“I’m not a gambler or a big spender.”
“Artur,” said his highly exasperated mother, “I’ve got my hands full with my own worries!”
“What worries?” he asked curiously.
His mother looked at him as dryly as if he were a stranger. Still he was much more related to her than his father was, who, so to speak, had joined the family. She pursed her lips.
“Everyone has worries, dear,” she corrected herself, thereby shifting into a new relational mode, somewhere between maternal and instructive.
And from that point on his mother had taken the day in hand. The kind of individuality with which she’d awoken had dissipated and Artur now could count on her. Ever since he could remember, they either accepted him or reduced him to being merely himself. When he was little they used to play with him, tossing him up in the air, smothering him with kisses—and then all of a sudden they’d become “individuals”—they’d put him down, saying kindly but already intangible: “all done now,” and he’d go on vibrating with caresses, with so many bursts of laughter still to let out. Then he’d get cranky, kicking at one thing or another, seething with a rage that, nonetheless, would give way just then to delight, sheer delight, if they only wanted it.
“Eat up, Artur,” his mother concluded and now once more he could count on her. Just like that he grew younger and more misbehaved:
“I’ve got worries of my own but nobody cares. Whenever I say I need money it’s like I’m asking to go out gambling or drinking!”
“So now, mister, you admit it might be for gambling or drinking?” said his father striding into the room and making his way toward the head of the table. “Well, well! That’s some nerve!”
He hadn’t counted on his father coming home. Disoriented, but used to it, he began:
“But Papa!” his voice cracking in a protest that didn’t quite manage to be indignant. Counterbalancing things, his mother was already won over, calmly stirring her milk into her coffee, indifferent to a discussion that seemed to amount to little more than a few extra flies. She waved them off the sugar bowl with a languid hand.
“Time to get going,” his father cut him off. Artur turned to his mother. But she was buttering her bread, pleasurably absorbed. She’d escaped again. She’d say yes to everything, without paying any attention.
Shutting the front door, he again had the impression that they were constantly handing him over to life. That’s how the street seemed to greet him. “When I’ve got my own wife and kids I’ll ring the doorbell here and visit and it’ll all be different,” he thought.
Life outside the house was something else entirely. Besides the difference in light—as if only by leaving could he tell what the weather was really like and what course things had taken in the night—besides the difference in light, there was the difference in his manner. When he was little his mother would say: “outside the house he’s a sweetie, at home he’s a devil.” Even now, passing through the little gate, he’d become visibly younger and at the same time less childish, more sensitive and above all with not much to say. But with a tame interest. He wasn’t the type who struck up conversations, but if someone asked him as they did now: “Sonny, what side of the street is the church on?” he’d grow gently animated, tilt his long neck downward, since everyone was shorter than he; and answer engagedly, as if this entailed an exchange of courtesies and a source of curiosity. He watched intently as the old lady turned the corner in the direction of the church, patiently responsible for her route.
“But money is made to be spent and you know on what,” Carlinhos told him fervently.
“I want it to buy stuff,” he answered somewhat vaguely.
“A little bicycle?” Carlinhos scoffed with a laugh, flushed with mischief.
Artur laughed grimly, unamused.
Seated at his desk, he waited for the teacher to rise. Clearing his throat, a preface to the start of class, was the usual signal for the students to sit further back in their chairs, open their eyes attentively and think about nothing. “Nothing,” came Artur’s flustered reply to the teacher who was interrogating him with irritation. “Nothing” vaguely referred to prior conversations, to hardly definitive decisions about a movie that afternoon, to—to money. He needed money. But in class, forced to sit still and free from any responsibility, any desire was based on idleness.
“So you couldn’t tell right away that Glorinha wanted to be invited to the movies?” Carlinhos said, and they both looked curiously at the girl who was walking away clutching her binder. Thoughtful, Artur kept walking next to his friend, looking at the stones on the ground.
“If you don’t have enough money for two tickets, I’ll cover you, you can pay me back later.”
Apparently, as soon as he got money he’d be forced to use it for a thousand things.
“But then I’ll have to pay you back and I already owe Antônio’s brother,” he replied evasively.
“So what? what’s wrong with that!” his friend reasoned, practical and vehement.
“So what,” he thought with restrained fury, “so what, apparently, as soon as you get money everybody comes around wanting to use it, which explains how people lose their money.”
“Apparently,” he said diverting his anger from his friend, “apparently all you need are a few measly cruzeiros for a woman to sniff it out right away and fall all over you.”
They both laughed. After that he felt happier, more confident. Above all less oppressed by his circumstances.
But later it was already noon and every desire was becoming more brittle and harder to stand. All through lunch he deliberated bitterly over whether to go into debt and he felt like a broken man.
“Either he’s studying too hard or he doesn’t eat enough in the morning,” his mother said. “The fact is that he wakes up in a good mood but then comes back for lunch with that pale face. Right away his features look strained, that’s the first sign.”
“Oh it’s nothing, it’s just how the day wears on people,” his father said affably.
