Projection

by Priscila Uppal

  Doctor Garbage shrugs. I don’t usually talk at all. But the girl is leaving, Mamma. I might die. You might die—you are very old, Mamma. She might die. These are things to say before we go. Then, leaning into me, he flips open his cellphone to a series of numbers attached to his name. Time to forget this. Understand?

  My mother is on her way back, her plate piled up to her nose. Like in a thriller, each step she takes echoes, and we rush to finish our intimate conversations.

  Let us say, my grandmother whispers, her voice cracking, that grandmother and granddaughter were wearing the same colour blue on their last day together. She brings my hand up to her heart and then to her lips to kiss.

  I am not wearing blue. This is when I recognize my grandmother is also a storyteller. Like me.

  Before I slip under the red comforter and spend my last night in my mother’s condominium, shadowed by the most upsetting image of myself I have ever encountered, she drops one last postcard on the coffee table:

  AIR CANADA: I spoke to Camila. She confirmed Priscila Uppal

  leaves 9:10 p.m., Toronto 6:45 a.m.

  check-in 2h30 antes = 6:40 p.m.

  A bedtime story.

  My mother must be anticipating the relief of tomorrow night, when she can sink into her theatre seat, wipe the useless tears from her eyes, and lose herself in the next Hollywood dream.

  I’m not sure I ever had the chance to compete with that.

  There is no name for my mother’s condition, only hopeless survival.

  When the characters in the film The Purple Rose of Cairo are left impotently waiting onscreen for Tom Baxter to return so they can continue with the plot of the movie, they beg their restless audience not to pull the plug: No. Don’t turn the projector off! It gets black and we disappear. . . . You don’t understand what it’s like to disappear, to be nothing, annihilated!

  My mother turns off the lights. I think I do.

  The Painting of Mother Goddess and Her Two Children

  end credits

  bye bye brasil

  Gypsy Lord, Master of Dreams: Dreams can only offend those who don’t dream.

  Forgive me, dear reader. Seven years after the event, only now do I discover to my surprise that I never kept notes in my journal about our parting. I’m sure I didn’t want to remember it.

  But I can’t escape memory, so I will do my best to reconstruct our sad airport scene, our final moments, our final words to each other. This is not the stuff reunions ought to be made of, but there you are, life rarely conforms to art. I write this book for all those who have discovered, like me, that life rarely conforms to art. Even now, my hands shake as I type. I’m not acting, or pretending, or shaping this day into art. I’m simply reporting my pain. And I must do this as accurately as possible. For me. And for you. I would hate for you to come all this way with me and not be offered the “gift of truth.”

  My only journal entry reads: Last day too heartbreaking to write about. Locked bathroom doors, sniffling, heads lolling on chairs, eyes pretending to be closed: counted, counted minutes.

  I must unpack these words. Reimagine:

  The thin string clothesline in her apartment tugs at my heart. I’m reminded of when she used to hang the laundry out on the wire in our Ottawa backyard. This I remember, and helping her with the clothespins. I loved handing over the wooden pins into her open hands.

  All night she screamed on the telephone. Actually screamed. I don’t know to whom. Her mother? Her sister? That strange couple from the airport? Probably her mother—I’m told she likes to fight with her mother—but I don’t ask. I can’t. I don’t want to, because maybe she’ll tell me. Maybe she won’t be able to help herself. They are probably arguing about me. About whether I’ll ever return. About why no one else in the family is permitted to send me off at the airport—why my mother is keeping them out of this final scene. She screamed and cried, turned on lights, turned off lights, cried and screamed some more. My earplugs no match for her denouement. She’s desperate to blame someone for her ruined dreams, and I know I fit the description of the suspect. I was the weak link in her plans. If I hadn’t stayed home from school that day, hadn’t observed the luggage being packed off into an unfamiliar car trunk, hadn’t screamed my butt off at the handling of my brother, hadn’t locked the front door and clung to our father’s bed, her life might have been vastly different. Triumphant. She doesn’t care about my life. Or Jit’s. Which would have been vastly different too, but potentially more tragic. Hers certainly less so. I ruined her life. I crushed her dreams. I killed her. Oh my god, I now realize, she hates me too.

