Projection

by Priscila Uppal

  And monkeys for free, Uncle Wilhelm jokes, as we watch two Capuchin swing through the backyard. Everyone who buys land in Brasilia must keep at least fifty percent green. This is law. Aunt Victoria claims she’d like an apartment better—less work since Wilhelm is at the office all day and Elizabeth and Guilherme live in their other home in Recife in the north of Brazil. I’m not sure what “work” Victoria is referring to, since we’ve been greeted by a team of servants whisking away our coats and shoes and pouring out tea, never once uttering a single word. The house, it probably goes without saying, is spotless; the furniture tastefully modern; the visual art all watercolours of Brazilian beaches and architecture in matching frames.

  At her sister’s home, whenever I am asked a question, even if my mother is across the room, she quickly waddles over to answer it for me—amazingly, she does this even when she hasn’t heard the question. Fear drips off her like sweat. It’s evident my mother does not blend into the family unit—she is the outcast, and my rejection of her might be the last nail in her coffin. Or, more accurately, nail in her mouth. No one need listen to my mother if I don’t need her as an intermediary.

  She lives in a house. No, I live in an apartment.

  She lives with a man named Chris who is a newspaper editor. No, he’s a freelance editor for literary publishers. And a poet. And he’s training to be an archivist.

  She swims all the time. Actually, I’m not an active swimmer. I take springboard and tower-diving lessons. I’m afraid of heights and figured the lessons would help me get over my fears. They didn’t, but I can block the fear out long enough to get up on my tippy-toes and fall backward from the three-metre tower or to swan dive headfirst from the five-metre tower—there’s nothing quite like the rush of slicing through water in a perfect line, you don’t even feel wet.

  Victoria peppers me with questions about my neighbourhood, the university where I teach, what I like to eat, where I have travelled. She’s collected more information about me in fifteen minutes than my mother has managed to extract in over ten days. Victoria even asks me what I like to read.

  I read the last pages of a book first to see if I will enjoy the ending. I don’t want to read unhappy books, my mother says, clapping her hands decisively. Aunt Victoria chuckles. I’ve already noticed that Aunt Victoria chuckles a lot. And keeps her distance from my mother. Doctor Garbage is nowhere to be seen.

  My mother’s reading practices are more in line with Harlequin Romance addicts, not literary enthusiasts. That’s no way to choose a book, I say, losing my battle to curb my growing impatience.

  My mother smirks. Oh yes, she says, it’s a good thing I do. I don’t care that you don’t like it.

  Any writer would say this.

  I don’t care.

  I try to process the lessons Uncle Fernando has taught me. I don’t exist. She’s fighting to fight with herself. She’s a coward and cannot face real people. But I can’t help defending my vocation.

  Then you don’t care about art. I turn to Aunt Victoria. Please, I say with a chuckle, do not read the last page of my novel first. Do not be like my . . . like her.

  And it hits me, like an avocado falling off a tree and striking me on the head: I hate my mother. I hate her. I’ve hated her for most of my life because she abandoned us, which I always took to mean she didn’t care what happened to us. But I was willing to leave most of that hatred in the past and shake hands with the woman who exists today. And I am only too painfully aware that she does exist. However, the woman who exists today is just as hateful, if not more so, than the woman of the past. And she could still not care less about me, or my brother, or my father for that matter—it’s just now she doesn’t care for different reasons. If she cared, she’d have to face the ugliness of who she is. The wasted talents. The wasted time. The wasted opportunities. Her wasted life. My mother surrounds herself with movies and artworks and music so she never has to look inside her own heart. Discover if it’s still beating.

  I’ll lend my copy to you, my mother blurts out before bustling off to the other side of the room. But I don’t think you’ll like it.

  I’m glad she’s escaped to the other side of the house, because now that I’ve admitted the truth to myself, my unfettered hatred is growing at an astonishing rate. I’m worried I will lose control of my emotions, even in these elegant surroundings, and stick out my foot to trip her, or pull her hair, or punch her smack in the gut. I’d love for this story to turn slapstick. For a pie to land on her face. For a monkey to jump on her back.

