Читать книгу Funhouse - Sergio Kokis - Страница 9

MY FATHER DOESN’T WANT TO KNOW about niggers and priests. That’s why I can’t talk to him. No one else wants to answer my questions either. I’m too little. If I keep talking about things like that, I’ll get the hiding I deserve. Brazen little brat!

The women don’t really care what I do. They yell at me half-heartedly, without real anger. They’re too happy to be visiting the monastery, sure that they’ll find a husband in the coming year. A real husband, a church wedding, something to last forever. With a white gown, a virginal wedding night and envy etched on the faces of the other women who will turn into old maids or worse. Yesterday, the toothless old black lady predicted that a man would come — so it has to be true. Mother plies her with questions, digging for details, burning to know whether the lover promised the day before is the same as the husband St. Anthony will surely send. She wants to know everything. Her friends chatter on endlessly about the tiniest details: the urge to pee, the way they felt when they touched the saint’s thighs, what they were thinking about during prayer service, the colour of the eyes of the monk who held the collection plate, was he good looking or not, hairy or not ... All this talk is shot through with nervous giggling and shrill cries, and interrupted by frequent trips to the toilet. Lili can’t stand it any more. She has to have a sip of sugar water. Her fatigue, the sharpness of her desire, those sudden impulses, are going to set her on fire.

“Quick, the sugar water! Some herb tea! No, bring the ether. We’ve got to calm her down ... Quick! The poor kid, she’s dying. Ah, men, what a curse, what ingratitude ... Get out of here, you nosy little worm, what are you up to, spying on us all the time? Good for nothing! You’re always underfoot. Keep on sticking your nose into other people’s business and you’ll see what’ll happen to you ... Shifty little devil!”

They box me on the ears, just a couple of smacks to move me out of the way. Nothing serious, really. They’re not upset with me; they’re afraid of being let down again, despite the new dreams that have sprung up after last night. The toothless black lady doesn’t mess around. With her it’s serious business, she’s on intimate terms with the macumba spirits, in direct contact with the earth. She can see the man of your dreams at the bottom of her glass. I saw it with my own eyes once when they got all worked up during one of their rituals. It was a little scary, but not as bad as the women outside the convent. Stranger though, like being scared of ghosts: suddenly the old woman’s eyes began to roll, she started speaking some bizarre language and her breasts came to life as she danced.

Starting with my mother, the women in my house believe in her more than in the monk. I don’t know why, but the visit to the convent frightened me more. The old woman makes me laugh. Yesterday, they spent the whole day waiting for her, cooking and keeping an eye on the clouds. The moon’s got to be out, that’s for sure. Rain will ruin everything, wetting and softening things up too soon. The old woman won’t be able to see. Or the man of their dreams won’t be able to pass through. I’m on my best behaviour so they’ll forget I’m there.

When the old woman arrives, that’s exactly what they do. She’s huge, black as a telephone with big eyes that bug out when she looks at me. Her eyes are red, almost brown, but she’s not mean, especially when she laughs and shows her rare, blue-blotched teeth. A big, resonant laugh that startles you and makes you jump. I look at her only from a distance. Her pink gums are enormous, too, standing out against her black skin like a rain-drenched flower. Everything else about her is white, the colour of the spirits: her dress, her shoes, her panties when she shakes her skirts to air herself out. Everything, even her tapioca bread. Funny-looking little loaves that the women heat up in the frying pan until they turn completely dry. They taste like the host, my mother says. White, too, are the sheets they lay on the floor to walk barefoot during the ritual.

The ceremony will be held on the rear balcony, where we hang out the laundry to dry, next to the ice-box and the little room where Maria the maid sleeps. Out of doors, so they can see the stars. Everybody is happy, it’s going to work for sure, like every year when it doesn’t rain. The black lady attracts other women to our house, most of them my mother’s friends and cooks from the neighbourhood. She’s a specialist in moon-water, an important event that takes place on the night before St. Anthony’s feast. In a basin of water lit by the moon, the black woman makes the face of the promised man appear, or names the one who is secretly in love. She might even be able to make men fall in love, I’m not too sure.

