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  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO: Now tell me your story.

  ROSA IMACULADA (delighted by the request): Do you know that the most horrible and most beautiful things in my life happened at the same time! I became pregnant with Davi and then came this heart trouble. My health collapsed. At first I thought it was (a terrible amount of gentleness in her voice) the flipping fetus that was sucking the strength from me, my growing belly. Davi was enormous. But it only got worse after the birth. And then suddenly everything was in a shambles. The doctor said I would die if I didn’t get a new heart. Dear God, what a diagnosis! I had to move to Fortaleza to wait for the new heart. The waiting lasted and lasted and las— (interrupts sentence, realizing that it is utterly inappropriate to complain about this in front of Estêvão Santoro), well, yes, I mean, my son and Grandma were with me . . . I’m sure you can imagine how many times we all almost went crazy there . . . Our friend’s wife, who we were living with, was so kind and so flexible . . . Davi would cry and this one (points at herself) didn’t have the energy even to hold him properly . . . Grandma would get tired too, and our friend’s wife would have to help with child care . . . (shakes head) and this one couldn’t even promise that she would survive . . . that the whole circus was worth the trouble . . . I might just slip away despite it all . . . just die . . . in the middle of everything . . .

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO (in a determined but not at all bitter tone): And then Murilo died.

  ROSA IMACULADA: Yes. Your son died, and now I’m here.

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO: How do you feel?

  ROSA IMACULADA (even more cheered by this question about her well-being): Much better, thank you! But do you know, my immune system is weak, the doctors say. I can’t live a normal life right now. I have to be very, very careful all the time. I still can’t even go back to work at the beauty salon . . . The customers can have all kinds of germs, and I have to protect myself . . . But the doctor promised that if I survive the first six months, my prognosis starts to be quite good . . .

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO (interrupts fervently): Tell me how it feels!

  ROSA IMACULADA (taken aback): Excuse me?

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO (impatiently): Tell me how the new heart feels.

  And this is the critical moment, although neither knows it yet, the moment that could have been nothing more than one small, strange twist in a discussion, the content of which has otherwise been more light small talk than emotional confessions, which is more than desirable in these unique circumstances: a certain safe superficiality, a distance . . . acknowledge the facts . . . respect each other’s grief and understand each other’s relief . . . Rosa could have responded with something vague such as “Well, it’s in there pumping away,” or “It’s big, but I’m already used to it,” or “Sometimes I forget the whole thing happened,” (although this might have been an insulting response in this situation) but no, Rosa didn’t evade the question. Instead of politely sidestepping it, she approached it head on. For a long time she was quiet, observing an entire spectrum of expressions on Estêvão Santoro’s face, impatience turning to curiosity, curiosity turning back to annoyance, annoyance to embarrassment, and embarrassment to empty horror (an expression that anyone who has lost a loved one tragically recognizes on the faces of her companions in misfortune but outsiders usually interpret as arrogance or rejection), and, this has been proven time and time again, empty horror is only a short journey from remorse, which can reach the level of “I wish I had never been born.” But Rosa did not allow Mr. Santoro to fall to the bottom of the well of remorse. Instead she made a move that changed EVERYTHING.

  ROSA IMACULADA: Would you like to touch it?

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO: Excuse me?

  ROSA IMACULADA: You can place your hand on it.

  Rosa moves her stool closer to the couch, and Estêvão Santoro mechanically extends his hand toward Rosa’s chest. Rosa grabs his hand and guides it to the right place.

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO (in an almost piping, little boy’s voice): I don’t feel anything . . .

  ROSA IMACULADA: Put your hand under the shirt. No reason to be shy.

