by Luiza Sauma
“Why so quiet?” she said.
“Am I?”
“You always are.”
I pushed my glasses up my nose. Being quiet was—and still is—regarded with suspicion in Rio, which is strange, considering the sullenness of our Portuguese forefathers. Daniela thought, somehow, that her being my girlfriend would change me, but still, I was determined to make an effort, to stoke up the crush I had before Mamãe died.
“Want to swim?” I said.
“Yes.”
We stood up, shook the sand off our bodies, and walked to the ocean. As the cool water rushed over our feet, Daniela yelped at its force. I took off my glasses and held them in my right hand.
“Can you see anything?”
I could see a smiling blur where her face was. Behind her, the Atlantic. Behind that, who knows. “Not much.”
She took my hand and we waded in.
After the beach, Daniela and I went to my flat to get a drink—it was her idea. I felt queasy, thinking of her meeting Luana, but I couldn’t think of an excuse not to go. Dani wanted to see where I lived. We took the service lift because we were covered in sand, but walked into the flat through the guests’ door.
“Hello?” said Luana from the kitchen.
“Hi, it’s me. I’ve brought a friend.”
Luana walked into the living room with her hands clasped behind her back, looking strangely formal.
“Luana, this is Daniela.” I forced a casual smile.
“Hi,” said Dani, looking at Luana, then at me.
“Prazer.” Luana nodded. “Can I get you anything to drink?”
Before I could say no, Daniela gave her order: “Yes, please, can I have a guaraná with ice?”
“For you too, André?”
“Yes, please.”
Luana left the room, her uniform hanging loosely over her body. It was probably her mother’s dress, I realized. Dani and I sat on a sofa, spreading sand everywhere. She leaned in and kissed my cheek while I tried to think of something to say, knowing that Luana could hear us.
“What’s up with her?” whispered Dani, rolling her eyes.
“What do you mean?”
Before she could answer, Luana had returned with two frosted glasses of guaraná with ice.
That evening, at dinner, Papai quizzed me about my day at school. I told him what I’d studied and left out the bit where I spent the entire afternoon on the beach, drinking beer with my friends, smoking cigarettes, and flirting with Daniela. Shoving each other in the water, holding hands, laughing at the return of our mutual attraction.
“Just make sure you work hard,” said Papai. “Keep your head down. Don’t waste time with your friends.”
“Surely I can see them sometimes?”
“Within reason.”
Papai had been a teenage nerd—I could tell from his old photos—and was trying to mold me in his image. I had the glasses, but that’s where the resemblance ended.
Thiago had put a fork through his chicken breast and was eating it in tiny bites, like an ice cream on a stick.
“That is a disgusting way to eat,” said Papai.
Thiago continued, regardless. My father couldn’t be bothered to pursue it. “What did you learn at school, Thiago?”
“About the Portuguese landing in Brazil.”
“What year was that?”
“Fifteen hundred.”
“Who discovered it?”
“Uhhh … ”
“Come on, this is easy for us.”
“Cabral!” said Thiago, through a mouthful of chicken. “Pedro Álvares Cabral. Is he related to us?”
“Probably.” Papai sliced his chicken and took a quick bite. He clashed the fork with his teeth, sending a shiver down my spine.
“It’s a common name, though,” I said. “He didn’t even stay in Brazil.”
“Oh, André, stop ruining our fun.”
“Yeah,” said Thiago. “I’m the king of Portugal!”
He shot his skinny arms into the air, and we all laughed.
“André, I have a proposition for you. How would you like to come work in the surgery? Just once in a while.” Papai pushed his glasses to the top of his head and looked at me intensely. I didn’t have a choice in the matter and knew that “once in a while” did not mean “once in a while.”
“What would I do?”
“Watch operations, help the receptionist. Maybe even, you know, assist me.”
“Is that legal?”
He screwed up his face as though to say, “Who cares?” My father didn’t care for rules, other than the ones he set himself. In this sense, he wasn’t unusual. The country—indeed, the continent—was run by men like him. Rules were for servants and poor people, and lucky gringos who lived in civilized countries.