The women crowd around, it’s already late at night, the lights have all been switched off. First they light candles in every corner of the room. Their dim flickering glow throws moving shadows on the walls when the black lady gets up to dance. She moves around a large shallow basin that Maria uses to wash herself. But Maria isn’t in it, and the water in the basin is crystal clear, shimmering, yellowish in colour, then dark blue when the candles are blown out. In her raucous, moaning voice, the old lady captures the moon in the water, which then becomes just as holy as the water blessed by the parish priest. Only you can’t piss in holy water or rub it between your thighs; you just touch it to your face when you make the sign of the cross. Moon-water is stronger, like medicine from the pharmacy. You have to use it with care. The black lady says a few more prayers and pours egg white into the basin. The other women light candles, even more candles than before, to see better. Her mouth gleams red with incantations. Just then, one of the women squats down and pisses a few drops into the basin. She lifts up her skirt to keep from wetting herself, showing her buttocks and her thing full of shadows and reflections from the moon-water. When several woman are looking for a man, they pour water into other basins, into plates or glasses, so no one’s man gets mixed up with anyone else’s. Sometimes that makes for funny situations: the women get so excited that they trip over each other, spill the sacred water and piss on the floor.

That’s when I’m most likely to be found out, because I can’t keep from laughing, and the blows can be something. They’ll kick me out, and my mother will whip me. You can’t make fun of sacred things.

“Crux Credo, may this little monster end up in hell! Devil child! Hellion!”

Sometimes it’s not even my fault. But my big brother can hide quicker, getting away like he’s innocent while I’m still trying to make out the details in the darkness. I forget the danger and get too close in order to look at the shapes the egg-white makes in the mixture of piss and water. If my brother starts laughing, I get trapped in the middle of that horde of jittery women, right in the path of their blows and their vengeful fingernails.

But if they don’t catch me at that crucial moment, then everything turns out fine. The women are so happy with the black lady’s visions in the moon-water pots that they don’t see anything else. In a deep voice, she describes the men in detail, talking with each woman and helping her find out who he might be, to remember his face and connect her description with a man in the neighbourhood. A clerk or a truck driver perhaps, a policeman or a fireman, even a bar owner. Tempers flare, and their voices are shrill. Sometimes the man in question is already married, and more services from the black lady will be needed to open the door. Secret things, things spoken in low voices, in which my mother has a certain influence, since she knows plenty of other black ladies. All the same, the atmosphere is light-hearted. The toothless black lady laughs, she knows how to talk and provide the intimate details. She vaunts the qualities of her imaginary man like a butcher selling a scrawny chicken. The complete opposite of the poor monk who stands there muttering in Latin, not even looking at the rear-ends and breasts rising and falling around him. The black woman rarely admits defeat, even when the moon-water turns opaque and milky, a bad omen. Her eyes see through everything. Even if she can’t provide all the details, a man is there, that much is clear. A man who reveals himself timidly, who wants his woman to be braver and show more of herself, everything will depend on her and her alone ... The other women console the poor creature, showering her with advice about how to display her best qualities, whispering to her that it’s probably this man or that one, how he loves her secretly, she’ll have to coax him out by moving her backside better, and letting him see her tongue when she smiles. The conversation catches fire, confidences fly thick and fast, broken by bursts of laughter. The more experienced women give the younger ones lessons in seduction, what to do with the part below the belt, how to lead while pretending to follow. Men like it that way ...

