by Luiza Sauma
“My sons, they’ve never tasted northern food.”
“Yes, we have,” I said.
“Well, not this stuff.” As Papai shuffled through his pocket for money, he looked over at the man again. “We live in Rio, you see.”
“But you have a northern accent.” The man smiled. Most of his teeth were missing.
“I was born here.”
“I’ve never been to Rio. What’s it like?”
“Beautiful,” said Luana, and the man nodded at her, as if seeing her for the first time.
She was standing behind us, her small suitcase at her feet.
“I’d like to go someday,” said the man. Papai paid him and he was gone, farther down the queue.
“It’s beautiful here too,” said Papai, passing the pancake to Thiago, who held it for a while, sniffing it. “Eat it, menino!”
Thiago took a bite. “It tastes like nothing.”
I grabbed it out of his hand and took a bite. He was right. “Yeah. Like paper.”
I thought of offering some to Luana, but then thought better of it. Sharing your food with an empregada was definitely weird. Papai ate the rest of the pancake and didn’t offer us any coffee, but he was still in a good mood. After buying tickets, we boarded the ferry as the sun moved over the river, making the brown water glimmer like gold. Our seats were on the top floor; shielded from the glare by a roof, but with large, open windows overlooking the river, which was bigger than I had imagined. I had thought, at the very least, that I would be able to see the other side, but it stretched out like a murky ocean. Thiago took one look at it, said, “Huh,” and started reading one of his Turma da Mônica comics. The comics followed the adventures of a gang of children, led by a bucktoothed tomboy. Papai always thought Thiago should be reading something fancy and foreign, such as Tintin or The Little Prince.
Papai put his bag on his seat and stood gazing at the water. His olive skin was smooth, all tension released. Luana sat on a chair next to the edge of the ferry, sometimes turning towards the river. In the sun, her eyes were the color of lime flesh: acid green. She glanced at me and we both looked away. I went and stood next to my father.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said.
“Yes.”
“It’s been too long. This is my home, André. You don’t know how it is, to be away from your home for so long.”
“Why don’t you visit more often?”
He screwed his face up. “It’s so far away.”
“It’s not that far.”
“Your mother never wanted to come.”
“That’s what you always say.”
“I meant to come back, but then I met your mother. It’s easy to leave a place when you’re young. Coming back is harder. That’s my advice: stay where you are.”
It started to rain so we sat back down, moving away from the seats by the windows. The trip took three hours. It was sunny when we disembarked on the other side, and Papai looked as peaceful as the Dalai Lama. The scrappy harbor was crowded with people taking boxes and suitcases off the ferry, shouting, talking, hugging hello to friends and family. The air smelled of chicken shit, jungle, and sweat. To my amazement they had taxis, even though it looked like the kind of place you could only travel by donkey.
We sat in the cab in silence, apart from Papai, who was telling the driver about his connection with the island. Thiago, Luana, and I sat in the back, staring out at the stretches of forest and marsh, herds of buffalo, and clusters of two-room shacks. Their windows and doors were all open. Through them, we saw people lying on sofas and beds, watching television or listening to the radio. Music everywhere. I heard little bits, as we passed, but I couldn’t put them together to remember the song. The sun was now blazing high up in the sky and the cab had no air-conditioning. The insides of the car were stuck together with tape. Everyone had a shiny face. If it was cooler in Marajó than in Belém, it was hard to notice the difference.
We pulled up outside a blue house. Compared to all the bungalows, it had an old Portuguese grandness: tall windows, fresh paint, a garden sprouting yellow and purple flowers, and a porch. We got out of the car and stood on the lawn while Papai paid the driver. I watched Luana as she looked up at the house. Her full top lip curved down in the center, in a deep Cupid’s bow. I imagined tracing it with my finger. Down and up.
The cab rattled away.
“Is this the hotel?” said Thiago. “Does it have a pool?”
“This is your inheritance, filho.” We stared at Papai, not understanding. “This was my grandmother’s house. I haven’t been here in decades.”
