The Air You Breathe

by Frances De Pontes Peebles

  “Do . . . do you think the new sound you created with Sal e Pimenta is a reaction to the war? Going softer with samba’s sound and making the lyrics darker?”

  Vinicius glanced at me.

  “Well, Dores . . . Miss Pimentel—my partner, over there—and I don’t consciously set out to work current events into our sound. Samba comes to us naturally, and we try to respect it, to listen to it. But we were all affected by the war, so I’m sure some elements made their way into our sound. Music is a reflection of ourselves, after all.”

  A few of the reporters stared at me, then jotted notes onto their pads. Graça’s cheeks were flushed, her smile rigid. The youth faced me.

  “Miss Pimentel, what made you agree to do a show when you’ve avoided the spotlight for so long?”

  At the main table, Graça laughed. “Dor’s avoided the spotlight like a bee avoids honey,” she said. “I thought this press conference was about Sofia and Blue Moon coming home, not about Ketchup and Mustard, or whatever they call themselves.”

  A few reporters chuckled. Another stood and addressed Graça. “There are rumors that you’ve been sent multiple times to a weight loss farm in the United States. Do the Americans want to change your Brazilian shape?”

  The skin above Graça’s eye twitched. She gripped her hands together so tightly her knuckles turned white. “It was a clinic.”

  “Were you sick?” the reporter persisted.

  “Filming’s hard work,” Vinicius said, his voice too loud. “She needed a place to rest.”

  “Those dance numbers look challenging,” the reporter said. “Tell me, will your Copa show be a comedy act like your films, or will you actually play samba?”

  Vinicius stood. “You’re walking a thin line,” he shouted. “Ask me again if we’re comedians . . .”

  Cameras flashed. The reporters scribbled wildly in their notepads. The Lion beamed. An Aerovias representative rushed before the table, clapped his hands, and said the press conference was over—Sofia Salvador and Blue Moon needed rest before their big show. Vinicius took Graça’s elbow and helped her rise from her chair. She blinked several times, as if there was dust in her eyes, and held tightly to Vinicius’s arm as he guided her out of the ballroom and into the elevator.

  “I could sleep until I die,” Graça said.

  Vinicius cupped his hand to her cheek. “Don’t die, amor. We’re going to put on a hell of a show day after tomorrow, and you’ll teach those assholes who’s boss.”

  Graça looked at me. “It’s not my show they care about.”

  * * *

  —

  The hotel’s bar was strangely empty for a Friday night. Outside, the sky glowed orange. It was high tide on Copacabana Beach. The waves looked as though they were on fire.

  The boys and Graça had disappeared inside their suites on the Palace’s private penthouse floor. But after all those bennies, the thought of staying inside my room made me nervous; I could barely keep still. Vinicius found me at the bar.

  “You should be sleeping,” he said, slipping into the seat next to mine.

  “So should you,” I replied. “You’ve got a long few days coming up.”

  “We all do. If the crowd at the Copa is anything like those reporters today, you’ll have to peel us off the stage floor, we’ll be beat up so bad. You’ll spend the rest of the trip nursing our wounds.”

  “You’d be a terrible patient—a whiner. And I’d be a bitch of a nurse.”

  Vinicius smiled. “Sounds like a perfect match.”

  I focused on my empty glass. “Do you think tomorrow, for our show . . . What if the Ipanema crowd’s mean?”

  Vinicius rested his hand over mine. “That won’t be a tough crowd at all. And if they are, hell, there’ll probably be so few people there, you and me can take them with our arms tied behind our backs.”

  I nodded, then rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “Those fucking bennies. I should flush them all down the toilet.”

  “Want to take a walk?” he asked.

  Without a word, we strolled hand in hand to the beach outside the hotel. The evening was cool. Other couples strolled, arm in arm, along the beach’s wide sidewalk. What a comfort it was, to blend in with them, to squint, as they squinted, at the disappearing sun. A vendor popped corn in a metal cart. Vinicius stopped, his hand tight around mine.