My father always says that women are stupid animals, and he won’t tolerate macumba in his house, he claims they’re all whores, starting with Lili. Her little routine must be getting on his nerves. All day long she’s flashing her panties, and she never closes the door to the toilet. Plus the house is always full of my mother’s friends, other aunts coming and going, older than Lili but younger than my mother. When they come to our house to visit, which can last for months, bras and panties are everywhere. Open dressing-gowns, thighs being shaved, breasts showing while they remove their hair, lineups at the shower door. There’s always something going on, women yelling, weeping or locking themselves in their rooms if my father says the wrong thing. Then he has to go in and console them, and beg their pardon. Sometimes he’s so successful that my mother starts shouting obscenities at her sisters, threatening to throw the lot of them out, calling them shameless bitches who’ll end up with tuberculosis or syphilis ...These are bad times, dangerous ones, and we kids hide as best we can while my father takes advantage of the chaos to step out for a breath of fresh air.

My hiding place is under the big bed. Quickly, I slip under it and make the whole world disappear. Until tempers cool down. From my foxhole, all I can see is legs, fat dust balls and cobwebs. But when I close my eyes tight I can make all kinds of things appear, people, colours, even lights if I push down on my eyeballs with clenched fists. There, alone, protected by darkness, the things that flow through my head are so entertaining that I end up blind to what’s going on outside. Sometimes I combine the two and make a new world. That’s my brand of moon-water.

I know it’s dangerous, I’ve got to be careful because it can put you to sleep like the mind-numbing perfume of certain flowers. If I fall asleep, my goose is cooked. They’ll catch me and say I was doing it on purpose, trying to give my poor mother a heart attack ... The women will grab me by the legs or the hair and drag me from my hiding place. That’s my nightmare. After I’ve been punished I realize what a mistake I’ve made. My stupidity, my lack of attention, my inexperience caused me to fall asleep and lose track of the world around me. Once they’ve calmed down and dried their tears, the women realize that one of the little vermin, the nastiest of the lot, must have slipped out into the street, on purpose, to cause even more trouble. Shouting, they search high and low for me through the tiny apartment and in the corridors, waking up the neighbours as they go. It’s the same routine every time, the one my brother enjoys so much. He always remembers my hiding place. They’ve got to take it out on someone and discharge the fury that’s gnawing at them, and they feel better once they’ve punished a hooligan caught in the act.

I’ve got to be on my guard. Moon-water is dangerous stuff. I can’t say a word about it, I’ve got to learn to keep it to myself, and hold it in behind my eyes, clenching my teeth so it won’t slip out. I can’t let myself go. My brother already beat me up once on account of my cobweb stories. He even tore a page out of one of my father’s illustrated books because it showed a monster that scared him. It’s true that I ran after him with the book open, just to spook him a little. He grabbed it and threw it out the window. There it went, the only weapon I had against him. I miss that picture of the ogre holding its severed head by the hair, like a lantern. I try to imitate it by lurching towards my brother, but the effect just isn’t the same.

No use trying to talk with the women. They won’t listen, they look away in boredom. The doctor taught me to keep my mouth shut. He didn’t look mean, he and his ruddy grandfather’s face. But my mother must have cooked up a plot with him, by telling him I was too thin and how I’m always falling asleep. I have trouble breathing at night, and sometimes it gets so bad I hurt myself tearing at the walls with my fingernails. For no good reason, just for a change. When it’s dark, I’m afraid of the ghosts under the beds. At night, the bedroom is completely filled by my parents’ big bed, plus the two cots, mine and my brother’s. Beneath mine is an enormous dark cave that I can see through the webbing. I curl up in a ball to keep the ghosts from grabbing me by the legs. Ghosts always pull on the legs of bad little boys. During the day I crawl under the bed and my ghost stories don’t scare me. But at night, since I can’t sleep, I’m alone with them.

