During the final days of her cancer, Filomena became addicted to morphine, and Senhor Pedro to Guida. Even after Filomena’s burial, the pharmacy owner never tired of seeking out the young woman to conclude unfinished business in the back of the pharmacy. Since Guida no longer had any need for morphine injections, and needed a great deal of peace, her responses to Senhor Pedro were variations on ‘No’ in the beginning and threats to file a complaint in the end.
‘If you keep this up, senhor, I’m going straight to the police to speak with the commissioner.’
‘Go ahead. The commissioner’s going to laugh in your face, that’s what’s going to happen!’ And to reinforce his point, Senhor Pedro laughed in Guida’s face right then and there.
Guida turned her back and tried to think about other things. She was Guida Gusmao, the woman who only slept with those she wanted to sleep with, and when she wanted to sleep with them.
After Filomena’s death, Chico grew so resentful that Guida allowed him to sleep in her bed once again. A mother’s body is an excellent remedy for rage. They held each other beneath the covers, Guida believing she was protecting her son, her son believing he was protecting his mother. Guida breathed deeply so that Chico would think she was sleeping, Chico breathed deeply so that Guida would think he was sleeping. They would fall asleep together. Guida would wake up after a short while and resume taking shallow breaths.
It was no use spreading the news through the neighborhood that she was once again accepting children under her care. The mothers of Estácio had found other babysitters, for better prices than those demanded by Guida. The flour jar where she put away money contained neither money nor flour. The end of the month was arriving, and the landlord had already begun to look at Guida with hungry eyes.
She found work as a cashier at a haberdashery in Rio Comprido. It was a narrow and dark store that received its share of dust from the trolleys and buses going up and down the Rua do Bispo. The store belonged to a Turkish lady with enormous breasts, which appeared even larger in the printed dresses she wore. Dona Amira had been a widow for years, and in order to survive as the owner of her business and her fate she’d discovered she needed to act like a man. Not even the teardrop earrings and long nails managed to give her the slightest feminine air. Everyone in the neighborhood showed respect for her unsmiling Good mornings, her pursed lips and her complete lack of interest in anything other than needles, scissors, and thimbles.
The tiny store on the Rua do Bispo was Dona Amira’s estate. There, she gave orders and bellowed commands. A few minutes’ lateness would be docked from Guida’s paycheck. Free time at the cash register was time that could be spent doing other work, so Guida had to make the rounds through the store with the duster. Or the broom, or a damp cloth over the glass showcase, and what did that bird-brained Guida think she was doing with the duster on the other side of the haberdashery? There’s a woman at the cash register trying to buy bobs of thread! Incompetence was something that irritated Dona Amira to no end, and since she needed motives for irritation in order to feel alive, Guida soon became incompetent. ‘You’re incompetent!’ she would say, and Guida would lower her head.
Guida knew that her incompetence was related to the lack of love in Dona Amira’s life, so she didn’t think much of it. She knew that her work was related to her son’s wellbeing, and so she accepted the situation. Guida also knew that it was better to have a woman as a boss than a man, even if this woman was capable of transforming a haberdashery into purgatory. Better to be in purgatory than in some back room sprawled beneath her boss.
What’s more, everything was going to get better the following month, when Guida’s ‘training period’ would come to an end and she would finally earn a full minimum wage and have her work documents signed. Dona Amira had hired Guida on the condition that she undergo a three-month tryout period, earning only half the salary. According to the Turkish woman, ninety days were what was needed to ensure that she could use the cash register. Guida had accepted. Not only because there were no other conditions to be accepted, but because this Dona Amira, so versatile in the art of keeping employees under her thumb, gave Guida an advance, which allowed the young woman to pay the month’s rent and made her feel indebted to her boss from the outset.
After spending days receiving orders Guida would return home wiped out, her skin covered in a dusty film. Chico would either be reading a book in the living room or reading a book in the bedroom. Mother and son ate dinner together and in silence. Guida had nothing to say about work, and Chico didn’t want to talk about school. They felt the absence of the noise of children and of Filomena’s laughter. Eating in silence was like eating with Filomena, the emptiness reminding those left behind of the space she had once occupied.
One July night Chico complained of a sore throat, and Guida prepared a saltwater rinse. He had a bit of fever, so Guida gave him aspirin. A few days later, the boy couldn’t get out of bed. He spent the morning in a fetal position beneath the sheets, trying not to moan.
