No one knows for sure what came first. These were facts that were blurred over time and space, and later were diluted in the memory of the participants. One witness would say it happened like this, another would say it happened like that, and the only consensus was that the events did in fact take place.
And this is what occurred: Antenor passed all tests of resistance, ability, and political maneuvers thrown at him by the upper brass of the Bank of Brazil. His desk went through transformations imperceptible to the naked eye but visible after some years. It gradually grew bigger and moved to areas with wide-open spaces near large windows.
After decades of dedication and advancement he landed at a desk in an office of his own, which received the early morning sun through the five neoclassic windows of the bank headquarters. A smaller office, occupied by a secretary in black stilettos, separated Antenor from the other public servants, who at this point were more public than he was.
Antenor’s promotion to vice-president hadn’t been big news in itself. He had always believed he was predestined to occupy a leather chair in a room decorated with Persian rugs. That appeared to be the natural order of things. He was merely following the river current, a river that had never had any undertows, since the day he’d begun memorizing his multiplication tables.
It was around this time that Antenor began to think he knew everything. The best shoes were to be found at Casa Aguiar, a GE radio was better than an Emerson. Minancora cream was good for anything and Leite de Rosas was useless. It didn’t matter what anyone else said, their words were transformed into a buzz later interrupted by Antenor, who would say, ‘Don’t interrupt me! GE is better because that’s how it is.’ Afonso was an excellent student, Antenor knew this. It was the grades he received that were incorrect. Cecilia was an exemplary young lady whose lipstick was smudged because a friend had bumped up against her face. Euridice was a fulfilled woman absent of worries, thanks to him, Antenor, who never allowed the spoon to touch the bottom of the food jars. They had always had abundance, they would always have stability, and for that reason, his wife was happy.
Euridice’s eyes wandered until they landed on her husband. He was a lost cause. Later they simply wandered, as she sat in front of the bookshelf. The woman’s melancholy state, which had improved with her sister’s presence, worsened when Guida went to live with Antonio. The house fell silent once more, and once again there were more hours in the day than there ought to be. Antenor had work, Maria had her cleaning, her children had their whole lives. And Euridice, what did she have?
Afternoons in the living room, facing the bookshelf. Now and then Maria poked her head out of the kitchen to look at her boss, her feet stretching out over her slippers, arms resting across her belly, a wooden spoon lolling from one hand. Euridice didn’t even notice, or pretended not to notice. The maid would walk back into the kitchen, shaking her head. When Cecilia and Afonso arrived, Euridice pretended not to see, looking from side to side. When Antenor arrived, she pretended even harder. She didn’t want to give her husband explanations.
Perhaps it had been the repetition. Years and years seated in the same place, facing the emptiness embodied by the bookshelf. Or perhaps it happened because it was meant to. The fact is that during that new season of empty gazes, Euridice began to feel different. It was a weak sensation in the beginning, almost like an itch. She noticed that it only appeared when she sat there in the same place, eyes fixed on the same spot.
Euridice began to sit at her post less to gaze at the nothingness and more to wait for that sensation to arrive. The sensation would appear, and in the midst of the silence it found room to grow. It grew until Euridice could see it, and Euridice saw that the sensation was exactly that: the sensation was the gift of observation.
Euridice could see the bookshelf for the bookshelf.
She saw the bookshelf.
She rose to her feet and passed her right hand along the spines of the books. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert. Gilberto Freyre, Caio Prado Jr., Antonio Candido. Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir and Jane Austen. Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto, Hemingway and Steinbeck. Some of those books she had read and already forgotten, others she had bought and forgotten to read. A few others were added by Antenor, who bought books the same way others buy light bulbs: they are always good to have around, just in case.
It was a decent library. She sat back down on the sofa in the company of a book, and for the first time in a long time she directed her full attention to the pages before her. Later she grabbed another, and another, and began connecting the imaginary dots that made all of those texts one.
When she’d finished reading, Euridice put on one of her dresses and went downtown to buy a typewriter. Returning home, she cleared some space on the desk in the study that had until then been Antenor’s. She sent Maria to find another place for the accounting texts her husband had stubbornly held on to since he’d turned eighteen. She placed the typewriter on the desk and spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the letters. Tack-tack-tack is lovely on the ears, Maria thought to herself. As long as the sound could be heard, no one in the house would sit staring at the bookshelf.
Tack-tack-tack was the sound that defined those times. In the beginning, the sounds came out more slowly, a tack here and a tack there. Later they were transformed into a constant noise, a tack-tack-tack-tack-tack that filled the entire afternoon, so constant that its noise became nearly imperceptible.
Beyond writing, Euridice found herself another function for her hands, which was to light the cigarettes she would sneak into the first-floor bathroom. Each cigarette was a cry of freedom that was complete in itself and left no tracks. She soon had yellow teeth, and breath full of mint mixed with something Antenor couldn’t quite identify. She also acquired a sure expression, which came from the combination of the puffs of smoke and the books she read.
