25 Antropofaga
Ananda Lima (2019)
She devoured tiny Americans that came out of the vending machine. They slid out inside thin metallic plastic packages that almost opened themselves when punctured. Emerging from their wrapping with their tiny hands on either side of the rip, they proclaimed their nutritional content (calcium, sugar, fat, 350 mg of synthetic protein). Sometimes she decided to diet and promised: no more Americans. But she walked by, with an eye on the spot between the Ruffles and the Doritos, salivating. And before thinking much about it, there she was again, inserting the coins, hot and sweaty from her palms, into the machine’s mouth.
The first time, it’d been a pinkish, overweight man—flowery shirt, white sneakers, and socks biting at his thick ankles. He laughed and talked to invisible friends, pointing at things only he could see in his surroundings. He didn’t notice when she lifted him up, index finger and thumb under his little armpits. Holding a selfie-stick with a phone the size of a lentil, he posed in front of her giant, open mouth, as if she were the Statue of Liberty. Right after the timer took the picture, Béia swallowed him whole.
She knew eating from a vending machine was unhealthy. And the satisfaction it provided was brief and superficial. When possible, she preferred to bring a fruit, rice and beans, or leftover takeout. But that first time, she hadn’t packed lunch in the morning. She hadn’t slept well and felt off-kilter. Cleaning the speckled light-green floor of the hospital where she worked, she thought about her phone fight with her ex-boyfriend and about her new roommate, who hadn’t washed the dishes. And while she thought, the back and forth of her mop took her like a current to the corridor, where she found herself alone with the machine, its chocolate, chips, and Coca-Cola shining bright under the strategic white light.
The machine had always been there. But it was the first time she stopped to face it. As she stared, propping her hand and chin on the pole of the mop, she began to grow angry. She thought of the long hours in the hospital with that stringy, wet head, disgusting even when covered by the strong disinfectant smell. The lazy roommate who’d replaced her boyfriend. The money she never managed to save. The many times she stayed quiet, or smiled, or thanked people without wanting to. The child, house without a fence, dog, and wedding that went down the drain in a counterclockwise swirl before ever happening. Grinding her molars, she hunted for coins in the pockets of her ugly uniform, more out of rebellion than hunger, wanting to do something she was not supposed to do.
She hadn’t planned to come back a second time that very next day. A few minutes before lunch, she was putting away her basket with the cleaning cloth and spray, when a hand tapped her three times on the shoulder. The pale woman sucked a bright pink liquid from her see-through plastic cup and see-through straw. Without interrupting her suction, she pointed down to a deconstructed version of her beverage spread out on the floor: ice cubes sliding on a pallid pink puddle between the dome lid and the body of the cup, which was now wide open, like the mouth of the woman’s child, who screamed for her lost drink.
It was almost lunchtime. But she couldn’t leave that mess there. Somebody would sue. Or she’d get fired. Both things easy to happen in the US. The woman interpreted Béia’s hesitation as a lack of understanding. Her lips let go of the straw, and she tried to explain: “Limpiar? Por favor? Gracias!” Béia nodded, gave the woman a deflated smile and went after the orange cone, the bucket, the mop.
Béia had a meeting at two where they would evaluate goals and objectives versus performance for everyone in her wing, including the cleaning crew. As she waited in the long cafeteria line, she couldn’t stop thinking about the three taps on her shoulder and the screaming mouth of the child. A secret thought occurred to her, which embarrassed but consoled her a little: “The truth is, I don’t even like children.” But the consolation was diminished by the correction that followed, “I don’t like other people’s children.” Other people’s children were the only ones she could like or not like.
Hungry and impatient, she stepped out of the line and went back to the machine. This time, out of the package came a cowboy with muddy jeans, boots, and a hat. He licked his index finger and lifted it to feel the direction of the wind. When she picked him up, he was shielding his eyes from the imaginary sun, his hands resembling a salute over his eyebrows. Facing her mouth, he concentrated on the horizon, as if searching for an approaching hurricane.
She kept coming back every few days, usually at lunchtime or close to the end of her shift. She swallowed an aging Southern belle, blond, skinny and lipsticked, in tasteful clothes. A woman whose hair needed washing, wearing Minnie Mouse ears and carrying a Dora the Explorer backpack. A bearded hipster holding a bottle of craft beer. He seemed to be in the middle of giving a disinterested but intelligent opinion, the punch line indicated by an unenthusiastic raise of his eyebrows, just before she swallowed him. Once started, it was a difficult habit to stop. An annoying and persistent urge, like a mosquito bite that kept itching, even after the skin had been scratched raw.
