Projection

by Priscila Uppal

  I am not a hurtful person. I have lived a hard life.

  My father does not live an easy life either, I remind her again.

  I know. I have lived a far better life than your father. And then she smiles. A wide, smug, demeanor-stabilizing smile. Regardless of her tears, with that camera close-up smile, my childhood hate for her, like a cold front to her rising temperatures, is helping the tornado take shape. I want to slam back, I don’t think so. He knows his children. You do not. But I don’t. Not yet. Instead, I say as calmly as possible, Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe not.

  I am not talking about material things.

  We did not have many material things growing up. We did not have money. We did not live well, I reply.

  She shrugs as if those things don’t matter anyway, are not worth worrying about, although I suspect she has enjoyed financial comfort and some luxuries here with her work in civil service and academia and likely a family inheritance to boot. I am silent as she finishes off her plate of ravioli and two extra pieces of bread, and then, while I decline dessert, spoons mounds of carrot cake into her red mouth, the temple of her ongoing monologue.

  I do not wish to live. Living is too difficult. Every day I wake up and say, Oh God, I guess I am alive . . .

  This is blatantly contradicted by how strictly she follows her cancer doctors’ instructions regarding diet and medication, but I am beginning to understand my mother is a mess of contradictions. How am I to know what she really thinks or feels? Or is every thought, belief, and memory dependent on what she wants her audience to believe at that moment? Almost everything she says contradicts something she said before. A conflict of extremes. Incapable of subtlety or introspection—a bundle of violent emotions tied together haphazardly with a flashy bow. A Pandora’s box.

  It is only because of my parents and my religion that I do not kill myself. People have said to me, “Theresa, God must want you to live.” And so I live. I do not enjoy living. When my father was dying of cancer, I would have gladly given my life for his. Brazilians are nosy, they want to know everything about everyone. They think I’m a radical for not talking about my personal life. I will answer a question if it is asked, but then I’ll forever label the person as unintelligent and I will never speak to them again. People ask me, “Does Priscila have children?” And I say I do not know. This is personal. I do not ask. I have a very close friend at the university. Very, very close. People would ask me, is she married? I would say, I do not know. I have never asked.

  So, there’s the answer, she’s proud she knows nothing about her daughter. I can understand her avoidance of discussing her personal life with strangers—I’m guilty as charged, especially with lazy interviewers keen on reading literature as thinly veiled autobiography—but to not care whether your friends, or your offspring, are married or have children is an extreme case of willful ignorance. What do they talk about, just movies, novels, office politics? Well, I’m not going to play this role, I decide—avid listener without a speech of my own. I have a personal life and it should matter more to my mother than what I think about movies. In North America, we think if you are not willing to share personal information with a very close friend, then you’re not really a very close friend. And it’s considered self-centred to never ask someone questions about themselves, to talk only about yourself.

  My mother scrunches her face in disgust. People who know personal things about other people are common. I do not want to be common. I want to be extraordinary.

  Now that she has polished off her dessert, my mother takes a moment to survey the space. Several diners quickly shift their gazes away. I suddenly realize I am afraid. Not just upset or anxious, uncomfortable or angry, but actually afraid. My mother is hiding too much from her family, her friends, her co-workers, and from me. Is she a psychotic? A sociopath? Perhaps, but I quickly dismiss these terms as too easily flung about when someone’s worldview or behaviour is radically different from one’s own. Is my mother an actress? A performer? Does she think of herself as a person of flesh and blood or simply as “Theresa Catharina de Góes Campos” or that woman who left her husband and two children for Brazil? The failed poet? The journalist? Movie reviewer? The woman who refuses to answer questions about the past, who refuses to know basic things about people because that would be ordinary? I can hear her pleading with me, like Joan Crawford with her own daughter in Mommie Dearest: Why can’t you just act like one of the strangers on the street? Treat me like you would a stranger on the street? and me, like Christina, shouting back, Because I am not one of your fans.

