by Luiza Sauma
“We all miss Dona Beatriz. Don’t cry, Thi.” It was as if Luana had been possessed by Rita. It was exactly the sort of thing she would say, in that same low, shushing tone. “I’ve heard that this is a great book, you know.”
He stopped crying and fixed his eyes somewhere in the distance. All of us were silent for a while. Papai drank a much-needed glass of whiskey, then we went to church.
After Pará, Luana took to wearing the perfume fairly often. Even when she was just cooking and cleaning, she smelled like a rich lady on her way to a party. The perfume was called L’Air du Temps. I didn’t remember that until several years later, when Esther took me to Kentish Town to meet her parents for the first time. It was May 1994—a Saturday. Two months before my twenty-sixth birthday. We walked up Falkland Road arm in arm. Still wearing wool coats, even though it was spring.
“I’m nervous.”
“Don’t be!” said Esther. “They’ll love you. They love anything foreign and exotic.”
“You’re the exotic one, gringa.”
Esther’s childhood home was a Victorian terrace, three stories high, with bumblebees clinging to lavender in the front garden. The door was opened by her mother, Judith, a good-looking woman with short dark hair and Esther’s smile. We said hello, and then I smelled Luana in the air. Flowers and musk. Marajó. The leap of a wave on Ipanema beach, out of my living-room window. Everything else. I kissed my future mother-in-law on both cheeks, answering her questions, laughing when she told me that I had a charming accent, that she had always wanted to go to Brazil. Soon her husband, Joe, was in the hallway, and I was shaking his hand and offering the bottle of wine I’d brought, but my body felt as if it were closing in. After a couple of minutes I excused myself and went to the bathroom. Splashed water on my face, looked up, and saw it there, sitting next to the sink: L’Air du Temps.
EIGHT
It was the same church Papai had attended as a boy: small and white with a blue trim, and a sign saying 1911. All the seats were taken. The doors were open and half of the village was sitting outside, straining their necks to see the priest give his sermon, fanning themselves with prayer books. We were a few minutes late and the priest was already in full swing, droning away in Portuguese and Latin.
“There’s nowhere to sit,” I said.
“Let’s just sit here.” Papai gestured at the people on the ground outside the church. They were all looking at us and whispering to one another, but in a friendly sort of way.
“Senhor,” came a voice from just inside the church, from a thin old man sitting in the last row of chairs. “Your daughter can have my seat.”
I looked at Luana to see her reaction, but she had turned away from me and was staring at the half-naked, gape-mouthed, wooden Jesus.
“That’s quite all right,” said Papai rather loudly. “We’ll sit over here. Thank you.”
We sat on the floor, just inside the building. People moved over to make room, then offered us drinks and snacks. Cups of coffee (“It’ll help you stay awake”), manioc cakes, and handfuls of buttery popcorn. After taking one bite of a cake, Thiago curled up on Luana’s lap and fell asleep. I felt jealous that he was young enough to get away with that. She looked sleepy too. Her eyes were opening and closing, opening and closing. She put her arms around my brother.
I looked to my right and saw Papai’s face in the darkness, looking at me, his eyes glinting. A tiny piece of popcorn was stuck to his lip. I could barely hear a word of the service, other than the regular améms that the crowd joined in with. Neither could the people sitting around us, it seemed; many of them were having quiet but animated conversations.
“Comfortable?” said Papai.
“Not really.”
“Me neither.” He seemed as bored as I was. Fidgety, barely watching. “Maybe we should wake up those two.”
I gave Thiago a little shake.
“Mamãe,” he said, wrapping his arms around Luana. She was asleep too, hugging him back.
“Thi-thi,” I said.
He opened his eyes. “Where are we?”
“At the church.”
“Huh?”
“In Marajó.”
He looked up and saw that he was in Luana’s arms, not Mamãe’s. Luana opened her eyes and lifted her head.
“Come on, let’s go,” said Papai.
