a shower, calling up an old friend—there were still a few left—and going to the movies was perhaps the best way of closing that meaningless day. Perhaps I’d find a rerun of some old Fellini film around town if I looked hard enough.
Jandira placed her hands on my shoulders. She smelled of cinnamon, basil, rue. She was no longer cross-eyed when she looked me in the eyes.
“Before you go to sleep, put a glass of sugar water at the head of your bed, son. To call the fairies, they get thirsty and come to drink next to your head in the early morning hours. And tomorrow dress in white and don’t eat any meat, to avoid driving away your father Oxalá, may he protect you.”
39
Out in the hallway, I bumped into a woman dressed all in black. It was Teresinha O’Connor.
“You, here?”
She kissed me three times.
“I’ve heard she’s great, I don’t know what to do any more. He treated me really bad today, like I was I don’t know what.”
“Good luck,” I said. Without understanding any of it.
40
I turned on the radio. I wanted other noises in my brain besides my own thoughts. More profane, less confused. A very excited falsetto voice cried flaaaaash-baaaaack! and it didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all to take a shower listening to help I need somebody help I need someone, even though I couldn’t sing, I think I still knew all the lyrics by heart. Unexpectedly, as if emerging from the depths of time, the time I had met her, Dulce Veiga began to sing “Nothing More.”
I turned off the radio. The silence I had felt on the way out of the theater returned. And me, inside of it. Me, me alone, alone.
Old friends then, take a shower, call, go to the movies, dinner afterwards. There weren’t many people left from that long period of silence and pain. Maybe Nelson, I began to count them off, railing against his wife and three daughters, all I do is work to feed those females; maybe Maria do Carmo, each time looking a little more like a typical member of the Wretched Army of the Victims of Feminism: a son, no husband or lover, flesh and dreams hanging around aerobics gyms and women’s magazine newsrooms; maybe Fernando, eyes of cold fire, chasing after coke until his teeth gnashed, then a hooker—or a transvestite, would I be capable of that?—at the first street corner, pay and go limp. Otherwise, there was also the Lively Legion of Those Who Had Made It, all paired off, come over on Saturday, we’ll do dinner, you have to see the videos we brought back from Tokyo, the computers from New York, the wines from Paris.
No, I didn’t want to see any of them. I didn’t want anything, I didn’t want anyone. Like Dulce Veiga, what I wanted was to find—something else. I preferred being by myself to bitterness, explicit or softened by fondues, slide shows, and imported Armagnacs. It was cleaner. At most an old Bergman film, replete with traumas. Then the doorbell rang, and everything started happening very fast.
It was Patrícia, pale, disheveled, helmet in hand. She walked in without waiting to be invited.
“Sorry for barging in on you like this. I asked for your address at the paper, a girl gave it to me. I’ve been calling you all day, nobody answered, I thought your phone was out. You have to help me.”
“What happened, Virginia?”
“It’s Márcia, do you understand?”
I didn’t understand anything.
“She’s disappeared.”
Repeating the question I’d asked dozens of times the past few days was inevitable.
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
“Since two in the afternoon. She didn’t come to the rehearsal, left hanging some people who wanted to tape something for TV. Lots of things, lots of people. She didn’t call, she didn’t say anything.”
I noticed something furry just below her neck. It was Vita, the cat, tucked in her jacket, with only her head sticking out. Patrícia was wearing the same heavy glasses she had on the previous day, the stems held together with scotch tape. She’d been crying, and now kept repeating:
“Like her mother, just like her mother. The very day the show opens.”
Without meaning to look cynical, I reminisced:
“When I was younger, show people used to do this kind of thing, it was called a publicity stunt. Singers were assaulted, actresses busted their bra straps at carnival balls, stuff like that. Nowadays I think it would be called a media coup.”
Vita meowed politely as she took a good look at the surroundings. Patrícia slammed her helmet down on the table. There was nothing left on it or anywhere else in that apartment that wasn’t already half broken. She was serious.
“Don’t talk like that, this is for real. Márcia’s been acting crazy, snorting too much coke, she hasn’t slept for three days. She only smokes and snorts. Then all of a sudden this story on her mother’s disappearance. Maybe she decided to do the same thing, I don’t know.”
Electra, Alcestes, Iphigenia: which complex was this?
“Did you call the police?”
“No way. There’s drugs involved, all kinds of shit.”
