Chapter 29

CLARICE WAS WALKING home from school, billowing dress, nails painted red. Mona stood in the shadows, waiting for her to pass. The day was crisp and radiant. As Clarice neared, Mona stepped out.

“Hey,” she said.

Clarice stopped. “Oh, hey. You startled me. I was lost in thought. What’s up?”

“What are you doing right now? Do you have somewhere you have to be?” Mona had rehearsed this first part of the speech.

“Erm, well, I was going home. Why?”

“I want to show you something.”

“Okay,” said Clarice, a little confused. “What?”

“Follow me,” said Mona and started to walk toward the Corner. She was trying to stay steady, maintain an air of confidence. When they got to the entrance, she took the key for the shelter from her pants pocket and said, “We have to make sure no one sees us.”

“You have a key?”

“Shhhh.”

She unlocked the door and quickly glanced around. All clear. She motioned for Clarice to descend the stairs. She then locked the door behind them. The luminous sky disappeared behind the heavy door and their eyes were met with a darkness that one expects to find only inside a tomb.

Clarice grabbed Mona by the shoulder and said, “I can’t see a thing.”

“Don’t worry,” Mona said, pulling out a flashlight and lighting the stairs.

Mona had been down here earlier and put a couple of lamps inside, to make the place look nicer. She turned them on and they glowed like suspended balls of heat. The shelter was nothing but a concrete room, with benches lined against the walls. Blankets were folded and piled up in corners. Some reading material was stacked under the benches, like first aid handbooks, a dictionary of catastrophes, and the President’s collected works, brought down by Ruben. There was also a botanical field guide, to help survivors identify different types of plants and trees, and one about spotting local birds, which Mona had been looking at.

“It’s odd,” she said, offering the botanical book to Clarice, “were there to be a catastrophe and we had to shelter here with gas masks on, this would probably be the most precious book.”

Clarice leafed through the pages, but stopped to say, “What’s that smell?” She looked around a bit more. “And what is that thing?”

She pointed to the Invention, which, covered by a sheet with orange flowers on it, looked like a beast, poised to leap. The machine stood in the far corner of the shelter.

“Oh, it’s The Invention. Belongs to my batty great uncle, Robinson.”

Clarice went up to The Invention and lifted the sheet—the machine glistened with thick oozing oil that puddled up all around it, as if it was alive and breathing. Clarice quickly dropped the sheet and stepped back.

“Creepy,” she said.

“Apparently it can see into the future, but it takes too much power.” Mona laughed. “As the future might. Can’t expect to see into the future on a domestic electricity rate, can you?”

Clarice laughed.

“Want some tea?” Mona asked.

Mona had tried to make the shelter as comfortable as possible, both for herself to read in and hide, and, most importantly, to present to Clarice as an attractive option, notwithstanding the unforeseen element of The Invention’s brooding presence, mostly felt through its potent odor. She had brought down her diary, which she deduced that her mother had been reading; she’d also stashed her cigarettes here and taught herself to smoke convincingly. Except for Ruben at the end of every day, no one had the inclination to descend into this cold subterranean space. She had no idea that Robinson made his pre-dawn escapades down here, and that he had noticed that Mona had made it into a secret nest. He thought he’d keep it to himself. Mona had also brought down a small heater. She turned it on. Gave a blanket to Clarice. She made peppermint tea in a tin pot. Clarice said nothing, just sat down on a bench with the blanket and watched Mona.

“So what’s all this, you spend time here?”

“It’s quiet, and no one ever comes. I make tea and read and smoke.”

“You smoke?”

“Yes. Want one?” She took her pack from a box where she held the rest of her kit: her diary, spare light bulbs, gloves for when her hands got cold, tea bags.

“Does Maia smoke?”

“No. Just me.”

Clarice took a cigarette and they lit up. Mona had picked up the demeanor and gestures by watching the adults and copying their moves. She was doing well, she thought. They sat in silence for a moment, waiting for the tea to brew.

“I have another key, if you want,” Mona said. “I thought maybe you can read here, write too. You can bring your typewriter down. I don’t have one, but I compose some poetry in my notebook.”

Clarice said nothing for a while.

“Yeah,” she then said. “It’s not a bad spot.”

Mona was delighted, but didn’t show it.

“We could have a signal knock?” Mona asked.

They agreed that they would knock three-pause-two-pause-three times, to warn each other when they were coming in. If there was no knock and the door was being unlocked, they’d hide. They shook on it. Then, not finishing her tea, Clarice said she had to go. Mona gave her the key.

“Well, I’ll let myself out,” Clarice said with a smile.

She walked up the stairs thinking that Mona was odd, but that she also liked how daring she was.

“Thanks,” she said as she left.

