When in Rio

by Delphine Dryden

  “In a way, it’s loud at night,” Jack assured me.

  Mario, who was indeed too chubby for safe rock-climbing but an utterly delightful person nevertheless, kept up a lively stream of conversation that didn’t end when we crunched to a halt in the wide gravel drive that circled in front of his house.

  I gathered that his family’s fortune had been made in shipping, and the house had a vaguely nautical feel, but that may just have been all the exposed wood beams and the breathtaking panoramic view of the ocean just past the treetops.

  The house, which was built into the side of the hill, was like a cross between a tree house and an interior designer’s wet dream. Each stick of furniture, each gently curving paneled wall or cunningly crafted array of lighting, was utterly and absolutely perfect. And the whole thing had the desirable quality of being enormous overall yet cozy in its particulars, with the feeling one might ramble forever but never be at a loss for a little nook in which to have a chat or read a book. And from every space—for it was difficult to say just where rooms ended and began in much of that house—there was a view of the forest, or the treetops over which the house was perched, or a grotto created by the structural relationship between the house itself and the hill into which it was nestled.

  Jack summed it up best. “It’s like every little kid’s dream house, if the little kid had all the money in the world and a team of internationally famous designers.”

  “The little kid is also a fan of the fine arts,” I added, automatically scanning the spines of the books in one of the built-in shelves that seemed to grace every likely inch of wall. Shelves for books, but also pottery and oil paintings both large and small. Most were jungly abstractions of just the type I had been looking for from that street vendor I’d never been able to find again. I suspected I wouldn’t have been able to afford even signed prints of most of the pieces in Mario’s collection, however.

  “I haven’t been here since Anne and I finished my place,” Jack said, frowning as he joined me in looking over the titles. “Now I’m going to go back home and my place will look like crap after this.”

  I knew what he meant, but laughed anyway. “I like your place. It’s just more structured than this.” A few seconds later I wondered if that had been the right thing to say, but it was too late. My brain seemed to be short-circuiting at the oddest moments, despite the relief of being out of the car and off the bumpy road.

  “You still haven’t invited me to your new home,” Mario pointed out to Jack, shaking his finger in accusation. “The children have never been to Texas. They want to go, they want to see Texas cowboys. I keep telling them that we have more cowboys here, and in Houston they’re more likely to see businessmen in suits, but…”

  “Rodeo,” Jack laughed, clapping Mario on the shoulder. “You can come during the stock show and rodeo next February, Mario. The kids will love it. They’ll get to see honest-to-God cowboys riding bulls and horses. Marta may even like it too, she’s the horsy one anyway. Speaking of which, where is everyone?”

  “On their way back from the ranch. They should be here soon. And Marta apologizes in advance, she won’t be cooking tonight, but she promises to make it up to us all tomorrow.” He was leading us as he talked and we wound up in the kitchen, a space that would have made most professional chefs drool with envy. Even though I wasn’t much of a cook, I was envious myself. There were acres of stainless steel and granite, blond wood and industrial-strength cooking and cooling capabilities. Considering that the house seemed fairly remote and must be relying on generators, propane and septic systems, the whole thing seemed even more impressive. It had long since crossed my mind that Mario’s family must do quite a bit more than just own “a few boats”, but until seeing his home I hadn’t quite grasped the extent to which there must be fabulous wealth involved. I had to approve of the way Mario had put his funds to use. The house was just so much fun.

  “So,” Mario explained, pulling things from an enormous refrigerator tastefully concealed behind panels that matched the cabinetry. “We are fending for ourselves tonight, on sandwiches and beer. Like college!”

  Maybe things had been different for Jack and Mario. In college, I never had paper-thin slices of rare roast beef and savory pork for my sandwiches, on fresh rolls, with horseradish sauce handmade by the cook-cum-factotum who was the only servant in evidence, though I sensed there were probably more about the place.

  Mario seemed at home in the kitchen, slicing onions and tomatoes with an ease that suggested he often helped Marta with her legendary cooking. When I mentioned I wasn’t much of a beer drinker, Mario got a gleam in his eye and led me into what I thought was a butler’s pantry. It turned out to be a wine cellar, with several different zones of cooled and climate-controlled storage for everything from crisp, dry whites to heavy dessert wines, ancient bottles with flaking yellowed labels to the red he pulled out which was a very nice, young Beaujolais.

  Once the sandwiches were made, our genial host led us from the kitchen through the adjoining seating area, which featured a windowed wall and a huge native stone fireplace, out to a cantilevered terrace from which the full impact of the view became clear. This surely must have been the best time to see it, at sunset, with the jungle behind us and spread out below, and the hills deepening to darkest blue just where they met the ocean at the horizon.

  Once the sun was truly down, which we couldn’t quite see from our vantage, the distant land and sea seemed to melt together into a band of midnight, with only the faint afterglow from the sun’s departure marking the line of sky. By the time we’d finished eating it had all faded into darkness, and a smattering of lights across the hills made it clear that the area wasn’t as isolated as it seemed. Still, it was quiet, almost eerily so, and I wondered what Jack had meant by his earlier comment about the noise.