  Estêvão Santoro obediently slips his hand under Rosa’s red and white striped negligée shirt. The hand is large and clammy. When Santoro’s hand is in the right place, Rosa presses her own hand on top of it. On Murilo’s heart. Yes: Murilo’s heart, not hers. Rosa is sure of that now. The new heart has been sewn into her chest and there it is, a kind and compliant creature, because it doesn’t reject her, but something is still wrong. The heart is becoming part of her in a way no one told her about before the surgery . . . There are things Rosa has never told anyone. Not the doctors, not her friends, and not her grandmother—least of all her. Every once in a while, the new heart plays nasty tricks on her. It sort of sends messages. Not like Lula (Lula doesn’t talk to her any more) but in a very different way. Not with words but with actions. It makes her think about things she’d prefer not to think about. It forces her to feel strange feelings. Example No. 1: For many nights she has been having a dream of an extremely beautiful girl who lives in a large, white house behind a wall. She’s come to visit the girl. She climbs the winding stairs to the girl’s room, and they exchange a few insignificant pleasantries (“Hello”, “How are you?”, “Did you miss me?” and so forth). Then, without further discussion, she tumbles the girl on the violet-colored silk sheets and slips her finger under her panties into her wet, nearly ready pussy. With her other hand she removes her shorts, climbs onto the girl, and after pushing into her begins a rapid series of movements. She thrusts, rams, and twists herself inside the girl, lithely rotating her sporty rump. She nibbles the girl’s lips with her teeth and sucks on her neck with her lips and pulls the girl to sit on top of her. She wets her thumb with her own saliva and shoves it in the girl’s anus so deep that she reaches the wall between the vagina and the rectum. With her first two fingers she massages the girl’s perineum, rotating the thumb against the rectal wall at the place she can feel her own organ doing its piston motion . . . Her penis swells even more, grinding brutally against the thumb as if wanting to push it away, but the thumb only presses more violently back . . . and so the thumb and forefinger and middle finger and the whole hand squeeze and knead and rock the now dripping almost-woman lost in abandon in her lap . . . And every time, at exactly this spot, the girl completely goes off the rails. She screams and rises and pushes down and rises and pushes down and rises and crashes down and moans and comes, and at that moment she wakes up to her own orgasm with her lower abdomen wet, her whole body hot and sweaty and pulsating, and she doesn’t understand, truly doesn’t understand, not until NOW, now that she has seen Murilo’s photograph, her own nocturnal self . . .

  ROSA IMACULADA: Can you feel the pulse?

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO: Sort of . . .

  Suddenly Rosa pushes the man’s hand away and pulls her shirt off.

  ROSA IMACULADA: Put your ear against my breast. Then you’ll hear it.

  Estêvão Santoro does as ordered and hears the sound, TuTUM, tuTum, TUtum, tuTUM, and begins to sob. Rosa strokes his hair.

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO (sobbing): What is it like . . . now that it’s there?

  ROSA IMACULADA (in a quiet, calm voice): It’s big, bigger than my own was. They had to put it in deeper, and that’s why it felt strange at first, kind of heavy and occupying too much space. At first I was afraid of it . . . That it would turn me to mincemeat . . . But it didn’t. It does something else. (Pause.) This may be hard to understand, but I think that in some strange way Murilo is . . . working inside of me.

  Estêvão Santoro jerks his head away.

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO: What do you mean?

  ROSA IMACULADA: I have dreams of Murilo with his girlfriend. I just realized it. It’s him, definitely him. We have . . . I’m sure you can guess what. (Rosa begins to pull her shirt back on.)

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO: You can’t be serious!

  ROSA IMACULADA: The girl has long, shiny brown hair. She’s really cute. From a rich fami
ly. The house is so splendid. In the dream I climb a spiral staircase. The steps are marble. The railing is like gold. The girl lives with her parents. She has her own room on the top floor, a fine four-poster bed, and violet silk sheets . . . And, don’t misunderstand, I don’t like women that way.

  Estêvão Santoro stares at Rosa with an incredulous look on his face.

  ROSA IMACULADA: And that isn’t all. I have new, strange desires. I crave chargrilled chicken skin . . .

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO: I don’t believe you! That was Murilo’s favorite!

  ROSA IMACULADA: . . . which I couldn’t eat before. Anything burned tasted horrible to me. And what about this: grunge rock, like Autoramas. Before I detested it; now I like it. Beer. Football. And the most incomprehensible of all: Marmite. I hadn’t even heard of it before, and now I could eat it straight out of the jar with a spoon.

  Estêvão Santoro collapses deep in the corner of the sofa, his red BOW TIE now askew. His shocked expression confirms that each item Rosa listed was correct: chicken, rock music, beer, football, Marmite—bingo! Santoro takes the rust-colored handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dabs his brow. Rosa feels tired, at once heavy and light. She has said out loud the thing that has been bothering her for months. She has also received an explanation, and that brings on a faintness, making her afraid and disgusted, and (as even the most crushing diagnosis also comforts with the knowledge of where the tormenting symptoms are coming from) it also calms her: it will never just be “her”, Rosa Imaculada, again. Always and forever it will be “they”, Rosa and Murilo . . .