“Pai, I have a lot of schoolwork at the moment. I don’t know if I have time for this.”
“Stop going to the beach with your little friends, and you’ll have time for it.”
“Do I have any say in this?”
He looked straight at me and laughed, his eyes small and mocking, his brown skin glistening with sweat. What would Mamãe have said? “Matheus, leave him alone, meu Deus do céu—he’s just a boy.”
“Oh, it’s like that? I offer you an opportunity and you just want to wriggle out of it and go to the goddamn beach? I would have loved to do something like this at your age, but unfortunately I had to do it all alone.”
This was a recurring theme: how lucky we were, compared to him, though he never went into much detail about his past. Mamãe, when she was angry with him, would tell us: Papai was impossible because he came from an impossible family. She said that his father had a dozen illegitimate children and disappeared when Papai was a teenager, probably murdered. I didn’t know if this was true, but it sounded exciting, like a novela.
“OK. I’ll do it.”
“Good.” Papai looked genuinely pleased. “You’ll start next week.”
We didn’t talk any more. All I could hear was slicing, chewing, swallowing, drinking, and, outside, cars on the street, people walking and talking. Life was out there; one day mine would begin. I ate quickly and stood up to leave. Thiago followed me.
“Run along and watch TV,” said Papai, “because soon you’ll be working with me. Playtime is over, menino.”
We went to the TV room. I was furious. Anger pumped through my heart, burning my fingers and toes. One day I won’t be under his thumb, I told myself. One day I’ll show him I’m a better man than he is.
Thiago was in his own world, telling me about his school’s new petting zoo. “I stroked a baby goat.”
“Was it nice?” I managed to say.
“It was cute. We should get a goat. Turn on the TV.”
I don’t remember what was on—some novela—because I wasn’t watching. Looking at the TV, but not seeing it. After washing the dishes, Luana appeared and sat on her wooden chair. Her eyes lacked their usual brightness. Less lime flesh, more trampled leaves. Still beautiful enough to make my anger turn lukewarm. I paid even less attention to the TV. She knew I was looking at her—her jaw twitched and her eyes were glassy—but still, she stared ahead at the screen. I turned to Thiago and saw that he had been watching me.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Nothing.”
Luana glanced at us, looking uneasy, then looked back at the TV. When the show finished, she got up, said, “Good night,” and retired to the room at the back of the kitchen. She didn’t even look at me when she left. Flip-flops slapping on the kitchen tiles. I counted them: um, dois, três, quatro … Then Thiago followed soon after and went to his bedroom.
Living with Luana was becoming more difficult every day, and there was no end in sight. I was planning to attend university in Rio and would be living at home for many years, until I paired off with a woman. It could be six years, ten years, or forever, like Mamãe’s brother, Gustavo, who in his forties was still living with Vovó and Vovô, jobless, delus
ional, and dulled by lithium. Aunt Lia lived in fear of becoming his guardian—she was a psychoanalyst and had enough mad people in her life. But I was nothing like Gustavo. I decided to avoid Luana as much as I could. No more TV sessions, no more lingering looks. I would follow my father’s orders and stay in my bedroom, do my homework like a good boy. His offer of unpaid labor was the perfect excuse to get out of the flat, even though I didn’t want to do it.
That night I lay awake in bed, neatly lining up my plans, like ornaments on a shelf. Then I masturbated while thinking of Luana—her curved pink lips, her round bum-bum, her small breasts and her nipples, which I had never seen, but which were surely as brown and hard as raisins—but after I came stickily into my right hand, my excitement faded to shame. A sound came from the kitchen, on the other side of the flat. Luana or Rita’s flip-flops. Slap, slap, slap. Water gushing into a plastic cup.
TWELVE
When I was kid, Europe was the dream: o primeiro mundo, the mythic first world. Despite the fact that my friends and I had all been there on holidays—and found it deeply boring, walking round art galleries and tired old streets, wearing too many layers of clothing—we clung to the idea that emigrating to Europe was like going to heaven. The specific country didn’t matter. To us, Europe was itself a country—uniformly glamorous, wise, and superior—though looking back I doubt we were dreaming of the USSR, Yugoslavia, or Romania. Those countries didn’t count.