  The arrival of Marta and Mario’s children, however, was far from quiet. We heard the car first, and saw the headlights flickering lower down on the hill before the curve of the road took it back out of sight again. Then the muffled hubbub of the family entering the house, carried down the hill from the front door. We couldn’t hear them once they were inside, but the sound burst forth again when two tiny cannonballs came hurtling through the door and out onto the patio, barreling into Mario with cries of glee and fierce competition for his attention. The boy, Gabriel, seemed to win out, and he started telling his father a lively story in incredibly rapid Portuguese, ignoring us completely. Meanwhile his little sister, Silvia, who seemed to be about four, stared out at us from behind her father’s leg with huge, dark eyes, somber and suspicious.

  The children must have inherited their coloring from their mother, because their raven-black hair and fair, fair skin hadn’t come from the rather sandy-and-tawny Mario. But Gabriel was in all other respects a copy of his father, with the same mannerisms and the same laugh, identical features and an identical radiant smile of slightly mischievous goodwill. When he was done regaling his father with his tale, he turned to acknowledge Jack and me with as courtly a bow as I’d ever seen, clearly not something that even a formal etiquette class would teach these days in the States.

  “Dona Kate, I am Gabriel. It is an honor to make your acquaintance,” he said in barely accented English, and then the little rascal actually kissed the back of my hand before he finally broke into a snicker.

  The snicker was only because Jack reached under his arm and started tickling him, at which point the boy finally gave up the hug he’d obviously been withholding. Jack picked him up and bear-hugged him, tousled his hair and then set him on his feet again, warning him he’d get into trouble one of these days flirting with pretty girls who were already taken. Undaunted, Gabriel flashed another winning smile my way before giving in to his father’s demand to go see what was taking his mother so long.

  “Silvia, come out and say hello,” Mario encouraged the little girl once her boisterous brother had left and the energy level on the terrace had been reduced by several magnitu
des. “This is your uncle Jack and his friend Kate. Sorry, Jack, she probably doesn’t remember.” He had succeeded in coaxing his daughter to his lap, but she was now burying her face in his chest.

  “That’s okay, I doubt she does. She was…what? One year old last time I was here? I can’t believe how big she is.” And then Jack said something very quietly in Portuguese, and the little girl turned a tiny bit, just far enough to see what he was holding out in his hand. It seemed to be a tiny jade frog, although I couldn’t grasp the significance.

  “Oh, just what she needs, Jack, another frog,” Mario said wryly, but encouraged Silvia to take the offering. She did so with all the reticence of a shy woodland creature taking a handful of corn from a camper, snatching the trinket back and eyeing it with growing excitement and the first hint of a smile I’d seen.

  “Obrigada,” she suddenly chirped politely, without prompting. Clearly she liked frogs, although how Jack came to have a miniature jade one in his pocket was a mystery to me.

  “Marta told me frogs were ‘it’ right now,” he explained, when Silvia had finally scampered off into the house to show her mother and brother her new acquisition. “I saw it at home actually, in this place in the Heights, and got to thinking it might go over well.”

  “She didn’t burst into tears and refuse to speak,” Mario said with obvious concern for his unaccountably shrinking violet of a child. “So you’re way ahead of most strangers, I admit. Everyone keeps saying it’s just a phase.”

  “I was like that until I was about seven,” I admitted. “Although in my family you hardly noticed, since all we did was sit around reading all the time anyway.”

  “Ah, well then, perhaps there is still hope for Silvia,” Mario grinned. “I will give her until she is seven before seeking professional help to find out how this family could have possibly produced a shy child.”

  Once Marta came out, it became even more evident why shyness seemed so extraordinary in this household. Marta was not only lovely—she looked, in fact, rather like Snow White, and was far too slim for all the fabulous cooking she was supposed to be doing—she possessed social graces I knew I never would. She managed to make me and Jack feel like honored guests and comfortable old friends at the same time, and only much later that evening did I realize that I’d been pretty thoroughly grilled for information over the course of the fifteen or so minutes she spent with us before ducking back inside to make sure the children got ready for bed. She’d done it skillfully enough that, at the time, all I felt was that she was tremendously interested in everything I had to say. The woman must have been a world-class date before she settled down.

  When the mosquitoes and other flying horrors grew too irksome despite the elaborate built-in spray system that protected the little terrace, Mario saw us back inside and back through the house to the front door. He’d explained we were in the “guesthouse”, which turned out to be accessible only by foot, by way of a little lighted path through the jungle itself.

  Or at least it seemed to be jungle at first glance in the darkness. In fact, it was rather more manicured than that, part of a much larger tropical garden sculpted into the hill around the house. The guesthouse was at the far extreme of that garden, and turned out to be a little cottage built from the same native materials and in the same very modern style as the main house. There was a queen-size bed under mosquito netting, two fans turning lazily in the exposed-wood ceiling, a well-appointed full bath and a wide decked porch along the front and side of the little house. Mario pointed out that there was air-conditioning should we prefer it, but the cottage was cool and comfortable enough in the evening air.

  I seemed to have guessed correctly about the invisible servants, because somebody had already brought our bags along from the car. Mario left Jack and I to “freshen up”, an expression I thought he had surely learned in Texas.

