Her voice cracked. The steam made my nostrils burn and no matter how many breaths I took, I felt short of air. I let go of her hand and moved away, across the room, hoping the distance could stop her from winning my forgiveness. I wanted the Graça who’d pulled my hair and fought me in Riacho Doce’s river; the one who’d tricked the Sion nuns; the one who’d yelled and cursed and called me names in Lapa. I wanted her meanness, her smallness, her stinging words, her bite. I wanted an opponent, not a victim.
“That was my music,” I said. “You should’ve asked me for it.”
She flinched as if I’d shaken her awake. Then her face changed, her gaze sharpening, her features hardening into a kind of mask. And my heart leapt.
“And if I’d asked, if I’d begged you, you think you would’ve given those songs to me?” Graça said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to be rich, or known, or given credit like you do. I want to be magnificent. Do you even know what that means? You’ve never been magnificent a day in your life. You want to be, but you aren’t. So you put yourself around people who are, like me. Like Vinicius. You want everything that’s mine, but you’ll never get it. You can’t. You’ll always be Jega in fancy clothes.”
We were girls again, meeting for the first time in that empty Great House hallway where everything I’d come to know was changing: the tiny scrap of freedom I’d experienced was being taken away; everything I’d pretended was mine had never truly belonged to me, and never would. And there was Graça, with her cork-colored eyes and beautiful pink mouth, as proof. Jega. She’d never before called me that name.
The bathroom was small. My legs were long. In two paces I was in front of Graça. I gave her two gorgeous slaps across the face, my hand bouncing off both of her cheeks. Graça’s eyes lit. I curled a hand around her neck, feeling her pulse under my fingers. It would have been easy to squeeze harder, to press all the air out of her as if she was a balloon. Wasn’t this the fight I’d wanted?
Graça moved her hands up, toward me, but instead of gripping my hands, instead of fighting to make me let go, Graça placed her hands on my face, cupping my cheeks the way a mother might hold a child’s.
“Don’t you fucking leave me, Dor,” she wheezed. “Everybody leaves me. But not you.”
I let go. Graça wrapped her arms around my waist and rested her head on my chest. She whimpered and gasped like a small, hurt animal until the front of my gown was damp. Then Graça, naked, stared up at me with wet eyes, her nose red and her mouth trembling, and I grabbed her again, only gently this time and for a different purpose.
Kiss. To say this word in English, your lips must pull back, your teeth must lock together so that you may press air through them and make a hissing noise. Beijo is quite different. To say beijo, you must pucker your lips. You must do as the word intends. What Graça and I did as girls in our little Lapa room, those were beijos—soft, wet, hesitant at first and then, slowly, becoming bold. What we did in the Copa’s bathroom was nothing like those early beijos of ours.
Graça’s teeth clicked against mine. Her tongue was a muscle—hard, probing, intent on prying me wide. I tried to shake my head away but Graça clapped her hands to either side of my face. I tried to catch her, to grasp her into some kind of calm submission, but she was still wet from her bath and slipped under my fingers. She was roundness and muscle, softness and resistance.
It was not as I’d imagined it. How could I not have let myself imagine, from time to time, what it might’ve been like to kiss her again? In that vast, unbounded landscape of my imagination there were many places I went, and this was one of them. I could not allow myself to visit often because, like walking into a field of uncut cane, I was afraid of losing myself inside or emerging covered in a thousand invisible wounds from head to toe. But there were moments when I did enter, and what I pictured was Graça both amazed and afraid—not of me but of herself, of the extent of her wanting me and nothing else. And all the while there would be a perfect rhythm between us—our breaths, our movements, even our intentions would sync so seamlessly that we would not be able to tell Dores from Graça, Jega from Sofia Salvador.
How faraway this fantasy seemed that night, in the Copa’s bathroom! My mind whirred as Graça pressed on, intent, it seemed, at completing a task. Is this her way of giving me comfort? I thought. No, this is her way of getting comfort. But that didn’t seem right either, and all I could think of was her onstage, wiping away her red lips. And the songs. My songs.