She started talking to her colleague, Rosa, about her strange snacks, which she now consumed almost daily. She wanted to know if Rosa ate Americans too. But as she began talking, Rosa got called over the PA system.
She rushed to go attend to the call but paused at the door on her way out of the storage room. “Mira, what’s the point of dwelling on ingredients, where things come from, is it organic or not, yadda, yadda, yadda? You are going to eat it anyway, right? Might as well just enjoy it.” Rosa blew Béia a kiss and turned away from the door. “Buen provecho guapa,” she said, while she walked away.
Béia then spoke to Patricia, her friend who’d been brought up with money and a good education, before her father lost everything in circumstances she preferred not to elaborate on. “Ai, Béia, no one has time for these philosophical wonderings,” she shook her head. “Put your feet on the ground, Amiga. Let’s get some work done and get out of this place.” Patricia looked at Béia sympathetically now. She reached for one of Béia’s hands. “Also, you need to have more fun in life. Go out sometimes. Come to the pagode with me this Friday. It’s so much fun. It’ll do you good.”
Béia was not ready to go out yet. But she’d begun, slowly, to get used to everything that had happened in the last few months. She’d started smiling again, every once in a while. The roommate suggested they watch a Netflix series together. She realized then how she’d missed having some company when she got back home at night. The two laughed and talked about the show, a series on the 1960s in America that everyone had watched ten years before them. And they spoke of their days, the difficulties of being newly single and working long hours in their respective jobs. The dishes the roommate left didn’t annoy her as much anymore. She found it somewhat endearing now, a reminder of her company the previous night.
During that time, she spent a week away from the machine. Until one morning when she was actually feeling good and well-rested. Humming an Anitta song in the laundry room, she grabbed a pile of warm cleaning cloths from the dryer. Then went to one of the windowed patient rooms, where she sprayed the cleaning product and started wiping the window sill. Someone had brought a mixed spring bouquet for the patient who slept under the soft sunlight. She was a thin young woman, probably in her twenties, who looked healthier now than when she’d arrived a few weeks before, despite the clear plastic cannula still attached to her nose. Béia rearranged the bunch a little, spacing some of the flowers. She took out a limp, dying lilac and threw it in the trash. The bouquet looked fresh again and the room clean, pleasant even. She left in good spirits. The hospital was not very busy that day, the corridors calm. She decided to take five minutes to sit outside at the small patch of garden on that sunny day, even if it were still cold. The machine was on the way to the garden. She thought about what Rosa and Patricia had said. Maybe she should enjoy herself a little more. This was her life now. She bent over and grabbed a packet from the chute of the machine and went outside.
She inhaled the cold air, closed her eyes for a minute, feeling the sun’s dimmed warmth on her cheeks, the dark orange behind her eyelids. Then she ripped the bag open. Out came an older woman, old enough to be Béia’s grandmother. She resembled the red-headed woman in the 1960’s series but aged by decades. Her once full body was now thinner, her back curved in slightly. She wore a McDonald’s uniform and visor and stood as if leaning on a counter, listening to a customer’s order. In her tiny eyes, Béia recognized a melancholy for something lost. And the recognition brought back the memory of that morning in this same hospital. The place had felt so different on Béia’s day off. She remembered again walking in silence back to the car next to her boyfriend. The little American woman on her hand glanced at her watch. Béia looked at the door leading back to the hospital and thought of the work waiting for her inside. She didn’t want to waste her time here being sad. Her palm itched beneath the lady’s feet. She put the woman in her mouth quickly, avoiding another glimpse into her eyes. Once her hands were empty, she finally got to properly scratch her itch, which seemed to have spread to both palms now. When she was done, she rubbed her hands together one last time and went back to her shift.
