When I say the three of us went to the hills frequently, I’m of course talking about the resorts of Canela and Gramado. Few families attempt anything more ambitious than that. On those trips, my father was the guy who drove with his arm hanging outside the car, and my mother was the woman who thought that that posture wasn’t correct or safe. My father was the guy who saw a stall and wanted to drink sugar-cane juice and eat cake, and my mother was the woman who reminded him that my aunt and uncle were expecting us for lunch.
Julia and I stopped to eat at a place by the roadside. It was begging to be visited, a pastiche of German architecture, the front of which was overcrowded with flowerpots and garden gnomes and rugs made of squares of hide. We got out of the car and inhaled the fresh mountain air, as if we had spent the last six months in an airless cave. Two easels fixed in the gravel (“Give us a try!”) left no doubt that they also served lunch and snacks as well as cheese, salami, honey, phone cards and batteries to take away. “Nice,” said Julia. I personally thought that places that sell a bit of everything only highlight the fact that they are unable to prosper in any specific area, but even so, I had to agree. The surroundings, at least, were very pretty. I took a few steps forward and looked at the valley below us, speckled with wooden houses. Chimneys were smoking, dogs were barking, children were running around a girl whose out-stretched arms, open palms and short steps gave the impression that she was wearing a blindfold. Julia came up to me, dragging her feet over the gravel.
“Perhaps we should look for something outside town. When we get to Antônio Prado,” I said.
“Like cabins?”
I nodded.
“I second that.”
Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, I think we must have planned the famous Unplanned Journey a hundred times. And when something like that is repeated so often, with minimal variations, it’s only natural that everything compacts into a single powerful memory, the setting for which is determined at random—it only needs to have happened once in the place in question—while its dramatic charge comes from the sum of all the nights that eventually led us to the idea of the trip, plus the number of years separating us from those nights. In my case, the memory is this: Julia and me lying on the rug in her spartan room on the third floor of the exclusive Maria Imaculada all-girls residence, where she lived the whole time she was at university. We’re looking at the ceiling. To my left, there’s a record player that Julia’s family was thinking of throwing away, and the vinyl that’s spinning once belonged to her brother and brought great delight to the small parties where her parents served Coca-Cola and a boy who was more devious than the rest adulterated his friends’ plastic cups with palm fruit cachaça. Houses of the Holy, Led Zeppelin’s 1973 album, lived right between Pink Floyd and Metallica in a typical teenager’s bedroom in Soledade, often smelling of the sweat of forgotten soccer shirts under the furniture. But then Julia’s brother supposedly stopped listening to music after he got married.
The day we listened to Houses of the Holy lying on the floor, we got carried away again over the Unplanned Journey. There was an infinite number of uninteresting towns to be discovered, and that album seemed like fuel for our plans for freedom. But yet again, we didn’t leave the room, we didn’t run downstairs, we didn’t reach the car before the spark went out. To tell the truth, we stayed staring at the ceiling, even though the volume and tone of our voices betrayed a great deal of excitement.
It was as if you’d spent months thinking about whether to dye your hair blue, and suddenly you realize that all that time spent deliberating, analyzing, imagining, has ended up completely satisfying your desire to rebel. And so the trip was left for another time, a safe distance away from disappointment, after all, having blue hair was perhaps not such a great way to break from the status quo and uninteresting places were perhaps just uninteresting places, nothing more. I breathed deeply. It was mountain air, and we were there, five or six years late, but there, finally. We had survived a fight that was still hanging over us, Paris, Montreal, the madness of our families. This journey was another irresistible failure.
2.
I KNEW VERY LITTLE ABOUT ANTÔNIO PRADO. Only that a period movie had been shot there once and they had filled the streets with mud, then left it all behind after they finished filming. When Julia and I arrived at the town, it was already after four. The front windshield was coated with a fine dust. I drove slowly along the cobbles of the main street. We had stopped on the way there to visit, by mutual agreement and in the following order, an old water mill just outside Picada Café, a recreation of a nineteenth-century German colony where Julia had sat on the bench outside the school making vague comments about the lives of immigrants (apparently all the old dead folks’ clothes and the narrow beds and the crumpled promissory notes fading in display cases had had the desired effect), then into a green labyrinth that twice brought us to a dead end, and, finally, the old workers’ district of Galópolis, where the steeply sloping roofs over brick buildings seemed to anticipate a snow that never fell.
Now, Antônio Prado, a city colonized by Italians, not far from Caxias do Sul. But I wasn’t paying attention to details as I drove. I was thinking about a place with cabins. Any place, so long as it had cabins. Julia opened the window.
“Hi, excuse me, I wonder if you could help us.”