  Elizabeth arrives, sheepish as ever, joining her mother and father and our grandmother on the couch as Uncle Wilhelm explains the Brazilian mania for soap operas, which air in the evenings, only four months each and then change again. Plot updates are published in the daily newspapers with weekly updates offered in weekend editions. Friends frequently make plans for “after soap opera.” If a soap opera is overly melodramatic (I’m not sure how they define this) or poorly researched or contains extremely weak dialogue, they label it a “Mexican soap opera.” Brazilians are leaders in the soap opera business, he jokes. Also in the soccer business, the model business, and the plastic surgery business. Elizabeth confirms that most young girls dream of growing up to become models, young boys soccer stars. Plastic surgery trends rotate with fashion seasons—a woman might sign up for breast reduction one year, breast augmentation the next. There is no stigma for plastic surgery, only the barrier of money. Liposuction is not an uncommon solution to holiday bingeing.

  I went to the Alanis Morissette concert last year, Elizabeth offers. I’m a big fan. Are you?

  Yes, I’m a big fan, I reply with amusement. All over the world, no matter what island you land on or backwater town you find, no matter how little English people possess, Canadians will always run into Bryan Adams and Alanis Morissette. Both from Ottawa, like me. But my connection to Alanis runs deeper. Alanis was one of my best friends when I was in grade seven and eight. We went to the same Catholic school. Elizabeth looks so mesmerized by this coincidence, I consider elaborating—how I would spend days at her house dancing and swimming while she sang; how, like silly girls, we decided to wear dollar-store rings and “get married”; and how her mother, one of my surrogates, kept trying to coax my father into writing a book about his life which she was convinced would end up a best-seller and turn our financial circumstances around—but decide my mother might misinterpret my story as name-dropping so I leave it at that.

  Do you go to concerts a lot?

  No. Not a lot. I’m a little nervous in large groups, Elizabeth admits, and I hear Doctor Garbage whispering in my ear, Look at her eyes, she’s crazy, like all the women, except Victoria. Victoria is the one exception. She missed the crazy. How you say, fluke?

  Do you go to the movies a lot?

  No. Not a lot, mother and daughter reply in unison. Once a week, Aunt Victoria clarifies. Not too much. Everything is relative. In every sense of the word.

  And then Uncle Fernando actually appears, a pile of ripe yellow bananas like a large child in his arms; he has taken them from the trees outside. You can have a lot of money, but never too much. A lot of happiness, but never too much.

  Are you tired, Grandmother? I ask, since she’s remained silent for most of this visit, fiddling with her house keys like beads on a rosary.

  She’s just dying! Uncle Fernando booms. You’re so old, die already, Mamma!

  My grandmother shakes her head at the insolence of her little boy. Aunt Victoria and Elizabeth giggle. Uncle Fernando delivers the bananas out to his car.

  I wonder where things went wrong for the Campos family. Uncle Fernando has two estranged children. How is it my grandmother, in a land that valorizes mothers and families above all else, except Jesus—although here the Virgin is worshipped far more than Jesus or the disciples—has managed to produce two out of three offspring who have had no contact with their children, her grandchildren, for decades? No wonder she fawns over Guilherme and Elizabeth—wh
at other option does she have?

  I will answer the question that is on everyone’s mind, Uncle Wilhelm announces. Oh shit, I think. Because the question on my mind is how I’m going to be able to withstand even another minute in my mother’s presence. How I’m going to be able to stop myself from choking her fat face in the middle of the night. Standing up as straight as a military officer, he clarifies: Yes, we can repeat!

  Good—I love second helpings. And thirds. No wonder family occasions always include lots of food. The ultimate distraction. We can stuff our faces rather than empty our hearts and minds of all the resentments and unhappiness. We can get through the next few hours with sugar and fat and passing dishes and licking spoons. So this is what it means to belong to a family that celebrates holidays together. Pile plate upon plate and we might all forget just how hungry we are for acceptance, for attention, for support, for love.

