Heliopolis

by James Scudamore

  I spoke to my mother every week, happily supplying what she wanted to hear: tales of the magic of the United States and the transformative effect my time there was having on me. I listed the books I was reading, wowed her with half-learned facts, and let her picture me in collegiate, first-world splendour, never letting on how out of place I was. And she told me to wrap up warm and be sure to eat well, and kept me up to date with what was happening with the family—from whom I heard little.

  I had written Zé a long, formal letter shortly after arriving. It sought to thank him for all he had done for me. ‘I will never be able to repay the debt I owe to you, for this, and for every other opportunity you have given me,’ it read. ‘But I hope at least to make you feel that in choosing me, you made a wise investment.’ Something about the finality of the tone might perhaps have made him think that this was the end of our transaction—that he had sent me off into the world to succeed. For whatever reason, the fact is that after I sent the letter I heard nothing from Zé or Rebecca for almost four months.

  When I spoke to Melissa she was breezy, spilling over with some new comment on pregnancy or marriage, and apparently perfectly happy. I spoke to Ernesto too, when he answered the phone, and he always sounded delighted to hear from me. They sent me joint letters, some of which contained photographs, so I could see how big she was getting, and watch from afar her growth into a radiant mother-to-be.

  Something about the distance was healing. Now that I did not see Melissa, and our contact was restricted to platitudes exchanged over thousands of kilometres, I realised how much of my life she had dominated, and what I stood to reclaim. It was for that reason that I let the frequency of our calls drop off, and started to feel self-sufficient for the first time in my life. As a result I only found out from my mother two weeks after the event that Melissa had gone into labour early, and that her baby had been stillborn.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said into the phone. I had been calling every couple of minutes for three hours since hearing the news.

  Her voice was cracked and tired. ‘It wasn’t very nice. I wouldn’t recommend it.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m not there.’

  ‘Looks like I could have done the business degree after all,’ she said. ‘Is it worth it?’

  ‘I’ll let you know.’

  After that we resumed our regular conversations. I knew that what had happened had affected her, but felt that it was not my role to console her. Another three months passed. Deposits of cash arrived in my bank account every month, but they were not generous enough that I could have afforded a flight home. And still there was nothing but silence from my adoptive parents. I was not invited back for the holidays, so I assumed that I was to stay put.

  When, just as I was about to start my third semester, I answered the phone and heard Zé’s voice at the other end, I jumped.

  ‘Ludinho, my boy.’

  ‘It’s you,’ I said, absurdly.

  ‘We never hear from you. You went completely silent after writing that sweet letter. We’ve been wondering how you are getting along. How is your English? Are you ready to come and run my business yet?’

  ‘I am having a wonderful year, Senhor,’ I said, resorting to formality, at once pleased and nervous that he’d called. ‘I don’t know how I can repay you.’

  ‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Now, Ludo—’

  There was a pause. His sigh broke over the long distance line like a crackling, static wave.

  ‘Ludo, Ludo, Ludo.’

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  My first thought was of Melissa. There had been further complications. She was hurt. She had been taken again. Because I had abandoned her, she had lacked protection, and someone, or something, had pounced.

  ‘I regret that I am phoning with bad news.’

  Here it comes, I thought.

  But Melissa was perfectly safe.

  It started with an accident in the forest. Silvio was away visiting relatives in the northeast, but you can’t blame him for what happened. There were dozens of people on the farm who could have helped if she had been the kind of person to ask.

  It was a Sunday; almost a year to the day after Melissa and Ernesto were married. A sudden storm came, and just as before, the power cut out. Zé and Rebecca had not come for the weekend, so there had been no guests to cook for, and no Silvio to feed either. I see her preparing for the week ahead, doing what can be done in advance, planning how she will feed the workers in the coming days. I see her settling down in front of the TV when the power goes down. I see her curse as the lights flicker out, then head down the hill to start the emergency generator, surprised as she steps outside by the intensity of the wind and the hot rain.

  She slipped, landing on a sharp, protruding branch of a fallen tree and slashing open her thigh. Unable to stand, she crawled the remaining distance to the generator house, which was flooded with water as usual during heavy rains. By the time she was found the next morning she had contracted pneumonia.

  But this was my mother. She could have survived anything, I tell myself. And I am right. She could have shrugged all of it off, were it not—and here is the fact that makes me want to scream at the sky and beat my chest, because how can this be true, how can a world exist where this can happen—were it not for the fact that she had not been eating properly. With nobody to cook for, she had simply forgotten to feed herself. She was too weak after her night bleeding in the generator house to fight off the pneumonia, and she died three days after the fall.

  It is a simple enough fact: the forest, which always threatened to step forward and reclaim some of its territory, finally did so, and took my mother when nobody else was around. But the fact is also that the spot where she fell was only metres from where Melissa and I had made our jungle camp all those years before—and only metres, therefore, from the spot where a year before to the day I had promised the forest anything if it would bring Melissa and me back together.

