We All Loved Cowboys

by Carol Bensimon

  As far as I could remember, I had never been able to visualize the landscapes, the people and the situations our trip would entail, even having given it a lot of thought. I’m not talking about specific things like that little chapel, which I doubt many people knew about, except for the locals, or the way the light falls on the hills between Antônio Prado and São Marcos, I mean any vague idea, which might be completely wrong, or even fall into the most banal of stereotypes. Something, basically, to fill up space and time. Was it because I lacked points of reference, having been raised in Porto Alegre with no aunts, uncles, grandparents or cousins to visit in the interior? I don’t believe that was the case. The thing was that our idea always had the appearance of a long line stretching between nothing and nothing. I mean, I honestly didn’t know whether Julia thought that way. I did. As for her, she might have always been interested in picturesque cottages. How could I be sure that what was important for Julia, as for me, wasn’t being in a certain place, but getting out of another?

  The track came out in a cobbled street in São Marcos. It seemed like a fairly ordinary town, so we passed through without paying much attention, occasionally pulling up to the curb, lowering the window, giving a toothy grin and asking how to get to Mulada. São Jorge da Mulada, in the rural belt. We had to do this three times before getting it right. Then the shutters started to come down, the shop signs, the villas, the electricity poles overloaded with cables all disappeared, and as the velvety folds of curtain were raised into the rigging, a gently undulating field, more burnt ochre than any nuance of green, with araucarias scattered here and there, appeared surprisingly in front of us.

  It was called Campos de Cima da Serra and, in the eighteenth century, troops and their contraband mules from Uruguay had gone there. After slogging for months and months in a country that was barely born, experiencing attacks from Indians, hunger, illness, storms, they arrived in the middle of Brazil and sold their mules for the price of gold. A mule, what was it again? A cross between a donkey and a mare. One of those, at that time, could be worth something like forty cows because they played a vital role in mining, out there in the depths of Minas Gerais. The farmhand had told Julia all this while I was busy with something else.

  Now she was looking out of the window, resting her head against it. I think she had gotten tired of the precise view offered by the front windshield. She wanted to see the landscape moving quickly.

  “Are we looking for something specific?” I asked.

  Her voice mingled with the wind.

  “Not one thing. Several.”

  “That the blue-eyed farmhand told you about?”

  “Wanna stop this business of calling the guy a farmhand?”

  “Okay, fine. But what did he tell you?”

  Suddenly, some kind of unusual monument appeared on the horizon, with a spire pointing skywards, staircases and two silhouettes that seemed to be human.

  Julia smiled, pleased at this unexpected chain of events.

  “This was one of the things he told me about.”

  It was no exaggeration to say that this memorial turned out to be without doubt the strangest, most out-of-place thing I saw on the entire journey. Someone ill-informed, on seeing the general whiteness of the construction, the straightness of the lines, the bronze statues on a rectangular base, might even have been convinced that it was a tomb to the unknown soldier, but they would only have to move closer to those statues for that surefire military hypothesis to unravel. Two men with accordions? In any case, we didn’t have a war behind us, or rather, there were many wars, none which was particularly clear, documented, told, and retold, for us to then go erecting pieces of concrete and crying for all those who fell. No cemeteries of white crosses. No blockbuster movies. No tears for strangers. Our men ended up being flattened in the middle of the countryside, and it was the wind that fluttered their red neckerchiefs, that took away their horses and left their women in a state of panic, that entered open mouths and abandoned ranches and made the branches of an umbu tree burst into flames, that witnessed a stone fall in the ruins of Sete Povos das Missões and even led the Indians to believe in the fire serpent Boitatá, and that’s why they closed their eyes so tightly.

  This was what had happened in the place where I was born. You can read about such courageous people in historical novels, but sometimes they’re not entirely truthful. That monument, anyway, did not pay homage to any soldier or revolution, even though the language had something rather grandiose and consequently ridiculous about it. In beautiful metal letters: TO THE BERTUSSI BROTHERS, FROM THE GAUCHO HOMELAND. Their names were Honeyde and Adelar, and the apex of their heroism, according to an illustrated timeline, had been to introduce drums into the regional music. Both wore typical gaucho clothing, boots, bombachas, shirt, neckerchief. The younger-looking one, in so far as you can compare two bronze statues, held his accordion to his shoulders, fingers hovering over the keyboard and the buttons on the opposite side. As for the older of the two, he was immortalized in a rather comical pose, with one hand on his hip (as if suffering from lower back pain) and the right leg supported on his accordion (which surely showed a certain lack of respect for the instrument?).

  Julia began to laugh, in the middle of the memorial site.

  “All this for the Bertussis, I can’t believe it.”

  “You’ve heard of these guys?”

  “My uncle Francisco played accordion when I was little.”

  Given that Julia had grown up in Soledade, that didn’t seem strange at all. To me, however, gaucho music was as far removed as celtic songs or aboriginal drums. I seemed to recall one single memory, very vague and hazy, involving accordions, traditional frocks, and formally dressed gauchos jumping around a sword without stepping on it. It was at a steak house in Porto Alegre, which, in addition to food, offered customers a full folkloric show. So full that my parents decided to leave before the show finished.