  My mother’s mental flashlight is set on me until we finish two helpings of coconut cake and pineapple jelly and can return to the mother-daughter retreat mirage of the Hotel Blue Tree. But before we do, Doctor Garbage slips the tabs from the four beers he’s downed in an hour and a half into my hand, shrugging when I ask him what he wants me to do with them, and insists on taking a photograph of all the Campos women. The only sure way of knowing how crazy you are, he whispers while I explain how to use my digital camera, is to have a daughter of your own. If you fight all the time, you’ll learn how crazy you are. Another good reason not to reproduce, to add to my ever-growing list. Check.

  Winking at us crowded together, arms wrapped around each other, on the couch—Elizabeth, Victoria, Grandmother, me, and my mother, who refuses to sit anywhere except beside me—Uncle Fernando smirks gleefully, as if to say, Wait until the sixth day, Gabriel, you will see the kind of people I will put here. Ha!

  Oh, Uncle Fernando, it’s one of my favourite photographs of the trip. I’m smiling right back at you.

  After a swim in the glittering pools of the hotel, I ask my mother if she’d like to take a walk with me on the grounds. Since this space is so beautiful and we are only here for one night. All I know now is that I will probably never like my mother, I might even hate her for the rest of my life, but I suppose I would like to take a stab at that grand cliché of the family-movie genre: making peace.

  My words please her and we stroll for a good hour, in almost pleasant silence, watching the other guests swim and read and play cards under the garden lights.

  Either you love someone or you don’t, she finally risks, it’s immediate.

  So my mother knows I don’t love her. That can’t be easy for her to face. I think love needs time to develop, I reply, as gently as possible.

  Some people don’t have time. Time is taken away from them. Blood ties are everything in life.

  Not all families are the same.

  Families are generic, have laws. You are the mother. You are the father. She points to a couple lounging on bright red towels as their children wrestle with their floatation devices.

  We were never such a family. There are different kinds of families.

  You liked Soares right away. Me too.

  But sometimes I like people right away and they turn out not to be nice people.

  Almost pleasant silence. And would you believe we actually witnessed a shooting star? Neither of us spoke of wishes. Hidden messages crouch in our silence. Wounds. Threats. Regrets. Unrequited love.

  As I change for bed, my mother places a pale-green plastic jewellery box on my pillow, and disappears. When you open the lid, a ballerina spins to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. A child’s jewellery box. Did she go out and buy this before I arrived, or has she been saving this gift for years? Did I once ask for such a jewellery box? Did she own a similar one as a little girl?

  Your father likes to tell me that it’s only a mother who’s allowed to love that way, unconditionally, the matriarch Lena says. But don’t we all love conditionally, even if we haven’t been able to articulate what those conditions actually are? I picture my mother slouched over the car wheel, angry because that is her primary physical response to the void inside that can’t be fulfilled, not by a mother’s love or a daughter’s love, not by anything but her dead dreams, and I’m positive we all love each other conditionally.

  There have been moments on this trip when I’ve also wondered about my mother’s medications, whether they might be partly responsible for her erratic mood swings. But I don’t think so. As Doctor Garbage also confessed on our high-speed car chase with the past: Your mother is a coward. So am I. Some of us are not prepared to deal with life. Not when bad things happen. Better to run away. It was good my father died before my mother. He was not as strong and he was afraid she would die first. My mother is crazy, but she’s also strong. Strong people are always crazy. You seem very strong. Most people don’t know why you’ve come. Your mother is afraid of why you’ve come; the others are just confused. They think you seem nice, have a nice life in Canada, they know your mother is crazy, why would Priscila want to spend time with her? But I say, Priscila wants to know about herself.

  This, to me, is the myth of fingerprints. I already am who I am, I said. Firmly.

  Yes, I can see that. It’s your mother that is not a full person. I have no idea what goes on in her head. But she doesn’t live here. She doesn’t live anywhere you can visit, you understand?