We thanked everyone for their food and drinks, and they all nodded in return, saying, “Prazer, prazer.” Papai had satisfied his nostalgia, so it was time to go home. Midnight mass, like Belém, didn’t live up to his memories.
“Now I remember why I stopped going to church. It’s so boring,” he said, as we walked home.
Luana and Thiago were trailing behind, hand in hand.
“Isn’t it funny?” he continued. “You yearn for things that you didn’t even like at the time.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned to me, but I couldn’t see his expression. It was too dark.
“Never mind. I’m just rambling—it’s what you do when you get old.”
Inwardly, I agreed. My father was ancient to me. He was forty-three—younger than I am now.
It was too hot to sleep that night. I lay awake in bed, sweating through my sheets, feeling as if I were on fire. The cicadas were screaming so loudly it sounded as if they were in the room. I opened the window, but it made no difference. The air was thick and unmoving. I reached for my glasses, but they weren’t on the bedside table. I got out of bed and went downstairs, where it was cooler. The tiles were almost cold beneath my feet. I was walking to the kitchen to get a glass of water when I heard her.
“André?”
In my sleepless, half-blind haze, I thought my mother’s ghost might be paying me a visit. I spun round to face the doorway of the darkened TV room and saw a shadow, sitting on the sofa. Luana’s curly hair was loose. So different from my mother’s, which was straight like an Indian’s.
“What are you doing in the dark?” I reached for the light.
“Don’t.”
“Have you become a vampire?” I walked into the room and felt my way along the wall to the sofa. I sat on the other side, far from Luana.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
“Me neither. It’s too hot.”
“The heat doesn’t bother me.”
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know or you won’t tell me?”
“We shouldn’t act like friends,” she said.
“Why not?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“Sorry.” I was about to ask her if she missed Rita, then realized that was another question. “I don’t know what to say now.”
A silver halo of light was around her hair—the only thing I could see of her. No features, nothing. Just black.
“You look like an angel.”
“What?”
“There’s a halo around your head.” A stupid thing to say—too intense.
“Were you thinking about Dona Beatriz? Is that why you can’t sleep?”
“Kind of. When I saw you sitting there, I thought you were her ghost.”
“What gave me away?”
“Your hair.”
In the dark, she shook her curly head, and the halo shuddered over it.
I swallowed hard before asking, “Do you think about your father?”
“No. I never knew him.”
“Who was he?”
“You and your questions. I don’t know, some white guy from Vidigal who doesn’t live there anymore. Mamãe only mentions him when she’s warning me about men.”
“What does she say?”
“Not to bother with them. Just to concentrate on work.”
But Rita loves me, I wanted to say, and I’m a man. “That doesn’t sound fun.”
“I know.”
I knew then that I could kiss her. Outside could wait. There was nothing in the world apart from that room, the humming of the insects
, Luana’s halo, and my erection, rising hopefully in my shorts. I moved closer to her. Cool sweat trickled down the sides of my face.
She must have felt the sofa shift. “What are you doing?”
“Now you’re asking the questions,” I said in a serious, flat tone. The kind that men used in novelas when they were seducing women.
I didn’t mean it to be funny, but she laughed. “André.”
I moved closer, so that our thighs touched. Her skin was cooler than mine. In the darkness I found one of her hands, resting on her lap. Our palms were sweating. Her breath was blowing hot and humid on my face. Using it as a guide, I could just about work out where her lips were hiding in the dark. Those full pink lips, with the deep Cupid’s bow, like the letter V. I leaned in.
“What are you doing?” she said, but didn’t push me off.
My calculations were wrong. I kissed her on the side of her mouth, and she whispered a laugh. I laughed too, nervously. Luana turned her head an inch and our lips pressed drily against each other’s, came away, then pressed again. It lasted five seconds, no more, until she stood up, so that her halo disappeared.
“I’m going to bed.”
“Luana?”
“Good night.”
