The Air You Breathe

by Frances De Pontes Peebles

  I stared at her ruffled hair, at her discarded earrings, at the soiled handkerchief beside her foot. She had not asked for a napkin. She had not wiped her mouth with the back of her palm. She’d had the handkerchief ready, waiting, in her dress. And her eyelashes: they had been plucked off as easily as petals from a flower. Her unmasking had been achieved in a few graceful sweeps. That kind of spontaneity took great planning.

  At show’s end, Graça closed her eyes as if she were savoring some rare delicacy. Then she stood and bowed. The audience was painfully quiet, as if it had rehearsed this silence many times beforehand and was intent on sticking to its original script. Only a few brave souls in the balcony clapped. At the table nearest to the stage, Aracy Araújo, looking dazed, turned to the general beside her and started whispering. Others in the room followed suit, turning their chairs back to their tables, lighting cigarettes, taking long gulps of their stiff drinks, and speaking in hushed voices, as if they’d just witnessed a car wreck and were unsure of how to respond, or if any of the casualties were even worth saving.

  Slowly, Graça stepped off the stage. Vinicius held her arm so she would not tumble under the weight of her skirt. She walked with her head high through the crowd, which made a great effort not to watch her leave. I caught many glance up from their drinks and conversations to watch Sofia Salvador’s last exit from the Copacabana Palace. The Blue Moon boys trailed behind her, mouths clenched, jaws rigid with fury. Tiny’s eyes pooled. When he finally allowed himself to blink, near the exit, two fat tears ran down his cheeks and into his mouth. Before I followed them out the door I looked back at the stage where Sofia Salvador’s earrings lay, glittering and discarded, on the floor.

  THE END OF ME

  Quiet, please.

  Quiet’s what I need, a

  moment to find my way

  out of this maze, querida.

  You were sugar on my tongue—

  sweet grit.

  Now you’re gone.

  Is there sense to make of it?

  I’m wandering.

  Let me be.

  Following a great samba,

  that always escapes me.

  Walking our old haunts.

  Visiting our beginnings.

  Watching the pretty girls walk by—

  now my head is spinning.

  Life’s played its greatest trick on me:

  there are only dead ends left,

  you see.

  I’m wandering.

  Let me be.

  Hearing it now, faint but true—

  a song I’ll never play again: you and me,

  me and you.

  The leaf forgives the tree

  for shedding it.

  The shell forgives the sea

  for crushing it to sand.

  Can I forgive myself, amor,

  for digging this grave with my own two hands?

  Quiet, please.

  Quiet’s what I need.

  I’ve caught it alive

  and won’t set it free,

  until I sing this samba about

  the end of me.

  There are moments, just before I wake, when I forget where I am. Am I curled on a hard pallet next to Nena? Am I in one of Sion’s narrow school cots? Am I in a dilapidated Lapa room or in our Bedford Drive mansion? The possibilities list themselves in my head, and, just by the fact that I can create this list, I know those places and the people who inhabited them are gone from me and from the world.

  Vinicius and I bought this house thirty years ago, after we’d married and back when Miami Beach was considered a haven for the elderly and the outcast. Vinicius and I stubbornly believed we were neither. It is a sprawling, many-windowed home with a courtyard and an old Spanish façade and more bathrooms than seems reasonable. It puts the Great House to shame.

  When we moved in, there were two trees in the front yard: one large and one small. The smaller one had germinated in a crevice of the other. The small tree’s roots wound down the large tree’s trunk and its branches up. It wrapped itself around the larger tree in a net of limbs until they looked as if they were bound in an embrace.

  “They’re dancing,” Vinicius liked to say.

  Our gardener asked if he could hack the smaller tree away. “A strangler fig,” he called it. “No good.”

  “Let it be,” I ordered, and found us a new gardener.