The only person who knew about her cigarettes was Maria. She saw her boss lock herself in the bathroom, smelled the cigarette smoke leaving the ventilation window, and heard the sprays of perfume Euridice launched into the air, to fool herself into thinking she had fooled Maria. The maid couldn’t have cared less. In fact, she thought that it had taken a long time for Don’Euridice to find a form of escape. When she herself was upset about something – for instance, my husband showed up, stole our money, and began whacking the children with the broom – she used the bottles from Antenor’s bar to alleviate her frustrations. Maria avoided the Ballantine’s – she knew Antenor continued drinking it during the Nights of Whiskey and Weeping – and instead explored the liquors that sat there like statues. When the alcohol in the bottle became low, she would replenish it with water and sugar so Antenor wouldn’t take notice, and life would continue, easier to face.
As soon as Euridice heard the front door open when the children returned from school she would remove the sheet of paper from the typewriter and lock it away with the others in the desk drawer. Then she would go to the living room and ask her children how their day had been.
‘It was good,’ Afonso would say.
‘I got a B on my math test,’ Cecilia announced one time. ‘The teacher said if I keep it up, I’m not going to have any trouble passing my college entrance exams. Luiza showed up with a French manicure. She said there’s a salon on Rua Mariz e Barros that does them that way. Can you buy me the new Tom Jobim album? I really want it.’
Antenor would arrive soon thereafter. He kissed his wife on the forehead, went to the bedroom to change his clothes, came back to the living room in his slippers. The family ate dinner together, one of them asking to pass the rice bowl, the other commenting on how hot it was that day.
Everyone knew about Euridice’s new routine but no one dared ask what she writing so much about. It was on an October night, when Euridice had already progressed quite far with her writing, that she let slip, between one forkful and another, the bit of information that sated the family’s curiosity.
‘I’m writing a book. It’s about the history of invisibility.’
Everyone continued eating in silence. No one bothered to ask any more about the book, if she wanted to publish it, what it was about, or who she was to decide to write just like that. They all held the conviction that Euridice was only to be taken seriously when announcing that dinner was ready or that it was time to wake up for school. Her projects were confined to the universe of that house. Or perhaps that of the neighborhood, if the project in question was making cheese sandwiches for a birthday party.
Euridice didn’t let herself worry. This not worrying was part of her new phase. She spent her days locked in the study, and if the sound of the typewriter fell silent, it was because books were lying open over the desk, with Euridice’s head square in between them. Now and then Maria heard someone talking and poked her head out of the kitchen to see if the visitor wanted a coffee. When she made it to the living room she would find Euridice talking to herself, behind the study door. She would let out a sigh before returning to the kitchen.
It was with her books that Euridice conversed. ‘This here seems brilliant, I can’t agree with this argument, this paragraph has everything to do with this other book, just look,’ she would say, addressing the pages before her. She underlined passages, wrote in the margins, and sometimes abused the exclamation point.
Now and then Euridice would catch the bus to the National Library. She would open the archive catalog, jot down a few numbers, and spend the day between stacks of books. She made notes in a new ruled notebook that Antonio was only too happy to sell her. Late in the afternoon she would return home, walking to the bus stop and clearing a path between the famished pigeons in the square in front of the library. But she saw neither the pigeons, the path, nor the bus. Euridice could only see the words that she’d read, as she looked distractedly through the bus window.
The only one who seemed to understand Euridice’s eccentricities was Chico. During Sunday lunches, when the Gusmao-Campelos welcomed Guida, Antonio, Chico, and Eulália into their home (this last one only appeared when she wasn’t sick, and she was never sick when Euridice was making salt cod), Chico went up to the study with his aunt. No one heard much of their conversations because they were conducted behind closed doors, and because no one was all that interested.
What caused consternation during Euridice’s new phase was her expression: that gaze of hers now seemed to pierce right through people, as though stealing their secrets. But as long as the household routine was maintained, as long as Afonso got a haircut and his uniform was clean, as long as Cecilia’s skirt was the right length and she didn’t laugh too loud, as long as Antenor’s slippers and the couch pillows were in the right place, Euridice could have whatever look on her face she very well pleased.
The Gusmao-Campelos had a life that was normal at last.
But that isn’t the full truth.
It’s nearly the full truth.
Antenor was still engaged in his mission to become a cuckold. He still drank more than he ought to on the Nights of Whiskey and Weeping, he continued to blame his wife for her nights of lust prior to their wedding. ‘Who was he?’ Antenor would ask, and Euridice would always respond that he never existed. But now she’d come to think that such nights would have been a good thing, for her and for Antenor.
Guida was present on one of those drinking nights. She sent Maria home as soon as she heard Antenor start to yell and did the dishes herself. She was drying the plates when Euridice appeared in the kitchen doorway, head hung low.