Sometimes older siblings or cousins would go over for a year or two and come back blabbering about the galleries, the culture, the statues, the superiority of our ancestral home. (I have Italian and Portuguese blood, but even Portugal, when I visited, seemed entirely foreign: that brittle accent, the dour people.) Our twentieth-century explorers always came back, for some reason. Like Carlito’s older sister, Juliana, who spent two years in London, living with Brazilians in a shared house, dating a Brazilian chef, and skipping her English lessons: “Meu Deus, it was incredible.”
The old world. Londres. Roma. Lisboa. Paris. But especially Londres. No dictatorships, bureaucracy, muggings, or shitty currency. (That year we had a new one, the cruzado.) Most of us had been mugged at least once. I had been with Mamãe when she handed over her purse to black boys with knives. My bicycle—my seventeenth-birthday present—was taken three weeks after I received it. Rodrigo had his trainers stolen while visiting family in Santa Teresa, up in the hills. He walked back to his aunt’s house in socks. Carlito once came home just in his boxer shorts. Isabel lost her grandmother’s wedding ring to two boys, no older than twelve. The ring had survived Auschwitz, hidden away in some orifice, but couldn’t survive a night out in Copacabana. Daniela had been mugged twice in São Paulo—once at knifepoint, once at gunpoint. Not surprising: wealth seeped from her freckles, her blue eyes; nails done, legs waxed, hair sun-bleached, walk insouciant. Our wealth shone from our faces like beacons: come and get us. No wonder we wanted to get away and live in cities where there were more of us.
I hadn’t been to Europe since I was twelve, but that didn’t stop me from taking part in the hagiography. We had it all planned out: midnight strolls by the Trevi Fountain, gold glittering on the girls’ necks and ears, with no risk of theft; eating croissants by the Seine.
“The streets were so clean in Londres,” I said, “and everyone sat in cafés, reading books.”
We were sitting under a tree outside our school, just after classes had ended. It had rained heavily that morning, but already the ground had dried to dust.
“Wow,” said Isabel.
Any of us could have sat in cafés reading books in Rio, but we didn’t. I had forgotten that the streets of London are also flecked with chewing gum, dog shit, and homeless people, shivering in the year-round cold—or maybe I hadn’t noticed.
“We went to the cinema and could watch any film we wanted—nothing was banned.”
“Nothing’s banned here anymore,” Dani pointed out.
“Yeah, not for the last five minutes,” said Carlito. “What did you watch?”
“The Empire Strikes Back.”
“That wasn’t even banned here,” said Rodrigo. “I saw it at Barra Shopping!”
“Yeah, but come on—I was twelve years old,” I said. “I wasn’t going to watch Deliverance.”
“What’s that?” said Dani.
“Only the most important American film of the seventies.”
“The seventies?” said Isabel. “Who cares about the seventies?”
“I don’t know why you’re all so obsessed with leaving,” said Dani. “I like it here.” We all looked at her, making her face turn pink. “Why is that weird?”
“This country is a shithole. I’m gonna go to Paris, work for Vogue.” Isabel cackled, as if she knew it was a pipe dream, and that she would become a society woman like her mother; kept, stretched, and gym-honed, with three empregadas and a husband who played away.
“I don’t need to live in the center of the world,” said Dani.
I wondered if people felt different living over there, walking through those old streets, knowing they were going somewhere, doing something. You would walk off the plane and feel a crackle of importance in the air. I hadn’t felt it when I was twelve, but I was a man now.
“You don’t mind living here for the rest of your life?” I said.
“I’d like to travel the world,” said Dani, “but I want to come back afterwards.”
“No way, cara, I’m leaving and never coming back. As soon as I get signed to Juventus.” Gabriel laughed ironically, just as Isabel had done.
“In your dreams!” said Carlito. “I’m leaving too.” He picked a city at random. “Madrid, or something. What about you, André?”
I was serious. I wanted to get away. From the suffocating humidity, palm trees on the beach, the taste of coconut water, neatly folded clothes in my wardrobe. The view of the Cagarras from my living-room window. All of it an echo of my mother. All of them whispering, Mamãe, Mamãe, Mamãe.