  One thing I’ve learned on this trip is that when someone is scared of you, this person can’t have a real relationship with you. This person can fawn over you, or put you up on a pedestal, or suspiciously watch your every muscle twitch, but this person can’t approach you human being to human being. And I realize that one of the main reasons I’ve undertaken this journey, and will deem it a success, is that I am no longer scared of my mother. Whatever damage she has caused me, she can cause no more.

  You can’t kill me, she said. No one can kill me.

  And she’s right. I can’t kill her. No matter how much I’d like to erase her from my memory bank, she’s there, taunting me with her presence, her bulk, her phonograph mouth, her relentless dreams. But at least I am no longer afraid of my dreams.

  Is Brazil built on dreams? Bye Bye Brasil, one of Carlos Diegues’s iconic films, is dedicated to “the Brazilian people of the twenty-first century.” The movie chronicles a travelling magic show, run by Gypsy Lord, Master of Dreams (played by José Wilker) and his exotic partner and lover, Salomé (played by Betty Faria), and all of the misadventures they encounter as their Caravana Rolidei is gradually supplanted by film and television. By the end of the movie, these once mesmerizing and mysterious characters, so enthralling that a young accordionist and his pregnant wife abandon their village to join their troupe, are reduced to selling sex instead of magic. In reality, the trip leads not to the stars, but to betrayal, heartbreak, disillusionment, to a tough and cruel future. No one wants to buy the dreams of the “Master of Clouds and Time,” who can command the skies to snow in Brazil (using grated coconut), or engage in telepathy with dead relatives to comfort the many widows in small villages (he sees who in the audience is crying and directs his message to them). Instead, having struck it rich in smuggling, the Master of Dreams employs a harem and his Queen of Rhumba wears blinking Christmas lights in her hair. The Caravana Rolidei abandons mysticism and sensuality to deliver titillation with “commercial flair.”

  As I collect my luggage, my mother paces her living room, hands clenched into tight fists.

  I resent wasted time. I’ve wasted so much time doing things for others. Now I do only for myself. Even God can’t give you time back.

  My mother isn’t stupid. She doesn’t say stupid things. She sometimes says wise things that are horrific when placed into her specific context, but frequently the things she says would be applicable to other sane situations. In her own way, my mother is a Master of Dreams, peddling her version of the world even in the face of brutal contradicting reality. Even in the face of her own sad and angry daughter. I have wasted her time. Dream time. She’s right. Even God can’t give you that time back.

  Art is meant to create empathy. Art is ethical but it is not ethics. This has not happened for my mother. Art is either expressing something right or wrong. Art is an escapist addiction. Like heroin. Like the characters at the end of the film, she betrays her dreams. Did they (does she?) have any choice? Fair question. All of these dreams are understandable; all of these endings avoidable. Aren’t they?

  Or perhaps we need to face the fact that some dreams are meant to die.

  In one of our last moments together we visit the airport washroom before I pass through security. I am standing in front of my mother in the line, arms crossed. I can feel her eyes on me like target sights, her frown covering the sinks. I am seco
nd in line. As the woman in front enters the recently vacated washroom, my mother points angrily at me.

  You will be next.

  I’m twenty-eight years old. I know how to use a washroom, I sigh.

  I’m just being helpful, she announces to the line.

  You’re being bossy, I slap back before entering the sanctity of the stall.

  When I re-emerge, my mother is outside the washrooms, hands glued to the handle of the steel luggage cart. One look at me and she propels the vehicle forward toward the security clearance area.

  Thank you, I can push my own luggage.

  She flashes a look that could smash bricks. No, Priscila. I do the right thing. Until you leave, I will do the right thing, as I have this entire trip, no matter how you have treated me. Since I am so bossy, I will tell you to go now. I am not bossy. Americans and Canadians are bossy, not me. You wanted everything your way. And now you will see. You will never see or hear from me again. I will erase you from my mind. You can be in command in Canada. Here, I am in command. I wish nothing for you.