“It’s just been sitting here?” I said.
“My cousin Eduardo used it sometimes, but it’s mine. Meu Deus, it looks just like I remember, only smaller.”
Inside, the house was cool, spacious, and clean. There were colorful ceramics on every table and sideboard, paintings on the walls, neatly made beds. Looking back, I realize that someone—an empregada—had tidied up ahead of our visit. But I didn’t notice such things then. Meals appeared, houses cleaned themselves, beds were made.
Luana helped us to carry our heavy bags to our rooms, then she went to the small maid’s room behind the kitchen.
FIVE
Papai took us on a tour of Salvaterra, a village centered around a strip of shops and cafés. Luana stayed at the house, doing whatever she did there.
“It’s changed,” said Papai as we walked down the street. “When I was a boy, there was almost nothing here. We brought everything we needed from the mainland.”
He walked with his hands on our shoulders. I couldn’t remember him ever doing that before. It was disconcerting. He pointed out a tree he liked to climb, a house where a beautiful woman lived—was she the skinny old lady sitting on the porch?—and the church he used to attend. “When I still believed.”
Then he took us to a beach. It was five-minute walk from the main street, but the sun was fierce and bright, so it felt ten times longer.
“Look, they’ve got the right idea.” Papai pointed at two chubby women walking down the road under brightly colored umbrellas.
The beach was virtually empty: two sunbathers, a coconut seller, a few stray dogs, and, at the far end, a herd of buffalo, standing by the river. Papai went over to the coconut man, said hello, and held up three fingers. The man took three green coconuts out of his icebox, chopped their tops off, and handed them over, with a straw in each. We sat on the sand and drank them quickly. Ice-cold heaven. That’s something I miss—drinking straight out of a coconut.
“Want to go for a swim?” said Papai. “You’ve never swum in the Amazon before—there’s nothing like it.”
I shielded the sun from my eyes and looked ahead at the water, which was pale brown, with gentle waves.
“I can’t see the other side,” said Thiago.
“I don’t have my swimming shorts,” I said.
“Ah, come on!”
Papai undressed to his boxers, wiped sweat from his forehead, and strode into the river.
“He’s gone mad,” I said.
“Has he?” Thiago was too young to notice anything.
“Want to go in?”
“But you said he was mad.”
“Come on, idiot.”
We quickly undressed. I threw my glasses onto the pile of clothes and we ran into the water, splashing it high with our feet, laughing. Papai had swum farther out, maybe twenty meters away from us, but we could see his face sticking out of the water, his black hair slicked down. We swam out to meet him. In my mouth, the river water almost tasted sweet.
“It’s wonderful!” shouted Papai. “I told you!”
It seems like paradise now, those first days in Marajó. I barely noticed it at the time. Young people don’t know the importance of things when they’re happening, but when those images still play in your mind, long after your hair’s gone gray and your belly slack, that’s when you know. As I swam in the slow-moving river, which was so different from the salt
y violence of Ipanema, I felt happy for the first time since Mamãe’s death. Maybe life with Papai would be all right, I thought. Different, but fine. My joy quickly became tinged with guilt.
Remembering Marajó, I feel as if I’m flicking through a filing cabinet, reading files written in a language I once knew, but am out of practice in. The language of being young, of knowing nothing. I’m setting these memories out as though they came to me so simply. This happened, then this and then this. But that’s not how it is. That’s not how it was.
I left Thiago treading water with Papai and swam off, dismissing shouts of “Don’t go too far!” with a thoughtless, “OK, Pai!” When they were just specks in the distance, I stopped swimming. I couldn’t touch the riverbed with my feet. I flipped onto my back, held my arms and legs far apart, and floated. So this is where Papai is from. Does that mean I’m from here too? How far back do you have to go to find your origins? Back to the Portuguese, to the Lebanese, to my native ancestors who must have floated like this, hundreds of years ago, in the same river?