In the emergency room, patients waited to the sound of the TV. Two angry, blond women screamed about DACA on Fox News. In the storage room, Béia mixed the disinfectant with warm water and thought of the ultrasound morning again. The silence of the missing heartbeat. The nurse’s face. How that face she’d seen so many times before in the hospital had changed at that moment, looking at the screen, avoiding Béia’s gaze. She realized, staring at the nurse’s profile in the darkened room, that the face had been a shallow cutout, an outline without much depth. Before that moment in the ultrasound room, the nurse had been merely an extra, part of the scenery of Béia’s life. But something in that moment, something sad and pitiful, filled in the nurse’s face, and she became something denser and harder to understand, another person. Béia’d thought, looking at the nurse’s face, of the neurological condition that some people had where they could see but could not comprehend faces. She focused on the tension between the nurse’s eyebrows, which the nurse seemed to try to disguise but couldn’t. There was so much to the face, on the surface and underneath it. Béia felt sick and didn’t want to think about what was happening. The nurse was going to get the doctor, she said, looking at Béia’s boyfriend’s eyes to avoid Béia’s. No, there had been no blood until that morning, Béia told the doctor. “A silent loss,” the moving mouth of the doctor had said. Standing by the car afterward, she’d shrunk away from her boyfriend’s attempt to hug her. He talked about trying again. But that made no sense to her. They had not tried anything in the first place. The “again” didn’t fit. They had conceived without planning during their trip back home to meet each other’s families. She’d gotten sick early in their journey. After the ordeal, as they joked about her stomach having become Americanized, sensitive to the local food, they had not considered the minute possibility of the episode affecting her birth control. They didn’t know if it happened in Bahia, where her parents lived, or São Paulo, where they visited his grandfather. The baby had been a little Brazilian gift they brought back with them without knowing. The suggestion of replacing it with something calculated in the New Jersey winter struck her as repugnant. “Monstrous,” said the woman on TV now, as Béia walked out of the storage room and back through the emergency waiting area, now with her rolling bucket and mop.
In the following weeks, Béia swallowed a bodybuilder in American flag Speedos, posing before her as if she were a mirror. A frat boy drinking from a red plastic cup, while nodding his head slightly to a beat, as if a mob of college kids were yelling at him, “drink, drink, drink.” A policeman who held up his gun and pulled the trigger right as he fell into her mouth.
One day, when she recovered her belongings from her cubby at the end of her shift, she saw missed calls from her ex-boyfriend. Shaking, she deleted his number. Then she wiped clear her call history so that she wouldn’t find his traces there later. When she got home, her roommate seemed to be out, until she heard giggles coming from behind the closed door of her room, and the voice of a man. Béia drank a glass of water and went to her bedroom. She put on her headphones. She didn’t want to watch an episode of their show in case the roommate wanted to see it later. So she scrolled down her feed instead, pausing at each post she read to scratch her itching palms. But it was all too much, and she shut her laptop and lay in the darkness for hours until she finally fell asleep.
The next morning at work, she felt something hardening in her hands, a thin scab trailing the m on her palms. She put an orange cone by the area where she’d been mopping, rested the mop and her bucket against the wall. The voices of the blond women on the waiting room TV talked about anchor babies. She went to wash her hands.
At lunchtime, she showed her palms to Patricia, who looked at them closely, ran her fingers along the m and frowned. She scratched at Béia’s hands lightly with her fingernails, as naturally as if they were her own. She ended up scraping out of them a thin layer of something that looked like white cotton candy, or a spider web. “Have you been working around any patients with skin diseases? Fungi infections?”
Béia answered no, but they both knew there wasn’t a way to know for sure.
“Maybe an allergy? With all these chemicals we deal with here, credo. Get it looked at, OK?”
After Patricia left, there were only a couple of minutes before the end of her break. So Béia hurried to the machine, this time more out of necessity than because she really wanted to. She placed the open bag on top of a table full of pharmaceutical pamphlets and distractedly looked at her left palm while her right hand reached inside the bag. She thought about making an appointment in a week or so if things didn’t get better. When Béia looked at her right hand, a woman stood there with her back turned. Béia felt queasy. There was something wrong. The woman had tight, shoulder-length curls, and the brown skin emerging from the uniform was like Béia’s. The little body, still facing away, swayed back and forth. The woman held a mop. Béia’s hands started to shake. This destabilized the little woman, who stopped mopping for a second. But then she found her footing again and kept going, even as her floor trembled. The itching on Béia’s hands was unbearable with the woman rubbing her mop on them. And Béia was terrified of seeing the woman’s face. She tried to scratch around her. Then the woman began to turn. In a panic, Béia threw her into her mouth and swallowed her.