  “Have you never heard Oh de casa?”

  I shook my head.

  “My uncle used to play it for me.”

  Then she pretended she was holding an accordion to her chest, her hands opening and closing the squeeze-box as she fingered invisible keys, her feet joining in the choreography, one of them lifting a couple of inches off the floor, then the other, but the most impressive thing was that Julia was singing. She knew the lyrics by heart. Her voice was deeper than usual. The r’s much more rolled.

  I come from far away with a long path still to tread,

  I beg of you, kind sir, for a place to lay my head.

  Bring your boy and dismount, put the horse in the stable,

  In this ranch there’s a bed and hot food on the table.

  I think I felt rather disconcerted after Julia’s performance. I started trying to follow the Bertussi brothers’ timeline, like someone who lacks the patience to read long texts on museum walls, but who doesn’t feel right being defeated by them. In truth, I was looking at the photographs. Only the photographs. In one of them, Adelar Bertussi, with his inseparable accordion, was holding out an enormous gourd of maté. Did old uncle Francisco perhaps resemble him slightly? Did Adelar dye his beard? And, if so, why not the rest of his hair as well? Was Julia’s uncle by any chance gray haired? Why did he no longer play the accordion?

  The strange thing was that I had never met a single wretched member of her family. Although her father went to Porto Alegre frequently, supposedly on business, we had never been introduced to one another. On one of those occasions, I was convinced that Julia was doing everything she could to avoid the encounter, like someone sending you out the back door to greet someone else at the front. That, of course, is a manner of speaking. Everything seemed to be timed, basically, so that we wouldn’t meet. The same with Mathias, who went to the city now and then, and that’s probably not counting the other times I didn’t even know about. Back then, I was intrigued by everything about her. I really wanted to get to know the Cerattis. I wanted them to tell me stories about her childh
ood, and for Julia to be mortified and try to change the subject. And what about Soledade? I’d always wanted to see Soledade. We were sufficiently close for Julia to have made the invitation, but she hadn’t even come close to that.

  I soon got bored of the timeline. I looked around me. Julia was at the other side of the memorial. Elbows on the railings, leaning slightly forward, she seemed to be concentrating hard on the stillness of a little red house. There were some cows nearby, and a small weir. Julia tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear. Sometimes, all of a sudden, it became difficult to reconcile that person, the contemplative-depressive, with the other, a thousand miles an hour, private shows in the middle of nowhere, double life in the capital at eighteen, Montreal and the world at twenty-one. Perhaps I was in love again and, worse, without the slightest idea what my chances were. I mean, there was a chance (in the sense of it having happened before). And yet there wasn’t (in the sense that it ended badly).

  Julia turned back.

  I shouted: “Shall we go?”

  And so we returned to the car in silence.

  Yes, I was attracted to girls. Technically, I was bisexual. My own timeline would show all the signs. Played with Ninja Turtles. Went to soccer camp. Refused to wear a skirt. Fell in love with female teachers. Enjoyed a sci-fi series whose female villain was actually a lizard and yet utterly tempting. Wanted to talk about it and fell for the female psychologist. Went to gay clubs with a fake ID. Watched the clip of Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler running wild on the road two hundred times, and alone, and lying face down. Kissed classmates in public restrooms. Wrote feminist phrases on ripped jeans. Was a fan of rock bands fronted by women. Stopped the car on a dark road and jumped into the back seat with Marina, then with Luciana, then with Amanda. Read Lolita. Read the complete works of Hilda Hilst. Got some girl’s number and she never answered. Saw Wild Things, kept rewinding to the pool scene. Lied she was at a friend’s house when it was a motel whose décor was supposed to resemble a dungeon. If you turned off the right lights, it could more or less have been one.

  But I said bisexual. Girls and some guys. Or, to be more exact: guy. Girl. Girl. Girl. Guy. Girl. Girl. Guy. And that tended to be the ratio from then on. I went with guys out of inertia. Girls, out of fascination. With guys, everything took place as if in the script of a rom-com for the general public (except that I was just faking the role I’d been given). With girls, everything began, continued and ended with the purest melodrama. First boy: at fourteen, after a Carnival dance in Tramandaí, day was breaking as he sat on the edge of the bed to put his shirt on. First girl: at fifteen, she seemed confused, she asked if I’d done this before, I lied that I had, and she said, “You can tell.” Boys asked me out, I was pretty, perhaps rather mysterious to them, I didn’t ask them to call me afterwards. With girls I had to battle, inch by inch, a hand resting on a thigh, an exchange of glances, then finally a kiss. Sometimes I had to convince them that they wanted to be with me. I’m saying this because it wasn’t uncommon for me to fall for a straight girl. Perhaps that has been my greatest mistake: I never accepted the fact that I couldn’t want just anyone, but ideally only those who existed within the four walls of a place called gay. For God’s sake, I wanted to fall in love with the next girl to walk along the street and be in with a chance. Not be afraid of getting involved with someone who might wake up the next day and regret it. But I ended up being a lapse for many people. A quickly outgrown phase for others. My attraction to the female sex was both a sweet adventure and a condemnation to the most claustrophobic of worlds.

