So Many People, Mariana - Tanta Gente Mariana - Maria Judite de Carvalho - Part 4

A few hours earlier it had been night, a cold February night with lights flickering from the cars and neon signs forming puddles of light above the cafés and the cinemas. In the air there was a slight mist like the breath of the city. We went into the Royal. There we had met Costa, a friend of ours from Lisbon who had won a grant to study at the Recherches Scientifiques, a group of his Brazilian friends, as well as a Portuguese woman I didn’t know. She was called Estrela Vale and she was a sculptor. To begin with I hardly noticed her. Then I began to see her through the look, new to me, that Antonio was giving her. She was small and thin, with a small round head, and thick black hair, thin lips smeared with cyclamen. She had large breasts and a mole at the base of her over long neck. She talked a lot, but slowly, as if words too needed to be modelled by herself, and she spoke with great care, meticulously.

 The beginning of it was not some mystical presence, nor a special look, nor an intimate conversation, but some words that came out of nothing, and which therefore, perhaps came inevitably. It is strange how certain I was about its inevitability. Common words, innocent like so many others that are said which dissolve into time and are forgotten. These words, however, remained etched in my memory. Everyone was speaking; Apollinaire, what a great poet! Have you read ‘Les Alcools’? Julinha Reis, do you know who she is? Julinha Reis……..then suddenly they were deep in conversation ‘for Brazilians’ in which they tried to find out whether such and such a person was married. Estrela was lifting her white Port to her lips and António was looking at her, forgetting all about his beer. At some point he said in a voice that I had never heard,

“I love the mole on your neck. It’s like a love-me-not.”

I was afraid. António didn’t make such comments. Normally he was quite formal in his speech. Was it really Antonio who had spoken? Was it really him?

The woman put her hand on her neck to check on the love-me-not that had just appeared, and she began to laugh, a lot, for no reason, as if, filled by one of those complete happinesses that people experience sometimes, and which disappears as suddenly as it comes, putting aside a whole week of bitter tastes and foul looks, of dark lightless days. I don’t know what Estrela really thought or what she felt…… António continued to look at her, oblivious to everything and everyone. She was laughing and laughing. I am still listening to that laugh, that secret laugh, subterranean, which came to the boil without ever boiling over.

Why do I remember that night so well? The voices of my companions bounced off each other, some rising above the others, treading upon each other’s voices, as each one wanted to dominate in importance and in being right. I continued to hear the sound of Estrela’s muffled laughter.

For a whole hour the Brazilian with a stern face  -  what was his name?  -   melancholy from the whisky and full of sickly sentiment for his family that he had left behind in Curitiba that he just had to let out, spoke about his wife (he called her my Old Lady) and about his children  -  real beauties  -  all the while staring, as if one thing suggested the other, at Simone’s enormous breasts. António was speaking with Estrela, but so low that I could not hear him. The others, enjoying themselves and uninterested in other people’s affairs, continued their conversations, chewing over repeated words, with the help of some more alcohol, that at the appropriate moment arrived at their lips.

We made our way back, crammed into the dark-haired Brazilian’s little Renault and into Simone’s Vedette which jerked and jolted, sometimes backwards, through the dead old city, getting lost in the narrow alleyways or in the wide boulevards where even in the day time Simone would get lost, because to her  they were all equally dark and ugly. If someone said there were good things in Paris she would agree. Far from her to disagree. The nightlife was great. There you have it………..But where it came to elegance, the people of Rio dressed much better. And as for Parisian cooking! And Parisian beauty? What beauty! She was fed up, really fed up, my dears, with steak, chips and filth. Her eyes, so black you could see no iris, danced in the small rectangular mirror. Her slender hands, their nails painted scarlet, rested impatiently on the steering wheel, because once more, Simone had got lost.

“Rio is different,” she said suddenly, dreaming, “the coastal road, eh, Estelvino? You know it. The road that never ends!” On the back seat, to my left Estelvino Cruz’s teeth flashed in the night.

“So why did you come here?” he asked in his oily voice, “Why don’t you catch the first plane back? Did you come only to criticize? That’s not good, my dear?”

