“Where exactly do you live?”
“Petrópolis.”
“I’ve never been to Petrópolis. Is it a house?”
“Yes, a house.”
She stood up.
“It seems you’re a lucky girl, Cora.”
I was still lying in bed, tossing from side to side. Surrounded by wooden planks and cheap prints and all that space outside. Julia had gone round the back of the cabin to ask for help riding a horse, the most docile, an old mare, because she hadn’t ridden for years and she was a bit scared. It was me who had suggested she call the blue-eyed farmhand. She didn’t say yes or no, but soon banged the door and so I lay there a few moments more, thinking about the little we had seen and what was still to come.
The room was shady and a light, cool breeze came through the slightly open window, making the small net curtain sway. No voices, not a single sign of human life outside. In my entire life, I had never ridden a horse. I prefer to avoid situations that make me look like an idiot, so I said: “That farmhand must be crazy to help you.” He was the owner’s grandson. And Julia slammed the door and went off to find him.
I yawned, then rolled onto the opposite side of the bed, where the sheet and bedspread, perfectly smooth, seemed to want to disguise the fact that someone had slept there. On the nightstand, next to a common black ashtray, Julia had left her turquoise Navajo bracelet.
There was no doubt it was a beautiful bracelet. Two feathers engraved in silver, the bright blue lozenge between them. It had been made at an indigenous reserve in Arizona. It had been purchased from a silent Native American at that same reserve, back when Julia and Eric were happy. I put on the bracelet and got out of bed. Without my realizing it, the room had become lighter, a sign that the sun was momentarily free of clouds. I began to look for my checkered shirt. Our cases were open, and Julia had spread out her multiple bags of make-up and useless creams over the table. There was also a bit of wheat bran. Half a salami that should have been kept in a cool place. Two unopened bottles of wine. There was my shirt, screwed up on a chair, so I put it on and buttoned it from bottom to top. Then I opened the closet, where there was a good-sized mirror. For quite a while I just looked at myself like that, shirt, panties, bracelet. It gave me a strange pleasure.
Since the previous day, there had been a new element in the story, and he was called Eric Aslan.
“Eric isn’t Muslim,” Julia had said. We were heading towards town. The car rocked about in the ruts of the dirt road.
“You know, lots of people get that wrong.”
“I didn’t say anything about him being Muslim.”
“I know, Cora.”
The car jolted suddenly to the left. Julia laughed.
“After all, Eric eats sausages. He loves sausages.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“Not precisely here,” she replied, gesturing the landscape with her index finger. Small properties were scattered on both sides of the track. Wooden barns or shelters for firewood, vineyards, houses with well-tended gardens, others with fading walls that suggested some years of neglect, on the verandas of which there was always a puppy curled up like a Swiss roll, barely raising its head when the car passed.
Eric had grown up in a suburb of west Boston. Picture a lot of oversized houses, some with games rooms and greenhouses, with water automatically sprinkling over the well-trimmed lawns in the late afternoon. That was the Aslans’ American dream. But, after 9/11, it wasn’t uncommon for the neighbors to get confused and imagine an open Koran on the coffee table in the living room. Only that they weren’t even Arabs. Turks and Arabs were as different as a Navajo Indian and a Guarani Indian. But what did it matter when Eric insisted on sporting that thick beard? If that wasn’t enough, the word Aslan sounded dangerously close to Islam.
One day, Eric got tired of having to explain. The worst thing was when people shot glances at him in the street and he wasn’t able to defend himself. When the time came, he decided on a university beyond the border. The Americans of Massachusetts were close enough to the province of Quebec to have an opinion on it, but far enough away for that opinion to be quite wrong; to them, that place might as well have been France: a strange world with elastic rules. Eric liked that. So much so that what attracted him most in the beginning, before setting foot in Montreal and meeting Julia in a certain class and then sharing a room with her in a house full of foreign students, was the fact that he only had to be eighteen in order to drink any kind of alcoholic drink imaginable. Eighteen, not twenty-one. Which gave him three extra years of partying.
