The Complete Stories (17 page)

But not only did the birthday girl not explode at the miserable splash of wine Dorothy had given her but she didn’t even touch the glass.

Her gaze was fixed, silent. As if nothing had happened.

Everyone exchanged polite glances, smiling blindly, abstractedly as if a dog had peed in the room. Stoically, the voices and laughter started back up. The daughter-in-law from Olaria, who had experienced her first moment in unison with the others just when the tragedy triumphantly seemed about to be unleashed, had to retreat alone to her severity, without even the solidarity of her three children who were now mingling traitorously with the others. From her reclusive chair, she critically appraised those shapeless dresses, without any draping, their obsession with pairing a black dress with pearls, which was anything but stylish, cheap was all it was. Eyeing from afar those meagerly buttered sandwiches. She hadn’t helped herself to a thing, not a thing! She’d only had one of each, just to taste.

And so to speak, once again the party was over.

People graciously remained seated. Some with their attention turned inward, waiting for something to say. Others vacant and expectant, with amiable smiles, stomachs full of that junk that didn’t nourish but got rid of hunger. The children, already out of control, shrieked rambunctiously. Some already had filthy faces; the other, younger ones, were already wet; the afternoon was fading rapidly. And Cordélia, Cordélia looked on absently, with a dazed smile, bearing her secret in solitude. What’s the matter with her? someone asked with a negligent curiosity, head gesturing at her from afar, but no one answered. They turned on the remaining lights to hasten the tranquility of the night, the children were starting to bicker. But the lights were fainter than the faint tension of the afternoon. And the twilight of Copacabana, unyielding, meanwhile kept expanding and penetrating the windows like a weight.

“I have to go,” one of the daughters-in-law said, disturbed, standing and brushing the crumbs off her skirt. Several others rose smiling.

The birthday girl received a cautious kiss from each of them as if her so unfamiliar skin were a trap. And, impassive, blinking, she took in those deliberately incoherent words they said to her attempting to give a final thrust of enthusiasm to something that was no more than the past: night had now fallen almost completely. The light in the room then seemed yellower and richer, the people older. The children were already hysterical.

“Does she think the cake takes the place of dinner,” the old woman wondered in the depths of herself.

But no one could have guessed what she was thinking. And for those who looked at her once more from the doorway, the birthday girl was only what she appeared to be: seated at the head of the filthy table, her hand clenched on the tablecloth as though grasping a scepter, and with that muteness that was her last word. Fist clenched on the table, never again would she be only what she was thinking. Her appearance had finally surpassed her and, going beyond her, was serenely becoming gigantic. Cordélia stared at her in alarm. The mute and severe fist on the table was telling the unhappy daughter-in-law she irremediably loved perhaps for the last time: You must know. You must know. That life is short. That life is short.

Yet she didn’t repeat it anymore. Because truth was a glimpse. Cordélia stared at her in terror. And, for the very last time, she never repeated it—while Rodrigo, the birthday girl’s grandson, tugged at Cordélia’s hand, tugged at the hand of that guilty, bewildered and desperate mother who once more looked back imploring old age to give one more sign that a woman should, in a heartrending impulse, finally cling to her last chance and live. Once more Cordélia wanted to look.

But when she looked again—the birthday girl was an old woman at the head of the table.

The glimpse had passed. And dragged onward by Rodrigo’s patient and insistent hand the daughter-in-law followed him in alarm.

“Not everyone has the privilege and the honor to gather around their mother,” José cleared his throat recalling that Jonga had been the one who gave speeches.

“Their mother, comma!” his niece laughed softly, and the slowest cousin laughed without getting it.

“We have,” Manoel said dispiritedly, no longer looking at his wife. “We have this great privilege,” he said distractedly wiping his moist palms.

But that wasn’t it at all, merely the distress of farewells, never knowing just what to say, José expecting from himself with perseverance and confidence the next line of the speech. Which didn’t come. Which didn’t come. Which didn’t come. The others were waiting. How he missed Jonga at times like this—José wiped his brow with his handkerchief—how he missed Jonga at times like this! He’d also been the only one whom the old woman had always approved of and respected, and this gave Jonga so much self-assurance. And when he died, the old woman never spoke of him again, placing a wall between his death and the others. She’d forgotten him perhaps. But she hadn’t forgotten that same firm and piercing gaze she’d always directed at the other children, always causing them to avert their eyes. A mother’s love was hard to bear: José wiped his brow, heroic, smiling.

And suddenly the line came:

“See you next year!” José suddenly exclaimed mischievously, finding, thus, just like that, the right turn of phrase: a lucky hint! “See you next year, eh?” he repeated afraid he hadn’t been understood.