They were talking and all of a sudden I felt alone, so alone that once again I wanted to cry. But now I had nobody to run his fingers through my hair. António was by my side, it’s true, but I knew that in his spirit he was with Estrela who was in the car that belonged to the fat Brazilian, whose name was, now I remember, Garibaldi. Then Simone began to sing. She had a heavy low voice, and her songs were always sad. Her eyes spoke of hopelessness, drunken eyes that were like the docks at night when the ships were moored and silent, eyes like deep lagoons where men disappear forever. Her voice stretched out, seemed to slip away, but it never ended.

Costa, who was sitting next to her, asked for a happy song. Her song was too sad. Simone shook her thick black Indian hair. Impossible, she said. The alcohol had made her sad and there was nothing she could do about it. She was full of sorrows. One night, feeling sad, she had thought of suicide and taken an overdose. There was nobody else like her.

Jandira, the blond girl, sitting by the door, snuggling up next to Costa, confessed that only on the fourth whiskey did she find the true taste of life and suggested that we finish the night in an all-night bar in Montparnasse. Simone stopped the car to suggest the idea to others and before long we were again sat together around another table.

António had sat himself down to Estrela and had continued the thread of their conversation in a low voice. Simone, her eyebrows frowning, seemed to be considering death as the only remedy for life.

It is strange how I remember the details of that night. At one point Jandira began to sing a samba and António went to dance with Estrela. Their faces were almost touching and their bodies seemed to form one sole being. They weren’t talking. Suddenly Simone explained, as if with sudden inspiration.

“I’d give everything for a Brazilian bean stew,”

“Me too. There’s a restaurant nearby where we can get on,” Estelvino said.

“You’re joking! Really?”

“Yes, Salustiano told me where it is, but I wasn’t paying much attention. Now it’s a bit difficult because he’s gone away.”

Antonio and Estrela came and sat down. Estelvino was beating time with a box of matches.

“Waiter, a half, please.” It was me who was speaking.

“You’ve already drunk enough and you’ll end up drunk. You know you can’t take much,” António said.

I swallowed the beer in one gulp, then another, then another still. Everything changed. Suddenly people seemed nicer and I wanted to hug them. So great was the tenderness for Estrela that arose in me that I almost cried. It was more or less at that point that I noticed she had a white hair and I couldn’t look at anything else. Estrela too, began to stare at me insistently, no doubt because my drunkenness had put her at ease. Then she looked very carefully at António as if to say, “How could this man marry that woman?” It was easy to guess the thoughts expressed in those sharp eyes and the perplexed frown straight up between the plucked eyebrows. I then leant over the table and pointed out to her the white hair.

“You let me pull it out. You could easily pull out the wrong one, and then you’ll be missing a hair.”

The words were all chewed up, struggling to get out. But they had got out. There was a heavy silence, cut by a nervous laugh from Jandira. Then António helped me get up. He put my coat on me, wrapped a scarf around my neck and told the others not to worry about us. The barman said there were taxis nearby. At the door we bumped into a man giving out Bible tracts……….Rappelez vous de la vie eternelle…….I laughed at him, calling him an old fraud, and then I turned back to say goodnight to Estrela for whom I felt, I remember, a great affection.

The next morning, when the alcohol had worn off I thought of committing suicide. I don’t mean to say that I had resolved to do it. Far from it. There are very few suicides and such people rarely talk about it, but sooner or later, suddenly they do it. The others, those who spend their lives talking about it are nothing but swindlers of death. I’m going to kill myself because you are the lover of that woman or that man. If you leave me I’m going to kill myself. In general such threats work because human credulity (especially masculine credulity when personal vanity is in play) is without limits.

I only thought of suicide so as to suffer more. It was a sort of game of chess  I played with an opponent   -  António  -  who wasn’t there, without him knowing. And even when I went into that chemists shop in Boulevard Saint-Michel, it wasn’t because I wanted to kill myself, but because I wanted to sleep, and I couldn’t sleep without a sedative.

Much later, yes, there was a day I wanted to die, the day Estrela came back, just to take from me what little that remained  -  the memory of the son that I never had.