Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters

by Maria José Silveira

  After Lígia had disappeared, Chico could no longer stay in Brazil. He decided to go to Chile, exiled like thousands of other Brazilians in his situation during those years in which the dictatorship expelled wave after wave from the country.

  For a long time, he held out hope of finding Lígia, of finding that she was merely imprisoned in some unknown but very real location, of her reappearing one day. Curious how in the space the human mind allows for irrationality when in the depths of our desires there shines the tiny light of “if,” however miniscule and entirely void of reason, entirely nuts, entirely blind—yet there it is, shining its light. Until his return to Brazil following the general amnesty, this insane little light still glowed within him, though it eventually dimmed and flickered only intermittently, the light he hoped to find in Lígia’s unsettling eyes as he turned a corner, the solemn voice he hoped to hear when he picked up the phone.

  He had been preparing to bring Maria Flor to Chile when there was suddenly a coup against Allende. The horror of the days that followed replicated the horror of earlier events in Brazil. Chico was imprisoned in the soccer stadium, along with Chileans, Brazilians, Argentines, Americans, Europeans, people of all nationalities who had gone to Chile to change the world. From there, he was exiled to Belgium, and from Belgium he went to France.

  Only in France, after some time, was he able to send for his daughter.

  Maria Flor lived there with her father until just before her teenage years. After the general amnesty law, they returned to Brazil, Chico married a woman from Pernambuco, and went to live in Recife. Though she loved her father and the beaches of the Northeast, Maria Flor hadn’t wanted to follow them. She preferred to stay with her grandmother in Brasília, where she completed high school and soon embarked on the tiny drama over what to do with her life.

  Flor enjoyed drawing human figures in several outfits and always had a genuine interest in the human body in all its aspects. She was vain; she liked to dress up and put on makeup, and given her uncommon nature, she always designed her own clothes and accessories. There was even a time when she designed, and quite successfully, the costumes for her uncles’ films. She knew better than anyone that the right clothes help to build the profile of a character.

  Hovering on this thought and its ramifications, she made a decision: she was going to be a stylist. She would work with fashion, like her great-grandparents Umberto and Leda Rancieri.

  As soon as she made this decision, Flor became another person. She forgot about her post-modern illnesses, her doubts and anxieties, she adopted the maxim that “she who isn’t comfortable in her own body can’t be comfortable anywhere,” and off she went: she moved to Rio, rented an apartment with some friends, and set to work with fervent dedication.

  She considered clothing an integral part of a person, her character, and her personality. It could add or subtract from a person, change their way of seeing the world and the way the world saw them. It could lend, or take away, charm or a certain gracefulness. It was capable of attracting, or repelling, admiration and interest. It was a trigger. A first step. A magnet. After that, the rest was up to them.

  She was happy with her choice and was soon in high demand. She made costumes for the movies, the theater, and TV soaps and had a studio with a view in Santa Teresa and all the bells and whistles. She would research new materials and come up with brilliant ideas. She earned prizes for her work, such as that which she won for her black, slim dress made of a soft synthetic fabric that she’d help to develop, without anything, anything at all, but her grandpa Rancieri’s straps of gold lace. She lived her life amid the colors, shapes, and beauty that she so loved.

  But there were times when she still found herself in the midst of a tiny drama over her choice of a profession. Like the day when one of those mean and cruel little people that infest humanity managed to get close to her—which was rare, because in general Flor surrounded herself with people who were as friendly, warm, and affectionate as she was.

  Thinking it over, wait a second! What I just told you couldn’t possibly be true. No one is able to surround herself with kind, warm, and affectionate people alone. The fact is that Flor wasn’t exactly an expert in reading people and liked to think that others were as sincere as she tended to be. She considered herself a skeptic, a woman who knew a thing or two, experienced, someone who knew the ways of the world, but deep down, she had a tendency to be naive the way most kind, affectionate, and warm people tend to be these days.

  And this little person came close only to ask Flor whether she thought that her mother, who had given her life to the revolution, would have liked to see her dedicate her life to something as futile and vain as fashion.

  Flor had arrived at home in tears.

