The Woman in Panties
Matias and his parents lived in a house on the corner in the street where the primary school was. The house was opposite the school and it was on the left corner of the block. The school took up a whole similar block. This was in Aureliano Marques in the beginning of 1959.
To the left of the house, opposite, was the police station. The police station was in a small house with a tiny porch.
Matias's house had two bedrooms, one of them very small, a sitting room, a dining room and a kitchen and the bathroom. In the kitchen there was a wood-burning stove which Matias's mother didn't use because she preferred the kerosene cooker they had brought from the town of Tupã. There was a porch at the front of the house and another porch at the back, tile-floored with carmine coloured tiles. There was also a backyard. It was wide and it was level with a short slope in the middle and then it levelled again. Before and a little after the slope, when facing the house backdoor, there was grass on the left. The rest of it was earth. The backyard was a magic place to play in. There was something in it that was intangible, something else that you did not know what it was but it was there. Matias did not know what, nor could he define it in later years. Perhaps an element of the Sherwood forest in the Robin Hood story, although Matias in those times had not heard of them yet. The backyard was fenced on the left, and the right side and the back were walled. Three steps tile-floored gave access from the porch to the backyard.
Sometimes a young policeman sat at a wooden bench in front of the police station on the sidewalk and talked to his girlfriend. Once the girlfriend played she was punching him very slowly and very weakly and she laughed and he laughed as well and punched her just as slowly and just as weakly. Matias's father gave sporadic lessons to the young policeman, who was preparing for the entrance examination to the secondary school.
One afternoon Matias's father, who had been teaching the policeman in the police station, strode across the street and into the porch, where his wife was sitting. Matias was near his mother.
'Maria Letícia,' he said. 'Your grandmother died at three o'clock this afternoon, the news has just come by radio to the police station.' There wasn't a telephone in Matias' house.
Matias' mother started to cry.
'Oh, grandma! Grandma!'
One day Matias, who was five years old, picked up his father's Gillette safety razor and tried to shave. It made a superficial cut on his face.
'What happened?' his father asked his mother.
'He shaved with your razor.'
'You'll end up being arrested by the policeman, young man, with that cut on your face, you'll see,' his father told him.
One Sunday afternoon they were in front of the house on the sidewalk. Matias's parents were talking to their neighbours on the right and there was somebody else with them, somebody who lived nearby. Suddenly a man came and told Matias's father and the other men, that there had been something, an incident in the football field. It seemed some women had quarrelled, there had been a brawl. The football field was up the street that was on the left of the house and not far from it, but it was out of sight. Matias had never been to the football field.
Indeed there had been something as the people standing beside the police station had their faces turned in the direction up the street. But nobody in front of Matias's house could see it on account of the primary school building, which blocked their view. Suddenly there was a hush and everybody stared, as what had happened finally came into view from behind the corner of the primary school building.
In a march that would be forever imprinted on Matias's memory, first there came a woman. She was tall, well proportioned, and to Matias, who was only five, she was a big woman, of an increased build, as if she had come out of a film by Fellini. The fact that she was wearing only her panties and a very short petticoat that looked like a vest made her even bigger. She came at the front. Behind her walked the policeman to whom Matias's father gave lessons, and two other women. The two women were wearing skirts and there was nothing wrong with them except the fact that the policeman came in the middle of them walking arm in arm with them. He had his baton in one of his hands and a forceful look in his eyes.
Matias stared at the half-naked woman at the front in fascination.
The woman walked calmly, smoothly, at a normal speed as if nothing was happening, as if walking in the streets in panties in front of everybody was the most natural thing in the world. The woman did not try to do anything, she did not make any gesture to cover her partial nudity. She just accepted her situation. She was blonde and her eyes were swollen as if she had cried although her impassive expression did not suggest that she had cried. Matias felt sexual attraction for her.
Watching that big woman half-naked that could do nothing to change her situation, having to show it to everybody in the street caused Matias to become even more mesmerized.
The small procession turned right to enter the police station, the naked woman ahead of the rest. She had to lower her head a little to walk through the entrance. After her came the two other women and the officer.
Matias's father made a short unintelligible comment if so to the other men, and Matias's mother said nothing. They simply watched.
One or two months later Matias heard that the police station was moving house. They would go to a bigger house in the town center.
Matias rushed to the backyard and stayed glued to the fence. He kept watching through the space between one post and the other the things being removed from the police station and carried into a truck. He felt happiness inside himself, and yearning. He would not leave the side of the fence until he saw what he wanted to see. For he was sure the tall woman in panties was there inside the police station and she would certainly be carried out with the desks, chairs, typewriters, furniture and utensils from the police station and put into the truck. He was sure they would take her out and he would see her once more in her panties and wearing the very short petticoat.
Matias' mother came with a bundle of clothes to be hung on the clothesline and started hanging them on, fastening them with clothespegs.
'Matias, what are you doing?' she asked him when she saw him glued to the fence.
'I'm watching the police station moving, mom,' he told his mother and he knew he was hiding something from her. Matias' mother carried on with her task and Matias stayed at the fence until he eventually realized the tall woman wasn't there anymore.