  “This is amazing,” I said, wishing I could think of a more original way to put it.

  “It’s like a movie set, isn’t it?” Jack agreed, pulling a polo shirt out of his suitcase and sniffing it experimentally before exchanging it for the one he’d been wearing. I enjoyed the brief glimpse of his torso, pouting a little when he covered it with the fresh shirt. “This is really just sort of his getaway home. He has a place up in Recife. He’s up there on business quite a lot but he doesn’t always want to stay at his parents’ place. Their compound, really. And then of course, his family and Marta’s both have ranches near São Paulo.”

  “So what exactly is it that Mario’s family does? Obviously it’s more than just owning some boats.”

  “Shipping. And cattle ranching, although that’s more of a sideline. I think Mario’s grandfather just liked the idea of doing that. Marta’s family are the real ranchers. Packaging and distribution too. So there’s a certain extent to which the marriage was…well, not arranged, but it sure was convenient to bring the two families together.”

  I was surprised. “They seem like they’re crazy about each other.” In fact, the couple had been openly affectionate, though never inappropriate, during our brief visit. They seemed thrilled to be back in one another’s company after what was apparently just a few days spent apart.

  “They are crazy about each other, now. They just both resisted the whole thing at first. Their families had known each other forever and both sides were really pushing for the match. I think they only figured out they liked each other because they spent so much time together, plotting how to convince their families to get off their backs about it. But it worked out well.”

  “Their kids are gorgeous.” I contemplated my dwindling supply of clean clothes, trying to decide whether I should change too.

  “Silvia’s so big,” he said as if still stunned by this. “Somehow it’s more startling to see her jump from one to five than to see Gabriel jump from six to ten. I’ve seen pictures of course, but it’s just not the same.”

  I wondered if he saw frequent pictures of the children’s cousins too, Marisa’s sons, who might have been Jack’s if things had gone differently. From what I’d seen over the past few months, he and Mario phoned and e-mailed each other a few times a week. A lot of chances for photos to be relayed back and forth.

  Why do you even care, Kate? I asked myself furiously, then looked up at Jack, worried for a moment I’d spoken out loud. He was watching me fiddle with my clothes but his mind seemed to be elsewhere.

  “Mario actually seems a little quiet, for him,” he said out of the blue. “I know, I know, you’re thinking if that’s quiet, what’s he usually like? But seriously, he seems like he’s worried about something. I’m trying to figure out if I should just ask him or…”

  I didn’t want to, but I felt obliged to make the offer, just to be a bigger person than I felt like I really was. “Do you want me to stay here, and you can just go and catch up for a bit? Maybe it’s something he doesn’t feel comfortable telling you in front of me?”

  “No,” Jack said instantly. “I think it’s actually something he doesn’t feel comfortable telling me. But I guess it’ll either come out or it won’t. I just hope it’s nothing bad about him or Marta or the kids.” Smiling suddenly, shaking off the topic with a shrug, he said, “He likes you, by the way. Do you know what he said when I talked to him yesterday and mentioned we’d only need one room?”

  I blushed automatically and looked back at the contents of my suitcase. “No, what?”

  “He said, ‘I wondered when you would figure it out’.”

  “Ah.”

  Jack snorted and flopped onto the bed, looking up playfully from where he lay flat on his back, just past my suitcase. “You think we have time for a quickie?”

  I glared at him. “Would I get to come?”

  “Nope.” His grin was shameless, unrepentant.

  “Then no, we don’t have time.” Pulling my cosmetic bag from my suitcase, I rummaged around for the smaller bag of makeup, some cleanser, my toothbrush and toothpaste.

  “What if I told you to
pull off all your clothes and get on my dick, right now?” He was still smiling that obnoxious frat-boy smile, and I could tell he wasn’t serious.

  “I think I might have to tell you to go straight to hell,” I said with what I hoped was a winning smile.

  His peals of laughter chased me all the way into the bathroom.

  * * * * *

  We talked with Mario and Marta late into the night, over several more glasses of wine and bottles of beer, about anything and nothing. I was startled by the frequency with which Jack and Mario got pulled into debating the environment with one another. While both passionate about conservation in their ways, each accused the other of wasting the opportunity to do something about it.

  Two captains of industry, I thought, and was a little awestruck by the knowledge that it wasn’t really an exaggeration—and by the company I suddenly found myself in. This largely friendly debate, clearly one that had been evolving since their college days, was now a multimillion- or even multibillion-dollar issue for both of them.

  Marta was the mediator, always slipping into the conversation sideways and emerging in some completely different place with both men in tow. It was impressive, and I couldn’t quite figure out how she managed it even though I was sitting right there. She was like an anti-Lourdes, really.

  “We’ll leave them to it,” she said finally, rising with a final roll of her eyes at the ongoing restrained argument. “I’ve already been hearing this for years, it never changes. Come with me, you can help.” I followed her from the cozy snug with the fireplace, where we’d been sitting and talking and drinking, back up into the kitchen, where from yet another cleverly concealed refrigerator she was pulling a covered cake plate.