“Did you talk to anyone else?”
“A few people, friends. Nobody knows anything.”
“So why did you look for me?”
Very tall and thin, unsteady as if she might fall any minute, she paced back and forth, squeezing Vita inside her jacket.
“You seem alright. And a journalist must know what people do at a time like this.”
“I think they call the police.”
“No!” she cried. Vita meowed again, underscoring the cry. “Not the police.”
Heavy drugs, death squads, elimination of witnesses, Medellín cartel. Márcia floating in the Pinheiros River, the white foam of pollution in her hair, almost as white, a toad sitting on the tattooed butterfly between her breasts. At the wake, a wreath in the shape of an electric guitar, the Toothed Vaginas singing the backup vocals on “My Heroes Died from an Overdose.” I looked for a clear space on the table, knocked on the wood. And began to worry.
“I don’t know what I could possibly do. All I can think of is stuff like that—police, hospital, morgue.”
Patrícia sat on the couch under the window, unzipped her jacket, Vita jumped out. Her tail in the air, she began to investigate the apartment. Patrícia crossed her legs, put her face in her hands. Her distress was real, but I didn’t want to believe that story. Strategy, I repeated, stratagem. Suddenly I thought of Jayne Mansfield’s scandalous display at the Copacabana Palace carnival ball, I really was old. Or else stars like those of the past no longer existed.
Patrícia raised her head:
“Give me a cigarette.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m a very observant guy.”
She grabbed my hand, her fingers were cold. Vita was sniffing through some papers on the table.
“That’s why I looked for you. Please help me. Did Márcia say anything strange during yesterday’s interview?”
I pulled my hand away. I lit her a cigarette, then another for myself. Behind her, the night was falling.
“She said a bunch of things. All strange, but nothing—” Nothing but, I thought, a beautiful illusion. I felt like turning on the radio again. But Dulce Veiga’s song must be over by now.
Patrícia got up, pulled Vita away from the table, sat down again. She looked at her watch, one of those digital things for divers. Huge, full of buttons.
“Almost seven. She should have been at the Hiroshima by now. We need to check the lights, the sound, a bunch of things. Do you really think she’d repeat Dulce Veiga’s story?”
Ismene, Clytemnestra, Jocasta: my Greek repertoire wasn’t that broad. I knelt before her Cyd Charisse legs, sheathed in torn jeans and boots, Maria Schneider-style. But I wasn’t too impressed with that script, delivered with wild eyes and quivering voice à la Meryl Streep. And why didn’t she get on the phone and call this Hiroshima place, Alberto Veiga, or a thousand other places, anyway?
We just sat there smoking in silence, for a moment so long that, if it hadn’t been for that electric field around her body, I might have rested my head on her knees and told or listened to some spicy story from Bloomsbury while she stroked my hair. As if reading my thoughts, Vita jumped down to the floor and rubbed against my legs. We might have even looked for Jandira, who would have said something like, “The small flame of the Apocalypse went out before the fire began,” or told the story of some orixá who, when the stage is set up, turns into a laser beam and flies off through the buildings.
It was almost dark, Patrícia began to cry. The neon sign from the funeral home came on outside, Vita looked up, her eyes flashed like two headlights. The green neon shone on Patrícia’s tousled hair, and she no longer looked like Virginia Woolf, but an androgynous adolescent, lost and in love. And I liked her, shit, I always ended up liking all these goddamned people and their craziness. Perhaps because of that, because I liked her and wanted to help her, I suddenly understood what anyone not as dumb as me would have understood from the very beginning.
Patrícia was in love with Márcia. Madly in love.
The minute I realized it, maybe because we both looked fragile and unreal in that light, in that situation, I had the absolute certainty that she was hiding something. I held out my hand, touched her pointed chin lightly.
“Listen, Patrícia.”
She sniffed. I put on my deepest voice of the Mature & Understanding Man, Although Tired of Youth’s Folly:
“If you really trust me, you’d better tell me everything now. Otherwise we’re going to sit here, staring at each other’s faces until the day after tomorrow. And nothing’s going to happen. The most I can do is order a pizza and some beer, and put on some music.”
“Right,” she said.
“Right what?”
“I trust you.”
“Then tell me everything.”
She tossed the cigarette butt out the window. For the first time since she’d come in she looked into my eyes. She took off her fogged-up glasses, leaned her arm on Vita’s back and rubbed her eyes. They became even redder, more frightened.
