Spilt Milk Page 2
6
When I get out of here, we’ll start our new life in an old city, where everyone greets everyone else and no one knows us. I’ll teach you to speak properly, to use the different types of cutlery and wine glass, I’ll carefully choose your wardrobe and serious books for you to read. I sense you have potential because you’re hardworking, you have gentle hands and you don’t make faces even when you bathe me, in short, you seem like a worthy young lady despite your humble origins. My other wife had a strict upbringing, but even so Mother never understood why I’d chosen her, exactly, when there were so many girls from distinguished families to choose from. My mother was from another century, on one occasion she actually asked me if Matilde had body odour. Just because Matilde’s skin was almost cinnamon in colour. She was the darkest of her seven sisters, daughters of a federal deputy of the same political party as my father. I don’t know if I ever told you that I’d already seen Matilde in passing, in the entrance to the Church of the Candelária. But I hadn’t been able to study her as I did that day, when my eyes settled on her in the pause before the offertory. She was in the choir that was singing the Requiem, and her Marian habit didn’t sit right on her; it seemed to surround her without touching her skin. A garment as rigid as armour, truly alien to her body, and a naked body under it could have danced without being noticed. It was my father’s memorial service, but I was unable to free myself of Matilde. I sought to divine her most intimate movements and her ever-so distant thoughts. I registered her blush from afar, her darting eyes, her demure smile as she sang: libera animas omnium fidelium defunctorum de poenis inferni. And it was like an electric shock when Mother touched my elbow, summoning me to communion. But no sooner had I risen to my feet than I threw myself back into the pew to prevent a scandal. Under no circumstances could I be seen standing, much less beside my mother, in that indecent state. So, covering my face with my hands, passing off my shame as mourning, I tried to think of sad things while Mother consoled me. When I had managed to diminish the inconvenience, I accompanied Mother to the high altar, head down, and took communion knowing I was committing a sacrilege for which I would soon be punished. And with the wafer still whole on my tongue, almost unintentionally I half-opened my eyes in the direction of the choir, which had dispersed. Full of remorse, I watched the end of the ceremony and then stationed myself alongside my mother to receive the endless queue of sympathies. I accepted formal condolences, emotional outbursts from strangers, sticky hands and foul-smelling breath, without any great hope of Matilde. Until I spotted her beside her parents, then briefly among her sisters, then in the group of Marian congregants. I saw how she approached not in a straight line, but in a spiral, entertaining herself with all and sundry around her, as if she were queuing at an ice cream shop. The closer she came, the more I longed to see her face to face, and the more the possibility of losing my composure again tormented me. She arrived, gazed at me with suddenly tear-filled eyes, hugged me and whispered in my ear, courage, Eulálio. Matilde said Eulálio, and confused me. A shiver ran through me as I felt her warm breath in my ear, then a counter-shiver, as I heard a name that almost humiliated me. I didn’t want to be Eulálio, only the brothers used to call me that back in high school. I’d rather have grown old and been buried with my childhood nicknames, Lalinho, Lalá, Lilico, than been called Eulálio. My Portuguese great-great-great-grandfather’s Eulálio, passing down through great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, grandfather and father, was for me less of a name than an echo. So I looked her in the eye and said, I don’t understand. Matilde repeated, courage, Eulálio, and now, in her slightly hoarse voice, it seemed that my name Eulálio had a texture. She spoke my name as if grazing over it slightly, and when, turning on her heel, she left, I experienced, as I had feared, a new obscene surge. Her six white sisters were already drawing near, directly behind their federal deputy father, arm in arm with their mother, then the Marian congregants, followed by the still-long queue, and I had no alternative. I doubled over, clutching my stomach as if in pain, slipped away from my distressed mother and took off through the first door I saw. I crossed the sacristy, startling the priest and his acolytes, and reached a side exit of the church. Seeing people on the pavement, I took off my coat, covered my legs and darted down a side street. But soon, on Avenida Beira-Mar, I was able to walk as befitted a gentleman, except for my hat, forgotten on the church pew. And at the end of a long trek I arrived, with my sleeves pushed up, at the mansion in Botafogo, where I saw my mother’s old chauffeur leaning against the bonnet of the Ford. I went in through the back door and headed straight upstairs to the bathroom, as I’d perspired heavily and was in need of a cold shower. And I had a pressing need to better understand the desire that had so unhinged me; I had never felt anything like it. If that was desire, I can safely say that before Matilde I had been chaste. Perhaps, inadvertently, I had taken possession of my father’s libido, just as overnight I had inherited ties, cigars, businesses, real estate and the possibility of a career in politics. It was my father who had introduced me to women in Paris; yet, more than the French girls themselves, I had always been intrigued by the way he looked at them. Just as the aroma of the women here didn’t intrigue me as much as his smell, permeating the garçonnière he used to make available to me. In the shower I now looked at myself almost with fear, imagining in my body all of my father’s strength and insatiability. Looking down at my body, I had the feeling that my potential for desire was equal to his for every female in the world, but concentrated on just one woman.