Looking at himself in the hallway mirror before leaving, he really did look just like one of those working fellows, tired and boyish. He smiled without moving his lips, contented in the depths of his eyes. But at the entrance to the theater he couldn’t help borrowing from Carlinhos, because there was Glorinha with a girlfriend.
“Do you guys want to sit in the front or the middle?” Glorinha was asking.
At that, Carlinhos paid for the friend’s ticket while Artur covertly took the money for Glorinha’s ticket.
“Apparently, the movies are ruined,” he said to Carlinhos in passing. He immediately regretted doing so, since his schoolmate hardly heard him, focused on the girl. There was no need to cut himself down in the eyes of his friend, for whom going to the movies just meant getting somewhere with a girl.
As it turned out the movies were only ruined at first. His body soon relaxed, he forgot all about the presence beside him and started watching the movie. It was only near the middle that he became aware of Glorinha and with a sudden start stole a glance at her. He was somewhat surprised to realize she wasn’t quite the gold digger he’d taken her for: there was Glorinha leaning forward, mouth open in concentration. Relieved, he leaned back in his seat.
Later on, though, he wondered whether he had in fact been used. And his anguish was so intense that he stopped in front of a window display with a horrified expression. His heart pounded like a fist. Beyond his startled face, floating in the glass of the window, were assorted pans and kitchen utensils that he looked at with a certain familiarity. “Apparently, I’ve been had,” he concluded and couldn’t quite superimpose his rage over Glorinha’s blameless profile. The girl’s very innocence gradually became her worst fault: “So she was using me, using me, and then she just sat there all smug watching the movie?” His eyes filled with tears. “Ingrate,” he thought in a poor
ly chosen word of accusation. Since the word was a token of complaint rather than of anger, he got a little confused and his anger subsided. Now it seemed to him, considered from the outside and leaving out personal preference, that in this case she should have paid for her own ticket.
But sitting before his closed books and notes, his gloomy expression cleared up.
He no longer heard doors slamming, the neighbor’s piano, his mother talking on the phone. There was a great silence in his room, as in a vault. And the waning afternoon seemed like morning. He was far away, far away, like a giant who could be outside with just his fingers inside the room and leave them absorbed in twirling a pencil around and around. Sometimes his breathing became labored like an old man’s. Most of the time, though, his face barely grazed the bedroom air.
“I already did my homework!” he shouted to his mother who was asking about the sound of the water. Carefully washing his feet in the bathtub, he thought about how Glorinha’s friend was better than Glorinha. He hadn’t even tried to see whether Carlinhos had “taken advantage” of her. At this thought, he hurried out of the tub and paused before the sink mirror. Until the tiles chilled his wet feet.
No! he didn’t want to have to justify himself to Carlinhos and no one was going to tell him how to spend the money he’d get, and Carlinhos could go ahead and think he was spending it on bicycles, but so what if he was? and what if he never, but never, wanted to spend his money? and he just got richer and richer? . . . what’s the big deal, you wanna fight? so you think that . . .
“. . . maybe you’re just too wrapped up in your own thoughts,” his mother said interrupting him, “but at least eat your dinner and say something every once in a while.”
Then he, in a sudden return to his paternal home:
“First you say we’re not supposed to talk at the dinner table, then you want me to talk, then you say we’re not supposed to talk with our mouths full, then . . .”
“Watch how you speak to your mother,” said his father without severity.
“Papa,” asked Artur meekly, frowning, “Papa, what are promissory notes?”
“Apparently,” said his father with pleasure, “Apparently high school’s useless.”
“Have some more potatoes, Artur,” his mother tried in vain to pull the two men toward her.
“Promissory notes,” his father began while pushing his plate away, “work like this: let’s say you have a debt to pay.”
Mystery in São Cristóvão
(“Mistério em São Cristóvão”)
One May evening—the hyacinths rigid against the windowpane—the dining room in a home was illuminated and tranquil.
Around the table, frozen for an instant, sat the father, the mother, the grandmother, three children and a skinny girl of nineteen. The perfumed night air of São Cristóvão wasn’t dangerous, but the way the people banded together inside their home made anything beyond the family circle hazardous on a cool May evening. There was nothing special about the gathering: they had just finished dinner and were chatting around the table, mosquitoes circling the light. What made the scene particularly sumptuous, and each person’s face so blooming, was that after so many years this family’s progress had at last become nearly palpable: for one May evening, after dinner, just look at how the children have been going to school every day, the father keeps up his business, the mother has worked throughout years of childbirth and in the home, the girl is finding her balance in the delicateness of her age, and the grandmother has reached a certain status. Without realizing this, the family gazed happily around the room, watching over that rare moment in May and its abundance.
Afterward they each went to their rooms. The old woman stretched out groaning benevolently. The father and mother, after locking up, lay down deep in thought and fell asleep. The three children, choosing the most awkward positions, fell asleep in three beds as if on three trapezes. The girl, in her cotton nightgown, opened her bedroom window and breathed in the whole garden with dissatisfaction and happiness. Unsettled by the fragrant humidity, she lay down promising herself a brand new outlook for the next day that would shake up the hyacinths and make the fruits tremble on their branches—in the midst of her meditation she fell asleep.
