"O mal é da idade, que pra tal menina não há um só remédio em toda medicina"

The girl in Luiz Gonzaga and Zé Dantas’s song does not know the name of what is happening to her. The doctor cannot prescribe a cure either. He can only recognize that certain changes belong less to the body than to the very course of life. Growing up has always been an experience without a remedy.

Perhaps that is why namoradeiras have occupied windows for so long. Not to represent any particular person, but to preserve the memory of an age. An age of discoveries, restlessness, and promises, when the street still seemed capable of bringing every new thing in the world along with it.

The little figure remains turned toward the outside, as if she were still inhabiting this interval. Not the childhood that has already passed, nor the adulthood that has yet to arrive. Just that brief moment when life begins to announce, without explanation and without return, what each of us will become.

Perhaps no other age has been sung about, remembered, and sought after so many times. And perhaps that is why no remedy for it has ever been found.