  “Close your eyes, Dor,” he said. “Take a deep breath.”

  I obeyed.

  “Smell that?” Vinicius asked.

  The evening smelled of popcorn, of salt water, of perfumed girls.

  “We could almost be in Rio,” Vinicius said.

  “We are in Rio.”

  He shook his head. “Not the one I remember. It feels different now.”

  “Maybe we’re different,” I replied.

  We were quiet for a while, staring at the ocean as the sky darkened to gray and then indigo.

  “It’s okay to be nervous about tomorrow,” Vinicius said. “You haven’t played in front of a crowd in a long time.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “You’ll be great. Pretend we’re in the studio, just me and you.”

  He hadn’t shaved since we’d left Miami. I slid my hand across his cheek, just to feel the roughness of him. Vinicius closed his eyes, then caught my hand and placed it, gently, back at my side.

  “I don’t know if I can go back, Dor.”

  “To the hotel?”

  He shook his head. “To L.A. Tiny’s going back because of that Disney secretary of his. Graça’s going back for her movies and her costumes. You’re going back for her. What the hell am I going back for?”

  The ocean lapped at our feet. Once, years before, when Graça and I swam in those waters, the ocean was very rough and a wave took me under. It slapped my face and turned me upside down. Water filled my mouth and throat, but when I got my bearings and paddled onto the sand, my stomach felt strangely empty. It was as if I’d been hollowed out by that wave. I felt the same way in that moment, on the beach with Vinicius.

  “Graça,” I said. “You’re going back for her.”

  Vinicius nodded. “I’m not sure that’s reason enough anymore.”

  “So you’ll wait here for us. Until we come home.”

  Vinicius’s brow furrowed. “After the Palace show, there’s no more Blue Moon. And hell, if we bomb that show—and we probably will—there’ll be no more Sofia Salvador. Not here, anyway. Graça will have to find herself a new act, or stay in L.A. We said we’d only be gone a few months the first time around, and it turned into a few years. If you girls go back north, you won’t be home anytime soon. I can’t wait here forever.”

  “So you want a clean break from us?” I asked.

  Vinicius took my hands in his. “If I follow Graça back now, I’ll be following her all my life. That’s how things work with her. You know that, Dor. Whatever she becomes next, I’ll be some accessory to it. She’ll change and change, and I’ll stay the same, like a horse tied to a different wagon. And either she’ll get bored with me, or I’ll start to hate her. And I don’t want to hate her. It’d kill me.”

  I spotted a bench on the beach’s paved path, away from the water. I walked there and sat. Vinicius followed. I kept hold of his hand.

  I thought that if I held on in that moment, I could hold on forever: to him, to the boys, to Graça, to the music. I’d never written a song without him. I believed that as soon as Vinicius left us, all creation would stop. All music would stop. And if it stopped, I would dry up like those bouquets of flowers hanging upside down in Graça’s dressing rooms. I would become as brittle and thin as those dried petals. I would break apart and turn to dust.

  “What about Sal e Pimenta?” I asked. “What about our songs? You’re just going to leave them?”

  “People in L.A. don’t want to hear our
kind of music. It only works here.”

  “We can make them want to hear it,” I said. “We can make the whole world want it.”

  Vinicius stroked my hand with his thumb. “Graça’s right: when you don’t get your way, you try to force things. There are some things you can’t force.”

  It was hard to focus on his words; the bennies were finally wearing off. “Have you told her you’re leaving?”

  Vinicius shook his head. “Please don’t mention it—not until after the Palace gig. Graça’s nervous enough as it is; I don’t want to ruin our last show together.”

  “What about our show tomorrow?” I asked. “You didn’t think about ruining that for me?”

  “I . . . I’m sorry,” Vinicius said, his eyes wide. “I’m so used to telling you everything.”

  I stood. “It’s all right,” I said, wiping sand from my trousers. “Like you said, it’s a small show. It’s not important. It’ll be our first and our last.”