“I think I know where she is.”
For one crazy second, one hand holding Patrícia’s chin, the other on Vita’s back, my mind racing, I thought—Dulce, she knows where Dulce is, and she was going to tell me everything, and then I’d tell Rafic, Castilhos, everybody, we’d do a big piece for the front page, I’d take Dulce on all the TV shows like “This is Your Life,” Rafic would make loads of money, heaps of prestige, he’d be elected representative, senator, whatever, maybe he’d get me an appointment abroad, maybe in Tirana, Albania, where in the winter, in the cold of the Balkans, I’d finally write poems again, good ones this time, maybe epics, like a rhapsodist, and maybe one day I’d get a letter from Pedro, setting up a tryst in Ibiza, Alexandria, or Volterra, and.
“Where?”
“I can’t tell, I promised. If I tell, Márcia will send me away.” She sobbed loudly, then wailed, “I can’t live without her, don’t you understand?”
I shook her chin gently, it was wet with tears. She stuck her chewed nails in the cat’s fur. This time Vita’s meow was almost a howl. Her hair was bristling.
“The full moon makes her nervous.”
“Tell me what you know right now. Or else get out and leave me alone.”
In a whisper, as if she were afraid somebody else, besides me, might hear her, Patrícia said:
“It’s a house, a very old house in Bom Retiro. I think it’s a boarding house, a tenement. Márcia’s been going there almost every day since we moved in together, since Ícaro died and I came to São Paulo. She always takes food, medicine, at times clothes. Women’s clothes. One time I followed her.”
“Who lives there?” I was almost shouting. “Who lives there, Patrícia?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t see, I didn’t go in. I just stayed out in the street, watching. Márcia found out, I don’t know how. She made me promise I’d never do it again. I’d never tell anyone. It was a secret, she said, a horrible secret.”
I sprang up. Almost at the same time, Vita jumped out of Patrícia’s lap, her fur bristling, ran across the apartment and began pacing in front of the door, scratching at the wood as if she wanted to go out immediately. Patrícia got up too.
“Do you think,” she stammered, “do you think that—”
“It’s got to be,” I said, my heart pounding, “it’s got to be her.”
Neither I nor Patrícia had to utter that name. And when we went out, even without having said it, I had the impression that it continued to reverberate alone in the apartment, pulsating like a living thing in the funeral home’s green light.
41
The tires screeched around the curve by the church, near the Tiradentes subway station. Vita let out a piercing meow. Ignoring the traffic lights Patrícia cut in between the buses. A couple of neanderthals yelled from a bar, I had to hold tight to keep from falling off. For a long time she wound through narrow, dirty alleys lined with shops and finally pulled up in front of an old rusty gate.
“It’s here,” she said. “This is the house Márcia entered that day.”
I jumped off the bike, glanced inside. Weeds grew between the cracks of the moisture-stained concrete walk that led to the crumbling steps. Through the half-closed door, painted dark green—deep green, I thought, moss green like Dulce Veiga’s armchair—you could see an orange plastic couch with a picture of Iemanjá behind it. I went up the walk, climbed the steps, stood in front of Iemanjá. Arms outstretched, hands opened toward me, she was walking barefoot over waters that looked muddy beneath the layer of dirt coating the picture. From inside the house, through a narrow hallway, came a smell of fried onions and boiled cabbage. There was nobody in sight. I wanted to go down that hallway, then I remembered Patrícia.
She was still standing next to the bike, with Vita’s face poking out of the open collar of her leather jacket.
“You’re not coming?”
She was banging her helmet against her knees, undecided.
“You go ahead, I don’t have the guts.”
All right, I said. I was ready to solve the mystery all by myself when, suddenly, I heard a strident meow and a furry streak shot between my legs.
“Vita,” Patrícia cried, “Vita Sackville-West, come back here, now.”
Running after the cat, Patrícia crashed into me, nearly knocking us down on the torn orange couch bursting with tufts of straw. Patrícia chased Vita down the hall. In the corridor with numbers painted in white on the closed doors, the smell of fried food, spoiled food, dirty clothes, poverty got stronger. A bulb hung from the wooden ceiling, but the yellow light wasn’t enough to illuminate the entire hallway. We couldn’t see the cat.
Patrícia squeezed my arm. From behind one of the doors, a baby began to cry.
