Her hand shook slightly the moment she touched the warm, moist plastic. She seized the bag. Heart in her mouth, dread that anyone might have seen. Turning the corner, she ran right into Márcia. She hid the bag behind her, as if she could will it to be invisible. This was not Elvira’s year.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi, what are you doing round here?’
‘I’m going home.’
‘Oh, right. Coming to the party tonight?’
‘What party?’
‘Igor’s.’
‘Maybe. I have to go now. I have to get to the bakery, then home, need to pick up some things Flávia wanted. Better get going now.’
‘All right. See you.’
She ran a little way ahead, then looked back to make sure Márcia was out of sight. She sat down on a rock. Leaning on the fence edging a piece of waste ground, she looked inside the plastic bag: risotto, still warm. ‘People who throw out food think someone can eat it just cos it’s kind of packaged up?’ she muttered to herself. She didn’t know what to do. She had a home, and she used to have a dead-end kind of job until a few days earlier. But there was never anything left over. For some time nothing left over. She’d lost the dead-end job and now she spent her afternoons in and out of employment agencies, offices, shops, apartment blocks – whatever it took. That week she’d gone through all her drawers hunting for change in order to pay the rent on time. She paid it. She wasn’t in debt. She shared a tiny basement apartment with Flávia. She wouldn’t have her friend knowing that she hadn’t a single damn real left. With the plastic bag lying open on her lap, she shoved her fingers into the yellow rice. Saffron? The fresh smell of rocket awoke her appetite and, using her fingers as a scoop, she shovelled a handful into her mouth, and another and one more and again. When she saw the morsel of steak, she closed her eyes and chewed for a while. Mouth full of food. She hadn’t eaten anything this tasty in a long time. All she’d been eating was bread and the little seventy-five-centavo biscuits that she bought at the mini-market round the corner. You could still get biscuits for seventy-five centavos. She saw a man crossing the road towards her. She froze. The man went by, eyes glued to his phone. He hadn’t seen her. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and let the open plastic bag fall to the ground. The food scattered. She felt sick. She had eaten out of a bin. That this might’ve been her best meal in days didn’t matter: she had eaten out of a bin. Light-headed, she wondered how her life had reached this point. The explanation was simple: she’d been hungry. She looked at the rice all spread out on the pavement. Whoever it was had taken care to put it all in a bag. I didn’t, she thought. No one would eat it off the ground, now. An animal, perhaps. She caught sight of her reflection in the frosted vitrine of the shop opposite: body bent double, herself practically an animal. Through the glass, beneath the vast sign announcing a brand-new property venture, uniformed office employees were watching the scene, torn between hilarity and horror. She grimaced. She had eaten out of a bin. Stepping on the rice, she headed into the street. As she went, she looked deep into everything, right into the foundations, as if she had to understand it all again, from first principles.
Staring into space, she walked down the stairs alongside the shared terrace. She didn’t even notice that Fernando, who owned the building, was sitting there.
‘Elvira, where are you off to?’
‘Hi, Fernando. Just home.’
‘Not even a hello.’
‘Hi, Fernando,’ she said again.
‘You’re short on the rent, you know.’
‘Can’t be. I added it up a hundred times.’ She’d counted it so many times, all the small change she’d found to make up the total; she’d added up her own and the cash she got from Flávia, everything.
‘But the rent went up – remember? Flávia’s covered. You’re missing thirty-five, but we’ll say thirty. No need to pay cash, even, if you’re running low.’
Fernando picked at his nails, eyes on the ground. Not once did he look up to meet Elvira’s gaze. He exhaled slowly through pursed lips. Pressure. Still neither of them caught the other’s eye. Elvira swallowed her fury and only went on down the flight of stairs.
‘Think about it, okay? Nothing to worry about. A favour between friends.’
She went inside and slammed the door. Flávia started. She was on the sofa, a towel wrapped round her head. It had been a stifling afternoon. Through the room’s only window, the sun was blazing right onto the TV screen, which was doing its best to show a soap that had Flávia engrossed. The musty smell had strengthened, and Elvira thought that if the terrace hadn’t that odd slant to it, the sun wouldn’t ever come in at that end-of-the-afternoon moment.
‘Let’s go to Igor’s party,’ said Flávia.
‘What’s the party?’
‘Igor’s birthday – let’s.’
‘No. I feel shit. I’m skint, I don’t feel like a party.’
‘But it’s free to get in and I can pay for our taxi back. Or we can get the bus back in the morning.’
‘No, I really don’t feel like it. I owe thirty-five reais’ rent to Fernando.’
Flávia squinted harder and made a face like she was just waiting for the next bad excuse.
‘Can we just go to Igor’s party, please? I really want to see the venue. This is our chance.’
‘What’s the venue?’
‘The Loop.’
‘The What?’
‘That gay club on Visconde.’
‘Oh, yeah. I know it.’
The next excuse Elvira thought of was that her stomach was playing up because her only decent meal that day had come out of the rubbish and perhaps this was a sign that life wasn’t going so well. And the excuse after that, should one be required, could be the fact that the owner of the house where they lived had hinted a minute ago that she could pay her rent with sex.
In the end, staying home by herself seemed much worse.
‘Well?’
‘Okay, I’m coming.’