I was dumb enough to tell the doctor about it. He wanted to know why I couldn’t breathe. He let me talk on, with the expression of a man who knows all about ghosts and monsters. I was so surprised that someone was listening to me that I probably exaggerated at little, just to prove I wasn’t afraid of ghosts, or black ladies, or the moon. He must have told my mother everything. Next visit, he tied me to a chair with leather straps, and while a nurse held my head, he pulled out my tonsils cold. I can still see his fake smile in the round mirror. Through the hole, he stared down into my gaping mouth forced open by a metal bit. He tried to fool me by telling me it wasn’t going to hurt, that I had to be a man, that there were worse things in life. But it hurt, it hurt a lot. I gagged on his forceps and bloody drool poured out of my mouth. In triumph, he showed me a tonsil. At the bottom of the enamel spittoon, red splatters were mixed in with shiny black clots, iodized gases, rust spots, and the blood-streaked dark blue of a tonsil. The other tonsil was missing; I must have swallowed it in a gagging fit. It was a terrible punishment, but it taught me a lesson. Funniest of all, my brother suffered the same treatment, right after me, and for no good reason. It’s the family tradition: punish all the pests and never try to find out who’s at fault.

My big brother isn’t bad, but you can’t push him. Sometimes he looks sad, even lost. That’s when he wants me to play with him or watch the street. But my stories bother him, and soon he loses interest and tries to change them his way so they’ll be more fun. I resist at first, but then I give in; we’re not talking about my story any more. That doesn’t matter. As long as time passes. He does the same thing when we play. He mixes things up in no particular order: toy soldiers with animals, cars with ships, as if he couldn’t concentrate and follow one story at a time. As soon as he gets a hankering for something, it’s got to be satisfied right away, and if he decides to march his horses through the airplanes, no one can protest. I try to point out that the two don’t go together. He says there aren’t enough cut-out pictures of cars, but plenty of nice horses or bicycles, or Christmas trees, whatever. All his pictures have to be a part of the game. If he gets mad, he’s likely to hit me. Or worse, stop playing completely. He just can’t get caught up in something like I can, he doesn’t take anything seriously. That’s why our games never last long. He’s learned how to string me along, maybe by watching me play alone. He knows I’m having fun even if it seems strange to other people. There’s nothing I can do about it. Sure, it bothers me. Sometimes I wish I was as casual as him, and could break off the game just because someone won’t give me one of his pictures. Next time I’ll surprise him, I tell myself. But he always loses interest first. Or else I give him an excuse by stupidly refusing to share or trade my things. Still, he’s the one who gets first choice every time. Because he’s the eldest, as our father says. That’s the way it is in life: he’ll have to look after the family if ever our parents aren’t there. Not now, he’s too young, our aunts or the maid tell us what to do when our parents are out. Later, though. Later, he’ll do great things, that’s what everybody says. So it’s normal that he gets first choice. Anyway, when he’s through with something, he hands it on to me, right? His old clothes don’t bother me, but when it comes to his pictures and cigar boxes, I pretend not to be disappointed. I’ve got lots of boxes anyway, and an enormous collection of beer-bottle caps, so I never come out on the losing end when it comes time to divide things up.

It’s trickier when it comes to pictures, since magazines are rare at our house. Nothing but love stories, photo-romances and fashion stuff. My mother copies the dresses in the magazines for her customers, or gets ideas for new ones — that’s why we mustn’t cut them up. Eventually, though, we end up with the romances after they’ve been read and reread, folded, crumpled, lent to all the neighbour ladies, cut out if the men are good-looking, kissed, rolled up to kill flies, looked at again if there’s nothing else to read, knelt on to wax the floor or after Maria has finished cutting up fish on the kitchen counter. So we don’t get much in the way of pictures. Besides, they aren’t always the right thing for us since our aunts don’t like war, or wild animals, or the circus, or trucks, or bandits. All they like are men who kiss women, and crying girls, and made-up women, and baby stories. My father doesn’t buy magazines. They’re for lazy, shameless women, he says. He only reads the Sunday paper.