  She had never thought about her profession that way, and luckily she had Joaquim, her psychiatrist boyfriend, at her side, a man who understood the human heart and who understood hers even more fully. As a result, he was able to help her digest and rid herself of that tiny but damaging dose of venom. He listened attentively to what she had to say: First (Maria Flor was one of these people who liked to organize her thoughts and she preferred to think things through by classifying them, placing everything in its proper place, ranking them—first, second, third), her mother was her mother and, whatever sort of person she was, she would have accepted and loved Maria Flor as she always had loved her. Second, each person’s beauty and well-being might be considered a side-point, but they weren’t “futile and vain.” They were part of things called “imagination and entertainment,” which, though not (this she recognized) basic needs in the way a home, food, health, and education were, were nonetheless an important component of one’s happiness. And her work was concerned with people’s happiness, exactly the same ideal for which her mother had died. Third, she had never given her vote to any of the horror-shows who made the daily lives of Brazilians torture: all those unscrupulous politics had been elected without any contribution on her part, and so she couldn’t make herself feel responsible for what was happening.

  Those were more or less her thoughts on the matter and she could even have continued until she reached a ninth or tenth argument, because whenever Flor wanted to reason things out and classify them, she went all in. But she had already begun to feel calmer and more secure, and Joaquim thought it better to end their session.

  Flor had met Joaquim Machado, the psychiatrist three years her junior, at drinks following the release of a book by a mutual friend of theirs. He came from a family from the state of Amazonas, had studied in Rio, completed his residencies in France and the United States, and had just opened his practice in Rio when they met.

  Over a glass of white wine, they struck up an animated conversation that continued with a glass of prosecco in a restaurant that was all the rage. But it didn’t stop there, either—they continued their conversation at his apartment over other things. The initial remark that set off this intense process had been the age-old theme of differences between the sexes, but in this case, fueled by genuine curiosity on both sides, it had been capable of sweeping them through the night.

  Both of them had found themselves in the midst of a discussion during drinks where one of the male participants, surely for lack of a better subject, had raised the question over whether women had a smaller brain, proportional to the size of their bodies, to which another woman in the group, also in an attempt to overcome her boredom, had responded: “But with a denser distribution of neurons, of course,” and so went the conversation until Maria Flor asked her new acquaintance and psychiatrist at her side another question, merely with the idea of making sure the conversation did not die out into awkward silence.

  “But where on earth did men get this idea that women don’t need to have as much sex as men? What’s all this about men being more promiscuous by nature and women being more interested in stable relationships?!”

  As the question had been posed directly to him, after one of fate’s masterstrokes had placed him n
ext to Maria Flor, the young psychiatrist also began to speak directly to her. Thanks to the old art of chemistry that often intercedes in such cases and keeps the world spinning, the circle composed by the others disappeared from their sight, and in no time they moved from idle chatter to an exhilarating tête-a-tête on a variation of the same theme: how men had repressed women and then later believed that the result of their own work was a legitimate product of nature, how startling it was that, to that very day, the proper attention hadn’t been given to the fact that the clitoris was the only human organ whose exclusive function was to give pleasure, while the penis, with its role serving two masters as a conduit for urine and semen, lacked such a refined specialization.

  Given the theme they discussed with such passion, it should come as no surprise that the conversation they had that night continues, in a certain sense, to this very day.

  Both of them, each in their own profession, are doing pretty well. They more or less like the same things—music, movies, nice restaurants, new computer programs, conversations about the third millennium, the stupid things people do, and the prospects for a better future for the country and the world. In soccer, one of them roots for Fluminense, the other, Vasco. One of them takes care of a Siamese cat, the other a stray dog. They enjoy dancing and vegetarian food at home, but they’re no fanatics. They spend hours on the Internet. While one of them goes to the gym, the other receives acupuncture sessions and gets shiatsu massages.

  Flor likes Joaquim’s sensitive and nervous fingers, and he likes her ballerina feet.

  They’ve lived together almost since they’ve met, and more recently, they decided to have a child. Maria Flor is thirty-three, an age that seems about right to her, and Joaquim also thinks it’s time he figure out what it’s like to be a father.

  Whether by talent or by luck, or because they know the right people, or for all of these reasons, Maria has become a media sensation. Though at first she was a bit startled at her fame, which took off at a wild pace—the pace of the fashion industry in the age of globalization—she’s now earning relatively good money and she intends to use it to fulfill a longstanding desire.

  An old and mysterious desire that started the time she vacationed on a rather unknown beach in Bahia, and which has only increased now that she’s pregnant: the desire to live on the edge of the sea, where the mornings glisten beneath golden rays, the sun’s true color when there is no pollution. She thinks perhaps, who knows, she’d like to live in some place like that, open a pousada, divide her time between there and Rio, with Joaquim. She also thinks the idea is a bit crazy, but she knows she could make it work, at least for a time. What is life made of, after all, if not exactly this: stretches of time, some longer, others shorter, all of them finite, finite moments that form our brief histories here on earth, composed of several layers, yesterday this, today that, tomorrow—who knows?