  The worst part, without doubt, was having to face my parents. It had been a long time since I’d given up on serious conversations with them. You know how it is, they vote for the left and are all for human rights and minorities until you show up at home with your girlfriend. Then the first thing they say is that they have no problem whatsoever accepting your “choices,” but that the rest of society, unfortunately, will stigmatize them. And, after all, they’re only looking out for your best interests. They love the word stigmatize, but of course it’s always other people who are responsible for that unfortunate error of judgment.

  And that’s not all. Are you going to miss out on the wonderful opportunity to have a child? Will you deny your child the chance to grow up at the heart of a normal family? That was the kind of thing they’d have said, if the conversation had ever taken place. But in truth there wasn’t even time for that kind of conversation. When my parents separated, I was sixteen. The most famous otorhinolaryngologist in Porto Alegre contented himself, from that moment on, with the following parental obligations: two meet-ups a week, Wednesdays and Sundays, during which we spent more time chewing frozen food than trying to create any kind of complicity. Therefore it was my mother I needed to deceive on a daily basis. Through our house passed a never-ending parade of “best friends”; if one vanished with no explanation, there was soon another crossing the living room in socks to get a glass of water from the kitchen. Where had the two of us met? This was always rather vague. And my mom, although all the signs were available to her without her even having to leave the house, had decided to avoid confrontation. For a while, at least.

  Then, one sleepy afternoon, she opened my bedroom door. She wouldn’t have been able to explain why, she always knocked, whether I had company or not, that was a rule she liked to stick to. That afternoon, however, with some excuse at the tip of her tongue, my mom entered my room entirely unexpectedly, perhaps wanting more than anything to employ some stupid pretext, something like: do you need anything? I’m going out, isn’t today the day to pick up your jacket from the dry cleaner? What she saw, however, in that bedroom full of icons she didn’t understand, made her shut the door in a split second and run downstairs in search of the telephone. She dialed her ex-husband. Somewhat stunned, she had the delicacy to go through the habitual niceties while she searched for a way to describe the scene, your daughter’s friend lying on the bed, panties with an almost childlike print, your daughter with her hand in—her hand in those panties, I always knew Cora would do something like this.

  Following my embarrassment at being caught in flagrante, my mom and I cried in separate rooms for several weeks. My tears were squeezed between my cheeks and two soft layers of pillow, for me and me alone. As for my mother’s waterworks, they seemed to be a mere detail in a whole pyrotechnic display of Greek tragedy, as if the distance between actress (her) and audience (me) meant her whole body had to show the fact that she was sobbing, with puffs and trembles and hisses and sighs and objects that fell from their places, for example, a glass duck from Murano, bound installments of Cooking from A to Z, a ceramic pot that had always been the sugar pot, the only picture frame holding a photo of my maternal grandparents.

  I can remember, it was May. As always in May, winter had already appropriated the nights to have a bit of a rehearsal. I put on a hoodie over my pajama and went out into the garden, clutching a cup of peppermint tea. My mom didn’t follow. Before our family crisis, I didn’t tend to go to that part of the house. There was a Parisian-style iron bench, next to a rose bush that was always in bloom, but I think the last time it was used was for tying up helium balloons on one of my birthdays. I sat on that bench and stared at the street.

  Ours was essentially a residential street, dominated by two story houses from the seventies, like ours. I had never lived anywhere else. Near the corner, there was a wooden sentry box, where there was a guard, paid for by the homeowners on the block. The guard that year was called Leônidas. At that time, he must have been about the age I am now, no more than twenty-six and no less than twenty-two, but when you’re a teenager you don’t tend to think of people in that age group as young; on the contrary, we find it only natural for them to be teaching us biology or Portuguese, treating our broken arm, selling us a guitar; they seem so distant, after all, so secure, so adult, and only when we reach that age do we realize that the abyss wasn’t insurmountable, that there wasn’t even an abyss, that it
was only details that separated us, maybe slightly more in Leônidas’s case, as his guard’s salary went to raising two children, photos of whom were pulled from his wallet whenever he got chatting.

  On those terrible May nights, I sat in the garden, thinking that it wasn’t fair of my mom to cast me in the role of villain. Couldn’t she spare me the daily demonstrations of her suffering? I warmed my hands on the teacup. Leônidas had to take a turn around the whole block and he would always pass me, on the other side of the fence. “Hi Cora.” Or : “Evening, Cora.” I think, at that time, it must have been obvious that something wasn’t right in our little family nucleus, and Leônidas might have suspected why. He had only to look at me with a bit of scrutiny. At sixteen, I was already what you used to call a tomboy. Put it this way, aunts and great aunts loved pulling me into a corner to suggest drastic changes to my appearance, after all I’d look so good with a patterned dress and some sandals, and why didn’t I wear my hair loose? Loose hair would only enhance the delicate contours of my face.