When she had finished telling me about Eric, Julia turned to face me as if it were my turn to speak, but I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t remotely surprised. Julia dating an American seemed rather predictable, to tell the truth. Nor was it unexpected that she felt proud of the fact. Which was kind of funny, and proved that there was, in that regard at least, a vast difference between us. In Paris, I only hooked up with people who were as uprooted as I was, peripheral citizens who felt rather uncomfortable at suddenly finding themselves at the center of everything, dazzled by beauty, confused by manners, numb with cold, and sick and tired of appetizer-entrée-dessert and the mechanical exchanges of niceties. So I said nothing to Julia, I just kept driving. Luckily, after a few moments of awkwardness, she asked me to stop. We had reached a colonial house that was falling to pieces. Julia got out of the car and crouched in the middle of the road to take some photos. The sun was strong and at times she held her hand over the view-finder in order to block the light and see how the photos were turning out. I got out too. She climbed a couple of stairs and tried to peer through the ruined door.
“Maybe I’m done with Eric,” she said, still spying through a crack that seemed more likely to have been caused by man than by the years passing. “Like, you know, this is another time. I’ve changed.”
Now I was surprised.
“The boxes,” I said, suddenly recalling our conversation on Skype.
“Yes. The boxes.”
The reunion. The suggestion of a trip. Now it all seemed more logical.
“Tell me something, does this Eric know about me?”
“In what way?” She laughed. “Yes, I think I mentioned you to him once or twice.”
We got back in the car.
Something told me that Eric was sitting at a window at that precise moment, guessing at the outline of snow-covered things while he dreamed about the paradise beach where Julia would supposedly meet her parents. No, he didn’t know that she was here. Definitely not that she was with me.
When Julia returned to the cabin, I was still in front of the mirror. Check shirt, panties, bracelet. She walked past me and said: “looking hot.” Then she went into the bathroom as if she were in a hurry. She wasn’t covered in dirt nor had she broken a bone, so I assumed that the horse had been good for her. I put the Navajo bracelet back in its place. As I dressed, Julia spoke at length about how excellent horse riding was, a pity I hadn’t tried it. The reverberation on the tiles increased the strength of her voice. Her story took a good few minutes. Towards the end, I went over to the bathroom and, leaning on the doorframe, said:
“Good thing you didn’t get hurt.”
She turned on the faucet.
“Since when have you been scared about that?”
Julia was drying her hands when something beeped in the bedroom. She left the bathroom and I looked at myself in the mirror, which was the same as looking at her, in the background, looking for her bag, then finding her bag and looking for her cell inside it, then looking at the screen, and finally saying “message from Eric,” still looking, longer than it would usually take to look at a damn text message.
I hadn’t taken a phone with me, although my mom had repeatedly insisted that I take hers. After all, she barely left the house now, while I would be spending who knew how many weeks in what she exaggeratedly referred to as a “risky situation.” I couldn’t help laughing. I said: “Mom, relax. Nothing’s g
oing to happen to me.” She saw me off with the promise that, at least occasionally, I would make some kind of contact. Neither of us mentioned my dad. And my mother started waving, in the middle of the street where I grew up, until the car had completely disappeared.
Julia and I were sitting in the square in the town center (my mom didn’t like Julia). Around us was a handful of historic houses. The leaflets from the Antônio Prado Tourist Bureau said that this was the most Italian place in Brazil. Forty-eight colonial wooden houses sitting within the municipal boundaries, lots of polenta on the menu, lots of rambling tales from grandparents speaking a dialect imprisoned by time. The people who arrived with empty stomachs from the Veneto valley had filled those stomachs in this part of Rio Grande do Sul, where, in the mid 1900s, there was still space. At school, the teachers told how the German immigrants had kept the good part of the highlands, and the Italians were left with the stony soil of the foothills. It didn’t seem too bad now.
“Tell me about Paris,” Julia said suddenly.
I thought about it. So I told her that I lived in the Chinese quarter. That my apartment was a hundred and sixty square feet and had a single window. That in the afternoon I made sandwiches near Notre-Dame for tourists who weren’t particularly interested in trying the local cuisine.
Julia made herself comfortable on the bench.
“You’re doing a fashion course, a fashion course in Paris. You’re not going to make it sound ugly and hard, Cora, sorry.”