A dirt track led us to the guesthouse. It was a villa from 1946, the date engraved on the stone foundation in bas-relief, which gave me the strange feeling that people back then must have been thinking about us, or else wouldn’t that inscription have seemed rather ridiculous in 1947, looking back like an idiot after just one year? Julia entered first, with me right behind. The old part of the building had been converted into a reception and games room. For a few moments we were alone, not knowing whether to clap our hands, as was traditional in these parts, or do something else to attract attention. To tell the truth, the room was rather suffocating; the hoard of rustic objects, farming tools attached to the ceiling, old lanterns, plates, portraits in oval frames, a Singer sewing machine, made the blue ping-pong table look somewhat out of place.
Suddenly, a woman came out from behind a door. Yes, there were cabins. Yes, some of them were vacant.
Julia began to fill out the register in her careful hand. Every now and then, she raised her head and smiled at the lady. The old woman, in turn, was following my movements around the room with her eyes, as if the collection of objects wasn’t meant to be seen close up, more as a brief panorama. Perhaps she was friendlier with other guests. Perhaps she offered strawberry bonbons to kids. But we didn’t seem to be the kind of person she took pleasure in serving. What kind of people were we? For starters, I was platinum blonde, tangled hair, an inch or so of intentional brown roots. In addition to the Doc Martens, I was wearing very tight jeans (good legs since I was young), a tank top and a close-fitting red leather jacket with a hood, which, as you’d expect, stood proud behind my neck. And since I’d been living in Paris, I’d been going heavy on the eyeliner.
As for Julia, she naturally had a better chance of raising a friendly response. For one thing, she didn’t look as strange as I did. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if someone suddenly complimented her earrings. Secondly, she was always eager to please, even when she perceived a touch of hostility in the other person. This had often irritated me in the past. And yet Julia also seemed to exude a certain degree of inadequacy, as if only a series of coincidences, a long chain of them, could explain her presence in that place.
Julia asked the lady her name. “Adiles,” she replied laconically. I continued my close perusal of that hodgepodge of objects. On one of the walls, there was a sequence of behind-the-scenes photographs from that movie. Patrícia Pilar. Glória Pires standing in front of a carriage.
“To be honest, we don’t know how many nights we’re going to stay,” said Julia. I was moving closer to the counter now. Dona Adiles looked at her without speaking. “I mean, two, I think. But is it okay if
we decide to stay longer?”
“Fine.”
And she took the registration sheet from Julia’s hand.
Through the window, I could see some of the cabins and the little stone paths leading to up them. The others sat in a dip in the ground and only their roofs were visible from reception.
“Can we choose our cabin?” I asked. “We’d prefer one at the back.” And I smiled at Julia.
The woman shrugged.
“They’re all the same.”
• • •
The entire time Julia lived in Porto Alegre, she had stayed at that all-girls residence. Decent girls who believed in God and cooked instant pasta under the fluorescent lights of the large communal kitchen. Girls who, every Friday, would pack their suitcase before going to class, come back, shower, change clothes, lock the doors, take the stairs as fast as the sisters in charge would allow, then raise their arms in the middle of the congested street and share a cab to the coach station. Sometimes, before boarding the intercity coach, each heading for the only town she really knew, they would sit together on the high stools in the snack bar for some fried chicken and a juice, not liking one bit the way the men looked at them.
Julia would sleep for the entire journey, only waking after passing under the familiar arch at the entrance to the town, eyes turning towards the parking lot, and of course her father’s black car would be there waiting for her. Some time after mid-night. A hug, a kiss. During the five-minute journey through the dead streets to her family home, the two of them would exchange very few words.
Soledade was small and, by night, even smaller.
Seemingly, the disadvantage of growing up in the interior is that you, or your parents, might be the topic of discussion in every well-lighted dining room within a three-mile radius. That’s why it’s best not to provide any ammunition to fuel the gossip, or at least that was what Julia used to say when I asked her what it had been like to spend her entire adolescence in a place of that size. I was interested in the deviations: someone who’s bored ends up doing stupid things, that was my belief and arguably my way of life, but apparently there was no deviation at all in Julia, a regular life with a regular family: the mother, one of the last housewives I’d come across, a father who measured social ascent by the size of his garage, a brother whose future wife happened, not by chance, to be his childhood sweetheart.
By the end of the day on Sunday, Julia would be on her way back to Porto Alegre and ready for class and the group work that she did for the whole group. Sitting on her bed in the residence, she would open her books and write, while into her room filtered the sounds of girls playing cards in a common room with a crucifix and a disfigured Jesus, a threadbare rug, an armchair with tapered legs that someone had left there out of charity or gratitude, as well as the eight-seat table on the side of which was written ass. Julia stayed in her room doing her work, even though the journalism department wasn’t quite as demanding as her dedication would suggest. But she had become accustomed to being a responsible, sometimes brilliant student, effectively ever since the point where they started encouraging competition between children at school. And being in Porto Alegre at the age of eighteen, without her family, practically without friends, living in a residence where she had to follow strict rules of cohabitation, didn’t seem to intimidate her at all.