  These are our last moments. I must collect myself. She is physically ill, I tell myself, and very likely mentally ill as well. She is performing some script that makes sense to her. I suppose I must perform last lines from a script that makes sense to me.

  Even though I feel like the cold, beautiful Salomé, who crushes her infatuated accordionist (Don’t think for a second that your love moves me. It makes me sick.), I don’t want my last words to be anger. There won’t be another trip. I know this. She doesn’t love me. And the truth is, while it hurts when people don’t love you, it doesn’t really hurt me more than when students or new acquaintances don’t like me; nevertheless, how embarrassing it is that my mother is abandoning me for the second time. At least this time, I can say goodbye.

  I can cue the bossa nova music and jump on my own travelling caravan. Even if, like the strongman, Swallow, who finally disappoints the Gypsy Lord by losing an arm-wrestling match on which he has gambled everything—their van, their equipment, their money, their monkey—I too have lost all my collateral on this risky bet. I can drop out, start over. As ugly as life gets, Carlos Diegues understands, there is still beauty in survival and happiness in small moments where dreams, old and new, almost seem possible. I can dream my own dreams. This is a basic human right no dictator, god, or bitter relative has ever been able to fully dismantle. I can dream my own dreams. My mother need not appear in any of them.

  As my mother rolls the luggage cart, I remember that during one of her many sermons, she admitted the part of Catholicism she hates is confession. I don’t like telling a man my sins. My sins are between me and God. I do not need an intermediary. Well, maybe God needs one, I think.

  And I am reminded of the story of how I was kicked out of Catholic Sunday School when I was eight and we were living with my cousins in Michigan. The assignment: paint your favourite disciple. Around twenty kids pulled brown paper from a gigantic roll and traced each other’s bodies in pencil to produce a proper human outline for our meagre painterly talents. We were then to fill in the outline on our own, adding a beard here, long hair there, robes, boots, belts. The nun on duty knew something was amiss when she found me drawing coins and a noose. Judas! You’re drawing Judas! she cried. Wicked girl! Wicked! She tore my brown paper and yanked me into her office, ferociously scribbling a note to my aunt and uncle barring me from returning. I knew I was suffering an injustice. Though I lacked the eloquence to fully explain myself, I did manage to eke out, several times, the conviction: Nothing happens without Judas. Which was indeed why he was, and still is, my favourite disciple. From a literary point of view, the narrative has no meaning, no trigger to unleash the full depth of the crucifixion-resurrection experience that is central to Christianity, without Judas. Judas is as important as Jesus.

  Nothing happens without Judas. I suppose nothing happened without my mother or my father. I arrived on her doorstep and she told me over and over again that she loves me, that she has always loved me. One spends a lifetime waiting for these words. And when it happens, one’s heart freezes, admits Salomé. Was I ever willing to believe her? I think I was, but who knows for sure.

  I recognize that for some, family ties are the only reason to live, work, make money, get up every day and do it again. But this dream is not for me. And I refuse to feel bad about this any longer. My goal was to find out who my mother is, who we are to each other. I’ve achieved my goal. We are strangers tied by blood and crushed dreams. We have damaged each other and now must simply live with that damage as best as we can. Some of us have just developed more excellent coping mechanisms than others.

  I don’t need a mother. And I no longer desire one. This doesn’t need to be a tragedy. This can be comedy. This can be freedom.

  Thank you for this opportunity to see where you live and who you are, and for bringing me to meet the rest of the family. I wish you a very healthy and happy rest of your life.

  I’ve never been one for long goodbyes. Chris always teases me about it. When I make up my mind to leave a place—whether a bar or friend’s house or a city I’ve just fallen in love with—I always want to get moving. Even if I’d like to stay, I am anxious at the thought of being left behind. That’s worse than missing a place.

