Chapter 30
A life, a person, a memory, are inherently imperfect. But a single moment in time can go from ephemeral to eternal, all it takes is the right vantage point and the curved glass of a camera lens.
“Look toward the far wall and lower your chin,” I instruct.
Joaquina obeys. Her body faces me, shoulders squared, face turned away, cast in shadows. Her hands and eyelids are soft.
We are in the drawing room. The lighting is best here, at once bright and soft, with the natural golden warmth of the pre-midday sun.
I watch her through the camera lens. I like the way the pearl necklace sits around her neck.
The earrings are a pale gold against the grays of the background.
Her smile renews with each pose. A cheery tune from the cylinder music box plays in the background.
Photography can capture the perfection of a single moment in time.
I feel it in fleeting bursts of inspiration when I am behind the camera: in the gentle curve of her neck and the way she arches her back when posing, and the sharp ridge of her collarbone above her chest. The air shimmers around her when the sunlight strikes just so.
Little by little, I enter into the right mindset.
Joaquina herself disappears and a platonic ideal of a woman emerges.
Click, click, click.
I can almost imagine my lips grazing her soft skin—but only in a gentlemanly way, of course, and I remain completely in control of my senses. What I feel for her is merely an artistic appreciation for the picturesque.
“A photograph freezes a moment in time for all of posterity,” I say. “To behold at any time. Isn’t it such a marvel?”
“Is that what you do with my photos?” she chimes, one eyebrow cocked. “Marvel at them when you’re alone?”
She’s overly familiar, Mother hisses.
Over the past week since we have been taking photos, Joaquina has gradually dropped the pretense of demure obedience in lieu of her talkative, impulsive, and borderline impertinent self. But I don’t dislike it.
“On the lonely nights you gaze at my photos,” she continues, “admire my beauty?”
“Sometimes I wonder what you must think of me.”
She shrugs. “I think you’re a young man like any other one. When will I get to see the photos?”
“They still need a little more time in development,” I lie.
She narrows her eyes. “You’ve been looking at them.”
“Only to check the development. They’re still too dark.”
“I’d like to see them anyway.”
Her tone is pleading, yet there is enough demand in it to give me pause.
She is almost unrecognizable from the person I used to think of as a chambermaid.
The quiet, demure girl who looked ashamed when I caught her wearing Mother’s clothes.
At times she brims with utter certainty of herself.
She stopped calling me Senhor Neves and now calls me Leandro.
You should have put her in her place long ago, Mother rails.
“Leandro?”
“You can see them when they’re ready.”
“When will that be?”
“Soon.”
She purses her lips. “That’s what you always say.”
From the beginning I made it clear to Joaquina that the photography sessions weren’t part of her paid duties.
She was not to feel obliged, neither was this something I could require of a servant.
It would be an off-duty activity which she should consider outside the boundaries of her work.
She seemed eager to comply, which I initially found curious.
But now I realize that having her portraits taken engaged her fantasies of being a different woman, someone glamorous and high-class, someone who wears such dresses.
It was an extension of her original fantasy, what she had pretended the day I caught her donning Mother’s clothes and jewelry in the room: the fantasy that she had a different life.
That she went to balls and wore gowns, and this time, she had an audience to admire her: me.
Altogether, it did not take much convincing on my end.
I’ve never met anyone quite like Joaquina.
Although, I suppose I haven’t met so many women in total.
A couple years ago I befriended the daughter of a neighboring family, a girl my age.
It was a close friendship, but Mother disliked her because the girl sometimes came here unchaperoned, and even talked back to her father once.
Mother said she lacked decency and chastity as most girls nowadays do.
At Mother’s insistence, I stopped going to the fairs, carnivals, and other public gatherings where I might find temptation.
Mother said she would find me a suitable match when the time was right for me to marry.
But she is wrong about one thing: She won’t easily find me a “suitable match” because we are not members of high society, despite her clinging to this fantasy.
Everyone has a fantasy they can’t let go of and that is Mother’s, I suppose.