  When I flew home, the family were already out at the farm, so I took the bus there for the first time. During the six-hour journey, I imagined my mother’s first trip out here, on these very roads, to take up her employment. I pictured myself lying in her arms, and imagined her nervousness as the bus left the city behind and headed into the wild. I had heard the story enough times for it to have acquired the feeling of a legend—something that had happened to somebody else.

  By the time I reached the town nearest to the fazenda and alighted from the bus, my satanic pact with the forest had become an incontrovertible truth. I sat with my luggage under a concrete bus shelter shaped like a question mark, waiting for Silvio to collect me, staring at the bright red earth of the road and the dark-green foliage behind it, wondering how I would ever atone for having killed her, and resolving never again to speak to the person who was my motive.

  I am twenty-three. No extreme weather has blown in to lend drama to this occasion. It’s simply a beautiful day: strong hazy sunshine, the noise of crickets and birds, my mother’s body in a coffin.

  I feel Melissa’s presence in the cool church, but I do not look around. Melissa is not what I should be thinking about.

  Melissa is what brought us here.

  I must never look at her again.

  I avoided her afterwards, too, circulating away whenever I perceived her dark suit making its way towards me through the wake. Luckily there were farm folk queuing up to offer me their condolences, and Silvio to talk to at length.

  We stood around the pool during the muted party, eating bowls of a moqueca that my mother had prepared before she died. The farm workers and other locals who were present probably had no idea, but I could tell it was hers, and tried to chew every mouthful of the sumptuous, spicy fish as slowly as I could, to draw the experience out as long as possible. Zé gave a dignified, warm address. I was offered the chance to speak but remained silent. I had nothing to say. Silvio chose not to speak either, but paid tribute by constructing a bonfire from the wood of the tree that had
wounded her. It might as well have been her pyre, so painful was it to watch the flames.

  Somehow, through trying so assiduously to avoid Melissa, I ended up alone with her father, standing on the lip of the hill, not far from my mother’s kitchen, gazing down the valley towards the river. I held an untouched glass of wine. He had just finished eating a short, stubby banana, and now he was drinking a caipirinha and smoking a cigar.

  ‘I shall miss her so much,’ he said. ‘It feels like the spirit of this place has been taken away.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘I hope this isn’t too painful a day for you, Ludo. If there is anything I can do . . . ’

  ‘It’s odd,’ I said, truthfully. ‘I hadn’t seen her properly for so long, even before I went away. I hadn’t been living as her son for years.’

  Zé coughed gently on his cigar, and chewed ruminatively. ‘I know that we took you away from her, but she was always your mother. You know that, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I don’t know how we will ever replace her,’ he went on.

  ‘Replace her?’

  ‘Or even whether we should. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but often your mother’s delicious food went to waste here. She was cooking like crazy seven days a week, and we were hardly ever here more than two days a week to eat it.’

  I pictured her, sweating in the kitchen, working, as she saw it, for her life. I thought of the mountains of cakes she must have made over the years, the oceans of soup. I tried to calculate how many animals had been raised and murdered to fuel this entertaining machine.

  ‘Naturally we were delighted to take her on,’ Zé went on. ‘To have given her employment out here. And a safe place to raise you. But that doesn’t mean that it is necessarily cost-effective to replace her.’ He took a large swig of his caipirinha and crunched on the ice, like a horse chewing sugar cubes.

  ‘And it wouldn’t be the same,’ I offered.

  ‘No, it wouldn’t be the same,’ Zé agreed, swallowing. ‘Your mother should not—could not—be replaced.’

  He pulled on the cigar. ‘It was extravagant in any case to have two cooks. And now that you young people don’t get out here as often as you used to. . . I think that what we will do instead is to start travelling with Claudia, from the city. She can just come with us when we go away forthe weekend. She knows all the recipes.’

  ‘Good.’

  I could see him looking sideways at me, working out how long he needed to pause before changing the subject.

  ‘The other question,’ he said eventually, ‘is what you want to do. You may not want to talk about this now, but you ought to think about whether you actually want to go back to the United States after this.’

  ‘I can tell you what I think now.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I want to stay here. Will you mind if I don’t go back?’

  He gazed down the valley. ‘No, I won’t mind. What do you want to do instead?’

  I paused. ‘Maybe I could stay here, on the farm. I could help Silvio. Take over from him when he retires. What do you think about that?’

  His laugh echoed off walls and caused mourners to look over from the fire.

  ‘You don’t want to be stuck out here for the rest of your life! We can find you something better than that. In the city. Something with prospects.’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘I have already thought about it. Do you remember a man called Oscar Cascavel? He used to come and stay here regularly, for a time.’

  ‘I remember. You used to play tennis with him.’

  ‘I still do. He’s a big shot in the world of marketing now. Runs his own agency. I could probably get you a job working for him.’

  ‘Zé. You overwhelm me.’

  ‘Let’s give it a try. See if you like it. Then maybe you can come and work for me later on. Be my marketing director.’