  During our first years in this house, Vinicius and I watched the small tree in our yard catch up to the larger one in size and stature. They were the same height, their branches the same width, and they clung to each other tightly, like lovers. Over time, the smaller tree enfolded the other almost completely in its ropy limbs and roots, until all we could see of the older tree was a thick, solitary branch reaching out from the strangler fig’s grip.

  Vinicius and I had a happy life together in Miami: walking the beach every morning, stopping for cafecitos at the same diner each afternoon, and producing new records. We even toured briefly as Sal e Pimenta, visiting Europe and Cape Verde, playing small shows until Vinicius’s memory began to fail him. We never played Brazil. After Graça’s death, we never returned home. At first because Vinicius and I were angry about that Copa show and its aftermath. And then because the military boys had taken over the country and either muzzled or arrested artists like us. Vinicius always said we’d go home when Brazil was a democracy again. In 1988 this happened, but by then it was too late. Brazil wasn’t even a memory for Vinicius anymore. If he missed it, it was in the same way he missed all of the places and people he eventually forgot: silently, and with tears. Most days he was cheerful, but other days he’d sit in our courtyard and stare at those dancing trees, his cheeks wet and nose dripping. I’d bring him a handkerchief and kneel to wipe his face. If he remembered me, it was as a safe and enduring presence, like a favorite chair or a faithful dog, but not as Dor. I, too, became a blank space for him, wiped clean from his memory.

  What endured were the songs. Not our songs from the Sal e Pimenta days, though their melodies were more complex and their lyrics better. No, the songs that stayed with Vinicius, the ones he sang even when he could no longer hold a fork and, later, when words were not available to him, the songs he hummed, were our earliest tunes, the ones we’d recorded in Lapa. He asked me to play those records over and over, and when he could no longer ask for anything and had to go to the hospital, I lugged our record player into his room and played them there. The songs we return to again and again allow us to hear something new in them each time. They are familiar and yet mysterious, like our greatest loves.

  “Where’s Graça?”

  He’d ask for her when he could still speak. And even when her name left him, she didn’t.

  “Is she coming? When will she be here?”

  “Soon,” I’d say. “You know how long it takes her to get ready.”

  This always made him smile.

  When words left him altogether, he’d stare at the door, waiting. Always waiting. His face as expectant as a child’s. When I appeared in the doorway, he couldn’t hide his disappointment.

  In tropical forests, competition for light is fierce; the world under the canopy is as dark as dusk. I read this in a book, long ago. I also discovered other, kinder names for the ugly and ambitious little tree outside, the one that forced itself upon the back of the other: Ficus, Banyan, Epiphyte. It’s in their nature to grasp, to embed, to grow up and down, all at once. By the time Vinicius died, his face still turned toward the hospital room’s door, the original tree outside our house was a withered trunk in the middle of that thriving fig. Today, as I write this, even that dead trunk is gone. The fig is hollow in its center, a circle without a core, but it carries on.

  I listen to those early songs now, too. Every night. And I do it for the same, simple reason Vinicius did—not to honor our music or to reminisce about the two
of us, but to hear Graça’s voice.

  THE END OF ME

  If you have ever been in a car crash, or escaped a fire, or experienced the sudden, nauseating drop of an airplane as if the imaginary string keeping it afloat has suddenly been cut, or if you’ve experienced any number of less dramatic but equally perilous incidents—a car stops short and knocks you over; food lodged in your throat makes you unable to breathe; a slip and a fall and that moment before you hit the ground where time seems to lengthen and you steel yourself for the impact—then you understand how, in the moments after, when you realize you’ve been spared, your sheer relief evaporates and you feel something else entirely. It’s in these moments that we’re confronted with life’s cruel indifference to our survival. We realize that we are at the mercy of forces we cannot fathom; the control we thought we’d exerted over our lives slips like a fish through our hands.

  This is how I felt that night, after Graça closed her Copa show.

  Before we arrived at the door, marked “Employees Only,” that led to the dressing room, a military boy ran behind our group.