Vita sat in front of a door near the end of the hallway, very quiet. It was number eight I noticed, as Patrícia knelt down to pick up the cat. Music came from inside, a voice singing a familiar tune, even though it was mixed up with the baby’s crying, the unmuffled exhaust pipes of the cars in the street, Patrícia’s panting, and my own heart beating. I put my ear to the door, trying to hear better. When I recognized the song I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to turn, retrace my steps down the hall, turn my back on Iemanjá’s image, take a cab, go home, throw a few things in the backpack, and go some place very far from there. In the middle of the flight
I didn’t dare put into practice, it was already too late, I recognized the voice and the song.
It was Dulce Veiga. Behind the closed door of that sordid tenement was Dulce Veiga’s voice singing “Nothing More.”
In Patrícia’s arms, Vita’s eyes gleamed in the shadows, violet like Liz Taylor’s. The two of them were staring at me, immobile. Because of all the movies I’d seen, and they were thousands, all the books I’d read, all I’d been taught about the way a man should act in these situations and all that—and, in short, because of many other things, I couldn’t simply turn my back and run, leaving the two of them standing there, alone, female, defenseless.
My God, I thought. I hadn’t thought about God in a long time.
I put my hand on the latch. An old latch, made of metal. It felt warm, sticky. Maybe it was my sweaty palm. I mentally counted to three. I pulled the latch down and noiselessly opened the door.
In the center of the room was a green velvet armchair with its back to us. And fallen against the top of the armchair, hanging over one of those wings level with the person sitting, was a woman’s blond head. Her hair was straight, disarrayed, parted in the middle, cut at chin level. We couldn’t see her face, just her head, part of her shoulders, and one arm. In the yellow light the skin of the arm flopped over the green velvet had a sickly hue, almost yellow as well. Scarlet nails dug into the mount of Venus in the upturned palm. In the crook of her elbow, just above the scarlet nails and thin wrist, a vein throbbed.
It was that vein Márcia was massaging, kneeling at the feet of the woman, holding a syringe. She was repeating things I couldn’t make out, gentle things, probably, as if she were speaking to a baby. Loving, soothing, hypnotic. The woman writhed in the chair, opening and closing her hand to make the battered vein stick out more.
Down the hallway, the baby cried louder.
Márcia didn’t look up. She slowly bent over the woman’s arm and, absorbed in her task, dressed in black like the negative of a nurse, a nurse of darkness, she stuck the needle in the vein. The woman stopped writhing. Márcia pushed in the syringe, injecting the liquid. The blond hair fell back over the green velvet.
At that moment I decided to go in, interrupt that horrible scene. Patrícia grabbed my shirt. I glanced around, standing in the doorway. The walls were almost entirely plastered with magazine covers and articles with pictures of Dulce Veiga from twenty, thirty years before. Besides the green chair, the room also contained an old iron bed with filthy, crumpled sheets and an open armoire full of old-fashioned dresses, tattered scarves, shoes, hats. Next to the closed window, on top of the vanity, among apples, cream jars, and perfume bottles, an old 78 RPM was spinning on the turntable of a portable record player. Cracked and scratchy, Dulce Veiga’s voice was singing her last hit.
Márcia pulled out the syringe. A drop of blood spurted in the air. She began to disinfect the woman’s arm with cotton. The cotton turned red with blood. Márcia took another ball and pressed it against the vein. Another smell, more penetrating than fried food and dirt, wafted in the air, cloying, like crushed almonds. The woman’s blond hair swayed, brushing her bare arm. Márcia sighed, raised her eyes. It was then that Patrícia let go of my shirt, Vita jumped inside meowing, Márcia dropped the syringe and looked up at us, terror-stricken.
Before she could cry or make a movement, I entered the room. Stepping on the shards of the syringe, I went around the armchair to see the woman’s face.
42
The second time I saw Dulce Veiga, and it was the last one, she wasn’t alone. Besides the baby, who not until twenty years later would I discover was Márcia, there was a man in that apartment with the curtains always drawn on Avenida São João. Everything was so fast, so confused, I can barely sort out the recollections in my memory, I don’t know what came before, during, or after.