He looked at her, proud of the cunning old woman who always slyly managed to live another year.

“Next year we’ll meet again around the birthday cake!” her son Manoel further clarified, improving on his business partner’s wit. “See you next year, Mama! and around the birthday cake!” he said in thorough explanation, right in her ear, while looking obligingly at José. And the old woman suddenly let out a weak cackle, understanding the allusion.

Then she opened her mouth and said:

“Sure.”

Excited that it had gone so unexpectedly well, José shouted at her with emotion, grateful, his eyes moist:

“We’ll see each other next year, Mama!”

“I’m not deaf!” said the birthday girl gruffly, affectionately.

Her children looked at each other laughing, embarrassed, happy. It had worked out.

The kids went off in good spirits, their appetites ruined. The daughter-in-law from Olaria vengefully cuffed her son, too cheerful and no longer wearing his tie. The stairs were difficult, dark, it was unbelievable to insist on living in such a cramped building that would have to be demolished any day now, and while being evicted Zilda would still cause trouble and want to push the old woman onto the daughters-in-law—reaching the last step, the guests relievedly found themselves in the cool calm of the street. It was nighttime, yes. With its first shiver.

Goodbye, see you soon, we have to get together. Stop by sometime, they said quickly. Some managed to look the others in the eye with unflinching cordiality. Some buttoned up their children’s coats, looking at the sky for some hint of the weather. Everyone obscurely feeling that when saying goodbye you could maybe, now without the threat of commitment, be nice and say that extra word—which word? they didn’t know exactly, and looked at each other smiling, mute. It was an instant that was begging to come alive. But that was dead. They started going their separate ways, walking with their backs slightly turned, unsure how to break away from their relatives without being abrupt.

“See you next year!” José repeated the lucky hint, waving with effusive vigor, his thinning, white hair fluttering. He really was fat, they thought, he’d better watch his heart. “See you next year!” José boomed, eloquent and grand, and his height seemed it might crumble. But those already a ways off didn’t know whether to laugh loudly for him to hear or if it was enough to smile even in the darkness. More than a few thought that luckily the hint contained more than just a joke and that not until next year would they have to gather around the birthday cake; while others, already farther off in the darkness of the street, wondered whether the old woman would hang on for another year of Zilda’s nerves and impatience, but honestly there was nothing they could do about it. “Ninety years old at the very least,” thought the daughter-in-law from Ipanema melancholically. “To make it to a nice, round age,” she thought dreamily.

Meanwhile, up above, atop the stairs and contingencies, the birthday girl was seated at the head of the table, erect, definitive, greater than herself. What if there’s no dinner tonight, she mused. Death was her mystery.

The Smallest Woman in the World

(“A menor mulher do mundo”)

In the depths of Equatorial Africa the French explorer Marcel Pretre, hunter and man of the world, came upon a pygmy tribe of surprising smallness. He was all the more surprised, then, when informed that an even smaller people existed beyond forests and distances. So deeper still he plunged.

In the Central Congo he indeed discovered the smallest pygmies in the world. And—like a box within a box, within a box—among the smallest pygmies in the world was the smallest of the smallest pygmies in the world, obeying perhaps the need Nature sometimes has to outdo herself.

Amid mosquitoes and trees warm with moisture, amid the rich leaves of the laziest green, Marcel Pretre came face-to-face with a woman who stood eighteen inches tall, full-grown, black, silent. “Dark as a monkey,” he would inform the press, and that she lived in the top of a tree with her little consort. In the tepid, wild mists, which swell the fruits early and make them taste almost intolerably sweet, she was pregnant.

There she stood, then, the smallest woman in the world. For an instant, in the drone of the heat, it was as if the Frenchman had unexpectedly arrived at the last conclusion. Undoubtedly, it was only because he wasn’t insane, that his soul neither fainted nor lost control. Sensing an immediate need for order, and to give a name to whatever exists, he dubbed her Little Flower. And, in order to classify her among the recognizable realities, he quickly set about collecting data on her.

