It Is Wood, It Is Stone

by Gabriella Burnham

  * * *

  Before I was born into consciousness, before I heard the boys at school call me preta, pretinha, little black girl, Mãe would hold me in her arms, arms that were not mine but hers, and point to the parts we shared. Hair, heart, hunger. I took these parts with me and wore them around. People liked to guess what my mother was. One woman in town—a stranger wearing a sunbonnet and grass-woven slippers—even asked if she was half Japanese. This made me laugh. Mãe covered my face, told me to stop, but all I could do was laugh. I had many different laughs. Confused, nervous, tickled, unsure. I couldn’t stop laughing, so my mother dragged me out of the store by my wrist, down the road, through the church doors, and into salvation.

  * * *

  The boys who called me pretinha played soccer on the red-dirt field rimmed with palm trees. I walked by there every day on my way home from school. My aunt had called me pretinha since the day Felina was born, because of the three of us, I was the dark one. The word had a softness when she said it to me as a child, minha pretinha, cuddling her fingers under my chin. But it grew edges as I got older and the schoolboys began to shout it at me from a distance. It was as though each time I heard the word, pretinha, I swallowed a little stone, until eventually those stones filled my body and I had no room for any more. They took it, the boys did, the part I shared with my father, our velvet, the only part that I shared with him that no one else did, not Mãe, not Felina, not Henrique. I felt the final shrill inside me, the scratch on my gut, pretinha, pretinha, pretinha, when they called to me in unison from the middle of the field.

  My name is Marta, I yelled to them. You assholes!

  A tall boy with a purple thread tied into his hair pushed the soccer ball into my stomach and asked me who gave me my pau, the dick between my legs. He ran away chanting: pretinha, pretinha, pretinha. When I got home, I told my aunt never to call me that again.

  * * *

  My mother cleaned houses and my father laid bricks. That’s how they made their money. The same way I make my money now: with sweat and surrender. Mãe cooked a week’s worth of rice and beans in deep steel pots, served with our hen eggs and collard greens from the garden. We all knew how to ration, how much to spoon into the bowl, how to train our bellies to want less. My father taught me how to slaughter a chicken, pluck its feathers, retrieve the liver and heart (my mother’s favorite parts), and butcher it from neck to tail. My mother taught me how to divide money—one coffee can in a hole under the mattress. A jar in the back of the refrigerator. An envelope in her dress pocket for bills and food. She taught me how to sew a broken button together, to rub the dark streaks out of a pan, how to water a garden using dishwater. My brother taught me how to treat a cough with chamomile tea, small cuts with lamb’s ears leaves, and to put mint under my pillow for good dreams.

  * * *

  My sister, Felina, taught me how to love. She was born in our living room, fell into our aunt’s hands, three years after me. She was a perfect blend of my mother and my father, and I remember how frustrated I felt not being able to claim her by parts like my parents had claimed me. Everything she had could be shared. Her body was strong and slender, her face sweet and assured. She was caramel and soft and dark and light and safe and beautiful. I held her in my arms and called her my baby.

  * * *

  On dry days, when rain hadn’t washed away the trails, my father would take me and my sister on the back of the mule to the top of Pedra Grande mountain. Atibaia was built at the foot of Pedra Grande, a holy rock that protected the town like a fortress. We would lie on the sun-warmed stone slabs at the peak and watch the low clouds and wide sky and the small specks of São Paulo’s city line on the horizon. Pai would pack a canteen of hot water and his chimarrão gourd. He pressed the wet, green mate against the side of the gourd and took the first, bitter sip, then passed the metal straw to me. I liked chimarrão with honey, but my father drank mate like a vaqueiro, and I was his vaqueira. Only Mãe let me have it sweet.

  * * *

  I tell this story now, at forty-five years old, wondering for the first time what it truly means to die. For my father, thirty years after I was born, his heart gave up, and then the rest of him followed. For my mother it’s been her kidneys, then hips, but she hasn’t gone yet. If I were to guess, of all my parts, I would say my breasts would betray me first. My arms have always been loyal. I have a strong spine. My lungs, heart, and stomach have worked tirelessly for many years, even when I wasn’t the best to them. But my breasts are the Gemini sisters of my being—at once charming and aloof, confidantes one moment, strangers the next.

  This is the story of my breasts:

  ■ I taped them down when they got too big.

  ■ I ran my fingers across the light stretch marks that wove into my skin.

  ■ I held them up, cupped in my hands, when gravity pulled, sore and tired and needing a lift.

  ■ I dreamt about surgeries to make them smaller; an insertion in the side to remove the excess, the weight, the part that draws attention.

  ■ Now they are a part of me just as much as any part. That is to say, they are me.

