Flesh and Bone and Water

by Luiza Sauma

“One of your friends called.”

  “Which one?”

  “Daniela. She was asking if you were OK.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said you were sleeping. She said she might come visit you tomorrow evening, if you’re still unwell.”

  Luana left and closed my door, and I lay in the dark, listening to the outside world.

  I never get ill anymore. That’s what happens when you have children. As a parent, you can’t play at being a child—not until you’re older, and then it returns with a brute, unwanted force.

  I felt a little better the next day, but not well enough to go to school, so I spent the day in bed, listening to music and trying to read Chekhov’s short stories, translated into Portuguese. My headache made it difficult to keep up with all the Russian names and characters. I managed one full story, “Gooseberries,” a story—within a story—about greed and disappointment, like all the best stories. I wondered how Chekhov managed it—writing in the evenings, working as a doctor all day. He must have had empregadas and an understanding wife. Even with his empregadas, I couldn’t imagine Papai having time for anything other than work. But then I gave up on reading and turned to music. There were two record players in the flat—one in the living room and one in my parents’ bedroom. Papai never used the latter, so Rita and Luana brought it to my room, put it on my desk, and plugged it in. I felt guilty for bossing them around, but they kept asking me what I wanted every five minutes.

  “Can you play the Chico Buarque one—Chico Canta?” I said to Luana.

  She had brought a pile of records into my room. Rita had gone elsewhere—back to cleaning. Constant cleaning: every day, all day.

  “This one?” Luana held up a record. The cover showed Chico in a flat cap and a mustache, crooning into a mic.

  “The third song.”

  She shook the record out of its sleeve, placed it on the machine, and pressed play. I thought she would then leave the room, but instead she sat on the chair, in front of the turning record. Mamãe’s song, “Tatuagem.” I hadn’t heard it since Marajó.

  “This is old music,” said Luana, grinning.

  “Not that old.” I closed my eyes and listened. The impossible beauty of the strings, the directness of his words. When I opened my eyes, Luana was resting her head on her palm, and her elbow on the desk, looking into the distance with her milky-green eyes.

  “I remember it,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Of course. Dona Beatriz played it over and over again. Especially on the days when she didn’t come out of her room.”

  “When was that?”

  “Lots of times. Sometimes she would stay in bed all morning and only get dressed and put her makeup on before you came back from school. Someone else would run her shop for her.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Well, you weren’t here. We could hear it coming from her room all day. My mother and I got so sick of it.”

  Luana got up to leave.

  “Don’t go.”

  “I have work to do.”

  “Luana, please. Tell me more about my mother.”

  “You should ask your father.”

  “You’re remembering it wrong. My mother was fine.”

  “You’re right, I don’t know anything.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  She left and the record played on, until it reached the end of side one and drifted into rhythmic, crackling nothingness.

  Daniela paid me a visit, true to her word. She came into my bedroom still wearing her school rucksack on her back. We had seen each other a few days before, but it felt like longer. All those dreams, all that stretched time.

  “I dropped by yesterday, but you were asleep,” she said. “I was walking past, on the way home. Just to see if you were all right.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

  “But you were asleep.” She seemed anxious.

  “How are you?”

  “Oh, you know. School. Boring.”

  She sat on the end of my bed. I realized we had nothing to say to each other. Maybe it was just the illness, clouding my mind. She looked lovely, with her nervous blue eyes, her blond hair in a bun, but I wished that she would go away.

  “Your empregada,” she said. “She’s pretty.”

  “Is she?”

  “You know she is. Isn’t that weird? Our empregada looks like an old bruxa.”

  FIFTEEN

  “Can I ask you something?” said Bia. “How did your mother die?”

  “You already know that.”

  “I know it was a car accident, but you’ve never told me the whole story.”

  We were at a local Italian restaurant, just the two of us. It was my idea—I wanted to tell her that I thought going to Brazil was a good idea, that she should accept Thiago’s invitation. After I said my piece, she brought up Mamãe. The wine, it made her bold. Esther wouldn’t have approved of us drinking together.

  “It’s not a nice story.”

  “Do all stories have to be nice?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “She was my grandmother. I just want to know. But if you don’t want to talk about it—”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  By then, a fourth letter had come. I’d been carrying it in my pocket for three days and had memorized it from beginning to end.

  André,

  I’m back in Marajó, sitting on my porch. Breakfast has finished, so I have a few minutes to myself before I go back to work. I thought I would tell you a bit more about when we left Rio.

  Chico settled in quickly up here—quicker than I did. When we left Rio, he kept asking, “Where are we going, why are we going there?”—and wouldn’t let go of my mother’s legs. She was crying too, which didn’t help. I kept the tears inside, but I knew I would miss Rio. I still do. The view of the beach from the morro, my friends and family, the constant noise, even in the middle of the night, when everyone should be asleep. I don’t like to be there, but I miss it. I’m sure you know what I mean.

  I missed my—

  “Dad?” Bia laughed, waving a hand in front of my face. “You’ve drifted off somewhere.”

  “Sorry. OK, I’ll tell you.”