  Vinicius called me back to the bench but I wobbled in the dark, across the sand to the hotel. I looked up the Copacabana Palace’s white façade, made blindingly bright by under-lights hidden in the hotel’s bushes. A doorman spotted me staring openmouthed at the hotel, and for an instant, I believed he was going to shoo me away. But he smiled, remembering me in my fine travel clothes, and opened the door. Without a word, I backed away and caught a cab to Lapa.

  * * *

  —

  Anaïs was still the picture of elegance in a fitted black dress and red lipstick, but her face looked care-worn and her hair was pinned into two matronly twists. When she saw me at her door, her eyes widened and she folded me into a tight embrace. She held my hand and pulled me upstairs, where another girl my age sat, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio. The girl offered me a cup of coffee and then stood to get it, as if the apartment was hers. Anaïs blushed and told me the girl’s name, but I could not recall it for the life of me. We sat, the three of us, around Anaïs’s little table and I nodded at her stories of the war’s hardships, the failing hat business and its glorious postwar return. I listened without listening, as if Anaïs was background music I’d heard many times before and kept on for comfort. When she mentioned Sal e Pimenta, however, I perked up. She’d heard all of our new records, getting copies from Lucifer.

  “I was wrong,” Anaïs said. “You can sing. You just had to find your own way of doing it.”

  I smiled. “We’re playing in Ipanema tomorrow night. I hope you’ll be there—you and Madame L.”

  Anaïs paled. “You do not know? Lucifer has been arrested.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For murder.”

  My ears burned. I gripped my coffee cup hard, so as not to drop it. “What murder?”

  “One of Dutra’s soldiers,” Anaïs said. “Lucifer shot him. The officer called him a bicha in his own cabaret. And now that soldier is dead and Madame is locked in Frei Caneca.”

  I will admit that I felt relief, not concern.

  After a fitful sleep, I woke early the next morning. Before the boys and Graça had even left their rooms, I popped two bennies, made my way to the hotel’s entrance, and stepped into a cab. When I told the driver to take me to Frei Caneca, he glanced at me in the rearview mirror and kept glancing throughout the drive, probably wondering what business a woman who stays at the Copacabana Palace has at the city’s penitentiary.

  The visiting area smelled of raw onions and damp dishrags. A guard led Lucifer into the room, directing him to the rusted chair across from mine. He still had the prim, straight-backed posture of an aristocrat. His uniform was clean, his nails immaculate, and his hair, which he’d always taken great care to straighten and part in the middle, was twisted into a series of thin and elaborate braids that ran from his scalp down to the nape of his neck. He wore a necklace with a small leather pouch at the end; I’d seen such pouches before, at Auntie Ciata’s house. The old-timers called them patuás and filled the pouches with herbs, tokens, beads, and other items important to candomblé. I’d never associated Madame Lucifer with the religion, but a stint in prison could make anyone devout.

  “I’m glad you came to see me today,” Lucifer said. “If you’d waited, I’d be gone. They’re transferring me to Ilha Grande.”

  Ilha Grande, an island just off the coast, was home to one of the most violent penal colonies in Brazil. “Jesus,” I said.

  “No use calling on him to help me,” Madame L. replied. “I guess some of these military boys thought I was getting too comfortable in here. You can buy anything here if you have money saved up, which I do, thanks to you and our Sofia Salvador. So I get to have my little luxuries and the guards look the other way. It won’t be the same on Ilha Grande, of course.”

  “I’ll get you a lawyer,” I said.

  “Don’t waste your dollars,” Lucifer replied. “Especially ones you don’t have. Don’t look at me like that! I read the news. You came back because you went bust out in L.A.”

  “We didn’t go bust. We’re still selling albums.”

  Madame L. smiled. “Sal e Pimenta? Your music’s good, schoolgirl. But too different to be a hit. Your voice sounds like an old drunk’s at a bar. Like you’re whispering all your secrets and will regret it in the morning. But I like that.”

  “We’re doing the show tonight, the one you set up at the club in Ipanema.”