  “Wait!” he called, breathless. “I don’t know about people’s manners downstairs, in the good seats, but I thought you were out of sight!”

  Without a word, Graça cupped the boy’s face in her hands and kissed him lightly on the mouth. Then she opened the employee door and disappeared behind it.

  We didn’t bother stopping at the dressing room, where a Mayrink reporter waited. A waiter slipped us through the hotel’s kitchen, where we found the freight elevator. Inside, the Blue Moon boys were mute. The elevator’s iron gate pressed into my back. My head felt like a fragile instrument wrapped in cotton batting.

  Vinicius spoke. What did he say? I could not hear, but Graça’s expression changed, her face suddenly stern.

  “We needed to try,” she said.

  “No, you needed to try,” Vinicius replied. “Those were our songs, mine and Dor’s. They don’t work for you.”

  Graça crossed her arms over her red top.

  “So you two are better than the rest of us?” she asked. “And what about that thing you used to say: ‘Nobody owns samba.’ Well, I guess you don’t believe it. I didn’t butcher those songs, I made them better.”

  The elevator shuddered and whined like a wounded beast, and we were all trapped in its belly.

  “Dor? You okay?” Vinicius asked. His voice was muffled, as if I’d pressed a cup to a wall and he was on the other side. I can’t remember what I said in reply, but his body slumped, his face fell slack.

  “What did you expect me to do?” he asked. “Leave halfway through? Refuse to play? We had seven hundred people watching. I didn’t know she was going to do this.”

  When we finally lurched to a stop at our penthouse floor, the boys left but Vinicius stayed inside the elevator. I almost stayed with him, but Graça pulled me out by the arm.

  “Don’t ditch me,” she said.

  She held my hand very tightly during the walk down the long hallway to her suite, as if she knew that if she let go, even once, I would run.

  * * *

  —

  I often dream of Graça’s suite at the Palace. I walk on its glossy terrazzo floor past wide sofas and long yellow curtains. In my dreams, the suite’s colors are dingy and muted, as if someone had dipped a paintbrush into dirty water and wiped it across the entire scene. It is larger, too—a labyrinth of tables, lamps, and chairs that I wind my way around, attempting to get to the closed French doors of her bedroom, although I do not want to go there. In my dreams I feel a terrifying, heart-stopping dread the closer I get to those curtained doors, yet my feet carry me there anyway, step by step, even as I hold on to the furniture in an attempt to stop myself. When the door is finally in front of me, I tell myself to move away, to run, to step back, yet I reach out and turn the handle. As soon as this happens, I always wake. I am alone in my Miami bed, sweating and gasping for air. Vinicius is no longer here to comfort me. Even when he was, I only pretended to be calmed so that he would fall back asleep. Then I would creep out of our room, knowing I wouldn’t sleep the rest of the night, knowing that I’d already opened that door and seen what lay behind it, and this was not a vision I could erase or a nightmare I could wake myself from.

  The suite was on the Palace’s top level, overlooking the ocean. That night, after the show, the view from the suite’s windows was as black as coal, except for the lights of a few boats. They looked like fireflies trapped in tar.

  Graça flicked on the lights. The dark ocean disappeared and there was only our reflection in the glass—Graça in her smeared stage makeup and tousled hair, me in the black evening gown she’d called plain, and it was.

  Graça covered her eyes and flicked the switch back down. “I’m so sick of lights,” she said.

  The room went black again. I stayed perfectly still. Only my breath—quick, ragged from too many cigarettes smoked backstage—gave my presence away.

  “I’ll die if I don’t get this fucking costume off. It’s like carrying an extra body,” Graça said, unzipping her skirt and letting it fall, with a thump, to the floor.

  My eyes began to adjust to the darkness. I watched Graça move slowly to the bathroom. The faucet creaked and water rushed from the tub’s tap. I dropped my purse; the arsenal of pills inside rattled in their glass vials. Then I groped my way forward, careful of everything that blocked my path.