Chico had contracted rheumatic fever. He would need injections of Benzetacil, cortisone, and heart medicine.
‘How long will the treatment last, doctor?’ Guida asked, wringing her hands.
‘Until he turns eighteen.’
Guida continued wringing her hands, as though she might find a few cruzeiros hidden in between her fingers. She was never very good at math (although she was good at covering up her errors at the cash register at the haberdashery), but it wasn’t necessary to add up the cost of all the medicines the doctor prescribed and multiply that by the twelve months in the year and the seven years of treatment to know that she would never be able to afford it all.
Or perhaps she would.
She went back home to work out a budget. She didn’t know much beyond being a cashier. Guida only knew about decoration, about styling hair, make-up, and nail polish…So that was it. Guida could open up a salon at home. She could work on Saturdays and Sundays, and there’d be no lack of clients. All the women in Estácio coveted her looks and appearances, and deep down wanted to look like her.
She requested another advance from Dona Amira, who curled her lips even more but did not refuse. Guida bought brushes, bobby pins, nail polish, nail clippers. She moved the dressing table from the bedroom to the living room, stacked the women’s magazines next to the armchair, and spread the news through the neighborhood that her house was now a beauty salon at weekends.
Guida was truly talented with her hands, and had good taste. Women would arrive in a bit of disarray and leave all done up. The money coming in covered Chico’s medicine exactly. The elixir for his heart alone cost four hundred cruzeiros! The same as ten days’ work at the haberdashery.
That day was the last Saturday of Chico’s second month of treatment. Guida had just turned off the living-room lights. Her last client had left and now she was resting in the dark, lying on the sofa. Her feet were swollen, her back ached. She grabbed one of the women’s magazines, leafed through it without paying attention to its contents. Of all the hands that touched those magazines hers were the only ones with chipped fingernail polish. The following day, women would turn up again at nine in the morning; Guida would barely have time to sweep the room, make some food, and clean the bathroom. Throw out the garbage full of hair and cotton-balls covered in nail polish, tidy up the pile of magazines, give a bit of affection to Chico, and have the feeling that she had only blinked her eyes during her brief hours of sleep. She felt tired but at peace.
She got up to grab Chico’s medicine. She opened the bathroom cabinet, where she kept the Benzetacil injections that she had learned to apply to her son and which hurt both of them so much. It was a thick needle that transported the concentrated liquid and left Chico’s backside aching for days. At times, the boy could not leave the bed because of the pain. Friends no longer called him to play football in the yard next to the church; just imagine if a ball were to hit his aching bum. She also grabbed the steroid pills and the bottle with the heart medicine.
As she was leaving the bathroom she tripped on the rug and the hypodermic needle stuck into her palm. She gave a yelp and dropped the medicines. The glass bottle with the heart medicine shattered, forming a dark-red puddle on the floor.
For two seconds Guida thought about calling her son to lick up the medicine that would save his life, and hers. There were eight days of work at the salon on the floor. Eight days brushing the hair of other women and painting nails that weren’t hers. Eight days lying to her clients: ‘You look beautiful with this hairdo,’ ‘You have such elegant, long fingers.’ Eight days in amongst four weeks of work so intense that Guida had stopped being Guida and had become a cog in a wheel whose purpose she couldn’t make out – she knew only that it spun, and that as long as these things gave her a small corner in which to live, a bit to eat, and little Chico’s health, they could treat her like a cog and she wouldn’t mind.
She could have sat on the toilet seat for half an hour or an hour and a half, crying over spilled medicine, if she hadn’t had more important things to worry about. Chico had to take his medicine the next day. The doctor had been clear: missing a single dose would leave her son with chronic heart problems.
She returned to the back room of the pharmacy and beneath the body of Senhor Pedro. The months of abstinence had caused him withdrawal symptoms, which revealed themselves in the drool he let fly over Guida. It was as though he were tasting honey for the first time; he made a mess of himself, a mess of Guida, and held down her arms, the pressure of his hands saying, ‘The medicine is mine, and for the medicine to become yours you have to become mine, and everything that is mine is beneath my body and firmly in my hands.’
Guida stared blankly to one side. She waited for the man to finish and left the pharmacy with the medication. Half a month’s medicine was now safely hers.
Two days later, she knocked on Euridice’s door.
