Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? Read online

  “Listen,” I said. “If you insist we can go on like this for hours. I can call Marianne Faithfull or Moore, Charlotte Brontë or Rampling. Very cultural and all. But it just so happens that I’m working, sweetheart.” The sweetheart wasn’t part of my vocabulary, but I thought it would help. And in a more formal tone, “Who am I speaking to?”

  “Patrícia.”

  Neal or Highsmith, I thought of asking, maybe Travassos. It was contagious.

  “You’re the person I want to talk to.”

  “Talk, then, love.”

  While I explained that I needed to write a piece about the group and so on—I thought it would be better to say that, the group; I didn’t feel ready yet to utter in public something like Márcia Fellatio and the Toothed Vaginas—Teresinha O’Connor was frantically placing calls from the desk next to me. She was the kind who dials with the tip of her pen, then chews the cap while she’s waiting for the call to go through.

  “Fine,” Patrícia said. “The press is the press, only that’s not how it really works. You call and act like the interview is already on. First I need your birthdate.”

  “Huh?”

  “Date, place, and time. Like Yoko used to do when all those people wanted to interview John Lennon. Just because we’re from Brazil doesn’t mean we’re not selective, know what I mean?”

  “But what do you want it for?”

  “To do your astrological chart, of course. I need to see if everything adds up.”

  Rocker, intellectual, and astrologer. She must wear glasses, I thought. And I pictured the pink surface of Neptune, Miranda, volcanoes of frozen gas. Then the Voyager lost in space, Mick Jagger’s voice screaming into infinity I Can’t Get No Satisfaction on behalf of us all. I had to think to come up with the right date, I almost couldn’t remember the year.

  “That old?” Patrícia seemed disappointed.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And the time?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “Nothing doing, then. Without the exact time, how can I figure out your rising sign? Isn’t it on your birth certificate?”

  “No.”

  “Ask your mother.”

  “My mother lives abroad,” I lied.

  “Call her up, it’s not that expensive. Call from the paper.”

  “She doesn’t have a phone—‘it’s a village lost in the Carpathians,’” I fabulated to myself. In the snow, in a cabin with no telephones or newsrooms, gossip columnists or rock bands, only moose. Where the hell were the Carpathians anyway?

  “At least tell me whether it was in the morning, afternoon, or night.”

  “Early morning,” I said. It was true, my mother always said she hadn’t slept all night. To make me feel guilty, of course. But once she said something like, when I looked out the window the sun was rising and you were coming out. I liked that, at least it was a sunny day.

  “Hold on,” Patrícia said.

  At the other end the infernal racket returned. Little by little the newsroom was becoming more animated. Fat guys from the Sports page, disheveled girls from Entertainment, pimply teenagers from the City Desk. I was getting old. And grumpy. I looked down, began to draw concentric circles on the back of the paper with her number. Slowly rotating my head, which in that heat made me feel even more dazed. Miranda, I enumerated, Carpathians, Passo da Guanxuma. All so far away, all fiction. Below the concentric circles I wrote “everything revolves around it,” like a card I’d seen somewhere.

  I was filling in the second o with ink when the racket returned, then became muffled again.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Look, darling, today’s impossible. We have a recording session. Besides, Moon days aren’t favorable. Very unstable, you know what I mean? Only Friday, Venus’ day. And at six in the afternoon, with Leo rising and the sun in the house of the other.”

  I articulated each syllable so meticulously that anyone, even a toothed vagina, could understand that I was getting mad:

  “Patrícia, I have to turn in this article Thursday. To be published on Friday. I can’t wait for the stars to be favorable and Uranus to be in the house of whoever the fuck.”

  She didn’t say anything, I wondered if it was the expletive.

  “It’s the cover,” I enticed. It even looked like Vanity Fair. “The cover, in color.”

  Suddenly she gave in.

  “All right. We’re going to tape a clip in the studio shortly. Come down there. But absolutely no interview. Only after the chart. Here’s the address.”

