I wonder where Tereza is...
It was 1997 and hardly anyone I knew had a cell phone. But Tereza strutted around holding her Motorola Dynatac, which looked more like a brick with an antenna. Standing there on the sands of Copacabana, she spoke to her boss loud and clear. The subject was work. The rest of her acquaintances, sitting on beach chairs around her, were attentive to the conversation. What kind of work was so important that it took up her time even outside of work? She, who was surrounded by her new friends, all Petrobras engineers, rejoiced at all the attention. But as the phone's battery lasted very little at that time, she became nervous as the call went on, as she was counting on receiving a call from a flirt later on. When she hung up the phone, she ranted about how annoying it was to have an inconvenient boss who insisted on talking about work on a sunny Saturday like that. This was rare in those days, when weekends were sacred.
Tereza said she worked for an import company. Nobody knew what she did there. We had only just met, but she had soon integrated into the group, especially with the male members. She was very talkative and funny, had a shapely body and didn't respect any limits. Although the group was made up of couples, she walked around uninhibited, with her bleached hair and her tiny bikini tucked into her ass. For whatever reason, she would squat down and bend over, bringing her new fans to near ecstasy.
I once arrived late at the beach. After kissing each of my friends twice, I asked if my boyfriend had arrived yet. The guys suddenly went silent, while the girls promptly pointed to the seafront. There, lying on the beach, was Tereza, while my boyfriend, crouching next to her, was spreading handfuls of sand over her body, which he then smoothed with zeal. An innocent joke, he said, playing dumb.
A month later, I heard from Tereza. The person who told me the news was my ex-boyfriend, who showed up at the house asking to make up. Tereza, he told me, was now in love with Luis Felipe, the new divorcee of the group. Good-looking, successful and very well educated, Luis Felipe was a hit with the ladies. Tereza tried everything to win him over. She even spent a small fortune at the hairdresser's to get her hair extended, when she discovered that Luis Felipe liked women with long hair. Disillusioned and U$400 poorer, she ended up discovering that to win him over it wasn't enough to be a woman with a beautiful body and a bubbly personality. He said he wanted a serious girlfriend to marry.
When February arrived two months later, she had already transformed herself into a businesswoman. She was now a serious woman who had decided to earn some extra money with a seasonal business. She had come up with the idea of selling caldo de feijão (bean soup) to the public at the samba school parade in the Sambódromo. Anyone who has been to the parade at the Sambódromo knows that it's like running a marathon. By the end of the day, the whole audience is tired and hungry. There's nothing like a hot soup to revive them. The idea of having a group of street vendors circulating among the crowd to sell caldo de feijão was brilliant!
Over the course of several Saturday mornings, she entertained us with details of her future venture: the number of vendors who would be employed, the profit margin of the business, the sizes and prices of the Styrofoam cups, the recipe for the soup, and how to ensure that the soup arrived still hot in the hands of the consumer. We were all amazed at Tereza's entrepreneurial skills. When Carnival Saturday finally arrived, she told us about the last-minute challenges and how she worried about not being able to handle everything later on.
On that Carnival Sunday, we got together in the afternoon to take a dip in the Primate Waterfall in the Botanical Gardens. When my boyfriend and I arrived at Rua Sara Vilela, the conversation was already lively. While we were waiting for the others to arrive to start the walk along the trail that leads to the waterfall, Edinho laughingly told us what had happened the night before. He and his girlfriend had decided at the last minute to go to the Copacabana Palace ball, where they made an incredible discovery.
As they entered the hotel ballroom, Edinho and his girlfriend spotted Tereza, dressed only in a tiny sequined bikini and a feathered tiara on her head. She was hugging a bald, paunchy man, who they later discovered was her boss. A little later, when they saw Tereza again, her face was already covered by a mask. She must have noticed them in the crowd and decided to disguise herself. The whole bean soup thing, they had realized, was pure invention to impress Luis Felipe.
Shortly afterwards came the coup de grace. This time it was Luis Felipe himself who told us the story. When he got divorced, he had moved back in with his mother, Gloria. And it was her home phone number that he gave to Tereza one day when he was distracted and she asked him for a number to call in an emergency. Shortly afterwards, he discovered that his mother, who by nature lacked attention, had grown fond of Tereza, who would call her often to gossip and hear about her problems.
Two weeks after the bean soup event, Luis Felipe came home unannounced one day to find Tereza and his mother sitting on his bed. On his bed, they had placed some of his underwear in a circle, in the center of which were photos and a set of Tereza's underwear. They cast a spell, hoping that Luis Felipe would finally fall in love.
A year later, Luis Felipe finally got married with all the pomp and circumstance. Lidia, his new wife, was a sweet and shy woman who quickly integrated into the group. Only his mother took some time to accept her, after all, no one paid as much attention to her as Tereza. I never heard of Tereza again, but to this day I remember her every time I drink caldo de feijão.
Voltar