carefully fixes her hair, her dress and her overflowing breasts. Most of the time we’re sound asleep when they get back. If she doesn’t go out, her friends come over to try on the dresses she’s sewn for them, or her customers who end up going out with her like her friends. We’re on our best behaviour because the customers don’t like noise. Her friends are just as heavily made-up and perfumed as she is. Looking at them closely, I can make out the layer of powder that cracks where their skin is wrinkled, the peroxided hairs of their moustaches, the rivulets of eyebrow pencil mixed with sweat that turn the bags beneath their eyes darker still. Sometimes they’ll redo their make-up or show Lili how to look more womanly. The final result depends on who’s doing the job, but it always reminds me of circus clowns or the evil spirit masks at Carnival. Other times they take off their clothes to try on their new dresses, showing off the bruises that mottle their thighs, and comparing their underwear.
Worst of all are the ones who like to kiss me. They’re regular witches. They start by poking and prodding me with their curved fingernails, then they grab me. Trapped, I endure the horror of their faces crushed against mine, smearing me with lipstick. I feel the wetness of their tongues, and smell their pungent, acid breath. One of them has to be crazy: as soon as she steps through the door, she starts shouting and singing. Her gaping mouth reveals huge gold teeth. She keeps licking the paint off her lips and smearing it across her chin. My mother respects her and doesn’t stop her, even when she starts bleating out a mixture of radio advertising jingles and operatic arias. This crazy woman loves to terrify me by staring at me with her evil eyes, which she can move around at the same time as her tongue. Once she pulled out a wrinkled breast and chased me, saying she wanted to nurse me.
Others are thin-lipped and dry as dust, with the grim-faced look of women in a hurry. If they don’t like a dress, they throw it on the floor. They don’t want to see us because they don’t like kids, so we get locked in our room. Sometimes we get shoved into the kitchen when they come with their gentlemen friends, because they prefer to try on their dresses in the bedroom.
That’s the way my mother’s friends are. They sit down with my aunts for a cup of coffee and begin gossiping about men. I’ve never seen my father’s whore because she doesn’t come visiting. I can hardly imagine what she looks like, but she must be beautiful and not need make-up. One thing’s for sure — my mother and my aunts don’t like her.
My father’s world is different. His workshop is crammed with fascinating things. Everywhere there are wires, tools and electrical components, resistors made of mica that glitter like jewels. The place is a welter of boxes and lamps, disembowelled radios, appliances stacked one atop another. When he works, he talks even less as he concentrates on the job at hand, his wispy hair disheveled. He has an apprentice, a weird-looking kid with a face like a monkey who smiles all the time, and who doesn’t look too swift. I’ve visited the shop a few times when my mother and Lili wanted to go to the Praça Republica. We’ve been dropping in more frequently lately, ever since the women came upon a spirit temple in the same building as my father’s workshop. He started talking about the place, and described the noise the worshippers make at night, during their ceremonies. He laughed about it, because he doesn’t believe in macumba. But these neighbours don’t bother him. They’re peaceful people who don’t tolerate immoral behaviour. They even hired him to install the lights on their altar that’s all covered with pictures.
His story caught my mother’s fancy, and she concluded that Praça Republica would definitely be a good place to go walking. She’s right. The Praça is a large, tree-filled park just across from the main railway station. In the evening it’s full of couples kissing or mounting each other, snorting and groaning as if they were breathing their last. Lots of beggars, girls waiting for someone, people lying down and drinking, old ladies feeding the cats. There are cats everywhere, thin and wild and jumpy from dodging the kebob vendor. Everybody knows the meat is grilled cat. The vendor says so himself, and meows. But the customers lick their fingers all the same. I never eat any because cats carry disease, and besides, it’s a waste to eat in the street when you’ve already eaten at home. The skewers of meat sizzling on the grill smell so good that the women stop to stare hungrily, saying all the while how disgusting it is to eat those filthy animals. Other wandering vendors have set up shop around the park, and clouds of moths congregate around their acetylene lamps. Couples amble over for a bite, then make their way back to the bushes.
At first, we could play wherever we wanted to in the park while the women visited the spirit temple. But my brother didn’t want to be alone. He was afraid of the dead bodies. And of the cats, too, because cats eat dead people. Often there are dead bodies in the park, stretched out like sleeping beggars, beginning to stink as they wait for the van from the morgue. Or people hurt in fights. I even saw a woman with her skirt pulled up to her belly, with black blood oozing out from between her legs. Only her head was covered with newspapers. People stood around talking, and no one tried to stop us from looking. A dead body is a funny thing: it looks like someone who’s asleep but you can tell they’re dead. Sometimes the position of the body is unusual, the mouth is open in a curious way, the eyes are half-closed, the whites have a bluish tinge. The colour of their skin is different, too, grey and yellow in the light of the votive candles.
The dead bodies interest me more than cats or beggars. I have to stop and look at each one of them, even if I know I won’t be able to get them out of my mind, and that at night I’ll be afraid one of them will reach up and grab my feet. My brother doesn’t like going anywhere near them. It’s dangerous, he says, the flies will swarm all over us, we might as well have touched the body ourselves. When you think about it, it is a little disgusting. But I can’t resist.
That’s the main reason he doesn’t want to come here any more. The dead bodies. We used to hide deep in the bushes and watch the men mount the girls. They’d squirm and writhe and I’d be terrified the men were going to choke them, or that they’d catch us spying on them. My brother said that if the women left us alone there one more time, he’d tell my father everything he saw. He stopped coming with me, which was worse. Now I have to wait in the lobby of the spirit house.
The room is big, bigger than my father’s workshop, and they’ve rigged up a makeshift lobby there. The plank partitions reach only halfway to the ceiling and let all the sounds through. It’s scary when the people in the room fall silent, and the hoarse voice of the priest takes on a sinister tone as he appeases the spirit that’s going to appear. Even crouching under the bench and covering my ears and pinching my eyes shut won’t help — sleep won’t come. I can hear the ghost screaming, just like a real ghost. I sneak a look to make sure it doesn’t slip out of the room and catch me hiding there. Shadows of figures play across the walls. My mother says that the shadows of the dead hang over the living until their spirit has been avenged. Which makes me think of the dead bodies in the park across the street. They know I looked at them, and now they’re watching me, thinking thoughts of revenge. Suddenly the people start singing again, dancing and knocking over their chairs. As the women wail and keen, the priest calls on other spirits. This can go on for a long time, since every woman has paid for the ghost of her choice to appear, but sometimes other ghosts turn up without warning, out of the blue.
The spirits have funny voices, like the groans men make when they mount the girls in the park. Like a cough stuck in your throat. It can’t be easy to be a ghost. It must hurt plenty. You can tell by the way they yell and scream. My mother says it’s important to talk to them, they know all kinds of things we don’t, they can help us if we help them by praying and doing other things that spirits do. My father thinks that’s all stuff for foolish women and ignorant niggers. She doesn’t like it when he talks about the spirits like that. That’s why he’s in the shit he’s in and our life is so miserable, she tells him. I don’t understand. We’re not as poor as tramps, but there’s obviously something not right in our house.
Crouching under the bench, I figure I can do without help from the spirits. Better they keep their distance. I promise to pray for them if they’ll leave me alone. They’re evil and I know it, slippery, shadowy, scary figures trying to catch me unawares. But the women seem to love those seances. They stream out happy and excited, and itching for a pee.
I get so scared at the spirit house that, when it’s over, I’m worn out and I