I’d gone back to get some pictures, song lyrics, perhaps to talk to her a little more, I don’t remember for sure. For some reason the editor of the magazine wasn’t satisfied, it was my first celebrity profile, and it wasn’t up to snuff. I rang the bell, a man opened the door, a tall man with light-colored eyes wearing a very sweaty undershirt. He was moving back and forth, throwing clothes and books, mainly books, lots of books, into an open suitcase in the middle of the living room, his hair plastered to his face with sweat. I remember he opened the door just a crack, looked at me, scared, over the chain of the lock, as if he were afraid I was someone else. Only when I told him who I was and what I wanted did he remove the chain, open the door and let me in. Then I saw her, for the last time I saw Dulce Veiga, but not her face.
There was an archway without curtains dividing the room in two. Standing next to the man who was tossing clothes and books, I saw Dulce Veiga’s chair in the other room, with its back turned toward us. From where I stood I could only see her blond hair hanging in disarray, part of her right shoulder, and a bare arm stretched across the green velvet. An empty syringe hung from her hand, a fine thread of blood gleamed on the skin of her arm. Darling, the man said, as if it didn’t bother him, it’s the guy from the magazine, but she didn’t answer, you need to think of your career, he said, especially now that I’m leaving, but she didn’t move, tell me where it is and I’ll give it to him, but she still didn’t answer, immobile in the green chair.
While the man spoke, continuing to throw things into the suitcase, I looked over there, where Dulce Veiga sat, and I could see the baby’s cradle, with an Indian cloth suspended over it like a tent, and the little table with the marble top, and on it, among packs of cigarettes and some papers, several phials, gauze, cotton, a bottle of alcohol. The man kept talking. Dulce didn’t move. Then, gently but firmly, he began to push me toward the door, telling me to come back later, some other day, that he was in a hurry, he was going to travel, that Dulce wasn’t feeling well, that there was no time, not even a minute, and he needed to leave, flee, urgently. When he opened the door for me to leave, the baby began to cry. Over his shoulder—he was very tall, he was very strong—I saw Dulce ineffectually try to get up from the chair, and before I went out into the hall she called to him in a voice that seemed to come from far away. Much farther than the other end of the room, from the other side of the world. From another world, she called to him.
Saul, she said, she asked feebly. Saul, see about the baby. The man left me standing at the door, went to the cradle, rocked it gently until the baby began to calm down, and when she finally stopped crying he tenderly caressed Dulce’s hair, then took the syringe from her hand, carefully, as if it were a loaded gun ready to go off. He placed it on the marble table, where it couldn’t harm her. Then he returned to me, repeating that I had to go, that he had to go too, before the men came, and he drew nearer, he was sweating heavily, he was shaking, I could smell his clean sweat, and see his eyes up close, they weren’t exactly green, but very light brown, they must turn green when the sun shone on them, but there was no sun there, the curtains were always drawn. They were eyes of fear, eyes of horror, the eyes of the man very close to me, gleaming in the dark. He put his hands on my shoulders, told me to be careful, that I was very young, not to tell anyone he was there, to publish the interview and write for everybody to read that Dulce Veiga was a great singer, the best of all, in the entire world. The man ran his hand over my face, his eyes filled with urgency and panic, repeating those things with a shadow of sadness, or despair, or leave-taking in his voice, and he came very close, each time closer to my face, then suddenly he leaned toward me, grabbed me, and kissed me on the lips.
The baby began to cry again in the cradle, Saul, Dulce called again, Saul, the child. He pushed me out into the hallway, slammed the door. I pressed the elevator button. I must have run my hand over my mouth, tasting the sweaty salty taste of the man’s mouth, I must have run my hand over my mouth many times, not as if I felt disgust, but just touching, investigating what had been taken and what had been left there, without understanding any of it, I was very young, I didn’t know anything. I don’t remember if it was when the elevator got down to the ground floor or when the door opened on the floor where I waited, I no longer know the exact moment when out of the old caged elevator burst four or five men in suits, one of them with a gun in his hand, and they pushed me against the wall. The singer’s apartment, they demanded, the guerrilla, where does Dulce Veiga live, the terrorist, where’s the apartment of that whore, of that communist, and without quite knowing what that meant, everything was going too fast, it wasn’t my fault, I told them the number, without meaning to, I think it was seventy, I said: they live over there. The men rushed past, I left.
I barely remember anything after that. In the elevator, or on the way out of the building, I heard the men kicking and banging on the apartment door. In the street people whispered, hurried by with their eyes on the ground, pretending not to see the secret police car parked on the sidewalk, with armed men all around it. Down there, on Avenida São João, right in front of that building where, twenty years ago, before being swallowed by the world, Dulce Veiga once lived.
