“Sim,” she’d respond, glancing between me and the sidewalk ahead.
I told her that I could help carry the groceries, but she insisted I only take the small items, a loaf of bread and an egg carton, while she had three plastic bags hanging from each arm. I think that she felt sorry for me. She wore rubber Havaianas, blue ones, with a Brazilian flag on the strap. Right as she turned to ask me again what it was I had said, one of the sandals wedged into a hole in the sidewalk, a misplaced brick where they were doing construction. Her knee gave out. I heard the fall before I saw it—the quick rustle, pat-crack against the ground, Marta’s deep bellow. A jar of strawberry jam, to go with the peanut butter, rolled into the road.
I dropped the eggs and rushed to her. “Marta.” I reached my hand out. “Are you okay?”
She didn’t respond, still hunched on the ground, her hands braced against the cement. Four or five people who were sitting outside a restaurant saw what had happened and hurried to her rescue. I stood frozen, unsure how or where to enter, and watched as they took each of her arms, one picked up the groceries, another talked to her soothingly. She stood and hugged the man who’d lifted her up, then hugged the woman who had consoled her, and then held the hand of the woman who’d retrieved the groceries. I stood, watching, the loaf of bread squashed by my feet.
“Marta. Are you okay?” I asked again, but still she didn’t respond.
“Obrigada, gente,” she said to them, dusting off her dress, and slipped her sandals back on.
Then she walked off. She picked up the grocery bags and crossed the street, away from me, toward the apartment. The people returned to their lunch, one watching me watch her as he ate a sliver of white fish.
Through the branches of a walnut tree, a breeze shook the leaves loose until they drifted down to the ground. Marta was already far gone, but still I called out to her, wanting her to turn around:
“Marta! Let me help you!”
She kept walking, as if dizzy, the hem of her dress swinging with each step. Later she would explain that she had been rattled—that the fall had made her forget why she left the apartment in the first place, so she instinctively went back. I would always remember that exact feeling, the feeling that I hadn’t been the one to help her, that a group of strangers had before I did, and that I was a fleeting asteroid in the grand scheme of her universe.
I picked up the broken eggs and followed. I tried to hurry to her, but she made a traffic light that I didn’t, and after that there was no catching up. I stayed light-years behind, still watching her, a dribble of yolk trailing me all the way home.
I felt closed in, claustrophobic, after dinner at the Provost’s. I longed to see Celia. My hand moved comfortably to the telephone, dialed Celia’s number, placed the receiver delicately against my ear. It was a Friday morning. She picked up with a just-woken hello.
“Alô?”
“Celia?”
“Falando.”
“It’s Linda. Did I wake you?”
She paused.
“Linda. Are you all right?”
Maybe she sensed the tremor in my voice—the nerves rose to my throat.
“Could I see you today? I’m fine. Just a little down.”
“Yes, sure.” I heard her ask something of someone else in the room. “You can come here to my house if you want.”
She gave me directions by bus, but said it would take over an hour, so I decided to get a taxi at the stand outside the park. The driver wore a brown suit and the car smelled like rose water. We drove up Brigadeiro and crossed over Paulista, through the financial malaise of gray and brown skyscrapers, and into the orchid-lined streets of Jardins and Pinheiros. I hadn’t ventured this far north before. The buildings in Pinheiros were covered in colorful graffiti—each side street revealed another geometric mural. I saw garbage bins filled with green coconuts, each with a straw sticking from the top, and cafés brimming onto the sidewalks.
Celia lived at the end of a short brick path in Perdizes, a hidden right turn at the bottom of a hill. She called it “the village.” The taxi left me at the end of her street, and I walked up the path, passing by stray cats sprawled across the sun-warmed bricks, to her house on the far side of the dead end. She’d instructed me to knock on the front window when I arrived. I did. No one answered. I tried again, rapping harder. I had the thought that I should turn around, that maybe I’d gotten the wrong house, when Celia pulled back the curtain and pointed me toward the front door. She stood with her arms ready for an embrace and her hair slicked back from a shower.
“Sorry!” she said and kissed me on both cheeks. “We’re on the roof.”
She led me up two flights of stairs, the first to her bedroom and an office, the second through the office and up a set of winding mosaic steps to a weathered and expansive rooftop. The ground was still wet from the plants she had watered: large, pink-petaled flowers with orange stalks jutting from the center. She had hanging vines, cactuses, a row of banana leaf trees and palms. There were two couches that had been left in the rain, the fabric marked with dried water stains, and beanbag chairs that had been left in the sun, the red plastic faded to peach. On one of the beanbags were her roommates, Rafael and Karina. Os Bandidos da Noite. Karina was underneath Rafael with her legs curled around him.
Rafael heard us come up and lifted himself off of Karina to greet us.
“Bom dia, Linda. Como vai sua tia?” He laughed and, seeing I hadn’t, clarified: “It’s a joke.”
“I’m going to finish making lunch,” Celia said and gave me a squeeze on the elbow. “Stay with Karina and Rafael for a bit?”