Sometimes I bring back magazines from the bar, things the tobacco-shop clerk doesn’t want. Our collections grow rich with photos of race horses, trucks, policemen and murder victims. Sometimes my mother’s customers leave us the magazines they’ve read, but unfortunately they face the same fate as the romances before our scissors can get to them. Good pictures are precious, and choosing them is serious business. I hide my desires, otherwise my brother will pick the same pictures I want. I’ve also learned to pretend to be upset and sulk, even if I’m happy with what I’ve gotten. If I don’t do that, he might decide to divide everything all over again. Sometimes, though, I forget. I admire my new pictures and say everything that comes into my head, and suddenly he realizes he’s been fooled. What’s even stranger is that I start liking my new pictures right after I’ve made my choice. I don’t know how to explain it, but the moment they become part of my collection, everything seems to work together, as if these were just the pictures I was waiting for to improve my stories. My brother’s never happy. He always wants to trade as soon as I start playing. That’s when I get mad. No more trades. My collection will be thrown off balance; the pictures he wants to give me don’t fit in with what I have. Of course they’ll end up fitting in if he forces me to trade, or if he starts to cry and our mother steps in and makes us combine both our collections and divide them up again, fair and square. Sometimes I get so mad that I use my fists right away, and that starts a fight that brings the women down on our heads. Worst of all, when they punish us, sometimes they rip up our pictures. That’s the last thing I want. I wasn’t really mad anyway, I was just exaggerating my anger to screw up the courage to hit him. That kind of stupidity irritates me, because I realize I like my things more than he does his.

Our games always end in argument and disappointment. But they break up the long stretches of boredom as we sit, withdrawn, even though we’re looking out the window together. Watching the street from our third-floor flat is everybody’s favourite activity. Except Maria, who can only do it when she’s finished her work in the kitchen and if my mother forgets to give her other chores. The street is broad with heavy traffic, and accidents are frequent. I can spend hours counting cars, or shooting all the red ones using my finger as a pistol. My brother shoots red cars, too, but he always scores more than me. He’s cheating, I tell him. That was so a red car, he answers, sometimes two or three in a row. While I argue he keeps right on shooting, running up his score. He cheats when we shoot at passengers in convertibles, too, always counting more people than there really are and adding them up so fast I can’t keep track. If I spot a car full of people before he does, he shoots at the same time I do, claiming that my aim is off, and that I only wounded them. For him, winning is important, not playing the game.

My brother is completely different from me, starting with his colour. He’s red-headed like my father and fairer, too; his eyes are green and he sweats a lot. We’re the same height, but he’s stronger and heavier. Our mother is always comparing us and telling me I’m going to die of tuberculosis. She’s got an obsession with tuberculosis, even if no one really knows exactly what tuberculosis is. In her eyes I’m thin and pale, and since I’m a bit of a dreamer, she thinks I’m sick.

It’s true that my skin and eyes are darker. Everyone calls me “Blackie.” For a long time it bothered me, then I got used to it. Now it even makes me a little proud, as if black meant something tender, something special. I know I’m not really black. Not like the black women who work in the kitchen. It’s the same word, but in my head it doesn’t mean the same thing. When my father calls me “Blackie,” it’s got nothing to do with what he means when he says that blacks are like animals. My mother says “nigger” instead of “black” when she talks about black people. And she tacks on, “When niggers don’t dirty the entrance, they dirty the exit “Which isn’t so easy to figure out because all her black girlfriends aren’t niggers. She likes them a lot, and respects them. “Nigger” means someone she doesn’t like, something like pest, demon, devil, witch, Satan, evil thing, shameless, Crux Credo, Virgin Mary, syphilitic, son of a bitch, skin and bones, wretch. If she’s chasing me with her whip and I manage to escape, she calls me “nigger,” or even “little nigger.” “Come here, little nigger, you shameless brat. So that’s it, you want to kill your mother, you dirty little pest?” She calls me “tubercular” when my coughing gets on her nerves. She can’t stand it when I cough, even if something went down the wrong pipe. Everybody else can cough all they like.

