Free His Own Man by Edgard Telles Ribeiro Page B

be smiling at us. I stood beside his coffin for a few minutes. The longer I looked at him, the more he seemed to smile. He must have somehow sensed the growing line of artists and intellectuals in the small São João Batista chapel, made up largely of men and women whose works owed much to his altruism and whose attendance also represented the dead and the disappeared.
    Marina and I made plans to get together and ended up seeing each other the following week, on a night Nilo had traveled to São Paulo. When I arrived at the small apartment the two shared in Jardim Botânico, she greeted me with a photo album in hand. Leafing through it while Marina fixed me a drink, I could see nearly fifteen years of her life unfold before me, in Uruguay as well as in the cities that had come after Montevideo. I saw that Max had put on weight with the arrival of their first child, and had grown a beard after the birth of their second. All the while collecting medals and decorations, visible on his jacket lapels in some photos, pinned in rows to his gala uniforms in others. Even so, as often happens in such cases, he started to appear less and less on each page, until he didn’t show up at all. Nothing like a family album to let us see, far beyond the ravages of time, the personal and emotional hardships that shape our lives.
    As I expected, Marina got to talking about her ex-husband. That was when she told me the train story in full detail, while I continued to flip through the album, now from back to front. She described the encounter with Max in the wrong cabin and spoke of the long dinner that would change her life. “It’s strange,” she added after a pause. “When I met Marcílio and we spent a good part of the night talking in that deserted car, I was positive that endless possibilities would open before me. Andall for one ridiculous reason: simply because he was listening to me. No one had ever listened to me that way before, with an intensity that shut out the rest of the world.… It was just an illusion, of course.”
    She looked at me with some small hope that I would be able to grasp what she was trying to say. And she continued, “I was barely twenty years old, a victim of one of those classic adolescent infatuations. With someone I mistook for a father figure. Someone who knew how to play his part adeptly, giving me the attention I desperately craved — and hadn’t received in my childhood.”
    She took the album from my lap and chose a photo at random. “Santiago,” she said. “The worst time of my life. And the country’s.” She then told me about a lover of hers back then, an Italian photographer named Paolo. I had the impression she was talking to herself as her tone remained impassive.
    Since I said nothing, she fell silent. And began to turn the album’s pages without lingering, until she pointed to an image of utter desolation: a snowman lost in the middle of a completely white yard, with two bare, black trees in the background. She sighed. “Washington. “The kids built the snowman but disappeared at picture time. They went to get a carrot for the nose, tomatoes for the eyes, string beans for the mouth. I don’t think they could get the vegetable drawer in the fridge open. And they forgot about me. They went to watch TV, leaving me standing out in the yard. Kids … So I took the snowman’s picture.”
    I set the album aside. Her sadness had only increased with each photo.
    “I felt completely alone,” she continued. “The house was far from the city. My marriage, already a sinking ship, ended up going under for good. One day I packed up the kids and left.”
    We talked about other things, but in circles, without getting anywhere. One painful impression gradually came over me: the hour spent together had produced incomplete fragments ratherthan the tapestry I had hoped the two of us would weave. The remarks about Max, which had reflected a whole series of truncated perceptions, the revelation