  “That’s a young place. And rich, too. Funny, that they like your stuff. But better to have a young audience than an old one. It means you can keep going for a while.”

  “Vinicius doesn’t want to. He’s staying here.”

  “And you’re not?”

  I shook my head.

  “Give me a cigarette, won’t you?” he asked.

  I opened my purse and removed two from my case. The guards didn’t even glance in our direction as I lit one cigarette for each of us. Lucifer took several puffs while he studied my suit, my white gloves, my gold-buckled pumps.

  “Age suits you,” he said. “Some girls get better with time.” He laughed and shook his head. “When you used to do odd jobs for me, I liked watching you sweep up. You swept that whorehouse floor like you were angry at the dirt for being there. You had ambition, schoolgirl. You’ll always have it.”

  His voice sounded wistful, almost sad.

  “When will they let you out?” I asked.

  Madame L. tilted his head to one side. “Don’t you know, schoolgirl? We’re saying good-bye.”

  “You won’t be in Ilha Grande forever.”

  “Twenty-seven years is a long time in a hard place,” he said, then took a heavy drag of his cigarette. “They’re finally letting her onstage at the Palace, those bastards. What’s she going to sing?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody does. She’s going to wing it, even though she’s been wanting to play there all her life.”

  “And you wouldn’t wing it?”

  “No. I wouldn’t.”

  “You think she’ll bomb up there?”

  I thought of Graça over the past year—sleeping more, flubbing her dance moves, returning from the Palm Springs clinic looking withered and lifeless. “No,” I said.

  “Do you want her to bomb?” he asked.

  Our eyes met and locked, the way they had years before, across his desk, when I’d asked for his help. This time, Madame L. was the first to look away.

  “Even if she forgets every word to every song, it won’t matter, you know,” he said. “People will talk about her for it. And they’ll keep talking about her for a long time. She’s the first of her kind.”

  “What kind is that?”

  “A real star, the whole world over, born and bred right here in Brazil. People here might hate her for it, but they sure won’t forget her. I envy her that.”

  Madame L. threw his cigarette to the floor and crushed it under his sand
aled foot. He bowed his head, removed the patuá from his neck, and pressed the little leather pouch into my gloved hand. “We’re all settled up, schoolgirl. There’s no more debts between us.”

  Before I could respond, Madame L. spoke again.

  “You could make a lot more records with what’s in there,” he said, pointing to the pouch. “It’ll be easy to sell that now. You could make something for yourself, no one else. There’s nothing wrong with wanting that. There’s nothing wrong with taking what’s owed you.”

  I pushed my chair away from the table.

  “I have to go. I have the show in a few hours,” I said.

  Lucifer nodded. “I wish I could be there, watching you from the back table, like the old days.”

  I stepped out of the penitentiary and into another taxi that whisked me across town, to the Palace’s doorstep. In the car I removed my gloves and pulled open the leather strings that pinched the patuá closed. Inside the pouch’s dark mouth, the diamond sugar cube glittered.

  The first time I saw that cube was in the Senhor’s mill office, where I stood beside Graça while Senhora Pimentel asked for her husband’s permission to take us to a concert in Recife. I had no idea what music was and why the Senhora thought we had to hear it; I’d only wanted to take that glittering sugar cube into my mouth and see if it would dissolve on my tongue. How naive I was to believe that something made to withstand centuries would simply disappear within me, as if by the sheer force of my will. And there it was, nearly fourteen years later, heavy in my hands.

  At the Palace I did not return to my room but crossed the street, to the beach. My heels sunk into the hot sand. I squinted as I wove around the day’s first beachgoers and made my way to an empty patch near the water. The leather pouch with the cube wrapped inside was as hard as a rock in my fist. Madame Lucifer was right—I could pawn that cube and get a stack of bills. Enough money to cut a few records with Vinicius; enough to help me stay in Rio, in a rented room like the old days; enough to escape from that flight back to L.A. I imagined Graça on that Aerovias plane, staring out a window while I stood alone onshore, watching her rise deep into the clouds.