Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? by Caio Fernando Abreu

Author:Caio Fernando Abreu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press

IV

THURSDAY

Green Armchair

33

Dulce Veiga, I had to find Dulce Veiga.

I looked at my watch, not even eight A.M. I hadn’t gotten up at such an ungodly hour in at least ten years. Maybe twenty, possibly even thirty. Out of the blue, a memory flashed through my mind.

When we went to the border, at the beginning of the summer, my mother spent two days making bread, frying turnovers, killing and cooking chickens. Sensing abandonment, the dog yelped feebly from under the bed. Then father took out of the garage the old Chevy that looked like a bat while I stood there staring at the washed-out morning light in Passo da Guanxuma. The trip took an entire day, all the way to the Uruguay River. A little after noon, father found some shade by the side of the road, near a reservoir, mother spread a checkered tablecloth on the grass and opened the white napkins with the chickens, the turnovers, the bread. Coral vines, she’d say, maybe there are coral vines here.

As if I were starting out again on one of those journeys early in the morning, I placed my right foot on the floor and squeezed shut my eyes, full of sand. Now mother would come with the pot of nearly sugarless coffee, a piece of homemade sweetbread, hurry up, child, we’re waiting on you.

Now, now.

Nothing happened. Nothing besides a growing terror, when I remembered Rafic, the money, and what, I didn’t know how exactly, I had promised him: to find Dulce Veiga. She could be dead, living in Cristiana, Salt Lake City, Alcântara, or Jaguari, in an asylum, far away from everything. I didn’t want to think about it, I didn’t want to think about a lot of things, about anything at all.

I needed to know about Pedro so badly.

I took Lidia’s letter from the table, opened a drawer and put it away with the other mementos of him. They had been there for almost a year. Very little, almost nothing. The Bola de Nieve tape, a t-shirt with Sal Mineo’s face, some poems by Ginsberg and that postcard in sepia tones with the picture of a man huddling by the riverbank. I didn’t have to turn it over to remember what was written on the back, right beneath the caption Pont Neuf sur la Seine: Mélancolie. I closed the drawer, I couldn’t afford to remember. I had to find Dulce Veiga, keep that job, go on living. Even if I didn’t find her, even if Pedro never came back.

Life can’t be turned off, I thought. And you can’t rewind it either. The time machine hasn’t been invented yet. Nobody’s coming to my rescue. I’ve been inventing my own days for such a long time. I have to start somewhere.

I sat there repeating aloud these useless, obvious, mournful things. I wanted my mother, I wanted to learn how to get up early again, leave for the Argentinean border and never return. But I washed my face, brushed my teeth, lathered my cock for the hundredth time to eliminate the last vestiges of Dora, queen of frevo and oral sex.

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