  Bia folded a slice of pizza in two and bit down. I had forgotten about my food, veal Milanese with spaghetti. I ate a couple of mouthfuls. It had gone cold. I sipped my wine before refilling our glasses. How many years since I’d last told this story? When I was young, I told it regularly to new friends and girlfriends, but I hadn’t had one of those in years.

  “I was at the beach one Sunday. Ipanema—you remember it?”

  “Everyone knows Ipanema.” Bia pronounced it Ipaneema, like a gringa. “It’s, like, world-famous.”

  “I don’t mean do you remember it from a picture, I mean from life. It’s a different thing. Especially on a Sunday. Thousands of people. Rich people, poor people, beautiful people, ugly people, tourists. Past midday, it’s nearly impossible to find a place to sit.”

  “Who were you with?”

  “My friends Daniela, Rodrigo, Isabel, and Carlito, and some others. I can’t remember their names. We were sitting on the beach, surrounded by people on all sides. It was very hot. Maybe thirty-eight degrees, maybe forty, which is when it becomes intolerable. It was January, which is summer in Brazil.”

  “Of course.”

  The waiter came and took our plates, then brought a dessert menu.

  “We were sitting at Posto Nove, the ninth lifeguard post, which was the fashionable place to sit—all the students and socialists used to go there. These were the final months of the military dictatorship, so there were lots of radicals around, lots of protests. I was swimming in the ocean with Carlito and Rodrigo, getting swallowed up by the waves. We were playing jacaré—‘alligator’—catching the waves with our bodies.”

  “Bodysurfing?”

  “Yes, but often the waves just caught us. The ocean in Ipanema, it
’s no joke, but we weren’t scared of drowning, because we were young.”

  *

  We swam behind where the waves broke and floated awhile, watching the girls on the beach, the sun shimmering on the ocean and on the new buildings that had been springing up since we were babies. Everything was blurred because I had left my glasses on the beach, with the girls.

  Carlito looked over with a wet, toothy grin. “André. Daniela—she’s crazy for you. Crazy.”

  I laughed and he leapt on me, pushing my head under the cool water, which rushed into my ears and nose as I fought him off.

  “Stop it, cara! You think so?”

  “Cara, she totally is,” said Rodrigo. “You’re lucky.”

  We looked over at the girls on the sand, in bikinis and sunglasses, lying on rented beach chairs with their tanned, curvy legs bent at the knee. Sure, Daniela was the prettiest. She stalked the school corridors in miniskirts and sandals, confident of her power.

  We waved at the girls, and they waved back.

  “She wouldn’t go out with me,” I said.

  *

  “And Carlito said, ‘Hey, isn’t that your maid?’ I looked up and saw Rita, one of our maids, standing on the beach.”

  “How many maids did you have, again?” said Bia.

  “Two: Rita and her daughter, Luana.”

  I hadn’t said Luana’s name out loud for years, perhaps decades. Even when I visited Brazil and saw Papai and Thiago, we never talked about her. Such an odd, familiar sensation, moving my mouth around those syllables. Lu-uh-nuh. It seemed to echo around the restaurant—perhaps I’d shouted it, by mistake?—but Bia didn’t seem to notice.

  “Rita was standing on the beach, looking out to the ocean and trying to find me. Like this.” I raised my hand up to my forehead and remembered Rita, in her white uniform, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  “Any dessert?” said the waiter.

  “Just a couple of minutes,” said Bia, resting her elbows on the table. “Carry on.”

  *

  Rita’s figure was hazy in the heat because I wasn’t wearing my glasses, but also strangely still.

  “I’ll see what’s up,” I said, looking back to check if a wave was coming, so I could play one last round of jacaré.

  There was. The wave curled behind me, as clear as glass, and I started swimming, feeling it take me. It dropped me in the shallows. A perfect catch. Pleased with myself, I walked out of the sea, rubbing my hair, squeezing the water out of it, but seeing Rita up close, I knew that something was wrong. I could hear beeping and shouting on the street, farther down towards Copacabana, but it was nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Are you OK?” I said to Rita.

  She was standing with her arms by her sides, unmoving, staring at me, a look of blank horror on her face. I laughed, hoping to hold back whatever it was she was going to say. I took my glasses from Isabel’s sarong and put them on, so I could see again.

  *

  “And she said, ‘It’s your mother. There’s been a car accident.’ ”

  “Oh, God.” Bia held her hands up to her face.

  “Rita had been walking out of our building when she heard the commotion, so she went to have a look. She was crying and I just knew. I don’t know how, but I knew.”

  “Wow.”

  “So I ran to the street, towards the noise.”

  Perhaps I hadn’t actually known. Time has tinkered with my memories, taken them apart and put them back together in a tidy new shape. I’ve been living with that memory for longer than I lived with Mamãe. But it was strange, how I started running without asking Rita for more information.

  *

  The black-and-white pavement was so hot that I had to dance across it, trying to stick to the cooler white stripes. Traffic had stopped, cars were beeping. A crowd had gathered farther down the street—I ran towards it. Police officers were shouting at people to stay back. Women were covering their faces. My feet didn’t feel so hot anymore. The world became silent. I walked towards my mother’s red sports car, crushed against a traffic light by a large blue truck. But she wasn’t inside. A police officer held me back.