Back to her room she went, padding through the kitchen. My heart beat quickly, like that of a small animal. I went to bed and masturbated while thinking of Luana in her orange bikini, then fell asleep as the sun was rising.
The rest of our time in Pará passed quickly. We were in Marajó for two more weeks, including a quiet New Year’s Eve, and then a few nights in Belém. I said all the right things to Papai, played with my brother, thanked Luana for lunch every day, but inside I was lit up. When I went to the beach in Marajó, the river water crackled against my skin like electricity. Everything slowed down when Luana entered rooms—though she seemed to avoid any room that I was in. She didn’t acknowledge what had happened, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Getting her alone was impossible. She stuck to Thiago like a parasite: watched TV with him, took him to the beach before I woke up, took him to the shops, and somehow convinced him to stay in the kitchen while she cooked. He sat on the little table, leafing through Alice in Wonderland, making her laugh the way I wanted to make her laugh. Angry and sweaty with jealousy, I would hear them from my room. There were no further kisses in Marajó, nor in Belém.
The night before we flew home, there was a farewell dinner at Camila’s with all the same people from the previous party, and a few more. Wine, several courses of food, and a three-piece band playing the same old songs. Thiago ate so much that he was almost sick. I rubbed his back as he retched in the garden. Nothing came up. Inside the house, he pulled two dining chairs together and fell asleep on them, as the party carried on around him. Papai and I were told, time and time again, that we had to come back soon. That we should have stayed longer. That we could stay in any of their homes, anytime.
I never saw any of those people again.
I went back to my hiding place, at the back of the garden, closed my eyes, and thought of Luana. The curve of her lips, her moist hand, her breath.
NINE
On a Friday morning in September I received a postcard of Christ the Redeemer, arms spread, looking over the city and the sea—the classic Rio shot, too far away to see the ugliness.
“Looks nice,” said one of the receptionists, handing it over to me.
“It is.”
André,
I’m visiting my mother in Rio. She still lives with her sister in the old bairro. I’ve asked her many times to join us in the north, but she always says, “Maybe next year.” She won’t even visit anymore. She thinks the river is cursed. I feel the opposite. I can’t stand to be in Rio. Can you? Graças a Deus, I will leave tomorrow.
Luana
I read the postcard in a few seconds, while waiting for my first patient. I read it again during my lunch break, over a sandwich, and then several times at home that evening, over a microwaved curry and a bottle of wine, half-watching a Danish TV drama that Esther had liked. I read Luana’s letters from the beginning, from the first to the postcard. I got out of bed at dawn and read them again in the kitchen. Outside the window, London was dark blue. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Ipanema beach, the ocean, the favela at the end. Then I opened them, saw a row of Victorian terraces, and felt a shiver of embarrassment. I was far from home.
In the afternoon I trudged down the road, exhausted, to pick up my daughters from Winston Road. I rang the bell for five minutes before Hannah answered, wearing pink pajamas, glasses, and a dark nest of hair, piled on top. While she got ready, I waited in the living room, sinking into our old leather sofa, resting my feet on the Persian rug Esther and I had bought together, a few months after we married. If I had closed my eyes, I would’ve fallen asleep in seconds—that’s how tired I was. The same framed photos sat on the mantelpiece, including the one that Matt took at our wedding. Esther wore a short white dress and dark red lipstick. She looked eighteen, not twenty-four, and ridiculously happy, caught in mid-laugh. The smell of the place: plants, wood, and dust, the smell of Esther, Hannah, and Bia. A hundred years from now, we would all be dead, but a hint of us would linger in the house. I was sure of it.
I took the girls to our usual place. After three months of living apart, we already had a usual place: the Clissold Park café, which is housed in an old mansion. It had once been the home of someone rich and important, but now it was a place to drink coffee and eat cake, for mothers with babies to congregate. It was close to the restaurant where Bia worked—she was saving up to go backpacking, before going to university to study medicine, the family business. We sat outside. It was one of those blue-and-gold early-autumn days that make you thankful for everything: sandwiches, coffee, various small dogs running around us on the grass. The girls ate with one hand, stroking passing dogs with the other.