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO: Rosa—may I call you Rosa? (Rosa nods)—I have to go rest. I’m sure you’ll understand how shocked I am. But I want to hear more. (Begins digging in his pants pocket.) Take this money; no, don’t object, Rosa dear, I know that you need it. I want to . . . Somehow I want to make up for this . . . and the conversations we will have . . . You have information about my son . . . that I need . . . you understand . . . I want to know more about him . . .

  Rosa nods. Both stand up, shake hands, laugh nervously, and hug. Rosa escorts Estêvão Santoro to the door.

  ROSA IMACULADA: Please do come again. Where are you staying?

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO: Near Pelourinho. In a hotel named Beija Flor. Here’s my card with my number if you want to call and talk.

  ROSA IMACULADA: Wait a moment.

  Rosa turns away, rips the white order coupon off the back of a Claudia magazine sitting on the table, and writes her own phone number on it.

  ROSA IMACULADA: I’m usually home, but it would be a good idea to make sure. Goodbye.

  ESTÊVÃO SANTORO: Goodbye, Rosa. Remember to take good care of yourself.

  ONEIRON: THE FIRST VICTIM

  Oooon . . . ei-ron!

  The women stare at Rosa Imaculada, whose eyes gape wide as she says the strange word. They didn’t expect this. They had imagined, and with good reason, that Rosa was trying to tell them about her heart operation again, about her child, about that strange man who invaded her home. Some of the women had even been ready with questions to give the story a direction. (Nina: What did he want from you in the end? Shlomith: Did I understand correctly that he was related to the organ donor? Polina: So was it him who blackmailed you?) Rosa had looked so intently focused, as if she were struggling to find precise words from her limited vocabulary, something savage to start with that would capture her listeners’ interest. And now this was the word that came out: Oooon . . . ei-ron!

  Or was it three words? If it was one word, then Rosa had pronounced it oddly, staring into space: she drew out the beginning and then divided the end with an emphasis on the syllable boundary. The EI jumped out like a scream or a hiccup between the slightly mumbled beginning and the final growl, RON, which for all its gruffness was amazingly snappy. And then again: Oooon . . . ei-ron!

  And if it was three words, they still couldn’t make any sense of it. The way that Rosa growled the end, RON, was particularly strange: the R didn’t roll sensually in her throat, and it didn’t soften into an uvular fricative—it was at its most revolting and impossible, an aggressive AR trilled with the tip of the tongue.

  What did you say?

  What is it?

  What?!

  Rosa Imaculada’s gaze is utterly empty. Her eyes don’t flutter even though Nina, who sits next to her, waves her hand in front of Rosa’s face. Before anyone can do anything, Rosa moves, but not like a person moves when she shifts position, say by fixing her posture vertebra by vertebra, or by stretching her arms, by flexing her legs. Rosa doesn’t do anything like that. She trembles all over like an aspen leaf in the wind. Or, since she isn’t particularly slender, since her body lacks the long petiole characteristic of aspen leaves that makes the aspen quake perhaps more elegantly than any other tree in the world—an effect that is heightened in the fall when the colors have changed (the entire tree seems to transform into dancing, tremulous, join-us! nuggets of gold whose collective siren allure makes a smile appear on even the most hardened nature-hater’s lips)—since no part of Rosa’s body resembles an aspen leaf in any respect, but more like, if we continue searching for a metaphor from botany, a hand-shaped, palmately veined maple leaf that, having separated from its stem, thuds to the ground after a brief, zigzag glide (whereas an aspen leaf can easily end up spiraling), Rosa’s body trembles, first and foremost, as if someone were shaking an empty tin box with both hands: violently, through and through, ever so slightly sideward, and without a sound. It is frightening. The work of a demon, one of the women easily could have said (presumably Maimuna, because she had used the word “demon” a couple of times before; ça c’est un travail du démon!), but no one makes the slightest sound. They only stare, mouths more or less open.

