Mouthful of Birds(3)

There are so many curses and insults coming from so close by that it’s useless to respond or try to placate them.

“What should we do?” asks Felicity. The three of them back up faster and faster.

“Don’t even think about crying,” says Nené.

The old woman, clutching at her wedding dress and wrinkling it in one nervous hand, grasps Felicity’s arm with her other.

“Don’t be scared, Grandmother, it’s okay,” says Felicity.

But the taunting is so loud now that the old woman can’t hear her words. On the highway, off in the distance, a white dot grows like a new ray of hope. Perhaps this is the moment when Felicity thinks, for the last time, of love. Perhaps she thinks to herself: Don’t let him leave her; don’t let him abandon her.

“If it stops, we get in,” shouts Nené.

“What did she say?” asks the grandmother. They are close to the bathroom now.

“That if the car stops—” says Felicity.

“What?” asks the grandmother.

The murmur is converging on them. They can’t see anyone, but they know the women are there, just a few yards away. Felicity screams. Something like hands brush against her legs, her neck, her fingertips. Felicity screams and she doesn’t hear Nené, who has moved farther away and is telling her to grab the old woman and run. The car stops in front of the bathroom. Nené turns back toward Felicity and tells her to move, to drag the grandmother with her. But it’s the grandmother who reacts and drags Felicity toward Nené, who is already next to the car and waiting for the woman to get out so she can get in herself and order the man to drive.

“They won’t let go!” screams Felicity. “They won’t let go of me!” And she desperately tries to break free of the last hands holding her back.

The old woman pulls. She yanks on Felicity with all her strength. Nené is waiting anxiously for the door to open, for the woman to get out. But the one who emerges is the man. With the headlights shining on the road, he still hasn’t seen the women, and he gets out in a hurry while he fumbles for the zipper of his pants. Then the din grows. The laughing, taunting voices forget Nené and fixate purely and exclusively on him. They reach his ears. In the man’s eyes, the fear of a rabbit facing the furies. By the time he stops, it’s too late. Nené has gone around and gotten into the man’s seat. She restrains the woman, who is trying to escape, and she opens a back door for Felicity and the grandmother.

“Hold her,” says Nené, and she lets go of the woman to leave her in the grandmother’s hands. The old woman obeys the order wordlessly.

“If she wants to get out, let her,” says Felicity. “Maybe these two do love each other and it’s not for us to stand in their way.”

The newcomer wiggles free of the old lady but she doesn’t get out of the car. She asks, “What do you want? Where did you come from?”—one question after another, until Nené opens the passenger door.

“Get out, quick,” she says.

They can hear the women’s cries even once they’re in the car, and in front of them, detached from the darkness by the headlights, stands the frozen, terrified figure of a man who is not thinking about the same thing he was a minute ago.

“No way am I getting out,” says the newcomer. She looks at the man without tenderness, and then at Nené: “Get going before he comes back,” she says, and she locks the door from inside.

Nené puts the car in drive. The man hears the noise and turns to look at them.

“Go!” shouts the newcomer.

The old lady claps nervously, then squeezes Felicity’s hand; Felicity looks fearfully at the man as he approaches. The tires on one side are off the road, and the car skids in the mud. Nené turns the steering wheel wildly, and for a moment the car’s headlights shine into the fields. But what they see then is not precisely the fields: the car’s light is lost in the immensity of the night, but it’s enough to distinguish in the darkness the swarming mass of hundreds of women. They’re running toward the car. Or, more accurately, toward the man standing in front of the car, waiting motionlessly for them, as though for death.

The newcomer presses her own foot down on Nené’s to floor the accelerator. And with the image framed in the rearview mirror of the crowd of women falling upon the man, Nené manages to get the car back on the road. The motor drowns out the shouts and insults, and soon all is silence and darkness.

The newcomer shifts in her seat.

“I never loved him,” she says. “When he got out of the car, I thought about taking the wheel and leaving him by the side of the road. But I don’t know, the maternal instinct . . .”

None of the other women are listening. All of them, and now the newcomer, too, just look out at the highway and are silent for a while. That’s when it happens.

“It can’t be,” says Nené.

In front of them, in the distance, the horizon starts to light up with small pairs of white lights.

“What?” asks the grandmother. “What’s going on?”

In the passenger seat, the newcomer throws glances at Nené, as if waiting for an explanation. The pairs of lights grow, coming closer. Felicity peers between the two front seats.

“They’re coming back,” she says. She smiles and looks at Nené.