“Bia,” I said. “Have you thought about where you’re going to go?”
“Dunno,” she said, chewing. “Maybe Brazil.”
“Brazil? Really?”
She narrowed her eyes and her upper lip twitched. “Yes, really,” she said irritably.
It was so easy to get on her nerves, so easy for her to twist an innocent remark into an attack. There was an air of sadness around her, a nervous tension that made me feel like a failure.
“It’s a dangerous country,” I said.
“Oh, come on.”
“Why do we never go to Brazil, Dad?” said Hannah.
“We’ve been a few times,” I said.
“Twice,” said Bia. “Once when I was three, which I don’t remember, and then for Granddad’s funeral.”
Papai was sixty-seven when he died. His empregada found him, keeled over in the bathroom. I’m next on the list.
“I remember the view from Granddad’s flat,” said Hannah, “of the beach?”
It was funny, how they called him Granddad when they barely knew him. They had met him just once, when they were too young to hold on to their memories. The second time, he was a body in a coffin—his skin smooth and waxy with makeup, blushing like a doll. My atheist father had a Catholic funeral with an open casket. Thiago organized the whole thing.
“Your uncle Thiago lives in that flat now,” I said.
“We know, Dad,” said Bia. “We know him.”
Thiago had stayed with us twice in London. A few days when he was a teenager, on his tour of Europe, and two months in his early twenties.
“Thiago’s emails are so nice,” said Hannah.
“It’s Chee-ah-gu,” I said, correcting her pronunciation.
“OK, Chee-ah-gu,” she said. “He’s always inviting us to come and stay with him and his boyfriend. What’s his name, again?”
“Jesse,” said Bia and I, at the same time.
Bia laughed. I was surprised that she knew Jesse’s name, that she had forged a relationship with Thiago without my knowing about it. What else did they talk about?
“We found some photos of you and Thiago recently,” said Bia, “when Mum was clearing out the attic.”
“And photos of your maids,” said Hannah. “I can’t believe you had maids.”
“In their little white uniforms,” said Bia.
“Oh my God, it’s like Downton Abbey.”
“Not quite,” I said. “There were only two of them.”
“Only two?” Bia laughed. “Can we get one, then?”
I remembered those photos, one in particular. It was taken at my grandparents’ house in Teresópolis, weeks before the accident. My mother standing next to a small tree in the garden, where a hummingbird had made a nest and laid two eggs, as tiny as aspirin pills. The nest was just outside my bedroom, and I took the photo from inside, kneeling on a chair. You can just about see the mother bird’s shimmering blue-green face and Mamãe—looking at her—eyes downcast, with a small smile, her black hair pulled into a bun. Her face is Bia’s face: wide cheekbones like an Indian, hooded eyes, pale skin. She’s a ghost of my daughter from the past.
The girls moved on to other subjects—school, TV, friends. When I looked up at their laughing faces, I realized that I had no idea what they were laughing at; I hadn’t been listening for several minutes. I was somewhere else. I should get something to help me sleep, I thought—yes, I’ll do that tomorrow. My daughters carried on laughing, somewhat hysterical. They dabbed tears from their eyes. I smiled, pretending to get the joke. The ground felt unsteady under my feet.
TEN
Like many apartments in Rio, ours could be entered through two doors: one opened into the kitchen and the other, the guests’ door, opened into an L-shaped living-and-dining room. My father unlocked the kitchen door as we stood in the hallway gloom. Thiago was expectant, waiting for a hug from Rita. Luana was staring straight ahead. She had mostly ignored me on the way home, but was just courteous enough for no one else to notice.
“Hello, everyone,” came a soft voice from behind the door, like a balm over a scratch.
“Rita!” said Thiago.
She was standing in the kitchen in her white uniform and white rubber flip-flops, that small rare smile on her face. Thiago rushed inside and hugged her wide body.