Rafael led me to the couch in the shade, but Karina stayed put. I sensed immediately that she didn’t appreciate my arrival. She liked it even less that Rafael left her to come sit with me. She straightened her back like a swan shaking its hind feathers and waved her arm in the air.
“Oi,” she said and picked up a beauty magazine from the cement floor.
Instantly, Rafael began asking me questions: What did I think of Brazil? What did I think of São Paulo? What was the biggest difference between Brazil and the U.S.? Which did I like better?
I think Brazil is very beautiful, I told him, from what I’ve seen in pictures. São Paulo is not one thing, but I know it is sprawling. The biggest difference is the language, it is the heat, it is the way people laugh, the way they eat lunch, how the children play soccer, the showerheads, the lack of ice cubes.
“I haven’t decided which I like better,” I said and poured a glass of water from a pitcher on the foldout table.
Rafael explained that he had had an affinity for the United States since he was a child. His body was covered in American tattoos: Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction on his forearm, an anchor on his shoulder with the quote “Not all who wander are lost” in cursive, an outline of the state of Texas on his foot.
“My grandfather took me there when I was six,” he said, running his finger over the lines on his foot bones.
“That’s a serious devotion,” I said. “Getting another country’s state tattooed.”
He seemed embarrassed for a moment, like he hadn’t realized how obvious it was until he met an actual American. But then a smile spread across his freckled, broth-colored face, his grizzled hair only adding to his attractiveness.
“Most of all, I am Brazilian,” he said in perfect English and puffed out his chest to reveal a Brazilian flag on his breastbone.
He told me about how he would fantasize about America when he’d sit on his mother’s bed and watch the movie Dirty Dancing. She would yell at him for loosening her perfectly tucked linens as he ran around the mattress pretending he was Patrick Swayze. He wanted to go to a camp with wooden lodges and pine trees and stacks of pancakes with perfect squares of butter on top. He imagined that in the U.S. democracy prevailed, not like the corrupt politicians in Brazi
l who embezzled government money, or the police officers who shot innocent people on the street.
“Does everyone eat peas?” he asked, pretending to shovel spoonfuls in his mouth.
“Maybe some families.”
“How about hot dogs?”
I smirked. It was hard not to be amused by his line of questioning.
“Sure, everyone eats hot dogs.”
I could see Karina, not so far away, slumped over in the beanbag chair, a creeping fern circling her feet. Her hair cascaded over her shoulders and around the taut plastic sides. She had opened her blouse to let the sun in and occasionally fanned her neck with a beauty magazine. It appeared she was enthralled by the articles she flipped through, licking her finger every time she turned a page so that it made a loud snapping noise. But I could tell that she wasn’t actually engaged. She was beautiful, but not interested in beauty. The magazine served as a decoy so that Rafael wouldn’t realize she was listening to his every word.
“I see you love the United States,” I said, nodding toward Karina. “What about her?”
“Who?”
“Karina.”
“Karina? She’s the love of my life.”
“That’s sweet.”
“I would marry her if she believed in it.”
He shouted “Karina!” as though she was on the roof of the adjacent building. He motioned for her to sit near him. “Vem aqui!”
She stared at him with crackling eyes, then turned away from us, her back creased and damp.
“Celia tells me you are graffiti artists,” I said.
“Karina is the real artist. I am her assistant.”
He said this with forced modesty.
“Karina is a visionary. She has dreams about the images she paints and wakes me in the night to go find a building.” He looked at her back as he said this. “Karina doesn’t…how do you say? Karina doesn’t have a clock.” He searched for the words. “No. Karina doesn’t have time?”
The fact that Rafael kept repeating her name over and over in a language that she didn’t understand wasn’t lost on Karina’s ears. By the fourth or fifth or sixth mention, she was fed up. She stood and threw her magazine on the floor.
“Rafael!”
“Que?” He lifted his arms.
She didn’t say another word. She stormed past us and went downstairs, muttering “chatos” under her breath.
Celia returned holding a platter of deli meats and rice and beans she had heated in a Tupperware dish. I wondered what had taken her such a long time, nothing required cooking, but then I noticed her fingernails were painted with a fresh coat of green nail polish.
“Karina foi embora,” said Rafael.
“Where did she go?”
“Não sei!”
Celia made a face, one that Rafael understood implicitly, and they both left it at that.
Celia had told me about her relationship with Rafael and Karina during our telephone conversations, but the reality of it hadn’t crystallized for me until I saw them together in the flesh. Both Celia and Karina were protective of Rafael in their own ways. Karina wanted his body near her. If she could see him and feel him, then and only then did she trust he was with her. As soon as she lost sight of him, a panic was unearthed and she became erratic, accusing him of lying, of betrayal. As a result, they spent most of their time together, either painting graffiti or on top of each other around the apartment. Karina’s protection appeared controlling, but really, it was Rafael who held the puppet strings in their relationship, knowing exactly when to pull away and when to give in. He was both the source of and the cure for her torment.
