Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? Read online

  Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga

  Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga

  A B-NOVEL

  BY CAIO FERNANDO ABREU

  Translated

  from the Portuguese

  with an Afterword and Glossary

  by Adria Frizzi

  UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

  AUSTIN

  Texas Pan American Series

  Obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cultura do Brasil/Fundação Biblioteca Nacional/Departamento Nacional do Livro

  This book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of Brazil/National Library Foundation/National Book Division

  Copyright © 2000 by the University of Texas Press

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition, 2000

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Abreu, Caio Fernando.

  [Onde andará Dulce Veiga? English]

  Whatever happened to Dulce Veiga?: a B-novel / Caio Fernando Abreu; translated from the Portuguese with an afterword and glossary by Adria Frizzi.

  p. cm. — (Texas Pan American series)

  ISBN 0-292-70501-8 (alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-292-75318-1 (e-book)

  ISBN 978-0-292-79237-1 (individual e-book)

  I. Frizzi, Adria. II. Title. III. Series

  PQ9698.1.B68 O5313 2001

  869.3′42—dc21

  00-037705

  Contents

  Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?

  I. MONDAY

  II. TUESDAY

  III. WEDNESDAY

  IV. THURSDAY

  V. FRIDAY

  VI. SATURDAY

  VII. SUNDAY

  Afterword

  Glossary

  Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga

  In Memory of Nara Leão

  For

  Odete Lara,

  Guilherme de Almeida Prado,

  Cida Moreyra,

  and all the female vocalists of Brazil.

  “I had seventeen dollars in my wallet. Seventeen dollars and the fear of writing. I sat erect before the typewriter and blew on my fingers. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don’t desert me now. I started to write and I wrote:”

  John Fante, Dreams from Bunker Hill

  I

  MONDAY

  Toothed Vaginas

  1

  I should have sung.

  I should have doubled up with laughter or cried, but I no longer knew how to do those things. Or perhaps I could have lit a candle, rushed to Consolação church, said an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and a Gloria, anything I could remember, after plunking some change, if I had any—and during the past months I never did—in the metal box “For the Souls in Purgatory.” Give thanks, ask for light—the way I did in the times I still had faith.

  Those were the days, I thought. I lit a cigarette and didn’t assume any of those dramatic postures, as if there were a camera in a corner somewhere watching me all the time. Or God. Without a judge or an audience, without close-up or zoom, I just sat there at the beginning of that scorching February afternoon, staring at the phone I had hung up a moment before. I didn’t even cross myself or raise my eyes toward heaven. The least one is expected to do in these cases, I guess, even without faith, as if reacting to some mystical, conditioned reflex.

  A miracle had occurred. A modest miracle, but essential to someone who, like me, didn’t have rich parents, investments, real estate, or inheritance and was just trying to make it on his own in an infernal city like the one throbbing outside my still unopened apartment window. Nothing particularly sensational, like suddenly recovering one’s eyesight or rising from a wheelchair with a beatific expression and the lightness of someone who walks on water. Even though my myopia was getting worse all the time and I often felt weak in the knees—whether from chronic hunger or mere sadness I couldn’t say—my eyes and legs still worked reasonably well. Other organs, it’s true, much less so.

  I felt my neck. My brain, for one.

  That’s enough, I said to myself, naked, paralyzed in the middle of the sticky midday penumbra. Think about this miracle, man. Simple—almost insignificant in its simplicity—the small miracle that might bring some peace to the string of aimless and erratic bumps which I, with a certain complacency and no originality, was in the habit of calling my life, had a name. It was called—a job.

  I looked at my face in the old scratched mirror, at the marks that belonged to the glass or my skin—I no longer knew which—and nodded in greeting. “Very good, congratulations. Now you’re employed.” I felt no thrill of pride, no quiver of hope light up my bloodshot eyes or push out my sagging chest where—I didn’t want to remember but I did—less than a week earlier I had discovered the first gray hair.

  I sighed.

  It’s true that only a complete idiot or someone totally inexperienced would feel, I won’t say ecstasy, but some kind of animation for having gotten a little job as a reporter at the Diário da Cidade, possibly the worst paper in the world. I don’t think I had turned into an idiot yet, not completely anyway. And as for experience—well, that marked face, still puffy from sleep, with a three-day stubble, watching me from among the mirror’s scratches, seemed to have plenty of it. All right, said the face in the mirror, since you insist on confusing experience with devastation . . . I sighed again. No, my dear face, filling page after page on the typewriters of that pre-computer-age rag was certainly no reason to jump for joy.

  But I had to be happy. And when you want to be, you are. I began to be. After all, that day might be the first step toward emerging from the morass of depression and self-pity in which I had been wallowing for nearly a year. I liked the expression morass-of-depression-&-etc. so much that I almost looked for a scrap of paper to jot it down. I had lost the paranoid vice of imagining I was always being filmed or appraised by some god with multifaceted eyes, like a fly’s, but not that of being written about. If I had been a dancer, would I have imagined perhaps that I was being sculpted constantly, in every movement? Ah, each gesture, a true aesthetic apology of pure form.

  It was funny. And pretty schizophrenic. But suddenly reality had become much less rhetorical.