“Tell me something about your life in Montreal.”
“If you throw a bucket of water out of the window in December, it freezes in mid-air.”
Looking around the square, some of the buildings made no contribution whatsoever to the vaguely turn-of-the-century feel that others, collapsing or restored, uselessly tried to recreate. A lottery kiosk, three stories of reflective glass or the glittering biblical scene next to the mother church. Generally, I had the impression that, as soon as the economic situation allowed, the families of Antônio Prado, supposedly proud of their origins, would drop everything and head for the nearest hardware store, choosing to cover everything in shiny hard surfaces in the belief that they were much more modern and practical.
Julia was biting her cuticles, her gaze lost on the children playing on the other side of the square. Since Eric had made contact, I hadn’t left her side. I knew, therefore, that the message had received no response.
“Hey, aren’t you going to reply to Eric?”
She stretched out her arms and pulled a face as if she had back pain.
“I don’t know. Are you worried about it?”
“No. Just wanted to know.”
Julia seemed to have found something about my question funny. Perhaps she wasn’t thinking about Eric, or the message itself and whether to reply, but about my funny question. I think that made me want to offer a lengthy explanation. I had that foible sometimes. I started to say that I had developed a theory relating to cell phones, and she asked what theory, to which I replied that we needed to free ourselves of them as soon as possible, I couldn’t remember whether that was in our initial plans, and anyway, our plans had been made so long ago, technologically speaking, but the fact was that cell phones or any kind of communication with the outside world weren’t in keeping with the spirit of our libertarian pilgrimage. I added that last bit to make her laugh.
She said she’d think about it, laughing.
“You won’t think about it.”
“I will! Promise.”
We exchanged a smile and then we dropped the subject.
That second day in Antônio Prado, Julia and I walked up and down. We climbed flights of stairs to high neighborhoods with houses new and old, where elderly ladies sat at windows watching the street and their own backyard and waited for the flowers to bloom. Young men drove around aimlessly in cars. I think it’s safe to say that their idea of youth consisted largely of aerodynamics, shiny hubcaps and huge sound systems in their trunks. I wondered where the girls were, where the hell the single girls of that city were, and how the owners of those cars went about meeting such reserved young ladies. It wasn’t easy growing up in a place where you had to put all your energy into customizing a motor vehicle or, in the case of the girls, into anything that was contained within four walls and was necessarily supervised by a responsible adult. To make things worse, there were so many churches, so many saint someone-or-others, and probably just as many promises of virginity.
I thought about all of this, but I didn’t dare make any comments of a religious nature in front of Julia. She was wearing a pendant round her neck right now. I had caught sight of the little Jesus or saint when she changed clothes in the cabin because of a greasy stain. She took off her denim jacket, then her blouse. She also changed her pants because the ones she was wearing didn’t go with the new top half. Then I saw the oval pendant, and you know that those kinds of pendants don’t show Elvis Presleys or Kurt Cobains, they are Catholic memorabilia, pure and simple. I had seen other things too: matching bra and panties with thin bands of black lace, maybe an extra six or seven pounds accentuating the thighs, the pale skin of a winter spent in the northern hemisphere. “Pass me that t-shirt,” she said, pointing at the open suitcase. “Right on top.” I reached for the t-shirt and left everything else where it was.
Late that afternoon, when we stopped at an ice cream parlor after a lot of walking, Julia unfolded our map of Rio Grande do Sul. It was the size of the table. She was studying it as if she was going to be tested on it. As for me, I started on the strawberry ice cream, searching for the chocolate so that I could mix them on the same spoonful. There was no one but us in the parlor, except for the server. She was doing Sudoku behind the cash register.
“Have you been to many of these places?” Julia asked.
I took a swig of water.
“Hmm, almost none.”
I could see the chain that would lead to that little saint. The almost imperceptible silver links around the neck, which descended carelessly among her freckles until they disappeared. Julia raised her eyes from the map.
“That’s because your mom and dad kept taking you to medieval castles when you were little.”
“That’s it. Goddamn aristocrats.”
“Oh, stop it, it must have been fun to find out about the Middle Ages. Did you see those little openings where they used to pour out hot oil?”