Her race is gradually being exterminated. Few human examples remain of this species which, if not for the cunning danger of Africa, would be a dispersed people. Aside from disease, infectious vapors from the waters, insufficient food and roving beasts, the greatest risk facing the scant Likoualas are the savage Bantus, a threat that surrounds them in the silent air as on the morning of battle. The Bantus hunt them with nets, as they do monkeys. And eat them. Just like that: they hunt them with nets and Eat them. That tiny race of people, always retreating and retreating, eventually took up residence in the heart of Africa, where the lucky explorer would discover them. For strategic defense, they live in the tallest trees. From which the women descend to cook corn, grind cassava and gather vegetables; the men, to hunt. When a child is born, he is granted his freedom almost immediately. It’s true that often the child won’t enjoy this freedom for very long among wild beasts. But then it’s true that, at the very least, no one will lament that, for so short a life, the labor was long. For even the language the child learns is short and simple, strictly essential. The Likoualas use few names, referring to things with gestures and animal sounds. In terms of spiritual advancement, they have a drum. While they dance to the sound of the drum, a little male stands guard against the Bantus, who will come from no one knows where.

It was, therefore, thus, that the explorer discovered, standing there at his feet, the smallest human thing in existence. His heart beat because no emerald is as rare. Neither are the teachings of the sages of India as rare. Neither has the richest man in the world ever laid eyes on so much strange grace. Right there was a woman the gluttony of the most exquisite dream could never have imagined. That was when the explorer declared, shyly and with a delicacy of feeling of which his wife would never have judged him capable:

“You are Little Flower.”

At that moment Little Flower scratched herself where a person doesn’t scratch. The explorer—as if receiving the highest prize for chastity to which a man, who had always been so idealistic, dared aspire—the explorer, seasoned as he was, averted his eyes.

Little Flower’s photograph was published in the color supplement of the Sunday papers, where she fit life-size. Wrapped in a cloth, with her belly far along. Her nose flat, her face black, eyes sunken, feet splayed. She resembled a dog.

That Sunday, in an apartment, a woman, seeing Little Flower’s picture in the open newspaper, didn’t want to look a second time “because it pains me so.”

In another apartment a lady felt such perverse tenderness for the African woman’s smallness that—prevention being better than cure—no one should ever leave Little Flower alone with the lady’s tenderness. Who knows to what darkness of love affection can lead. The lady was disturbed for a day, one might say seized with longing. Besides it was spring, a dangerous benevolence was in the air.

In another house a five-year-old girl, seeing the picture and hearing the commentary, became alarmed. In that household of adults, this girl had up till now been the smallest of human beings. And, if that was the source of the best caresses, it was also the source of this first fear of love’s tyranny. Little Flower’s existence led the girl to feel—with a vagueness that only years and years later, for very different reasons, would solidify into thought—led her to feel, in a first flash of wisdom, that “misfortune has no limit.”

In another house, amid the rite of spring, the young bride-to-be experienced an ecstasy of compassion:

“Mama, look at her little picture, poor little thing! just look how sad she is!”

“But,” said the mother, firm and defeated and proud, “but it’s the sadness of an animal, not human sadness.”

“Oh! Mama,” said the girl discouraged.

It was in another house that a clever boy had a clever idea:

“Mama, what if I put that little African lady on Paulinho’s bed while he’s sleeping? when he wakes up, he’ll be so scared, right! he’ll scream, when he sees her sitting on the bed! And then we could play so much with her! we could make her our toy, right!”

His mother was at that moment curling her hair in front of the bathroom mirror, and she recalled something a cook had told her about her time at the orphanage. Having no dolls to play with, and maternity already pulsating terribly in the hearts of those orphans, the sly little girls had concealed another girl’s death from the nun. They hid the corpse in a wardrobe until the nun left, and played with the dead girl, giving her baths and little snacks, punishing her just so they could kiss her afterward, consoling her. This is what the mother recalled in the bathroom, and she lowered her pendulous hands, full of hairpins. And considered the cruel necessity of loving. She considered the malignity of our desire to be happy. Considered the ferocity with which we want to play. And how many times we will kill out of love. Then she looked at her clever son as if looking at a dangerous stranger. And she felt horror at her own soul that, more than her body, had engendered that being fit for life and happiness. That is how she looked, with careful attention and an uncomfortable pride, at that boy already missing his two front teeth, evolution, evolution in action, a tooth falling out to make way for one better for biting. “I’m going to buy him a new suit,” she decided looking at him deep in thought. Obstinately she dressed her gap-toothed son in nice clothes, obstinately wanting him to be squeaky clean, as if cleanliness would emphasize a calming superficiality, obstinately perfecting the courteous side of beauty. Obstinately distancing herself, and distancing him, from something that ought to be “dark like a monkey.” Then, looking in the bathroom mirror, the mother made a deliberately refined and polite smile, placing, between that face of hers with its abstract lines and Little Flower’s crude face, the insurmountable distance of millennia. But, after years of practice, she knew this would be one of those Sundays on which she’d have to conceal from herself the anxiety, the dream, and millennia lost.