The sun baked the front of my body until it was nearly dry, while my wet hands shriveled. The waves were almost nonexistent. Just a slight rocking, back and forth. I put my head up and realized I had floated far away from the beach. Papai was standing on the sand waving his hands in the air, while tiny Thiago hopped up and down. Even without my glasses, I could see that they were still just wearing their underpants.
As we walked back, the sun was coming down and insects were clucking and purring, welcoming the night. Most of the houses still had their doors and windows flung open, with radios tuned to the same station, playing songs I didn’t know. In Rio I was always careful not to open my bedroom window at night because that’s when the mosquitoes get in. Maybe people here are immune to them, I thought. Then we passed a house that was listening to something else: a familiar swell of strings and horns. We stopped walking. Chico Buarque sang into the darkness about wanting to be a tattoo on the body of his lover—a desperate kind of love. It was strange to think his music existed there, in the middle of nowhere.
“Your mother’s favorite song,” said Papai.
“I know,” I said.
She sang “Tatuagem” often; sometimes whistled it. Its melancholy tune could be heard, distantly, all over our flat in Ipanema. From her bathroom, reverberating over the pounding water. From her bedroom, as she did her makeup. From the balcony, as she looked at Ipanema beach, at the islands. I remembered seeing her and Papai one Christmas Eve dancing to it. She sang the words into his mouth. She knew them all, back to front. Papai merely smiled back, with a boozy look in his eyes. I must have been ten years old, sitting on the sofa. We had Christmas at home that year, because Thiago was just a baby—he was asleep in their bedroom. It had taken them ten years to conceive again. The end of a happy year.
It was late. We’d had dinner and opened our presents at midnight. Our relatives—Aunt Lia, Vovô, Vovó, and mad Uncle Gustavo, whose intense eyes made me feel uneasy—had gone home. Luana and Rita were still there. They had spent the morning with relatives in Vidigal, the favela, before returning to make our food. Mamãe paid them extra to work on Christmas Eve. They were standing in the doorway that led from the living room to the kitchen. Luana was smiling and had her arms around her mother.
Standing on the street in Marajó, I wondered what had become of Luana’s father. She was so much paler than Rita. He must have been white or almost white. I once asked Mamãe, but she said he was long gone and that I should mind my own business. Don’t go upsetting the empregadas. Having a father doesn’t matter, she said, not to people like them.
The song drew to a close. We had stood there, on the dirt road, listening to the whole thing.
“Come on, boys, it’s nearly time for dinner,” said Papai.
He walked too quickly for Thiago to keep up. I dropped back and strolled with my brother.
“What was that song?” said Thiago.
“Mamãe liked it a lot.”
We walked on a bit more, until the blue house appeared. In comparison to the surrounding shacks, it was as grand as the Copacabana Palace. Papai was already inside.
“I miss Mamãe,” said Thiago.
“I miss her too.”
He stopped walking. “André, sometimes I can’t remember her face.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I’m lying in bed, I think of her face and I can’t get it right. It doesn’t look like her.”
“I know what you mean.” I didn’t—I was a decade older and my memories were stronger. Even now, I can see my mother and hear her loud voice, her heels clicking on the floor. She’s like a pop song, the melody and lyrics imprinted in my mind. “Just look at the photos and you’ll remember.”
Thiago nodded, his eyes downcast. I put an arm round his shoulders and ruffled his hair. I didn’t know what else to say.
Inside, our father had turned on the radio, which was still playing northern music. He was sitting on the sofa in the living room, flicking through a book. I could smell dinner cooking.
“You boys walk so slowly,” he said, looking up. “You fit right in.”
It was true. Everything was slower in Pará. People walked slowly, talked slowly, packed bags in the supermarket slowly. Even time passed slowly. In London, I learned to walk fast, focused and blinkered like a racehorse. But in Pará, that three-minute Chico Buarque song seemed to last an hour. By the time it ended, the island was black with night.