  * * *

  By the time she was five I could already see the change in Felina. I could see the way strangers looked at her. The same woman who’d asked if my mother was half Japanese stopped us to say how enchanting Felina was. She took her cheeks into her palms and told her that she was a wonder of Venus. I once asked my father if Felina was prettier than me. And he said, yes, she is, but beauty is a curse. He had given me so much of his body, everything that was given to him. For many years, into adulthood, I wished that I could take some of that pretty from her. I wanted to save her from the hurt that her beauty would become.

  * * *

  I spent most of the year 1967 waiting by our window. The Armed Forces had won—we were officially under military rule. I was eight, my sister was five, and my brother was twelve. When I came home from school and my parents were still at work, I would watch the birds bathing in dust pools outside the window, longing for the moment my mother would walk through the door. My brother looked after us in the afternoon before leaving to play soccer, then a neighbor would come to make sure we hadn’t fallen or burned ourselves or swallowed anything whole. Every day I begged my mother to take me to work. I didn’t like one of the neighbors who came to watch us. I had heard him use a belt on his own children, through the wooden fence dividing our backyards. Thwaps and cries. But every day was the same: my mother would push my sobbing face from her calf, and I would go to the window, waiting, and waiting.

  * * *

  When I think back on those days, my best memories are from when everyone was together at home. Mãe, Pai, Henrique, Felina, and me. Mãe liked to poke fun at Pai just to make us laugh, and he took it just to keep us laughing. She once told him she wanted to eat the dirt under his cracked nails until they were clean. Pai was self-conscious about his permanently stained hands, blackened from decades of bricklaying. He would hide his hands in his pockets when we went to church. Mãe pretended to gobble his fingers. We laughed in horror. He told her she had mean teeth, and kissed her smile.

  When I think of Mãe, I see her sitting on a stack of pillows and playing the guitar, wearing one of her hand-stitched floral dresses. I stuck my face under her skirt once and saw the shock of black hair, two angular breasts. She liked to be nude so that the breeze would blow against her, she said. She would let me billow the hem of her dress so that it rippled like waves.

  * * *

  One day, Mãe came home early from work. This had never happened before, so when I saw her walking by the fence and across our backyard, half her body slumped over, one hand covering her mouth, I ran from the window to her and wrapped my arms around her legs. She had contracted a parasite (we later learned it was tapeworm) and walked home from work, a two-hour journey by foot, in the midday sun, stopping occasionally to vomit on the
side of the road. Cars tried to stop and offer her a ride, but she waved them off, afraid she might soil their upholstery. I felt overwhelmed to see her. I couldn’t stop squealing. She told me to be quiet, that her head hurt. Her skin was tense and moist. She splashed cold water from the kitchen sink onto her neck and underneath her armpits.

  Where is your sister? she asked, wiping her mouth with the hem of her dress.

  I pointed to the bedroom door, which was closed, something my mother didn’t allow. She made the face she makes when she says she isn’t in the mood, and opened the door.

  * * *

  When she screamed, I assumed it was because she was angry with Felina for sneaking our great-grandmother’s teacups into the bedroom to play with her doll. But then she kept screaming, and I saw the neighbor’s shadow leap out of the window, run through the yard and over his fence. I stood in the doorframe to see what had happened. My mother had Felina clutched in her arms, and Felina looked like she had been soaking in the tub for too long, like the water had gone cold and washed all the color away.

  * * *

  After my mother found the neighbor in my sister’s room, she began bringing us to work. She was a maid in a gated community at the bottom of Pedra Grande. On the days we had school, we had to take a bus to the gate and wait for her to get us. My sister and I would lie in the grass and watch hang gliders propel off the side of the cliff, over the big, white houses with swimming pools, over the trees with red flowers the size of my face, and land somewhere between our house and theirs.

  But when we crossed to the other side of the gate, we also crossed into a different side of Mãe. She was quiet in these houses. She told us to stay in the maid’s closet and to be quiet too, quiet like work-mom is quiet, that the quieter we were the shorter it would be. We would sit in there for hours, sometimes ten hours at a time, and watch American Westerns on the small black-and-white TV. I began to learn English this way, through John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. I was very good at it. The sentences stuck easily in my mind. At one house I could hear the dona’s daughter taking English lessons in the kitchen. I would turn down the television and listen, correcting her mistakes in my head.

  * * *

  Felina and I invented a new game we called city girls. We would prop our mattress up on its side and pretend it was a giant building, a skyscraper, then circle around it like we were going to our city jobs. We invented the game from what we had seen at the houses where Mãe worked—pictures on the wall, hints of conversations. We had no idea what happened in the city, but we pledged to each other that we would go there someday. We would put on Mãe’s floral dresses so that they dragged on the ground, as if they were long, elegant gowns, and bump into each other in our hurry to and from our jobs in the giant mattress.

  Excuse me, where is your maid! Felina said to me.

  I don’t need one! I said. My house is always clean!