  Deep down, she wants a rest from her chaotic life in the big city, where the worst of Brazil seems to parade on display. She wants to give things in the country time to improve.

  She wants to run barefoot along the beach with the very same sand where perhaps one day other feet had tread, feet belonging to someone she never knew but who she knows existed and may well have tread that same spot. It could have been her mother, or her mother’s mother, or her mother’s mother’s mother.

  Now, as though in a fleeting mirage, she hears the sound of laughing and light footsteps racing along the sand. She can taste the salty seawater and luscious fruits, the flavors of the forest, she can smell the wind, she can hear bare feet trudging through the mud, the murmur of river waters, their pure gold, rippling silk, there’s the smell of roasted meat, the whisper of sugarcane in the fields, and bright sunny mornings. She can feel the weight of the impossible silence that belongs to the backlands and to the darkness, she hears a voice echoing through the woods, the melancholy chords of a piano and lament of violins. Horses galloping and livestock mooing, gunshots, feet running, blood, blood, and more blood, the taste of red savanna dust, the heights of the jatoba tree, and the warm scent of a woman.

  All this, she knows, is a taste of the past in disguise.

  A taste that is fleeting, ever-changing, but which she somehow feels is a part of her. These things belong to her, she carries them within her, as will the children who are soon be born.

  Children.

  Maria Flor parks the car in front of the building where she lives. Pregnant, her hair now the dark blue of a raging sea, she is coming home from the doctor’s office with Joaquim. At first, the news they have just received left them perplexed, almost worried: how could they have guessed what fate had in store for them after so many years using birth control?

  But now, they laugh at the news, thinking about all that remains to be done, their thoughts and energies directed toward the unexpected future that is now theirs: in Maria Flor’s latest ultrasound, they learned that they are going to have not just one child but twins, a girl and a boy.

  The two of you.

  Can you hear them laughing?

  And so, we’ve arrived at the end of our story, and the hour is near. The genetic codes of both of you are already processing information, and the proteins that will form your own memories have begun to reproduce. And that’s how the distant memories of time will continue to live within you and in your children, the children and grandchildren of Maria Flor.

  Tomorrow, April 22, will be a full day, the first of all of the days of your lives.

  A cloud floating outside in the nighttime sky, on this night with its full moon, a night on which babies like to begin to be born, will soon have moved on. Tomorrow will be as beautiful as April days centuries ago.

  The sky will be bright blue, for there are still special days when it manages to display this color; a small and sudden gap in the pollution will open in the sky, a pleasant breeze will blow through; the noisy traffic will unexpectedly pause and the street kid will put away his penknife for a moment of rest.

  But don’t take it from me.

  Extraordinary things await you both.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like first to thank the many hardworking professionals who have dedicated themselves to researching and writing about the history of Brazil: their works were of immeasurable value as I wrote this book. The wealth of historical writing today is extraordinary, thanks to the serious and skillful research that now has covered nearly all eras of the country’s history. Perhaps there is still much to do, but our historians have already been on the job for some time, and have delivered exceptional work.

  I would like to acknowledge here the origin of three episodes in this book: the story of Hans Staden, of which Tebereté’s tale is one of many versions already written; the story of the soapstone, which can be found in a report by Yeda Brandão about one of our common ancestors, and which was sent to me by Dulce Pedroso; and finally one afternoon in 1970, when Maria Lúcia Torres, without realizing it, tossed her poetry, together with fliers protesting the military dictatorship, from the top of a building on Praça João Mendes in the historical center of São Paulo.

  I would also like to thank several friends for reading this manuscript, and for their valuable suggestions and encouragement: Maria Lúcia Torres, Peg Silveira, Neide Rezende, Rodrigo Montoya, Alípio Freire, Virginia and A.C. Scartezini, Laura Duque, Maria Lucia Alves, Maria Luiza Torres. To Octavio, Px, Flavio and Denise, Jacinta.

  And especially to Felipe who, “from the end to the beginning,” made this book possible.

  Maria José Silveira is the author of ten novels, including the prize-winning Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and Her Daughters, the film rights to which were sold to TV Globo.

  Eric M. B. Becker is editor of Words Without Borders and an award-winning journalist and literary translator. He received a PEN/Heim Translation grant for his work on Mia Couto, and has also translated works by Lygia Fagundes Telles, Noemi Jaffe, and others.

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