  Dread is taking root in my bones. I should not have come here. This woman has no interest in any story other than the one she’s constructed. A lesson I’m very unhappy to have learned. At least, I tell myself, I owe her nothing. Not even my own story. This is my freedom. And my weapon. I can give her only what I want to give. Nothing more. She doesn’t ask, because deep down she believes I will not be willing to give. I am not a gift who needs a recipient. I am a person with the free will to lay my love where I wish. Just like her.

  My mother insists on paying all the bills (admissions, tickets, meals, clothing, cab fares), so even after the tense exchange she wipes her eyes, reapplies her lipstick, and signs the credit card slip. The trip is costing her, I know. Though I’m paying only for my airfare and a few souvenirs, it’s costing me too. I can assure you that I as write these lines, years after the fact, I am still paying—the mind and heart send their own collection officers on their own schedules.

  While we walk back to the square where Soares will meet us, my mother attempts a ceasefire.

  All this is settled. We won’t talk about it anymore. I should not have brought it up.

  It is unrealistic to think it wouldn’t come up, don’t you think? I ask.

  Oh. The day is gorgeous. Bright sunny thirty degrees plus. Not a cloud in the blue sky. Only we are burdened with severe weather warnings.

  Nothing is settled. The dust has only begun to rise. Objects, people, memories, will all be swept up in the path. And this is Brazil. You can set your sights on the vast blue horizon, but there are miles and miles and miles of dusty sandy beaches shifting under our feet.

  At the Pinacoteca do Estado, we stroll the sculpture gardens. This gives us both a chance to relax and take in the fresher air. When we do wander the gallery, surprise surprise, we reveal very dissimilar artistic tastes. My mother likes the Romantic period best, as well as portraits and realistic landscapes. Whereas I have little time for realism in painting, though I admire it in fiction and film; it strikes my eyes almost always as dull, unsuggestive, technique without artistry. I am an abstraction and expressionism fan. The world is not as it appears. It’s a series of lines, shapes, haphazard gestures, bursts of colour, oblique symbols, dizzying ambiguities. My mother, impressionism. For me, impressionism is too calm, too placating, too pretty.

  Graciously, she translates titles. She disapproves of artworks lacking titles. Sem Titleo. Apparently, she instructs visual artists to ask creative writers to title their art. I think the same of poems, that most poems deserve titles—it’s writerly laziness to leave poems naked; however, I’ve always thought visual artists should be freer to name a stage or a period for a show, and not necessarily each individual artwork. Here I am taken by a contemporary piece by Pazé called Cinzas, or Ashes, a huge sculpture secured within a wall-size Perspex container, a landscape of straws of different shades of white and grey, resembling the cross-section of a rock or mineral. You don’t notice the piece is made out of straws until you get very close to the container. This kind of optical illusion, made from common domestic objects, has always appealed to me. Clever. Playful. Uncanny.

  I am also intrigued by Antonio Henrique Amaral, 1935, BR-1 SP, oil over screen, a work composed of bananas and banana peels (bananas being the natural symbol of Brazil) made to look like a woman with tremendously long hair. While clever, the piece is unsettling too, as it implies the woman’s beauty is rotting away like
a banana peel. As I am making notes on other Brazilian artists of interest, my mother whispers:

  I am afraid of life. Afraid all the time. To live is frightful. I am not tough. I am fragile. I could not fight.