  * * *

  We were sitting in an unused sauna while my mother cleaned the house’s pool. I asked my sister, What did he do to you, while I was waiting by the window? She drew a circle around her body using a stick from the garden and dropped to the floor. I knelt next to her and lifted her head from the wooden floorboards. She kept her eyes staring straight ahead, like we did when we played dead, her neck limp, until I told her she could come alive now.

  You’ll never play alone again, Felina. I’m here, my sister.

  She nodded, shut her eyelids, and curled her body into my lap.

  * * *

  I saw my parents, late one night, sitting at the kitchen table. The light from the overhead lamp cast an orange glow on my mother’s cheekbones, my father’s face rested in his hands.

  What did you see? he asked her. Tell me what you saw.

  I didn’t see. I felt it. I smelled it. I am her mother.

  I know, querida, he kept saying, again and again, his face sinking deeper into itself. I will talk to him.

  * * *

  After we started going to work with Mãe, I only ever saw the neighbor after the sun had set, when he would sit in the back of his house to smoke a pipe alone. I tiptoed to the fence that divided us and listened to the tobacco crackle as he took a long pull, followed by one distinct, guttural cough. I imagined touching the pipe bowl with the tip of my fingers, the wood hot against my skin, and pushing, pushing, pushing it into his mouth. No, he’d try to say, his eyes gasping for air. The burning tobacco emptied onto his tongue, and with each inhale, a plume of smoke and embers buried into his lungs. He was rendered to ash, a gray heap beneath this story.

  * * *

  And then, as if the wind blew, he vanished. I listened for the sounds of his children next door, the cries from the belt, the stench of tobacco at night. But he was gone.

  The soldiers took him, I told Felina. They shoved him into the back of a camouflaged truck. His feet were dangling out the back window. They drove him to the jungle and fed him to piranhas.

  How do you know? she asked. Did you see it?

  I felt it, I told her. I smelled his wet tobacco stench drifting down the road.

  * * *

  Even now my mind plays tricks on me, wonders if it could have happened at all. I was sitting by the window the entire time. How did I not hear? How did I not feel it? On bad days I punish myself. On better days I pray to God and ask for forgiveness. On good days I say, You were a child too, Marta. You were a child too.

  * * *

  So how did I become a maid? It’s a question I asked myself for years, until I realized that the question had flattened my sense of being, that the question bore the weight of centuries, and even fate didn’t have the courage to answer to it. Why should I?

  The truth is, my parents had to choose. My brother, Henrique, the oldest, was the only one who could finish high school. He would leave the house at 5:00 A.M. and walk to a better school that was closer to town. I never made it through the eighth grade. I had to stay home, look after the house, take care of my sister, work. We had all gone to school together, Felina, Henrique, and I, in the same building where we went to church, a house with the walls removed from the inside. Dona Sadi was our teacher. She taught ages seven through fifteen, sometimes at the same time, and her husband was a bricklayer like our father. After the military took over, the government stopped sending money to schools like ours. The school building had leaks in the roof, so if it rained, we all had to sit on one side of the classroom. We didn’t have pencils or paper or enough books for everyone in class. Sometimes Dona Sadi would read aloud passages to us and we would have to listen, then repeat back what she said. This is why many of us still could not read by the time we left school—we never got to see the words on the page.

  * * *

  On my fourteenth birthday, my uncle came to our house with a bundle of books that he’d found in town. A wealthy family was moving, he said, and left half their life on the street for others to take. There were cookbooks and a dictionary and an old almanac. Felina wasn’t interested in the slightest, and Henrique already got books in school, so I had my pick. He even brought a book written in English, Treasure Island, that had English notes scribbled in the margins. I used these books to practice reading even after I had to leave school to help my parents. Literature became my secret retreat. I shared everything with my brother and sister, but these books were my own. I kept them under my bed and read them when no one was around. I even tried to pronounce the words in the English book until my mouth felt worn, like I had to exercise to get the sounds out.

  * * *

  Felina and I moved out of our parents’ home when she got pregnant. It was 1977—she was fifteen and I was eighteen. Our family and neighbors made up a story that we had been swept away by charming men. They all pretended like it was true, feigned admiration, jealousy even, and my mother went along with the fable. She didn’t want to admit that her youngest was having a child out of wedlock,
or else she’d blame herself for not keeping a closer watch.

  * * *

  The baby’s father lived in São Paulo. His name was Luis, and he was ten years older than Felina. To mask his insecurity over their difference in age, he professed that it was just a number, that Felina was mature for her age, that inside Felina’s young body lived a very old soul, that he had met women three times her age who understood half as much about the world as she did. This may have been true, but he was wrong. Felina was a child. And yet, still, if Luis hadn’t impregnated my sister, I might have felt bad for him. He was desperately in love with her and believed that they were destined for each other, that they might spend the rest of their lives together. Luis himself looked much younger than he actually was. He had round, supple cheeks that could not grow hair, and reminded me of a hairless rabbit with a mouth full of grass. I watched the way he watched Felina. I could see the stories he told himself about her.