Father never calls me “nigger,” and his “Blackie” sounds sweet to my ears. It’s his way of telling me I can come close to him, that he wants to show me something interesting, or comfort me. He’s proud that there are no niggers in the family, and he keeps saying so to get under my mother’s skin. He’s big and blond with blue eyes and a brush moustache — all the neighbours call him “the German.” He likes telling everyone how what he does is so different from the blacks and mulattos. They work like pigs, he says, whereas he’s a skilled worker, an electrician, he can even repair radio sets. He can read books, has fine handwriting and a complicated signature. He wasn’t able to study for long because his family kicked him out of the house when his father died and his mother wanted to remarry. But he’s not like the niggers. He finished a correspondence course, which is probably better because you learn by yourself, you don’t just get a mouthful of chewed-over stuff like all the other loafers. The neighbours respect him, and only my aunts say bad things about him behind his back.

My mother is smaller than he is, smaller than us almost. She should be called “Blackie.” Before she goes out, she puts on thick make-up and bright colours that bring out her dark hair. Our aunts and her friends called her Gypsy, and that makes her smile proudly.

I can’t figure that out either, because she’s always threatening me with Gypsy women, saying how they steal bad children and tell the future by reading the cut-open insides of babies. Whenever a Gypsy woman passes us on the street, my mother stops to chat without paying any attention to us. Then Lili comes over, even though she’s carrying the baby. The Gypsy women are darker than my mother, they’re dirty and they go around barefoot, but they don’t seem to care about us kids. They’ve got plenty of kids themselves, mostly little girls who crowd around my mother and my aunts to get in on the magic spells. Maybe they eat their little boys right away, or maybe they keep them somewhere until the time comes to look at their guts. Like in the story of little Hans that my aunts like to tell me to prove that people really do abandon bad little boys, and never come back for them. My father gets angry when he hears that story. Nothing but women’s lies, he says, we might get a hiding for our own good, but he won’t let the women abandon us. It’s against the law. All you have to do is call the police, and they’ll go straight to jail. My brother says so, too. He says it right to the women’s faces because he’s not afraid. He threatens to tell our father everything and they start shouting, but they don’t punish him.

Still, their threats do bother me. I’m sure they’ll never hand my brother over to the Gypsies because he’ll start yelling, and afterwards, my father will kill everybody. They won’t give away the baby either. They like it too much and besides, Lili needs it to stay on good terms with St. Anthony. But if they ever get it into their minds to give me away, I don’t know what I could do. So I make a point of not getting too close to Gypsy women. I watch them from a distance, ready to run. I’m scared of the tramps, too, because they catch little kids and carry them away in their sacks of old newspapers. But they’re no danger to me because the women won’t go near them. They’re afraid. I don’t like them, but I’m not as afraid as I am of Gypsies. If I look at them close up they seem sad, or else they make funny faces. Some of them try to make me laugh, like the one who drinks at the back of the bar, and who gave me magazines. He waits there once he’s emptied his glass, hoping the Portuguese guy at the counter or another customer will buy him a drink. Sometimes he starts singing. If he’s not too drunk and if he doesn’t start pissing on the floor, people leave him alone. He’s got a sack full of old newspapers, too.

My brother doesn’t like to go out at night, and anyway, my aunts would rather he didn’t come along. He’s always in a hurry, and he doesn’t know how to wait. No sooner is he out the door than he wants what they promised him to make him behave. Or he wants something else, then and there. He doesn’t like the bar because it’s dirty, and if he has to walk, he wants to go back right away because he’s tired. If Lili loses her temper, he threatens to tell everyone everything back at the house, which makes her nervous and puts her friends in a bad mood. He doesn’t know how to go for a walk. He’s always asking where we’re going, how much further it is, why we’re going there, what the joke is ... He’s a pain in the ass because he knows very well we’re not going anywhere. We’re just walking to pass the time. If he comes along it’s no good for me either, because the atmosphere gets tense. The baby doesn’t come along because he’s too little and besides, he’s a bother. My mother says people might think he’s Lili’s son, and then it would look like she’s a whore. So I go alone. Maria gets in on the conversation, too, and before long they’ve forgotten about me. If I follow along and don’t run off in all directions or lag behind, nobody will get mad at me.