The next day, Clarice knocked three-pause-two-pause-three times and unlocked the door. Mona had been there since school finished, drinking tea and eating butter cookies. Clarice came down, lugging her typewriter. Mona helped her find a good spot for it on one of the desks. They would hide the typewriter under the blankets at the end of each session, they decided. Clarice was wearing a hooded jacket and a hat, her brown curls sticking out from under it. She also had fingerless gloves on, which Mona silently admired.

“What’s your novel about?”

“Love. I’m trying to understand the mystery of love.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” said Clarice. “We are raised with this idea that a woman must find love and marry. That a woman can’t taste love, in the physical sense, before marriage. Well, I say crap to that.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve had sex, you know.” Clarice was looking at the ceiling, made of rough cement. “I’ve had it several times. The first time, when I was thirteen. With my cousin’s friend, in the village. We went to a bush and did it there. He was seventeen. He didn’t know what he was doing, and neither did I. But I wanted to try it.”

Mona swallowed. She was thirteen. She could not imagine herself being behind a bush with a boy and having sex. She felt hot. A great unease flooded over her. She glanced at The Invention, thought she’d seen the thing move with her unease. She looked away from it, said to herself, “Don’t be silly.”

“Men have so much more freedom than us. I’m telling you this because I think you’re cool, you can obviously keep a secret if you’ve got a key to this place. I congratulate you on this, normally everyone just wants to know what everyone else is doing, but you’re clearly a woman of private affairs,” said Clarice.

A woman? thought Mona. Me?

“Have you had a boyfriend yet?”

“No,” said Mona. “Not yet.”

“You’ll find men are not that impressive. But I’m looking for love, true love. That’s why I’m writing this novel, to discover, if I can, what true love is about. I don’t want to marry and spend my life tending to a husband, like my mother does. Clarice Lispector was an ambassador’s wife. She was also an incredible writer, the best there was, in my opinion, but she spent so much of her life living as a wife. I really don’t want that.”

Mona felt she should say something. “Yeah, that would not be good.”

“One guy, my dad’s work colleague, used to come around to our house all the time. One day, when my dad had gone to the kitchen and I was standing in the living room, he put his hand inside my dress. I was surprised, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t a virgin anymore, but I didn’t know if this would ever happen, I mean, I saw the way he’d been looking at me. I was fifteen, they like that, these older guys, they like us young girls.”

Mona was shocked. “What did you do? Did you tell your dad?”

“No!” Clarice laughed. “I let him. Next time he came when my parents weren’t home and we fucked in their bedroom. He taught me all I needed to know to be a good lover.”

Mona blinked, looked at her shoes. They were black. And round. “Oh, wow,” she said. Her throat was dry.

“You’re shocked, you think I’m disgusting, right?” said Clarice, part mocking, part searching.

“No, no!” Mona sat up. “I think it’s amazing, yeah, you should learn about this stuff.”

She didn’t know what she was saying, felt something she could not name.

“He came round all the time after that, sneaked out on his lunch break. I used to put on my mother’s lingerie, her high heels. It was weird. It was like I was my mother, but not my mother. I used to wait for him to turn up, wearing nothing but lace underwear and high heels.” She laughed. “It drove him wild. I liked to watch the way he got more and more needy for my body, for these roles I used to play for him. He asked me to slap him, to step on him with the heels, all sorts of shit turned him on.”

She stopped, thought for a while. Mona was imagining Clarice’s heel prodding the man’s thigh; there was something comical about it.

“Then I got bored. Told him I’d tell my dad if he insisted, so he never tried again. Though I still see him circling around the building on his lunch break. Anyway, I should do some writing now.” She turned around to her typewriter and bashed on the keys.

Mona went upstairs for lunch. Rosa had been cleaning out wardrobes, re-shelving books, sorting cupboards. Beef stew was on the table, around which Diogen, Ruben, Robinson, and Rosa sat, blowing into their heaped spoons. It was two days after the party. Mona felt lightheaded from Clarice’s stories and the oil fumes that filled the shelter.

“How was everyone’s day?” Rosa asked.

Diogen just nodded; he had not spoken for two days.

Ruben started talking about all the things he needed to prepare for his trip. “They say to bring warm clothing. The deck can be a rough place to stand on if it’s windy.”

Robinson said, “Today, I put two more pigeons on the path to recovery.”

After The Invention had been moved down to the shelter, he had taken to pigeon keeping, constructing a large cage on the balcony out of bicycle wheel spokes and various other recycled metal materials. He now kept—and released, for their “wing exercise” as he called it—over fifty pigeons. The cage was enormous and took up most of the balcony. Robinson’s rate of building was so prolific that the cage—which Ruben and Rosa and Diogen had agreed to after Robinson had lain on the bed half-dead for four days after The Invention had been moved downstairs, only going to the toilet but even that was done on his knees like a tortured martyr—went from a relatively small thing to an enormous dome construction in one afternoon.

“Really, uncle,” Ruben said, “I wish you would stop with the pigeon keeping—the birds are shitting all over the balcony and everything stinks again. And it’s impossible to sleep with all that goo-goo noise in the morning.”