Flávia smiled. She got up from the sofa and went into her bedroom. Elvira frowned and, as the last of the sun vanished over the horizon, she felt the heat in her body drain away along with the light. This place she was in was no good. But she couldn’t get the situation clear in her head. When she was little, she had imagined how her life would be at fifteen. How it would be when she could hold her exercise books without needing a satchel, as the older girls did. When she could stop wearing uniform and choose her own clothes, like the older girls. When she turned fifteen, she’d decided to go on wearing the uniform. It was better than the clothes her mother used to buy at the supermarket or that came from charities. Once she had gone to school wearing a school-friend’s old T-shirt. They started to call her ‘Second-hand’. She used to think that things would be better at eighteen, because she’d be independent and would be able to go out and work. That all came even sooner. Her mother disappeared. Elvira had woken with the kettle whistling and no trace of her. No trace of her clothes. Not a toothbrush. Not even the smell of her. Independent at last, Elvira had gone out to find a payphone, and from the open booth had called her father. She’d tried to explain that Mum had cut loose, but he hadn’t understood. No one understood, in fact. Her dad came to clear out the house and take Elvira home. Long separated from her mother, Dad lived in a box room at his older sister’s place. He was a nurse and was looking after the sister, who had Alzheimer’s. Elvira spent a year sleeping on a mattress beside her father’s bed in that box room. Through that year she had listened to her father snore, weep and fart every night. Until the day she had saved enough money to get out of there. She had gone to live in another town, in a hostel for female students. She needed to complete the final year of school which she had missed. She only finished when she was twenty. The twilight years of public schooling. That year, more days were spent on strike than in class. She attended the union meetings and joined the student council, and thought that at twenty-five her life would surely begin. Now, almost thirty, she’d given up on expectations. Unemployed, she had just eaten rubbish and, should she wish, could pay her rent with a hand-job.
‘Elvira, how long are you going to stand there like a statue? I’m practically ready.’
‘Sorry.’ Elvira came out of her reverie. ‘Isn’t it a bit early?’
‘No. The party starts early for people on the guest list. There’ll be some drinks.’
Elvira thought that a drink, or an ocean of alcohol, was an excellent idea.
‘I’ll just brush my teeth and we can go.’
At the party, she avoided Márcia. She avoided talking to almost everyone there. She said hi to Igor, wished him happy birthday, left Flávia to her own devices and danced until she could barely stand. In the blink of an eye that separated reality from her desire to reduce her existence to this single moment, she saw Douglas. She didn’t pay much attention to the boy, merely accepted his company. He seemed to be inside her bubble.
She fucked Douglas that night. End of the party. Amid the endless shots of vodka they drank, he said that he wanted to be rich, he wanted to be somebody. She said that she felt like a nobody and that she had eaten rubbish. Douglas with his cap tipped back on his head, thin, his nails bitten right down, his beautiful, clean face. His rough voice backsliding into posh here and there, specially when his camp side showed through. He cleared his throat and went on. He told her his whole life-plan – plan A – and how it had all gone wrong. He’d run away to São Paulo and now, five years later, he was living in the city, working as a baker.
‘You’re a baker?’
‘Yeah, I make pastries, sweets, cakes too.’
‘Why’d you come to São Paulo in the first place?’
‘To be a model. I had a contract and everything.’
‘What happened?’
‘I gave the agency girl the slip. Don’t really know why I did it. I just left her behind at the airport. I wanted to vanish clean out of my stupid town.’
‘And you washed up here?’
They laughed. He told her he wasn’t taking his hormones but wanted to go back on them and, soon as life got back on track again, which would be soon, everything would go according to plan – plan B this time.
They didn’t know how it happened. They knew that, when they left the party, beneath the viaduct, they’d started to kiss. Elvira felt Douglas’s cock against her thighs, then in her hand and then inside. She woke in a studio bedroom that stank of mothballs. Douglas was staring wide-eyed at her and chewing his lip. He said he had never had sex with a woman.
‘These things happen.’
‘They do.’
‘And how are you doing on your plan to be Mr Rich?’
‘Mrs.’
‘Mrs Rich.’
‘I don’t know yet. But you see I have to be rich as a woman. I want to be a woman – I want a new life.’
‘I also want to be a woman and get myself a new life.’
‘What do you mean you want to be a woman?’
‘I dunno.’ Elvira closed her mouth and breathed out hard through her nose. ‘What happened to me yesterday shouldn’t happen to anyone. I’ve practically become an animal.’
‘Because we had sex?’
‘No! Well – because of that, too. I think. But that’s not the main thing. You seem really cool. There’s other stuff. My life is awful. You know when you get to the point where you’re trying to understand what’s going on but it just doesn’t make sense?’
‘I think so. But what actually happened to you?’
‘I ate food out of the bin. And I think I’m going to have to have sex to pay some bills.’
‘You mean become a prostitute?’
‘No! I mean, I don’t know. Is that all you have to do? You see how bad things have got?’
‘If you’re having sex for money it’s prostitution. End of. I’ve got lots of friends who do it. Who am I to judge? It’s not my scene. I don’t know the score. Are you hungry now? There’s food in the house, we can eat together.’
‘I also don’t know where I’d start – and I don’t want to know, either. But I’ve got no choice. How much do you pay for this place?’
‘Four hundred reais.’
‘Not bad.’
‘I pay the owner direct. But what happened? I don’t get what makes you want to be a woman. Or – what makes you think you’re not a woman.’
‘I don’t get it either. I just don’t feel like a woman. I don’t feel like a person at all. It feels like I’ve failed in life.’
‘You feel like an animal?’
‘Something like that.’
‘There’re times it’s good to be an animal. I think we hang on to this idea that humans and humanity are always the best thing to be. What we’re really talking about is kindness – except it’s not always like that. Humanity is far from being a good thing. Look around. If everyone was an animal, at least no one would feel guilty. No one would be bearing grudges, no one would be judging.’
Douglas was chewing at the skin on his fingers as he talked. Elvira couldn’t believe she was hearing this, couldn’t believe this boy’s precarious innocence, but she kept listening, and found herself thinking he could be right. Perhaps it really would be better to be an animal.
From the novel Bicho Talvez (Perhaps an Animal)