She woke up the next morning nauseated. Squinting at her with suspicion, Patricia asked if she was going out with someone. “What are you up to, Amiga? You can tell me. I’ll do whatever I can, even harrass the fucker to make sure he treats you right.”
Béia swore it was impossible. There was no way she could be pregnant. Nothing had happened in months.
Patricia then looked at her with pity, “Amiga, don’t you think it’s time? It’ll do you good. Do you want me to introduce you to someone I know. There’s this guy, we had a thing a while back. But we are good friends now. He’s quite good in that department.”
Béia refused. Patricia used her phone to diagnose her with possible gastritis. Rosa agreed. At home, Béia thought to consult with her roommate, too, but she almost never saw her these days. Either the apartment was empty, or her roommate was locked in her bedroom with her whispers, laughs, and the man’s voice. She’d even heard them watching their 1960’s series, the words were muffled, but she recognized the theme music. But they must have finished the series and now seemed to have moved onto something else.
It took her a while to return to the machine, but she always did by now. The next American was a man wearing a suit, sputtering on his invisible phone, looking at what must have been a computer screen. She put him in her mouth, relieved he hadn’t been someone like the lady with the mop the previous time.
The weather started to get warmer. Béia’s hands itched a little more with the heat. Patricia suggested Béia Google rheumatoid arthritis. Rosa, who was now attending night school for nursing, disagreed. But despite her hands, Béia was happy that winter was dwindling down.
The next morning, she was making herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen in her apartment. She heard the faint hush of her roommate’s shower. Béia started filling the glass coffee pitcher. The door of the roommate’s bedroom opened, and the shower became a little louder, coming through the open door. Béia stretched her upper body around the bookshelf that blocked her view of her roommate’s bedroom to wave her good morning, ask if she wanted coffee. But what she saw in the roommate’s room was a man, turned away from her, facing the bedroom window. He held his cellphone to his ear, seemingly waiting for someone to pick up. Béia gasped. The man had dark hair and was of the same height and built as her ex-boyfriend. Her heart knocked hard against her chest as if demanding to be let out. Water started overflowing from the coffee jar she’d been filling. She retreated to her original position, standing straight in front of the faucet, her view blocked. She put the coffee pot upside down on the sink, letting the rest of the water spill back out over the dirty dishes. She dried her hands on the tea towel and prepared to look again. But before she did, the man spoke. “Oh, hi. Sorry, I’m gonna be a little late. Traffic is crazy.”
His accent was so markedly American. He couldn’t be her ex. Of course, he couldn’t. Would her ex have sounded like this man did all those nights next to Béia in her roommate’s bedroom? Would he care to watch that TV series? Of course, he wouldn’t. Hope and fear, concentrated in an unexpected moment like this, had a way of muddling things: logic, the past, the facts, what was reasonable. In any case, she was relieved it wasn’t him sleeping with her roommate. The relief was expected. But what surprised her was that she also felt disappointed, sad, as if her wounds were fresher now than yesterday. “I’ll be there in time for the ten o’clock,” the man said, probably to a machine. His American r and l, so liquid. His t, like a puff of steam. “I’ll be leading the kick-off meeting. See you very soon.” Her ex had so much trouble saying that little phrase “I’ll.” Those floating wavy consonants. He had to say “I will,” turning the double l into a second w. And although her English was better than his, Béia had trouble with that, too, especially when she was tired. She remembered practicing with him, how they laughed at the strange sounds rolling in their mouths and their combined failures. She stretched her neck around the bookshelf again and saw the man’s profile. He was white, his eyebrows thin. He looked nothing like her ex. She wanted him to turn around so that she could look at his back again, just for a minute. But he paced around the room, collecting his things, and now seemed about to turn toward her. She retreated, not wanting to be seen. She felt like crying but couldn’t. She left without her coffee.
The following weeks she ate a woman with a pink pussy hat, a bus driver, a biker, bearded and tattooed.
Patricia was determined to cook more at home and had brought real food for both of them, she told Béia. She scooped out the rice and beans, fried yucca flour, tomatoes, and beef with onions from her Tupperware containers and arranged them carefully on a paper plate they got from the cafeteria. She gave the plate to Béia and sat next to her. “How are you, Amiga?”