I stepped out of our embrace.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why now?”
Graça put her arms tightly around me again. “Shut up. Just keep kissing me.”
I shook my head. “I can’t.”
She moved her face closer to mine.
“Not now,” I said. “I won’t.”
Graça’s nails dug into my cheeks. “Do it,” she ordered. “Just take it.”
“No.”
I stumbled from the bathroom, into the dark, cool air of the suite, taking deep and gulping breaths, as if I’d been trapped underwater.
Graça slumped in the doorway. She wiped her mouth, leaning weakly like a boxer staring at her opponent after receiving a particularly vicious blow.
“So you’re leaving,” she said, her voice small. “You don’t want me.”
What could I do but deliver the knockout punch?
“No,” I said, “no one does.”
I left. My arms ached from our bathroom tussle. My hands shook so badly that I had trouble closing the suite’s door behind me. In the elevator, I reached for a cigarette but realized I’d left my bag—and in it my room key, my entire arsenal of bennies and Blue Angels, and my cigarettes—back in Graça’s room. For an instant, I thought of pressing the elevator’s buttons and going back.
I recalled our first concert in Recife, lifetimes ago, when we were children and yet Graça had not behaved as a child might have. She hadn’t ridiculed me for crying, or held me at a distance. She’d given me comfort as no one before or since had ever done. Jega—always kicked and slapped and threatened—had been held and understood. Why hadn’t I been able to do the same for her in that bathroom? She’d wanted comfort, wanted to fall into the oblivion of another’s body. Hadn’t I sought the same kind of comfort so many times before, from so many women and men? Yet I’d denied her, and myself, the pleasure of that comfort.
As I stood inside that Copa elevator with its brass gate and padded walls, I wanted badly to return to Graça’s suite. I wanted to hold Graça and shake her, yell at her, tell her what a mistake she’d made. If she’d only asked, I would have given her anything. Everything. But Graça—always the Little Miss—had called me Jega and then commanded me to grasp whatever scraps I’d been given.
Do it. Just take it.
Hearing this order, my choice was already made.
* * *
—
After searching the hotel bar and the backstage corridors, I finally found Vinicius on the beach. He’d walked a little ways from the hotel, to a more secluded spot near the water. Tide was low, the waves only ripples. A massive sandbar extended nearly to the horizon, where the moon sat, round and white like a low-hanging fruit that we could twist and pluck.
“Jesus,” he said when he saw me. My hair was unpinned. My gown sweated through. I wore no shoes. I began to take huge gulps of air, but couldn’t fill my lungs. I tried harder, my face wet now, my eyes losing their focus. Vinicius caught me in his arms.
Shhh, shh, shhh, he said, and rocked me gently, as if putting a child to sleep.
I didn’t want to leave that embrace, didn’t want to have to sit on the sand and explain myself. What would I explain? That I was still Jega? That I would always be Jega? That Graça believed I’d always wanted to steal from her, and I had. And she’d stolen from me. We were a pair of thieves, she and I—a perfect pair—always looking for one more thing to take from each oth
er. That night, in her suite, there was nothing left.
I unwound myself from Vinicius and looked up, wondering if I could see Graça’s penthouse window from the beach; if her light would be on, or if she’d be a shadow at the glass, staring down at the beach, at us. When I looked up I saw only Vinicius, and he saw me. Both of us wounded. Both wanting the same thing, but never able to fully grasp it.
He bent his head into my neck. The tip of his nose moved from my collarbone upward, taking in my scent. I held tightly to him, afraid my knees would buckle, afraid I’d fall and that the sudden movement might startle Vinicius away. Shouldn’t I want to startle him away? I thought, and then I stopped thinking altogether.
There is no stubble on a woman’s cheek. There is no smell of aftershave or sweat. There is a softness, an exquisite delicateness, to a woman’s mouth that one will never encounter in a man’s. But sometimes you do not want a calm bay—you want a rough ocean. You want to be tossed by waves, to be pounded into sand and rubbed raw, to feel your lungs and body burn until you finally, thankfully, come up for air.
