The Girl in the Photograph

The Girl in the Photograph by Lygia Fagundes Telles Page A

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Authors: Lygia Fagundes Telles
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up the hole with this wax that
     spread through our mouths with the smell of heaven. Dona Inês would talk so much about
     heaven heaven. I only experienced it the instant the nerve quit throbbing and went
     to sleep, completely waxed over. I went to sleep too. The smell of this wax mixed
     with the smell of creosote, they’re the two smells that pull me back into my childhood,
     the wax burning in the tooth and the creosote that came from the white can where Dr.
     Cotton would throw the used pieces of cotton. Another smell that mingles with them
     is the smell of piss. Real piss and not pee-pee, you hear Lorena? Pee-pee actually
     smells perfumy when uttered by your buttoned-up, peppermint-scented little mouth.
     Sen-Sen. “It refreshes one’s breath so,” she told me with her fresh breath. I chew
     gum to hide bad breath my gum is stronger easier ah yes I know it’s not as refined.
     Sen-Sen is refined. It’s not by accident that you always have one subtly melting in
     your mouth. So pee-pee ends up smelling like Sen-Sen but the construction site smelled
     like piss. Somebody who should have used Sen-Sen was Dr. Cotton, he smelled like old
     beer. To this day I can’t even look at beer because he would attend me after supper,
     the hour reserved for the most miserable patients, and at supper naturally he would
     swill down his half-bottle. Son of a bitch.
    “I’d like to put the drill on his teeth zzzzzzzzzzzz and drill a deep hole zzzzzzzzz
     and cut through his gum and through his jawbone zzzzzzzzzz.”
    “Hug me, Bunny, I’m cold, hug me quick because all of a sudden this is the North Pole
     with bears and all, I don’t want him to hug me, I want you to! Bunny, it’s great to
     be like this with you all friendly, I feel like crying it’s so good. Listen to this
     music, listen.”
    So then he said he’d have to pull out the four front teeth because they were too far
     gone, what was the point of keeping them if they were so rotten? I started to cry
     and he consoled me, smoothing the napkin that he had fastened around my neck with
     a little chain. It was better to put in a bridge nobody would be able to tell because
     he’d make a perfect bridge like he had for my mother and was going to make for Téo.
     I dried my eyes on the napkin feeling the cold chain biting into the back of my neck,
     it wasn’t a chain like yours Max. Or Lorena’s with the littlegolden heart. That one was dark and it held a napkin that had a spot of blood in one
     corner. Old hardened blood. The clasp hurt my neck, especially after he started smoothing
     the napkin harder as he repeated about how beautiful the bridge would be. Closer the
     smell of beer and closer the little eyes blue as beads behind the dirty lenses of
     his glasses. His icy hand and hot breath faster faster the bridge. The bridge. I closed
     my mouth but my olfactory memory stayed open. One’s memory has a memorable sense of
     smell. My childhood is all made up of smells. The cold smell of cement at the construction
     with the warmish funeral smell in the flower shop where I used to work poking wires
     in the stems of flowers up to their heads because the broken ones had to hold their
     heads high in the baskets and wreaths. The vomit from those men’s drinking sprees
     and the sweat and the toilets along with the smell of Dr. Cotton. Shit, all added
     up. I learned thousands of things from those smells, and from the anger, so much anger,
     everything was hard only she was easy. Her head was just for decoration. With me it’s
     going to be different. Dif-fe-rent, I would repeat with the rats that scratch scratch
     chewed up my sleep in that roach-filled construction site, dif-fe-rent, dif-fe-rent,
     I repeated as the hand pulled the button off my blouse. Where did my button get to
     I said and suddenly it became so important, that button that popped off while the
     hand searched farther down because my breasts weren’t interesting any more. Why weren’t
    

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