Luana was in the kitchen, tending to a few pots on the stove, one hand resting on a hip, the other holding up a wooden spoon to her mouth to taste. I stood behind her for a few seconds without her noticing. She took her right foot out of her flip-flop and bent it behind her other leg, so that I could see its pale sole. The air was steamy with the comforting smell of a fish stew: coconut milk, peppers, and lime.
“Oi, Luana.”
She immediately put her foot back into the sandal. “Hi, André.” She turned her head. “How was the beach?”
“It was great. You should go sometime.”
“Maybe.”
“You can come with me.”
She turned again and looked at me, but didn’t say anything, then rinsed the wooden spoon under the tap. The water fell heavily into the metal sink, loud and echoing.
“It smells good.”
“It’s the first time I’ve made a moqueca without my mother.”
“I’m sure it’s great.”
We stood there awhile. I was thinking of something to say. Her lovely brown face, with those green eyes, showed nothing. No emotion. Her lips were closed. What would it be like to kiss them?
“Is there anything else I can get you? A snack, a drink? Dinner will be a while.”
Rita was my usual snack-maker. I couldn’t treat Luana like that. “No, there’s nothing I want. Thank you.”
When I closed the kitchen door behind me, I felt weak. My heart was beating in my throat. I hit myself in the chest and tried to pull myself together. In love with an empregada? I had lost my mind. I hadn’t been interested in girls since Mamãe’s death. I’d barely even masturbated because it made me feel so guilty, as if her ghost were watching me. I was practically a virgin, if you didn’t count the fumbling fuck I’d had on the beach when I was fifteen, with a friend of a friend. But with Luana? No. That couldn’t happen.
I went to the TV room, where Thiago was flicking between channels. I flipped on the ceiling fan and it whirred above us.
“Well, that makes no difference.” I popped my head out of the door. “Pai!”
No answer. I could hear him whispering with Luana in the kitchen.
“Paaaai!”
“What, what?”
“Does this place not have air-conditioning?”
“Of course it doesn’t.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“Stop being so bourgeois. Wear fewer clothes.”
I was just wearing shorts, but he couldn’t see me.
&nb
sp; “Yeah, André, go naked,” said Thiago, giggling.
“Shut up.”
“With your willy dangling out!”
I jumped on him on the sofa, pinned him down, and tickled him.
He laughed gleefully, showing the little gaps in his milk teeth. “Stop, stop!”
“Only if you admit that you’re an idiot.”
“I’m an idiot, I’m an idiot!”
I stopped tickling him. “You give up too easily.”
He looked rumpled. Sweat had dampened his wavy black hair. I was getting a bit old to be teasing my brother. I sat next to him and pulled my feet up on the sofa. Luana came in, still wearing her apron, and stood by the door. Sweat trickled down my face, making my glasses slip. She smelled like moqueca, which made my stomach rumble loudly.
“Are you hungry, André?” She laughed.
“Yes, it smells so good.” I’d already said that before. Say something else. “Do you want to sit on the sofa? You’ll get a better view.”
“Uh, no thank you, I’ll get a stool.”
“Come on, it’s more comfortable.”
“OK.”
We moved up and Luana sat on the end of the sofa. I could feel Thiago’s hot breath on my left arm, and her denim shorts touching my right leg. I had never sat on the same sofa as her. I could feel the heat of her body, through her shorts. I hoped she couldn’t smell my sweat.
Everyone stopped talking and looked straight ahead as the opening credits to the six o’clock novela, De Quina Pra Lua, began, sound-tracked by a jaunty samba. In the credits, a shadowy male figure runs after a flying piece of paper; he rips a towel from a woman’s body, ends up in prison, then flies to heaven. The show followed the story of Zezão, who dies after winning the lottery and is buried with his ticket, prompting his family to go on a madcap search for it. Sometimes he appears as a ghost to give them clues.
It was the first time I had sat next to Luana and heard her laugh up close. In Rio she watched TV quietly, sitting by the door. But now she laughed quickly and loudly, like a machine gun.