7
Good morning, my pretty, but surely there’s a less ominous way to wake up than with a daughter snivelling at one’s bedside. And it looks as if you’ve yet again come without my cigarettes, much less my cigars. I know smoking isn’t allowed in here, but where there’s a will there’s a way and it’s not as if I’m asking you to smuggle cocaine into the hospital. I’m going to tell you the story of how, one fine day, in Paris, your grandfather decided to take me to a ski resort. Father was a man of many interests, but until then I hadn’t been aware of his sporting side. At the age of seventeen, he said, it was high time that I experienced snow, so we took the long train journey to Crans-Montana, in the Swiss Alps. We checked into the hotel at night, kitted out with boots and gloves and woollen beanies, pairs of skis and poles, the works. And I was about to go to bed when Father called me into his room, sat down on a chaise longue and opened up an ebony case. But what’s that, Father? Why, it’s snow, he said, looking very serious; Father made a point of always being serious, regardless of the circumstances. Using a tiny spatula he separated the whitest of white powder into four lines, then passed me a silver straw. And it wasn’t that rubbish that any idiot can get hold of; it was pure cocaine, available only to those who could afford it. It didn’t leave you with a bitter taste in your mouth or make you lose your appetite, nor your hard-on, as he then had the whores sent up. Sometimes I feel sorry for my mother, because Father didn’t give her a moment’s rest even after he was dead. Your grandmother had to receive the police commissioner into her home and put up with insolent questions, as there was a rumour going round that a cuckold had had my father killed. It was because he’d been machine-gunned down as he entered his garçonnière, but Mother only read O Paiz, whose articles attributed the crime to the opposition. I have to admit, it was not as if tragedy didn’t suit Mother; wearing black suited her nature. Just as all colours seem loud on you and your skin won’t tan. I can now admit that I felt sorry for you as a young woman, getting your make-up all wrong. You never convinced me in your glory days, smooching with your boyfriend in a Bentley convertible. You were unrecognisable dressed as a bride, tipsy at the Jockey Club reception; you looked beside yourself with happiness as you waved to me from the deck of the Conte Grande, in dark sunglasses and red gloves. You returned from your honeymoon in high excitement, full of your audience with Pius XII in the Vatican. And I forced myself to share your euphoria, such that I even congratulated you when you showed
me your passport, where a Palumba had been added to the surname Assumpção. I admit, I was also amused by Amerigo Palumba, especially when I saw the little shield on his lapel, bearing the crown of the Italian Monarchist Party. The silk handkerchief, the diamond-encrusted buttons, the pearl in the tie; the style wasn’t without its charm when you consider that old Palumba Senior had gotten rich gutting pigs in São Paulo. I don’t know if the son was ashamed of the sausages, but he must have thanked his lucky stars during the war, when bands of antifascists set fire to their cold storage plants. After the war he came to the capital, began to invest in the stock market, used slang terms to refer to money, and when he took you as a newly wed to live in a palace in the sky in Flamengo, he tried to impress, telling me how much rent he was paying. And you remained strangely happy, occupied with the decoration of the palace à la Second Empire. You went to the races at the Hipódromo, to the pool at the Copacabana Palace Hotel, and came close to reminding me of your mother when you danced the tango. Until Amerigo Palumba up and vanished on me. The following month, evicted from the palace for insolvency, you returned to normal and, a little curved, looked at me as if to say, see? The bills poured in, instalments on the convertible, the cruise company, the antique shop, policies, mortgages and promissory notes started to arrive from every direction, and you’d say, didn’t I tell you? Of Amerigo Palumba I received dubious news. I don’t know if he sank my money into aristocratic titles; some even say he became an intimate of the dethroned king of Italy. He was seen losing large sums of money at the casino in Estoril, to the delight of some old dukes, because making money at roulette was so nouveau riche. It was as the old phrase goes: wealthy father, titled son, poor grandson. It just so happened that the poor grandson was in your belly, Eulálio d’Assumpção Palumba, the strapping young boy we brought up, who grew to be rebellious and with good reason. He returned to the straight and narrow as an adult, but you must remember when he took it into his head to become a communist. Imagine what your grandmother would have said, her granddaughter married to an immigrant’s son and her great-grandson a communist of Chinese sympathies. That boy of yours knocked up another communist, who had a son in prison and in prison passed away. You say he died at the hands of the police, and I do have a vague recollection of such a thing. But an old man’s memory