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By Root 1993 0

mouth was gaping open and a little thread of saliva, as thin and transparent as a spiderweb, was hanging from his lip. She brought her mouth down to his and very delicately, so as not to awaken him, sipped the little trickle. The nearsighted journalist’s expression was calm now, an expression he never had when he was awake. “He’s not afraid now,” she thought. “Poor thing, poor thing, if I could rid him of his fear, if I could do something so that he’d never be afraid again.” For he had confessed to her that even in the moments when he was happy with her, the fear was always there, like mire in his heart, tormenting him. Even though she now loved him as a woman loves a man, even though she had been his as a husband or a lover makes a woman his, in her mind Jurema went on taking care of him, spoiling him, playing with him, like a mother with her son.

One of the nearsighted journalist’s legs stretched out and, after pressing down a little, slid between hers. Not moving, feeling her face flush, Jurema thought to herself that he was going to want to have her then and there, that in broad daylight, as he did in the dark of night, he was going to unbutton his trousers, raise her skirts up, get her ready for him to enter her, take his pleasure, and make sure that she took hers. A tremor of excitement ran through her from head to foot. She closed her eyes and lay there quietly, trying to hear the shots, to remember the war being fought just a few steps away, thinking about the Sardelinha sisters and Catarina and the other women who were devoting what little strength they had left to caring for the sick and wounded and newborn in the very last two Health Houses left standing, and of the little old men who carried the dead off to the ossuary all day long. In this way, she contrived to make that sensation, so new in her life, go away. She had lost all shame. She not only did things that were a sin: she thought about doing them, she wanted to do them. “Am I mad?” she thought. “Possessed?” Now that she was about to die, she committed, in body and in thought, sins that she had never committed before. Because, even though she had been with two men before, it was only now that she had discovered—in the arms of this being whom chance and this war (or the Dog?) had placed in her path—that the body, too, could be happy. She knew now that love was also an exaltation of the flesh, a conflagration of the senses, a vertigo that seemed to fulfill her. She snuggled up to this man sleeping alongside her, pressed her body as close to his as she could. At her back, the Dwarf stirred again. She could feel him, a tiny little thing, all hunched over, seeking her warmth.

Yes, she had lost all shame. If anyone had ever told her that one day she would sleep like this, squeezed in between two men, though one of them was admittedly a dwarf, she would have been horrified. If anyone had ever told her that a man to whom she was not married would lift up her skirts and take her in plain sight of the other one who lay there at her side, sleeping or pretending to be asleep, as they took their pleasure together and told each other, mouth pressed against mouth, that they loved each other, Jurema would have been scandalized and would have covered her ears with her hands. And yet, ever since that evening, this had happened every night, and instead of making her feel ashamed and frightening her, it seemed natural to her and made her happy. The first night, on seeing that they were embracing each other and kissing each other as though they were the only two people in the world, the Dwarf had asked them if they wanted him to leave. No, no, he was as necessary to both of them, as dearly loved as ever. And it was true.

The gunfire suddenly grew heavier, and for a few seconds it was as though the shots were landing inside the house, above their heads. Dirt and dust fell into the hole. Hunched over with her eyes closed, Jurema waited, waited for the direct hit, the explosion, the cave-in. But a moment later the shooting was farther in the distance. When she opened her eyes