  When I finished jotting down the endless you know where there’s a kinda grungy gas station and there you’ll see an underwear billboard with a very sexy guy and right next to a hideous building with green tiles, I put out my cigarette in Teresinha O’Connor’s bronze ashtray, very artsy. She offered me her cheek to kiss.

  “Three to get married,” she demanded.

  I gave her one, without touching her skin. Or the layer of makeup between my mouth and her skin. I grabbed a stack of paper and rushed out. At the door, I heard Teresinha’s voice:

  “Hey, don’t forget my news items, okay?”

  4

  Before finding a cab I passed two dwarves, a hunchback, three blind men, four cripples, a human torso, a man with only one arm, another wrapped in rags like a leper, a black woman bleeding, an old man on crutches, a pair of mongoloid twin sisters, arm in arm, and so many beggars I couldn’t even count them. The set consisted of trash bags giving off a sweet stench, flies buzzing, and children hovering around.

  At the corner a man in lederhosen and a little green hat was playing a hurdy-gurdy for one of those parakeets that draw lots. I stopped. The man made the parakeet peck the little folded paper three times before handing it to me. It said:

  “Hard work will provide you with all the comforts of life: learn to be happy by living honorably, ask and you will receive an unexpected fortune on which you will live well, this is what the stars tell.”

  The Japanese driver tried to strike up a conversation, but I answered with a grunt, so he gave up after commenting that it was going to pour. I moved the seat back, stretched out my legs, rolled down the window. He turned on the radio. I prayed he wouldn’t tune in to one of those shows with hyper-realistic descriptions of some little old lady’s rape, maggoty sandwiches, slaughters in orphanages. Suddenly Cazuza’s raspy voice began to sing. He’s going to change the station—I was sure of it—but he didn’t. That made me like him a little more, so oriental, a Buddhist, maybe, so I asked him to please turn up the volume, leaned my head against the sticky plastic headrest, and, for nearly one second, very briefly, while the car crept along in the congested traffic, over the scorching asphalt, my shirt soaked, the stack of paper turning into a solid lump between my fingers, I closed my eyes, the wind blowing on my face, drying the sweat, and, once again, for nearly one second, like someone who suddenly sighs or blinks and keeps going, swift as a moth flitting across a summer night in search of a light to hover around, like someone turning on or off that same light in an empty room in order to feel the vibrations of the wings still hovering in the air, not the insect itself, already gone, in the murky depths of the mind, I wanted to see through the darkness of the world, without desiring or provoking or taking the lead, for nearly one second, finally, inside the cab heading toward Ibirapuera Park, I thought of Pedro.

  5

  Before I even saw her, a blast of dry ice hit my face through the door she opened and immediately closed. She stood before me, like the guardian priestess of some treasure. A priestess at least six feet tall, no older than twenty or so, and looking like one of those long-legged birds pausing by the edge of a swamp in some environmental picture. She would have been funny, if she hadn’t tried to look so serious.

  As I had imagined, Patrícia wore glasses. Not round, huge, to indicate that she read a lot, or with colored frames, to make it very clear that, in spite of reading a lot, she wasn’t a nerd. Cat-eye glasses, fifties style, from some fancy
curio shop in the Jardins section. Her kinky, almost blond hair hung down in disheveled cascades to the waist of her skin-tight jeans. Tattered, of course. Her feet were shod in the heavy boots of a soldier or mountain climber. She gave the impression of not being the least concerned about looking pretty, nice, or well-mannered. Perhaps because of that—that look of a problematic high-school girl—she had a helpless way about her.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her t-shirt. On her chest there was something like a vertical open mouth, a bloody maroon blotch against the white background. Within the purplish outlines of that menacing mouth, two rows of saw-edged teeth, like a shark’s, threatened between the lips. It was when I thought lips, twisting my head to see better, that I understood. It was a toothed vagina. But I was sure only when she turned and I was able to read the name of the band, written on the back.

  She was looking at me with a bored expression. There was nothing special about me. Jeans like hers, but without tears, white t-shirt without a vagina or phallus on it. No earrings, no green streaks in my hair. A war uniform, that of someone who wants to remain invisible. And I had wanted to, for a long time.