Celia’s protection acted as a foil to Karina’s. She liked being the one Rafael ran to when Karina was cocooned in solitude, focused solely on her art. She liked to cook for him, to give him advice, to understand the deeper parts of his ambitions in art, in family, in his desires to travel. It was like being offered a diamond from his mind that only she knew how to mine, or so she believed. She made sure he had enough to eat and drink. She asked him about his most recent photographs. She offered for him to come to the theater with her so that he could have a quiet space to work.
The irony was that all of the reasons Celia wanted to be close to Rafael were the same reasons I wanted to be close to Celia. Seeing her act this way with Rafael unnerved me, especially as he systematically ignored her to continue talking to me about the United States. I made a plate of food and tried to act friendly, if for nothing else, to make Celia happy.
“Do you live in New York City?” Rafael asked me, a sliver of ham dangling from his mouth.
“I don’t. I live in Hartford, Connecticut.”
“Hartford,” he repeated, overextending the two “r”s. “Where is Hartford?”
“About two hours from New York City.”
He laughed. “It is so close! Why don’t you live in New York City?”
“Because my husband teaches there.”
Celia interjected. “Her husband teaches at USP now.”
“I always wanted to go to New York,” Rafael continued. “I was a punk rocker and wanted to be a professional skateboarder. But then I broke my ankle.” He wrapped his hand around his ankle as he said this. “So now I take photographs.”
“A shame,” I said and looked to Celia for direction, but she was patiently listening to Rafael.
“Do you go to New York often?” he asked.
“I have a couple times. I don’t like cities very much.” A black bird had landed on the cement wall. It picked at one of the white flowers growing over the side. “Times Square is my idea of a nightmare.”
Celia laughed.
“You have to go downtown,” said Rafael. “The Lower East Side.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I offered him a slight smile, largely to make Celia comfortable. There was something about Rafael, a confident immaturity, that I was struggling with. But it was clear that Celia adored him, so I wanted to as well.
I noticed, on the rooftop two buildings to the right, a woman was taking a cold shower in a red bathing suit. We could have been on a porch in the country, had it not been for the high-rises around us. The only sound from the roof was the wind chime. Above us, I saw a man pruning his plants; he cut them with scissors, then allowed the dead heads to fall to the street.
“Did Rafael tell you about his photographs?” Celia asked. “He’s very talented.”
“He didn’t,” I said.
“Let me go get some,” she offered, but Rafael resisted.
“Não, não.”
Celia picked up the empty water pitcher.
“We need more water anyway,” she said and began descending the stairs. “I’ll be back.”
Rafael reached under the couch and pulled out a wooden box filled with weed and papers. I watched him pinch the green pellets onto the creased paper and roll it between his fingers, expertly licking the edges as he rolled.
“What do you want to know about her?” he asked.
“Who?”
“You know.”
“Karina?”
“Não.” He lit the joint with a match. “Celia.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I come home and she’s on the floor curled up next to the telephone. She says she’s talking to you.”
“We call each other. It’s nice to have a friend in São Paulo.”
“Are you lonely?”
“Sometimes.”
“Are you in love?”
“In love?” For some reason I didn’t realize that he meant Celia.
“I love my husband,” I said, and then knew I had misunderstood the implication. He put his feet on the table and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Meu Deus,” he said and took a hit, the paper sparking red embers onto his lap.
We heard the clap of the office door and expected to see Celia with a new pitcher of water, but it was Karina. She walked up the mosaic steps with not a stitch of clothing on; only the white line from a bikini tan provided the illusion of covering. She carried a can of beer.
“Bom dia!” she said, brushing past us, and turned on the outdoor shower.
I looked at Rafael, expecting to see him shocked, perhaps even embarrassed, but instead he began to unbutton his pants. He tapped out the joint and threw off his sandals. When his pants were off and he was wearing only a small pair of yellow underwear, he rushed to her and into the water. He shrieked, “Nossa! Que fria!” By the time Celia returned with the pitcher in one hand and the other arm balancing Rafael’s photography books, he was completely naked with Karina, each splashing the other and passing the beer back and forth.
“I should go,” I said.
Celia looked horrified.
“Let me walk you to the door.”
Downstairs it was silent and dim. The windows did not let in much light. Celia had a floral teacup, a sleeve of biscuits, and a laptop set up on the kitchen island. Plants grew in glass bottles on her windowsill, foggy with condensation, the roots finding traction against the smooth and hollow insides. I noticed Claudius was sleeping belly-up on a bed in the corner of the living room.
“We barely got to talk,” she said. “It’s my fault. I have a deadline for a grant today. My attention was divided.”
“That’s all right,” I said, and went to give Claudius a pat. He rolled onto his back and I rubbed his belly. “I feel bad for calling. It wasn’t good timing.”
“Don’t,” she said and took my hand. “You can always call.”
That bit of reassurance was all I needed to melt away any insecurity I might have felt. She offered to make me a coffee but I told her I had to get back to the apartment. I didn’t want to risk seeing Rafael and Karina again.
“I want to give you something,” she said, and pulled a sealed envelope from underneath the laptop. “Wait a few days before you open it.”
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