“Londres. I really felt at home there.”
Everyone nodded, apart from Daniela. She was laughing at me, shaking her head. I was talking out of my arse. I hadn’t felt at home in London. I was bored, cold, and pissed off with my parents, trailing behind them at museums. Thiago had been two years old, the center of attention. The highlight had been the break-dancers in the street, with their rolled-out mats—black boys shilling for coins, just as they did in Rio, but these weren’t the same sort of black boys—and The Empire Strikes Back, which I watched with Papai at a cinema in Marble Arch. At least that’s where I think it was. It’s difficult to align the London of 1980 with the London of 2014. In reality, the only place I had ever felt at home, in 1986, was on Avenida Vieira Souto, between Rua Maria Quitéria and Rua Joana Angélica, five floors up.
THIRTEEN
Papai’s surgery was in one of the few remaining houses in Ipanema. Who knows why it was exempt from the destruction of the old Zona Sul—it was nothing special. Whitewashed and squat, windows barred against robbers, and too poky for its purpose. It seemed incongruous: state-of-the-art plastic surgery taking place in such an old building. (Old in Rio means early twentieth century.) But Papai always said that surgery wasn’t that sophisticated—just butchery and common sense. A large sign was posted in the front yard, stating Papai’s name and credentials, with a photo of his smiling face: MATHEUS CABRAL, CIRURGIÃO PLÁSTICO. I vividly remember an argument he had with Mamãe over the sign when he first bought the building.
“Who would want surgery from someone with a nose like yours?” she said.
But his business didn’t suffer. Maybe his clients liked the picture’s honesty. Here’s my big Lebanese nose, it said, here are my tiny native eyes, and my full, trustworthy Portuguese mouth. Now let’s see what we can do about your ugly face. Young women mostly wanted nose jobs and breast enlargements or reductions, while their mothers and grandmothers had their faces stretched tight over their skulls. Men, too, walked the streets of Zona Sul with ba
ndaged faces, proudly bearing their bloodied symbols of wealth. Sunglasses on top, like the invisible man.
I started working as the surgery’s receptionist, administrator, and general drudge, unpaid, on afternoons, evenings, and even weekends—Papai was working longer hours than ever before. The first operation I witnessed was a breast reduction. I don’t remember the woman’s face, but I will never forget her breasts—enormous, goose-pimpled, dark-nippled—and how her skin gave way so easily to my father’s scalpel, which I had passed to him. Under the skin, the woman was red meat and yellow fat, just an animal being butchered. I tasted something sour at the back of my throat and my body felt heavy, my head light, but, no, of course I wouldn’t give in to it in front of my father. He turned to me and nodded appreciatively, as though we were witnessing a rare work of art. I soon got used to the operations and sometimes even assisted Papai, beyond just passing him his instruments. It wasn’t legal, but the other doctors and nurses barely raised an eyebrow when, a few weeks in, he asked me to sew a nipple back onto a breast. I did a good job, and the woman would never know—she was out cold, her tongue hanging out.
“Who needs medical school when you have me?” Papai slapped me on the back and smiled widely through his surgical mask, his eyes small and bright.
I smiled back. It pleased me to please my father. I learned how to make an incision, sew someone up, and mold a nose to perfection. Ahead of the curve, just as he wanted. One day, all of this could be mine, whether I wanted it or not.
Papai had always been a workaholic, but sometimes I would wonder, what kind of person gets a nose job at 10:00 p.m. on a Monday? When I started working with him, the mystery deepened. Most of his employees clocked off at six or seven, but Papai and one of his nurses, Elena, worked into the night. After eating dinner at home, we would often return to the surgery, where I would sit at the reception, doing admin and welcoming his patients. The patients in the evening were not like the others. They weren’t registered in the appointment book. They didn’t look any different when they left. No bandages, no swollen chests. Just tear-blotched faces, wincing a little. All of them women, usually alone. Papai didn’t invite me into the operating theater and told me not to answer phone calls in the evening, but put them straight through to his office.