The Girl in the Photograph Read Online Free PDF

secretions. Oh Lord.
     Eating pastries at the café, what madness. But if she came with us, she’d end up poisoning
     our time together, she adores saying ironic things that M.N. pretends not to understand,
     so solid. So safe. “More wine, Lião?” The wine she accepts. Also the lobster, she
     pronounces it loster . But she pointedly remembers the statistics about the children dying of hunger in
     the Northeast, she gets carried away on this subject of the Northeast. I don’t know
     how long we’ll have to carry these people on our backs; it’s horrible to think that
     way but, as I’ve thought before and still think, if God isn’t there He probably has
     His reasons.
    “Oh, I’m a monster. Monster. I want so much to be different, so much.”
    And this tendency to be petty. Oh my Saint Francis, my Saint Theresa, son tan escuras de entender estas cosas interiores .
    “I’ll give it back tomorrow,” says Lião putting the handkerchief away in her bag.
    She won’t, of course. And if she did I wouldn’t take it, a handkerchief is like a
     toothbrush, you can’t lend them. Exactly like Ana Clara who still hasn’t learned this
     simplest of things: One doesn’t lend personal items .
    “Lia, Lia!” calls Sister Bula from the window of the big house. The voice of a forest
     gnome coming out from inside a tree trunk. She wants to yell “Telephone for you!”
     She places one hand beside her ear and pretends to crank the handle; thephones in her day had to be wound up. Or was she born even earlier? She must be two
     hundred years old.
    Lião is afraid. Ana Clara also pretends to be indifferent but if she doesn’t take
     tranquilizers she starts walking around in a delirium again. Without the slightest
     ceremony she opened my box of tissues and took over half of them, she goes around
     with great piles of tissues to clean herself after making love. The right thing would
     be to take a bath afterwards; it’s logical, hygienic and poetic to run naked to the
     shower. Or in the country to duck under a waterfall, shuaaaaaaaaaa! But to put yourself back together like a hurried chambermaid—! Certain gestures and
     words of Ana Clara’s, poor thing. The details give her away. It’s all in the details:
     her origins, her faith, her happiness. God. Especially her origins. “I know nothing
     about mine,” she said to me once when she was drunk. “And I don’t want to, either.”
     That daisy down there could say the same thing: I know nothing about my roots. And
     her? Neither father nor mother. Not even a cousin. She has no one. From the looks
     of it, all of Bahia must be related to Lião but Ana Clara is the opposite in terms
     of family. Not even an auntie to teach her that everything one does before and after
     the act of love should be harmonious. Is it unaesthetic to masturbate? Not exactly
     unaesthetic, but sad. During the time when Lião was doing thousands of surveys, she
     did one on the university coeds; how many masturbated? Incredible, the results among
     the virgins. Incredible. “We are coming out of the Middle Ages,” she said examining
     her papers. “The inheritance from our mothers and grandmothers, see. Added up with
     the adolescent habits, it gives us this alarming percentage. Do you masturbate too?”
     she asked, pinning the black eye of the Inquisition on me.
    Two blond bees, the kind that only make love and honey, landed on my foot, first one
     and then the other. I shoo them gently away, the gesture must be gentle so they don’t
     feel rejected, you hear, M.N.? If you don’t want me, you should treat me like this,
     run along, my little bee! run along. Before flying off, the larger of the two rubs
     his two front legs together, as if he were washing his hands, and then strokes himself
     all the way down to his yellow-striped abdomen. You can’t see exactly where his hand
     stops, but what if Lião were to research the habits of bees, Tu quoque, bestiola ? Bestiola means insect.