And so she was forced to sit and embroider with them. Her clumsy hands would attack the stitches crudely, eyes looking at the window. Henriqueta would tactfully undo her knots and give her the cloth again. Arlete would observe her with narrow eyes, her sickly face enlivened with joy. Even if Virgínia went pale from hunger lunch and dinnertime would not be altered. When the clock would strike one in the afternoon, Henriqueta would stand up, place her sewing on the chair and slowly set out for the tall cupboard that was lost in shadows. She would open its drawers and pull out some small foods, cold and odorless. Coffee was brought from the kitchen and smothered with a strange bonnet that seemed to look and smile, thick with dust. The sewing room itself smelled of wet dust, mold, new fabric, and coffee with cold sweet potato. Virgínia would get up from lunch starving and nauseated, feeling her uncontrollable and young body demanding full of outrage. Yet she was growing older, losing her colors, and was a woman.
On Sunday afternoon they didn’t work, the house would stay silent — Henriqueta would sit in the depths of the backyard, hands folded, resting. Virgínia had gone to the little garden. The wilted plants would remind her of the luxuriance of the Farm and she’d breathe deeply, her face turned toward a direction that seemed to her to be the way back. But the city . . . where was the city? She’d feel inside herself a kind of life that made her disgusted with herself, constant sighs of impatience and all that mixed with a real hunger that was more violence than hunger — she was thinking about food with a power that she would have liked to unleash on Arlete. Arlete . . . It sometimes seemed to her that Arlete was then her reason for waiting. There was a grudging union between them as if Virgínia too were a renovation for the old maid. Both spoke to each other with small words quick and oblique and were delighted, heads lowered hiding their eyes. Standing in the garden Virgínia would recall her dealings with Arlete and from her pleasure would be born the certainty of a growing decay of a depravation that in the end, beneath the warmth of the sun on her uncovered head and on the grayish plants, would come together in a movement of dismay in which hunger would break out again with a new urging. Bending over to pick up a dry stick she felt with a start that someone was lingering with indecision at the door to the house. She turned around quickly — Arlete. She laughed with triumph. The old maid was staring at her. Arlete!
“Come into the sun,” she said to her with a certain rudeness.
Arlete was leaning against the wall, her thin body beneath the black Sunday dress, washed, faded; talc stained her ashen and glum face — her thin hair was tied back in damp braids. And since she didn’t answer, her shining eyes looking at Virgínia with coldness, Virgínia didn’t hold back and in a voluptuous and daring movement murmured to her:
“You’re afraid you can’t stand . . .”
The other woman wasn’t answering. And since the situation had become very strange and a new and sincere reality was coming to the fore Virgínia added a bit frightened:
“It sure is hot out here . . .”
“Yes,” Arlete finally answered. “The plants got burned.”
“Look,” whispered Virgínia slow and pale, “I’m leaving, I’m hungry, you know what hungry means. I’ve paid my rent without fail and I haven’t seen food since I don’t know how long. That’s not right — just for the miserable attic to have to pay almost all the little money I have . . . And to top it off that rubbish about having to sew.”
Arlete wasn’t surprised.
“You came because you wanted to,” she said simply.
“And I’m leaving because I want to,” screamed Virgínia going up the cracked cement steps, going through the door and feeling on her arm for an instant Arlete’s hard body. When she was reaching trembling the middle of the room, near the stairs that would lead her to her room, she heard Arlete moan, turned around and saw her grabbing with both hands the ridiculous bulge in her chest as if she wounded:
“What happened,” asked Virgínia suddenly terrorized.
The other woman looked at her with attention and intensity.
“You hit me . . . You know that I’m weak and you hit me.”
Stupefied Virgínia looked at her. No one who saw them would suspect the ferocious understanding between them. The moment blew into her body a sure and dizzying drive to push her really and she closed her eyes getting a grip on herself. Another second and she’d do it. Her lips white and burning, she held herself back nevertheless because she realized that Daniel wouldn’t understand her and she wouldn’t know how to explain.
“You hit me,” the other was repeating in a rude victory.
“But you . . . you . . . are a bitch!” she screamed at her, “a lying bitch!” — and that discharge as if faded away her fear and shame, a cold sweat wet her forehead, she felt the brutality of those terms that belonged to the Farm, to the open field but not to the city, she looked at the old lady, yes, the old lady at whom she’d thrown the insult and who was waiting openmouthed with surprise, yellow teeth on display . . . Biting her lips she ran up the stairs and the house trembled with her. She spent the night wide awake packing her suitcases, disguising a feeling of horror and fear that was rising in her chest and that was threatening to toss her outside of comprehension. The day had hardly