  He flung the crushed lime halves from his empty tumbler into the bushes with a casual flick of the wrist and ground his cigar into the earth, where it mingled with bracken and leaf litter. Individually, either one of these actions would have signalled the end of the conversation—together, they buried it.

  ‘Thank you, Zé—yet again,’ I said. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to spend some time in the kitchen.’

  ‘Of course. Take all the time you want. We won’t be clearing it out for a day or two.’ He shook his shoe, one of a pair in soft Italian leather, to shake off the natural debris he’d picked up in stubbing out the cigar, and then turned to head back to the party. ‘I’m going to see if any of the boys would be interested in kicking a football around. I think it might be a welcome distraction, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s what my mother would have wanted.’

  Something was already different about the kitchen: the door was closed. It had never been closed in my life. Security wasn’t an issue out here, and my mother never took holidays. I wondered whether she had left the farm at all in the twenty-two years she had worked there. She had been tied to it by her gratitude, by the obligation, by the gift with conditions.

  The songbirds still twittered under the eaves outside. I walked down the line of cages, opening each one, and watching as each bird found the courage to flit out to nearby tree branches. Only one, the fat monk parakeet, stayed in his cage, even though I left it open all afternoon, so when I left I shut his door and took him back to the city, where he lives with me still.

  It was dark inside, pleasantly cool. The fire in the hearth had burned out. I found a piece of stray cardboard, propped it up, and put a match to it. It curled and flared briefly, then died to a glimmer. The table, planed down and built up again so many times by Silvio, was piled high with cakes and sweets ordered from a flash city patisserie. They were nothing next to what my mother would have produced. I looked inside the ancient gas-powered fridge that is now my own: remains and leftovers, in plastic containers and porcelain bowls. These last swirls of sauce and morsels of meat had suddenly become very important. Pulling out a half-eaten roasted chicken, I stuck my thumb deep into what remained of the breast and gouged myself a big chunk. Nobody was around to tell me off for not carving a neat slice.

  Still chewing, I opened the freezer compartment. It was filled with meticulously labelled tubs: stews, moquecas, soups. These were commodities whose value had shot up in the last twenty-four hours. Once, the contents of these tubs had been commonplace. Now they were finite, priceless. I began working out how I would get them back to the city without thawing them—I would not leave one portion here to be forgotten or discarded.

  The door was pushed open with a creak. Melissa stood in the entrance, dust around her hair, the light at a high pitch. She looked older. Those legs of hers were more intimidating than ever. But she wore the same white, plastic watch.

  ‘Shall I leave you alone?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve been avoiding me.’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted.

  She stepped inside. I inhaled slowly, pulling the warm earth and tree bark of the outside through Melissa’s perfume and into the homely smoke of the hearth. The bone-warm air of the farm, so different from the liquid heat of the city.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ I said. ‘How’s married life?’

  ‘Truthfully? It’s a little lonely.’

  This room that signified my mother, now empty of her, felt different. There was a need to fill the space with something—to reoccupy it.

  ‘Ernesto isn’t here?’

  She shook her head. ‘He heard it was a small, family thing. And he’s working. But he asked me to give you a hug from him.’

  And then came the embrace, that became a soft kiss on the cheek.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ she said.

  ‘I wanted to come home before—after what happened to you.’

  ‘It was painful. But Ernesto was wonderful. It shouldn’t be a big deal any more.’

  ‘But it
is?’

  She nodded.

  And now, as on no occasion before or since, things graduated smoothly, logically. After several botched attempts, the only meaningful time Melissa and I made love took place on the kitchen table, dutifully planed down by Silvio, amid the cakes ordered for my mother’s funeral.

  And that’s where it should end, with the two of us gloriously fucking there, smearing food all over ourselves, giggling, finally able to be with one another in the way I had known we could be. The forest, delivering my reward.

  But it doesn’t end there. Because all she was doing on that table was snaring me, pulling me further on to the hook. And we have this vulgar postscript, tacked on to the story proper, which now threatens to dwarf it, like a tumour grown larger than its host. Because for nearly three years since then I have lived this half-life, hiding in my one-room apartment, with my caged bird, and my one plate, my one knife and my one fork. And the only thing I have in my life which I value is the withdrawn version of Melissa I sleep with today, and Ernesto deceived, and Oscar down my throat, and no way out of any of it.

  It does not seem like a fair deal, the one that I struck with the forest. If I had the Melissa of that day, the one on the kitchen table, the one who missed me and wanted me and needed me, then I might be happy.

  But the deal does not work.

  I do not feel adequately remunerated.

  MANGO

  Slanting light cross-hatched by sackcloth threads. The inside of the bag smells of must, food and urine. There’s the feeling of insects too, though that could be my skin creeping at the texture, with the fear. A door slams, and I am thrown to the floor.

  ‘Did you think you were getting away that easily?’

  A spiteful kick to my stomach makes a reply impossible. I double up, curling away from the unseen foot. My hands grope across a textured, humid floor.