“I did.”
“Wow. And what else?”
“A whole load of tapestries.”
She smiled and looked at the map again. My feet were throbbing, I put them up on a chair, which made a certain amount of unintentional noise, causing the server to interrupt her intermediate level Sudoku, turn in my direction and recriminate me with thoughts that were as clear as the speech bubbles in comic strips. I pretended it had nothing to do with me, my feet were throbbing after all. You’d think those boots would be comfortable, because once upon a time something very similar clad the feet of soldiers who had to eat tinned food and walk all day on snowy fields, through forests under surveillance, finding body parts on the path, but not at all, the boots were just another problem. Julia started to laugh. “What is it?” I asked, to which she replied: “Look, there’s a city here in Rio Grande do Sul called Formigueiro and another called Suspiro. Anthill and Sigh.” Then we started reading out all the absurd names we found, which was slightly more difficult for me as I had to read everything upside down, and so Julia and I made fun of the small towns of Restinga Seca, São João do Polesine, Faxinal do Soturno, Chuvisca, Trigolândia, Anta Gorda, Tio Hugo, Não-Me-Toque, Boa Vista do Cadeado, Mormaço, Espumoso, the last two of which weren’t very far from Soledade, which as it happens was a rather unusual name too. Among the many laughs of that hour in the ice cream parlor, which I would venture to say had become the most uninhibited moment of our reunion so far, Julia told me that her dad had lived for three years in Espumoso before marrying, and perhaps there was no reason for me to suspect that that statement
put an end to our game, the funny names would always have run out anyway, but the fact was that soon afterwards Julia leaned back abruptly as if she wanted to free herself once and for all from that map, and then she sighed heavily. I could hear the hum of the freezers as she sat perfectly still. Then, very slowly, she stretched out her arm for her sundae glass, which was more or less on the border with Uruguay, but all that remained in it was a creamy pool of an indeterminate color. She gave up. I wanted to understand why Julia’s mood sometimes changed so suddenly. She had always been that way.
I folded the map and paid for the two ice creams. Outside, the sun was just about touching the roofs of the most faraway houses, and the warm light exploded on the rectangular paving stones. When we started walking, Julia said, as if continuing a very serious conversation I couldn’t recall at all: “It’s great that my parents are happy at the beach.” We crossed the road and I asked what she actually meant. So she gave the kind of laugh used to apologize preemptively, a pretty little laugh that tends to suffocate any counter-argument, and said that the fact that her parents no longer lived in Soledade seemed, to her eyes, more of an abrupt rupture between her and her native town than her own departure for Canada. I had no time to ask whether that wasn’t rather unfair because she immediately continued saying that, to make the situation worse, Mathias had moved to a place a couple of miles from Soledade, he was an agronomist and looked after two or three soya plantations that obviously didn’t belong to him, but to very rich people who didn’t actually understand soya at all, concluding: “You’re lucky to be an only child,” and without taking a breath: “It must be much easier that way.”
That was what Julia said before we got into the car. I’m an only child, I thought. I’m an only child, and never in my entire life did I ask for a sibling.
3.
THE BLUE-EYED FARMHAND had shown Julia a small dirt road that didn’t appear on the map. The following day, nice and early, we left Antônio Prado on that road. It ran along the edge of a precipice and we caught glimpses, down at the bottom, amid the foothills of the bushy mountains, of the various twists and turns of the River Antas. Country music was playing on the stereo. Nasal vocals, guitar, some mention of Tennessee. Julia was happy, as was I, of course, although I was gripping on tightly to the steering wheel and my tires kept encroaching on the opposite lane (where, luckily, there was nothing coming), just like an old lady undertaking the arduous task of going home. All of this was justified by my fear of heights, although that didn’t make me like the place any less; there was no doubt that it was a very scenic route and that the best way to get someplace, the next place, could only be this, with mist scudding across the mountain tops, the fresh air, the pines, a few vineyards, Julia, the quietness. And then, suddenly, without the farmhand having mentioned it, a tiny chapel about a hundred years old. The nave was being cleaned. A dozen or so wicker chairs had been piled up outside.
We All Loved Cowboys Page 3