I was twenty-six years old—a child! I wasn’t wise enough to be able to weigh my conflicting desires and see which should be fed and which left to wither. I fed them all. And isn’t that the beauty and the danger of youth: that reckless ability to feel without asking yourself why, or how, or if that feeling is good or bad for you? What did I truly want in that moment on the beach with Vinicius? I wanted what all of us want at one point or another: to be yearned for; to be the very center of someone’s longing—only me, the star of the show.
* * *
—
A chord is three notes struck simultaneously. It is the basis of harmony and disharmony. I learned this late in life.
That famous young musician who recorded with me in Las Vegas also did me the favor of teaching me about music’s more technical aspects. I asked for the lesson. After our recording sessions, he patiently explained to me about chords, pitch, tempo, and timbre, among other things. The more he spoke, the more I realized that he was simply giving names to things I always knew existed. Harmony. Contour. Melody. Tone. Rhythm. Meter. Key. I’d spent my life sensing these aspects of music without ever knowing what to call them, or why.
I take great comfort in the fact that music existed before anyone could pin names onto it, and music will exist even when language fails us. And it will fail us; it always does. We think we need words because it is in our nature to define, to decode, to try to understand by piecing things apart and labeling them, like specimens in a museum. A child is born and we give it a name, but it is not the naming that brought the child into being. Our names make us easy to recall, and by recalling we believe we know, and by knowing we believe we understand. Names bring us comfort. It is the things we cannot name that frighten us most.
Here we are then, after so many sleepless nights, and all I’ve done is arrive at the point in the story where most choose to begin. Why did all those reporters, biographers, and hacks choose to start their stories about Sofia Salvador here? Because death sells books and magazines, and Sofia Salvador’s death came too soon, and (for most) without warning.
Contrary to popular belief, I’ve told this part of the story many times. So many times, in fact, that I vowed never to tell it again. In the days after she died, I repeated the story over and over to police, military officials, the lawyer I was forced to hire, and to the Blue Moon boys, of course. It’s infuriating how twelve short hours can come to define our lives and the stories others tell about them. If I wrote a song about us—Graça, Vinicius, the Blue Moon boys, and me—this part of our story should merit only a line. But, like a drum setting the rhythm of the entire melody, it has become the heartbeat of our song.
* * *
—
Vinicius found her. Most days I am grateful for this.
He and I fell asleep on the beach, side by side. Without having taken any Blue Angels that night, I didn’t fall into the dreamless trance they usually provided. Instead, I dreamed of Riacho Doce. I stood before a sea of cane. Nena was next to me. The cane towered over us. When the wind hit, I heard the cane’s stalks scrape one another, like knives sharpening. Behind us, something let out a wail—hoarse and desperate. An animal, wounded? I looked back and Riacho Doce disappeared.
The sun was too bright; I could barely open my eyes. The boning under the satin corset of my black gown pinched my sides. My left hand was numb. I sat up and shook it until it tingled back to life. My head throbbed. Grains of sand crunched between my teeth.
Vinicius and I hobbled into the hotel. It was still very early; hardly any guests were up and about. The Palace’s staff stole sideways glances at us as we called the elevator. Inside, we didn’t speak or look at each other. Then I stood before my room’s door, while Vinicius bid me good-bye.
“I’m going to face the music now,” he said.
He and Graça still shared a room. Had he meant that he was going to face her foul temper? Would he leave Sofia Salvador and Blue Moon that morning? Would he tell her about our night together on the beach? Would this be his revenge on her, as it was mine? Who knows. We never answered these questions, even though they seemed vital at the time.
As Vinicius shuffled down the hallway, I stood before my room’s door, blinking at the lock. I didn’t have my key. I’d have to face Graça, too, if I wanted the purse I’d left in her room. I looked down the hall but Vinicius was gone. Then I thought I was dreaming again, because the wailing I’d heard earlier, in my sleep, came back. Only it was louder now, and coming from Graça’s room.