  Graça was in her robe. A candle flickered on the stone countertop. She sat upon the vanity’s small stool and tilted her head up. Then she swiped wet cotton balls roughly across her face, her hands moving at a frantic pace. Even in the candlelight I could make out the few thin hairs left in her eyebrows after years of plucking. There were creases around her mouth, a series of stubborn little wrinkles across her forehead. Graça kept her eyes on me as she worked.

  The room grew hot. My gown felt wilted and sticky.

  “The tub’s going to overflow,” Graça said.

  I turned mechanically and shut the tap. Steam rose from the water. My hands shook. Gently, Graça pushed me aside.

  She let her robe drop. I turned my back but it was impossible not to glimpse her in that vast, mirrored bathroom. The pounds she’d lost again and again in Palm Springs had returned. The tops of her arms were thick, her stomach meaty. She looked like a woman from an ancient Italian painting, all soft flesh and dimples. She climbed into the steaming water and sat without hesitation, taking up a sponge and rubbing her arms.

  “Are you going to be a mute all night?” she asked. “I’m the one that bombed out there, not you.”

  Her spine was like a piece of rope caught under her skin. I resisted the urge to trace it with my fingers, to tug it underwater and hold it there. “Those were my songs.”

  Graça let out a long sigh. Her breath cut through the steamy air. “So you’ll get all the credit for my flop.”

  The room’s heat made my cheeks prickle. “I don’t want credit.”

  “You always want credit,” Graça said, and leaned back to wet her hair. Her breasts bobbed on the water’s surface, round and pink. I closed my eyes.

  “You planned that bit with the makeup, the earrings,” I said.

  Graça sat back up. “I couldn’t keep doing the same old thing. I needed something new. When I saw you, in Ipanema, that was it. You know how important this show was for all of us. It was do-or-die. I needed your act.”

  “I’m not an act.”

  “Sure you are,” Graça said. “We all are. Everything’s an act, from the minute we wake up and open our eyes.”

  “You can’t sing them anymore. I won’t let you.”

  Graça let out a high-pitched laugh. “Nobody wants me to sing anymore.”

  She pushed herself from the water, stepping out of the tub. Her hair dripped down her neck. She sighed and seemed to deflate, burying her face in a
towel and keeping it there for a long time.

  Her shoulders did not shake; she wasn’t crying, was she? Had she become dizzy? Or was she composing herself, like an actress about to go onstage? These are the questions I asked myself as I stood in that sweltering bathroom. I’ve had decades to look back on this night, on this moment, to put the pieces into place again and again and wonder how I might have changed them or rearranged them to give us all a different outcome. It is futile, this kind of reminiscing. It is a cruel game with no winner, because I cannot go back to that night. I cannot erase my mistakes. I cannot be kinder, more generous, more understanding. I cannot tell myself to put aside my pride, my anger, my sense of retribution. Now, I see things more fully. I see those many uncomfortable minutes when Graça hides her face in her towel as a kind of plea I did not answer. I couldn’t, because in that moment, I thought myself the victim and Graça, the thief.

  When she finally emerged she dropped the towel and moved toward me, naked and trailing water with each step. She took my hand in her wet one.

  “I’ve had this awful feeling, ever since Fruity Cutie,” she said. Shadows from the candlelight distorted her face, making it look as if she was made of putty, melting in the room’s heat. “I know Vinicius doesn’t want to stay with me. Hell, he’s so mad at me right now, he’s probably already packed his bags. Singing’s the only thing I could ever really do. Every day I wake up and I think, How much longer? How much longer do I have to trudge through this fucking life before I can get in front of a crowd again, before I can sing again. I used to be able to wait, you know? The time between shows didn’t feel so long. But now? Shit, now a day feels like forever. I just . . . I can’t seem to get things right out here, in life. But up there, in front of people, boy do I nail it every time! Except for tonight. Tonight I couldn’t make them love me again.”