can’t be trusted, and now I’m sure I saw the boy just the other day, alive and kicking. He even gave me a box of cigars, but wait, my mistake, the one who died was another Eulálio, one that looked like a thinner Amerigo Palumba. The thin Eulálio is the one who became a communist, because he was born in prison and they say he was weaned too soon. As a result, he smoked marijuana, hit his teachers, and was expelled from all his schools. But even though he was semi-illiterate and a pyromaniac, he found work and prospered; the other day he gave me a box of cigars. He visited me at my place with a girlfriend with her midriff bare and an earring in her bellybutton. I wouldn’t have minded that one as a daughter-in-law, but the one who gave birth in prison was another. I’ll never forget the day they called me to collect the baby from the Army Hospital. The colonel was polite, said he knew me from elsewhere. I was even somewhat moved when I saw the little guy, practically an orphan, because Amerigo Palumba was far away and you were in prison, locked away and incommunicado. But wait a second, that’s not possible because you left the hospital with me, with the baby in your arms. All I know is that Eulálio d’Assumpção Palumba Junior was baptized and raised by us. He’s the one who now takes you for rides in his car and gives me Cuban cigars. He came over here to my place the other day with a girlfriend with a pin in her bellybutton, who didn’t seem like a communist at all. Nor does the lad strike me as the kind who’d distribute pamphlets against the dictatorship. You must be confusing him with someone else, that darker-skinned Eulálio, the skirt-chaser, who was involved with a Japanese girl and got his cousin pregnant. But that one, if I’m not mistaken, was the son of the strapping young Eulálio and the bellybutton girl; sometimes my mind gets a bit confused. It’s all a tremendous jumble, my dear, aren’t you even going to give me a kiss? It’s not pleasant being abandoned like this, talking at the ceiling.
8
Memory is truly a pandemonium, but it’s all in there; after rummaging around a little the owner can find all manner of things. What isn’t right is for someone from the outside to meddle with it, like the maid who moves one’s papers to dust the office. Or the daughter who wants to arrange my memory in her own order, chronological, alphabetical, or by subject. Some time back I found a certain colonel in a dark corridor of the army hospital. He said he’d last seen me when he was still a third sergeant, but his face in the half-light didn’t ring any bells. Nor did mine for him, I’m sure, since he’d recognised me by name. But the recollection wasn’t mutual, and in such cases, so as not to offend, one usually says, ah, yes, of course, how are you, and that’s that. Because scouring one’s memory all the time is tiresome, but he really believed I was making an effort to remember him, and wanted to help. And he only confused me further when he said, in French, that forty years fly by, and I wasn’t sure if he was quoting some poet. I was about to excuse myself when he mentioned the artillery tests at Marambaia and I don’t know why he hadn’t done so sooner; it all came to me in a flash. Riffling through files of names and faces would have been useless, because my memory had preserved the sergeant in the landscape. It was a sunny day, and from the top of the dune I was gazing at the narrowest stretch of a spit of land, a line of the whitest sand which the ocean hadn’t swallowed up, on some whim, or out of pity, maternal zeal or sadism. The waves foamed simultaneously to the right and left of the spit, like a beach looking in a mirror. At the foot of my dune was the sergeant, with a group of young soldiers, all wearing olive-green trousers, without jackets, their sodden t-shirts clinging to their bodies. He was helping position a cannon in the sand, as instructed by the French engineer. He stood out from the others as he appeared to have some knowledge of the language and was ever ready to translate the instructions for his colleagues, which left me free to let my mind roam. The heavy work had the young men panting, but it was Dubosc, sitting on a box of ammunition, who most seemed to be suffering from the heat. And it turned out that all the effort was in vain, because when the battery was finally in position and ready to fire, we received news that the minister of war had cancelled his visit to the demonstration. The sergeant translated the courier’s message, but it was to me that Dubosc turned. And I must say, the Frenchman’s bad humour was prophetic, because sooner or later his peeves always proved him right. It was my job to absorb his outbursts of rage; for two hours in the car to the Palace Hotel I served as his punch bag. Two-faced, perfidious, incompetent, indolent, tardy, and even a bad driver. I listened to a great many insults in silence, because I knew they weren’t actually addressed to me, but to my fellow countrymen in general. Dubosc went overboard from time to time; he was a highly-strung engineer. He’d barely set foot in the country and wanted to find every door open, or else blow them open with dynamite. I, on the other hand, knew that the doors were just pulled to; my father had