  What happens next surprises everyone. For, you see, Rosa begins to sink. But not down. Rosa remains in exactly the same place she had been. She does not recede or shrink but also does not stay the same. In some way she begins to . . . fade? To lose her features? As if light snow were falling over her. Or as if very thin, nearly transparent ice were forming and covering her. Or is it more like gauze? Or a clouded glass surface, or a sarcophagus made of thick, transparent plastic that slightly distorts the features inside? However, there does not appear to be anything in between. Shlomith is the one who checks, boldly sticking her osteoporotic, bony hand (which could have been broken with one quick snap) toward Rosa but touching nothing, and let it be emphasized: nothing. She encounters no ice or snow or gauze or glass or plastic, nothing of the sort, and nothing of any other sort, not even Rosa, although Shlomith pushes her hand deeper and deeper. And yet Rosa is there! Like a pillar of salt, frozen but real. Very close. Shlomith continues pushing, and her arm keeps sinking. Everyone sees it, the hand, and everyone also sees faded Rosa, the hand and Rosa at the same time, and it isn’t possible, but nevertheless it is.

  Can you feel her?

  Shlomith answers Polina’s whispered question with a shake of her head and pulls her hand away: Rosa Imaculada’s form hasn’t caused so much as a tickle against the skin of her arm.

  So there they sit around Rosa, as if horrified by the carcass of a hare crushed on the road, silent, unable to avert their eyes, unable to leave the scene of the accident, because there is a feeling that this is far from over. No one knows how to act in a situation like this. Should they mourn? Should they organize a small devotional? Light a candle (in their minds), bring flowers (in their thoughts)? And more generally—is it so horrible now? Is Rosa Imaculada’s vanishing, fading, partial disappearance something to cry over at all?

  There are a number of facts they have to hold onto. So says Polina suddenly. The women give a start when they hear her voice. They had each sunk into their own slack, unfocused thoughts, thoughtlessness, a state that wasn’t ultimately that bad to be in, where they could have perfectly well remained, staring dumbly at pale Rosa. But Polina wanted to begin collecting thoughts. They can’t stay here! They have already begun to move away, haven’t the
y? Have they begun to grow pale too? To cloud over? Is it only a matter of time before the next one’s turn? Does the word Rosa said have the power to destroy them as well?

  It is a fact, Polina says solemnly, that Rosa Imaculada’s pigmentation has suddenly begun to fade. The strident magenta of her piqué shirt first changed to a gentle flamingo red, then to a washed-out porcine pink, and then to white. The same had happened to Rosa’s red lips. Her black hair, on the other hand, had gone gray by way of dark brown, light brown, and the color of a field of grain, and the darkish, pockmarked skin of her face had gone pale. Her beige shorts had gone white all at once, while the red fabric belt threaded through the loops had lost its redness the same way as the shirt and the lips: magenta, flamingo red, piggy pink, and white. It is also a fact, Polina continues, that this change occurred after Rosa said a word which she had never said before, which no one here has ever to their knowledge said, a word whose meaning will remain an eternal mystery since Rosa is no longer able to give any answers.

  They can’t be sure of anything else. Rosa has become unattainable, closed-off, displaced. Perhaps the most dead of all the dead or maybe returned to life. Who knows?

  Ulrike moves like an insect awoken from dormancy: with an almost imperceptible flinch. With helium lightness she remembers the horror that waking up to not breathing had caused in her before Rosa began to fade. She remembers the cursed matter of which Rosa had tried to speak. She remembers being in Rosa’s lap, the comfort of Rosa’s feather-light embrace around her body. And then: the feeling of horror had disappeared. She had found comfort in the strange woman’s arms as she listened to her confused explanations. That did not fit the image Ulrike had of herself. She was not easily comforted. Even as a child she had cried inconsolably if she was ever injured, if someone had caused her distress. And it was not, as others imagined, demonstrative weeping. If it had been that, she would have enjoyed it when whoever had wronged her came begging for forgiveness. But the more the people who had offended her asked forgiveness, the more deeply she sank into disconsolation. And no one else could join her there. Sorrow flooded in, then receded a little, but only temporarily, only in order to build up speed, to gush back even stronger. All that worked was a 10 mg diazepam, or two. She had been given the prescription when she was fifteen years old.