43
In spite of the blue silk dress, the high heels, the scarlet fingernails, the pearl necklace, and the blond hair exactly like Dulce Veiga used to wear—the person sitting in the green chair wasn’t her. Through the black stubble and the layer of makeup highlighting the cheekbones and the proud, almost hard line of the jaw that made the false face even more like hers, I recognized without too much trouble the brown skin and the eyes filled with panic from twenty years before. The dilated pupils were fixed on me.
In a low voice, I called his name.
“Saul.”
But even though he was looking straight at me, I realized he didn’t see me. Neither me, nor anything or anyone outside himself. He was living in another world, maybe the same one from which Dulce Veiga had called to him once, while he was preparing his escape, to look after the baby, the same one who was looking after him now. He was smiling a pinched smile, a thread of drool running from the corner of his mouth, his legs spread, the arms with bruised veins abandoned on the green velvet. As if he were traveling in space, as if he were piloting a spaceship. Lost in galaxies, his head thrown back, the blue eyelids half-closed, far from us and everything else, alone at the wheel of his madness.
Márcia went to the dressing table and turned off the music. She looked perfectly calm in the middle of that uncomfortable silence. Or too exhausted to be scared.
“Do you know him?”
“I could lie and say no, like you did,” I said, and she lowered her eyes. “But I saw him once. Many years ago, in your mother’s apartment.”
Patrícia was picking up the blood-stained pieces of the syringe. Vita was gently rubbing against the legs of the man dressed as Dulce Veiga as if she wanted to caress him. The baby had stopped crying. The rancid smell from the hallway wafted in through the open door.
“They were very good—” Márcia began. Then she hesitated, ran her hand over her head, spiking up her bleached hair. And repeated, more firmly, “They were very good friends, Saul and mother. He doesn’t have anyone else left in the world except me.”
“And why you, exactly?”
“That’s my business.”
“You could be arrested for drug trafficking, you know that?”
I immediately regretted having said it. As if by magic, Márcia’s calm or fatigue suddenly vanished. A spark went through her body, and she became her old raving self again. Hands planted on her hips, she screamed:
“Go ahead, turn me in. There must be a police station around here, why don’t you go and turn me in as a dealer. A thief, a murderer. Whatever you like, go ahead, what are you waiting for?”
Maybe the same way, I thought bitterly, maybe the same way, without meaning to, I turned in Saul twenty years ago, and you don’t even know it. It was a horrible thought. And it wasn’t my fault, I wanted to throw myself at Saul’s feet, scream like a madman, crazier than him, rolling on the floor, gnashing my teeth, that I was so young, I didn’t know what I was doing.
Vita meowed, frightened, looking at us. Patrícia put her hand on Márcia’s arm, explaining in a low voice:
“I was the one who called him. I didn’t know what to do, you disappeared, the rest of the band is in a panic.”
Márcia pulled away with such violence that the shards of the syringe in Patrícia’s hand fell back to the floor.
“You’re an idiot, you just had to blab my whole life to a complete stranger, didn’t you? I warned you that if you did that you could pack up and get the fuck out.”
“Our show, the opening night,” Patrícia wailed. In Márcia’s presence she turned whiny and imploring like a little beggar. “I thought it was important, I was just trying to help you.”
“You’ve been trying to help me for years, and you always fuck everything up. Wasn’t it you who told Alberto that I’d lost my mind in New York? Do me a favor—don’t try to help me ever again. I want to fuck myself up on my own, honey. Like I did when Ícaro died.”
Suddenly, without anyone expecting it, Márcia threw herself on the bed and burst into tears, her face buried in the filthy sheets. Before that living-dead man disguised as another living-dead person, Patrícia and I stared at each other, like actors who haven’t learned the lines or the stage directions of a film or play, or maybe a book, of dubious quality. She glanced at her diver’s watch.
“We should already be at the Hiroshima.”
But we are there, I thought. In the center of the atomic mushroom, at the second of the explosion, blind and dumb with the ghastly light. Stuck in the mirror of the dressing table was a picture of the real Dulce Veiga. The black tulle of a veil covered her face almost completely. Except for her thin-lipped mouth, which was smiling at us. Vita had jumped on the bed and was purring in Márcia’s hair.