  Jit and I are tough, I say flatly to avoid being suspected of bragging or posturing. And she nods. I know she is trying to explain why she had no courage, no strength to hold the house together for her children or even to keep in contact with them. Between Brazil and Canada, Canada would win. And I’m glad it did. For when I look around this country, as beautiful and vibrant as some of its people are, as sublimely glorious as some of the mountains and beaches, I am aware of how many opportunities I would have lost if we’d immigrated here. We would not have been better off with my mother—able-bodied and employed and from a family of money and social standing though she is. Nor do I think it would necessarily have been better if my father and mother had managed to stay together. In any case, you can’t change the past. It’s difficult for me to see how my life would have been different; as an artist I’m surprised I have so little imagination in this respect. Or perhaps those childhood my-life-would-have-been-so-much-better-if fantasies are simply over. People who carry them around as adults like bandages for unseen hurts annoy me; no, offend me; disgust me. Here is life: deal with it. My brother and I dealt with it: we learned how to buy groceries and toiletries, how to pay bills and balance a chequebook, how to prepare a commode or empty a urine bag, how to walk on my father’s arm to lessen the pain of tremors, how to score goals and baskets, how to earn highest-achievement plaques, how to graciously accept free clothes and toys and orthodontist work from strangers, how to garner invitations to our friends’ houses for holiday dinners and vacations, how to forget some of our troubles with books and music and movies, how to use our imaginations to find our way back, how to laugh, how to raise ourselves, how to live life regardless. Here is my mother: this sometimes pleasant, sometimes frightening, damaged woman who gave birth to me. Then I think of my sad, stubborn, tragic father. It’s impossible for me to believe our lives could have avoided suffering. But it’s also impossible for me to believe we wouldn’t figure out how to get through it.

  I do not like competitions of any kind. If someone wants to share with me, I say yes. But if they do not want to share, if they want this chair, I will take the chair I don’t want.

  A single black bowler hat floats in and out of view as we stand in front of a white screen watching a film of a Norwegian cliff-side landscape. It’s whimsical, lovely, the freedom of the bodiless hat in space, rising and falling like a magic carpet, without owner and without destination. Beside it is a sculpture composed of black sand and a sawed-off LP record by artist Mark Manders titled Reduced Night Scene with Broken Moment (reduced to 82%). Something about this title makes me instantaneously melancholy and regretful.

  What do you mean? I ask her. Competition has always been a welcome word in my universe. My brother and I could turn anything—eating cookies, riding bikes, carting medical pads from one room to another—into a competition, with rules and penalties, prizes and punishments. We still can. For us, competition permitted our inner desires to surface, allowed us to showcase our talents and devise new skills, pushed the other to do more, do it faster, do it better. And winning was expected of us. A typical South-Asian father in that respect—I believe “excellence” is a South-Asian’s favourite word—second-best was never good enough. My father established a reward system for our academics, whereby we were given a small amount of money for each A+—not an uncommon practice, but the difference was if we didn’t earn an A+ we were obliged to pay him. For us report card day meant a small windfall; we could buy new sneakers or computer games or go bowling. And in sports we were expected to be leaders, on the scoreboard and off the court, rink, or field, with Cs or As on our jerseys and MVP trophies. Yet I can’t recall a single occasion when my father ever said he was proud of me. To express pride would indicate doubt of outcome. And an Uppal must succeed. Just not in the arts. I could participate, grudgingly, but when I excelled alarm bells sounded. My father pulled me out of a city-wide drama class after the instructor phoned to tell him I was the most talented student he had ever acquired. And if I won a poetry or short story contest, my father would stay up all night studying each word as if they spelled a code of mental destruction. When I informed him I was unwaverable in my decision to pursue English literature and creative writing at university, he was inconsolable. In fact, when I was offered my professorship, he sighed with relief, wrongly concluding: “Now you can finally stop writing those books!” I imagine he was wary of me following in any way in my mother’s footsteps, connecting her penchant for the arts with her declining mental state, the way my brother and I for a long time connected tropical landscapes with my father’s paralysis. Nevertheless, regardless of the arena, my father understood the attraction of competition and winning fairly. Hadn’t he been the first South-Asian in charge of all those Caribbean island projects? When I think of our test scores, our sports tournaments, I realize that without competitions we honestly might have been left behind.

  I want you to understand my psychology.