  She asked:

  “Are you the guy from the paper?”

  I said yes.

  “You look real square.”

  I said I was.

  She peered at me over her glasses.

  “Your rising sign must be Pisces.”

  I continued to stare at the vagina between her breasts, without saying anything. I knew that we could get caught up again in one of those labyrinthine dialogues at any second: Dorothy Parker or Lamour, or Dandridge, maybe?

  That’s when I began to hear it.

  From behind the door came a familiar music. Not just familiar, there was something more disturbing in it, or in the strange feeling it aroused in me. I tried to listen more closely, but it wasn’t exactly what I remembered, even though whatever it was that I remembered, or almost remembered, but couldn’t quite identify, was there as well, in the music or myself. It gave me a feeling of nostalgia, sorrow. And something else more somber, fear or pain. In my mind blurry figures intertwined, fleeting, like a badly tuned TV, confused as if two or three projectors were simultaneously casting different images on the same screen. Fusion, I thought: pentimento. And I saw again a dark room with a very high ceiling, daylight shut out by the curtains, an old-fashioned ashtray in the shape of a small round box, the kind women in black and white movies from the forties carry in their purses, a strand of pearls on a woman’s white neck. It didn’t make any sense.

  Patrícia was looking at me with curiosity. A reflection made a rhinestone on one of the tips of her glasses sparkle. Perhaps because of that, so clear-cut among those vague images, an armchair took shape in my memory. Or imagination, I didn’t know which. It was a classic armchair, a green velvet bergère. I looked around in search of a green like that. There was none. Leaves that never see the sun, moss, bottle-ends—a piece of glass I had found once in the sand, so green and polished by salt and water that it looked like it had absorbed the color of the marine depths. It was like that, the green of the armchair.

  “I know this music,” I said.

  Patrícia shrugged.

  “Everybody does. It’s our big hit, it’s number two on the charts.”

  I pushed past her.

  “I need to hear better.”

  “You can’t interrupt—” she began to say.

  But I had already gone in. The large room was foggy from the dry ice. Through the mist, I gradually began to make out some men, or parts of them. Torsos, heads. Then, in the back, a painted cardboard set reproducing dilapidated buildings surrounded by huge trash cans nearly the same size. Unexpected objects spilled out of them: a mannequin’s leg, a pendulum, a cello split in half, beheaded dolls, plastic flowers, garlic braids. Salvador Dalí in Hollywood, I thought, designing the sets for a Christopher Lee movie.

  Against the buildings, three girls dressed in jeans and shirts like Patrícia’s were playing drums, electric bass, and keyboards. They were the Toothed Vaginas: a black drummer, hair braided with colored beads, a fat keyboard player with a nearly shaved head, and a huge Japanese chick. In front of them, leaning against a fake lamppost, another girl with bleached hair, dressed in black leather from head to toe, with a guitar. From where I stood I couldn’t see her face. Only the contrast between her heavy clothes and her almost white hair, hovering like a halo around the starkly pale face, beneath the bluish spotlights. As unreal as an angel. An angel of darkness, without wings or harp, a fallen angel. It was Márcia Fellatio.

  When I entered she stopped singing immediately. At the same time, telepathically, the three Toothed Vaginas also stopped. Patrícia whimpered in my ear.

  “I tried to warn you. Márcia hates this.”

  Out of the fake fog, a man yelled.

  “Hey, what the fuck’s going on, kids? It was going great, this ain’t gonna cut it.”

  Márcia slammed the guitar against the lamppost. The cardboard pillar shook in the painted Styrofoam base. Hands on her hips, she glared at me and Patrícia. In slow time, the black girl with the cornrows began to beat on one of the cymbals. It seemed intentional: the obvious soundtrack for the crescendo of suspense one second before the burst of rage.

  “Patrícia!” Márcia screamed, an overseer ordering a hundred whiplashes, and salt rubbed in the wounds. “Haven’t I told you a thousand times I don’t want strangers around when we’re recording?”

  “He’s the guy from the paper,” Patrícia explained. Her voice sounded childish, strident. Ridiculous, and at the same time consistent with that long-legged bird look. “He barged in, it wasn’t my fault.”