“What is it with you people?” said Robinson. “Can’t I do anything to keep my soul alive? First you deny me my life’s task by moving it into that catacomb, then you want to take my pigeons, which have become like my babies!”

He was about to enter into one of his dramas, so the family decided to keep quiet.

“Also,” he said, “someone has been rummaging around my money again.”

“No one is rummaging around your money, Robinson,” said Rosa. “You have no money.”

Robinson eyed everyone suspiciously and bit into a piece of beef. “Yeah, right,” he said.

The sound of the gurgling pigeons came from the balcony in a great reverberating noise.

Mona didn’t speak. She had nothing to contribute to this exchange, which was turning into a daily ritual. Her heart was heavy. It was as if an entire layer of the Earth had been peeled off by Clarice’s confession, revealing an unbearably hot ground that she was meant to stand on. She had no idea whether the Clarice she loved and the Clarice she had spoken to were the same Clarice, and she didn’t know if she wanted to talk to Clarice further, but something about the idea of her opening up like that, of sharing her secrets with Mona—and what secrets!—felt as if pulling back now would equal a type of betrayal. It was a feeling she had not known before, a feeling of wanting to be pulled under and wanting to emerge, a simultaneous plea for intimacy and separation. Who was the plea aimed at? Herself or Clarice?

“God, you’d think the smell of the oil would have gone by now, but it’s still very strong,” said Ruben

Mona realized that she stank of oil. Her mother looked at her. Did she know? It was always hard to tell with Rosa, but it seemed she knew everything. So during that lunch she decided to assemble a special set of clothes for the shelter—a sort of shelter uniform, she called it to herself.

The next day, Clarice continued. “I had a boyfriend last year. I thought that was love. He said he adored me. Pah! We had sex everywhere. Outside, inside, wherever we could. But then, after some time, he said he didn’t want a relationship. He said he wanted to be free to go with other girls. At first, I was upset, like a stupid girl. I didn’t know what do with that. But I agreed. I thought, What’s the point in trying to convince him? And then, when I went off with another guy and he found out about it, he went mad with jealousy. Nearly killed him.”

“Oh wow, really? That must have been confusing.”

“Yes.” Clarice paused. “After him, I was with this other guy, who thought he was a woman.”

“What do you mean, he thought he was a woman?”

“Well, he loved women, he said. But he fucked like a man.”

Every time Clarice said the word “fuck” Mona’s insides would freeze a bit, but she ignored this feeling for she knew that this was the word she’d have to use too, from now on, if she was to be taken seriously as an equal.

“He wanted to be a woman, he said, he thought women were superior to men, so he would pose for me sometimes as if he were a girl. He’d put his dick between his legs, you know, so it looked like he didn’t have a dick, and he’d put my bra on, and we’d sometimes get drunk and role play. I was a guy and he was a girl, he loved that. He’d put tights on, he used to buy loads of tights, and then he’d ask me to rip them off. That was quite fun for me.”

“Oh my,” Mona said. “I didn’t even know such things existed.”

Clarice offered her a cigarette and said, “Oh yes, my dear, all kinds of shit exists in this town of ours, under the watchful eye of the President and the parents and the school teachers. And under the watchful eye of this thing,” she said, pointing to The Invention. “I swear it’s fucking alive, this machine, it’s like it’s listening to my every word.”

Mona looked at The Invention, and indeed, the machine appeared as if it had been billowing under the sheet the moment before, but suddenly stopped, not wanting to be detected.

“Nah, it’s just a weird machine that doesn’t work,” said Mona, mostly to herself.

“Anyway,” Clarice continued, “one of my classmates was fucking a philosophy teacher in the toilets after everyone had left school, that happened the other day. Plus everyone smokes in the school toilets. It’s a crazy world out there. But I repeat, I don’t want to marry anyone. The guys here are stupid, and a woman is imprisoned by marriage.”

Mona nodded.

And so Clarice told Mona her stories, and Mona had no idea if they were true, though she did believe them since she had yet to acquire experiences of her own. But the stories flattened her, for her entire concept of the outside world and its structures fell apart with them. The stories gave her a sense of speculation, of wonder when she walked down the street. Who was doing what to whom and how, and why? Clarice was also the first and only person who had asked Mona if she masturbated.

Mona timidly nodded, said, “Sometimes” in a choked voice.

“Just like Lenin said, Learn, Learn, Learn,” Clarice insisted, “I say, Masturbate, Masturbate, Masturbate!”

She roared with laughter and Mona pretended to roar, although she was really quite uneasy. All their confessions remained buried inside the fallout shelter. She thought of Diogen saying that fallout shelters were actually tombs, and she thought that, in a way he had not intended, he was right. Mona wanted to confess the greatest thing of all for her—that she thought she preferred girls to boys, and that most of all she preferred Clarice, though it was becoming quite clear that Clarice did not feel the same way.