This wasn’t exactly the story Guida told to Euridice. Sitting with her legs crossed, having captured her sister’s attention, Guida regained a bit of her self-esteem. In the version she told her sister, Filomena was a retired schoolteacher (‘Only by working in education can you understand children like she did, Euridice!’). Senhor Pedro was a saint who helped Chico with his medications (‘I don’t know what would have become of me if that man hadn’t wanted to please me so much!’). The part about Marcos, Guida told in its entirety – throwing in ‘scoundrel,’ ‘good-for-nothing,’ and ‘thin-skinned’ for good measure, and revealing details that made Euridice’s eyes transform into the shape of marbles.
‘Soon after we were married, Marcos asked me what a strainer was for. He’d never seen a strainer, Euridice! I told him it was to remove little bits of fat from the milk, and he told me the milk in his house had always come strained from the kitchen. How is it, Euridice, that a man doesn’t even know what a strainer is? Marcos had never cut an orange. One time I put a few on the table after lunch and he cut the fruit sideways, there was no way to eat it anymore, the wedges were unsalvageable. And he was only able to sleep with a pillowcase over his eyes. He said he couldn’t get used to the morning sun beating down so close to the bed, that his room in Botafogo had velvet curtains that kept out even the midday sun. A sissy, Euridice, a real sissy.’
Euridice felt a bit relieved to hear the stories that Guida told. It was inevitable that she would compare Marcos to Antenor, who she’d always known was a good husband. At least Antenor knew what a strainer was. A strainer was that thing that his Aunt Dalva and his wife Euridice used when they made orange juice, so he wouldn’t die clogged up with pulp.
In the part of the story with Dona Amira, Guida invented a bit more. The sweetest boss. When she received Guida’s resignation, she had to sit down to contain her dejection, and said, with a hand over her heart: ‘You’re a daughter to me, you hear, Guida?
‘You should have seen how she cried! But I told her that it was time for me to change my life, and dedicate more time to Chico’s education.’
It was exactly because she wasn’t a daughter to Dona Amira that Guida was at her sister’s house. She set the coffee cup down on the table and sat on the edge of the sofa.
‘Well, Euridice, it’s time for me to be near Mom and Dad again. I thought that we could go together to their house. Perhaps Dad won’t understand my running away, but Mom – I know Mom is going to forgive me.’
Euridice responded with her eyes cast to the floor.
‘Mom died last year.’
Guida brought her hand to her chest, seeking out the pendant of Our Lady that she would never again find there.
No one ever knew exactly what was wrong with Dona Ana. It was an illness that grew almost imperceptibly, day by day. Dona Ana became more and more hunched over and weak. She even left bits of salt cod untouched, and this was a woman who would always finish meals with a bit of bread to clean her plate. When she wasn’t feeling sad behind the cash register at the greengrocer’s Dona Ana was feeling sad cleaning the house, or sad cooking, or sad simply feeling sad, looking to the frame which held Guida’s picture.
Every now and then she would go to a different doctor. It’s anemia, it’s a lack of vitamins, it’s a lack of calcium, they all said. In fact, it was a lack of Guida, but that wasn’t in their books, so Dona Ana would go home with a prescription for vitamins and promises that she would improve. You need a tonic for your nerves, for your heart or for your muscles, they’d say. A tonic to forget that her daughter had run away, so she grew sicker by the day, leaving bits of salt cod on her plate and casting her eyes towards the picture frame in search of the only antidote that could make her regain her health.
One day she opened her eyes and decided that there was no reason to leave the bed. She turned to one side, turned to the other, and took a few naps. The next day she opened her eyes and decided there was no reason to turn from one side to the other. On the third day, she didn’t open her eyes.
Senhor Manuel went a bit mad after the death of Dona Ana. Like the good Portuguese man that he was, he preferred doing this alone and against the bedroom wall, where he beat his head in anguish during the first seven nights without his wife. He wished he had hair to pull, but now there were but a few strands behind his ears, combed over the top of his head to cover his bald spot. The sparse strands of hair were so precious to him that he thought it better to leave them be. He felt the same remorse in his heart as Guida when she learned of her mother’s death. Remorse for things that weren’t even his fault, like the rough manner that came from his childhood, and the belief that nothing was as important as honor. It was this belief that had caused Senhor Manuel to disown his own daughter. Better to have a daughter far away and a wife dying bit by bit than to take back the prodigal daughter and transform the shame into something tangible.