  “It’s my mother’s car.”

  He raised his eyebrows and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s at the hospital.” He led me away. “Come with me. You should get your clothes.”

  I was still just wearing my swimming trunks. I craned my head to get a better look at the car. Its smashed red paintwork was shining in the sun. There was blood on the black-and-white pavement where she had landed, ten meters away.

  *

  “My mother had crashed into a traffic light and the truck hit her from behind. She died on impact, thank God.”

  It was a white lie. The force of the crash threw her onto the pavement, and she died in the ambulance. She had suffered. But I preferred the story this way.

  “That’s just awful,” said Bia.

  “It was.”

  “Why did she crash?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said she crashed into the light before the truck hit her. Was there something wrong with her car?”

  Was there? I can’t remember. “Yes, yes, there was a fault.”

  How could I not remember? It was such an important detail. Her foot slipped on the pedals—yes, that was it.

  I looked at the bottle of wine, but it was empty.

  I missed my mother most of all. I didn’t know anyone here. The nights are silent, apart from the animals and the thunderstorms. It frightened me, at first. But not Chico—he slept well. He ran around the forest with his new friends, climbing trees, getting lost, swimming in the river. The kids here are softer, more gentle. They went swimming every day after school and I would watch from the beach. Chico was the palest, so the kids called him Branquinho. When they weren’t little anymore, they called him Branco. He grew tall, grew his hair out big and frizzy, and started getting attention from girls. He was beautiful.

  Beijos,

  Luana

  SIXTEEN

  I was doing homework on the round dining table. After being stuck in my room with the flu for so many days, I needed a change of scenery. But I struggled to stay focused. My eyes wandered to the glass doors that led to the balcony, to the ocean. I went to the kitchen—Luana was round the back, hanging up laundry next to an open window. Rita was somewhere else. Luana lowered the drying rack from the ceiling using a pulley, with her strong arms. Once the rack was just above her head, she tied the rope and started hanging up the clean sheets.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She stopped. “Bom dia.”

  The tension had lifted somewhat, since my illness. We were no longer afraid of talking to each other.

  “Do you want some help?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to help me.”

  “There’s no one around.”

  She didn’t answer, so I took it as a yes. I went over and took a pillowcase out of the basket, shook it out, and slung it over the rack. She handed me a peg. I clipped it over the pillowcase and took another from the basket. For a few minutes we stood, side by side, hanging and pinning up the rest of the sheets. Luana worked quickly, automatically, while I fussed over each item, trying to perfectly align them all on the rack. Once we were finished, sweat was trickling down my back, under my T-shirt, and the sheets were hanging over us, damp and fragrant.

  “Thank you.”

  “Anytime.”

  “Want to drink some mate? I made some a few hours ago. It should be cold by now.”

  “OK.”

  She opened the fridge and brought out a white plastic jug covered in condensation, full to the brim with cold, sweet mate. I took two glasses out of the cupboard and she poured out the drinks until they were both full.

  “Let’s drink it in the living room,” I said. “Then we can listen to music.”

  “Oh, OK.”

  We took our drinks to the living roo
m. She looked around uneasily.

  “Sit on the sofa,” I said.

  She sat on the dark green velvet sofa. I wondered if she had ever sat there before. Maybe only when we were out.

  “Put your feet up.” I dragged Mamãe’s Moroccan pouf under Luana’s small, flip-flopped feet. “Comfortable?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t look it. Her body was stiff and her eyes were downcast, embarrassed.

  “What would you like to listen to?”

  “Surprise me.”

  Our records were mixed up: my dad’s classical music (the only thing he listened to), Mamãe’s MPB, and Thiago’s Turma do Balão Mágico collection. The only record I owned was Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Unlike my friends, who knew all the latest rock groups from São Paulo, New York, and London, I didn’t keep up with music, but since Mamãe’s death, I had claimed her music as my own; her favorites were now my favorites.

  I found what I was looking for—Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis, a sixties classic. It was out of fashion by 1986, that’s for sure. I pressed play on the title track—a psychedelic, chanting mess. I loved its weirdness, it made me feel free. Before the accident, I would sometimes hear it on a Sunday morning, drifting from my parents’ room. Mamãe often stayed in bed late, it was true. I had forgotten all about it, till Luana reminded me.

  “This is a weird song,” she said, her face hovering between a grin and a grimace.

  The album was released in July 1968, the month I was born, when Mamãe was twenty-one, nearly twenty-two, freshly dropped out of her law degree at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps she had left me alone with Rita, who was even younger, and not yet pregnant with Luana. I can imagine Mamãe wandering the sunny streets of Ipanema, towards a record shop. Still bloated from pregnancy, but happy, I hope. Or maybe she bought it months later. I don’t know.

  Luana was looking straight ahead at the record player, watching the black disc go round. Her eyes blinked softly as the song ended. I got up to turn it off.

  “Leave it. Let it play.”

  The next song started: “Lindonéia” sung by Nara Leão.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever sat on this sofa before?”