  “You start today, pal,” Castilhos had said on the phone. In that voice at the bottom of which, to feed the old subliterary habit, I could have detected something I’d call gruff-complicitous-fondness, although it was actually nothing but an excess of nicotine and busted balls. “And see if you can keep from fucking up on the very first day, okay? I swore to the guys you were a hotshot.”

  Frightening: the night before, I had gone to sleep a nearly forty-year-old unemployed journalist, in debt, bitter, solitary, and disillusioned, to awaken the following day, magically, with that voice from the past informing me on the phone that I was—a hotshot. From today on, a life of facts. Action, movement, dynamism. The clappers snap shut. God turns another page of his endless, supremely boring script. The sculptor chips off another piece of marble.

  I put on water for coffee. Whitish mushrooms were growing in the dampness of the kitchen. Nice. Sort of bucolic, even. I turned on the radio, got in the shower. The apartment was so small you could practically do all those things at the same time. With one hand I lathered my head, with the other I adjusted the volume of the radio in the living room, stretching out a leg to turn off the burner when the water boiled.

  “Giddy-up! Onward ho! Yee-haw!” I yelled under the ice-cold water. “Yippee-hi-yo, Silver!”


  Then I heard a familiar tune on the radio. It said something like, “reality doesn’t matter, what matters is the illusion,” with which I completely agreed. During the last months, anyway, nothing had happened to me besides fantasies. But the song that echoed in the recesses of my memory was old, like a bolero or a fox-trot, and what came out of the radio now was one of those rock songs with a desperate electric bass, mean percussion, and hysterical synthesizers. The female singer’s voice sounded like glass ground up in a blender. In any case, I thought, the lyrics are right. And all the things I remembered, or thought I remembered, because in remembering them so intensely I had ended up turning them into sheer—and lousy—literature, no longer mattered.

  What was left of the last piece of soap slipped through my fingers. It was so small it disappeared down the drain.

  2

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “Does this group really exist?”

  Castilhos tapped the ash of one of his cigarettes in the air. He had been smoking three or four cigarettes simultaneously for as long as I’d known him, about twenty years. Some were balanced on the edge of the desk, the metal rim covered with dark burns, others were scattered in the ashtrays lost among piles of papers, photos, clips, folders, envelopes, plastic cups, artificial sweetener, tubes of glue, wads of money, lottery tickets, writing pads, pencils, pens, half-eaten sandwiches, Diet Coke cans, and a clay ox from the Northeast, which I knew from other newsrooms. The fan behind him blew the ashes in my eyes. The temperature in the carpeted room must have approached a gas chamber’s.

  He set the cigarette in an ashtray shaped like a pair of hands cupped as if awaiting manna from heaven. I thought I knew the ashtray too. Past newsrooms, other times. Actually every one of those knickknacks looked familiar, including him. And that wasn’t exactly what I’d call a “pleasant feeling.”

  Castilhos shuffled through the photos, pulled out a mulatto girl in a thong bikini and white boots, clipped it to a page so furiously scratched out that the corrections had perforated the paper.

  “What’s so strange, just because of the name? It’s the times, what can you do? Now they’re called Grunge Rats, Filthy Worms, Disgusting Bugs, stuff like that.” He turned to the lower side table, stuck a sheet in the typewriter and pounded away. “Check out this babe, man!”

  I looked at him uncomprehendingly. As far as I knew he liked the skinny spiritual type à la Audrey Hepburn. At most, Deborah Kerr. Among the newest, Michelle Pfeiffer, maybe. Never mulatto girls in white boots.

  “The caption: ‘Check out this babe, man!’ Twenty-four characters—without the exclamation mark it fits just right.” He tore the sheet out and barked, “Pai Tomás, come over here.”

  “Perfect,” I said. I had forgotten that talking to him was always like that. Two or three intersecting themes interrupted by sighs, coughing, snorts, phone calls, cigarettes, and shouts. Abrupt cuts, retakes, and counter-themes, without any preface, like as-I-was-saying or stuff like that.

  “Pai Tomás! Where did that harebrain go?” He distractedly ran his yellowed fingertips over the mulatto girl’s thighs. Castilhos’ hands always amazed me. Instead of predictable hairy paws, they were small, plump, rosy. Whenever I began to hate him, all I had to do was look at them. I immediately forgave him everything. “Vomit. The other day some kids came up with this group. Not group, band. That’s what they say nowadays. There was another one, The Slugs. Beelzebub and the Inverted Cherubs also turned up. It’s the times, what can you do?”

  The phone rang, he answered. I looked around, but the huge and decadent room, with its floor fans, was nearly empty. Except for a young man, hair bristling with gel, all in black, who was furiously typing, perhaps a scathing review of the Inverted Cherubs.

  “We close at eight,” Castilhos was barking. “Eight on the dot, dammit. I want it on my desk by seven, at least to have a look at that crap, okay?” He slammed the receiver down, cigarette butts flew in all directions. “Lamebrains, all of them. The other day one of them wrote that some woman won the Academy Award for best actoress, is that pathetic or what?”