In another house, beside a wall, they were engaged in the excited task of measuring Little Flower’s eighteen inches with a ruler. And that was where, delighted, they gasped in shock: she was even smaller than the keenest imagination could conceive. In each family member’s heart arose, nostalgic, the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for himself, that thing spared from being eaten, that permanent source of charity. The family’s eager soul wanted to devote itself. And, really, who hasn’t ever wished to possess a human being for one’s very own? Which, to be sure, wouldn’t always be convenient, there are times when you don’t want to have feelings:

“I bet if she lived here, it would lead to fighting,” said the father seated in his armchair, definitively turning the page of his newspaper. “In this house everything leads to fighting.”

“There you go again, José, always pessimistic,” said the mother.

“Mama, have you thought about how tiny her little baby would be?” the eldest daughter, age thirteen, said ardently.

The father stirred behind his newspaper.

“It must be the smallest black baby in the world,” replied the mother, oozing with pleasure. “Just imagine her serving dinner here at home! and with that enormous little belly!”

“Enough of this chatter!” the father growled.

“But you must admit,” said the mother unexpectedly offended, “that we’re talking about a rare thing. You’re the one being insensitive.”

And the rare thing herself?

Meanwhile, in Africa, the rare thing herself held in her heart—who knows, maybe it was black too, since a Nature that’s erred once can no longer be trusted—meanwhile the rare thing herself harbored in her heart something rarer still, like the secret of the secret itself: a tiny child. Methodically the explorer peered closely at the little belly of the smallest full-grown human being. In that instant the explorer, for the first time since he’d met her, instead of feeling curiosity or exaltation or triumph or the scientific spirit, the explorer felt distress.

Because the smallest woman in the world was laughing.

She was laughing, warm, warm. Little Flower was delighting in life. The rare thing herself was having the ineffable sensation of not yet having been eaten. Not having been eaten was something that, at other times, gave her the agile impulse to leap from branch to branch. But, in this moment of tranquility, amidst the dense leaves of the Central Congo, she wasn’t putting that impulse into action—and the impulse had become concentrated entirely in the smallness of the rare thing herself. And so she was laughing. It was a laugh that only one who doesn’t speak, laughs. That laugh, the embarrassed explorer couldn’t manage to classify. And she kept enjoying her own soft laughter, she who wasn’t being devoured. Not being devoured is the most perfect of feelings. Not being devoured is the secret goal of an entire life. So long as she wasn’t being eaten, her bestial laughter was as delicate as joy is delicate. The explorer was confounded.

Second of all, if the rare thing herself was laughing, it was because, within her smallness, a great darkness had sprung into motion.

It was that the rare thing herself felt her breast warmed with what might be called Love. She loved that yellow explorer. If she knew how to speak and told him she loved him, he’d puff up with vanity. Vanity that would shrivel when she added that she also loved the explorer’s ring very much and that she loved the explorer’s boots very much. And when he deflated in disappointment, Little Flower wouldn’t understand why. For, not in the slightest, would her love for the explorer—one might even say her “profound love,” because, having no other resources, she was reduced to profundity—for not in the slightest would her profound love for the explorer be devalued by the fact that she also loved his boots. There’s an old mistake about the word love, and, if many children have been born of this mistake, countless others have missed their only instant of being born merely due to a susceptibility that demands you be mine, mine! that you like me, and not my money. But in the humidity of the forest there are no such cruel refinements, and love is not being eaten, love is thinking a boot is pretty, love is liking that rare color of a man who isn’t black, love is laughing with the love of a ring that sparkles. Little Flower blinked with love, and laughed warm, tiny, pregnant, warm.

The explorer tried to smile back at her, without knowing exactly to what abyss his smile responded, and then got flustered as only a big man gets flustered. He pretended to adjust his explorer helmet, blushing bashfully. He turned a lovely color, his own, a greenish pink, like that of a lime at dawn. He must have been sour.

It was probably while adjusting his symbolic helmet that the explorer pulled himself together, severely regained the discipline of work, and recommenced taking notes. He’d learned some of the few words spoken by the tribe, and how to interpret their signals. He could already ask questions.

Little Flower answered “yes.” That it was very good to have a tree to live in, her own, her very own. For—and this she didn’t say, but her eyes went so dark that they said it—for it is good to possess, good to possess, good to possess. The explorer blinked several times.

Marcel Pretre had several difficult moments with himself. But at least he kept busy by taking lots of notes. Those who didn’t take notes had to deal with themselves as best they could:

“Because look,”—suddenly declared an old woman shutting the newspaper decisively—“because look, all I’ll say is this: God knows what He’s doing.”