The door hadn’t been locked. Inside, it was bright. The curtains were wide open. The French doors were closed. The howling came from behind them. I turned the knob and walked inside.
The bedroom smelled sickeningly sweet, like Lapa’s alleyways after Carnaval. Vinicius sat on the floor beside her bed, his mouth open. Graça lay at his knees. The bedsheets were satin and I remember thinking how slippery satin was, and that’s why she had fallen out of bed. But why wasn’t she cussing or joking? Why didn’t she open her eyes? Everything in that room looked familiar but also terribly askew, as things sometimes do in dreams. I wondered again if I was still asleep.
I knelt beside Graça. Something wet and cold seeped through the skirt of my gown, where my knees touched the floor. Vomit—yellow, like congealed mustard—puddled under us. It had seeped under Graça’s head, clumping in her hair. A yellow crust dotted the corners of her mouth and coated her chin. Her hand was cold, the fingers stiff.
I heard myself talking, but can’t recall the words. When I think back on this moment I see Vinicius’s once handsome face, rigid with shock. He’d stopped wailing and listened, intently, to me. Apparently I told him to call a doctor. Not the Copa hotel’s doctor on call, but our doctor. One we could trust. Dr. Farias, the man who’d treated Graça during her stint at Urca years before. I didn’t know his telephone number but I somehow remembered his address: Barata Ribeiro Street, in Copacabana. I told Vinicius to ask the telephone operator to find him and only him, though I had no idea if Dr. Farias was still alive. The police asked me over and over to recount what I’d said to Vinicius.
How did you know this doctor?
He helped us before.
Helped?
Yes, helped.
In what way?
In a doctor’s way.
Why call a private doctor?
She would never let a stranger touch her.
Why did you tamper with the body?
Tamper?
Why did you move her?
Because she was cold. She needed to be warm.
You thought she was still alive?
* * *
—
Vinicius was gone, off to find a telephone. I stared dumbly around Graça’s bedroom. On her bedside table was my purse, its mouth open on its side, and my bottles of Blue Angels
and bennies sat empty, their caps discarded on the floor.
How many Nembutals, Benzedrines, codeines, and Seconals had I brought on that trip? Fifty? Sixty? How many were left on the night Graça and I fought? I’d taken two Blue Angels on the plane, two bennies on our first day in Brazil. Or did I take more? Did I give the boys some pills on the airplane, or backstage before the show? I’ve tried to account for those pills so many times over the years—first to police, then to Vinicius, then to myself. I close my eyes and think of those amber vials and try to recall the numbers and colors of the tablets left inside. It’s ridiculous, really, the amount of time one can spend fretting over what doesn’t matter, and what can’t be changed. It doesn’t matter how many pills were in those vials when I left her room. What matters is that they were all empty when I returned.
I brushed my hand through Graça’s hair. Vomit smeared my fingers. Suddenly I was in the bathroom, wetting one washcloth, then another. I dabbed her face. I wiped her hair and her arms. I cleaned the floor.
I tried to prop Graça to sitting, so I could wash the back of her head. She was heavier than I’d expected. She would not bend at the waist no matter how much I coaxed her, so I somehow found the strength to heave her into bed. I put a blanket on her. Her hair, wet from my washing, soaked the pillow. In the bathroom I found a tube of her red lipstick. Graça never saw visitors without lipstick.
Did you know that the most essential part of any voice is air? Empty space. You must make room for your voice to pour out. Great singers know how to relax their throats and tongues when they sing. They know how to breathe so that they expand their bodies, taking in as much air as possible, sustaining each note for as long as humanly possible. It is air, after all, that makes our vocal cords vibrate. The air we breathe is our voice’s food. It is its source.
Vinicius said, later, that as he and the boys ran back down the presidential suite’s private hallway, they heard a terrible kind of moan that went on and on, for as long as they ran down that interminable hall. The voice did not die, did not pause, did not stop to catch its breath. Hearing it, Vinicius said, made his stomach drop.
The Air You Breathe Page 41