been through them before. Being young and inexperienced, as by appearance the Frenchman judged me to be, the next day I might have found myself lost in a labyrinth with seven hundred doors. But I had no doubt that, for me, the right door would open on its own. Behind it, precisely the person I was looking for would call me by name. And they’d promptly announce me to the influential person, who’d come down the stairs to fetch me. And they’d open up their chambers, where there’d be several phone calls waiting for me. And over the phone, powerful people would whisper the words they wanted to hear. And with my eyes closed, along the way I’d grease the same palms my father had greased. And for three times the price that had been agreed, they’d buy the cannons, the howitzers, the rifles, the grenades and all the ammunition the Company had to sell. My name is Eulálio d’Assumpção and for no other reason did Le Creusot & Cie. appoint me its representative in this country. And while I saw to it that
things were taken care of, it was probably a good thing that Dubosc went on boat trips to unwind or travelled up to the mountains to hunt capybara, always with his acquaintances from the French colony. But he had no qualms about calling me late at night, for lack of a better companion, to escort him to a restaurant or a dance hall. When he was off the job he revealed a different temperament, bragging about his progress in tango, foxtrot, charleston and maxixe classes; the latest novelty was the samba. And once, at the Assirius Cabaret, after dancing with some young ladies from another table, he ordered another lime cocktail and asked me why I never brought my wife, whom everyone said was so charming. I don’t know where he got that from; no one from his circle knew Matilde. He also said that on the phone my wife had a warm voice and spoke excellent French. That, I’m sure, he said to flatter me, and it made me laugh because Matilde’s French was all but broken. I’d actually considered taking her to the reception at the embassy, and she’d painted her nails and picked out an orange dress for the occasion. But I’d decided it wasn’t worth it; Matilde would have felt out of place in such circles. She wasn’t interested in politics; in business, even less. She loved westerns, but couldn’t sustain a conversation about literature. She knew little about the sciences, geography and history, though she’d studied at the Sacré Coeur. At sixteen, when she dropped out to marry me, she still hadn’t completed high school. She’d studied piano, like all girls of her position in life, but she didn’t shine at that either. We were still courting the day she sat at my mother’s Pleyel and I prepared to hear a piece by Mozart, the composer whose work she’d sung, or pretended to sing, at my father’s memorial service. But instead she banged out a foot-stomper called Voodoo Ditty; goodness only knows where she had learned that. And Mother came tripping down the stairs to see what on earth was going on. The next day she asked me if Matilde’s parents had given her permission to be alone with me at our place every day after class. Little did she know that, by night, I secretly watched the back garden from my window, waiting for Matilde to steal on to the lawn on tiptoe, between the almond trees and the servants’ quarters. I’d race downstairs and open the kitchen door, and Matilde would barely cross the threshold. She’d lean against the kitchen wall, her breathing short, and open her black eyes wide. In silence we’d stare at one another for five, ten minutes, Matilde with her hands at hip level, clutching, twisting her own skirt. And she’d slowly blush until she was a deep red, as if in ten minutes an afternoon of sun had passed across her face. A palm’s distance away from her, I was the biggest man in the world; I was the sun. I’d see her lips part slightly, and above them tiny beads of sweat would appear, as her eyelids slowly relaxed. Finally I’d throw myself against her body, pressing her against the kitchen wall, with no skin-contact and no hands or legs moving forward, according to some unspoken agreement. I’d crush her with my torso, almost, until she said, I’m coming, Eulálio, and her whole body would shudder, causing mine to shudder with it. An unsettled feeling would follow, then meandering thoughts, the neighbour’s dog, the cold beer in the Frigidaire, the warmth moving down my thighs, the dog, my soaked trousers and underpants, the Frigidaire that my father had sent for from the United States, the laundress showing Mother my clothes, the beer in the Frigidaire that Father never got to see. When I came to my senses, I’d be pressed against the tiled wall, because Matilde always slipped away. And every time I would go to inspect the drawing rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, the basement and the attic, pretending that I believed that she had accidentally fled into the house. A long time later, after she’d left my life, I maintained the fanciful habit of looking for her like that, every night, in the chalet in Copacabana. And I left all the doors open for her until the end, but I shouldn’t be talking so much about my wife to you. Here you come with the syringe, sleep will do me good, take my arm.