I waited a while before approaching her. The truth was that, to begin with, I wasn’t very interested at all. There was something that made me turn up my nose at that girl from the interior. I think she had the air of those people who feel prematurely proud of the brilliant future they imagine for themselves. And that attitude also seemed to assert that Julia’s present existence was nothing more than a wait, as tedious as it was inevitable. There weren’t even many opportunities to prove myself wrong, if that were the case, because every Friday she took the damned coach to the Capital of Precious Stones. Her mom was a good cook, although no one had ever asked whether she enjoyed it, Mathias was going to marry his long-term girlfriend, Julia helped her dad pack amethysts in plastic bubble wrap. Some of her old friends were studying in Passo Fundo, others had stayed put, spending Saturday mornings negotiating with impoverished mineral prospectors, then later on showing foreign entrepreneurs to their families’ stores for them to examine macaws and obelisks and trees sculpted out of precious stone while they tried sips of maté, pulling faces and laughing at themselves.
When Julia and I actually spoke for the first time it was at a costume party. She was dressed as Penelope Pitstop, I was a punk heroin addict. My outfit included a syringe without the needle, which I carried in my pocket with the plunger sticking out. At that costume party, during our first semester in the media department, I met her waiting in line at the bar and her mere presence at that event was enough to surprise me. If you’d asked me to pick words that defined Julia Ceratti out of a basket full of them, I’d look for normal or serious or dedicated. She was the girl who raised her hand to ask a question with five minutes to go before the end of class.
And yet it just happened, we began to trade impressions of that warehouse full of people, where a samba school with a strange name used to rehearse, but which was now invaded by middle-class university students who were increasingly drunk, euphoric and self-centered. Some of them would spend the whole night trying to explain to everyone else what on earth they were dressed as. That girl there, for example, what’s that on her head? Julia was laughing deliciously, even though she averted her eyes from mine at times, as though she were looking for something better to do. When it was her turn to be served, she tugged a screwed up banknote out of her pocket. She barely waited for her change. Using the hand with which she clutched her can of beer, she began to push her way through the crowd and advanced a fair distance before remembering I was there and turning back. “I always wanted to talk to you, Cora.” She said this categorically, with no interest in any possible response, and then she disappeared.
It was rather odd, yes, but I didn’t want to give myself a headache over it, so I returned to the corner where my friends were, Alex from Clockwork Orange, a surgeon, a flapper in a very short skirt, a guy with a vampire cloak who had just tossed his plastic canine teeth in the trash. They were rating the teachers, making conjectures that weren’t particularly funny or deep about their private lives. Beyond the general comments about the teaching staff, coursework, the dilapidated media building, the lousy food in the university canteen, none of us had much to say to one another, when it came down to it.
By about five in the morning most people had left. The sound reverberated around the empty corners of the warehouse, leaving a metallic sensation in my ears that seemed irreversible. Not many of the girls could be bothered dancing any more, and those who could seemed to be doing it in order to impress someone who almost certainly was no longer there. Of my acquaintances, only Alex remained, his eye half lined with mascara, in a solitary and contemplative state. A pink panther was looking for its own tail. There was no more beer for sale. Just caipirinha and cheap whiskey.
I decided to leave too. I went up to Alex and shouted that I was going. He raised his hand slightly, in a gesture that vaguely resembled a bye. I said: “You’re going to catch a cab?” He babbled something. I left the party.
There was a line of taxis on Avenida Ipiranga. The driver of the first kept shouting taxi, taxi, taxi. It was quite an old car with its door open, and the reclined driver’s seat made me think of someone sunbathing in a lounger at the beach. I turned to the side. Julia was there. She had sat down on a low wall. Her Penelope Pitstop gloves lay in her lap. She kept running her fingertips over the satin. She seemed like someone with a lot of problems.
“I think I got left behind,” she said when I approached. “Our classmate from Sobradinho went home. Do you know our classmate from Sobradinho?”
“Yes.”
“Where do you live, Cora?”
“Petrópolis. And you?”
“Maria Imaculada Residence.” She laughed as if
slightly sorry for herself. “The sisters wouldn’t like you with those pants of yours and that ripped blouse.”
“That’s fine. I don’t have much love for them either.”
She thought about it.
“Sure. You’d think my dad could rent an apartment for me here, wouldn’t you? Pfff. Of course he could. He rents one for my brother in Passo Fundo, and my brother is the kind of guy who knows how long it takes for dirty dishes to get moldy. But hey, my parents want the sisters to keep an eye on me.”
“You’re not planning to go back to the residence, what’s it called?”
“Maria Imaculada.”
“You’re not planning to go back to the Maria Imaculada just now, are you?”
“Pretty much. I’m trying to come up with a better plan.”
“Can’t you just not turn up for a night?”
“The sisters will snitch on me. They’ll call Soledade and say, ‘Your daughter went out at 11 at night and still …’”
“Okay. Let me think. When the sisters call Soledade, your parents will find out that you just did the most innocent thing in the world, stayed over at a friend’s house after a party, see? I can speak to them if you like.”
We All Loved Cowboys Page 2