  Good. That’s exactly what I want too, whatever that means. This is not a typical mother-daughter gallery chat, but a case study. I want to know what makes her tick, what keeps her living when she claims she’d rather die, what thoughts fill her day, what thoughts fill her night, what she has done with the past—where she has hidden those skeletons, if she’s dressed them up in parasols or Arctic snowsuits, if she ever takes out memories like antique cutlery and sets a special table for them.

  I do not like to fight for things. If someone wants to fight me, I hide.

  She doesn’t believe she’s cruel; although she won’t use the word, she’s labelled herself a coward. It’s the psychology of someone who, as a child, never had to fight for what she wanted. Faced with the possibility of competition, she bolts to avoid conflict, confrontation, failure. Whereas her children fought for everything they have. Failure was something we dreaded, unacceptable as anything lower than an A+, but something we had to acknowledge was a force of nature, like fire, we needed to heed. My mother fled to a world without flames. In that world, my brother and I are chairs my father was willing to go to war for. She simply sits in other chairs.

  Soares has never eaten at the expensive revolving tower restaurant he has recommended for dinner, but he knows this is where tourists go to revel in the panorama of São Paulo, so he is confident I should eat there. To Soares, I am an aristocrat who deserves the very best of every sight and taste and experience Brazil has to offer, which is touching, especially considering that on his wages he would not be able to access most of what he tells me I must see and do. You will dine like a queen, he boasts. Apparently queens revolve while they eat.

  The view is stunning, the bright lights of the mega-city like neon night flowers opening up to the moon. I am content to sink into the cushioned chair, sip a banana daiquiri pierced with a pineapple umbrella, and stare off into the mind-numbing waves of electricity and concrete while the floor moves slowly on its elliptical orbit underneath us. The last few days have been trying, although I have been loath to admit it and I have not cried or slept particularly badly now that I have a separate bedroom. But here, to puncture the illusion that I am taking everything in stride, my stomach gives out.

  My mother is not impressed. Ordering delayed, she huffs when I return from the washroom where I have been dousing my forehead with cold water, my temperature having risen in a flash. I’m trying not to hold my breath or cringe as stomach cramps unfold in two-to-three-second waves while my mother regales me with stories about my childhood.

  I want you to remember. You had a very good childhood. You used to put my lipstick tubes in the vase and clog it up and make your father very mad when you were toilet training. Your brother liked puzzles and was skilled at them. When you were silent I would know you were working on one of his puzzles. It would take you longer,
but you would not get up and leave the puzzle until you had mastered it, even if it took you all afternoon.

  Before our pumpkin soup appetizers arrive, I’m back in the toilet, holding my stomach and wiping sweat from my lips. You had a very good childhood. You had a very good childhood, I repeat to myself, trying not to puke. My mother has moved a good thirty degrees. The multicoloured lights of the tireless city assault my eyes as we spin.

  Your brother loved his pacifier. We could go to restaurants because he would suck on it contentedly for hours. If the staff looked nervous, we would tell them not to worry, he would be very quiet, and he always was. When you were born, this was a different story. You wanted to touch everything. Do everything. My father would ask, “Is Priscila coming? Then I will not come.” My parents were so embarrassed about your behaviour. At museums I would force you to keep your hands behind your back, otherwise you would try to touch everything. At one museum, you were given your own personal security guard.

  Boar ravioli. Glass of red wine. Back to the toilet. Fruit cocktail dessert. Back to the toilet.

  You had a very good childhood. You had a very good childhood.

  On the way home, I attempt to place her stories among my jumbled memories. As my mother, she must insist I experienced a happy childhood, any unhappiness attributed solely to my father and her absence from my life. Nevertheless, she might be right. Children don’t know anything different from what they have. I was a curious, energetic, bright child: I’m sure I threw myself enthusiastically into puzzles and games and sandboxes. I still do. My mother obviously took me out a lot, and when my hands were not forced behind my back, they were probably reaching out, often landing in hers. I’m told I was inconsolable my first year of kindergarten, that I cried and cried until the witch they called our teacher locked me inside the clothes closet until I stopped. I must have loved her something awful. But now?