“Maybe it would be better if you two went to the theater,” I said. “We’ll talk later.”
Then a woman appeared at the door. She was fat and placid, very brown, the straight hair of an Indian, a thick mustache. She looked like a Bolivian, a Yanomami. She was rocking a snotty baby in her arms, probably the same one who’d been crying. She glanced inside.
“What’s going on, dona Márcia? I heard cries, is your Saul sick again?” From the chair, Saul let out a moan. The woman laughed, went near him and said, “He’s funny, he doesn’t like people to call him Mr. Saul. He turns into a regular tiger, only he doesn’t bite. He wants you to say Dulce Veiga, who knows why.”
“It was nothing,” Márcia mumbled.
“The opening, the show,” Patrícia said.
Saul groaned again. The woman repeated rhythmically, like a song, until he quieted down:
“Dulce, Dulce Veiga. Everything’s okay, Dulce Veiga, everything’s all right. You’re looking so pretty today, dona Dulce.”
Márcia got up.
“Let’s go. I have to sing.”
And the show must go on, I thought. Not telling them the apartment number wouldn’t have helped, the police always knew everything in those days. Márcia was walking to the door. I grabbed her arm.
“You’re gonna have some explaining to do.”
“I don’t have to explain anything, goddammit. Stay out of my life.”
“But I need to know.”
Suddenly, she relented.
“All right,” she said, and pulled her arm away, so meekly I could hardly believe it. She had violet circles under her very green eyes, two deep lines on the sides of her mouth. Her skin looked worn, dry. I tried to hug her, say again that it wasn’t my fault, but she pushed me away without anger. “Later, after the show. Look for me at the Hiroshima, we’ll talk.”
In my ear, Patrícia asked in a whisper:
“Who is this guy?”
I didn’t answer, I couldn’t. In a way, I didn’t know either. Márcia kissed Saul on the forehead and said to the woman:
“Call me if he gets sick, dona Iracema. Anytime, you know where to find me.”
The woman with the Indian face was standing next to the green armchair. She was rocking the baby in one arm, while with her free hand she caressed Saul’s livid forehead. You’re pretty, Dulce Veiga, she was saying, I’ve never seen you looking so pretty in my entire life. Like the silvery track of a snail, the drool continued to ooze out of Saul’s mouth onto the blue silk of his dress.
44
I stood in the shower for nearly an hour. When I finally came out, feeling just as dirty as before, I remembered they used to run off the arts section of the following day’s paper around ten o’clock. I could go by before the show and take Márcia the published interview. Or, I had always dreamed of this, burst into the printer’s crying, “Stop the press! Stop the press!” But there would be nothing new to print. Other than perhaps a picture of Saul dressed as Dulce Veiga. And me at his feet, my head on his knees, like a bisexual pietà: “Twenty years later, reporter bemoans consequences of his tip to police.” Not tip: denunciation or betrayal were more the Diário da Cidade’s style.
I slapped myself, cool it, it wasn’t your fault, everything was already set up. On the way out, I took some money, put it in an envelope, and slipped it under Jandira’s door, as if I were trying to buy the sympathy of the orixás. I went down the stairs pursued by a swarm of raging Exus.
The full moon was rising behind the overpasses of Bela Vista. Huge, round, yellow. I walked down Rua Augusta, staring at shop windows, magazines, people, kicking empty cans, pebbles, mentally adding up the numbers of the cars’ license plates. I could lose my mind if I wanted to, I knew so many terrible stories. It would be just as easy to walk into the first bar, drink myself to sleep, and wake up with a throbbing head and vague memories of some nightmare.
When I saw the paper I felt better. Above the color photograph of Márcia, Castilhos had put a full page headline—Márcia F.: Everything More. You could see the colors of one of the butterfly’s wings between her breasts beneath the unbuttoned blouse. It was nice, provocative. The text seemed pretty good too, despite the typos. Slowly, my shoulders began to relax, and I felt like a good person, I felt decent again. I decided to buy roses for Márcia. White roses, roses of peace. It took me so long to get to Largo do Arouche that by the time I arrived at the Hiroshima it was almost midnight. There were a lot of people in front of the lilac neon atomic mushroom.
I ran my fingers over my parched lips. In a way, that kiss was still burning. As if a piece of my mouth had been missing all those years, still clinging to Saul’s mouth.