  But my mother’s short goodbye takes the cake. Like a delivery person, my mother backs away from the luggage cart. There will be no kisses, no hugs, not even the shaking of hands or a pat on the back, only that sickly half-smile on her face.

  You too, she says. Goodbye.

  I hear Maria Callas, the legendary opera singer, in her only non-singing film role, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s haunting 1969 version of Medea, screaming out the last line of the movie as her dead children burn along with the city behind her: Nothing is possible anymore!

  A home is a physical place. But more importantly, it is an imaginative concept. A place of shelter and support and comfort. My home is not here. My mother’s home is not here either. But that’s not my concern. It’s her job to find hers, and my job to find mine. Perhaps hers really is in the movies.

  Betrayals abound, especially in the form of kisses. I just hope I am able to do something creative with her betrayal. And with my own.

  Isn’t that what art is for?

  Some dreams are meant to die. Without looking back, I walk through the security gates. Nothing blinks or buzzes. I am free to go.

  I must rely on myself to create my own home. As I’ve always done.

  The Women of the Family—(left to right) Fernanda, Victoria, Therezinha, Priscila, Theresa

  epilogue

  blade runner,

  the director’s cut

  Roy: It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.

  After being poked and prodded, I answer a series of questions from Dr. Iris Gorfinkel, my family physician. I adore Dr. Gorfinkel because even though she sees sick people all day long, she always looks distressed when you present her with physical complaints, like it’s unusual, if not horrible.

  “I just can’t believe your mother rejected you,” Dr. Gorfinkel says protectively. I know she’s a mother of three.

  “Wasn’t enough to do it once,” I laugh. “I don’t think I’ll be visiting Brazil again anytime soon.”

  “I just can’t believe it,” she repeats, shaking her head at me in my light-blue paper hospital robe perched on the steel examining table. “I would be so proud to be your mother.” I know she is telling the truth. She’s often told me that she finds my life story inspiring. She alludes to this again when she continues: “I still don’t know how you’ve lived through all this and don’t need a psychiatrist or medication. I would need extensive therapies. Are you sure . . . ?”

  “I’m sure,” I repeat for the third or fourth time in our history as doctor and patient. “What’s a shrink going to tell me that I already don’t know? I had a turbulent childhood. I know this. I experienced trauma. I know this. In fact, I think I function quite well despite everyth
ing. I just have to keep going.” Suddenly, this sounds like something my mother would say. God wants me to live, so I live. I doubt my mother’s ever set foot in a therapist’s office.

  “Priscila, in terms of your yearly physical, you’re basically in excellent health,” Dr. Gorfinkel informs me, after noting my height and weight on her chart. “But I’m going to prescribe antibiotics because your tests show that your stomach problems are not stress-related, as we first thought, but the result of a parasite.” She makes one of her contorted faces when she says the word “parasite,” as if she is picturing one crawling about my intestines.

  I return the disgusted glance. Parasite? “You mean there’s a foreign organism living in my system?”

  “I’m afraid so. It’s more common than you think. Considering all the stomach pain you experienced during your trip, I’d say you must have contracted the parasite right after you landed in Brazil. The antibiotics will wipe it out. Just rest and stay close to home if you can.”

  “I’ve been organizing my day according to where the toilets are for weeks now,” I admit with embarrassment. And I think about how I could have felt better sooner if I’d known, how I could have enjoyed the holiday Chris and I took right after I returned home even more—I’ve always wanted to visit Paris, I told him, and I need a beautiful trip after this horrible one. Although we did have a glorious time, we also joked that it was my “bathroom tour of Paris,” as I needed to utilize the facilities usually once an hour. Oh, well. If only I’d known a lot of things.

  It’s a test designed to provoke an emotional response . . .

  I throw my hands up in the air. “A parasite. I just thought I hated my mother.”

  Dr. Gorfinkel giggles and then laughs. I join her. I’m sure those stuck in the waiting room must be wondering what’s going on between us. We don’t stop laughing for some time, as if I’ve told the funniest joke in the world.