  A black man suddenly materialized next to his desk, young, but with completely white hair, like a Preto Velho, an Old Black Spirit of the Umbanda religion. He gave a military salute, serious. Beneath the unbuttoned khaki shirt I saw a ritual necklace of red and black beads. They glistened, shiny with the sweat of the black skin. Castilhos raised the photo of the mulatto girl and waved it in my face.

  “Pai Tomás, this is our new Entertainment reporter.”

  “Laroiê!” said Pai Tomás, bowing his white head.

  I smiled. That is, I contracted the muscles of my face to show my teeth. I was feeling a little weak, hadn’t eaten anything all day. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again Pai Tomás had vanished.

  With Castilhos, you never knew for sure when things stopped looking funny and became pathetic, folkloric, or vaguely menacing. Behind his desk the filthy windows filtered the gray light of Avenida Nove de Julho. The city looked like it was under a bell jar fogged up with steam. Smoke, exhalations, evaporated sweat, carbon monoxide, viruses. I looked at his hands again and, without really trying, I gave it one last shot.

  “To be honest, Castilhos, I need the job pretty bad. But I don’t know if I’m the right guy for it.”

  “Sure you do. You know perfectly well. And you’re going to do everything just right, okay? So what if the girls’ band is called Márcia Fellatio and the Toothed Vaginas? It’s a very original name, and they must be groovy girls. It’s on the radio all the time.”

  “I only listen to Gregorian chants,” I lied. Then I sighed, “Dykes, sexists, teenage rebels without cause or consequence.”

  “A good title for a piece. But first go see them, then write it.” He lit another cigarette. And repeated, “It’s the times.”

  “What can you do?” I concluded for him. “Give me their number.”

  He pushed aside a pile of papers, grabbed an address book with more loose sheets in it than all its pages put together. And it’s still only February, I thought. He handed me a scrap of paper.

  “Talk to Patrícia. Or Vanessa, Môonica, or Cristiane, one of those modern names. What’s going on here? There aren’t any more Veras, Juçaras, Elviras. And what about Carmens?”

  “Castilhos, do you still live in that apartment on São João?”

  He opened the drawer with his foot, then slammed it shut loudly, pushed his glasses up on his forehead and caressed the horns of the Northeastern ox. This I remembered: it was the signal that our conversation was over. As I was getting up, I said:

  “Beware, warrior, when the fingers of the great master caress the bovine’s horns.”

  He grunted. Maybe it was a smile, I don’t know.

  I headed for the exit, picking my way through the empty desks. A blonde in her fifties, wearing lots of fake gold and a low-cut imitation leopard-skin dress, bent over her typewriter as I passed. She could have been vulgar, but something about the elongated neck and the square shoulders, thrown back, betrayed a certain aristocracy. Perhaps a recent divorcée trying to get a fresh start, an ex-ballerina from Russia fascinated by the tropics and forced to do sordid translations in order to survive. Behind her a calendar of the Japanese Seicho-No-Ie cult read, “Now is the time to be reborn.” I was sitting down beside her to make a call when Castilhos hollered:

  “It’s Friday’s cover,” and then, without getting up, but in a perfectly pitched voice and an English so flawless I understood absolutely nothing, he recited: “‘Disable all the benefits of your country, be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making that countenance you are.’”

  The young man in black stopped typing, his hands suspended in midair over the keys.

  “John Donne,” he ventured.

  The ex-ballerina from Russia clapped her hands.

  “Fernando Pessoa.”

  She was completely off base. During the twenty years I had known that game, the only Portugues
e author Castilhos admitted was Camões. And on one occasion, to everybody’s surprise, Florbela Espanca: “Always the same strange disease of life, and the heart the same open sore!” Now everybody was waiting, looking at me. It was as crucial as an initiation test.

  I shot out:

  “Shakespeare.”

  Castilhos confirmed:

  “As You Like It. Act four, scene one.”

  The others clapped. I bowed in acknowledgment, then I asked the blonde’s leave and picked up the phone. Before I could dial the number, she stuck a hand covered with rings and long scarlet nails across the table.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said, with no Russian accent whatsoever. On the contrary, with its open vowels it sounded slightly Bahian. “I’m Teresinha O’Connor.”

  “Teresinha what?”

  “O’Connor,” she repeated, laying the accent on thick. “Of Irish descent, you know. I write the gossip column. When you have anything of interest, will you pass it on to me? People who deal with the arts always have something.”

  “You can count on me,” I said. And I began to dial.

  3

  An infernal racket was coming from the background. A murder, bullfight, children’s party, or rape. It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, I thought, they must be rehearsing. We continued to shout back and forth without understanding each other. Then I heard a loud noise, like a door slamming, the racket now muffled, and the voice on the phone.

  “Who do you want to talk to?”

  “Vanessa,” I said.

  “Which, Redgrave or Bell?”

  “Either one.”

  “There are no Vanessas here, honey. Try Jane.”

  I struck back:

  “Which, Fonda or Bowles?”

  Her surprise was exaggerated. She was from Rio de Janeiro, I figured from her shushing s’s and scratchy r’s. And she was having fun.

  “You said Bowles, Jane Bowles? I don’t know that one.”