Hours passed. And when the silence was twinkling in the fireflies—the children suspended in sleep, the grandmother mulling over a difficult dream, the parents worn out, the girl asleep in the midst of her meditation—a house on the corner opened and from it emerged three masked individuals.
One was tall and had on the head of a rooster. Another was fat and had dressed as a bull. And the third, who was younger, for lack of a better idea, had disguised himself as a lord from olden times and put on a devil mask, through which his innocent eyes showed. The masked trio crossed the street in silence.
When they passed the family’s darkened home, the one going as a rooster and who came up with nearly all the group’s ideas, stopped and said:
“Look what we have here.”
His comrades, made patient by the torture of their masks, looked and saw a house and a garden. Feeling elegant and miserable, they waited resignedly for him to finish his thought. Finally the rooster added:
“We could go pick hyacinths.”
The other two didn’t reply. They’d taken advantage of the delay to examine themselves despondently and try to find a way to breathe more easily inside their masks.
“A hyacinth for each of us to pin on our costumes,” the rooster concluded.
The bull got riled up at the idea of yet another decoration to have to protect at the party. But, after a moment in which the three seemed to think deeply about the decision, without actually thinking about anything at all—the rooster went ahead, shimmied over the railing and set foot on the forbidden land of the garden. The bull followed with some difficulty. The third, despite some hesitation, in a single bound found himself right in the middle of the hyacinths, with a dull thud that stopped the trio dead in their tracks: holding their breath, the rooster, the bull and the devil lord peered into the darkness. But the house went on among shadows and frogs. And, in the perfume-choked garden, the hyacinths trembled unaffected.
Then the rooster pushed ahead. He could have picked the hyacinth right by his hand. The bigger ones, however, rising near a window—tall, stiff, fragile—shimmered calling out to him. The rooster headed toward them on tiptoe, and the bull and the lord went along. The silence was watching them.
Yet no sooner had he broken the largest hyacinth’s stalk than the rooster stopped cold. The other two stopped with a sigh that plunged them into sleep.
From behind the dark glass of the window a white face was staring at them.
The rooster had frozen in the act of breaking off the hyacinth. The bull had halted with his hands still raised. The lord, bloodless under his mask, had regressed back to childhood and its terror. The face behind the window stared.
None of the four would ever know who was punishing whom. The hyacinths ever whiter in the darkness. Paralyzed, they peered at each other.
The simple approach of four masks on that May evening seemed to have reverberated through hollow recesses, and others, and still others that, if not for that instant in the garden, would forever remain within this perfume in the air and within the immanence of four natures that fate had singled out, designating time and place—the same precise fate of a falling star. These four, coming from reality, had fallen into the possibilities afoot on a May evening in São Cristóvão. Every moist plant, every pebble, the croaking frogs, were taking advantage of the silent confusion to better position themselves—everything in the dark was mute approach. Having fallen into the ambush, they looked at each other in terror: the nature of things had been cast into relief and the four figures peered at each other with outstretched wings. A rooster, a bull, the devil and a girl’s face had unleashed the wonder of the garden . . . That was when the huge May moon
appeared.
It was a stroke of danger for the four visages. So risky that, without a sound, four mute visions retreated without taking their eyes off each other, fearing that the moment they no longer held each other’s gaze remote new territories would be ravaged, and that, after the silent collapse, only the hyacinths would remain—masters of the garden’s treasure. No specter saw any other vanish because all withdrew at the same time, lingeringly, on tiptoe. No sooner, however, had the magic circle of four been broken, freed from the mutual surveillance, than the constellation broke apart in terror: three shadowy forms sprang like cats over the garden railing, and another, bristling and enlarged, backed up to the threshold of a doorway, from which, with a scream, it broke into a run.
The three masked gentlemen who, thanks to the rooster’s disastrous idea, had been planning to surprise everyone at a dance happening such a long time after Carnival, were a big hit at the party already in full swing. The music broke off and those still intertwined on the dance floor saw, amid laughter, the three breathless, masked figures lurking like vagrants in the doorway. Finally, after several tries, the revelers had to abandon their wish to crown them kings of the party because, fearful, the three refused to split up: a tall one, a fat one and a young one, a fat one, a young one and a tall one, imbalance and union, their faces speechless under three masks that swung about on their own.
Meanwhile, all the lights had come on in the hyacinth house. The girl was sitting in the living room. The grandmother, her white hair braided, held the glass of water, the mother smoothed the daughter’s dark hair, while the father searched the entire house. The girl couldn’t explain a thing: she seemed to have said it all in her scream. It was clear that her face had become smaller—the entire painstaking construction of her age had come undone, she was a little girl once more. But in her visage rejuvenated by more than one phase, there had appeared, to the family’s horror, a white hair among those framing her face. Since she kept looking toward the window, they left her sitting there to rest, and, candlesticks in hand, shivering with cold in their nightgowns, set off on an expedition through the garden.