When Antenor arrived home that afternoon, he stumbled upon a scene from a soap opera. There was this woman he had never seen before, so beautiful – even as she made a face – flailing her arms, as Euridice consoled her and Maria waited on foot with a glass of sugar water on the silver serving tray. Cecilia and Afonso had arrived home from school a short time before and also stood by watching the scene; they couldn’t miss a drama like that. There was also this pudgy little boy with a pouty look on his face who hugged the young woman and rocked back and forth with her to the rhythm of despair.
Antenor didn’t even grow angry, because for the first time in a long time he noticed the interest in Euridice’s eyes. He liked to see his wife so attentive, even if it was as a supporting actress in this dramatic scene, and even if this scene took place in his living room next to the radio with its toothpick legs, which he had hopes of seeing survive the performance intact.
He decided he could kiss his wife’s forehead another time and went straight to the bedroom to change his clothes and put on his slippers. When he came back to the living room the woman had calmed down considerably. She continued rocking back and forth, but now she sobbed quietly in the arms of the boy and Euridice.
When Guida was herself again, she was introduced to Antenor. She had rivers of black make-up running from her eyes, and eyes that didn’t pay attention to that. ‘A pleasure,’ Guida said; ‘A pleasure,’ Antenor said, and uttered not another word. Euridice took her sister and Chico to the guest bedroom, showed them the bathroom and told them dinner would be served in half an hour.
When the six places at Antenor and Euridice’s dinner table were occupied that night, everything seemed perfectly natural. It was natural to host these exotic guests, and it became natural to see them walking through the house, first for a few days, and later for a few months. The routine of phrases traded between Euridice and Antenor, the good mornings and goodbyes, the sitting together for breakfast, the telephone call he made to his wife after lunch, the kiss on her forehead at five-thirty in the afternoon, the dinners, all took on a deep and implicit meaning: My sister will stay with us as long as she needs. She will leave when she feels ready, which might happen in a month, a year, or who knows how long.
Antenor consented. It was good to see Euridice happy, smiling and showering Cecilia and Afonso with kisses. It was good to hear his wife’s laughter echo throughout their home. He hadn’t even realized she could burst into laughter like that, time after time. He also enjoyed having Guida around. Euridice’s sister brought the Guida touch to the Gusmao-Campelo house. The crystal vases were suddenly filled with flowers, the tables had bordered tablecloths, and just look at those new pillows on the sofa. Chico was a quiet boy, living in a world composed mainly of his new school. He was the best student at the best institution in Rio, but he didn’t seem to care. The only things he cared about were his books, which unnerved Cecilia slightly. How could a boy who wasn’t all that ignore the girl who had earned the title of Class Queen, chosen nearly unanimously by the three classes of the sixth grade? (The girl who placed second received eight votes that, according to Cecilia, were bought with cheese bread doled out during recess.)
Every now and then Chico would pull his head out of a book to play button football with Afonso, which Cecilia considered yet another affront. As far as she was concerned, the only buttons worth his attention were those on her dresses. Aside from this minor conflict, the addition of Guida and Chico to the family occurred seamlessly. It was as though the guests had been expected for a long time, as if their arrival was all that was left for the Gusmao-Campelo family to be complete.
It was also the only thing left to add to the rumors that circulated about the household. Zélia spent whole days and nights with her arms and legs crossed, her face and body immune to the world, tapping her feet and wondering what in the world could be so funny on the other side of the wall to make Euridice burst out laughing like that.
An inappropriate sort of laughter, Zélia thought to herself. Everything that went against morals and good manners was inappropriate in her mind, and it was certainly not good manners to show just how happy one was. And who was that woman who was so, so… exotic? And that boy so, so… boyish? Zélia soon found out that they were Euridice’s sister and her son. It appeared that the woman had lost her husband in a battle against cancer, which Guida made a point of recounting in detail to the curious neighbor. ‘We went to Cleveland for his treatment, we rented a Tudor-style house and spent the winter in the snow. We drank hot chocolate like it was water, Nicanor bought me a fur coat, and Chico learned to ice skate. But as you know, miss, when God calls, no one can pretend not to hear, and God called my dear departed Nicanor, a high-ranking diplomat, a faithful servant of our dear Brazil, a tall and handsome man… You know what they say, Dona Zélia: Over there is becoming more interesting than over here.’
Zélia’s heart shriveled with rage. It shriveled and it stayed shriveled, because there was no way for her to find the hair in the dish that was Guida’s life. But there was a hair somewhere, that she knew.