‘Antenor does these things. He thinks I wasn’t a virgin when we married because I didn’t bleed that first night.’
Guida continued drying the dishes.
‘That happened to me, too.’
‘What?’
‘The same thing happened to me. There wasn’t any stain on the sheet, but Marcos didn’t much care.’ She stopped for a second, looked straight ahead. ‘We were so in love in those days.’
Euridice eyed her sister the same way she eyed an interesting book. Then she went to put the silverware away.
Euridice’s writings lay in the desk drawer, stacked serenely in the darkness. The sunlight only snuck in once a day, when Euridice opened the drawer to add the pages she’d just written. There was hardly any noise, besides that of the typewriter. Despite the quietness of that life, those seemingly harmless pages had the near-magic power granted to certain sheets of paper: that of being able to disturb a great many people.
These great many people disturbed by Euridice’s writing were the other women in the neighborhood. In the minds of Zélia’s followers, Euridice’s latest antics went beyond boldness – they were an insult. Who was she to read difficult authors and write down anything besides cake recipes?
Euridice was disrespecting one of the basic principles of the Neighbor Statute, which stated that the happiness of a group is only possible when everyone in this group is alike, from the size of their bank account to their aspirations.
Upon learning from Zélia that the tack-tack-tack was the sound of Euridice’s typewriter, and seeing Euridice walking through the neighborhood with her arms wrapped around a stack of books, the Corporation of Women of the Environs of Rua Uruguai felt as though they’d taken a direct hit. Euridice’s behavior displayed an arrogance that could only be explained by a loss of reason.
The evidence of her dementia was ample: she no longer respected the laws of morality and good sense by continuing to greet Silvia after her separation. She didn’t want to participate in the Tijuca Council against Communism, founded by Dona Agnes. Euridice refused an invitation to become treasurer of the philanthropic committee of the América Football Club, engaged in eradicating poverty worldwide through the production of crocheted shoes for the bare feet of the black children who lived in the Borel slum.
One time Dona Efigenia asked Euridice what she was carrying in her bag from the Da Vinci bookstore, and Euridice had the nerve to tell her she’d bought the Complete Works of William Shakespeare and an Oxford English Dictionary, because she thought Shakespeare ought to be read in its original language.
Poor Euridice, the neighbors lamented. Now she’d lost it in two languages. They all felt such pity for the woman. When she began to wear a sea-green turban, they were filled with happiness because they could redouble their pity. Euridice no longer bothered with her appearance. She didn’t bother spending an hour in front of the dressing table, or two inside those mushroom caps in the beauty salons, just to parade through the neighborhood with her beehive, the kind that made a person look like she’d rolled up a camisole, stuck it on the crown of her head and covered the whole thing with hair.
It was shortly thereafter that everything changed. A truck rolled up in front of the Gusmao-Campelo household. Men in overalls walked out holding boxes, and more men in overalls with even more boxes. The bystanders couldn’t do anything but keep watching and begin to feel their blood boil.
It took Zélia an hour and a half to send out her first report. Antenor was all nerves as he watched the package containing his TV, Euridice was transfixed by the package of dishes, the delivery men were focused on developing hernias by carrying so many boxes full of Euridice’s books.
Yes, they were moving, Zélia said. And where were they going?
Zélia did her best to hide her face full of disappointment.
‘To Ipanema.’
To move to Ipanema in the early sixties was not merely to shift one’s residence by a few kilometers. It was to pass through time portals, to live in a place that made the rest of Rio look like the past. Ipanema was a neighborhood full of writers, poets, and musicians. Actors, painters, sculptors. Journalists, dramaturges, and cinema directors. Ipanema was also a family neighborhood, full of houses surrounded by low walls, buildings only a few stories high, and comfortable apartments that occupied entire floors, the most expensive in Rio.
It was to one of those apartments that Euridice and Antenor moved. Six living-room windows framed the Atlantic Ocean, the extensive hallway led to four rooms with built-in closets and a view overlooking the tops of the almond trees.
The move confirmed the neighbors’ suspicions, prompted by the Gusmao-Campelos’ abundance of domestic appliances: the family had become rich. They were no longer subject to the rules of Tijuca’s middle class, and a new evaluation was made of Euridice. She was not, in fact, nuts. Euridice was an exotic creature. Exotic with her turban, exotic with her writing. Exotic because there were no longer any parameters on which to base a comparison.
Euridice left Tijuca without looking back. She wanted nothing more from the neighborhood, not even the dust left behind on her shoes. When the boxes were loaded in the truck, she climbed into the family car and they made their way to Ipanema. Antenor pulled out into the street and Euridice crossed her arms in one big up-yours, though she swears to this day that she was only using her left hand to toss the wrapper for her cough drop out the window.
Ipanema, she would soon discover, also had its Zélias. But it was a new neighborhood and she was a new Euridice. And that, she knew, made all the difference.