Béia had just taken her first bite. The food tasted so real, good, fresh, and made with such care. The newness of the warm weather against her body again made her and everything feel more real. Patricia was sitting there next to her in an expecting silence. Béia filled herself with a staccato inhale that turned into a long sigh and began to cry. Patricia moved closer, and Béia lowered her head onto Patricia’s shoulders. Patricia held Béia’s hands and gently ran her fingers over her scars.
Later, a white man with gray hair and a thick, gray beard came out of the machine. He appeared to hold a sign. He wore a MAGA hat and screamed, veins visible on his neck. And it was as if the man’s hatred transferred to Béia. She wished he could see her, that he saw her mouth and teeth as they were about to crush him. But he didn’t see her. She flicked his ear. He waved his hand around the spot where she’d hit him as if there’d been a mosquito buzzing around him, then screamed with more vigor. Béia’s muscles, the neck and jaw, were rigid with anger. She shoved him into her mouth and bit hard. But he cracked too easily, like a soft-shell crab. She realized she’d wanted real bones, breaking loudly between her teeth.
She didn’t feel well the next day but came into work anyway. She didn’t have many sick days left this year. The lines on her hands sometimes stung, like cuts under antibacterial spray. She decided she’d finally see someone about it that day. She still felt nauseated, like when she was pregnant. She stopped by the machine because the nausea was worse on an empty stomach.
She felt her forehead before bending down to pick up the bag. She seemed to be running a fever now. When she opened the bag, the contents did not come out straight away. She turned the bag upside down over her open palm. The person that fell out was smaller than usual. The proportions were off. It was a small child, she realized. A girl, around two years old. Béia’s skin color. Same hair. The little face, a mix: her ex-boyfriend’s nose, Béia’s eyes. Béia felt dizzy and lost her footing. She leaned on the wall. The child lifted her arms, the chubby fingers reaching, asking to be picked up. Béia was going to be sick. Her hands shook, and the baby and the package fell. She ran toward the bathroom. On the way, the TV woman said: “It’s their fault for bringing them here.” In the warehouse on the screen behind them, a chain-link fence surrounded children who slept like potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil. Béia barely made it to the toilet and threw up.
In cold sweats, she went to the sink and ran some water over her face. Something came out of the lines on her hands. Sheets of the thin metallic plastic hatching out. Looking in the mirror at the silver planes growing out of her palms, she thought of Wolverine, then Edwards Scissorhands, the times she’d watched them dubbed in Portuguese, in her living room as a child. She imagined herself on the TV now, as her little child self-watched. The plastic on her hands reflected the fluorescent hospital lights, like the sun on a surface of water. She remembered herself when she was even younger, walking by the ocean with her mother, the sunlight glinting on the sea, the white roses on the sand. In her memory, her mother was silhouetted by the bright sun. She thought of her baby. Now she knew her face.
She stumbled out of the bathroom and was able to get to the smaller storage closet where she put away the mop and bucket when she needed to take a break. She went in and did not turn on the light, not wanting to call attention to her presence there. The plastic was growing longer, going all the way from her hands to the ground. She heard the slippery sound of the plastic slithering along the floor, then the noise went up around her, trailing the wall. The plastic made a ceiling above her. She was losing her balance, had to sit down, and when she did, she realized her body was sealed into a bubble of plastic, still connected to her hands, like an umbilical cord.
Her nausea stopped. It was completely dark, but she felt calm and comfortable now. She lay down. She was so tired. She’d been so tired, for so long.
She dreamed of her baby. In her dreams, they lay together under sheets of metallic plastic. They slept on their sides. She hugged her child, who was sometimes a baby, sometimes a toddler, sometimes a little five-year-old. When her little girl moved or whimpered, she went shhhhh, shhhhhh, and comforted her back to a quiet sleep.
But she woke up alone. She didn’t know how long she’d been there. After so much silence, it was jarring to hear a sound coming from outside of her package. There was a faint, white noise of running circuitry, but there was also something else: the sound of coins going down a shoot. The machine gulping them down. Something moved. Behind her. She could see the outline of a coil of wire against the plastic. She stood and felt the surface move beneath her feet as the package was slowly pushed forward. She felt the edge of the shelf and then her ground disappear. Her body floated to the top of the package as it fell, going down and down on a free fall.