  Yes, I understand. She doesn’t live in Brazil. Maybe that’s why it’s taken me so long to discover her whereabouts; I’ve always known, deep down, that my mother stopped living the day she walked out on us. The best part of her died that day. It’s what an abandoned child is probably desperate to believe, so I’ve attempted to suppress the thought, but it’s true, fundamentally true: my mother’s life, like lost luggage, went astray, with very little hope of recovery. My voice message probably shocked her to the core. She must want something, something huge, she must have thought. Maybe money, maybe revenge, maybe the secret to why she’s so screwed up (I believe my mother would have been infinitely happier if I’d arrived a washed-up heroin addict or gambling fiend or an abused wife—then her absence would have been more meaningful. If your daughter became a well-adjusted, kind, and successful woman without your influence, what does that say about your usefulness?). My pound of flesh is different than what she expected. Knife and scales concealed in my computer. I’m here for the full story. I want to see who she is.

  You won’t be happy.

  I don’t expect to be.

  Your mother expected to be.

  The full story. Because the final pages of the novel are torn out (used by the father as kindling), Mia’s childhood friend Cezanne must recount the ending of the fictional novel The Scream of the Rabbits. The main character of the novel has a memory of his mother, not a grand memory, just a simple, unshakable memory of her touching his back. He couldn’t understand why some memories were so vivid like a painting and others were as though they hadn’t even happened. I have no idea what memories my mother has of me as a child, and how these will now forever be affected by my visit here. My presence might have ruined them all. My presence might escalate her growing madness. I wanted, on this trip, to be a detective, but to my mother I am likely a destroyer. A saboteur of memories.

  According to Cezanne, you can improve your memory by standing on your head twice a day for two minutes. I consider this. It’s horrifying for me to think that, as gapped and faulty and unreliable as it is, I am most likely the one in the family with the best memory. I decide to try.

  I choose the wall that separates the washroom from the bedroom, put down my pillow, bend my chin to my neck, and roll up. Blood rushes to my forehead. I’m dizzy, but lean my back and legs against the wall. Remember. Remember. A ballerina in a jewellery box?

  Two minutes. Five. Ten. I remember only the frustration of being inflexible in gymnastics class.

  My mother’s gift to me was accepting me to come; my gift to her now is staying. She can, at least, save face that I
did not bolt and catch an early flight home. I already am who I am. A fellow writer once told me that under “occupation” on custom forms she writes “observer.” A fitting title. I’m an observer, not a judge. I might hate her, but she’s still my subject. And I still have a few things left to learn.

  When my mother returns, she smiles widely, red lipstick still flush and bright on her bedtime lips, I ran away. Did you notice?

  She doesn’t mention the jewellery box, as if the hotel staff left me an apple for breakfast or a notecard of tomorrow’s temperature.

  Uncle Fernando at the University of Brasilia

  11

  the purple rose of cairo

  Man (at the cinema): The real ones want their lives fiction and the fictional ones want their lives real.

  I’m nervous about the flight home. And about my mother. The time in Brasilia has zapped her powers somehow. Bulwark armour exposed, she’s sinking. The weight of the past slowing down her movements like pounds of extra fat. Better to hold on to an imaginary person rather than me. She knows I’m not her life preserver.

  Today, I can’t get The Purple Rose of Cairo out of my head. Unlike the majority of movie lovers I know, I’m not a Woody Allen fan. I find the bulk of his characters unlikable, shallow, uninteresting people who orchestrate their own misery by caring so little about anything real, who talk and talk and talk and talk and say nothing of interest. In The Purple Rose of Cairo, a work of cinematic genius, Allen’s brilliance is to deliberately fashion his shallow characters into two-dimensional stock characters from film, and to centre the plot around a character whose escape from reality is her actual quest. Its self-reflexive subject matter explores why we need movies to counter reality, why we project ourselves into the movies we watch. It also explores the costs of projection. Unlike any other Allen film, I can watch this one over and over again. And my heart always goes out to Cecilia, played by the fragile blond flower Mia Farrow.