Praça Tiradentes is their favourite destination. First we cross the avenue, then follow the streetcar tracks along Andradas, a narrow, dimly lighted street lined with old Portuguese houses. At night the bars are all but deserted, with a handful of customers drinking a beer or two before calling it a night. The women stop to chat with girlfriends who sometimes join the outing. They might encounter a group of men, and get caught up in introductions, laughter, bored but inquiring glances, with growing nervousness and much jealousy. If that happens, it’s all over for me because we’re not likely to be going anywhere far. I wait around for them to forget me, then sit down on the curb to watch the roaches and rats climbing in and out of the gutter. It’s better when the men invite them to a bar, on account of the interesting people who tell stories or leave magazines full of pictures lying around. Sometimes they give me sugared beer. The women are so pleased that they accept a round, too. While they’re having their fun, I fill my pockets with beer-bottle caps which, the next day, will become flying saucers setting out from our window.

Their suitors are no big deal. All they talk about is love, they make comments about how beautiful the women are, about their hair and other dumb things. Sometimes a quick remark about soccer. They mustn’t displease the women. They’re clerks or waiters in other bars, nothing special. No sailors or pilots, not even stevedores, smugglers or crooks. Certainly not firemen or policemen. They don’t have much to tell. They look at one another and smile, waiting for the evening to end or a miracle to happen. My aunts love it.

When they don’t meet anyone, the walk can go on longer, which they obviously find boring. Their greedy eyes are on the prowl instead of enjoying the landscape of overflowing garbage cans, cats on the hunt and couples rubbing against each another in dark doorways. That doesn’t matter, as long as I get out of the house. The further the better.

At the end of Rua Andradas is a small square named for Sao Francisco. I can tell we’re getting close from the strong smell of coffee. There’s a bar where they roast coffee before they serve it at the counter. It makes the whole neighbourhood smell good, even when it’s closed. The place makes me think of my father: he always stops there to drink two or three cups and smoke a cigarette, very slowly, while watching the passing streetcars. He’s completely different from the women in the way he observes things. Their eyes are always searching, as if everything had to be a mirror for them.

We continue on our way, and turn down the street where the theatres are to look at the well-dressed people as they leave the show. The street is wider and brightly lit, and decorated with posters showing exotic costumes and tuxedos. The place is swarming with transvestites. The women don’t stop. This street is only a passage for us, a place to provide food for dreams. They seem to be ashamed of their dresses, which frankly aren’t much to look at under the dazzling lights. A bit further along is their destination, Praça Tiradentes, a place full of working-class dancehalls and women with too-tight dresses and violet make-up that accents their mulatto colouring. The broad square is crammed with all-night bars, with legions of sailors, soldiers and vagabonds. Here, the lights are softer, and the music of dance bands keeps the atmosphere warm. All the benches are taken. There are people sitting on the grass at the foot of the martyr’s statue, others are lying down, couples and groups of tramps. Maids and kitchen help from the surrounding neighbourhoods gather here to show themselves off. Timidly, my aunts try to join this world in hopes of making new friends who will invite them dancing. The place is more like a country fair with its hurdy-gurdies, and wandering vendors of popcorn, roasted peanuts, cotton candy and ice cream in supernatural colours whose smell sets off the odour of underarms sweetened by cheap perfume. Under the light of acetylene lamps, the burnt vaseline of hot-iron straightened hair takes on a greenish tinge, transforming heavily powdered faces into mortuary masks. Many of the men are in uniform, even firemen and mailmen, since that’s the way the women like them. Others strut about in white suits and hats, with broad, multicoloured ties. But most of them are barely visible, their clothes blending in with the nocturnal light and the pale housefronts. Red and blue lamps cast pallid halos against the foliage, drawing people to the dancehalls. The crowd moves by in a casual rhythm. Now and again a drunkard passes close to me, muttering obscenities, or a crazy woman or a tramp displays a soot-stained face beneath grease-matted hair. Exhausted night-owls and beggars sleep on the benches. Finally I, too, find a place to flop down. The women lead me home like a sleepwalker.