“I don’t understand the perfume,” Joaquina says. “It isn’t going to show up in the photographs, so why must I wear it?”
“You were wearing it that first time.”
“Back then I was only playing dress-up. Like a girl plays with dolls.”
“Aren’t we playing dress-up now?”
She laughs. “Now we have a purpose.”
“What’s that?”
“The photographs.”
“Maybe the point isn’t the photographs.”
“Then what is it?”
“The fantasy. You are a rich socialite and the papers have been writing about you.”
She’s still for a moment. “What does that make you?”
I smile. “An artist at work.”
The lies you tell yourself, Mother sneers. This isn’t about art; this is about wickedness. Whoever heard of a man photographing his female servant?
Twenty minutes later, Joaquina sinks onto the sofa with a dramatic exhale. “My back aches.”
I lower the camera and tell her we can take a break. I don’t voice the thought that posing for the photos is far easier than her paid duties as a chambermaid, although she is also bad at those.
“I don’t understand,” she says as she rolls her shoulders. “Why can’t I wear the red dress now? Or the floral one with the high neckline and double puff sleeves? I tire of this worn gray one.”
“As I explained before, those are too big for this room. They don’t belong here.”
“Then perhaps we go outside.”
“For the groundskeeper and the stable master and Maria das Dores to gawk at us?”
“They have already left for the day.”
I sigh, irritated.
Do not argue with a servant, Mother scolds. It is beneath you. You give her far too much lenience, now look how she undermines your every word. A servant should be neither seen nor heard.
“I wouldn’t want to dirty Mother’s gown by bringing it outside,” I say.
“What if I wear my hair down with flowers in it?” Her voice goes up at the end and she straightens in her seat, as if rejuvenated by the notion. “It’ll look lovely in the photos…”
This strikes me as indecent. Hair down like a harlot. What will be next? She will want to be photographed naked?
“No.”
“No?” She blinks.
“I mean…I like your hair up like that. It reveals your graceful neck.”
She blushes, smiling. Her shoulders relax. Joaquina is quick to obstinance but also easily placated. All I have to do is pay her a compliment.
She remains quiet for the next moments as I take more photos. But her expression indicates that she is dangerously close to protesting again. Then she poses in such a way as to face the camera directly, as though determined to find me behind it.
“Joaquina,” I say slowly. “Remember what I said about how I don’t want you to look directly at the camera? And your expression is not right. Keep your face neutral.”
“I’ve seen portraits, people often do look directly at the camera.”
“That’s enough for today.” I start shutting down the camera. “Why don’t you go prepare me a bath?”
I feel her staring at me as I fiddle with the camera.
I wonder if she’ll protest this, too. Maybe she’ll say she won’t prepare me a bath until she sees the photos.
Maybe she’ll say she’s off duty, not currently working as a housemaid, and I should prepare my own bath.
Irritation starts rising within me—why must she be so difficult?
She gets up stiffly. “Of course, Senhor Neves.”
Senhor Neves, now? She stomps away.
It takes Joaquina a long while to prepare my bath. I read today’s Jornal do Recife front to back, then register the distant whistle of the kettle on the stove. Finally I hear footsteps as she carries the bucket of water up to my room, where the tub is.
Then—silence.
I head upstairs. As I reach the door of my room, I don’t hear a single sound. That in itself is strange. Evidently, she is in there—where else would she be? I heard her carrying the water up some time ago.
“Joaquina,” I call from outside the door. Then I knock softly. “Are you done?”
There is no response and a strange feeling comes over me. An image manifests in my head of Joaquina soaking in the tub, naked, having prepared a bath for herself.
“Joaquina? Are you done preparing the bath?”
No response.
It is my room. I don’t need her permission to enter. I turn the handle and open the door.
Joaquina stands by the bedside table, still as a statue, and does not react when I come in. She is looking down at something in her hands.
“What’s the matter—”
I realize it then. She’s poring through a small stack of grayscale images, transfixed.
Joaquina found her photographs.