The story of Ana

“To each, according to their needs.”

My name is Ana and I wear the same eyes, the same ruffled bathing suit with stripes of red and white, the same hair as when mother placed a bow on my hair – parted with precision into a perfect square – the closest I ever came to perfection. 

I still wear the same dazzling smile with perfect teeth aligned.  I wear the same sandy and fine, like Oma’s hair, except that mine is a little less white, and while hers was long and wispy, mine is cut just like the Indians from the Xingu, when Father took us to see them, paraded like tourist attractions.  They arrived in a long bus from the state of Goiás and we were already picnicking there waiting to see them.  It had been announced on the radio they would come.  Their hair was dark and thick but their cut was done with a gourd, we were told.  You placed a gourd on your head and cut around it. 

Later we tried that, when we also tried to straighten kinky hair by winding it around our heads, over and over, wetted then soothed and combed, then smoothly wrapped around, then protected by a cone of pantyhose tied by a knot at the end.  Best if we kept it overnight.  My hair was already fine and blond and straight but I wanted to belong, so at the end I had hair so stiff it almost always passed as straight.

I still wear the same dazzling smile with perfect teeth aligned.  The Xingu Indians had teeth missing in the front.  And I wear the same eyes, brown and dark like, eyes that capture the light outside.  Like their eyes.  Eyes of strange properties, like black holes.

My name is Ana.

I was born in the Rua do Bomfim, the street of the good end near the cemetery of the same name, the cemetery of the Good Death.  And I was told never to start a story with the sentencing of where I was born.  So I started elsewhere, but in the end, the story remains very much the same.

***

“To each, according to their needs.”

The Story begins and Ana pauses.



Left hand still– clammy with mud the color of dirt right hand on hold with the beginnings of a face – broad at the base, wide forehead, the eyes, yes – ah, his eyes never quite focused, his eyes, green and tiger like were forever distracted, were they not? Ever since early on, when she went to kindergarten happily dressed, hair parted like a perfect city block by Mama, red bow dainty on top, in uniform. And he howled and escaped through impossible narrow iron gates to get out of school. While she stayed.  He could not spell, she won all the prizes. At seven she pleaded: “Dear Santa, what I want from you is a complete set of furniture to furnish an entire house!”

She focuses on the right hand, stops to consider her left - the campus in full summer mode, the kids of sculpture in summer classes moving in jeans and in grace, now familiar posture of poised bent elbow on to ear and tiny phones, broken sounds:

“Hi, Hon. Happy birthday! Where are you? In Boston? What?? No, You didn’t. Yeahh, I went in but…”

Ana floated with the floating words, gush and knot rising from the interior, near where the stomach.  To each according to their needs - his eyes are not yet his eyes.

The yellow gold horns, broken shards of pottery, brown and polished bronze in glaze – across and climbing the cement concrete beige old wall, a broad-leafed ivy yellowed almost to the white she imagined.  She is alone, no cell phone, no friend, no family to weave a safety net. Jump, free fall to the each according to their needs…

The upper lid in brown clay shaped sampaku like scary eyes, those of her brother.

When Ana was working at the college, up north at Skidmore, she waited sometimes for hours to hear or to see something other than “vin ordinaire”.  And as she waited, she wandered un-happily around with her eyes.  And her eyes almost always feasted her with sites of the un-imagined. 

She imagined the vertical walls as flat surfaces – there was no one behind those walls – no opposing thumbs, no architect, no audience, no classroom, no learning, no author, just the ivy slowly invading pretty like until the cement gave way…to red of fall.

The bits of his eye shapes found her fingers, there was warmth in the clay, as she carefully folded wrinkles around his eyes. She then molded a deadly flatness, un-mirrored light blue.

Not to remember the red slashing of the veins?  Oh yes, not to remember yet to honor the slashing, the roads not traveled inside, the underground rivers.

Her hand pressed his cheek a bit hard, a roughness of acne, a temper tantrum, a hatred, a misunderstanding – then, a lack of understanding, the beginnings of incomprehension hit, like a jolt.

There he was, his face entire – uncanny – him, her lost mad brother. Done in clay and finished by her.

She did not have to chase the faces inside the city busses any longer.  She was done with that!
She had what she wanted, for now – his face in clay.
She pushed the glass doors open a sliver, the red of ivy gray yellow brown– shivers and the worry the clay might crack.  Not now. 

This creation she must preserve for sanity.