  The post-punk-pre-apocalyptic-prima-donna looked straight at me. Perhaps because of the lights, her eyes shone too brightly. Synthetic, as if they were made of acrylic or emitted laser beams. An accursed beacon, leading seafarers astray. I guessed they might be green.

  “Who did you say you work for?”

  “The Diário da Cidade,” I stammered. I would have liked to say The New York Times, Le Monde, or something like that. “I have to write a cover story about you. It wasn’t Patrícia’s fault, it’s me who.”

  Márcia kicked the post again. A man yelled, “Easy, girl, you’re gonna fuck up the set that way.”

  On the drums, the cymbal continued to rattle. The Japanese chick wrenched from the bass a strident chord that rent the air. Leaning against the electronic keyboards, the fat girl was smoking with a cynical little smirk stamped on her face. I could tell they were having a good time.

  One of the men clapped his hands. “What’s the deal, boys?” Nobody laughed. “We ain’t got all day. You wanna tape this shit or not?”

  Márcia’s laser eyes swept across the studio.

  “What you call shit, I call art. You only see as far as your eyes let you see.”

  “Right,” said the invisible man apologetically. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Let’s get on with the recording.”

  Patrícia squeezed my arm.

  “Isn’t she awesome?” she whispered.

  All you could hear was the percussion punctuated by the wail of the bass. Márcia hung her head, kicked the crooked post carelessly, and picked up her guitar.

  “All right,” she said. “Never mind, we’ll let it go this time.”

  “Recording!” shouted the director.

  Márcia turned her back and raised her right arm, her forefinger pointing to the ceiling. On her wrist, a spiked bracelet. Márcia looked at the other Toothed Vaginas, then counted, stamping her foot on the floor.

  “One, two, three!”

  A bloodcurdling guitar chord made me picture one of Teresinha O’Connor’s long scarlet nails scratching a blackboard from top to bottom. Márcia began to sing again.

  That ground glass voice, harsh and piercing, churning inside a blender, not ugly or off-key, but uncomfortable in the way it took up space in your brain, that voice which, regardless of what it sang, gave the i
mpression of coming from the depths of atomic ruins, not the fake ruins of that cardboard set, but Hiroshima’s, Cologne’s after the bombing, the rubble of a village near some nuclear plant, after the explosion, a survivor of the end of everything, that radioactive siren voice—was the same I had heard on the radio, while I was taking a shower before going to the paper.

  I ran my hand over the back of my neck, the goose bumps didn’t go away. Because—I suspected more than knew—it wasn’t just that. I knew that music from another place, another time. I paid attention to the lyrics.

  Distorted by an arrangement reminiscent of a radioactive wind blowing through a gothic cathedral, accelerated, moaned, and screamed, completely different from the serene tone it had once possessed, polluted by the contaminated wails of the guitar and drums imitating distant explosions, it was an old hit from the forties or fifties. To my surprise, I could remember all the lyrics.

  I began to sing along, moving my lips without sound—I couldn’t sing:

  “Nothing more,

  nothing but an illusion.

  It’s enough,

  my heart thrives on delusion.

  Believing everything

  that love, lying, always says

  I go on like this,

  happy in the illusion of happiness.

  If love only causes us

  sadness and pain, the illusion of love

  is better, so much better.

  To keep my poor heart from confusion

  I wish and ask for

  nothing but a beautiful illusion.”

  Nothing, nothing more, Márcia was repeating, almost motionless, stepping away from the post only to lean forward, dramatically holding her hand out and lifting her face, disfigured by the ghastly light filters. Closing my eyes, I saw that green armchair again. And nothing else, nothing more, until I began to remember the same lines sung by another voice. A woman’s voice, ancient, thick, heavy.

  “Cut!” someone shouted.

  Then I remembered, in a flash: Dulce Veiga.

  Dulce, Dulce Veiga had recorded the same song too.

  Ten, fifteen, how many years ago? The goose bumps traveled from the back of my neck to my arms, strange as a premonition.